Judith Hamann

Goose Apparitions

Judith presents a collection of embryonic explorations falling under the broader umbrella of ‘goose studies,’ collating recent writing, performing, and thinking about geese. Drawing on research begun during a three month period sharing an island in Finland with a host of barnacle geese last year, thinking-with barnacle geese calls into question how we construct, and in turn how we might dissolve or alter how we perceive categories, marvels, and time. Here, Judith collects together work-in-progress fragments, responding to geese in all their simultaneous holding together of gaggle and skein, tangled and clear, mirabilia and mundane, they become (and in turn Judith also becomes) apparition, mark makers, maps, haunts.

barnacle goose flight path drawing no. 1

graphite drawing based on goose data generated by the Southern Colour Marking Group, UK

Goose apparitions/Suomenlinna walk  (audio)

A reading of the in-progress essay ‘goose apparitions’ with a spring 2020 routine evening A and B islands sound walk.

Sample of Ricercare in D minor, is from Schola Hungarica’s ‘Das Gänsebuch (The Geese Book)’ performed by Matthias Ank.

Goose apparitions

I wanted to make a piece about geese, but instead I found myself filming my own haunting.

Have I become a ghost rattling around my apartment? It feels as if anything could happen, that it might be entirely possible to be haunting myself, as if it might be possible to have exited linear, straight time, and be somewhere else entirely.

I am listening to recordings of my past self taking long walks around an island and the sounds of geese are almost omnipresent. I make too many cups of tea, stare at the contents of the fridge, and pace up and down the length of my one room apartment while listening. I keep catching myself matching my footfalls to the recordings, as if in some sort of sympathetic entrainment, as if by doing so I could somehow time travel, could collapse then, into now.

The barnacle geese arrived on Suomenlinna, a chain of islands near Helsinki, Finland, about a month after I did in late March last year. Just a few at first, but the population continued to swell, until they were just about everywhere by May.

No one from the artist in residence organisation hosting me there had mentioned the substantial migratory goose colony prior to this, and they were to me, entirely unexpected (I suppose so were most things that unfolded in the first months of 2020). Their presence in terms of my emotional, intellectual, and imaginary life grew in a similarly graphed curvature to that of their numbers, and I found myself beginning to orient myself via the geese: thinking about and with the geese to locate my own coordinates, as well as in the sense of ‘finding my way.’ [to borrow one sense of orientation from Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology]. 

The geese formed something analogous to a transitional fix for my-life-in-flux, something to pivot around, respond to, a reason to force myself outside each day.  They were companions easily anthropomorphised, replete with distinctive characteristics and characters, local haunts, often very funny when on the ground, and breath-stopping [miraculous] in flight.

I suppose that I filtered the geese through a particular lens that shaped my time in that strange spring, the geese served as a sort of diffractive surface through which to view the world, keeping certain things in focus, and the periphery of what felt less possible to manage, mostly blurred.

Geese are multifocal creatures in terms of their behaviour, but also in the forms they take as linked with the language (in english) we describe them with. The collective noun for geese on the ground is a gaggle. To roll around the word gaggle in your mouth while observing the geese feels apt, almost onomatopoeic.  Geese on the ground squabble, and hiss, they move in slow reconfigurations, pairs and triads shifting position, turning, rotating orientations. Grounded geese produce a sort of rolling, dubious, grumble, and a rising edge of exclamation which maps together contours of pitch and rhythm like some kind of avian geiger counter, a sondol for the proximity of any creature who they are not sure should be there, rising in density, amplitude, and pitch on approach; falling as you recede.

During this time, I started to think of myself predominantly in relation to the geese—I became an apparition, a shiver, like a break of gooseflesh (ha) on the backs of your arms. At a time that I felt as if I might have become somehow almost see through, gauzy, ghostlike, the geese became what I could most clearly refer to in order to register my solidity, my physical presence, my real-ness. The geese were, in themselves, a sort of community, that I was of course not at all included in, but somehow I felt more defined, less blurry, via being noticed and (mostly) tolerated by them, living in regular temporal cycles of encounter with them, through their grumbles and hisses, their sudden bursting into flight.

On an open field about a five minute walk from my studio a large gaggle, maybe thirty or so geese, always gathered in the late afternoon/early evening and among them was a goose with one leg, who I started thinking of a great deal. Geese fiercely protect injured members of their community, and I grew very fond, dare I say, even envious of this one legged goose and her tight knit community who rallied around her at the smallest hint of danger.

Geese fly in V formation as an aerodynamically sound practice, the buoyancy generated by each goose’s wing flaps ahead makes flying easier and less labor intensive for the other members of the formation. The lead goose has the hardest position with the greatest air resistance, but this role is rotated among the members of the group, there is no fixed leader.

There are many obvious analogies to be drawn from the cooperative, lateral structures of goose formations, so much so that ‘goose strategies’ have, somewhat bizarrely, even found resonances in various kinds of inspirational business consultancies, peddling goose-like-feel-good cooperation within unequal capitalist structures, to “be like geese!” as if the imagery of the camaraderie of the goose-team might salve or distract from the cruelty and violence of the systems in question.

I’m not sure what to be ‘like’ geese might mean in this context, perhaps to embrace certain human interpretations of their properties which mirror behaviours one wishes to encourage, a form of productive ethics?

Is there a way to consider geese that is less/non-extractive?

In flight, geese transform.

The english word for a constellation of geese is a skein, and I use ‘constellation’ here rather deliberately, as that is what I feel they become: relational coordinates rather than something as ambiguous in the description of their form as a ‘flock.’

A skein is perhaps more commonly, to the degree that skein is a common word at all, used in relation to wool. A skein is a specific bundling of wool, or twine (but never thread or rope, it is particular to its material) which has a central pull strand. It is a structure which is formed around its potential undoing [to be undone]. A woollen skein is loosely wound, often twisted. It is considered a fraction of roughly 1/6 to a hank, which is the larger form of wool coiling. In that sense a skein is a unit of measure, one that can be drawn roughly in terms of overall length being about 360 feet (roughly 110 metres).

Considering bundles as forms of measurement, makes me think of Marcel DuChamp’s ‘joke’ about the metre, ’Three Standard Stoppages,’: where three pieces of wool one metre in length are dropped from a height of one metre. Each time, of course, the formal shape of its landing is different and yet it still retains its identity as a unit of measure, creating a ‘new image’ of a ‘non-rational’ metre. It’s messy and perhaps even a grasping sort of thinking on my part I know, but I wonder about skeins in both wool and goose forms as non-replicable forms of measure, each iteration a specific rendering of length and material, coordinate, relation, and form.

The question of how a loose bundle of wool and the ‘V’ formation of flying geese are correlated is, I surmise, connected to the question of entanglement and labyrinths. A skein can also refer to something tangled, something difficult to decipher. I can imagine and almost feel the memory physically between my fingers of the near impossibility of undoing a bad wool snarl. It feels almost irreparable, the nodes of tightly snagged knotting and looser loopings, forming a new shape, that of the tangle: a form defined by a contradictory [[an almost oxymoronic]] amorphous ‘stuckness’: being fixed only as a result of a node/knot being unable to be undone.

How a tangle becomes an arrow in the english language is more specifically answered through thinking about the notion of labyrinths further, via the Greek myth of the minotaur and the labyrinth and its human leads, Theseus and Ariadne. To grossly over simplify the story: King Minos of Crete’s (almost) impossible to navigate labyrinth was designed by Daedelus to house the half bull, half human creature the minotaur (born Asterion, the minotaur was the result of one of those classic insult-to-a-God-punishment-trick-scenarios where King Minos’ wife Persiphae fell in lust/love with a bull). Young folks from Athens were sacrificed annually to the Minotaur, in the ‘tribute’ sense, all quite ‘hunger games™’ really, until one year a young prince named Theseus was sent, and King Minos’ daughter Ariadne fell in love with him. To save Theseus, Ariadne secretly gives him a dagger and a skein of wool before he enters the labyrinth, so that he can slay the minotaur and then find his way out, which he does, and then promptly abandons Ariadne on an island on his voyage home like a proper jerk.

The thing is, that a twist of wool, a skein, was also called a clew in old English, with its origins in the Germanic clewe. In its 1590s definition, it meant “anything that guides or directs in an intricate case” and was used fairly specifically only in relation to labyrinths and tangles. Over time, this gradually became dissociated with the labyrinth and came to mean “that which points the way,” and eventually, our contemporary definition and spelling: clue.

And so a skein is both a twist and an arrow, a tangle and a line, a snarl, yet also a clew/clue, a direction to follow, a point, a trajectory or orientation, a way to find one’s way home.

Home is a confusing idea for me now, but if we were to, just for a moment, think of home as place-of-birth, then mine would be Narrm/Melbourne, on the stolen lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation. In so-called-Australia we only have one native species of goose1, known in settler-colonial english language as the Cape Barren Goose but in the part of the world now dubbed ‘Cape Barren’ as wayintalutja. It is also known on the mainland by many other names in many languages, for example as laulwuri, a ngaitji (friend/totem) of the Talderar people of the Ngarrindjeri nation, in the place also known now as ‘Tolderol Point.’ These soft grey geese are quite shy, and known for their ability to drink salt and brackish water, which enables them to live mostly on offshore islands.

In other words, you don’t tend to come across any geese in the city I’m from.

This brief hemispheric shift is really only here as an attempt to explain some of my feelings about geese generally, and to make clear that before last spring, I had never seen a barnacle goose, or any of the Branta genus — Branta coming from ‘burnt’ and referring to geese with black plumage. I am aware that for many people more familiar with northern hemisphere geese, they are a nuisance, or a pest, or a background noise sort of bird, and that my interest in them may be vaguely irritating/confusing, even a bit odd, as if someone were deeply enthusiastic about city pigeons, myna birds, or seagulls mad with hot chip lust.

Barnacle geese are not endemic to the island of Suomenlinna, and their numbers there are a relatively recent phenomenon, driven in part by a shift in migration patterns that can be chalked up to various scales of human intervention, from the enormous (climate change) to the local (lack of open spaces for the geese over the Russian border). I understand that they’re becoming a terrible pest in terms of their impact on other birds, plants, and even somewhat disastrous for Finnish farmers. An International Single Species Management Plan has been drawn up to find ways of coexisting/coping with the three main barnacle goose populations in Europe, who have begun to pose problems for aircraft, and crops, the drift, the survival strategies of the geese are now bringing them into conflict/collision with human needs and desires.

Scientists are observing the geese change their migration patterns and timing in response to change of habitat, but they are unsure of whether the geese can adjust quickly enough to survive long term. Conditions in the Arctic Circle are changing so rapidly that even an adaptable, migratory bird can only barely keep up, although they are trying: shifting breeding windows and locations, altering flight paths, trying new rest spots, even just staying put.

In that sense, that the geese and I spent last year’s Spring visiting with each other, and the way in which it unfolded, represents a moment of encounter formed by human driven disturbances: the shifting in migratory patterning for the geese; the coronavirus’ leap from bat to humans and its travel driven spread; the alteration to my own wonky patterns of nomadic movement; my temporary grounding; coalescing in a shared moment of different movements, a suspension for me, while for the geese, things were very much in motion, the busy activity of adaptation.

Geese remember good rest stops, and tend to return to them. I can’t move around like a goose, but I find myself returning anyway, imagining, haunting.

Geese, like all migratory birds, are believed to be able to sense and navigate by magnetic fields. They possess the sense ‘magnetoception,’ a particular protein in the birds’ retinas enables them to see the light generated by the Earth’s magnetic field. I imagine what it would be like to have integrated into one’s body a relational system so connected to the earth, its magnetic poles, a connection to place coloured by a glow of magnetism.

On the far end of the chain of islands that make up Suomenlinna, there are slabs of rocks covered in human made markings, old school tagging from soldiers, sailors, and more recently tourists, in both cyrillic and latin alphabets, names, dates, sometimes words that are hard to make out, smudged by the sea wearing at them. Earlier on, I looked for the oldest date I can find, still thinking in linear time, trying to fashion my own occupation of the island into some sort of context. It becomes increasingly ambiguous to me over my time there, over countless visits, which marks are human and which are formed by the ocean, which are geological: made by movements of rock in a different metabolic temporal system.

I see another resident near the rocks. We talk at a distance (of course), shouting over the wind, and she yells “you can’t even sit on these rocks now, they’re totally covered in goose shit.”

I rather like the idea of the geese participating in an aleatoric, seasonal [temporary] overwriting of everything.

There is one place on the island that is less visited, less marked by people, and if you slide down the rocks a little from the cliff’s path, there is one soft curve of rock and plants there that always asks me to visit with it. These rocks feel completely different to the rocks that make up the buildings and residual structures of the Swedish and then Russian occupations of this island, the military fortress Sveaborg (or Viapori in Finnish). The rock of the fortress was mostly quarried from the island itself, (a gesture that feels to me a little like a form of geological cannibalism), however these cradling rocks I visit are part of the granite body of the islands, something (I imagine) finding its form in the Svecofennian orogen around 1700 million years ago. Their metabolism extends and collapses my own sense of time.

Here, it feels as if I am being held by the island, wrapped up by the rocks. Enfolded, in its etymolgoically entangled relationship to complicity. It feels almost loving.

I can’t tell if this is because I’m finally listening and the rocks are very alive/close here, or because I haven’t touched a person for several months.

Perhaps a mixture of both.

I’m not sure which time scale I’m on anymore, rock time, goose time, pandemic time, solitary time.

In thinking about external time as it is rendered observable by [what is in] motion, perhaps the geese have become more important than I realised. Even just as apparitions, with months and a thousand odd kilometres between us.

1: The ‘magpie goose’ is, it turns out, not a goose at all, but the sole living species of the Anseranatidae family.


Goose Satellite Data Video (in progress)
Original footage taken from the Euro Bird Portal barnacle goose tracking data for 2019-2020

Geese, mythologically, or metaphorically, are often connected to time.

The Grágás, or “Grey Goose Laws”  of 16th century Iceland, may have derived their title related in part from the perception of goose age, their association with timelessness. Geese were thought to live longer than any other birds. Geese in the part of the world that I encountered them in, also have connections in Sámi storying to the shape of certain concepts that we might describe from a settler-colonial positionality as wisdom, freedom, time and timelessness.

I stick and poke tattooed the outline of a goose on my right leg a couple of weeks before I left the island. “Tattoos are forever” they say, like a loose threat. Forever is an intimidating figure.

Barnacle geese specifically, mostly nested in Siberia prior to their more recent drift southwards, where they feature in creation storying. In the Mordvin variant of the (fairly widespread, really) earth-diver creation telling: from the saliva which God spits into the primordial sea in order to grow the world, the devil in the form of a goose appears. God tells the devil/goose to dive to the bottom of the sea to fetch the earth and bring it to the surface, however upon succeeding, the devil/goose attempts to secretly hide some of the earth in their cheek. The earth in the devil/goose’s mouth continues to grow until it can no longer be contained, and so from the goose cheek, are formed the mountains of the world.

In Finnish, the name for barnacle geese translates to ‘white-cheeked goose.’ This makes me imagine a barnacle goose holding all the mountains in that cheek, because of course, it is easy to think of mountains as belonging to the colour category of white if you come from somewhere where it snows.

Language, or rather the specificity of naming, filters so clearly the perception of which visual properties are most distinctive or important as relative to place: a white cheek, to appear ‘burned,’ a grey wing, a black beak, an embryonic resemblance to barnacles.

Barnacle Geese are, in certain circles which I have become increasingly aware of, one of the European scientific history world’s most ‘notorious’ goose species. This is due to a famous ‘misunderstanding’ of how the birds migrate and breed, and as a result for centuries, the barnacle Goose was thought to grow from driftwood, or barnacles, and at certain points even trees. A resemblance between the goose barnacle and the barnacle goose led to a conflation of the two as a means of explanation for the mystery of how these geese reproduced (their nesting behavior was not seen in central Europe or Britain due to their migratory patterns). This meant that this particular goose has been understood within a kind of shimmer of origins, in turn: a parthenogenic creature, a plant, an arthropod, pure miracle, a life emerging from non-life.

The now outdated, but once widely accepted belief in spontaneous generation, as it connected to the notion that a specific taxon of creature could emerge from other, unrelated organisms or non-life, was, in part, connected to the length of perpetuation of this myth. That trees could grow a goose barnacle, and via them, a barnacle goose, was not a stretch for the medieval imagination, and the barnacle tree persisted for centuries as an idea. Written and pictorial records of the barnacle-goose-tree assemblage stretch back to the 12th century at least, found in the work of Provençal rabbi Isaac ben Abba Mari, and the writing of Gerald of Wales, lingering on until finally laid to rest in the late 19th century.

Goose barnacles do actually build their own linked platforms, a way of clustering together, something that would not be immediately distinguishable from another material, such as driftwood. That driftwood birthed the goose barnacle, which in turn birthed the barnacle goose is among the variations of the myth, where they “develop from beams in the water and hang from trees enclosed in shells until they can grow feathers and fly.” [Gerald of Wales]

The idea that animals emerged from plants, is reflective of the European organisation of a hierarchy of living things as it has evolved over time. The notion of birds growing from trees, could be seen as in some sense, a grappling with the introduction of time to the historical comprehension of species formation. If life began with beings like Leibnitz’s ‘monads,’ or with single cell organisms, the logic that plants are a direct ancestor of arthropods or birds represents a reflection of a certain moment in European logics, one formed by its own ideology of progress, accumulation, and complexification.

The materials of plants, wood, pollens etc. were, by the romantic era, pushed beyond merely being not-alive to ‘dead’ matter, however it seems within the framing of the tree/animal entangled myth, they were also considered living things. ‘Sheep-like ‘creatures were at one time believed to grow from trees, something which John Buckeridge [whose barnacle research I am deeply indebted to here] suggests might form the origin of the German word for cotton, baumwolle, literally tree-wool, from tree-sheep.

The barnacle goose came for some time under the category, and this was an actual taxon, ‘Animalia Paradoxa‘, that is, “contradictory animals,” as grouped by Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae (this category was dropped by the 6th edition in 1748). This taxon included, in all earnestness; the hydra, the monoceros (or unicorn), the siren, and the manticore (strangely, it also included pelicans and antelope). At that time, the goose barnacle and the barnacle goose were part of this taxon as the same animal, with the barnacle and the goose forms being each one part of the paradoxa’s entire life cycle.

This particular species of geese, its nomenclature and history seem to pose some sort of not-quite-in-reach series of metaphors, as the barnacle goose, and the goose barnacle are far more tangled than merely a visual resemblance or nominal correspondence. Human understanding of the barnacle goose’s origin has been one that is molten and morphing, moving across our understanding of species and differentiation between animate and inanimate, mineral and animal, bird and tree, miracle and science, and rendering our means of categorisation, in terms of a European settler thinking way of understanding the world quite strange. The geese offer a sort of charting, providing a thread of how we might have thought about the world, and how we might think it.

While several authors claimed decisive sightings and testimony as to the barnacle goose/goose barnacle in its process of cross taxon life cycle, further investigations, such as that of future pope Pius II, Cardinal Piccolomini in the 15th century, were told upon finding no evidence of this phenomenon, to seek the barnacle goose/goose barnacle further afield, perhaps in the farther reaches of the Scottish hebrides. To this, Piccolomini apparently, and seemingly somewhat dryly remarked that “miracles tend to flee farther and farther.”

For some reason I keep returning to the idea of horizons lately, and this statement, for me, conjures a sort of palimpsest of imagery around the idea of goose horizons, the physicality of their V formations sliding towards them, as well as horizons in the utopian sense: in the activity of moving towards a horizon as an act of constant becoming, rather than an arriving.

I think here of José Esteban Muñoz’s queer horizons, of performance as an ephemeral materiality becoming and disappearing simultaneously, of Maria Siegel’s vanishing points, of what it might entail for a miracle to flee onwards always, moving towards different horizons of terrain, topographies, understanding, possibility.

Goose thinking in this sense, represents a process or a practice, rather than an outcome or object. It is active, an activity: always becoming, never quite arriving. Thinking in these skeins brings forth a kind of residue, a trace of ideas, a haunt if you will. In some sense, they form a kind of substance that cannot necessarily be ‘shown’ or held clearly, something opaque that I am still reaching for as I write this. Perhaps, it is that ideas do not necessarily disappear as they approach horizons, but are transformed, creating “another understanding of what matters,” [Muñoz] and through this, what matter itself might be and contain, generate and change.

barnacle goose flight path drawing no. 2

graphite drawing based on data generated by the Southern Colour Marking Group UK

Barnacle geese were also used to perpetuate faith in marvels, in the natural designs of a higher being. They were held up in Christian theology as proof of parthenogenesis, or ‘virgin birth.’ Many of the recorded tracings of the history of the barnacle goose/goose barnacle are found in documents from both Catholic and Jewish scholars debating whether the goose was a bird, or a shellfish, and how the confusion regarding their in-between status as a category of animal might be applied to whether or not one could eat them, and when.

Charles Darwin researched and wrote extensively about barnacles (Cirripedia), and in a way, that work formed a crucial component in the development of his theory of natural selection. Between earlier notes on transmutation (the idea which would eventually be recast as evolution) and his work on the Origin of Species, for nearly a decade Darwin took what was widely perceived as an odd detour, and worked to clarify and unravel confusion about the nature of barnacles, something which owes its historical confusion to the barnacle goose/goose barnacle tangle. He noted, “Cirripedia do not approach (any animal) beyond the confines of the Crustacea,” and wrote, “I need hardly say that Science in her present state does not countenance the belief that living creatures are now ever produced from inorganic matter,” assertions which appear to resonate with the aim of a disentanglement of any residual cross-category ambiguity surrounding barnacles, and so via cirripedes, barnacle geese.

In French, the word used to refer to barnacle geese is canard, which remains a term that also means “a false report.”

Darwin struggled in his attempt to simultaneously refute the possibility of agency of living things, and theories of external design. In some sense, the idea of design and a ‘greater being,’ rather than disappearing from his work, went underground, but leaves traces, or teleology as linked to theology. [Riskin]

He used the term tendency a great deal: innate tendency, the tendency to vary, hereditary tendency (as a sort of memory), the tendency to complexity, to regress.

I have been thinking of this sense of tendency filtered through my own understanding of what it might mean to tend towards something, and I keep returning to desire. A falling stone desires the earth, laws of attraction, of pull.

Tendency also has as its etymological root ‘ten,’ meaning to stretch toward, could that not be a reaching for, a desiring?

Goose Study no. 1 (a contradictory animal) (audio)
for cello and guiro bow

barnacle goose flight path drawing no. 3

graphite drawing based on data generated by the Southern Colour Marking Group UK

Charles Darwin (despite his efforts) and Darwinism/Neo Darwinism more so, were in some ways unable to fully untangle themselves from theology as subtext, from an understanding of the world still deeply formed by the notion of nature as passive, mechanical, of  brute matter, and God or ‘designer’ as active. There is something, a trace of that theological foundation to European thinking still, about the difficulty many settler-colonial humans have in conceiving of not only animals, but rocks, metals, land, rivers as possessing agency, as such a thing is not possible within the frame of the lingering ghosts of a colonial historical thinking system in which life is bestowed from above. In this designation, animals are mechanical, and the concept of ‘man’ is decidedly positioned as centre, or above [by ‘man’ of course I mean a specific kind of human: white, wealthy, cis, straight, men, with access to European heritage forms of education. Humans not belonging to this rubric of ‘man’ have been, and continue to be in certain cultural formations, historically othered: grouped in proximity to or with animals, as ‘nature’, or considered purely material (cargo, capital, data)].

Despite contemporary science and biophilosophy moving decidedly in the direction of a shift in understanding of agency as the ability to self organise, leaning more towards a “conatus” or creative striving, a reinvention of understanding of spontaneous generation, or irreversible processes in chemistry, of becoming-in-time rather than being outside of time, this feels not to have translated somehow. Mechanistic, positivist, human-centred, closed system thinking now looms large as threats to survival of many beings across various entangled categorical formations of bodies, only some of which we might also think of as species.

Perhaps this is connected to the inability to think our way out of linear time, growth, beyond aim or arrival, beyond endings. Both the internal vitalist and external mechanical design ways of thinking rely in some part on the idea of life possessing some kind of goal as a preexisting coordinate, rather than perhaps another way to consider what ‘striving’ or ‘desiring’ might be, a reaching towards a horizon, a constant becoming.

Or perhaps it is connected to a difficulty in thinking beyond scalability, beyond plantation thinking of closed, replicable systems (to borrow from Anna Tsing’s discussion of the colonial plantation as a model for scalable, capitalist structures). The cross over/resonance of this occupies a space in our historical understanding of the tendencies of life as something which ‘should’ be replicable on multiple levels, a correlation between description, interaction, and behavior, however the idea of order, of closed repeatable systems of molecular activity do not scale to the macro level.

The goose barnacle/barnacle goose assemblage occupies a strange space in this, in its echo of a belief in the vitalistic possibility of Life appearing from Non-Life on a temporal scale which humans can observe. They propose an image: that driftwood or stone, that ‘non-life’ might instead be a form of matter which possesses agency, force, or desire; that these could form the same being or the same animal as a cirripede, as a goose. The goose barnacle/barnacle goose forms a historical diagonal trace, adumbrates a relational possibility of a different conception of cross-matter taxon, it strains and pulls at the skin of distinction between categories.

Barnacle geese as their own strange in-between space illuminate a different kind of thinking, they serve as a reminder that even within European thought, contemporary settler colonial ways of seeing the world in closed categories are relatively new. [of course, this is not news in Indigenous thinking and knowledge practices]

The lifespan of documented belief in the goose barnacle/barnacle goose assemblage stretches proportionally longer than our knowledge of them being otherwise. It also shows us that, contrary to the contemporary narrative of European positivist colonial conquest, ‘animist’ or vitalist beliefs are not a way of understanding the world that was ‘long ago’ eclipsed by reason: they stretch almost right up to us, they are much closer than we think. It feels worth a regular reminder that the use of science as a tool of conquest, the blunt (or sharp) objects of closed system ‘fact,’ law, and reason, relatively recently rubbed shoulders with miracles.

I am by no means advocating or arguing for any kind of ‘return’ to 12th century goose categories of knowledge, but I am interested in how thinking about these geese call our understanding of category and the closed concept of species into question: the importance of them, how they are made, who they serve, what they control, how they have been performed, and to show that they are not by any means eternal, that they might be pliable, or porous.

In other words, a reminder that things, even seemingly immovable systems, can be changed.

To think with the barnacle geese is think and instead of or, goose barnacle and barnacle goose, tangle and clarity, gaggle and skein, marvel and mundane. What of a sort of goose ontology? One that can hold and accept this shimmer of collapsed metaphor and meaning, one that could draw multiple threads together?

I started making some cello studies, which are a gesture in that direction, more than one distinctive element and physicality creating a composite, able to be heard or discerned as distinct creatures, yet forming one total, a ‘contradictory animal’. As always, I find myself returning to the cello to parse out an understanding of the world. I find us two, cello and I, always form a responsible/response-able sounding dyad, a way of working through feeling and thought to locate something I would never be able to uncover alone.

I was explaining my goose research to a friend who said that they thought this wide ranging gathering of goose history, goose facts, seemed less interesting to them than my experience of being on the island with the geese in the ‘fixed’ time period of the last northern hemisphere spring. This made me think about several things, and I wonder if I am in fact, somewhat fraudulent in this goose interest somehow? Am I behaving in an extractive pattern? Is it ok to write about, to think about something that you know you don’t really understand? Is this in some way an anti-intellectual exercise?

I’m not sure that I do have anything to offer in terms of outlining an experience on the island with the geese that was particularly transformative, or meaningful, anything that could carry a tune or a punchline, a narrative arc, provide some sort of summary, knot the loose ends.

We just visited with each other for a while. Is that not enough to spur a gathering of my own sort of ‘goose archive’?

The idea that seems to underwrite this gentle critique, that of the goose time being ‘closed’ or ‘past’ started to bother me like a recurring phantom itch, more and more, so that I feel it important now to write that I can’t think of my time with the geese as a fixed coordinate. It is instead, a leaky space: one that occupies multiple time frames, one that appears now like an apparition, one that leans backwards to all these iterations and understandings of geese. The geese, in other words, are not closed, rather they act as an opening.

Maybe what I have to offer here is to do with orientation, it is a turning toward the geese, a paying-attention-to. And I think that means real life geese honking overhead, as much as it refers to a noticing of geese suddenly ‘everywhere,’ it is a redistribution of attention. It is friends sending me video of Canada geese hanging out on a median trip in Pasadena, or paintings of geese they have stumbled across in a medieval text, poems they have read, or photographs of geese up a tree in their mother’s Illinois backyard.

I have friends living in the countryside in Brandenburg, a couple of hours drive from Berlin, whose house is on the edge of a network of open marshy fields that are home to one of the country’s largest goose colonies. In solidarity with my goose interests and my fixed physical location due to lockdown, they are keeping a log of what time the skeins fly over in the evening each day, keeping track in case I can come later on, or even possibly, “for next year” (when things are different).

What is that gesture if not a manifestation of some sort of contagious goose orientation? A turning towards, a being with the geese, a marking out of goose time?

“March 4, 2021, goose time: 17:45  – 18:20 approx”

For next year, when things are different.

READING LIST

Some things I’ve been reading and rereading while writing this (so far). I’m not trying to position this as a scholarly article, which it is not, but I think all of them are important to acknowledge as integral sources for my thinking/feeling/interpretation. Some texts are more related than others, but of course everything touches everything etc.

Ahmed, Sara – The Promise of Happiness

Braidotti, Rosi – Nomadic Theory

Black, Jeffery M. – The Barnacle Goose

Butler, Judith – The Force of Non-Violence

Buckeridge, John – Of Trees, Geese, and Cirripedes

Buckeridge, John, and Watts, Rob – Illuminating our World- An Essay on the Unraveling of the Species     Problem, with Assistance from a Barnacle and a Goose

Carson, Anne – The Anthropology of Water

Clarke, Phillip A. – Birds as Totemic Beings and Creators in the Lower Murray

Dodge, Harry – My Meteorite

Fanon, Frantz – The Wretched of the Earth

Ghaddar, J. J. and Caswell, Michelle – “To Go Beyond”: Toward a Decolonial Archival Praxis

Glissant, Edouard – Poetics of Relation

Jarman, Derek – Modern Nature

Lorde, Audre – Sister Outsider

Muñoz, José Esteban – Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Orbrist, Hans, Rangel, Gabriela, and Raza, Asad – Trembling Thinking, Ethnography of the Unknowable

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. – Genotologies

Prigogine, Ilya and Stengers, Isabelle – Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature

Ramayya, Nisha – States of the Body Produced by Love

Riskin, Jessica – The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick

Robinson, Dylan – Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies

Sandoval, Chela – Methodologies of the Oppressed

Singh, Julietta – Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt – The Mushroom at the End of the World

Wang, Jackie – Carceral Capitalism

Wynter, Sylvia – Unsettling the Colonialism of Being/Truth/Power/Freedom

Yunkaporta, Tyson – Sand Talk

With love and gratitude to HIAP Suomenlinna, the Finnish migratory barnacle goose colony, Leo Abrahams, Anthea Caddy, Lucio Capece, Amanda Chisholm, Armando De La Torre, Alexander Garsden, Todd Moellenburg, Frederike Offizier, Karla Pringle, Jacob Wick, and most of all to Patrick Farmer for letting me let my childhood bird enthusiast self run completely wild.

Judith Hamann

Verity Birt

Notes on Sounding

They would press their cheek against the stone and know the origin of the universe,

They would feel it in their throat,

                           a tender resonance.

My voice cracks as I descend my pitch into the chasm. I’m lying flat with my cheek pressed against a sweeping sandstone outcrop, warmed by the June sunshine in Northumberland National Park. Grains of primordial sand dust the porous surface and imprints my skin with shining speckles. I turn my mouth into the carved channel, the boisterous wind now tenderly stroking the back of my hair.  

-_—-uHHHHhhHggggg**gghhhhhH>Ghrrrrrrrg~hghhhhhhhuuu“`

             ~~`uuuoOOooo\

Worn smooth by thousands of years of Northumbrian weather, the carved gouge snakes its way down through the belly of the slab for several metres. It was crafted over generations with bone and antler picks and painted rust-red with ochre. Cup marks dimple the surrounding stone, collecting rainwater, straggles of tangled fleece and orange soil thrown up by rabbits. Soft rings radiate from these shallow vessels, spiralling outward in soft mesmeric ripples.  

“Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts.” 1

An older woman is whining to my right, I feel her warm breath in my ear. Her voice rings pure and deceptively girlish. I shift my pitch to match hers and pass the resonance down the channel. My left ear distinguishes a soft cackle, gradually releasing a clangourous eruption of laughter back up the stone, shifting from joyous to menacing. The volume suddenly amplifies and we become one continuous 

yyyyyYYYyyeyehh  hhhhhhhhurrrrr…//=====.   .. .,

…~~’’’’***aaaaaiiighHH=h\\\\\\hhhhhhhhhhhhhYYYYYYYYY>>>AAAAAaaaaaa;;==  

        —–~~~~~~ ~}}eeeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyhhhhh

               Hhhhhh        lllllluuuuuuurggggghhhh    haa ahahahh–––yyyaahaha

The sandstone protrudes like sleeping limbs from under a blanket of turf. Deep time has soaked into the peat and hangs in the heather. This place holds memory; its anima locus charged with mythology and ritual, enfolding many layers of human ancestry. Older than writing, the symbols held by the stone offer a threshold into another word, one entangled with, and engendered by the land. An Iron Age hillfort perches atop the crest of the hill above us, incorporating carved standing stones into its architecture. Bronze Age cairns cluster around the outcrop, the piled stones almost swallowed by clouds of purple heather. Just across the valley, Simonside’s ridge crests the horizon. Thought to be a corruption of ‘Sigemund’s seat’, the site is named for the dragon slaying hero from the epic poem Song of the Nibelungs.

As a group of womxn, excluded from written history, we have come here to re-member this acoustic space where stories were transferred orally and songs were sung for millennia. What sounds have we lost from each-other and the land; too lively to restrain into language, too vibrant for rational translation?

It is the body which points out and which speaks, this disclosure extends, as we shall see, to the whole sensible world … the experience of our own body, will discover in all other objects the miracle of expression.”2

The Neolithic rock art is nestled on the side of the hill, facing the river. Unlike the phallic and monolithic structures we associate with prehistoric monuments, these large slabs are naturally horizontal; an inviting stage. The topography shelters us from the wind and amplifies our voices. Lying flat, we see and feel the minerology of the sandstone intimately, its glittering surface flecked with lichen and traversed by ants, flies and money spiders. The spiral rings of the ancient carvings appear like vibration; sound waves. We improvise in response, passing sound between our bodies of flesh and stone. We become one organism, listening and sounding simultaneously. Immersed in this sonic space, time bends and loops back; refrains building and repeating, sounds now coming not from us, but from somewhere else. My own voice becomes submerged; we are everywhere. A skylark joins the chorus, the stone begins to vibrate, charged with energy, something is emitting. Emotions stir, I hear sobbing. Voices quieten, the wind brings its own whispers. I pull my fingertips over the soft lip of the channel, I meet another’s hand.

*

Across the gallery, our voices coalesce as a two channel sound work; a speaker in each corner, re-enacting the way it was recorded in her living room. Her private domestic space enveloped this therapeutic sounding session; a meditative process to release and share energy as sonic vibration; call and response. We are experimenting with voice beyond language, a preverbal expression emitted from our bodies. The atavistic sounds caress and test each other, feeling out the space between understanding. 

Sound is an envelope. No point of focus; no fixed boundaries; space made by the thing itself, not space containing. It is not pictorial space but dynamic, always in flux; creating its own dimensions moment by moment. It has no fixed boundaries, is indifferent to background, the ear favors sounds from any direction, it can experience things simultaneously.”3

The improvised nature of this experiment lets the sound shape itself; finding resonance in and between the bodies of those present, sometimes in harmony, sometimes in discord. We are sonically affirming the bond between us, an ongoing permeation. Soon she will be pregnant with an embryo created with my eggs. I have fertilised, she will gestate and deliver in collaborative reproduction. 

Uuuuuuuh uh}yaaaaauuuuuuuuuhhhuuuu“uuuuhhh h hhh hh `—––-–––whuu

      }}}uuuuuya    aaaaeeeeeeeeeeeeey y yyyey y__—≠≠≠yu yu  

Our voices reverberate off the furniture, skim the hard wooden floors and sink into the deep piled rug; fleshing the sound. Now echoing through the gallery, it takes on a new flesh, permeating and caressing the bodies of the viewers, bouncing off the artworks and leaking out onto the street. There is something ancient and holy in this vocal lament to motherhood; moving through states of yearning, grace, tranquillity and grief, our voices channel various maternal manifestations from the Virgin Mary to Gaia. Singing together creates bonds of trust and kinship,4 and re-calling the oral transmission of memory and embodied knowledge outside of written and patriarchal history, the sounding acts as a non-linguistic container for that which is raw and undefined; as Audre Lorde affirmed “about to be birthed, but already felt”.5

We have no model for this collaborative mothering project, just an intuitive sense of unfolding destiny. The timing was right, our lives aligned. Finding words to identify the power of this experience will always fail. Instead we seek to communicate between the definitions, in the gaps left for us to emerge.

Notes

1: Anne Carson, “The Gender of Sound” Glass Irony and God (New York: New Directions Books, 1995) 120

2: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge 1962) 197

3: Marshall McLuhan in J. Marchellsault Marshall McLuhan (London: Sage 2005) 91

4: Jill Suttie, “How Music Bonds Us TogetherBerkeley June 28th, 2016, accessed 1/12/2020

5: Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury” in His Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle His Masters House (London: Penguin 2018) 


Click below to listen to some accompanying sound recordings: 

Deformation Attends Her

Yoke 

Verity Birt

angela rawlings

On Listening around the North Atlantic

A random conversation with an elder stranger on a rural Scottish bus ride conjures different modes of listening. In the flow of conversation, he asks about my accent. “Confused,” I reply, but offer also a North American upbringing and Icelandic home base.

“Oh, Iceland! I was stationed up near Keflavík for many years. I was a Listener. Listened to the Russians. Copied their codes.”

“Oh, you were a Codebreaker?”

“No, just a Listener.”

For the following five meditations, I consider how I listen in non-standardised ways. How do we listen to listeners? How do we listen to how we listen? When do we listen, to what or whom, and why?

The Listening Voice

Stone, shell, sand, sediment, shoreline, water-bodies, human-bodies. Any collaborative partner has a constrained “vocabulary” or “palette” for their potential actions. As a collaborator, a responder, I have a sense of that vocabulary, but I cannot anticipate exactly how this might unfold or what choice or impulse any collaborator might enact. A partner is governed by the constraints of her corporeal components; before I can formulate reaction or response, I first must embody and consider my listening.

In 2016, French-born interdisciplinary artist Laureen Burlat joins me in Scotland to explore performance as research. As one intervention, we make a list of letters (from English and French) represented by consonants, select a phoneme for each, and divide this into continuous versus staccato or percussive sounds. Continuous implies it is possible to produce the sound, without interruption, for the entirety of one breath. Staccato indicates the sound is produced briefly. We include J and X in both lists. The vowels are automatically assumed as continuous.

CONTINUOUS

F, H, J, L, M, N, R, S, V, W, X, Z

A, E, I, O, U, Y

STACCATO

B, C, D, G, J, K, P, Q, T, X

We discuss the emotional colour of uttered phonemes, working first with M to see what affect the utterance can produce. We use M to produce sounds of agreement, understanding, disagreement, negation, consideration, interrogation, cuisine enjoyment, strain, anger, frustration, exasperation, and questioning. With so many ways to impact the reception of M based on what emotion is used to colour its sound production, we shift thought to the “personalities” of the letters.

To ascertain what personalities might be ascribed to letters, we devise a vocalising and listening exercise that gives us a chance to consider the emotive, behavioural, and physiological impact of producing specific phonemes. Working as partners, Laureen produces the first sound in repetition while I listen. Then, I produce the same sound repeatedly while Laureen listens. We then compare how we would describe the response we each had to making the sound (the embodied response) and the response we had when hearing the sound (the listening response).

J

Embodied response: almost tickles the tongue, high breath sound though low anchored voice.

Listening response: vacuum cleaning and sshhh, more volume.

K

Embodied response: percussive back of throat, almost choking. Diaghragm, pumped.

Listening response: soft, insistent. Slap.

T

Embodied response: aggressive, explosive. Temples (light-headedness). Connected to active, pumping diaphragm.

Listening response: striking a match

Through this exercise, we estrange our typical affiliations with the letters as word-material.

Earlier and later, Laureen and I adapt In Memory: Jökull (Broken Dimanche Press, 2015) for two voices. The sound-poetry performance hinges on two voices hocketing the words jökull and jökla between them. Jökull means glacier in Icelandic. Glaciologists predict all glaciers in Iceland will disappear within two hundred years. Tourists enter Iceland either via flight, landing in proximity to the former Keflavík US military base, or via ferry, on Iceland’s east coast north of a still-classified naval listening centre. Tourists seek out interaction with these glaciers. All will soon disappear. Who listens, and how?

Laureen and I hocket jökull and jökla between us, exploring the materiality of phonemic amalgam. We learn the letters we’d played with our French and English training through pronunciative difference, deference. In Icelandic, the j sounds as y, k a crisp percussive cut mid-vowel, and the double ll becomes an unvoiced tl—matches struck. We listen to ourselves, these words passed between foreign tongues. We listen to ourselves as we respond. Our collective utterance recalls melt-drip as we colour each phoneme with kaleidoscopic affect.

The Vocal Breast

Sometimes I focus on different parts of the body to sound through them. The practice is similar to a modern dance exercise, where you allow one body part (such as the elbow) to lead the rest of the body in movement through space. In my variation, I invite one body part to lead my voice through space. The gesture attempts to uncore trauma through pre- or proto-semantic utterance.

When I was diagnosed with cancer in 2012, I wondered what my afflicted breast would voice. Before surgery, I found the exercise too difficult manifest, to pair breast with voice. I found it impossible to be with my breast, full stop—hard to be with a site of trauma.

After surgery, during the punishing rounds of chemotherapy, I returned again to the exercise. Canadian singer and actor Ciara Adams and I travelled to Iceland’s east coast, northeast of that rumoured US military listening centre. On a black-sand beach with a stalwart rock towering over us, I stated blankly, bluntly, that I wanted to enter the now-excised breast. Ciara lead me through breath; we entered together.

            My own voice was unfamiliar to me; cessation of mucous production caused dry throat and challenged my ability for prolonged sound. I stopped sounding and listened to Ciara’s exercise. Her voice behaved in ways I’d never heard before. It flipped, with ease, into an unexpected, much higher octave than she typically sings. Clear as glass or blue. Clear as blue. Vocal discovery. She was so open, so grounded; her voice had gained its own will. How did she do that?

            After some time, Ciara moved behind me with her hands under my shoulder blades. Then Ciara was no longer Ciara—not in her voice. I listened as she channeled. The voice came from overseas. Ritual. She became new to me, and we walked into that newness together. I didn’t feel so frightened anymore, having entered the breast and sounded.

The Listening Dream

During chemotherapy treatment in Iceland, I was unable to recall night-dreams. Within weeks of the last round, my dreams returned—vivid and sense-dominated. One of the first dreams conjured listening.

Whenever entering a cavernous space, I test the acoustics by hooting my voice into it. My dream hinged on this wakeful exercise. Had I ever listened within a dream? I couldn’t be sure.

In my dream, I entered a room where a previous owner collected geodes. Before inspecting them, I hooted into the space. The acoustics of the office room were odd—damp and resonant. Some parts of the room produced harmonics, signaling in my dream-logic that the room was poorly constructed. A second or third note would vibrate between the plywood slats if I sat at just the right spot and hooted.

            I called G- into the room and told him I wanted to share with him two things— the acoustics and the geodes. I asked him to make sound to test the acoustics; he made a sudden, hard, elongated nasal eeee with his eyes squinted tight. I almost told him it was the wrong way to do it—as if there is a wrong way to produce sound!!—but instead I waited to see what would happen for him. He continued to do this as he intoned and listened, scooting on his bottom around the room.

I started my own hooting again and found a spot with harmonics. My eyes were closed so I reached out my hand towards G-, grabbed his shirt to tug him to my spot so he could hear or test these harmonics, too. He grabbed my hand to navigate, and scooted backwards to sit in front of me, the exact space where the harmonics were produced. We continued our hoots and eeees, and he moved into the sound space between us so that our lips touched briefly in the transfer.

Then I woke up. We never inspected the geodes.

The Invisible Heard

To what, in my sensorium, do I have access? What local markers provide access to temporalities and safety?

Through the latter half of the 20th century, the US military in concert with neighbouring countries established the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), a network of hydrophones embedded in the North Atlantic. Secret listening centres were situated on surrounding islands and lands, in rural locations. Centres in the middle of nowhere. Centres of nowhere with international implication, listening for human action in ocean depth.

On a late morning in November 2015, a quiet bass drone emanated from the wide, open-air cavern of Loch Long, Scotland. Deeper than wind through the autumn trees and more monotonous than the ebb of wave crash on the shoreline, the drone shifted via Doppler effect over five minutes. Its source was a Vanguard-class nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, freshly deployed from the nuclear-warhead storage and loading facility at RNAD Coulport.

A submarine, situated within the romanticized, pastoral landscape of rural Scotland, takes on a similar sighting mechanism to wildlife. One may sense the presence of roe deer, porpoise, eagles, submarine. Heard: brush-scruff, splash, leaf displacement, drone.

Escorted by several military and coast-guard boats, a submarine dwarfs the loch as it slides towards submersion and open ocean. A submarine deployed with nuclear missiles symbolizes an instant obliteration of human life as well as a strategy to extend a status-quo human existence given theoretical human-produced threats. The drone obliterates time and extends it.

In operation, a submarine seeks invisible knowledge—not through sight, but through listening. Those directing the submarine are not responsible for its destination or its ultimate activity; these are governed by personnel at great distance from the submarine. These people use their submarine to listen.

Scotland boasts a “right to roam,” more aligned with Nordic policy than with English or Welsh policy in private property and the commons. In Iceland, for example, “roaming” is confined to walking within the law, as off-road driving is forbidden. This is for the benefit of fragile bioregions that take the marks of tire tracks years or centuries to assimilate.

In Scotland, I walk all roads within a two-mile radius of where I live. I walk some overgrown driveways. I notice one right-to-roam sign as I explore the region. I walk through farmland fields, scale stacked-stone fences, push through tightly-grown temperate rainforest flora. I collect contact mics and a hydrophone, intent to extend my right to roam to the realm of foreshore and underwater listening.

I do this proximal to the UK’s largest Ministry of Defense base. To listen in proximity of the base throws surveillance and military presence into perspective. I see submarines in the loch, and police stop me occasionally to inquire what business I have walking in the region. I am within a five-mile radius of the Ministry of Defense base, and within that radius my right to roam is occasionally questioned. I question the safety of my intention to listen while my listening bristles with anxiety with each unidentified motor or drone that echoes through the rural loch. I never lower my hydrophone into the ocean.

The Island Listening

The Icelandic word kuðungur signifies both a spiral-shaped shell (formed by snails or whelks) and the cochlea (spiral-shaped component of the inner ear). Linguistic observation of this Icelandic sign invites metaphor: Univalves are cochlea. How are univalves not cochlea? How are univalves cochlea?

We hear the ocean inside of a seashell. Here, we link ear and shell. The Icelandic word for island (ey) dwells within ear (eyra). This coincident word construction invites a meditation: How might an island hear?

An island forms through volcanic eruption, grows via layered eruptions. An ocean heaves ground shells and stones onto an island’s shoreline, and the island expands. An ocean drags shells and stones from the island to its bed-depths—erosion. The images used to explain this invoke a listening-memory—shells, sand, waves, eruption, or wind sound in the mind of the reader.

In Icelandic, we signify seasons in verb form, through their becoming—að vetra, to become winter. “It winters” or “it becomes winter” might be ways to translate “það vetrar.” Here is a cyclic state that simultaneously progresses its cycle. The season becomes the winter that had, in a previous state, been becoming winter.

The submarine cycles to become war. It wars. Shells become sand through tide and time. They sand. Ears hear an ocean that sands, that implies sand in its sound. Within our vocal experiments, we listen. Our voices become the sensorial room for listening. We become voice.

We listen to, listen through—sifting sound as ephemeral sedimentation. Biosemiotic codes might be unearthed denoting human-selves and more-than-human-selves, landsoundscapes and submarinescapes. We embrace our urges to hear what we cannot or should not—deep ocean and its inhabits, be they more-than-human or human-spawned. Kuðungur an ear-shell, unseen sound-impacted geodes. We become urge, dredge sono-etymologies, voice a physiological proto-semantic. We listen to surveilled sites—be they body, land, room, shell—that suffer or propose invisible trauma. Our bodies island to other bodies, a network of -phones extended between, a chance to hear and be heard.

angela rawlings

Nisha Ramayya

drinking at the artificial wormhole

Abstract

This creative-critical piece explores relationships between mathematics, the sea, and sound, to test out listening as a receptive and generative methodology that may hold together disparate topics. I first encountered Fernando Zalamea, a synthetic philosopher of alternative logics, at Arika in Glasgow (2019) and was rapt hearing him speak about and enact a mathematics of gesture, romance, and epistemological possibility. In a series of conversations and performances with boychild, Laura Harris, Nathaniel Mackey, and Fred Moten, Zalamea returned time and time again to Moby Dick and a line in Moten’s all that beauty (2019): ‘We’re all whales.’ Moten read that line at the launch of Gravitational Feel, his collaboration with Wu Tsang, as Ahmad Jamal Trio’s ‘But Not For Me’ played on a loop. Running with these loops, tying knots haphazardly, diving benightedly, I find myself on a seabed, steps away from a drop-off that is really an artificial wormhole. Unable to see or to hear, I try to tune myself in to speculative frequencies – jelly, telepathy, entropy’s music – and to listen oceanically (hydrophones help!). Such a listening practice enables a move away from institutional pressures and sacrificial logics, at least, that’s the dream. We do it together for the sake of sticking together, bound by monkey-rope, submarine cables, and vibes. I don’t know where we’ll end up, if we’ll be sent or assimilated, but one way or another this piece will venture a response.

*

Presentation

On Thursday 21st November 2019, I attended a study session in Glasgow led by Columbian mathematician, philosopher, and critic Fernando Zalamea. The session was part of political arts organisation Arika’s Episode 10: A Means Without End, a programme of public events featuring a fabulous line up of artists, poets, and philosophers, a few of whom I’ll mention below. I found the entire programme to be emotionally, aesthetically, intellectually, and politically mind-altering, as I’ve written about elsewhere1,but here I want to focus on Fernando, the synthesist to whom I lost my corazón (co-reason/co-heart). Before introducing Fernando properly, I’d like to mention that when I first encountered his work, I hadn’t studied maths since my Highers, thinking very little about it in the 15 years since leaving school. But something about Fernando’s work makes me want to study anew, to think about mathematics, to dwell in its structures and activities, to set aside worries about not understanding in order to come closer to what he terms mathematics’ ‘wild heart’. It’s difficult to speak about something that one doesn’t know about without propagating anti-intellectualism or quackery, yet it also feels important to throw oneself into the unknown, to try to articulate the experience, to share those hazards and flops. I’ll come back to the limits of poetic licence in a bit, but for now, visionary-poet Will Alexander provides a helpful way through these complex junctures of knowledge, language, and poetry that is not a way out:

Of course, one reads and ventures into all manner of things across duration on this Earth. In this sense, the poet is not a vacant species, the poet is endemic with life itself. I guess the overused word passion applies here. For me, passion creates technique, not some external knowledge superimposed upon a deserted psychic land. In other words, what moves you? What allows your imagination to vibrate? My experience gives me understanding that the alphabet blazes, that its accents stir not unlike recorded dusts on Mars. Bud Powell, the jazz pianist, in his constant desperation to play, seemed consumed by an experience not unlike the one that now consumes me. If I go more than a few days without writing I feel as if ostracized from myself and so, like a camel or a cheetah, I speed to the nearest watering hole of my imagination so as to continue to survive in the flux that continues to guide the quotidian kingdom2.

We won’t evade the problem of not-knowing, instead, we’ll try not-knowing as an approach to and beyond the surface; lapping at the watering hole, casting a hydrophone, descending that lifeline to access other elementals.
          Fernando led and participated in a number of sessions on epistemological entanglements, gestural maths and dance, mathopoetics, and Moby Dick. He repeated the same questions at the beginning of each session, riffing on Denise Ferreira da Silva’s work on race and social justice: how can we understand difference without separation; how can we fight against separation and reduction to entangle and expand our understandings of the world; how can we move on in the world, within the world’s complexities? These are questions for mathematics as much as for philosophy, poetry, and politics, he maintained, and maths should not be segregated from culture and thought. By way of several mathematicians – predominantly Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866), Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), and Alexander Grothendieck (1928-2014) – Fernando offered us many dialectical theories to prove the inadequacy of the singular point of view and to present models for considering entanglement. In order to bring together and to think together polarities like One and Many, Infinite and Finite, Structure and Deformation, Beauty and Truth, Fernando explained the mathematical sheaf, which is central to his book Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics (2019)3.He writes:

The pragmaticist maxim thus serves as a sophisticated ‘sheaf of filters’ for the decantation of reality. The crucial role of the sheaf secures an amplified multiplicity of perspectives which, for that matter, filters information in more ways than one, thus establishing from the outset a certain plausibility for the claim that knowledge may be sufficiently rich and multivalent. (118-119)

The sheaf glues together multiple, diverse perspectives, enabling an expanded knowledge to counter the violence of dogma. This is a non-universalizing universalization, taking us through the looking glass from completeness to incompleteness, from the known world to the unknowable world, inversion’s prerogative.
          As well as talking and using the whiteboard, Fernando gestured and gesticulated, using his hands and arms to condense the mathematical techniques, to show us that we could do maths too, embody complexity, hold abstraction in our historical specificity. He explained how these concepts manifest in poetry, in cinema, in the figure of the whale, in the felt and projected experiences of our lives. He demonstrated a pedagogy of kindness and generosity, offering us highly specialised ways into the shared wonders of knowing and not-knowing our world, pausing frequently to take questions. Can you explain ramification? Do Riemann surfaces hold pronominal possibilities for exploding gendered subjectivity? What do you mean by logic, beauty, neighbourhood? Does maths go beyond language? How does this theorem help us in our quotidian lives? Why do the layers signify whale-song? One attendee said: I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but when you said continuous, I burst into tears. A pair of origami whales made by Arika’s co-founder Barry Esson appeared on the table. I told my friends that I’d fallen in love. Fernando referenced Fred Moten’s all that beauty4,this poem in particular:

Blackness is swimming,

can’t quite let the water go or be,
we harp on the water.

The blackness of the whole thing
is that our flesh lights up the world,
the ringing, the bubbles,

               the particles appear
to fade
in suspense. What else
might happen to us folds us
in. Not, but amniotic wail.

                          We’re whales.

We hate the world. We love
the word whorl, our whirlpool
pianism, our pullen, our
pullin’, our practice,

                            our
saturated name. (64)

This poem came up time and time again; Jackie Wang heard in its music the music of Alice Coltrane; Fred read it at the opening of Gravitational Feel, a ‘kinetic sculptural performance’ made in collaboration with Wu Tsang. Shimmering ropes fell from rotaries above – gold, indigo, turtle dove, aquamarine – notated with small and big knots, filling the space with friendship’s weave. We sat cross-legged under stichomythic showers, those heavenly wigs, as Fred and Wu read poetry over Ahmad Jamal Trio’s ‘But Not For Me’ on loop, playing hide and seek like Old Bollywood lovers in a banyan, like clown fish.
         In a discussion with Fernando about Moby Dick, Laura Harris likened Gravitational Feel to the monkey rope, in which Ishmael, bound to the harpooner standing on the dead whale as he himself stands on the ship, ponders:

For better or for worse, we two, for the time, were wedded; and should poor Queequeg sink to rise no more, then both usage and honor demanded, that instead of cutting the cord, it should drag me down in his wake. […] Queequeg was my own inseparable twin brother; nor could I any way get rid of the dangerous liabilities which the hempen bond entailed.

[…] I saw that this situation of mine was the precise situation of every mortal that breathes; only, in most cases, he, one way or other, has this Siamese connexion with a plurality of other mortals. If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die. True, you may say that, by exceeding caution, you may possibly escape these and the multitudinous other evil chances of life. But handle Queequeg’s monkey-rope heedfully as I would, sometimes he jerked it so, that I came very near sliding overboard. Nor could I possibly forget that, do what I would, I only had the management of one end of it5.

Ishmael describes this bond in terms of a sacrificial logic – a rope with two ends, two knots; one destroyed so the other can be saved, or, one destroyed because the other is; the surrender that devotion entails – a logic that Fernando and Gravitational Feel confound in their differential entanglement, weaves of demonstrations to disqualify extreme perspectives. A pamphlet of emails, research, and drawings by Fred and Wu was on sale at the bookstall; I bought a copy for my friend James, my friend Laurel bought a copy for me. A week later, my partner Rob made a mini-Gravitational Feel for my birthday, using a wooden mobile and a pack of multicoloured cords. A handicraft box jellyfish, it hung from the ceiling in our bedroom until the cats pulled it down, only to realise that it’s much less fun grounded.
         This mini-sculptural performance made by Rob, Worf, and Ticklepenny Prawnmobile reminds me of an offset from the mother-sculptural performance made by Fred and Wu, a polyp, a pup. It’s a citational practice that’s a devotional practice, running circles around the loved one to get their attention, abrading a path in your context that overlaps other paths and other contexts, bringing up clouds of referential sediment that obscure before settling and forming little heaps of thought, maybe as a musical phrase or a poetic tactic or a socialised tic. Sometimes I feel like a barnacle attaching myself to influential writers and texts, clinging on for dear life because everything depends on them, from a single poem to the futures we’re conjuring; once attached, we might radiate. Sometimes I drop a quotation into a poem to watch my words and obstructions change colour, scatter, get drunk. Fernando shares some of Grothendieck’s metaphors to depict immersion’s aid:

For Grothendieck, a problem can be imagined as a sort of ‘nut’, whose hard shell has to be penetrated in order to get to its ‘soft flesh’. In Grothendieck’s conception, there are two essentially distinct strategies for opening the shell: hitting it with a hammer and chisel – sometimes slipping and sometimes smashing the inside to pieces along with the shell – and immersing it in a liquid (‘the tide’) in such a way that, after weeks or months, its exterior softens and opens up ‘with a squeeze of the hands […] like a ripe avocado’. The first strategy (yang) aims to resolve the problem; the second strategy (yin) aims to dissolve it. Through an adequate immersion in a natural, ambient medium, the solution should emerge within a generic landscape that outstrips the particular irregularities of the shell. (148-149)

I love the scalar incongruity of immersing a nut in the sea, rather than a dish or even a bathtub (and hear those echoes of Ishmael’s cooperative bliss!); Fernando’s own metaphors carry us further out. In Peirce’s Logic of Continuity (2012), he opens with the fluid interconnections between maths and myth, embodied by an ever-changing figure: ‘Like Proteus, the sea god which changed his appearance at will, the continuum moves between the physical world and abstract ideals’ [n. p.]6.These figures are difficult to represent, but not utterly beyond representation; rather, they require multiple, mutable attempts in language, diagrams, and performance.
         In another transit, or discordant translation, the author of a book about cephalopod consciousness describes the body of the octopus as a topology: ‘there are facts about which parts are connected to which, but the distances between parts and the angles are all adjustable’ (220), which also suggests a methodology for reading and writing poetry7.I am making intuitive, somewhat erratic leaps between things, eliding the distances between contexts; this is not proper scholarship, says my internalised examiner, and maybe poetry shouldn’t be caricatured as logic’s subterfuge, the metaphor ejecting a bloom of ink in the face of history. But Fernando offers a way to think about these movements, which means that we’re almost ready to jump. At Arika, he talked about Moby Dick’s oscillating images of the whiteness of the whale and abstract blackness, knowledge and non-knowledge, what’s part of us and what’s beyond, mappable space and subterranean currents. To illustrate the back-and-forth transits of topology, Fernando described seeing a painting by ‘Glasgow Boy’ Arthur Melville in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and finding interconnections between the artist and the novelist: in their surname; in the painting’s depiction of Spanish mountains and the mountain in Massachusetts that inspired the enormity of the whale; and in the curator’s descriptions of colour and shade. Fernando explained the kind of knowledge that the gluing and transits of sheaves can engender: ‘this abstraction in the co-razón is the one who is projected in the particulars of our razón below.’ Plasticity is not carelessness, and there might be ways to tune in to speculative frequencies to access other knowledges, other gestures, other inscriptions even as they disperse. We’re at the deep-sea drop-off; Fernando offers a final boost:

In fact, it is not even a question of a ‘reading’ in Grothendieck, but rather a listening. An articulation between images, intuition and ear, as opposed to other merely formal manipulations of language, seems to be fundamental for him. In addition to the metaphor of the nut and the rising tide, another of Grothendieck’s central metaphors is, in fact, the image of the creative mathematician attending to ‘the voice of things’. (151)

*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*

shhh  – – –  intermedial
song – a little little light to none

to none “donate voice”
go down – shhh “to voice
bank” leave

dunked poet’s lullaby
like sugar in watercolour

granular hush
to send
line
off

*

the descent pockmarked with caves, caves papered
with layers
          “dynamic”

closed to feel “interaction
of energy lines”

wetly amass to taste without touching:

hello
hello you

*

               *
               *
         greetings
       “crystal”ular
               *
               *
        ball”oonical
        salutations
               *
               *

*

ballum rancum ooh-ooh-ooze
“spirit estate is the space”

pliés & splats of microtubes
“spirit estate is the space”

radioledance across latitudes
“spirit estate is the space”

*

who says it’s me! down the line and hears it’s you
who says “call me tantra” – hears write this bridge

this bridge called roseability

*

pecking coral to build
“vibratory fields of webcams”

                    ~chainmail
                glitch~

to grit in unison

*

multidimensional sirens sound

“how to
      educe
sonic
      events
from the past”

how to redo
    glitter
         city
             chi
                chi
                   chi

DO! to dissolve the keys

*

ask not faint rays of sun
on what is predicated

your sunken eyes
your “promised land”

ask athwart of flatness

*

“sound being given, thing evolved”

*

a glimpse of what we’ve left behind:

               submerge papers in
                   “period”ic flow
              pseudokin “rubs out”
                     the context
                “tantric sentence”

following haemolink elimination, tree

            brought down, Mulder
               & Skully uncover
          the fungous catacombs
                  of life’s birth

*

         “tragic”
       l i d l e s s
     l e s s n e s s
      n e s s l i d

some ears are
open caskets

*

a glimpse of what will be:

housecats on the windowsill
   “quack”ing at parakeets
     in the silver fir parrotfish
knit intestinal rainbows

*

“consciousness without memory”: the perpetual mantra
           hrīṁ strīṁ huṁ phaṭ ||
           body seeder
           wildfire shuttering up and down
your sevenfold spine: now! now! now! now! now! now! now! &c.

*

some ears are ears of the “world prison”

some hear membraneously

*

to fly through these jammy clouds of pan-studying
we fly “building in improvisatory asides”
to admit the artifice of foresight
buoyant skull escape pod
expertise ricochets
skywriting
passion
atoms
are
us

*

the particular correlates with all other
particulars in the universe, a scallop’s
bubble-the sonospheric foam, a clack-
“the straight edge of the cloud” unless

*

if name and form fuse, signs
proving things for things,
stirring them into sensibility

as one can’t lie to a telepath
how precisely we’d sound
how sound would consummate

“freeing data
                   and

triggering virtualities”

*

sound says: “the lesson that sticks” is the easiest to forget
let each souvenir retune you in a flash, let each flash pale

*

[Read ‘a group exhibition of atoms, interim, stars’.]

[1] Nisha Ramayya, ‘Notes on A Means Without End’, Poetry Review, ed. by Mary Jean Chan and Will Harris Vol. 110, No. 1 (Spring 2020), pp. 35-45.

[2] Will Alexander, ‘Language Seems to Stoke Itself: A Conversation with Sylvia Legris’, Music & Literature, No. 9 (24 April 2019).

[3] Fernando Zalamea, Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics, translated by Zachary Luke Fraser (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019).

[4] Fred Moten, all that beauty (Seattle: Letter Machine Editions, 2019).

[5] Herman Melville, ‘The Monkey-Rope’, Moby Dick; or, The Whale (London: Richard Bently, 1851).

[6] Fernando Zalamea, Peirce’s Logic of Continuity (Boston: Docent Press, 2012).

[7] Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life (London: William Collins, 2018).

Sally Ann McIntyre

The Weight of a Feather in 1907

PART I

i.

When he arrived, his only fantasy seems to have been that of the list. So much so that the custodians of the land were forced into re-burying their own dead so he would not rewrite the meshwork of place and its living relations into a still and ordered silence.

The list went with him, a map that informed his every movement. He brought it with him over the yearning sea, part of the baggage he bundled up on land with his well-oiled guns and his rations, even as he slogged off into the thick green dawn of cacophonous, bird-ringing air.

To re-write the world through a kind of re-placing also invited a re-definition of his own role: that of adventurer, taxidermist, and collector. His battle with the land displaced a battle with the hierarchies, the music of the old empire.

It was a form of sensory cancellation, the kind of deafness which attends statues, the book of his ingressive narrative. In the indecipherable and soundless book of nature, too, his only encounters seem to have been with objects.

His tireless task there, as he perceived it, was to keep moving in the service of this stasis, to lay the grid of the list out over the land, to add his signature, to construct the museum catalogue.

ii.

The collector encountered the Southern form of the bird for the first time in 1877, in the remote reaches of what would become known as Porter’s Pass. He heard it before he saw it, an unfamiliar sound calling out from an unlocatable position in the density of bush.

It seemed to throw its voice there, to be present in two places at once. Writing in his field notebook a curt assessment, his was one of the first, yet least eloquent, descriptions of its song:

“flute-like, melodious.”

He moved on. Through these densities, into the reductive clarity of sight.

And this is where the recording stops.

iii.

Although the collector quickly learned both languages spoken locally, and could use them in print and, more haltingly, in his everyday transactions, the writings we have from him are largely translations from the German.

He did not extend these attentions to learning the bird’s language. In his many field notebooks and the later, longer texts, we hear and see only glimpses of the bird’s behaviour; although there are of course many references to its morphology as specimen. There in the book, his own placeless place, he is the giver of the name, its descriptive logics of separation.

It would fall to others to record the bird in life. There are only a few extant descriptions. These more sonically observant and attuned first-hand accounts arise in the same period  from other explorers. They write, enraptured or lonely, on their long sojourns within these wilder Southern landscapes, of the bird’s haunting song:

…[F]ew people are aware that the Crow is a song bird, as it is only in the depths of the forrest they can be heard to perfection. Their notes are very few, but the sweetest and most mellow toned I ever heard a bird produce.

When singing, they cast their eyes upwards like a street musician expecting coppers from a fourth story window, and pour forth three or four notes, softer and sweeter than an Aeolian harp or a well toned clarionet.

Indescribably mournful. The wail of the wind through a leafless forest is cheerful compared to it. Perhaps the whistling of the wind through the neck of an empty whisky bottle is the nearest approach to it, and is sadly suggestive of departed spirits.

When reading these recordings, we might note two things: firstly, that the words they used were also approximations, the name of the bird mis-translated into European equivalences. Second, that they knew the bird as many things: a sonic mirror, a relatively common forest bird, a drinking companion, but not yet through its silence. They were not yet calling it the grey ghost.

iv.

When the bird began to listen, it was from the fact of a disturbance, that of his intrusion into the set of known relations. It met him at an auditory threshold, at the juncture of plant-thicket and echo, so tightly woven into a sonic knowing it could walk along it effortlessly, without any need for flight.

At the very beginning of encounter, it approached him without fear. It bounded through the breathing forest as though tumbling, to ask the question, along the pathways of interlocking branches within its known territories.

“Who are you?” it said, calling in its own language.

Peering down at him from its home in the dense canopy from a position of inquisitiveness, tangled so thick into the fabric of its world. Walking alongside him as a co-presence through the breathing forest, signalling in greeting and warning, disappearing at intervals to become echo and refrain.

A call and re-call, ever forming. Figuring reverberance as shapes within the whole overarching density of green.

“Who are you?” the bird said.

v.

Through the almost-impassable bush, the collector hacked his way; he carried his culture with him in the form of words sharpened like long curved knives with which to carve silence into the breathing land. In his field notebooks these carvings were laid out in careful rows of observations, dates and names. He named the birds, the valleys and the fjords. At night by the campfire he occasionally curled them into the forms of poetry, and fetched a mouth organ from his pocket to whistle sentimental refrains from the old country.

What the bird thought of this music is not recorded.

vi.

The collector understands his first encounters with the bird not as interlocutor, but as  observer, within a complex scenario of trust and subterfuge, recognising the bird’s curiosity, even as he positions himself as pursuer:

“As long as they are not disturbed they are very tame and peer inquisitively at the intruder in this lonely wilderness,” he writes, speaking later through the mouths of his own translators, in 1892.

And then, “When they are chased and molested they shun the persecution by quickly hopping away, using their wings at every jump.”

vii.

The collector gathers as many specimens of the bird as he can carry. In an apparent disregard for its specialisation and its attendant rarity, he moves numerically beyond the type specimen, beyond the limit of the orders placed, those wanted by both local and global museums, toward the edge of a more complete cataloguing.

He takes whatever he can find, individuals, pairs, then whole nests complete with eggs or just-hatched clusters of tiny blind and vulnerable chicks. From this distance, it is difficult to grasp his motivation for these questionable acts, which far exceed that needed for scientific verification and study.

Whether this frenzied taxonomy is predominantly prestige-based or financial, it is impossible now to know. Perhaps it is just that the list has possessed him. That he has been drawn into its fiction of a graspable limit. Excited, ultimately, by the idea that the whole life of the species is in his hands.

Perhaps it is simply that he wanted all the birds for himself, the barbed scythes of a categorial imperative twisted into a pathological drive for the complete collection, a Borgesian mania of accumulation, where, mistaking the map for the territory, he could not return until he had collected the whole species.

Perhaps ultimately this motivation toward total accumulation might itself be seen as a drive toward authorship, the collector re-casting himself not only as the discoverer, the giver of the beginning limit of the name, but also the writer of its end, its limit in extinction.

When the dark speaks he cannot hear it. It is a darkness also hidden from himself; the song attending the successive acts of violence is camouflaged within the terseness of the notebooks; we do not read it there, within each logged body, set down as a discrete indexical ciphering.

(Natiomystis cincta)
(Heteralocha acutirostris)

(Callaeas cinerea)

They appear there as a checklist, a telling of bare life stripped to its empirical appearances, a carefully scripted set of names, dates and locations.

viii.

The moment when the list gives way is when he sees them. When they emerge again, and for a brief instant he grasps the bird’s living and dying, its co-presence tied up within his own. It is no coincidence that this is also the point at which his listening returns.

He writes at Milford sound of an encounter, as violent as all the others. A bird is shot from the invisibility and safety of a hide, from the self-scripted sovereignty of an unobserved position. But before he can emerge to grab and quickly gut its body, the encounter transforms through his witnessing of something new:

”When it fell to the ground, the other, he writes, “hopped down to the fallen bird and instead of fleeing; it repeated several times its call note and jumped highly excitedly around its dead comrade.”

Through listening, an individual death is suddenly thrown into focus. Through relation, through a companion’s distress, it is something he understands: “I had to go away, as I could not stand to look on; it pained me deeply that I had shot the poor bird,” he writes.

ix.

For the collector, the return of the ear is a painful thawing, sudden and involuntary. We read in his journals that he cannot shoot the mourning bird, a development he initially understands as a strangely inexplicable failing, a moment of self-doubt, an inability to move beyond sentiment, to do the job.

Instead, he waits until the bird has finally left its dead companion. He then furtively leaves his hide, scoops up the now-cold body, strokes the slate-grey feathers of the breast. He places it, solitary, with the others, the orderly sets of pairs nestled together, their legs bound with a hemp and paper sheaf of careful dates and locations.

What ghosts him within the experience, and beyond it, is the call note, repeated several times. As he hears a question ringing down the centuries without answer, it is a gateway through which his listening opens out, toward recognition of another’s sentience, the voice which is the articulation of its grief, and with it his own responsibility for its being and nonbeing.

It tells him that he is both seen and heard. That he is also the song of a man in the mouth of a bird. That his own experience has also been authored, is being written by the bird in its own blood.

x.

From this point onwards he will find that his specimens are also ghosts, irreducible to the bare, objective functioning he gives them. They follow him as he utters solitude in a world teeming with hidden beings.

They tell him that while he appears to exist outside history, there is no way out of time. As much as the act of collecting is for him a form of writing himself out of entanglement, of simplifying the narrative. As much as he writes his own loneliness and exceptionality within this world of connections.

He begins to repeat the call note to himself, walking through the forest, as a whistled self-haunting. The refrain continues to haunt him even on his return to the old country, all the way to his own early death, where, half-mad, poisoned by the taxidermy chemicals he uses to create his many specimens, he whistles it over and over, on his death bed. The extinct song from half a world, half a life away.

The bird, now extinct, also learns from this experience. For it, in the future forest, all is echo. It too learns how to use the knives of silence he has brought into its world, as a set of techniques. It learns how to live as a ghost, a half-perceived whisper in the tomb of the archive. This lesson is for the future when the forest, too, will be a museum.

PART II

i.

Under the vast raftered ceiling of the wooden room, the birds are overwhelming, a measureless repository of waiting memories. A shaft of sun from the one nearby window spills daylight across the table upon which lie the specimens usually kept far away from its radiance, in drawers and cupboards. Those now laid out by the curator of birds in front of me, despite their seeming magnitude, comprise one small fragment of the total collection itself. Something I am used to seeing in black and white, in the historical partitioning of painterly representation, swims into the light of day, as painful as a thawing of something long-frozen, long-numb. They emerge from their carefully guarded cupboards and drawers, Into the light. A stunned quantity of frozen beings, their vivid un-faded feathers caught in the shafts of golden radiance, as in a coloured photograph dropped out of time and inserted back into the narrative at the wrong point. A representation made long before that technology existed. Memories belonging to no-one now living.

The collector shipped them off to Europe in 1889, coinciding this with the publication of the bird books. But these are not his masterpieces, these once-living beings. They resist his – and any human – authorship, even as they are subject to its reductions and transformations. In 1889, they became fugitive texts, retellings of lost forests, slipping through our imaginations before we had time to solidify them there. In their vault in Vienna, they are far from these lands, and we who inhabit those losses do not remember them. They are not our emblems, nor our fictions. They are our ghosts. Some part of me thinks: it is better this way.

ii.

I enter into the archive of the visual and material traces of the bird as entering into a mausoleum. These representations were stabilised by arsenic over a century ago, set into its thin powdery stone. They do not look like the illustrations I have come to know, within the iconic bird books, those images which, despite not having been drawn from life but from museum specimens, have almost substituted themselves for the birds lost to living memory, although their extinction dates are relatively recent: 1907, 1914.

Sir Walter L. Buller, the author of the books, was notoriously hard on the underpaid colourists who filled in the birds’ substance within the illustrator’s initial sketches, wanting the colours exactly right, as though from life.

Even though the colourists, like the illustrator himself, had never seen the birds in life.

iii.

In a museum in its home country, I have seen a curator of birds touch an extinct owl, stroke its feathers with a sad kindness. In another I was given a set of blue plastic gloves with which to handle a sacred wattlebird lost to time, but in his collection in the Natural History Museum in Vienna I was simply left alone with the birds, as though respectfully, a private audience with the massed dead.

As with many ornithological collections from the 19th Century, the trace elements of the arsenic used in the preserving process had arrested the progress of decay and through affecting a stasis in insect attack, stabilised the form of the creature. This halting of the breakdown of organic matter also meant a transformation into a different material order, as the forests of Chernobyl were said to have shifted ontology from vegetable to mineral. There, the normal cyclic transformation of vegetation through decay was arrested in its transformation, conforming instead to a stonelike stasis. The forests stopped mulching, leaving leaves to pile up endlessly. This toxic suspension of time in turn caused potential problems among the living, who are not of its dimension, an infiltration of a different order of time, up through the food chain.

iv.

Encountering the Southern form of the bird In the archive i expected something inflexible, ossified, rigid with time. What I am confronted with instead is a material pliability that stops time forcefully in the present, as it simultaneously underlines the enormity of the loss. the softness of feathers, the presence of tiny details of life – the tuft of down on a grey breast, a kind of chalky grey like warm slate. The orange of a withered wattle, framing a still, closed beak. Each of these colours stunning in its vivid complexity. A cluster of birds in a cardboard box, snuggled together. Still and quiet, it is as though they could have been shot yesterday, and it takes a lot to comprehend that their tags say: 1884.

v.

It has been noted he was not an educated man, that his craft was learned through patient auto-didactic method. In one sense, to look upon the rows of extinct creatures was to come face to face with his knowledge of his own artistry, his own authorship. There was no doubt he was a good taxidermist. Unlike some of the botched jobs in cabinets I had seen around the world, these specimens were not obvious grotesques, unmentionables, which despite their sacred nature must be locked away permanently, out of the light. The birds were perfectly preserved, each set of quiet legs tied with a small label, his name stamped on it in a blue ink, like a business card, or the pricing on expensive goods.

It’s like they could have been shot yesterday.

vi.

In Vienna I look at hundreds of beings that can no longer look back, for whom the very agency of seeing has been removed. In the public-facing specimens the glass eye, inserted in its place. There, seeing becomes a depthless simulation; a decorative wall, a placard.

But in this bird, rewritten by the collector as a study skin, no replacement eye has been offered, and the sockets are open to the tufted fronds of arsenic-infused cotton, above a beak tied with a small loop of hemp string. Cotton and flax. These substances are also infused with colonial histories. They fill the body, rendered placeless, with their own material agency, another order present as a blind and glassy field, a placeholder for the farms that have themselves replaced the forests with a blind and husklike dryness, where the tall grasses wave in ripples and folds, grazed by the molars of sheep in quiet wind. They are recordings, stilled and inactive. The memory of forests is buried here, erased beneath the quiet amnesia of this useful landscape. The forests burned, to make way for pasture, are a layer of charcoal, an unspoken and illegible violence written as a layer of ash in that geological strata. It is also present here, in the quiet body, the arsenical-soap stilled study skin, which is also a recording. It holds these sounds to itself as a witnessing, and itself becomes an archival sound-object, a phonography without playback.

vii.

In the bird’s eye, plucked out and long discarded, is the past I cannot access. There is a world there, a way of sensing and moving in the dense green thickets of canopy of the 1880s, which are not a landscape painting, that do not conform to that Eurocentric convention of contemplative distance. There, in the plucked eye, exist the food trees the bird knew as landmarks, the ones it regularly visited within the small constrained territories, walking through the forest in great leaps, in lines of kin, clambering through the thickly matted density of treetops, branch to seamless branch to branch, without any need for flight, without ever touching the ground. Those long-felled trees appear still, a mapping emerging as a series of bright points, a constellation sinking down. This too was song: a sonic tree-map of low muttered closeness, and all air, all earth, all distance subsumed in this closeness, the green density of the whispering canopy. The memory of nothing now living.

viii.

When looked at more closely and over duration, their historical positioning as objects is not so stable. Some of the assembled avian dead seemed to stutter inside their taxonomies, the labels tied to their flightless feet in a book-like burden of naming and re-naming, indicators of historical and scientific contingency  signalled in the proliferation of careful copperplate and patient fonts. There was a residue of unknowability even in this mausoleum, this tomb of quiet light, all this ordered certainty. A kind of grey haze that crept across the wood panelling like smoke, occluding something in vision. Was it that these kinds of blurred definitions accrued naturally to any orderly narrative in time, or that the sheer bulk of the extinguished life obscured the clear narrative that each scientific specimen would otherwise portray? Was it just that I flinched from seeing them, resisted his authorship over these bodies just as I tried to comprehend the monumentality of their extinction, wanted to see them – the vast and blank plain – outside his scripting of its narrative?

In Vienna I look at hundreds of beings that can no longer look back. There, seeing joins to listening in experiential time. The silence speaks, and I have to close my eyes, and join the birds in blindness.

Within the patient writing, clearly making sense of their deaths, the stark fact of extinction appears unanswerable. But a bird is only a book when read from left to right.

PART III

i.

The archive professes totality and cultural permanence. But what of the objects that exceed its categorical imperative, its fantasies of completion, its need for closure, its incapacity for ambiguity, it’s narrow recognition of the self-same, its inability to fully comprehend that which fades, crumbles, degrades, or is subject to erasure?  

The archive collects the dead and does not recognise the living. it does not recognise that some becomings run into the open, that some becomings quaver on the gradient of the instant, that some becomings can willingly choose to evade its scrutiny, to disappear.

ii.

The archive is the inventory of the things we know. We know, for example, that the South Island kōkako (Callaeas cinerea) is an endemic bird from Aotearoa. It was declared extinct in 2007, forty years after the last official sighting. That very same year, a sighting was made by two observers at Rainy Creek, near Reefton. This report will eventually be accepted, and prompt a retrospective adjustment in the bird’s conservation status: from “extinct” to “data deficient”. The bird accordingly shifts its place again in the archive. It has come back from the categorically dead. Not yet welcomed into the list of the living, but shifted into the liminal space of a nebulous unknowing, of the we-don’t-know. The bird is beyond the edge of the list. There, possible sightings of Callaeas cinerea continue to be made the South Island, on a semi-regular basis.

The contemporary monitoring of species is increasingly done by data collection, although such automation does not fully, at the time of writing, replace forms of human observation, whose basis in human perception and knowledge joins the automated surveillance of the camera trap and its audio equivalent algorithm in an uneasy relation. This complex observational amalgam includes such technics as the search for tracks, marks, discarded  feathers, and other physical signs of activity, stop-motion cameras, and sound recording. All these evidential methods have attended the search for the South Island kokako but have yet to materialise it as a conclusively readable text.

iii.

For the ornithologist, it began in Fiordland in 1977, almost exactly 100 years after the collector had arrived in the same remote Southern landscapes. While tramping in he heard “an ethereal tolling bell call” at the head of Lake Monowai. It was dusk, too dark to see the direction or any shape, but he knew enough to know the map, that this was the exact location of an historical report of the bird’s presence. He went bush for three months, searching for any sign.

The ornithologist joins this narrative as a figure. It is his recordings we now hear, the fragments of  which are inconclusive, that do not form a coherent and legible sound library of traces. He has been tracking the bird through remote areas of the South Island for over forty years. The library of sub-evidential sound recordings of (what might be)  S.I. kokako calls, which he has gathered in this time is a series of partial, inconclusive fragments, some altered by editing or audio cleanup, some digitised from earlier tape recordings, with a total running time of less than two minutes long, the bulk of which was recorded while the bird was officially extinct. He listens, re-listens, subjects the recording to forms of audio-cleanup, hoping to find the bird hidden in the thickets of noise.

The ornithologist’s collection of sound recordings, while not authored as such and comprising only one part of a wider activity of experimental conservation research, might for the purposes of the current discussion also be considered as a counter-archive, in its relation to the classical texts of natural history sound recording, biologically-motivated field recording, or phonography. One that, in its preoccupation with the search for something that might not actually exist, with the gathering of traces of fugitive texts, in its allowance for the existence of the unfinished, for that which is perpetually under revision, and in its yearning for the seemingly uncatchable, calls into question the archive’s actual ontology, its very reason for being.

iv.

The ornithologist asks, when playing back calls of North Island kōkako into the forest, in the hope of a legible response:

“Could it be that common birds like tui or bellbird remember kokako and their calls and are eager to advertise the fact when one broadcasts calls of North Island kokako or locally obtained calls?”

In this, he reveals a process the natural history sound archive normally conceals, one in which listening to sounds becomes an experience of being cast into the space of an echo, one that, if it returns at all, never returns as evidence of authorship or identifying mark, but in the form of an irresolvable difference, in the form of a question. The closed binary of the same is destroyed and replaced by an open complexity, where the trace of a bird’s identifying song might be passed on to other authors, and return as a ‘mockery’, in turn mocking the archive’s categorical imperative and rendering it void within the greater densely-woven textuality of forest memory. 

v.

In his long experience listening-out for thekōkako, searching for its traces, tracks and signs in the forest, the ornithologist is increasingly convinced the bird exists, but is also increasingly aware through the process of searching for something that is never found, of his own existence, his own traces, the crack of the stick on the path, or the human scent he leaves as an involuntary signature, his own bodily presence including that of his listening. The ornithologist sees his own position, knows the corporeality of himself and his listening, as species among species. The bird, also listening, chooses not to appear. It has learned something about appearances from the activity of this species who observes it, and chooses not to display itself, to be seen or heard. It is in hiding, in a hide. It inverts the relation between the observer and the observed, as normally understood in birdwatching, in ornithological field practice. The ornithologist writes of the difficulty of tracking it: “How can one detect a bird that is so quiet, unpredictably responsive to playback, and appears to keep its distance from humans?” His tracing of the bird itself becomes the deciphering of a fugitive text within the forest, where the methods of natural history collection are themselves rendered inadequate, obsolete, much as a mutating virus becomes immune to a vaccine. The classical texts of observational listening are called into question, and a more open listening starts to appear.

And where does this listening occur? Not in the dead air, the stasis of the archive, but in the more open, mobile space of a listening, listening to itself. As the idea of an originating viewpoint is called into question, it occurs in the action of the tracking, in the tracing. To attempt to locate the relation of the human/non-human ear within this listening, is also to recognise the presence of a living ear, which is always coming into being, that contains more than recording can allow. To question where and if our role as observers within these epistemological frameworks might still be able to occur, in this more open field. Where we can no longer simply listen from the fixed position of the bird identification manual or birdwatcher’s hide, nor from the shelter of a binary of the out-there and the in-here, the collector and the collected, but from a position that is always both outside and inside, moving-to and moving-with, which always fails to catch the subject of listening in the service of understanding the silence of non-observance as a listening back. The listening as a constantly re-calibrating relation between two moving subjects, holding open a space of listening to another, moving within language of fugitive, always-hiding figures. an open listening, which allows them to disappear.

vi.

The ornithologist might be dimly aware, and increasingly, that the story of the forest he hikes through, in the difficult terrain also traversed by the collector forebears he symbolically numbers himself among, includes texts that cannot be logged, that are perpetually slipping away in the dark, that can be apprehended only in glimpses and glances. Texts that remind us what it means to purposefully erase a recording, to let it disappear completely forever. These texts stand in defiant opposition to the archive.

The ornithologist searches the textual and sonic archival record, looking for clues going all the way back to the first observations of the colonial collectors. He might conclude that the kokako’s behaviour is less trusting than it was in the mid to late 1800s. The observational field he moves through has accordingly changed, since the bird has allegedly modified its behaviour in response to humans, since it became “shyer,” its process of disappearance is an active rather than passive escape from observation, the archive, the taxonomical record. But maybe we can just say that the kokako has learned to listen, that the heavier footstep of this new species has caused it to enter another space in relation to listening.

vii.

The taxonomical-archival relation is a system of fixities, origin points, observational centres. To correct the kokako’s status from the closed (extinct) to the open (data deficient), puts the bird back into this archive uncannily: both as a living absence, and as a figure aligned with contemporary digital impermanence. The bird sits in the forest of the cultural imagination, not filling it with the beauty of its song, but with the presence of a potent withdrawal, a refusal, rendered as silence. It is an Elvis taxon, appearing in times and places it should not, in grainy photographs as a blurred and insubstantial shape, from the back, with a tantalising suggestion of definition. Like a corrupt file on a hard drive, it is a text rendered unreadable but still taking up space. Even the certainty of its extinction is now flickering, insubstantial, unstable. The fixed image in the ornithological manual degrades, it becomes unrecognisable, it folds again into a listening which the forest reaches out to hold, this time as fade and decay.

viii.

This is not a project of preservation. There shall be no archives allowed. No datasets and genetic repositories as sonic ecosanctuaries, as libraries of life with their harmony of well-tuned niches, awaiting a technological future of perfect forms, an orderly and stilled living museum. The collector is, at best, an unreliable and confused observer, nothing more, logging hearings of impermanent, shifting, insubstantial texts. As listeners to his gatherings, we not presented with a totality. As listeners we record the metadata but not the data. We celebrate the trace, and bid a simultaneous welcome and farewell to texts that by accident or design do not end their wanderings with us, that continue to fade, decay, or simply remove themselves from the deadening promise of our observation. This transmission fails to hold its signal, it dissipates into the blue of an air sparking with a battery-acid tartness, a burnt smell of electrical discharge. It builds a forest again within the location of our listening, a spectral thicket of unsurpassable noise. And it is here where the bird stays, erasing itself at every moment. Erasing a song and re-presenting it as refusal. It is a message written in invisible ink, a self-destructing tape, a whisper passed through so many mouths it has ceased to have meaning at any point of locatable origin.

By now the collector’s voice itself has also been subsumed, far from his fantasy of the ordered list, of the singular author, he is only one of a chorus of songs sung in the forest of the book, the textual traces of these woven multi-stranded events, through many mouths and tellings. Just as his field-jotted writings echo after his early death, through his son’s compiling and editing, building on the bare traces of his fragments of notes, ironing out their many factual errors, pulling them into the category of the adventure story. Such actions raise the possibility that he himself might not exist as we have come to know him, but only as genre legend, historical chimera, some species of echo.

Freya Johnson Ross

Call me: the politics of interpersonal listening

Don’t be afraid

you can call me

Lying in the dark, rehearsing snappy conversation in my head. Does this count as cultivating self-listening, or is it a nervous tic? Walking along the street rehearsing what I want to say to you, or rather, what I don’t want to say to you. Wot do u call it?

What does your internal monologue sound like? Is it chirpy or angry? Are you familiar with it? Are you so familiar with it you’re bored? Can you tune it out or have you practiced quieting it? Actually perhaps ‘it’ isn’t right, or too singular, maybe it’s they… 

How do you listen to yourself? Can you do it without cultivating speaking to yourself in some way, or are the two inseparable? For example, if you write a diary are you talking to yourself or someone else? Or maybe it feels like an external voice is observing and noting on the page.

Maybe you listen to the way your body feels or senses without words. Exhaustion. Thirst. Sadness. Restlessness. Tension. You just read these words. Think them. Say them. Hear them. Feel them?

If you lie still can you ever hear your body, perhaps sensing the internal vibrations. Swimming in breath or pulse. Hide and seek. More delicate than listening to a recording of your own voice: talking, lecturing, reading, practicing, musing, pretending. Horrifying and delighting. ‘Perhaps I just get bored with myself’. Find your guts.

Listening needn’t have a response, form part of a dialogue. Speaking into a void, to exorcise, you don’t want anyone to hear. Or if you’re just noodling. When you read your own (old?) writing, do you feel like you’re listening to past you. Writing a letter to yourself and having it posted by the workshop organisers so you receive it some months later *eyeroll*

You say elision, I say liaison. Listening between the lines, lip reading. Lip syncing intimacy. Rising sign.

I’m worried about cancer, 1 in 2, twit-tu-woo. The sound of your voice does soothe me, but hearing your noises of understanding as you listen to me voice these fears is worth a thousand ships.

Active, gentle exchange of listening, giving and receiving, reciprocity unspoken and not negotiated.

Taking turns, take a break.

Who do you ask questions of?

No but I meant:

You’re not really listening.

Wot? I didn’t quite catch that, I lost you. Sorry? I don’t know if it’s my reception – can you walk around a bit. Hang on, I’ll try again.

Is that any better?

Shit.

Maybe try turning off your video? Can you hear me?

Sorry!!

In your ear, intimate. Visibly out of sync – auditory jet lag. Uncomfortably close. Neuropathology swimming to consciousness: plastic, china, lid of metal. What’s insiiiiiiiiideeeeeee

Walking: let’s swap sides.

Airing out loud – validated, reflected by and through someone else who knows you. A precious commodity. Vent.  ‘Holding space’ has a ring of personal architecture – the framework for…an auditory hug?

Do you think I understand you. Hmm. Listening, holistically (or specifically) as relationship building. What are we doing? Perhaps I can help you to make sense of some of the confusion around what you’ve been feeling. We could explore that together. I’m sick of the sound of my own voice, how long it takes to feel like someone has heard you. To feel like someone.

If you’re feeling sad and lonely, what does it feel like to be heard by a stranger? What does it feel like to listen to a stranger? I did hear you on the Lesbian Line before, the birds are singing so loudly.

*suffocated*

I wonder how many people I know have called the Samaritans, and I’m not sure why I don’t feel able to ask them. Freedom in anonymity. A friendly void. Stickers on the inside of toilet doors, and signs attached to high places.

maybe it’s late

but just call me

Don’t imagine you’re an amateur psychiatrist. Some people have never had anyone to give them their complete attention. There’s no more precious gift you can give to another human being than your undivided attention. Non-judgemental. Not giving advice. Not jumping to conclusions. Most people don’t want advice: they want to be told that what they have decided to do is ok.

Are you ok?

Under your skin: mirroring or mimicking? The parole ricochets around the room. The zoom. Do you lean towards filling silence out of politeness, to convey or steer? Discussion, resolution, decision. The ears have it, the ears have it!

Shared, ecstatic, hypnotic. Moving. Singing. Listening as part of a whole, to stay part of the whole. In sync. Effortless.

Excruciating, lonely, tense: that bombed. Can you edge it in or are you too worried about how it will be received? No repartee to lean on. Silence. Awkward attention. Focused, quiet, listening. Positively restrained: leaving space not leaving the room.

Drained. Have you ever gone through a conversation with your internal voice piping up after a while, god they haven’t asked me a single question, as you draw out and inquire into the detail of another person’s mind. That’s not to say it can’t be delightful, or fruitful, to devote yourself conversationally to an other. But it can be tiring, or come to feel like you are servicing someone else with your grin, engaged eyes, nods and encouraging noises. Equally, listening to someone’s unfolding thoughts, ideas or feelings – their unrehearsed mood can be joyful, captivating, relaxing. Closeness: a privilege. Effort or dedication to listening, is just as present as when it is light, reviving or unnoticed.

What do you listen to to numb yourself? Really really loud relentless music. Deliberate radio in the background. Any radio in the background. White noise. Rain, café, rustling. Sound clash. Hoovering inside and out. Something really interesting. Silence, something closer to silence. Less impingement, semi-anechoic chamber. [hhinnngggggggggggggggggggggggggg]

Cheap, careless, unlimited repetition. render tender tck tck tck-tck-tck  tck tck tck-tck-tck  tck tck tck-tck-tck


Freya Johnson Ross is an artist and researcher whose practice is focused on sound, multimedia installation and interdisciplinary listening – and how this relates to methodologies for knowledge production. Her current work addresses the politics of listening and the ethics of making and using personal and institutional archives. From Glasgow, she has studied at the University of Cambridge, Wimbledon College of Art, and the University of Sussex.

Freya Johnson Ross

Mark Peter Wright

The following text is reproduced from handwritten notes that were found within a dilapidated structure. They appear to detail the last known traces of an as yet unidentified wildlife sound recordist.

I will do my best to recall the circumstances that have led me to this point. I stand amongst a scene I can barely believe. My reflection no longer belongs to me. Soon I fear it will be too late to even speak.

I arrived here a week ago to record the sound of cicadas. Conditions were sweltering from the start. I spent days out in the long grass under burning heat, capturing the sounds of neocicada hieroglyphica, cacama valvata, tibicen canicularis, tibicen resonans and many more. I would sit in the field for hours happily listening to the high frequency buzz of insects. The work required stillness and quiet on my part, as to not encroach upon the recording. I tried to be invisible and inaudible. I was a silent listener immersed in a world of nature I have now come to fear. 

I took what was essentially a hobby very seriously. My recordings were frequently deposited in archives and used for research or artistic purposes. With the days work done I would return to my makeshift home-studio, have dinner and hurriedly begin the playback and cataloguing process for the duration of that evening, archiving and grading each recording one by one in order to preserve the sounds for future use.

It was systematic work done in the dimly lit confines of my purpose built abode. I broke up the monotony of cataloguing by manipulating and layering certain sounds into compositions. Nature was as musical as it was scientific. I would listen to my animal orchestra until I drifted asleep. How I long for those nights amidst the wreckage of my current mind state. 

This routine went on. Long days in the field with immersive nights listening back to recordings. My memory is cloudy now, but I remember things began to change one evening when I awoke from a nightmare. The dream was unique in that it appeared to contain sound alone. An unidentifiable heavy breathing crackled and howled in the most terrifying of ways. It produced an abysmal feeling of solitude in me coupled with an overwhelming presence of someone, or something.

Gasping out of sleep I sat up in bed and noticed a patch of dry blood on the pillow. I panicked and checked my body but nothing, not even a scratch. I ran my hands over my face and stopped as I touched a clotted knot of hair near my temple. I got out of bed and walked haphazardly to the mirror. The blood seemed to be coming from my left ear. “Strange” I thought, “how on earth could that have happened?” It was extremely painful to touch and felt as though something had been gnawing at my cochlear. After rinsing my hair and cleaning the blood away I managed to ignore the throbbing pain and gradually drifted back to sleep. 

Dawn came and blistering heat pierced through the windows. After coffee and a quick bite to eat I picked up my equipment and opened the door for another day of recording. I didn’t notice at first but gradually, as I made my way towards the site, just 100 feet from base, I realised something was missing. “Where had all the cicadas gone?” I couldn’t hear their usual incessant noise. I clicked my fingers next to my ears. There was nothing wrong there. I sat for hours on end waiting for the cicadas to stridulate. The heat became more and more pressing as the fatigue of waking from the nightmare took over. I drifted in and out of sleep amongst the gentle sway of the breeze. 

I came too with a sudden exhale; my ear began to cause huge irritation. Raising my hand, I felt a sticky, puss-like liquid on the lobe. I pressed a finger into the ear cavity and jumped out of my skin as a high screeching sound ricocheted around my skull, releasing a pain that registered in my teeth. Startled and anxious I hurriedly packed up the equipment and made my way back to my lodgings where I fell into another deep slumber.

I awoke in the dark, unsure of the time. Feeling disorientated, I decided to listen back to recordings from the previous day, hoping they would reassure my confused state. I set up the laptop and played a file at random. No sound was there. I played another file and again, no audible sign of the cicadas. My ear burned as I clicked on wav file after wav file. I couldn’t hear the sounds I knew I had captured from previous days. I frantically switched views and begin to analyse the visual spectrogram. None of the usual hi staccato imprints that epitomized cicada song were apparent. There was however, a ghostly marking throughout the recording. The cicadas may not have been there but something certainly was. I began isolating frequencies where I thought the inaudible content existed and boosted the volume, moving my chair closer towards one of the speakers. 

A faint, slow rhythmical sound filtered through the air. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. I placed my good ear gently against the speaker cone membrane and then suddenly amongst the hiss of amplification I realised what I could hear – it was the sound of my own breath. 

Fear streamed through my veins like never before. Panic swirled around me. I stumbled backwards from the speaker. Both ears now throbbed as a breath, my breath, emanated outwards, growing louder and louder. I felt a sharp piercing pain pour through my left ear again. I ran to the laptop to stop the file but it wouldn’t end. I unplugged the power and all I could hear was my breath pulsing louder and louder in a terrifying cascade that swamped the room. I began hyperventilating as I noticed the speakers seemed to be physically swelling with every pulsating breath. I crashed into a box of notes sending them spiraling through the air and I as turned, struck my head on the glass light bulb that dangled from the ceiling. 

I don’t know how long had passed before I came too, drenched in sweat. There was no sound and I was glad. Daylight splintered its way through the window. I picked myself up and walked towards the small refrigerator for some water, trampling over broken glass and paper notes. I felt a tug at my ankle and fell to the floor. For a brief moment I was sure something began dragging me backwards. Sat upright I raised a tired laugh as I fathomed audio cable had spiraled around my leg. Tripping me up yes, dragging me back, surely not?

Over the following days strange incidents continued. I walked outside and again, no cicada sounds passed through the air. Had I done something to affect them? During the nights I couldn’t bring myself to listen back to the recordings for fear of hearing that dreadful noise. 

Things began to escalate. A microphone momentarily grafted itself into my hand; I had to tear it away, breaking the skin of my palm. I woke up with cables wrapped around my legs. They became impossible to remove. In my growing delusion I cut one that was attaching itself around furniture and to my horror, a strange liquid oozed from it. Exhaustion grew. I lost everything. Sleep, dreams, heat and utterances took over. Life became a waking nightmare; my sanity escaped the room. I stopped going outside for fear that something was going to take over my body. Now I know that it was already here, in this room and in me, all this time. 

{Five pages torn haphazardly from the book. The only words visible in the severed margins appear to be: I, laughter, who, patterns, transparent, noise}

I have no idea what day it is or how long I have been here. I am tired and the pain is now unbearable. The last time I looked in the mirror my body began to pixelate and blend into the background. When I squeezed my arm a noise shrieked from everywhere. I stared at myself for minutes, shimmering and flickering with the room. Slowly, and with frozen fascination, I moved the pixels of my face and blanked out.  

{Two empty pages with faint lines drawn on them}

Last night I placed headphones on in one last attempt to find sanctuary in listening, but felt a tension between my ears. The pressure became so much that I ripped the headphones away and as I did so, cicadas spilled into the air in a horrifying slow-motion dance. In a fit of auto-destructive rage I demolished equipment and smashed hard drives into pieces. Exhausted, I pummeled microphones onto walls and across the floor. 

What is happening? My body is changing; my voice distorting; everything is alive!

{Long break in the page, scratches and torn pieces of page}

These last few hours, or days, I’m not sure how long, have brought a deterioration that bears no words. I have lost my voice. When I try to speak there is only shrieking feedback. Language now swims in a sea of metallic waves. I spend my day in noise, unable to move for the unbearable feeling that something is listening to me; thousands of things in fact are listening to the tiniest sounds of my every move.  

All equipment is destroyed but somehow it still manages to whirr into operation every night. My computer screen flickers on, speakers begin to swell and the sounds of my breath, my feet, my shuffling recorded body fills the night air. I am immersed in the horrifying noise of myself. 

{Smears of blood and matted grey fur stuck to page}

Both ears are now completely covered by abscesses. Everything sounds from within a muffled chamber. I can hear my heart beating loudly. I tried to run but couldn’t get out of the door. Thousands of cicadas moved across the window. I felt a microphone underfoot. Picking it up I was shocked to see legs squirm from under it, like an insect flailing in the air. I threw it against a wall. 

Grey fluffy material appears to be growing out of my skin. Sound continues to sink more and more within itself. I can hear my respiratory system crackling and wheezing; every step triggers a chain of echoes, reverberating up and down my spine. I cannot write much longer. As I grapple to form these words I’m becoming translucent. Like a pixelated image my skin is cubed, it morphs effortlessly into the environment. I am camouflaged from myself. 

{The notebook was discovered open at this point}

Mark Peter Wright

Lucía Hinojosa

crevice or, space that opens 

*

polyphonic pulse

*

What is a sound. A sound is two things heard at one and the same time but not together.

—Gertrude Stein

Rhythm refers not only to vocal emissions or to the sound of acoustic matter, but also to the vibration of the world. Rhythm is the inmost vibration of the cosmos. And poetry is an attempt to tune into this cosmic vibration, this temporal vibration that is coming and coming and coming.

—Franco Bifo Berardi

I’d like to make a metaphysical stroke over the body-machine which is trying to breathe and that hasn’t only been (even more) suffocated in the past months, but is utterly lost in the abstraction of fear, in an insecure, confused and repressed condition controlled by the undeniable structural global violence that permeates our contemporary paradigm. 

I don’t want to add more layers to the texture of uncertainties, accumulated in waves of overwhelming information, usually distorted, covered-up, and edited, regarding our fragile immune-social condition, the economic crisis, the reality war. Rather, I’d like to reflect on two concepts as vehicles that can reactivate our bodily experience, that will help us position and think ourselves in-relation, as bodies: sound and breath. If we perceive sound as materiality in continual vibration, and breath as the universal witness of a collective pulse, acting as a filter for ordinary experience and finally leading to an ideological, cultural, and socio-political experience of the world: how does a body breathe? I ask myself if our respiratory experience has also been oppressed as it becomes more and more involved with a structural rhythm of control. 

The vibration of sound and breath could work as instruments for a more profound ontological investigation regarding our current condition. If we perceive their agency with more attention, we could notice that they act as the evidence, the registry, of dynamic strokes over the body-machine, those which are apparently intangible, but that work as the essential rhythm of generative states within the body-machine. 

Parting from Franco Bifo Berardi’s premise, we can meditate on the presence (and absence) of the breath’s flux as a psychosomatic metaphor and a social symptom within physicality, visualizing the experience of these circuits traversing our bodies like residues in loop that are trying to synchronize—from the agency of the body’s subjectivity—with the context’s conditions, with its reality. I think it’s important to meditate intensely on this during this crisis that wants us to remain in an anti-respiratory state, in a continuous sensorial detachment from bodies-in-relation.

*

chaosmosis

*

Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates.

—The Kybalion

Recently, I made a list of the etymologies of the word ‘chaos’. The evolution of its meaning is fascinating and, in a way, all of these descriptions have been enmeshed in today’s reality, like a constellation of infinite abysses:

+ kháos o cháos = the unpredictable

+ elemental confusion

+ a mass of matter without form  

+ vacuum occupying a hole 

+ from the Indo-European root gheu, it means being open

+ it means to yawn, or to open from a cavern

+ a random behaviour governed by complex principles, sensitive to its conditions

+ vacuum framing the rest of existence 

+ confusion of absolutes, disorder 

+ crevice or, space that opens 

+ the original state of matter

Berardi says that today’s notion of chaos lies on the absence of semiotic measurements in order to comprehend the flux of information and phenomena. It is the inability to attribute a “logical order” to a series of complex events that become unpredictable, and then, this indeterminacy extends into a very confused ambiance that is impossible to decipher through the frames of reality we have within reach. In other words, the semiotic frame that had been collectively integrated in order to perceive “order” is trapped within its own limits of reality. What we thought society or civilization was is falling, because the actual semiotic flow is going too fast and, at the same time, it has broken with the temporality and structure that we thought, illusively, was holding this model. Guattari’s term chaosmosis, and which Bifo eloquently recuperates from the standpoint of poetry and breath, refers to the synchronic rhythm between cosmic chaos and singularities, and more precisely, with subjectivities. It is “the process of rebalancing the osmosis between mind and chaos, with the osmotic evolution of chaos in itself.” In this sense, this stance opens up and generates an infinity of possibilities that enter into a cosmic rhythm that, for Berardi, happens through the flow of respiration, through breathing. Breath in this sense, is the ultimate measure of relation, overcoming the limits of an established semiotic rhythm and reality, subtly auto-generating from a vibratory re-modulation between subject and experience. Berardi says, “when we say chaos, then, we mean two different, complementary movements. We refer to the swirling of our surrounding semiotic flows, which we receive as if they were “sound and fury.” But we also refer to attempts to reconcile this encompassing environmental rhythm with our own intimate, internal rhythm of interpretation.”  

In this sense, the sound of drone music could be perceived as matter without form, which is governed by complex principles, as the unpredictable mass of experience: the open state of chaos. Our bodies, our materialities, are part of the vacuum that occupies a space where the rest of existence is framed, but they can find their own rhythmic scale to connect with this open state and enter into an osmotic condition from a continual, subjective exploration, an internal interpretation, and not from a prosthetic semiotic limitation, a rhythmic control: a model that erodes singularities. 

Eliane Radigue, Jetsun Mila, 1968. (Composition inspired by the Tibetan poet and yogi Milarepa). 

The vibration of the drone, characterized by sustained repetition of sound and notes, will work as an allusion to observe the relation between our bodies and the sphere of an unlimited semiotic flux. The drone maintains a complex, penetrating sonic reality, and we could say that, as opposed to a traditional musical composition that produces sound in calculated intervals, creating a harmonic narrative “starting from zero, from silence,” the drone is a generative organism that is alive, and that is “always there” as potential mass, already holding an infinity of sound permutations and variations. This effect is released and can happen over our sensorial surface, in an osmotic act, within the physicality of our bodies: the drone happens with the body, in-relation: the body is the vacuum where vibrations can be held. 

Eliane Radigue, L’ile Resonante, 2005. 

Drone and minimalist music activate a reality principle that is radical. Its conceptual and practical design is fluid and paratactic, avoiding a dual, tautological loophole. For instance, the traditional principle in Western music starts with the idea of silence. Notes and frequencies are added over silence from a linear perception in order to construct something from an apparently blank, clean space, creating a composition through a sequential notational system that “did not exist before.” This way of ordering reality responds to a hierarchical model. Drone music takes its principles from Indian classical music, from the sustained sound of the tambura. Drone music and Indian music sound very different, but they share the same model in a structural, practical sense. This premise is based on the idea that “sound is always, already there” happening through a field of continuous electricity, and the body can tune in with that other sonorous body-mass in order to create a new state of singular synchronicity. In a way, it turns into a collaborative act between vibration and individual. 

Jung Hee Choi, RICE, during the exhibition The Third Mind, Guggenheim, 2009.

The body must listen attentively to the accumulation of vibratory frequencies in order to tune into the sonic continuum and, from that place, articulate its own experience. There is no a priori imposition or an anticipated idea, or desire, for new measures to be composed “over” space, there is only relation and interaction with frequencies that are already permeating every space, every aspect of sound. As the Italian artist Caterina Barbieri mentions, “the sound of the drone is the most penetrating archetypal gesture.” In this sense, there is no aspiration to create a new semiotic limit or a measure. The most penetrating vibration is already there, within us, between sound and bodies. 

La Monte Young, The Well-Tuned Piano, 1987.

*

circuits

*

We need to visualize the subject as a transversal unity that encompasses the human. 

—Rosi Braidotti

The dissolution of the limit and the production of resulting tones and cosmic vibrations are central to the phenomenon of resonance.

—Ben Neill (Pure Resonance, La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela).

What is the experience of subjectivities? Where and how do they happen? Guattari and Deleuze put forth that the subject identifies with the centre because it lacks the capacity to observe the circuit of intensities and living states that it forms part of. But, the subject is being constantly reborn from the state that is experimenting, this is what determines it. In this sense, the subject within the body is actually impossible to locate because it is in perpetual movement and never in the centre, rather in its peripheries, moving. Therefore, the subject produces and is produced as residue, defined by the states that it experiments in a vital oscillation. 

Respiration traverses, affects and is affected by all of these subtle circuits, and maybe the attention to our breath could reveal the tempo, the rhythm of these routes where the subject happens, generating a temporality frame that could be interpreted subjectively and intimately, in relation to other tempos and other breathing circuits. 

Our anti-respiratory paradigm is gradually suffocating our sensorial awareness, with the promise that, if we wear our masks, we’ll go back to the norm, to our normal reality, where it was already impossible to breathe. If we think of the circuit of intensities and states that Guattari and Deleuze put forth, there’s really no before and after, but a continuum of exhalations and inhalations that are clearly informing us, as we lose touch with our intimate rhythm and vital subjectivity, about our psycho-social condition. The political and economic paradigm that insists on sustaining its “rhythm” generated by the politics of isolation, that leads us more and more to the terrors of an egotistic individuality and self-absorption, structural violence and inequalities regarding racism, class and gender, labor exploitation, ignorance and ecological abuse, and the ever omnipresent media garbage, promoting a frightening state that is not only asphyxiating but overtly anti-contact, anti-touch, irrevocably reveals itself by lifting its veil and showing us a structure that only works as it subtracts our breath, our air. But, in exchange of what? This is the essential ideological trade model, the effect of semiocapital’s power, as Berardi would put it. 

It is essential to feel and probably even think through the body’s agency and information, and only from there, to try to pierce into social, political and cultural fields in order to interpret and affect the model through different semiotic possibilities. To find the localities of our rhythmic patterns and think about these drives and flows—where do they come from and why? We could even differentiate and intervene with the circuits where our subjectivities are oscillating. Berardi talks about the word conspiration, which means breathing together, but I like the evolution of its meaning, the idea of a secret agreement, a plan. The agreement to observe the unseen, the hidden strokes and traces of our bodies’ intimate breathing.

I celebrate the circuits that produce new respiratory paradigms and that can tune-into frequencies of possibility in order to sustain other vibratory articulations and even produce echoes and resonance in other bodies, traversing to other respiratory fields: the poetic-political actions, the re-articulation of human rights movements fighting gender and racial violence, alternative study groups and feminist collectives, spaces for social and artistic experimentation; but above all I celebrate the complicities of friendship and rhythmic solidarity that are opening new routes based on open-ended, perhaps unfinished principles but that are able to articulate respiratory variations and multiplicities, creating a synchronicity that is possible because it is open to semiotic mystery, producing subjects that experiment themselves in-relation. 

Caterina Barbieri, Fantas, 2019.

References:

 Patrick Farmer: Azimuth, The Ecology of an Ear. SARU, 2019.

 Franco “Bifo” Berardi: Breathing: Chaos and Poetry, Semiotext(e), 2018.

 Los Tres Iniciados: The Kybalion of Hermes Trismegisto, Editorial EDAF, 1978. 

 Rosi Braidotti: The Posthuman, Polity Press, 2013.

William Duckworth, Richard Fleming: Sound and Light: La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, Bucknell University Press, 2012.

Lucía Hinojosa

Kirston Lightowler

Reading:

I’m reading a lot of non-fiction at the moment—on herb gardens, metals, stones, and the early histories of northern California. But I recently went through a period of Charles Willeford (Pick-Up) and Leonard Gardner (Fat City)—brilliant neo-noir set in the shadowy lanes of San Francisco and the wide open highways of Stockton, California.

Henry Beston, Herbs and the Earth (1935) 

A beautiful guide to starting an herb garden and an “evocative excursion into the lore & legend of our common herbs.” I had read Beston’s The Outermost House, which includes so many astonishing passages on sound as it relates to the sea, but recently discovered Herbs and the Earth through an article by translator and poet Lydia Davis.

Jaime de Angulo, A Jaime de Angulo Reader (1979) 

Wanderer, writer, linguist, anthropologist, rancher, translator of Native American languages—California legend!  Jaime de Angulo was translating and transcribing stories and songs in northern California at nearly the same time Knud Rasmussen was doing so in Greenland.

Charles Bucke, On the Beauties, Harmonies, and Sublimities of Nature (1843)

I feel like I’ve been reading this book for years. It’s always on the nightstand and I return to it a few times a month—almost as if consulting an oracle. Some chapter titles from the book: Beautiful Sounds—Sublime Sounds, Echoes, Music of the Spheres, Language of Birds, Corallina, Influence of Climate, Electrical Appearances!

Béla Hamvas, The Seventh Symphony and the Metaphysics of Music

An essay in which Hamvas begins by discussing Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 and then pivots into a discussion of bird song, which is completely marvelous. I have Herbert Pföstl to thank for this discovery.  

Listening to:

Bonnie Guitar — Candy Apple Red & Dark Moon (1959 & 1957)

Mesut Aytunca ve Silüetler — Bir Dost Bulamadim (1972)

Mario Bertoncini — Arpe Eolie (1973)

Loren Chasse — Footpath (2008)

Jean-Luc Hérelle — Pastoral Bells (1995)

Watching:

The films of Peruvian experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder

Forbidden GamesRené Clément 

Lots of films from the 1970s (Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins) and treasures found on the Criterion Channel

Current Projects:

Epidote Press just published A Shelter for Bells: From the Writings of Hans Jürgen von der Wense and we are currently working on a follow-up publication related to the writings of Wense. 

Personally, I’m focused on a project with the working title of Hydaspes. I can’t share too much about it at the moment, but it is a long-form poem that looks closely at both stones and sound—it’s dedicated to my mother. The river Hydaspes was said to furnish a musical stone and—when the moon was waxing—this stone gave forth a melodious sound.


Kirston Lightowler is a writer, publisher, and archivist who has worked with analog film and sound since her days at the San Francisco Art Institute. She founded Epidote Press in 2014, an independent publishing imprint based in northern California’s Point Reyes Peninsula. EP is devoted to publishing historical texts, as well as art and writing concerned with landscape and the poetics of place. The press is informed by her interest in natural and environmental history, reading and the art of research, folklore, and translation. EP is particularly interested in publishing work that exists at the intersection of art, literature, and science—finding associations and connections across branches of knowledge and fields of meaning.

Epidote Press

Rie Nakajima

Reading/Listening:

I haven’t read or listened anything particularly…this is incredibly disappointing part of my lockdown life :) 

Watching:

I watched Chibi Maruko-chan, the Japanese animation mostly. 

Doing:

I did lots of fixing. Darning socks, coats and trousers, painting walls, repairing chairs etc.  Also I picked flower from my daily walk to bring back some nature to my flat as i don’t have a garden, and then i felt sorry to them so i pressed them in books, and i made some collage with them. Then I did some recordings for O YAMA O and some other recordings for new works, and I made a sculpture called ‘seven days bird songs’ from 14-20 May online. Very recently I did a conversation with David Toop over emails on sculpture that we would like to publish sometime somehow.  


Rie Nakajima is a Japanese artist working with installations and performances that produce sound. Her works are most often composed in direct response to unique architectural spaces using a combination of kinetic devices and found objects. Fusing sculpture and sound, her artistic practice is open to chance and the influence of others, raising important questions about the definition of art. She has exhibited and performed worldwide. Her first major solo exhibition was held at IKON Gallery in Birmingham in 2018. She has also collaborated with Museo Vostell Malpartida (Cáceres), Tate Modern (London), Serralves Museum (Porto), ShugoArts (Tokyo), Hara Museum (Tokyo), The Hepworthwakefield (Wakefield), Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin) and Cafe OTO (London). Her frequent collaborators includes David Cunningham, Keiko Yamamoto, Pierre Berthet, Marie Roux, Billy Steiger, David Toop, Akira Sakata among others. In 2014 she received Art Foundation Award in the category of Experimental Music.

Rie Nakajima