the sea: wave 1

 

The following sequence of texts - 'The Sea: 6 Waves' - were co-written a few years ago with my friends the artists and performance makers Cupola Bobber (Tyler Myers and Stephen Fiehn) as part of a 'Reading Companion' for their performance Way Out West, The Sea Whispered Me, which toured internationally in 2009-10. Published in April 2009, the Reading Companion is an exquisite 24" x 36" double-sided colour poster in which the texts are laid out to take on the shapes of the landscape - Sea, Mountain, Cloud, etc.

Other contributors of additional texts in the Reading Companion were Ian Abbott, Alice Booth, Simon Bowes, Lucy Cash, Karen Christopher, Ezra Clayton Daniels, Zach Dodson, Jeff Harms, CJ Mitchell, and Bryan Saner. The poster was designed by Zach Dodson and illustrated by Ezra Claytan Daniels.

The collaborative writing process was simply structured and wholly pleasurable. Over a period of some months, Tyler and Stephen would send me a textual 'wave', and I'd respond, bouncing another one back across the Atlantic to their base in Chicago. A slow writing into and out of what lapped or crashed on to each other's virtual shorelines.

My heartfelt thanks to Tyler and Stephen for letting me post these texts here, and for inviting me to collaborate in the first place, in this play-fully dialogic way.

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We resolve to believe these people who eat their lunch in silence in their sea-facing cars arenʼt waiting for it to do anything in particular. They are not keeping watch over an unruly neighbor, they arenʼt expecting any event at all. They are just sitting at the edge and looking out precisely because nothing much will happen beyond the slow mechanical play of cloud, sky, and water. Speaking of fishermen who catch no fish, Sebald says, “I do not believe these men sit here all day and all night waiting so as not to miss the time when the whiting pass.” (1)

It should first be noted that I am speaking out of place and that I am not The Sea. I am an imposter with a blue suit on, standing in the middle of the Atlantic, yelling: “I am the sea too” at the passing ships. I have been here - listening - for quite a long time. I imagine that I will be here until my senses cease to work, The Sea has so much to say. Sometimes the gossip from town(s), about the crabs that tickle the belly, about so many clouds (they can be ornery), and ...

I will have you believe that The Sea has just whispered to me: “I have yet to find a home.” I will have you believe that The Sea has just whispered exactly that, and also that I have in return asked the following: “What do you mean? You are The Sea.” The Sea looked down and examined its shoe. It rubbed its forehead. Then it said:

“Iʼm not so sure I can answer that simply, but I will try. I am contained, controlled by gravity and other forces, I go where they direct me. But, I am constantly working to find my way beyond my borders. Sometimes I think I have finally broken through, but I always find there is a new shore waiting for me. There are some people who have built their houses close to me, and sometimes during the night after they have left I sneak into their homes, wet the pages of their libraries, wash over their cutlery, take the fruit out of the bowls sitting on their kitchen counters, wash the floor boards and retreat back to my side of the border that marks me. “

With a wistful note in this last, The Sea trailed off. I took my sky blue kerchief out of my jacket pocket (matches my carnation), and made it ready should it be needed (my manners are superb.) I asked: Why? The Sea started with a faraway look:

“Way out West, way out West, there …”, but then stopped. I readied the kerchief, but after a dramatic pause and a few false starts, The Sea continued:

“If there is a shoreline I will set myself to it, that is my lot. Several billion years of work, digging in the sand, moving it, putting it somewhere else. Knowing this, the men along the shoreline have built walls to protect their towns from me. They are also constantly working, building me new buildings of the same towns a little further west, something to look forward to. They dig and they build walls and I slowly grind them down to dust (wet dust), and then they rebuild their churches and stores and streets and towers, and I work away at it; and so on and so on. This is just what I do and I cannot speak for them. I am always on the move, I have yet to be at rest and feel as if rest will never come. Sometimes it may look like I am calm, or at rest, but I am still working. One would think that I would grow tired, or that my age would keep me from working, but I do not think in terms of tired or age or anything really, because I donʼt have the ability to know if I canʼt go on. Itʼs only that Iʼll go on. Itʼs alright with me.”

Noting a break in the monologue, I saw a chance to tell The Sea about the delightful little town of my childhood … there was the small “playground” that was a patch of sometimes muddy earth next to Mr. Cooperʼs store, and hide and seek with the two neighbor kids and their imaginary friends, and there was my father’s study and the set of encyclopedias, the 4th of July parades with the Indians with the muskets, the abandoned house in the woods where we dug out a fort, the bananas with honey and milk weʼd eat on the picnic morning in the new sunlight, the door jam with my height and corresponding year, the red toothbrush I got at the dentist office (the dentist office smelled like no other place Iʼve ever been.) Just then I noticed The Sea had stopped listening, so I carried on in my head but let The Sea have silence. I was lost trying to remember the layout of every house and apartment I had ever lived in when the sea broke in.

“I have found a set of steps on the coast just north of Blackpool, I believe they call this area Cleveleys. I spend a great part of my days trying to climb these steps. That is, to really climb them the way they were intended to be climbed (one step at a time.) It always goes like this: I step up three stairs, and just as I reach for the fourth, I am pulled back to my body. I guess that I cannot go anywhere unless it (all of it) also goes with me. Sometimes I imagine that I am walking up the steps and onto the land, and through the town past the church, through the pastures on the other side, over the privets, and up the mountain to get a look at what everyone is looking at when they are looking at me. Because I have no sense of it. Imagine, all eyes on you, and never knowing why. But, if I am on the mountain, what am I looking at?”

What indeed, I thought. I thought, can I short circuit my brain by looking at my hand? I watched The Sea. Concentrated on its face. Concentrated on the creases around its eyes, and they seemed to brace themselves for something; looking, but not outward. That look an old Wyoming sheep herder might give when asked if there is anything they regret about a life lived in a trailer in the mountains watching sheep. And their answer is the coffee. The Sea concluded:

“We all walk in mysteries. We are surrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know nothing at all. We do not know what stirs in it and how it is connected with our intelligence. This much is certain, under particular conditions the antennae of our souls are able to reach out beyond their physical limitations (2). These are the shores of dreaming.”

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(1) WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, London: Harvill Press, 1998, p. 52.

(2) Goethe, letter of 23 July 1820, quoted in ‘The Writing of Stones’, Cabinet no. 29 (‘Sloth’), Spring 2008, p. 39.

the sea: wave 5

Elsew/here I could hear particles that are in that air … that they have something to say to the particles that are below me, in the water. That those that have entered the sieve of The Sea, and through its motion (longing for the land) have been ground so light as to wash up somewhere to be taken up by the wind, that spoon the sky uses to stir, lift, and mix. The greater the scale of your vision (in your head), the less the descriptor entropy becomes appropriate. There are so many things happening. And we arenʼt in control. And that is beautiful. That means the small moments of our lives exist in a system, and what joy they bring is perfect and especially enigmatic. This is a permission to look at the world, open to feeling, like yourself a net, things to remember, or interest, or excitement; the beauty is in the collection of things that you become. A collage. A good diary never makes that much sense to the little brother. Like a walk, ice cream, a performance, a book, or a painting ... the things they stand for, remembered.

Elsew/here: The sun goes down. The sky and sea become indistinguishable.

As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on, covering houses, hills, trees, as waves wash round the sides of some sunken ship … The light had faded from the tool house wall and the adderʼs skin hung from the nail empty. All colors in the room had overflown their banks. The precise brush stroke was swollen and lopsided; cupboards and chairs melted their brown masses into one huge obscurity. (2)

Elsew/here, like a grain of salt becomes known by every molecule of water in a boiling pot and has the effect of raising the boiling temperature of that water, so is the effect of our buildings on The Sea. And just as the boiling potʼs water becomes vapor slowly, sending it and its humid saltiness into the air introducing itself to the air in the same way the salt met the water. All at once, a chemical wicking at light speed. As much as the waterʼs mood affects the land, so it affects the air, and in this way great changes happen slowly. Like the Seaʼs assault on our shores, The Sea is content with slowness. It takes the parish churches of our towns, as it always has, and introduces them to the air, the clouds, and those grains that were walls that protected our worship, or our thoughts, come back to us and try to find their way into the folds of our clothes, moving with an assist from the breath of wind to find the spaces at the threshold of our houses, to re-occupy. Stone is our most permanent building material, but its life isnʼt the width of a human hair on a 300 foot timeline of this world. It may be that you are breathing the parish church of St. James right now, a lone microscopic particle that remembers finding a hair in your nostril, now a part of you. And its time with you will be relative to the start of a blink of an eye. But that doesnʼt mean it doesnʼt happen. The gravity of a moment isnʼt judged in terms of its duration.

Elsew/here entropy is a microscopic phenomenon. Such a thing does not exist when viewing the earth from space, or the universe from the stars, or space from the edge of space. Matter has no death.

Elsew/here particles cluster into voices: (in order of encounter) Stan Laurel, Paul Valéry, Stan Laurel, Herman Melville.

Well I couldn't help it, I was dreaming I was awake. And then I woke up and found myself asleep. (Laurel) I was walking on the very edge of the sea. I was following an endless shore … This is not a dream I am telling you. I was going I know not whither overflowing with life, half intoxicated with my youth. The air deliciously rude and pure, pressing against my face and limbs, confronted me – an impalpable hero that I must vanquish in order to advance. And this resistance, ever overcome, made of me too at every step an imaginary hero, victorious over the wind, and rich in energies that were ever reborn, ever equal to the power of the invisible adversary …

That is just what youth is. I trod firmly the winding beach, beaten and hardened by the waves. All things around me were simple and pure: the sky, the sand, the water. I watched as they came from the offing, those mighty shapes which seem to be running from the coast of Libya, charioting their glistening summits, their hollow valleys, their relentless energy from Africa all the way to Attica across the immense liquid expanse. At last they come upon their obstacle, the very plinth of Hellas; they shatter themselves against those submarine foundations; they recoil in disorder towards the origin of their motion. When the waves are thus destroyed and confounded, yet seized in turn by those that follow them, it is as though the forms of the deep were engaged in strife. One sees white horsemen leaping beyond themselves, and all those envoys of the inexhaustible sea perishing and reappearing, with a monotonous tumult, on a gentle almost imperceptible slope, which all their vehemence, though it come from the most remote horizon, will yet never be able to surmount … (2)

Do you believe me or believe what I see? (Laurel) … consider them both the sea and the land; and do you not find an analogy for something inside yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life ...

Elsew/here the Sea is massive and its featureless-ness helps us to understand the size of those systems at play on this planet, whereas land betrays us into the lullaby of geographic specificity. Humanity is just as geographic as land, and we are function of these systems, and the motion of these systems is whatʼs awesome, and my impact, your impact, on these systems is nano, but the crater of impact isnʼt the measure of meaning, itʼs only a physical resonance. What is beautiful is inside you, the viewer. And to feel beauty is great, but not material, and not truth, and not eternal. In fact, beauty does not exist where one can smell eternity.

Elsew/here things are remembered, and their pattern comes together like a cloud atlas. A system viewed too closely for connections reveals none. Latent connections are like mist. Heat the air with your breath and they disappear like so much vapor. Intentions turning into words often sound like pain. Keep your love locked down. Internalizing the world happens like a collage, not like the linearity of external living.

Elsew/here erosion reveals fossils. Layers working back on themselves, patterns appear in complex systems when given the chance (time).

Elsew/here … “in the space of a few minutes, the bright sky darkened and a wind came up, blowing the dust across the arid land in sinister spirals. The last flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all contours disappeared in the grayish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon lashed by strong, unrelenting gusts. I crouched behind a rampart of tree stumps that had been bulldozed into long lines after the great hurricane. As darkness closed in from the horizon like a noose being tightened, I tried in vain to make out, through the swirling and ever denser obscurement, landmarks that a short while ago still stood out clearly, but with each passing moment the space around became more constricted. Even in my immediate vicinity I could soon not distinguish any line or shape at all. The mealy dust streamed from left to right, from right to left, to and fro on every side, rising on high and powdering down, nothing but a dancing grainy whirl for what must have been an hour, while further inland, as I later learnt, a heavy thunderstorm had broken. 

When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had buried the broken timber emerged from the gloom. Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of a caravan that had come to grief in the desert. A deathly silence prevailed. There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not a rustle, nothing. And although it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith, remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down.” (4)

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(1) Virginia Woolf, The Waves, Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2006, p. 174.

(2) Paul Valéry, Dialogues, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 111-12.

(3) Herman Melville, Moby Dick, New York: Norton & Company Inc, p. 236.

(4) WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, London: Harvill Press, 1998, p. 229.

the sea: wave 6

Lulled by the Sea’s roll and curl, its breath synced with mine, I return to my dream of floating far from land, the boat long gone, just me and the Sea and the sky. A me-shaped hole in the vastness of the Sea, two turbulences enmeshed with each other in a nameless place on no known map. The tight breath and anxious splash and oh-my-God of my earlier corkscrewing desire to stand up and out of the water and see where I am, to orient myself, are now released. Soft. My thoughts are fluid, nomadic, provisional: they flutter and drift and unravel in a waking that is brushed by wet sleep, carried on the currents of association, very small, very quiet, a slow swarm, the little by little suddenly. I have the impression the Sea can somehow hear my thoughts.

In the Mandaean sect in the region of the Iran-Iraq border, newly ordained priests marry a cloud, a stand-in for a wife in the other world. The Mandaeans’ holy scriptures tell the story of Dinanukht, half-man, half-book, who sits by the waters between the worlds and reads himself … (1)

Movement and transformation. The resilient persistence of matter, its survival, its memory - and yet the bottom line is that the only constant is mobility, change. It’s all circuits and flows in the mortality of forms, and the unpredictable migrations of their constituent parts. There are the remains of sea creatures in deserts and on mountain tops. Shells on Everest. And a tiny bead of sweat on a forehead might contain something of the exhaled vapour of another person or creature from long ago and far away. A glass of water here now is informed by the past. Perhaps it holds molecules evaporated from a glacier, a tree, tears, mist, snow, fog, ice, a cough, the gurgle of a new-born child ‘trailing clouds of glory’ or someone’s final sigh. Maybe even molecules from Archimedes’ bath water. Countless micro-moments of time, from yesterday or centuries ago on the other side of this blue ball, potentially co-existing in the same small container. The glass itself was once sand. It’s almost promiscuous, this co-mingling, and there’s joy in that thought.

I was born by the river in a little tent

Oh and just like the river I’ve been running ever since

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will (2)

Researchers estimate that 12 million tons of Sahara dust drops out of the air onto the Brazilian rainforests of the Amazon basin every year. Great plume-like vortices of aeolian sand that rise from the desert and drift west, only the finest phosphate-rich particles making it across to South America. Shamans too ride on whirlwinds; the way out of the world, or into another world, is through the vortex … (3)

If we could only let go of our compulsion to dress transience in mourning, and instead confer value on impermanence and change, might we not inherit the earth? Why not lament (briefly) the very notion of permanence and move on? ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Progress’ - looks to me like these are all cover stories, formative human delusions. Funny stories to tell ourselves, aren’t they – funny peculiar if not funny ha-ha. Let their heart-break go. Why not? It would be an act of kindness. Of realistic optimism. And an occasion for invention. We’ve been pointing in the wrong direction. Let’s use the fact of transience for our fictions. That’s the way to turn a death story into a life story. If you want to be remembered, give yourself away. La la laaaa la laaaa lalalaaaa, oh yes it will.

The words of Meister Eckhardt: ‘the humble man is he who is watered with grace’ …

Beginnings and endings, all endings in reality new beginnings. Hourglasses eternally emptying out and being turned over again and again. At first the Earth was a smouldering sphere condensed from interstellar gas, its atmosphere a toxic soup of hot vapour. For maybe half a billion years. Then eventually as the Earth began to cool it rained for maybe 12,000 years, and the Sea came into being ... As we fade and die, us humans, the hot-house internal fever of our living bodies begins to cool from its regular 98.6 degrees Farhenheit, and eventually we become food, then soil, then … The spilling of seeds …

In the past, when people died at home, a lighted match was applied to the big toe. The toe would blister whether the person was dead or still alive; but if they were dead, the blister would fill with gas and burst.

After he died, Alexander the Great was shipped back from Babylon in a vat of honey. Nelson came back to England from Trafalgar in a keg of rum. A temporary suspension, of matter and time.

There’s an invisible haze in the air and in the water – the water in that glass, this Sea, that sky-mountain cloud, in all water – a haze of stuff too small for these eyes to see: the dust of anything and everything, the ghostly traces of what is carried in the wind and the rain and the rivers and here, right here in the Sea. Dancing sediment. Ejecta. Dejecta. Rejecta. A kind of soil, life’s compost. Trace elements of Newton’s apple. Or of Darwin’s busy worms, their castings the source of his consolation and inspiration in his final years of life: blind machines for making soil (aren’t we all?); digestion as restoration, the life destruction makes possible. (‘Never say higher or lower’, Darwin once wrote in the margins of a book).  We regularly inhale air-borne fragments of vehicle tires. Possibly dinosaurs. Dodos. Certainly powdered insects’ wings. Powdered people. Debris dispersed and afloat and en route to who knows where. How to read and map and re-member these atomised histories, and our place in their foldings and unfoldings and becomings.  ‘Galloping horses of the departed century, I will consult ashes, stars, and flights of birds’. (4)

‘Air routinely carries intimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal, skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, and spit, as well as salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distant mountains, micro bits of cooled magma from volcanoes and charred micro-fragments from tropical forest fires. These sorts of things can add up. At dusk the particles meet rising water vapour, stick together, and fall: that is when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of it stays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch of topsoil … We live on dead people’s heads […] Time: you can’t chock the wheels. We sprout, ripen, fall, and roll under the turf again at a stroke: Surely, the people is grass […]’. (5)

A thousand years ago, in silent-order Benedictine monasteries, monks communicated through hand signals. If you wanted honey, you put your finger on your tongue. If you needed a candle, you blew on your index finger … Where are those breaths now?

It was said of Confucius, and there was no higher praise: He knows where the wind comes from. It was said of Lao-Tzu that he spent 81 years in the womb before being born …

Everything is still, everything moves. Floating here, treading water, pulled down by my body’s weight, buoyed up by a cushion of liquid. Up-down, gravity and lightness. The im/possible dance. Everything that is dances this dance. The structure of a day. Organic life cycles. Weather systems. Social histories. Religions. Civilisations. Mushroom cloud. Smoke from a cigarette. A glance. A memory, bursting to the surface like the fin of a fish, then gone. Every breath is in itself a wave, a weather system, a life cycle of rising up and falling away. The inhalation can be a falling away, the exhalation an effortless rising up. Body weather. The wind in my heart – the dust in my head. Internal oceans, deserts, fronts, cloud formations, floods, droughts, turbulences, seasonal lows and highs. A synoptic chart of the soul, written in and on the body. Upside down, inside out.

The wind in the trees, the oxygenated ocean of air in which we swim or sink; an economy of exchange, inside and outside touching and blurring, like lovers. The tree-like structures of the lungs, of blood vessel and nervous systems, of river deltas and tributaries, of lightning strikes, synaptic connectivities and divisions. The arc of a thought. Like lovers.

Resemblances, analogies, metaphors: ‘like’ does not collapse difference and create the same, for the in-between is unstable, potential, the coexistence of near and far, like and not-like, identity and difference. The Sea is like the sky, the desert like the Sea, only … different. Like is a gap. Everything happens in the gap. Mind the gap, you could fall into it.

It is said that when the philosopher Empedocles (the originator of the concept of the four elements: fire, air, water, earth) dived into the spurting liquid magma of Mt. Etna’s crater, his own ‘Eureka!’ moment at the age of 60 or was it 109, the volcano promptly spat out one of his bronze shoes …

Falling down. Falling sick. Sinking. Coming up for air.  Climbing back up. Standing up. Settling down. Falling in love. Free falling. Rising into love. Defying gravity. Gravity rises, lightness falls.

‘We don’t fall in rows like hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most of it tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. We open time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present’. (6)

Oh there been times that I thought I couldn’t last for long

But now I think I’m able to carry on …

Treading water. Leaving no trace. A little dance written on the wind.

Did you know that camels, the great anomalously-shaped, grace-ful ‘ships of the desert’, the two-humped Bactrian model like mobile model mountain ranges, leave oh so delicate lotus pad-prints in the sand for the wind to wipe away? (7)

Everything is still, everything moves. Sea. Sand. Sky. Air. Pulse. Breath.

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will …

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(1) Eliot Weinberger, ‘Mandaeans’, An Elemental Thing, New York: New Directions, pp. 100, 103.

(2) Sam Cooke, A Change is Gonna Come, 1964.

(3) Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Vortex’, An Elemental Thing, op. cit., 2007, p. 126.

(4) Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Unveiling’ (from The Rising of the Sun), in Collected Poems: 1931-1987, London: Penguin, 1988, pp. 124, 153.

(5) Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, New York: Vintage Books, 1999, pp. 124, 153.

(6) Annie Dillard, For the Time Being, op. cit., p. 203.

(7) Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Sahara’, An Elemental Thing, op. cit., p. 186.

the sea: cloud (an epilogue)

Cloud, from old english Clud [mass of rock or earth] 

Cloud Seed #1

Dirt from the construction site where buildings are beginning to be formed lifts up and moves into the atmosphere. Once a part of the earth's crust now set loose into the air: a potential staging ground for the condensation of water vapor; seeds for the formation of a cloud. 

No more permanent that anything else. Everything is a momentary apparition. Oh, but beauty. My eyes open each morning, and some mornings are full, like a song that makes me sing along. I am here. I am here. And it will not be forever. Thankfully. Because there is too much to see, and nothing would be worth trying to remember if my eyes will open every morning like a hose spraying infinite nows. Nothing is worth feeling if it can be felt anytime, always.

Cloud seed #2

A man who spent half of his Saturday afternoon kicking a can down the promenade comes home and shakes his jacket before hanging it on the coat rack.  Small crystals of salt, deposited on his jacket from the spray of the sea are set loose, moving out of the open window and into the atmosphere.  The salt crystals mix with the dust from the construction site, more water vapor condenses, freezes and the cloud is growing.

And looking at The Sea. Looking at the sea. From up here. “And now we are here. The dinner is ready and we cannot eat. The meat sits in the white lake of its dish. The wine waits.”[1]

 “Who watched the forms of the clouds over this part of the earth a thousand years ago? Who watches them today?”[2]We will watch and we will try to hold on, but surely they will change. We will cry – tears falling up into the sky – cuss – spittle flying under the clouds' haunted arches – we will roll in the meadow inhaling the mist while stains form on our trousers – whelm of joy mixed with dread – we will lay on our backs looking up listening to the sound of the blades of grass flittering in the wind and remember nothing is worth feeling if it can be felt anytime, always.

Cloud Seed #3

Sitting at the bar at dusk, watching the dusty antiques on the wall lose their definition with the fading of the light; a mass was forming before the drunkards’ eyes. Looking down at his drink, trying to avoid the scene, he suddenly felt an absence forming behind him. He fell of his stool, bumped off a table and a couple of chairs before he stumbled out the door.  It was damp outside; it was as if the clouds were sleeping in the street. Trying to make out the shadowy forms through the misty veil before his eyes, he picked a point and staggered towards it. After walking for some time, bumping off of various landmarks-changing his course with each bump, he could feel his body gaining weight from the droplets of water collecting on his skin and clothing, after some time he was swimming in the cloud and after some time he was becoming it. 

“What is in any [Sea] ocean but a multitude of drops?” [3] An awesome body of matter all tangled up more incapable of seeming an object than land, but then there’s air, The Sea as the entropic middle. And this, viewed from a distance, the edge of the universe perhaps, looks like Brownian motion, all of it bouncing around and against itself, changing course, the collection of these glancing blows becoming lives. Matter drifting in the system with the illusion of acting. But one cannot bounce off of belief - and vicious acts, or virtuous acts, are precipitated by belief. But without invoking some grand narrative in which to protect our fragility, why can’t small joy be joy? We can drift, and appreciate the view, and seek to collect these views into a remembered joy, always more possibility in the future, until there is no more future. Smiling into the face of a finite existence of little lasting result, manufacturing small meanings that add up, a joy in having participated instead of being frozen in the want of gifted meaning.  

Cloud Seed #4

Down below a couple is sleeping side-by-side covers up to their chins.  Clouds are forming in front of their mouths with the rise and fall of their chests.  Quietly, while they dream their bodies are regenerating tissues.  They wake up in the morning look in the mirror, see themselves the same face, look at each other say “good morning” seeing nothing as changed, maybe only the date on the calendar, but everything has changed. Everything. Clouds.  Each morning we wake up and meet our self ... meet the world. Our mostly-water bodies, our loose collection of matter, regenerating always. Clouds. “ We are all potential fossils still carrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of the world in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than clouds from age to age.”[4] But only the crud, none of the actual stuff. And still our hearts hurt when they are broken. Still we collect something. Small, tiny in fact, but ours (us).

An object is like a pattern of movement instead of a solid separate thing that exists autonomously. [5] Look through the microscope and pick your favorite, follow it closely, like a star, like drift wood, like a maybe-face in a cloud. Organization used to be understood as order. Databases, cordoned off, categorized. But clouds. Leaving those things we collect where they lay, and giving them keywords, signs, so that we might search for them later, the algorithm, the duplicitous web (put it in the cloud), cloud computing, more reliable, and more appropriate to our shifting understanding of relationships; time going by, entropic ephemeral re-structuring. Us to the world, us to nature, coffee to the morning, the world to the world.

“As for astronomy, the difficulty of recognizing the movement of the earth consisted in renouncing the immediate feeling of the immobility of the earth and the similar feeling of the movement of the planets, so for history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of the person to the laws of space, time, and causes consists in renouncing the immediate feeling of the independence of one’s person. In the first case, the need was to renounce the consciousness of a nonexistent immobility in space and recognize a movement we do not feel; in the present case, it is just as necessary to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel.”[6]

Clouds are like momentary apparitions; their possibility is in the air always, like mist settling down in the cool evening before burning off in new sun. A cloud looks like an object, but isn’t it really just the way air looks when the atmosphere conspires to make it so? I am a cloud.

[1] Strand, Mark. Reasons For Moving, Darker & The Sargentville Notebook, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 75

[2] Thoreau, Henry David. Autumn From the Journal of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin &Co., 1892, p. 429

[3] Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas, New York: Random House, 2004. p. 509

[4] Eisley, Loren. The Immense Journey, New York: Vintage, 1959.

[5] Bohm, David. On Creativity. London: Routledge, 1998.

[6] Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p. 1214

This epilogue text is by Stephen Fiehn & Tyler Myers / Cupola Bobber.

shuttle 15: colouring

'"Transparency, ah, there's the miracle". Transparency, the legacy of the desert where there is no colour, but where the light is large, open, with a transparent quality in which all colours are present at the same time, as possibility. In the desert, Edmond Jabès says to Serge Faucherau, "nothing is there as simply blue, but as a possibility of blue". And just as piling on colour leads to transparency, so "we pile up images and images of images until the last, which is blank, and on which we all agree"' (Rosmarie Waldrop, Lavish Absence: Recalling and Rereading Edmond Jabès, Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002, 99)

'The wonder of the heat is metaphysical. The very colours - pastel blue, mauve, lilac - are the products of a slow, geological, timeless combustion. The mineral quality of the earth breaks through the surface in the crystalline flora. All the natural elements here have known their ordeal by fire. The desert is no longer a landscape, it is a pure form produced by the abstraction of all others' (Jean Baudrillard, America, London: Verso, 1988, 137)
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'The plane drones away. Closing the hood of her car after putting in the water, Daria looks up, squinting, then drives off toward some purple-mountained majesty - a majesty that Antonioni, at one point, had thought to change. Production designer Dean Tavoularis was in Barstow with his painter, Roger Dietz, engaged by the filmmaker in conversation about those distant 'lavender grey' mountains.

"Can you make those red, from there ... to there?" Antonioni asked.

Tavoularis said to Dietz, "What about a crop-duster?"

Tavoularis: "I checked around and there was a bi-plane, kind of à la North by Northwest. And I said: 'Get as much red powder sent from LA, from Hollywood, as you can', and Roger put the red powder in the big bins for the chemicals they would normally use, and I instructed the pilot. 

Watching through binoculars, from where the camera would be, as the plane made several passes over the mountains, I noticed no particular change. 'Do it again', I said. Again, no change. Then, 'What about liquid? Can we get another plane that has a liquid system instead of powder? And can you get red dye instead of red powder? Rust red dye?' So we did that with another plane. I watched again with the binoculars ... 

I did try. I made a valiant effort. I explained to Michelangelo, and I had a couple of photographs to prove it. I don't think he expected that the mountains would ever change. Just wanted to see somebody step up, wanted to see somebody try. That was the important thing. That's what a master is. Life isn't about winning, it's about trying"'.  

Extract from Murray Pomerance, 'Zabriskie Point', in Michelangelo Red Antonioni Blue: Eight Reflections on Cinema, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011, 163-4

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Images from the making of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970); at the bottom, a still from the end sequence

For artist Juli Kearns' detailed three-part descriptive synopsis of Zabriskie Point, with numerous stills and assorted clips, see her Idyllopus Press site here

For an earlier post about Los Angeles, 'Let it shine', see here. For an earlier post about light and the colour blue ('Light'), originally written for Forced Entertainment's Marathon Lexicon, see here

shuttle 8: gone birds

A partial listing of the extinct birds of North America, perhaps to be read to the sky, the desert, a salt lake, or the sea ...

Aiolornis incredibilis, Antillean cave rail, Atitlán grebe, Bachman’s warbler, Bahaman barn owl, Bermuda night heron, Brace’s emerald, Californian turkey, Carolina parakeet, Cathartornis gracilis, Chendytes lawi, Cuban red macaw, Daggett’s eagle, Dow’s puffin, Dusky seaside sparrow, Eocypselus rowei, Eskimo curlew, Gould’s emerald, Grand Cayman thrush, Guadeloupe caracara, Guadeloupe parakeet, Guadeloupe parrot, Guadeloupe storm petrel, Gymnogyps amplus, Gymnogyps varonai, Great auk, Heath hen, Imperial woodpecker, Ivory-billed woodpecker, Labrador duck, La Brea stork, Lesser Antillean macaw, Martinique house wren, Martinique parrot, Mauge’s parakeet, Merriam’s teratorn, Puerto Rican obscure bunting, Passenger pigeon, Pavo californicus, Phoenicopterus minutus, Phoenicopterus copei, Saint Croix macaw, San Benedicto rock wren, Semper’s warbler, Slender-billed curlew, Slender-billed grackle, Spectacled cormorant, Teratornis woodburnensis, Woodward’s eagle

Photographs (from top): Atitlán grebe, Eskimo curlew (1962), Ivory-billed woodpecker (1935), Passenger pigeon (1898)

For an earlier post, 'Ghost flock (last song)', about artists making work in relation to extinct birds for the travelling exhibition 'Ghosts of gone birds', see here 

For an earlier post, 'wac wac', about Al Lingis, birds, feathers, the quetzal, see here