the zoo at night: beautiful mutants

 

 ‘… like all people who feel uncomfortable in an uncomfortable world, you want to make a map. Well let me tell you it is difficult to make a map in splintered times when whole worlds and histories collide’ (1).

It is a little puzzling to revisit the archival traces that linger from a performance that occurred almost a quarter of a century ago, in search of ‘what happened’: working note books, drafts, photographs, some video fragments, drawings, the programme, reviews, photocopied extracts from associated readings (2), and the odd object, including a blue paint handprint on a square of thick, water-stained canvas, a leather Arlecchino half-mask, and a finger-length luminescent peacock feather. It’s puzzling because the work itself and its processes are of course largely irrecuperable from these things, and the stories my cortex hums to me are of uncertain status at such distance in time, closer to fiction, or perhaps dream. The live event slips in and out of focus, some sequences and details still vivid, brightly lit and ‘hot’ in my memory, others largely defused or eroded over time.

However my memory of the place of the event - the New Fortune Theatre - feels remarkably immediate, embodied, animate; and as I write on this winter’s evening in my home in Somerset, England, in an instant I can cross the world and be there again. It’s a place I still feel I know well. Perhaps its clarity and intensity in my memory in part result from having spent a number of years working from an office in the English Department at UWA that looked out directly on to this space; perhaps in part this is the mnemonic residue of all those hours spent exploring its sculptural geometries and volumes, its live zones, sight lines, the movement of light and shadow over its surfaces. In what follows – a reworking and expansion of some earlier reflections on the production co-written with my core collaborator and friend Barry Laing, with extracts from the performance text – my memories of this place, its architectural and affective particularities, its agencies in the making of a performance, are at the very centre. 

                                                                                                David Williams

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 The trigger source for the Ex-Stasis Theatre Company’s production of Beautiful Mutants, commissioned by the Festival of Perth in 1993, was Deborah Levy’s novel of the same name. Initially the novel was adapted by David Williams and Barry Laing into a performance text/script, which passed through seven written drafts before being submitted to the company. The sequence of 24 episodes in this seventh draft then became the starting point for the material outcomes of the performance itself, which were collectively devised with the full ExTC company (3).

Beautiful Mutants, Levy’s first novel, marks the beginning of her transition as a writer from theatre to fiction, and its textures (linguistic and imagistic), tonal shifts of register and fluid narrative structure mine and extend many of the attributes of her earlier texts for performance. It is a work of vast imaginative range and depth set in the crumbling world of late 1980s capitalism and commercialism, characterized by one of Levy’s protagonists as ‘the age of the migrant and the missile’. (4) With the scope and dexterity of a cinematic vision, Levy hunts in unexpected places and moves easily among the shadows in the lives and fractured minds of people exiled from themselves, displaced geographically and psychologically: their culture too near for comfort, the land of their dreams sometimes too far to realize. In a world of rampant materialism, competition and consumption, the city – Thatcher’s London - becomes a ‘zoo’, peopled and echoing with squeals of desire, dances of obsession and dreams of flight.

ExTC’s production was gathered around and written into the specificities of the performance site, the New Fortune Theatre at UWA: a schematic ‘reconstruction’ of an Elizabethan theatre, with triple balconies on all sides of a large thrust stage, an audience ‘pit’, and a second open space behind the regular stage – and all open to the sky. The architecture of the New Fortune, familiar to both directors, was instrumental in the conception and development of the work from the very outset. We felt that its multiple zones, framings, layerings, its possibility for something akin to the mobility of cinematic close-up, long shot and depth of field, for montage and fluid dissolves of location (5) could inform and focus the emergent dramaturgy of the performance as a whole. Although we would have limited access to the theatre during the devising process, we tried to conceive of the space as protagonist, material and medium, rather than as passive ‘receptacle’ or container for our imaginings. And secretly we played the game of asking ourselves what it wanted, how it could flare into a different visibility by a shifting of the geometry of attention. Ideally the event could both ‘fit’ with the logics and possibilities of the site and at the same time be in a relation of tension or critical friction with it, the performance’s forms and materials somewhat ‘ill-fitting’ in terms of the site’s received conventions and languages (as we perceived them, at least). So the theatre itself as a particular space-time to refer to, align with, push against, hold present. Ultimately, with a view to being playful in a purposeful way, we sought to defamiliarise the space and make its latent dynamics and potentials active and apparent. To this end, the usual orientation of the space was turned through 45 degrees clockwise, with an L-shaped block of seating placed on two sides and two levels, thereby configuring a ‘new’ performance space privileging proximity, encounter and sensory imbrication, as well as a looking anew/askew on a known space at an unfamiliar angle of incidence, its centre line now running from downstage right to upstage left. In addition, the space usually designated as audience ‘pit’ in the Elizabethan configuration was sealed and flooded with water to a level of over a meter in depth. This pool area, the thrust stage and all three levels of the balconies were used by the performers throughout.

In terms of design, the core components were located in the pool: a metal ‘island’ with hinged struts, allowing transformation from a cage in the shape of cupped hands, a claw or a closed bud, into, say, an unfolding sunflower (see episode 3, ‘The Age of the Great Howl’, below); a bridge – a spine, a trestle of bones – with articulated metal supports, which could also be manipulated; a silk and bamboo structure known as ‘the pupa’, a tubular tunnel that snaked around the lip of the thrust and into the water like some massive grey intestinal tract or larval invertebrate; a network of rope and chain rigging, onto which spectators were invited to tie small handwritten notes of desired release, like prayer flags; and the water itself, able to suggest a tropical blue lagoon, a black lake of indeterminate depth, or a sulphurous burning reservoir. The water offered reflective and scriptable surfaces, mirrorings, doublings, and endless possible dis/appearances, dissolvings and re-makings. In its saturated metaphoricity and material fluidity it was conceived as the unstable space of memories and desires, of buoyancies, rips and drownings – in the words of the South African writer Breyten Breytenbach, water as ‘the soul of the mirror’ (6).

In this complex and dynamic space were elaborated the major roles upon which the performance turned. Lapinski, a Russian immigrant conceived on the marble slab of a war memorial, who leaves her home for a foreign land: an ‘island’, another place, an elsewhere. She smokes, conjures the martyrs and ‘love demons’ who haunt her, befriends a Poet, loves a Painter called Freddie, and tells stories. She is a kind of narrator, her voice pervading and animating the space of all the others, their stories enacting her story in turn:

Life is a perpetual to and fro, a dis/continuous releasing and absorbing of the self. Let her weave her story within their stories, her life amidst their lives. And while she weaves, let her whip, spur and set them on fire. Thus making them sing again. Very softly a-new a-gain (7).

In the flat above Lapinski, whose ‘otherness’ particularly confounds him, lives the Revenger. He exists crawling between earth and sky, swimming sometimes, mostly treading water, but burning with the struggle to turn his drownings into dreams. He is frightened and he doesn’t know why, he wakes in the mornings afraid and there’s no one there to tell; but incredulously and comically he is determined to be ‘master of his own fuck-ups’, and most of all amused by his own bitter jokes.

The Poet works on a hamburger production line in a factory on the edge of an urban wasteland – the ‘Meatbelt’, the brown underbelly of the city – with Lapinski and other women, sleepwalkers, blood under their finger nails. Among them is Seashells, a woman who can hear the sea, has visions, and loses her hands to the beast of the machine. In the Poet’s eyes, whole continents flicker as she transports herself, her workmates and the audience across thousands of imagined miles, through borders of every kind, no passports required. She has learnt the art of metamorphosis:

The night shift is nearly over. Soon we will return to each other after our long separation. We will be startled by the distance we have travelled, even though we are standing shoulder to shoulder in the same room. (8)

Freddie is an artist who glories in his own delusional ruminations on Lenin, Freud and Dali. He is a ‘lover’ fragmented by impossible past loves, including Lapinski, who realizes himself in the very moment of his immolation in the voracious lust and flaming mouth of Gemma the Banker. The Banker finds liberation in hatred and destruction. She is ‘love’s arsonist’, a Kali-like corporate raider who loots the city and every possible sexual scenario; ultimately she torches the Zoo in a maniacal, necrophiliac apocalypse of passion and pain.

   

Krupskaya, Lapinski’s shape-shifting cat, prowls through these stories and spaces, transformed by them variously into a grandmother, a corpse, a blow-up doll, and other shadows and reflections between worlds.

The form of the work emerged from these darkly comic and sometimes violent stories of exile and dislocation, and the possibilities afforded by the performance space. Dramaturgically and scenographically, the intention was to engender a cinematic fluidity that enabled radical jumps in space-time, sudden migrations, interweavings and collisions of discrete image-worlds: a kind of dissident, critical surrealism. The performance posited a cartography of multiple or possible selves using an episodic structure to speak of the pathologies of cultural ‘death’ and the possibilities of imaginal ‘life’, and the transitional spaces between. Conceptually, these transitional spaces were orchestrated as rips, tearings, overflowings, bleedings, ecstasies – formally suture, montage, jump-cuts – in an attempt to articulate an increase in the buoyancy of the imaginal pool we are always already swimming in.

In this context, we conceived of images as polyphonous ‘worlds’: collocatory syntaxes conjoining words, physical actions, music, sound and the rhythmed articulation of space – images as dynamic sites of possibility. The ‘images’ were thought of as the visible/audible/palpable intersections of these sites. In this way we understood the pool as a tabula rasa re-definable under different lighting conditions, revealing its depth or solidifying into an impenetrable, black void. The performers swam beneath its surface, emerging from darkness into the dreams or nightmares of their own stories, disappearing, then re-emerging in the memories of others.

The water, and the metal, wood, earth and canvas of the set and its structures – such as the bridge linking the front of the auditorium to the thrust stage – were ‘playable’. They served as musical instruments and pliable forms. The water deflected, reflected and re-animated sound, light and the performers’ actions. In ‘The Age of the Great Howl’, the bridge, which served as one of the sites for the Meatbelt, was played with iron bars for percussive and melodic effect, alongside pre-recorded sound and the thrashing of water. In episode 21, ‘Zoo Apocalypse’, the water was set aflame – fire over water – as were metal, wood and cloth dispersed throughout the space. The pungent odour of fuel and black smoke mingled with human cries and animal murmurings as the flickering shadows kept time with destruction:

The zoo at night is the saddest place. Behind the bars, at rest from vivisecting eyes, the animals cry out, species separated from one another, knowing instinctively the map of belonging. They would choose predator and prey against this outlandish safety. Their ears, more powerful than those of their keepers, pick up sounds of cars and last-hour take-aways. They hear all the human noises of distress. What they don’t hear is the hum of the undergrowth or the crack of fire. The noises of kill. The river-roar booming against brief screams. They prick their ears till their ears are sharp points, but the noises they seek are too far away. I wish I could hear your voice again. (9)

The spoken words of the script were one of a number of ‘textual’ components embedded in these composite images. For example in episode 17, ‘And All for Babies with Bone Disease’, the Revenger tells stories that collapse time and space while the figure of his father, enacted by the performer who plays the morphing Krupskaya, presides over his demise from a second balcony. Drifting piano music, the hollow sound of drips and a distant helicopter threaten the primacy of the spoken/written words.

In addition, we located a series of speakers in and around the performance areas to allow the soundscapes to ‘travel’ through and around, spatialising the movement of sound within the architecture of the theatre. One of the central audio images which recurred in different guises throughout the performance was of a helicopter with searchlight, circling ever closer, before hovering in the night sky above the space, finally careering out of control and being ‘sucked’ into the water with the performers (see below, episode 24, ‘This Does Not Exist’). The performers enact roles of ‘see-ers’, and the ‘seen’; they are able to transport themselves, but they are policed, living under the watchful eye and scorching light of equally possible repressions.

Finally, the particularity of the theatre space itself introduced a wholly productive unpredictability in two ways. Firstly, the weather became an active component of unfolding image worlds, particularly wind – warm gusts and eddies animating flame, smoke, cloth, hair, sounds - and the occasional summer shower, droplets disturbing the surface of the water as if it were reaching boiling point. Secondly, in all of the performances the theatre’s resident peacocks chose to remain present throughout, exquisitely languorous and bejeweled onlookers, uncharacteristically silent, taking up various positions on the balconies like baroque azure extras quietly performing an-other audience. This porosity in the parameters of space and event, their openness to the uncontrollable dynamics of the context (the allowing in of both a meteorological and animal ‘outside’), seemed to amplify and thicken the resonance of images, giving them further immediacy, body and carry.

David Williams and Barry Laing thank Deborah Levy for her encouragement during the production process. All photographs are by Marcelo Palacios.

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EPISODE 1: EXILE IS A STATE OF MIND

The first image of the performance. Soundscape: piano music, a lament, emerging from a sound of sampled water droplets, as the performers who play Lapinski and Krupskaya walk slowly into the space from opposite sides and meet on the bridge. Krupskaya carries an old, battered and threadbare umbrella, inverted above her, like a bowl; a black cloth over her shoulders, like a shawl. She gives the umbrella to Lapinski, who slowly spins it above her head to create her own ‘snow-storm’; from the umbrella white feathers swirl and settle on her shoulders, the bridge and the water below. At the same time, Krupskaya wraps her head in the black cloth, for a few moments becoming the ‘grandmother’, bidding Lapinski farewell.

Both figures then step quietly out of this space, down from the bridge and into the water, as the journey to a foreign land begins. Lapinski moves through the water with the umbrella, looking straight ahead. While she wades, she trails Krupskaya in her wake. She is a ‘corpse’, floating concealed underneath what is now a black shroud: her dead ‘mother’ – a memory, a weight. As Lapinski approaches the metal cage, Krupskaya is released, floating abandoned for a few moments, then re-emerging to dance serenely in the water with the cloth. The umbrella floats nearby, like a monstrous damaged lotus.

A distant dog bark in the soundtrack greets Lapinski as she climbs into her ‘new world’ – an island, a cage. As the music slips underneath, she slowly looks around her at the audience, and begins to tell Lapinski’s story:

           

LAPINSKI: My mother was the ice-skating champion of Moscow. She danced, glided, whirled on blades of steel, pregnant with me, warm in her womb even though I was on ice. She said I was conceived on the marble slab of a war memorial, both she and my father in their Sunday best: I came into being on a pile of corpses in the bitter snows of mid-winter.

On my fifth birthday, my father stole a goose. He stuffed it into the pocket of his overcoat and whizzed off on his motorbike, trying to stop it from flying away with his knees. We ate it that evening. As I put my first forkful into my mouth, he tickled me under the chin and said, “This does not exist. Understand?” I did not understand at the time. Especially as my mother stuffed a pillow full of the feathers for me, and soaked the few left in red vegetable dye to sew onto the skirt of her skating costume.

At the age of twelve, when my parents died, I was sent to the West by my grandmother. She said it was for the best. I was to stay with a distant uncle. When I asked my grandmother why he had left, she said, “Because he is faithless”.

The ‘mother’ has disappeared into the water, and now reappears in deep focus, walking quietly along a side balcony and off into the distance, a blue light painting the plastic shroud that rustles around her: the memory recedes.

Which is how I came to be here. Where women were rumoured to swim in fountains of sparkling wine dressed in leopardskin bikinis. I unpacked my few clothes, books, photographs, parcels of spiced meat, and wept into the handkerchief my grandmother had pressed into my hand. It was embroidered with one scarlet thread with my name – L. A. P. I. N. S. K. I.

The music has dropped out altogether.

            Exile is a state of mind… 

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 Notes

(1)  The Poet in Deborah Levy, Beautiful Mutants, Jonathan Cape: London, 1989, p. 16. Republished by Penguin in Early Levy, a volume with her novel Swallowing Geography, in 2014.

(2)  This pool of loosely related materials, reflecting our fascinations at the time and informing our approaches to some degree, include an annotated copy of Ted Hughes’s poem/film treatment Gaudete, sections of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse and of Breyten Breytenbach’s Confessions of an Albino Terrorist, two short stories by Gail Jones – ‘The House of Breathing’ and ‘Modernity’ - and essays about the dance-theatre work of Pina Bausch.

(3)  Beautiful Mutants was first performed at the New Fortune Theatre in Perth on 9 February 1993. The project was conceived and directed by David Williams and Barry Laing. The performers were Mandy McElhinney (Lapinski), Felicity Bott (Krupskaya), Barry Laing (‘Duke’, the Revenger), Andrea McVeigh (The Poet), James Berlyn (Freddie, the Painter), Anne Browning (Gemma, the Banker), and Kate Beahan (Seashells). The devising process also implicated the designer Ricardo Peach, lighting designer Margaret Burton, sound artists John Patterson and Andrew Beck, costume designer Bruno Santarelli, and the production manager Mark Homer.

(4)  The Poet in Deborah Levy, Beautiful Mutants, Jonathan Cape: London, 1989, p. 11.

(5)  Although these are characteristics of Shakespearean dramaturgy, film was our central metaphorical and aesthetic stimulus here for an approach to image making in the theatre.

(6)  Breyten Breytenbach, All One Horse: Fictions and Images, Faber & Faber: London, 1989, p. 14.

(7)  Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Grandma’s Story’, in Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Indiana University Press: Bloomington 1989, p. 128.

(8)  Episode 14, ‘One Body’, ExTC adaptation of Deborah Levy’s Beautiful Mutants.

(9)  Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body, Jonathan Cape: London, 1992, p. 135.

Extract from 'Space as protagonist, material, medium: Beautiful Mutants', by  David Williams and Barry Laing, a longer text with extracts from the performance text, published in The New Fortune Theatre: That Vast Open Stage, Perth, Australia: UWA Press, 2018. Eds. Ciara Rawnsley & Robert White

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 …

---

(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.

shuttle 16: drawing

'Drawing figures, is figured.
Drawing pulls, pushes, tugs, drags.
Drawing is friction, gravity.
Earth draws, is drawn, draws maps.
Sun draws, draws shadows, photos.
Moon draws tides'
(From Roberto Chabet's exhibition Lines on Drawing, 1999)

'A line, an area of tone, is not really important because it records what you have seen, but because of what it will lead you on to see' (John Berger, 'Life Drawing', in Jim Savage (ed.), Berger on Drawing, Cork: Occasional Press, 2007)
_________________________

'On an ancient lake bed located on the western side of Death Valley National Park, boulders that weigh up to 700 pounds sail across the almost perfectly flat terrain, leaving grooved trails in their wake ... Each of these furrows chronicles a rock’s journey, ranging from a mere few inches to nearly 3,000 feet. Some tracks manifest in straight bold lines, while others coil back on themselves in sinuous arcs.

Despite a century of scientific investigation, this curious phenomenon has confounded the geological community and park visitors alike. To this day, no one has ever seen the rocks move. But in lieu of eyewitnesses, countless theories have been put forward over the years in an effort to explain the reasons behind the migrations.

One early suggestion was that the rocks were driven by gravity, sliding down a gradual slope over a long period of time. But this theory was discounted when it was revealed that the northern end of the playa is actually several centimeters higher than the southern end and that most of the rocks were in fact traveling uphill.

Though no one has yet been able to conclusively identify just what makes the rocks move, one woman is coming closer to solving the mystery. For the past ten years, Dr. Paula Messina, Professor of Geology at San Jose State University in California, has made it her quest to understand what has bewildered geologists for decades. “It’s interesting that no one has seen them move, so I am kind of sleuthing to see what’s really going on here,” says Dr. Messina.

Many scientists had dedicated much of their careers to the racing rocks, but the remoteness of the area kept their research limited in scope. No one had been able to map the complete set of trails before the advent of a quick, portable method known as global positioning. Dr. Messina was the first to have the luxury of this high technology at her fingertips.

In 1996, armed with a hand-held GPS unit, she digitally mapped the location of each of the 162 rocks scattered over the playa. “I’m very fortunate that this technology was available at about the same time the Racetrack captured my interest,” she says. “It took only ten days to map the entire network — a total of about 60 miles.” Since then, she has continued to chart the movements of each rock within a centimeter of accuracy. Walking the length of a trail, she collects the longitude and latitude points of each, which snap into a line. She then takes her data back to the lab where she is able to analyze changes in the rocks’ positions since her last visit.

She has found that two components are essential to their movement: wind and water. The fierce winter storms that sweep down from the surrounding mountains carry plenty of both.

The playa surface is made up of very fine clay sediments that become extremely slick when wet. “When you have pliable, wet, frictionless sediments and intense winds blowing through,” offers Dr. Messina, “I think you have the elements to make the rocks move.”

At an elevation of 3,700 feet, strong winds can rake the playa at 70 miles per hour. But Dr. Messina is quick to point out that sometimes even smaller gusts can set the rocks in motion. The explanation for this lies in her theory, which links wind and water with yet another element: bacteria.

After periods of rain, bacteria lying dormant on the playa begin to “come to.” As they grow, long, hair-like filaments develop and cause a slippery film to form on the surface. “Very rough surfaces would require great forces to move the lightest-weight rocks,” she says. “But if the surface is exceptionally smooth, as would be expected from a bio-geologic film, even the heaviest rocks could be propelled by a small shove of the wind. I think of the Racetrack as being coated by Teflon, under those special conditions.”

In science, hypotheses are often based on logic. But over the years, Dr. Messina has discovered that on the Racetrack, logic itself must often be tossed to the wind. “Some of the rocks have done some very unusual things,” she says. In her initial analysis she hypothesized that given their weight, larger rocks would travel shorter distances and smaller, lighter rocks would sail on further, producing longer trails. It also seemed reasonable that the heavier, angular rocks would leave straighter trails and rounder rocks would move more erratically. What she discovered surprised her. “I was crunching numbers and found that there was absolutely no correlation between the size and shape of the rocks and their trails. There was no smoking gun, so this was one of the big mysteries to me.”

What appears as a very flat, uniform terrain is in fact a mosaic of micro-climates. In the southeastern part of the playa, wind is channeled through a low pass in the mountains, forming a natural wind tunnel. This is where the longest, straightest trails are concentrated. In the central part of the playa, two natural wind tunnels converge from different directions, creating turbulence. It’s in this area that the rock trails are the most convoluted. “What I think is happening,” proposes Dr. Messina, “is the surrounding topography is actually what is guiding the rocks and telling them where to go.”

Some people have suggested attaching radio transmitters to the rocks or erecting cameras to catch them “in the act” in order to put an end to the speculation. But as Death Valley National Park is 95 percent designated wilderness, all research in the park must be non-invasive. It is forbidden to erect any permanent structures or instrumentation. Further, no one is permitted on the playa when it is wet because each footprint would leave an indelible scar.

As for Dr. Messina, she is content in the sleuthing. “People frequently ask me if I want to see the rocks in action and I can honestly answer that I do not,” she says. “Science is all about the quest for knowledge, and not necessarily knowing all the answers. Part of the lure of this place is its mystery. It’s fine with me if it remains that way.”

From 'Life in Death Valley: The Mystery of the Racing Rocks', Nature
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For a Wikipedia entry on the 'sailing stones' of Death Valley, see here. 'In a study published in 2011 it is postulated that small rafts of ice form around the rocks and when the local water level rises, the rocks are buoyantly floated off the soft bed, thus reducing the reaction and friction forces at the bed. Since this effect depends on reducing friction, and not on increasing the wind drag, these ice cakes need not have a particularly large surface area if the ice is adequately thick, as the minimal friction allows the rocks to be moved by arbitrarily light winds'.