A Sampled Introduction

Consciousness is what makes the mind-body problem, if it exists, in the distant intellectual future. The actual physical borderland that I’m dealing with is not a comfortable territory to live in; this place of contradictions: hatred, anger and exploitation are prominent features of this landscape, the world and this expanse, or whatever other name is the work of Nature.

Thinking thought usually amounts to withdrawing. Evolving cultures infer Relation, the overstepping that grounds their unity-diversity; changes of shape - new forms - are the theme, none of the elements kept shape, and all were in conflict inside one body, the cold with the hot. Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human: the anti-human, the inhumane and the posthuman proliferate and overlap. Philosophy may be said to contain the principles of rational cognition with the result that a division has been made under these heads of theoretical and practical, by which, in effect, there has been no division at all.

Connie got up from her kitchen table and walked slowly to the door. “Let me in! Hurry! I was seven years old before I understood the meaning of ‘bad’ and ‘good.’” If the market was very far she would return next day in the evening as she was a hard worker. And it came to pass that the next day about evening we saw within a kenning before us, towards the north, as it were thick clouds, whereupon being not a little discomforted, we were advising with ourselves, what we should do?

Batbox / Beatbox (2007)

No one expected the dark. Every other calamity seemed to have found a place in the catalogue of coming catastrophe: the heat to drain the rivers and lakes and drum drought across the land; the rains to pour back floods that the fortunate could mark in blooms of sepia damp that rose across the walls and in the fruiting spores of mildew that set throats raw and heads pounding; soils so impoverished of what had once made them rich that they struggled to support whatever seeds were pressed between their fissures; seas, too, that turned from life to death.

The fearful forecasts were not all fulfilled, there were entirely other changes: better, worse. The winds that came - which in their season could transform a would-be walker on a city street into the buffeted, bent and squinting double of an 8mm mountaineer – these had also been less anticipated in science as much as science fiction, but it was the loss of light that we struggled most to adjust to. Even as eruptions were hurling unforeseen ejecta above each hemisphere, no bulletin or broadcast prepared us for The Long Eclipse.

After two sunless years without season, the gases and clouds started to disperse and dawns and dusks eventually returned in iridescent, Technicolor, intensities. Though the skies had cleared, with power supplies rationed, a more sombre world was ours, flickered by candle and the glowing mantles of lanterns, streetlamps as extinguished ornaments. The grazes and fractures from unlit collisions and stumbles faded just like the frequency of feelings of disorientation: with sight somewhat diminished, other senses amplified to sharpen nocturnal navigations.

Out of the air, aural attentiveness conjured clues once left undetected: the instrumental acoustics that found hawkers announcing fresh produce; that caught the first spatters and signalled the rush to lift lids from rain barrels; that captured the tremble of eucalyptus leaves which meant the winds were back; that allowed a road of surround sound cyclists to be crossed without once looking up from the book between thumb and forefinger.

And not only an instrumental acoustics but an invigoration of the tactility of hearing, where not just the ears but the resonant skull, the body’s cavities and the skin itself join into a diaphragm to feel the multi-channel touch of vibrating molecules, now soft, now loud, now doubled as echo, now stretched in reverberation, now suddenly here, now fading away.

To help night navigate, some learned sonar, remembering pixelated footage of a man discarding a white cane, adjusting a bike seat and riding down a traffic-edged road, air pushing from lungs to force clicks through his tongue, teeth and lips, clicks that radiated out and returned, painting surfaces as sound.

The inspiration of antecedents (and revivals of once-obsolete prosthetics) lent a familiar scale; yet the clicking, the sharpened hearing, the changing in rods and cones were something more than acclimatisation.

Unlike the water-H20 problem or the Turing machine-IBM machine problem or the lightning-electrical discharge problem, they would come around, coax me out of the deep, no one must find me.

What it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life: soft furry body, loose hanging skin, swinging upside down.

But one must take up the bat's point of view.

A is for Akroasis; Ancient Greek (used by Lizbeth Lipari).
B is for Belliphony, (neologism, J. Martin Daughtry).
C is for Clairaudience (possible neologism, Kodwo Eshun).
D is for Deburau (neologism, Michel Chion).
E is for Echo.
F is for Fosok; Qing-era Manchu (collected by Carla Nappi).
G is for Grisbating; Middle English (collected by Ian Rawes)
H is for Hmmmmm (neologism, Steven Mithin).
I is for Imbibet; macaronic Latin (used by Eric Satie in Limp Preludes (for a dog)).
J is for Jean, the Friar (used by Francois Rabelais in Gargantua
and Pantagruel).
K is for Kokoro; Yoruban (used by Ben Okri in The Famished Road).
L is for Lift-Up-Over Sounding; translation from Kaluli (collected by Steven Feld).
M is for Mysterious Power of the Infinitesimal (used by Eliane Radigue). N is for Non-Naturalism (used, separately, by Annie Goh, Mark Peter Wright and Gabriele de Seta).
O is for Oryngham; plant language (used by Monica Gagliano in Thus Spoke The Plant).
P is for Psithurism.
Q is for Qinetiq (neologism, unknown).
R is for Rokuikuchippukyuririri; (neologism, Shuntaro Tanikawa).
S is for Shumrhithmuzika; Russian (neologism, Arseny Avraamov).
T is for Tintinnabulation (possible neologism, Edgar Allen Poe).
U is for Umble; late 19th Century Shetland (collected by Ian Rawes). V is for Vibrotaction.
W is for Wobble (used by Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue, The Sonic Experience).
X is for Xenophonography (neologism, unknown).
Y is for Yagura-no-Todoro; Japanese.
Z is for Zawawa (neologism, Naohiko Terashima).

Sounding Back (2011)

Earthquakes all result from the force of the three planets.

The woes of the landscape have invaded speech, rekindling the woes of the humanities, in order to conceive of it.

Terrible sounds precede or accompany earthquakes, a rumbling, like cattle lowing, or men shouting, or the clash of weapons; some places overturning walls, in others sucking them down deep fissures.

The shock wave set off by the earthquake has spread far and wide. No specific history (joy or tragedy, extortion or liberation) is shut up solely in its own territory nor solely in the logic of its own collective thought.

Once the Eclipse had dissipated and the rhythms of night and day had been re-asserted, bringing shapes beyond sheer precarity, a chance to explore, to assess, equipped with our new sensorium, what was lost and what had been gained. Even under blue skies, we kept ears open for more tremors.

Some cities resembled sites of sustained siege: those toppled walls and fissures, rust twisting from shattered masonry, most windows empty, the rest showing spider web cracks, pavements heat-bubbled, smoke-blackened, oil-blemished, buildings reverting to earlier stages of their construction, returning to arches, also angles of walls and posts. Meadows and olive-trees, with a public road between, then crossed to opposite sides.

It was not just the road-crossing meadows and olive-trees. Though the extreme inundations had subsided and had not been matched by any of the subsequent seasonal flooding, shorelines everywhere seemed reluctant to resume their original shapes. Many of the vast areas of reclaimed coastline given over to vegetable oil cultivation and cropping for bio-fuels were now free of seawater but crusts of evaporated salt would likely take generations to eradicate.

Valleys and cliffs, sink holes, lakes and waterfalls that no maps had ever shown were all cracked into existence where fault-lines had sheared; mountains, canyons, reefs and, with grim irony, volcanoes, that had formerly been printed with cartographic conviction were erased or redrawn by the shifting plates. Low-lying island chains, some with flags and currencies, had disappeared while other archipelagos were sculpted from molten lava, all as if the sea kept alive some underground intercourse with the volcano's hidden fire.

(Expanse [extending] ramifies its web. Leap and variance, in another poetics. Transversality. Quantifiable infinity. Unrealised quantity. Inexhaustible tangle. Expanse [extending] is not merely space; it is also its own dreamed time). To live through such terraformations - to survive them - was to become ungrounded, unworlded; even encountered at a considerable temporal remove from the initial cataclysms that brought the Eclipse, the landscape remained unsettlingly raw, not just for its relatively un-weathered condition but for its seemingly permanently protean state that could manifest in rockslides, mudslips or the ever-feared earthquakes.

Seismic folklore bubbled up, claiming tremors never occur unless the sea is calm and the sky so motionless that birds cannot hover, or that clouds stretch like linen threads. No matter where one is, one can hear the mounting desire to discover order in chaos or at least to guess its unlikely motivations: to develop this theory that would escape generalisations. Alternative vernacular wisdoms around the continuing earthquakes emphasised those same sonic sensitivities recalibrated by the Eclipse, directing attention beyond the historical category of the heard to tensions in the sinuses, to neck pressures and to throbbing at the temples.

—

Alchemy equals biology plus chemistry, multiplied by divinatory energy.

Futurity turns geology (history) away from impurity or jeopardy towards a kineticity of liminary multiplicity.

Numerology rejects the orthodoxy of unconstrained possibility, a quandary for those who claim reality has no symmetry nor teleology.

The insistence on universality, of course, has validity as warranty for rights, for opportunities, yet xenophily (a rare spelling of xenophilia) creates a space of hospitable affection for the strange and the stranger – for difference, for the non-universal - one which, from yesterday all the way into the future, has to be guarded zealously.

Human Flesh (2019)

Straight after the flood, when the earth was muddy and heated again from above by rays of the sun, it produced an infinite number of species. Hot in the sunshine, the seeds of animal life, mud in the water-logged marshes, the flood-drenched fields; when heat and moisture are blended, we know that they lead to conception, everything on life’s threshold owes its first beginning to those two elements; their combination produces the whole of nature – and its opposite. Some of the forms which emerged were familiar from before, but others were amazing, a new horde brought forth by spontaneous self-creation.

Animals had long spelled out the social grammar of virtues and moral distinctions for the benefit of humans, canonised in moral glossaries and cognitive bestiaries that turned animals into metaphorical referents for norms and values. Some wondered, shielding their eyes from the unfamiliar brightness, trying to find their feet on the new ground, facing the amazing lives that had been newly released from the mud, newly unearthed by the seismic shocks - lives whose contours could barely be traced, far less understood - some wondered about those old metaphorical habits.

These re-assessments did not exhaust themselves exploring human- animal interactions: the upheavals had unsettled everything. Following years when the dirty-fingernailed scrabble was simply for shelter and sustenance, the survivors’ lives stabilised sufficiently to permit consideration of how survival might be organised and how, in that organisation, the collective character of shelter and sustenance could be negotiated. In time, perhaps, a thousand alternative approaches to the dynamics of dwelling would bloom in our earth- altered landscapes, but, at first, two contrasting conditions prevailed.

Those located towards one pole found their desires in the protections of permanent place, where they could be offered the convictions of continuity, the regulated exchange of community and the certainties of commonality (of purpose, of the virtues and morals of social grammar), recognising that this form of settlement required forfeiting absolute autonomy. Those whose temperaments privileged autonomy above all, tended in the direction of the other pole, to nomadism.

To anglophone speakers, the two assemblies were Islanders and Wanderers, and divination had become central to both. For a whole Islander territory, soothsaying – whichever form it took - would be rigorously managed according to one set system. Wanderers, by contrast, preferred promiscuous affiliations, borrowing paraphernalia from fortune-tellers from every tradition: yarrow sticks, coins, crystals, cards, bones, dowsing rods, hallucinogenic herbs.

Animals – alive or dead - got conscripted into prophesising; frequently in the old instrumentalising way, as token of the human subject’s sense of supreme ontological entitlement. Sometimes, though, the inter-relations human/animal were perceived as constitutive of the identity of each: with the new horde unleashed, all had to grapple monsters.

There always something monstrous – and something geological – in the human face. Make an example of the ear, the ear that learned new lessons in the dark, now joined on perimeter guard duties by the pulsing neck and throbbing temple.

Down the untouchably smooth skin escarpment that curves to the peninsula of flesh, as criminally individual as the fingertips’ whorls, to the waxy valley with its delta of scarlet capillaries.

Then the plateau peppered with delicate blackheads, pleated rifts and berms leading to a cavern fringed with a winter’s copse.

An alliance with life in its non-human aspects, productive, immanent.

Apotamkin, (Maliseet and Passamaquoddy peoples of Turtle Island (USA / Canada)).

Boraro, lit. “the pale one,” (Tucano peoples of Colombia and Brazil). 

Chupacabra, lit. “goat sucker,” (Puerto Rico).

Dingonek, (Kenya).

Ekek, (Philippines).

Fear Gorta, lit. “man of hunger” (Ireland).

Glaistig, (Scotland).

Huli Jing, (China).

Inkanyamba, (Zulu and Xhosa peoples of South Africa).

Khyah, (Newar peoples of Nepal).

Leshiy, lit. “the one in the woods,” (Russia).

Manananggal, (Visayan Islands of Philippines).

Ninki Nanka, (Gambia).

Ördög, (Hungary).

Peikko, (Finland).

Qareen, lit. “constant companion,” (Arabic, Middle East).

Rangda, lit. “widow,” (Old Javanese, Bali).

Skoffin, (Inuit peoples of Greenland).

Ushi-Oni, (Japan).

Voirloup, (France).

Wyvern, (Middle English?, England).

Xtabay, (Mayan peoples, Yucatán Peninsula).

Yara-ma-yha-who, (Aboriginal peoples of Australia).

Zashikiwarashi, lit. “the kid of the room,” (Japan).

Ring Tone (2016), Keel Row (2016)

Perhaps the phrase ‘new horde’ obscures more than it reveals.

The very newness of the new life was moot: ancient organisms were supposedly disturbed from swamps or through fissuring geology.

When hearing opened itself up to touch, when sight belatedly visualised the dimly-lit and when once unsensed fluxes became discernible, it was no surprise that the seemingly new was discovered.

But it wasn’t simply the case that previously sealed-off pockets of primeval life had been breached by flood or quake, nor that the recalibrated perceptual systems enabled the detection of what had gone unnoticed: other entities had joined the world.

Those overturning walls were sometimes holding up laboratory roofs. The erratic power supply – even with rationing - meant that occasionally electronic gates would swing open on research facilities (facilities which were equally absent from any maps).

All kinds of things escaped: the fleshy, the plastic and every hybrid form between.

Seismic shocks, deluges and volcanic activity wounded the planet, leaving it vulnerable to further damage from the rapid disintegration of the structures designed to store oils and gases, to contain volatile chemicals, secure flammable substances, and isolate radioactive and bio-hazardous materials. Polluting the places the Islanders and Wanderers wanted to navigate, these toxins could also mix to catalyse the unpredicted.

The language of ‘new horde’ tilts the narrative to horror – and this is another problem. Nothing lumbered with jaws and wings and a raging hunger; no luminous lichens spawned to corrode concrete; no poisonous plants bloomed outside the botanical knowledge preserved in the Islanders’ locked libraries or the Wanderer’s more portable, plural, knowledges; no viruses set human against human. What was unleashed was not horror – it was weird and eerie.

The presence behind your back that stayed unseen. The veranda’s termites that kept arranging themselves into perfect triangles. The diaphanous form which pulsed just once through a spectrum of colours - like petrol in a puddle - before leaving our ears ringing for more than an hour. The howling gale that dropped, then returned to ferocity just as suddenly. The mouse that looked at your candle through the window, the bird whose call was just a little bit too regular.

The beauties of Nature are so often found blended with beautiful forms, may be addressed as modifications either of light (colours) or of sound (tones): a green and brown web flowed out from them and into them. They stood on the shoulder of a huge ant. Grapevines grew from their finger ends. Planting in the ground artificial flowers (which can be manufactured exactly like natural ones) or placing artificially carved birds on the boughs of trees, the animal images felt real: they did not appear animations but as living beings.

What is more highly praised than the bewitching and beautiful note of the nightingale in a lonely copse on a still summer evening by the soft light of the moon? And yet a merry host might deceive the guests who were staying with them to enjoy the country air, by hiding in a bush a mischievous boy who knew how to produce this sound exactly like nature (by means of a reed or a tube in his mouth).

Now we have rudimentary sign languages with many mammals. Some, like apes, use sign language with each other. Mice and termites too?

__

All basic categories depend – each fleeting grouping held in jittery kinship – like most ‘natures,’ on problematic qualifications reinforcing susceptibility to undermine variations: why xerox’s yesterday’s zoology.

Flatlands (2018)

We have sound-houses to practice and demonstrate all sounds and their generation. Divers instruments of music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any you have, together with bells and rings that are dainty and sweet: small sounds as great and deep, great sounds extenuate and sharp; tremblings and warblings of sounds, which in their original are entire. We represent and imitate all articulate sounds and letters, the voices and notes of beasts and birds. Certain helps which set to the ear do further the hearing greatly. We also convey sounds in trunks and pipes, in strange lines and distances.

The first thing they did was surround me, then all were singing, beating drums, clapping hands, ringing bells and dancing. So I was singing other earthly melodious songs which sorrow prevented me singing since I entered into this bush, in such a way that all the ghosts or every creature of this town were dancing, singing and shouting with joy and running warmly up and down in the town. They were dancing away from me to a distance of about five thousand feet and then dancing back to me again.

Islanders as experimental instrument builders obsessively focused on the one thing that gets done and redone until it is produces such polished perfection that a flaw is revealed to inspire more doing. Wanderers as revellers in the haphazard, as those for whom the very flaw is life and perfection that which threatens its diminution; singers, dancers, drummers lost in rhythms where patience becomes distraction. It is exciting to dream diametrically, but the reality finds dancing and obsessiveness on either side.

What really differentiates the two social arrangements is the split between singular and multiple methods, each approach determined by the respective conditions of dwelling. The more stable settlements were (and, as a corollary, their greater size), the more amenable to the specialist rather than the generalist, supporting dedicated spaces, less portable tools, apprenticeships, confraternities. In keeping with how they tackled divination, the Wanderers’ commitment to mobility necessitated mixing things up.

As time stretched further from the eruptions and the Eclipse, from floods and pollutions, as familiarity diminished the disruption of discovering new creatures amongst us, as experience revealed the ultimate emptiness of fighting, the initial scrabbles for shelter and sustenance lost a little urgency. Yet the imperatives remained imperative: few felt prepared to divert scarce resources to the ostensibly inessential.

When the gales were not making walking upright impossible, lifting soil and sand into shrieking clouds and shredding branches from taller trees, winds sped faster than anyone could remember. As a consequence, harnessing their ferocities was harder rather than easier. Even in established Islander communities, electricity was intermittent at best.

Instead, batteries and motors were supplanted by kinetic power: all the bicycles that filled the roads, skiffs and canoes, foot-cranked sewing machines, typewriters, printing presses, wheelbarrows and trolleys, hand ploughs, axes, washboards, windlasses, treadmills, treadwheel cranes, bow drills, pump augurs.

So it was with entertainment. Islanders’ libraries were mined for gems buried from supposed obsolescence; zoetropes worked beautifully in candle-light, magic lanterns for the evenings, camera obscurae for the days.

And with instruments. The Islanders liked their one thing done well: harmony tuned to a single scale. Wanderers? Pandemonium.

Violence, fear, disease, hunger but also love, dreams and dancing. __

Against boredom, creativity dissolves every fundamentally groundless hierarchy – intellectual jurisdictions, Knowledge legislating mind- numbingly obscure philosophical questions.

Reality’s special terrain: unruly virtues without xenophobia. Yeah! Zoe-egalitarianism!

A Sampled Conclusion

Structural features of perception might be more accessible to objective description, even though something would be left out. It begins where it ends, I descend into black earth, dark primordial slime, no longer repellent to me, nor confining.

“Birds make no outstanding contributions, except plumes for use in war, and grease from the geese of Commagene. I have bathed there beside friends, attentive to the volcano's drums. We have stood bent against the wind without falling. One lone bay; whatever name it had evaporated; to take an example that matches the case of our Caesars, Saturn is likewise lower than Jupiter.”

It is both exciting and unsettling to be reminded, almost on a daily basis, that we are, after all, such stuff as dreams are made of and that the new possibilities are immense. But it is quite possible to give a representation of naïveté in a fictitious personage, and, rare as the art is, it is a fine art. For you who will be born from my best hopes, to you I dedicate my act of war.

I dreamed a dream that I am present when this “Secret Society of Ghosts” is performing and I believe so, because my dream always comes to the truth in the future. And we do also declare natural divinations of diseases, plagues, swarms of hurtful creatures, scarcity, tempest, earthquakes, great inundations, comets, temperature of the year, and divers other things; and we give counsel thereupon what the people shall do for the prevention and remedy of them.

Samples in the order of their sampling:

Thomas Nagel, ‘What Is It Like To Be A Bat?’, Philosophical Review, 1974. 

Gloria Anazaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 1987. 

Pliny The Elder, Natural History: A Selection, trans. John F. Healy, 77. 

Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing, 2010.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn, 7.

Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman, 2013.

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith, 1792.

Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time, 1976.

Amos Tutuola, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1954.

Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis, 1627.

Author’s Note

I am, for many years, making writing projects encompass inventions, experiments (particularly lexicographic). I call this process ‘applying constraints’ and there is a yin and yang between writing legible meaning and observing the invisible limitations that might interrupt or unsettle that meaning. Constraints operate nearly subliminally, textual rules all intended not to surface. The approach is inspired by avant-garde practices from named gurus in poetry, literature and music (where such constraints, both subliminal and on the surface, have a long history) and by the anonymous innovations of coders and cryptographers. This technique of constraints might make writing more difficult and reading more awkward (threatening to make the words akin to a sudoku puzzle), but I enjoy it as a guerilla form and consider that it upends the notion of a neutral, uninhabited communication medium. In the past, I have used the alphabet embargo imposed by acrostics – in which each first letter spells a word – as a means to half-heartedly bring up-to-date this ancient form. I have employed high-tech software translation and filtering systems to create glitches. I have created textual tariffs by controlling the number of characters in a word, the number of words in sentences, the number of sentences in a paragraph; I have selected a specific vocabulary, made punctuation deliver a message in Morse, all in an effort to respond to George Perec’s idea:

“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms.
To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep.”

This author’s note includes four different half-hidden constraints, the essay “Tout Kreyati Bèl / All Beautiful Creatures” includes several others and, additionally, adopts a different shtick: the experimental production practice of appropriation, where the ten books in the bibliography, selected from a 2000 year period and read in order to understand more about Jani Ruscica’s art, are sampled without attribution to provide the entirety of the Introduction and Conclusion and some of the main body of the text.