Having moved mere moments away from river Wye, I feel this article, the ‘last’ in a series concerned with 〰 (a symbol I began working with at the time instead of writing out the word, tinnitus), hearing, listening and balance, has gained a new degree of significance.
Where possible, I tried to avoid confining 〰 wholly to a situation, position, mechanism or person. In this instance, 〰 was not treated as just spatial and temporal, but relational. I tried to approach 〰 amidst confluences of mind-body-environment, and as such, this article began to drift among three zones; depiction, environment, and chance.
I briefly focus on popular tropes in Edvard Munch’s painting, The Scream, in order to arrive at the ambiguity of Boat in the Sun, a painting by Gastone Novelli. The latter portrays a kind of painted language, one seeming to contain a foreknowledge of a host of hidden implications that I explore through such things as Surrealist objective chance and the lens of Biosemiology.
I ask what 〰 life could mean in this instance, considering how the difficulties and contradictions of 〰 experience often spill over into its communication, whereby attempting to describe 〰 linguistically, for example, can lead to an amplification of 〰, subsequently clouding one’s ability to think and communicate, an issue partially attenuated by a brief exploration of asemic writing and a consideration that depictions of 〰 need not always directly refer to or represent 〰.
I also think through a “drawing-poem” by Robert Grenier, though I’m at pains to state that whilst Grenier’s work is not directly “about” 〰, it has however, helped me to listen to it, revealing a number of subtle contextual parallels.
Subsequently, this article looks not only at modes and methods of depiction that focus on 〰, but possible ways of doing so, notably in the work of Michel Serres, experimenting with the ways we might experience 〰 if some of its more popular tropes and methods of depiction, such as placing hands over ears, were otherwise.
It’s my hope that this ongoing process of seeking and considering alternative ways to engage with 〰, ultimately as someone who can benefit from varying degrees of chance and ambiguity in both their encounter and subsequent communication, can help to soften the continua of communicative difficulties. So I continue to try and find ways to convey 〰 experience without directly mentioning them, acknowledging them without pointing straight at them.
River Wye
During a discussion about the surrealist concept of the marvelous and its possible relations to 〰, a friend suggested that if I wanted to come close to understanding their 〰 then I should spend some time watching, not listening (in fact, they requested I go out of my way not to listen) to movement and interaction, life, of river Wye.
I managed to do this several times over the course of a month, and made many drawings, as if I were somehow drawing variations of my friend’s 〰. One of the most curious and synchronous things I observed was that there always seemed to be a part of river Wye who was flowing slightly faster than their neighbouring region, serving to speed up waters around them, exerting drag on faster flow.
At some point I realised I’d only been paying attention to river Wye, and not who surrounds them, I’d been unduly separating, which I have attempted to address in this article. I believe this is part of the reason why my friend asked me to experience life of river wye for myself, in mind of the difficulty of writing several simultaneous events at once, having by necessity to split them up and order them sequentially. With this in mind I imagine one way of navigating the three zones of this article would be to read them out loud to each other at the same time.
Spending time with river Wye helped me comprehend 〰 multiplicity around and outside of my friend’s body-mind-environment as anything but laminar, as conveyed in ways other than sounds of human speech, who can so often serve to further amplify the parallel presence of 〰. This lead me to picture motion of 〰 like motion of gnats over surface tension of river Wye.
Each part of river Wye seemed to act in a perturbing fashion on all of their other parts, and I was reminded of Italo Calvino’s Mr Palomar, trying to count each individual wave on a beach. Effects constantly cycled and fed back into each other, I observed innumerable vortices swirling behind river rocks, water turning back on themselves. Such observations, in which each new advance of water is partnered by understanding and amnesia, reflects the beauty of talking and writing about 〰, as soon as I feel I understand them, they change.
I haven’t pressed my friend as to exactly why they wanted me to pay attention to motions of river Wye, to search for fixity seems to miss the point entirely. River Wye helped (helps) to remind me that there is much more complexity inherent in 〰 than I can perceive, or that I can remember, they are often so much more than a tone. As stated, this article is concerned with my phenomenological, lived experiences of 〰, and so I focus on environment as much as my own thoughts and feelings, trying not to separate them, whenever and wherever possible.
In an essay titled Field, John Berger writes that field you are standing before appears to have the same proportions as your own life. It’s interesting to consider how 〰 and environment can suddenly flip, as motion and mention, feeding eachother as they both disappear whilst increasing their intensity. This is akin to what Sarah Hughes, in relation to Berger’s essay, has called an encounter, wherein Berger writes from a position of being surrounded. Field we are standing before contains elements of whoever and wherever we are, and in this doctrine of similars, regardless of whether we live with 〰 or not, we might explore and take note of ambiguities, an act akin to layering field upon field, in the hope that, whenever such a flip occurs, when the experience of being surrounded veers toward singular, literal, we find ourselves among living relation more than opposition.
I often perceive my 〰 outside of me, not only (as explored in the zones of this article) in motions of flies and sounds of cicadas, but in undulations of gnats. This relation doesn’t make 〰 ‘better’, it certainly doesn’t always make them disappear, but during such encounters I feel like I am being taught another way to communicate and perceive, a way that doesn’t always lead to an escalation of who I am trying to depict, or even hold in mind, to the point that they shut down such an attempt.