Environment
Cicadas make sound by arousing paired tymbals on their abdomens. This means that unlike many other stridulating insects, cicadas undulate, and by rapidly vibrating (almost phasing) their bodies, they are akin to resonating chambers, highly sensitive and responsive to environmental influence. This enables them to modulate intensities of their call by positioning their abdomens toward or away from directional substrate upon whom they are projecting.
“The press of my foot to earth // springs a hundred affections,” writes poet Ronald Johnson. I often feel like speaking and writing about cicadas is tantamount to communicating, or even perceiving, dare I say learning, more about 〰, and at certain times of year, walking through fields full of crickets and grasshoppers, can feel like pressure and motion of every footstep produces an emergent 〰 of soil.
This can helps to guide 〰 out of my body and about world, drifting back and forth in who becomes an articulated semiosphere helping to temper isolation becoming a quality of experience.
Cicadas voices are feverous punctuality, as volumes of their chirping can correspond to air temperatures. As environment heats they become more sonorous and vociferous. Being as these creatures, at least in part, call in order to attract a mate, as environment heats their population grows.
Now we will digress (I can’t help but think of river wye and the absurdity of digression) in order to return to an initial direction.
In Phaedrus, a Platonic dialogue, cicadas are uttering with hot sun, addressing one another like refractive weather patterns. Socrates insists he is resistant to their sound. “If one gives into them, they laugh. But if the cicadas perceive us steering clear of them, they might feel respect and grant that boon which heaven permits them to confer upon mortals”
Upon hearing this, Phaedrus, Socrates’ interlocutor, states he is unaware of a surrounding myth, and so of course, Socrates takes this opportunity to tell cicada people’s story, of those who cultivate music.
Cicadas used to be human beings (human beings used to be cicadas) who lived before Muses were born. When Muses were born and song was created some people were so overwhelmed with singing’s pleasure that they forgot to eat or drink, they died without even realising.
And so a race of cicadas came into being, and as a gift from Muses they had no need of nourishment once they were born. Instead, they immediately burst into song, without food or drink, until time came for them to die. They sang with such abandon, stranded in a living death of pleasure.
Cicadas, transmogrified humans, humans, transmogrified cicadas, by dint of their singing, set themselves outside themselves, ubiquitous as pressure changes.
Earlier in Phaedrus, we read that a lover will admit that they’re more sick than sound in head. They’re well aware they are not thinking straight; but they’ll say they can’t get themselves under control. So when they start thinking straight, why would they stand by decisions they had made when they were sick?
Typing in more sick than sound in the head into a search engine primarily brings up websites relating in some way to 〰. Looking at the Images section reveals node after node of people covering ears with hands, a figurative rendering of course, as has already been mentioned, symbolising torment and exasperation of this so-called “sick sound,” this “scream,” symbolic of cicada’s undulating membrane.
Yet placing hands over ears will so often serve to make this seemingly internal affliction “louder.” Irony overpowers any rationalisation we may wish to proffer, being as 〰 is more often than not described as sound with no “external correlate.” Though I see experiences no reasons to assume 〰 requires a solely auditory correlate.
One image of 〰 described in an ancient Babylonian clay tablet was singing, regarded as stemming from someone being held by ghosts.
This is echoed by scholar Irvine Finkel, who claims that in ancient Babylon some ghosts where thought to enter body through ear. The word for ghost, he writes could be written in several ways … one sign combined signs for to open and ear, giving a literal reading of ear-opener.
Ghosts open ears invisible and wide, inviting all sorts of roaring and ringing, quite an opposite to attempting their closure, placing hands over them.
Chance
Gastone Novelli professed admiration for semiologist Ferdinand De Saussure, indeed, as we have already seen, many of his paintings are inhabited by flecks of language, distended and repetitive morphemes who compost and grow between semantic layers.
With this in mind, I’d like to further consider Novelli’s Boat … through Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiosis, and by extension, biosemiotics. As both practise and wider field, biosemiotics is a process based semiotic biology working under an assumption that all living organisms are made of, and live within, sign-relations.
Biosemiotics is brought together by biology and a study of language, redescrbiing them as sets of interwoven relations so to hold mind-body-environment within fluctuating and conceptual frameworks who move beyond a classical world of objective mechanism and dead matter. In short, biosemiotics helps me to understand that I understand very little of 〰, mechanically and otherwise.
Biosemiotician Jesper Hoffmeyer states that there are at least two stumbling blocks who need be transcended in order to comprehend a biosemiotic view of world. A need to move away from mechanistic and gene-centred biological understanding, and engagement with Peirce’s triadic signs.
Triadic conception concentrates on sign vehicle positions (bearer of sign manifestation, regardless of significance), object (those to whom sign-vehicle refers), and interpretant (a system who construes sign-vehicle’s relationship to their object).
A contextually relevant understanding of such a relationship of the three interrelated and cycling entities that form a sign can be found in an example of a child who suddenly breaks out in a rash of red spots. Upon taking their child to a doctor, their parent/s learn their child has measles. For said doctor, as well as parent/s, red spots are a sign of measles, but previously, to parent/s, red spots were a sign that their child was sick.
I see this part of flies primarily as a note for future research, but we could briefly think here of certain semiotic differences between sign-objects and vehicles (tinnitus and 〰) whilst remaining aware that because of their close proximity in this article, it can quickly become slippery, trying to keep them separate enough to enable 〰 symbol to retain any semblance of plurality and chance.
In other words, a sign-action is a process wherein an individual (in biosemiotic context this term can also refer to a cell or organism) encounters a sign-vehicle and responds to them in such a way that there is a reinforcing effect on said response toward said sign.
Such sign-readings lead toward semiotic habits. I’m not saying that this is true for everyone of course, but if I encounter the term “tinnitus” several times over an hour, let’s say, chances of 〰 becoming aggravated exponentially increase.
As mentioned, 〰 symbol is not a guarantee of anyone, but their capacity to hold disposition as multiplicity brings with them a kind of sympathetic articulation in which their mention can be encountered without 〰 becoming more present, creating new and shifting motion within fields and patterns.
Here we find an opportunity to return to a surrealist practise of objective chance, which we might finally, albeit loosely, define as unfathomable, beyond any single predicate wherein imagination is part of capacity to think about someone who is “not there.”
In this context, “not there” is paradoxically revealed through efficacious coincidence as paradoxical cultivation of attention to chance encounters.
Such practise of cultivated serendipity and coincidence is akin to trying to write about 〰 in those briefest periods of their seeming absence, paying attention to chance moments, to environments who aren’t consciously sought out. I often feel like I have 〰 as much as environments are 〰, such relationality undulates and shifts, filling with positive feedback loops pushing energies into new directions wherein negative feedback loops stop edges from flying off into oblivion.
During an experience of 〰, however they manifest moment by moment, I feel there are many subsets of self-similar experience, each with their own particular degree of regularity and confusion.
To try and communicate 〰 is rarely to communicate 〰 and 〰 alone.
What I term motion of flies can help me write and think alongside, perhaps even through, 〰, fostering communication, in other words.
In this sense motion is associated with “outside,” environment, inaudible, they are chance encounter and a means with which to indirectly draw attention to 〰.
In such straw duality, mention of flies is opposite, they are, tinnitus, inside, person, audible, drawing direct attention to symptoms that can often cause an increase in awareness and possible aggravation.
Mention of flies makes it very difficult to not think about tinnitus, let alone communicate. Motion seeps into my porous self-world (in which we find associations of mention), producing senses of engagement and often transitory phasing wherein one cancels out another.
Thinking about this in relation to Novelli’s Boat…, in my initial interpretation amidst their inherent ambiguity, we could say cicada acted as sign-vehicle, who in my case has an environmental connection to 〰, acting amidst triadic concepts of sign. So cicada is here sign-vehicle of 〰, and 〰 as object then partly determines responses of interpretant, myself.
Glancing at Novelli’s painting, cicada becomes a boat, and subsequently I find myself in mind of Michel Serres, who in Genesis, refers to his 〰 as a mad murmur, tense and constant in hearing, speaking to him of his ashes.
Serres speculates that such ashes may refer to those from whence I came, the ones to which I will return. This seems to be someone of a 〰 trope for him, as in another work of his, Biogea, he speaks of his 〰 as being borne of sea. The sea and I used to vibrate with joy. He then goes on to recount his time at sea and such noise who prevented him from hearing other people onboard, noise who transmuted into his 〰, a permanent affliction who reproduces with high fidelity whistling and silky sounds, implacable mass of moving water overflowing their regular bed, occupying flood plain.
In this particular depiction of experience, one that so reminds me of my friend’s request, a slow shift of layered and emergent environments, 〰 provides a dividing link, at least my sense of hearing has never left the Garonne, says Serres.
As stated, biosemiotics seeks ways of being with world who are capable of describing natural and cultural life alike, from cell to society, from inner environment of organism to outer environment in which they live, to provide a language for talking about language who is inseparable from life.
Theoretically and practically biosemiotics states that living systems have agency to extents that there is flexibility in all information processing capabilities, such as immune responses, sensing internal and external conditions, regulating internal operations … discussions of whom are saturated in semiosis.
Semiotic habits can of course vary in accord with myriad influences, namely environment, just like 〰 can be more easily, or tacitly, ignored or passed over in certain environments, or contexts, than others, a busy gallery compared to a workshop focussing on 〰, for example. Another way of thinking about this can be found in Anne Carson’s explication of anthropologist Mary Douglas’s definition of dirt as matter out of place. Poached egg on your plate at breakfast is not dirt, poached egg on British Museum’s Reading Room floor is.
Dirt, like 〰, confounds categories and mixes up definitions.
Where could this entail, referring to 〰 not so much as signal, but sign? With accord to biosemiotic place, signals are signs, and in triadic Peircean realia of signs we find means to participate in their relationality instead of striving for opposition.
A common definition of tinnitus, “the term for the sensation of hearing a sound in the absence of any external sound,” expresses a reduction of 〰 (as a triadic sign-relation) solely to sensation. As biosemiotic sign, 〰 need not be thought of in isolation from environment or person as a whole.
Novelli’s painting can lead to articulation of affinities, potentially different upon every encounter. If background is not fixed, but representative of a moment of time, a switch, then perhaps we could consider structure of letters in mind of Brownian motion, constant movements of molecules caused by their mutual impacts, movements I would compare to scholar Wendy Wheeler’s understanding of a passive alertness on part of buffeted organisms.
For Wheeler, provocation of difference is an organism’s creative response to chance, which as stated, for me is akin to a surrealist notion of objective chance, trying to perceive with 〰 without always being perceived by them.
Chance’s role is important because we can work with them creatively and thus experience life with and through them. Such chance is also a form of logic, what Peirce calls abduction, resonating with context of discovery more than assessment, deftly knotted with feeling and affect, patterns, sensations, and tacit knowledge intuited and imbibed, for example, during my time with river wye.
I am writing under a premise that 〰 is alive. 〰 is part of me as much as I am part of them, the same goes, of course, for environment. Not every environmental affect appears directly in self-world, such presences can be felt, those who live with 〰 may also say heard, but not necessarily experienced. How might we come to know 〰 as meaningful? How might we begin to respond to such a question without abstracting 〰 from environment? How can we avoid simply addressing them as an object in isolation, to not think of 〰 as some sort of “meaningless” accident?
I admit, herein lies an obstacle, as I cannot in good conscience enthrone 〰 as some sort of tacit neo-liberal principle, implying that, if we think of 〰 as meaningful we must learn to embrace them, live with them, get over them, or worse, if we think of 〰 as meaningful, 〰 will automatically get better, and so will our lives, and even worse, if we fail in such endeavours then we have no one to blame but ourselves because, in this flattened discourse, ‘tinnitus’ is an illusion anyway, they’re not real … There needs to be a middle ground, even if only to instigate shifting, one who does not fold into the cyclical nature of conflicting opposites, but considers meaning as emergent and processual.
Perhaps this enlivens 〰 potential as subject, verb, process of creative translation far from a panacea (whether 〰 is thought of as subject or not, this doesn’t mean that nights won’t still be hell sometimes). Biosemiotician Thomas A. Sebeok writes that to be alive is to be semiotically active, who can this vibrate and shake in relation to acknowledging 〰 life? Evoking a long held almost paradigmatic comprehension in whom elements of relation and contingency, self and environment, predominate, wherein complex systems, such as 〰, are not necessarily required to show such recognisable qualities as foresight or altruism in order to be considered as “living,” at least in some operational sense of the term.
Perhaps 〰 is indeed best suited as a verb … and this leads us upstream, returning to this article’s mouth, to Cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, who said that we are but whirlpools in a river of ever flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns who perpetuate themselves.
Conclusion: where were we?
Aside from river wye, a good amount of this article was written in my living room, and during particularly hot days, with windows wide open, a number of small flies would congregate around the centre, in constant motion.
Beings twirling tend to englobe, who knows if I’d have had this response if I weren’t writing … but I can’t be present with motion of flies without perceiving some form of 〰, without imagining river wye’s flow, motion mentions motion.
〰 permeates and shutters interactions of mind, body, environment, they are part of a “secret” rapport within but also through and out of, such extended bodies. For me 〰 is an experience most receptive to a multiplicity of approaches, a confluence of fields and subjects.
In Conversations on Science, Culture and Time, Michel Serres asks Bruno Latour if he suffers from “that constant whistling in the ears, which never ceases, day or night?. Serres compares such whistling to body heat, heat who doesn’t just originate in our bodies, bringing with them an intensity of background noise, subtle difficulty of inner awareness. Unfortunately, though perhaps predictably, we might even say understandably, if Latour does indeed “suffer” from such whistling, he then takes the conversation elsewhere, without giving an answer.
I encounter such iterations of “constant whistling” in patterns of cycling dust motes, in pollen who drifts along water’s surface, sheets of turbulence whose presence accompanies us as both hot organism and noisy universe. Indeed, in his essay, Literature and the Exact Sciences, Serres implicitly compares such atmospheres, describing chaotic and Brownian wasp leaps as soundings who go deeper than language’s deepest strata, to wave, clamour, dust-haze.
〰 symbol is a nested set of fluctuating relations who tend to coalesce into a medium of conveyance who can just as easily hinder that very process. Over the course of writing 〰 has acted as mnemonic trigger, one I don’t so much read as observe. They help me to develop ways in which I can reflect, adumbrate, and expand upon, what I hope to mean, and indeed feel, when I communicate 〰, without them always taking over completely.