(This essay was written for Critical Animals, a research symposium held during This Is Not Art, Newcastle Australia, October 2009. The title comes from a poem by Aleksandr Skidan. Photograph of fireflies by Akihiro.)

Everything we need is here, nothing is missing. No omission, no repetition. It is rare, it is miraculous, that we may read openly, in a syntax as transparent as the work of mathematics, the coherent semantics of a universe already constructed. Yet nonetheless this is true.
– (Michel Serres)

Events are produced in chaos.
– (Gilles Deleuze)

Susan Howe says, “The selection of particular examples from a large group is always a social act.” This paper is a social act. I am interested in constellations beyond the usefulness of a rhetorical trope. If we can look to the stars and find a goat’s head, we can enact a similarly creative poesis when looking to the material of our experience. I am in Philadelphia, falling into an opposite weather pattern to Newcastle. In the northeast of America, the sky is pale and silvery, like the flanks of herring. Weather gets caught between the Appalachians – a curious ribcage – and the Atlantic. Three nights ago there was a thunderstorm that cracked through the air and woke me from a fever. You will find connections here in my language, you will sketch your own goat’s head.

Earlier in the year I taught a first year writing and cultural studies subject, Text and Context. In a week’s lesson titled ‘Subject/ivity,’ I had a hard time explicating why ‘we’ (we being the highly problematic collective ‘lens’ of the cultural studies discipline, as though culture is something outside to be observed from inside the classroom – that is, something apart from ourselves) might say ‘subject’ rather than, for example, ‘you,’ ‘Americans,’ ‘women,’ or ‘salmon’. After class, disturbed by the lack of resolution, I asked my friend Ben to help me come up with a useful metaphor, something that I could send to my students as an afterthought. It’s worth mentioning that my back-and-forth with Ben occurred entirely via Twitter, in a sequence of ‘@’ replies to each other. Ben’s desk is next to mine at UTS, but he always works from home, so we largely perform our friendship via ultra-nerdy one-liners during the day while we’re working on our theses. It’s as if the gassy excess of our studies – common in their lust for pseudo-science – discharge as small offerings, items of exchange, links or citations, attempts at a chaotic synthesis, a kind of live-action indexing of thinking-and-writing.

Ben began by saying, “Tell your students that some abstractions are really ways of being more specific, in ways that pointing to objects can’t be,” followed by an example: “‘Capital’ is an abstract model that arises from specific material relationships. It’s not simply money, or bosses.” Three minutes later, he added this: “Subjectivity is the emergent effect of experiencing the world, arising from complex storms in the cultural landscape.” From here, his response bloomed and vectored. The metonymic relationship (pathogenic, contiguous, parasitic) of his ideas-in-language, occurring in and as an event of thinking, was traceable.

Caught in the storm-trope, Ben composed an improvised, partly tongue-in-cheek prose poetic of the storm-as-subject. I have collated the offerings in one passage, even though each has its own self-contained attractiveness.

“Storms are not sovereign. Their complexity and consistency are indebted to (and can’t be separated from) all kinds of flow. Meteorologists probably have some abstract model of “autonomic stormness” that can’t be achieved by pointing at Katrina. Aspects of storm autonomy can be located in ocean temperature. The ocean is not a storm. We can also describe stormness via the wreckage that storms leave behind. But the wreckage isn’t the storm.”

Tuning and framing. The mercurial scholarship of weather patterns. Probability that a storm will crack open any particular night, during sleep. The ‘ness’ of Ben’s ‘stormness’ is the kind of prepositional ontology I’m attempting. Here and in other places.

*

In my first few days in Philadelphia, I walked up a cobbled sidestreet in Mt Airy to get to the food co-op. It was dusk, and the first day I had needed to wear a jumper. Late summer was becoming early autumn, the same impossible transition that Guy Davenport describes when a ripening capsicum moves its green into reds. During my walk, I saw a baby snake and a firefly. Later, I looked up fireflies on Wikipedia. The entry referred to their ‘crepuscular bioluminescence’ that attracts mates during the highly-sexed summer courtship period. What a seductive combination of erotics and chemistry! I reported my sighting and my research findings to a friend in an email, who replied, “When I was in Virginia there were so many that the trees looked like they were reflecting the sky. I remembering looking up at them moving around above my head like those bugs that skim over water and thinking they were tracing the constellations.”

There is a curious glitch here. My friend thinks of stars by remembering one insect by another; on seeing the fireflies in the sunset-ish sky he thinks of patterns traced on water, and how these patterns cite constellations. He gets from the sky to the sky via water, from stars to stars via insects. He uses a sequence of self-similar metaphors to compose an analogue for light. It’s as if he has layered a series of transparencies on top of each other, each referring to the others, and has projected a composite image of sameness and alterity.

In imagining a cosmos, we must also imagine ourselves; we are of the cosmos at the same time that we actively produce and reproduce its conditions. When my friend looks to a sequence of metaphors in order to understand seeing fireflies, he is writing himself in the sequence, he is the attentive aperture placing the experience in the event of becoming or being meaningful. Through his language, a firefly indexes other things in order to be a thing. To paraphrase Isabelle Stengers paraphrasing Deleuze and Guattari, it is not that there is a relativity of truth, but a truth of the relative. Steven Shaviro says, “the practices and processes that produce truth involve such “actors” as animals, viruses, rocks, weather systems, and neutrinos, as well as human beings.” My friend as attentive aperture is an example of one perceptive and cognitive event. The complex geometries of romancing fireflies is another. The imaginative histories of the constellations—narratives of sex, harvest or war—is another.

*

Constellations are things seen from earth. The appearance of flatness and cluster is a matter of positioning. Elaborate cartographies of the stars emerge from the collaborative impulses of poesis. To map a centaur drawing a bow, to map a saucepan, scorpion, willow, to map narratives of genesis. This is a poetics of fantastic eccentricity. From another position, the stars comprising a constellation move away from each other. Flatness turns into unthinkable topologies: elastic band, wrinkled handkerchief. Saucepans mutate. Stargazing is a pleasant time-travel. How relaxing to look into unfathomable histories and to have no genealogy. Lemon pie, warm with tea. Patterns of milk. Long-exposure shots reveal perfect curvatures. All the astronomers at the observatory in Coonabarrabran were divorced, my brother decided he’d become an astrophysicist instead. Years later, at a public lecture in Sydney, I sat in an auditorium full of astrophysicists to hear about dark matter. Wedding rings glinted in constellations.

*

In Lyn Hejinian’s book-length poem, My Life, she writes:

“Overhead a small plane drags a banner, it is summer, its engines revving and whining – for years I suffered nightmares in which just such a plane would lose control and plunge spinning through the roof of the schoolroom, blazing the cobalt, red, green, and yellow of the Hammond World Atlas. I in my chronic ideas return. Stalin medallions dangle at the windshield in trucks throughout the republics – why do they do this. The language of inquiry, pedagogy of poetry. One doesn’t want to be seduced by the sheer wonder of it all, whereby everything is transformed by beauty. There is a bulging lake and sunlight juts from it like a rock, as laughter for its practitioners. Past midnight, exhausted, fainting, and very old, the gray ice – Halley’s beaver – was swimming in the sky toward the deep forest on the distant ridge, its tail partially submerged. The flow of thoughts – impossible!”

Heraclitus was a process philosopher, all things in flow. Christian mythology imagines two Euclidean points, Genesis and Apocalypse. Coastlines are fractal. Alfred North Whitehead says, “no language can be anything other than elliptical, requiring a leap of the imagination to understand its meaning in its relevance to immediate experience.” Coastlines are immeasurable. Map a coastline. Find the centre of a melody. The story goes like this: sitting on a cliff, it was noticed that air touching the surface of the ocean produced ripples. Air is thingly. Atomism refers to the smallest data of experience. On a car trip with my father, he told me that since atoms are mostly empty space, we are mostly empty space. This idea pleases me, it makes the sensations of intimacy and encounter seem like impossible accidents. Over summer, in Camperdown park, I read Lucretius’s epic poem, De rerum natura. At the beginning of the poem, he says: “I will reveal those atoms from which nature creates all things and increases and feeds them and into which, when they perish, nature again resolves them. To these in my discourse I commonly give such names as ‘raw material’, or ‘generative bodies’, or ‘seeds’ of things. Or I may call them ‘primary particles’, because they come first and everything else is composed of them.” Lucretius was writing some time before 54 BC. Bread, cheese, a tomato. The raw materials of lunch. A single James Squire stubbie, cracked on a rug in the slanted angle sun of late afternoon. Dust motes. Jean-Luc Nancy gestures towards Lucretius. “[I]t is necessary to reread,” he says, “in the work of the Democriteans, the fall of the atoms into the void and the clinamen: as the distance, contact, assembling, separation, tangency, interval, and the interference of the singular, diffracted there is.”

*

At a conference in Canberra, my friend Duncan said, “poetry is our dirty ontology.” While reading my paper, the day before, I overheated. I was producing excess heat. The kinetics of nervousness and highly engaged attention. During question time, I spoke of the erotic circumstances of language. I feverishly tore off my duffel coat as I said the word “intercourse.” I was temporarily deeply embarrassed. One event overlapped another. The durational overlap was meaningful in a way I had not intended. In Greek mythology, Eros orders cosmos from chaos. Cosmos refers to a process of ornamentation, a meaningful composition of things alongside other things.

*

Earlier in the year I was involved in the re-enactment of Allan Kaprow’s 1965 work ‘Push and Pull’ at the Locksmith gallery in Alexandria. Kaprow set out the basic conditions for the event to take place. To take up these conditions is to both produce and reproduce the work. All things happening. Basic frame for the event of an artwork being, existing. Here is a frame, use it. In ‘Push and Pull’, a room is made available and things are brought to the space. Loosely speaking, these things are domestic miscellany. Furniture, etc. Participants are invited to engage with the space in whatever manner they choose. Rearrange, tidy, destroy, tinker, sleep, draw, stretch. Patterns emerge and are erased. Social complexes form. Networks arrange themselves. Nick wrote an essay about the eventhood, relationality and complexity of Push and Pull. He says: “Complexity is not chaos or anarchy in the usually (and wrongly) understood sense of the terms. Chaos and anarchy are not total disorder, complete lack of relations, but are rather the order of relations themselves, just as in ecological systems. And Push and Pull is an ecological system. Ecological systems are not just what happens in the wilderness, untouched by the evil hands of humans, they are everywhere, where humans and non-humans exist side-by-side, in complex relations.” In a series of notes taken during this time, I wrote: “Nonmetric concepts of neighbourhood, like ‘infinitesimal closeness’.” I was reading Manuel DeLanda. Last week, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I walked through the Duchamp collection, and was reminded of his wonderful trope, infra thin. “The warmth of a seat (which has just been left) is infra-thin” Duchamp says, in one of countless definitions.
“Velvet trousers–/ their whistling sound (in walking) by/ brushing of the 2 legs is an/ infra thin separation signalled /by sound. (it is not an infra thin sound) … When the tobacco smoke smells also of the /mouth which exhales it, the 2 odors / marry by infra thin (olfactory / in thin) … Difference between the contact / of water and that of/ molten lead for ex,/or of cream./ with the walls of its / own container moved around the liquid …. This difference between two contacts is infra thin.”

*

On September 5 1977, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched. As of June this year, it is about 16.555 billion kilometres from the sun. If it is still functioning when it moves through the heliopause—the known limits of our solar system—it will be the first human-made object to leave the Milky Way. Inside the spacecraft is a golden phonograph record, an offering to any extraterrestrial life forms (or to humans in an inconceivable future). The record’s content, compiled by Carl Sagan and a group of researchers, includes sound recordings of animals, surf, wind and storms, tractors, tools, music, greetings in 55 languages and a message from President Jimmy Carter. Carter’s statement begins: “We cast this message into the cosmos… Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some — perhaps many — may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe.”

Also included on the record is an hour-long recording of the brainwaves of Ann Druyan, one of the researchers and selectors of the project. At the time of recording, Druyan and Carl Sagan were experiencing the intense shared event of falling in love. She says: “I entered a laboratory at Bellevue Hospital in New York City and was hooked up to a computer that turned all the data from my brain and heart into sound. I had a one-hour mental itinerary of the information I wished to convey. I began by thinking about the history of Earth and the life it sustains. To the best of my abilities I tried to think something of the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love.”

*

Mulled wine and lentil soup. Sydney winter. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, co-written with Druyan. Projected onto the living room wall, Sagan speaks of primordial earthly life forms, including the upsetting sounding ‘hollow living tube’. We didn’t evolve from the hollow living tube, but from another complex of data.

*

In the opening to his wonderful book, The Parasite, Michel Serres says: “[W]hat is essential is neither the image nor the deep meaning, neither the representation nor its hall of mirrored reflections, but the system of relations … The parasitic relation is intersubjective. It is the atomic form of our relations. Let us try to face it head-on, like death, like the sun. We are all attacked, together.” In the beginning there was the fall, inclination, the difference of all things. “Reciprocal alterity,” is what Joan Retallack calls it. Gertrude Stein says, “the difference is spreading.” Muzzy ontology. Constellating is a method of inquiry. Attuned to the drift. The fall as generative mode, producing all things. I am serious about playtime.

*

Serres will remind us that in French, temps is time as well as temperature and weather. This is useful to remember

Looking over the shoulder of an English language-learner
a list of idioms, e.g., falling in love           and
a realisation (an ‘oh yes’)      it’s giving itself a
verb,           not loving but falling            a
bad feeling       or small shock         like slipping in
socks on a plank of wood             gutty and
uncontrolled     Another is ‘ to try one’s luck,’ something
obvious to me: trial or experiment, ‘give it a go’.
At this point we look out the bus window        at
the passing weathers and think           idioms or
not            this day is cracking its yolk everywhere

because ever since god-knows-when
these are the waits traditional to
christmas – chinese dinners & ham
radios, eucalypts bled into watercolour
: “the sun poured down like honey.”
irish drums behave, in this instance,
as genetic coding

a purpose-built jigsaw tray that pulled
the skin & nail off my big toe – the
exact geometries of resemblance &
what it means to have sameness

sneaking behind a cactus garden for a
joint with uncle P : the ants so fat they
pop under shoes, or worse, climb to altitudes

puddingless and clotted, and with one
large gravy spoon, drunk. a desperation
or else, a physics kit, skull tattoos, underwear
embossed with glyphs of semi-quavers &

the smell of lavender a hit of snuff

“And the great problem presented by such historical analyses is not how continuities are established, how a single pattern is formed and preserved, how for so many different, successive minds there is a single horizon, what mode of action and what substructure is implied by the interplay of transmissions, resumptions, disappearances, and repetitions, how the origin may extend its sway well beyond itself to that conclusion that is never given – the problem is no longer one of tradition, of tracing a line, but one of division, of limits; it is no longer one of lasting foundations but one of transformations that serve as new foundations, the rebuilding of foundations. What one is seeing, then, is the emergence of a whole field of questions, some of which are already familiar, by which this new form of history is trying to develop its own theory: how is one to specify the different concepts that enable us to conceive of discontinuity (threshold, rupture, break mutation, transformation)? By what criteria is one to isolate the unities with which one is dealing; what is a science? What is an oeuvre? What is a theory? What is a concept? What is a text? How is one to diversify the levels at which one may place oneself, each of which possesses its own divisions and form of analysis? What is the legitimate level of formalization? What is that of interpretation? Of structural analysis? Of attributions to causality?”

– Foucault, The Archaeology of Knwowledge, p. 5-6

It’s paragraphs like these that remind me why I am doing a PhD.

born the son of a barge man, “I was six
for my first dead bodies”. active in a theatre
of war during 1939-45. the concept of the
parasite – Like a maggot in a turd he hid within
the word. Neil Young talks about Pocahontas. X
feels sad = X feels something, the history of corn
or gold-minding. I am interested in his opinion on
rationality. With my poor English it’s hard to
describe what I am up to: And now I am eager to
prove THAT and show it in detail! Thank you!
Orderly, dispassionate, and rational Europeans.

I am at war with myself, it’s true, you couldn’t possibly know to what extent, beyond what you can guess, and I say contradictory things which are, we might say, in real tension; they are what construct me, make me live, and will make me die. I sometimes see this war as terrifying and difficult to bear, but at the same time I know that this is life.

I suspect that Derrida’s final interview, published recently as Learning to Live Finally, is one of the most perfect language-objects I have read. The interview was conducted only weeks before he died from an aggressive, terminal cancer, and the simultaneity of living-and-dying is evident, almost shockingly, in what he says. A person, nudging irreparably towards the limit of experience, calling on a radical shift from late-capitalist globalisation and economies of war. A person, so critically engaged that his transcribed language is algebraically parenthetical, relentless. A person, so aware of death that his presence is charged with the overwhelming continuity of emergence. Every word emerges. Every word is an emergency: THIS IS HAPPENING NOW! TAKE NOTICE! THIS IS IS-ING!

In the translator’s notes, it is said that Derrida remarked with sadness that the interview read as an obituary. Yet the presentness of death in his language does not have the ritual finality of a eulogy. Instead, it has the über-geometry of chance and potentiality. The practice of philosophy is the coming-to-terms with death — deathness, deathitude, deathology — and the coming-to-terms with living. The parallel, of course is with language (is it a parallel?) and with a question of survival (the very delicate hyphen between life and death.) Derrida says:

When it comes to thought, the question of survival has taken on absolutely unforeseeable forms. At my age, I am ready to entertain the most contradictory hypotheses in this regard: I have simultaneously—I ask you to believe me on this—the double feeling that, on the one hand, to put it playfully and with a certain immodesty, one has not begun to read me … on the other hand, and thus simultaneously, I have the feeling that two weeks or a month after my death there will be nothing left. Nothing except what has been copyrighted and deposited in libraries.

At heart is a question of sustainability: of experience and of language. And here is the delicate balance. To be at war with oneself, as we all are, with the productive tensions (kinetic energy) of sustainable creativity and attentiveness. Not to be, as it were, an unproductive feedback loop of self-loathing or self-consumption.