The Cosmos is a Living Vibrating Animal

Patrick Farmer

Primordia of cod otolith

The written word hangs in time like a lump of lead. Everything should move with the ages
and the planets

Leonora Carrington

the sigmoid line

This lecture revolves around, on the one hand, questioning the assumption that sound
moves (encountered in an essay by Stefan Helmreich called Transduction), and on the
other, the work of Casey O’Callaghan (the notion that sound is an individual event), which
O’Callaghan claims entails no mysteries about sounds and sound experience. I’ve tried to
spin such perspectives around in a manner similar to Taoist dialectics, looking at the literal
in the figurative and the figurative in the literal, but also in mind of the Empedoclean
understanding of love and strife, the concern with something far subtler than any fixed
identification of either + or –, resulting in the need to discover, in each single instant, what
happens to be + or – for that particular moment, a process, as I later state, of observing
the obverse, to perceive perceiving, attending to process itself, motion made motionless.
We’ll spend most of our time with the implications of the literal (particularly in mind of
the living Earth), but it’s important to remember that Helmreich asks for us to think across
transduction, which I take to mean with it, again as process. It’s not how the cookie
crumbles, but simply that it falls apart, as Rosmarie Waldrop says. It’s not just the
instances of transduction (of passing through one medium and another) but the noise and
energy involved, facilitating and hindering transformations.
As I said, most of this lecture will be spent in mind of overly literal implications, but if we
probe and listen with regards the figurative, the alchemical, we might reencounter the
adumbral vocabulary of Jorge Luis Borges’s Funes the Memorius, the efficacy of infinite
vocabularies that mimic a vertiginous cosmos, wherein Funes, at a loss as to why a dog at
3:14pm (seen from the side) should have the same name as a dog seen at 3:15pm (from
the front), symbolises a way of living that is the polar opposite of counting as nothing
those perceptions of which one is not aware. Then there’s Cratylus, supposedly a student
of Heraclitus, who said that we can never step into the same river once (if sound doesn’t
move can we even hear the same sound once?). This drifts in sympathetic relation to the
aural incredulity of Thomas Bernhard, who, in his novella titled Walking, wrote: If
we hear something… on Wednesday we check what we have heard and we check what we
have heard until we have to say that what we have heard is not true, what we have heard
is a lie. It also aligns with Pauline Oliveros, though in a different register. Oliveros says that
sometimes, what is heard is interpreted anywhere from milliseconds to many years later
or never. And what of Zeno? His paradoxes were arguments against the reality of ever
reaching an end (that enlivened and vibrant blind spot where we hear ourselves), where,
as Anne Carson says, like a face crossing a mirror at the back of the room, eros moves.
Whilst this lecture will primarily be concerned with the literal connotations of the
assumption that sound does not move, inevitably the figurative will reappear, and will
make things tricky.

oak acorn acorn oak

We return to the image of a holographic plant, perhaps we never left? A plant eaten and
regrown, an attempt at perceiving the whole in a plant, not just the whole in a part,
holding space for the unseen energies that animate the cosmos. Of course the plant will
be different for everyone, and I can’t say what I perceive here, other than when I close my
eyes, such kin helps me see stars. I imagine the contours of these words, spoken and read,
inward and outward, remembered and forgotten, refuted and acknowledged,
contemplated and dismissed, shared and kept apart, as conjoined mercurial polarities that
hold in common the noise of motion and vitality, adumbrations of sharing and holding
back, putting down and shaking, conveying and obscuring. It all puts me in mind of a Zen
koan that places us ahead of the lecture itself… Wind, flag, mind moves. The same
understanding. When the mouth opens all are wrong.

As mentioned, part of this lecture will be spent thinking with Stefan Helmreich’s
experience of transduction, and remaining ahead a little while longer, the sparks that
emerged from my encounter with Helmreich’s essay have since metamorphosed into a
great many other faces. He asks us to think across transduction, I don’t know if that’s what
I’m doing here, but it remains close in an attempted ray of diffractive ethics, which we
recall, is not to pit seemingly contrasting semantic and ethical positions against one
another, but to consider them as places of inter-relation that require suspension of
judgement and disposition, places of inherent participation where possible.
however we call into a forest
Do we ever feel uneasy, or disloyal, when we have to speak of plants as ‘it’? As if objects
and not subjects, not companions or teachers. Could we try to animate English, speaking
respectfully of the living world? Listening to the world, to kin, we all are in our own ways
talking and listening, talking and listening, talking and listening. I continue to learn so
much from the work and energy of Robin Wall Kimmerer, none more so than throughout
this lecture, written in between talking and listening. Kimmerer suggests that if we think
about and with the world as being full of intelligences other than our own (stepping
outside or straddling the barrier in English whereby we are either human or thing) we
need to set aside time in order to sit and talk with plants, so they can tell us their stories,
and we can tell them ours. Gordon White presents a good example of this in referring to
Bill Mollison’s permacultural dictum, everything gardens… saying that if it was
everyone gardens, Mollison would have been misunderstood as referring only to
humans. It seems so simple?

The lessons our plant relatives offer to us are essentially stories. They are creatures of
reciprocity, of intimate contact, intimately trying to contact, and seeking contact, teaching
us how and when to reduce our barriers in order to appreciate and respond to the living
world, which alchemy says, is always trying to communicate, and we are part of that
communication.

All we have to do is put a recognisable face on something, and suddenly it’s a being, but
let’s think of the term face (and voice) as it both has been and could be (so still is by
extension). Faces have many aspects, only one (and within this one is an infinite amount
of variation) of them is human, likewise, intelligence has many faces, all of them vibrate in
place (place as transitional movement, passing through, from place to place, to be held
does not always mean to be still, we can be held in place and still be motile). Returning
to Joan Slonczewski’s interest in what it means to be a person (mask, persona), imagine
(do we have to imagine?), plants have their own faces, they have their medicines,
intelligences, gifts, voices and abilities. Communicating and receiving in a variety of ways,
plants have ears, just not our ears, I’m sure they listen to us, and as Kimmerer says, we
could do worse than listen to them, as co-creators of abundance.

Before we move to the next section, we should bring to mind that many theorists practise
under the assumption that the term sound refers to ‘human sound’, but here I think we
should consider that sound refers to the hearing thresholds of all life (and everything is
alive in some sense of the term), thresholds that are always changing. The study of sound
is by its very nature interdisciplinary, it doesn’t belong anywhere, at least in terms of
simple categorisation. One way of thinking with this is with Therolinguistics, a discipline
developed in the early 1970s by Ursula Le Guin in her story, The Author of Acacia
Seeds. Therolinguistics is part of a speculative discipline that explores the vibratory poetry
of spiders, the kinetic language of ants, the sacred architecture of Australian wombats, the
ephemeral aphorisms of octopuses. For animals and plants do talk and they do have
something to say, we simply have to remember, and try (and try not to try) to listen.
Vinciane Despret’s The Autobiography of an Octopus gathers together a series of scientific
debates and situates them in an indeterminate future held by Despret’s imagination,
blurring the boundaries between scientific facts and a poetics, suffusing reality with what
has always been there. What if spiders are trying to send signals to us to stop the
incessant white noise of the human machine? What if, through their strange constructions
of cubic faeces, wombats are demonstrating a new form of all-inclusive cosmology for
whomever might pass, visible or invisible, animal or human, thus proffering a lesson in life
and tolerance? What if octopuses, as early believers in metempsychosis, are frantic not to
be able to guarantee the reincarnation of their souls due to overfishing and ocean
pollution? Despret’s propensity for storytelling opens out into a vision that clears a path
between disciplines for attending to different ways of being human on Earth. And… there
are so many good stories to tell! In Le Guin’s essay, Learning to write Science Fiction from
Virginia Woolf, she advocates such a way of writing, one for those who like to see through
eyes other than their own, where sound waves are felt as fragile things, as delicate and
interconnected, as frayed, as life itself.

covered with blazons

During a talk concerned with rites of passage, cosmologist and historian Richard Tarnas
speaks about the Copernican revolution of the mid 16th century. This is the almost
monotheistic switch from geocentric to heliocentric universe, the little face slowly
stopped spinning. The decentring of the human, no longer living in the ‘delusion’ of being
the centre of the cosmos, this sounds seemingly modest, humble… but Tarnas meets it
with confusion when realising that so many previously geocentric societies that saw the
Earth as central and not moving, seem to have a much more relational connection to the
whole, less filled with hubris. He says that this took him a long time to sift through, and
one day, after reading a New York times article about the mother being the centre of the
child’s universe, he ‘got it’, realising that in all these so-called pre modern cultures, it was
never the human being that was the centre, it was the Earth, the human was embedded in
the Earth, which was embedded in the ensouled cosmos.

As the Copernican revolution took place (which Tarnas of course acknowledges was a
great intellectual happening), there was a powerful disconnection from the Earth, what in
psychological terms could be called decathecting, a falling out of love. The modern mind in
some sense went through a profound decathecting, instilling a solar logos, a cathecting
with the Sun, the new centre, manifesting a feeling, an intimation, that the mind knows
everything about the cosmos, the deep autonomous and solar empowerment in which the
Renaissance self was born, and all of the responsibility and significance that goes with it,
including cosmological disenchantment. All I and no Thou, as Tarnas says, radiant
egocentricity, the Cartesian monotheistic solar ego, the beginnings of the brilliant,
blinding scientific light that thought it could shine in every facet and corner of the cosmos,
objectifying and manipulating life to serve human benefit, losing a connection with the
ground of the Earth. Tarnas says the cure, and that, you know, that’s his term, but I see no
reason to alter it into something less absolute, is listening, a Shamanic descent to the
lunar part of ourselves, the way a mother does with her child.
The ear then, as an animate organ, can extend our capacity to listen, body-mind-
environment-cosmos (in no order), and not always be the solar radiant force. The animate
ear is not only the literal ear hinged to the side of the skull (the strap that holds the mask
up), it is what helps us to listen to other sources of wisdom, such cultures that were
regarded as primitive by some but have crucial keys to the Earth’s future, it is to listen to
our dreams, out intuitions, our bodies, to each other, to correct the one sidedness (which
is a constant correction) of our narrow consciousness, paying attention the subtle patterns
of our lives that express themselves in synchronicities, subtle energies that emerge and
give the impression that something more could be going on, something more than the so-
called random environment that we’re taught exists… This may help guide us out of the
mindset (set mind) that we human beings are the one form of the cosmos that is
conscious, that we are an absolute oddity of consciousness in this random, consciousless
universe, which once you say it out loud, once you get a sense for how absurd it is, seems
unimaginable.

All things are inherently intelligible and that said intelligibility does not depend on
adducing universal physical laws or upon a coherent systematic theology, rather, it is an
intelligibility, given with the shapes or physiognomy of the world, and physiognomy is
afforded directly to our sensate imaginations. James Hillman quotes from Alfred North
Whitehead in stating that we find ourselves accepting a world of substantial objects,
directly presented for our experience. Cosmology (in the metaphysical sense, the constant
complex correspondences that take place between astronomical patterns and human
experience) is therefore made possible by the intelligible nature of things themselves. This
kind of subtle divination does not imply a deterministic universe whose future can be
predicted through the movement of the planets as they correspond to terrestrial events,
rather, it makes known (in a multi-dimensional-sensorial/perceptual fashion), so might we
say attunes, the quiddity of any given moment, guiding and cultivating responsibility for
actions and decisions, coming to know the significance of frayed particulars as moirés of
vacillating energy fields. The cosmos, says Hillman, has a logos, a language, which
bespeaks the intelligence of the planetary persons who display themselves in the world.
The imagination that dwells with the human heart is reciprocally related to the active
imagination of the universe located in its heart, the Sun, which endlessly radiates images,
forming life with its imaging power. The Newtonian mind abstracted the rays of the
alchemical solar lion into heat, light, energy, velocity, radiation, the photosynthesis of
chlorophyll, but if this is analysed (by which I mean loosened to reveal its spiral nature,
much like the triple helix of collagen), then a metaphysics of soul can also envision
chlorophyll and the calor inclusus (an innate heat, that which urges all things, including
humans, to participate in the cosmos) of all living things to be images fulminating from the
sulfuric green lion, that which helps to shape life into its magnanimous variety of diverse
and mysterious forms. So transversally, the Copernican revolution also helped to place an
animal imagination of the heart in the centre of the universe.
In Isabelle Stengers’ book, A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, Thinking with Whitehead,
she writes about something that has intrigued me for a long time, something that echoes
the concerns of Robin Wall Kimmerer and the grammar of animacy*, indeed, anyone who
has spent a prolonged amount of time consciously listening to the point of disappearing
will surely identify with this curiosity. Whitehead was insistent on affirming a plurality of
existents endowed with properties, a bird, for example, is a songbird, song is attributed to
the bird, and we need to remember, says Stengers, that the song, like everything we are
aware of, signifies the totality of nature into which it makes ingression (which is to say, the
resonant process by which a potentiality enters into an actuality, or as Whitehead would
say, an object entering into an event). Even when we are aware of sound in its singularity,
sound is both stratified and situated, a relation of situations.

*To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language, says Robin Wall Kimmerer. In
this mind, it feels to me that transduction, which we’ll pass through soon (though we
always are, in some semblance of affect) is in part a descendent of an overtly mechanistic
vernacular, one bereft of animacy, from the spinning faces that live beyond the
disenchanted agency grafted by projected anthropomorphism.
It’s no coincidence that Kimmerer begins her chapter on the grammar of animacy by
telling us she is listening, her bones leaning against a column of white pine, in
physiognomic intimacy with something for which we have no language, the wordless
being of others in which we are never alone. Kimmerer understands the need to be
immersed in the language of more than one field. My previous comment about
transduction was not to rally against a language of mechanism (science often held as a
language of distance which reduces a being to its working parts), rather the plenum of the
Cartesian monotheistic solar ego that still enthrones much language use as reality
principle, full of normative, assumptive terminology, of belief so often mistaken for truth,
used to define the boundaries of our knowing, terminology that resolutely refuses to lean
against the pine.

Geologian Thomas Berry writes that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a
collection of objects, and that to be in the universe is to participate in something common
to all. With his infamous split of mind and matter, of soul from animals, rending soul from
everything but the human mind, and in turn, rending the human from the universe, René
Descartes is so often the spectre to whom blame is attributed. However, as a quick aside,
we could do worse than at some point returning to his work, to study and listen out for
those things that have been subjected to various agendas and cultural milieus. There is
indeed something in Descartes, notably his theories of resonance and the auditory nerve,
which deserve another look, and in so doing, perhaps this will help to cast a little light,
open the windows we might say, on those theories that have become so embedded,
revealing what has been left out, what has been manipulated, set aside, forgotten in the
miasms that emerge from the ground at night. Underneath the language of science
something feels missing, the same something, Kimmerer says, that swells around you and
in you.
the beak of a seed
What can be said of the body can be said of the environment and the cosmos. Such
correspondences undulate when we consider that planets are seeds in the Earth. The seed
of the moon in the Earth, copper as a seed of Venus, lead as a seed of Saturn… Such seeds
are psychic moisture coagulating in the Earth, moist vapours, psychic fantasies within the
deeper structure of the person, the voice of Pan, old night, fantasies in the body. Lives are
in the world, buried in all depths, we just need search them out, listen to voices other
than our own. The seed is the synthetic consummation of the entire planet, says Dane
Rudhyar in his Liberation Through Sound, and to try and prolong this intimacy a little
further… in Rudhyar’s book, An Astrological Mandala, Cycles of Transformation, he writes
that when one meets a person for the first time (here I take person to not be solely
subjected to the human), one often gets a clear feeling-intuition of what this person
stands for, vibrates with, and perhaps may mean in one’s life in days or years to come.
Another variation of an animate seed in an alchemical vocabulary that spins among the
tones and formants of other voices, other lives.
In Endocrinology, a collaboration between Mei Mei Berssenbrugge and Kiki Smith, we
read, feedback between health and fate unfolds so fast, there’s no way one step in the
chain can be based on the previous one. Wandering and gleaning from such abundance is
cross-pollination in reasonant recognition of place, an approach to the epistemology of
the amateur as a means of exfoliating boundaries in order to watch them grow back
entwined with many others. Inhaling such an atmosphere, akin to churning, veers close to
the bird that hears nothing of itself as it calls, another modality in Fred Moten’s intense
engagement, and of the erotic.

We here find ourselves in one of the many places that the English language reveals its
limitations. As Kimmerer says, western science has no words to hold the mystery of the
force that pushes a mushroom up from the earth overnight. Might we say, in such
instances, body-mind-environment-cosmos? Accepting, for now, the awkwardness. What
turbulent patterns surround the word, energy, that we can no longer perceive? I would
urge anyone to read Kimmerer’s work in order to listen to the wider context around
Potawatomi speakers and the living world. The deep need, among many others, to
readdress linguistic awareness as recognising and making soul, where making is not
granting, but participating, remebering, holding respectfully, slowly, breathing with
mysteries too beautiful for English to explain, for so many reasons. In this sense, the
fieldless field situates metaphysics in imaginal locations as we continually return to the
spiral we never leave, realising its metamorphic predilections as the cosmos displaying its
self-enjoyment. If we see the spiral as a spiral, is this akin to measurement? One layer, an
important layer no doubt, but one layer nevertheless, of its potentiality. With that in
mind, as we spin and retrace our steps whilst still moving forward, perhaps at some point
during this lecture (no doubt different for all, this lecture containing and contained by all
others in the series) the spiral will appear to be spiralling, every direction appearing in
diverse unity of wave and particle as present memory of experience.
Kimmerer tells us that Potawatomi classifies nouns and verbs not as masculine and
feminine, but animate and inanimate. You ‘hear’ a person with a completely different
word than you ‘hear’ an airplane. If we try (however we try) to exfoliate sounds of their
realities, washing them with pumice stones until they are of a single scaleless aperture,
would sound be all that survived of sound? As we mentioned in a previous lecture,
Kimmerer writes of an indigenous story tradition that speaks of a past in which all beings
spoke the same language, where life lessons flowed among species, a state where all that
can be heard is sound, emptied of its meaning, where the whispering of pines is sound
and plants tell their stories not by what they say, but what they do, in an alphabet once as
familiar as the song of every bird. Everything that effects a pine is expressed in its body.
The cochlea is a disturbance ecology of tensions suspended between the shapes we take
as the world acts upon us and the ideas of order that our imaginations impose upon the
world*. It’s among such tensions, not so much liminal as intermediate (the latter being for
me a more all encompassing and yet ambivalent term), that matter shakes electrons from
the ear, a cell of infinite variety within a grass-like and preponderous form. Such mattering
is a site of narrativity, to use a phrase by Serpil Oppermann, ever pouring into itself with
ongoing configurations of signs and meanings, epicycles and eccentrics, that we interpret
as stories. A sign is akin to a chord of subjective elasticity, and as Rosmarie Waldrop says,
placement does not explain but cultivates the vacancy between… and it’s in Waldrop’s gap
gardening that signs refer to, rather than create, the world, two voices, or is it one? Now
tuning in on themselves, fiber and leaf… a composite monster, a forest of tumbling
waves.

* Anna LowenhauptTsing’s disturbance based ecology is one model upon which I base my
relationship with ‘my’ tinnitus, interpreting the notion of disturbance in relation as a
method of communicative collaboration (far from the acoustic vestige that Tara Rodgers
so brilliantly reveals to us), full of potential and meaningful contradictions. Tsing
beautifully explicates what a disturbance based ecology might consist of, particularly in
relation to the cultivation of the matsutake mushroom in Japan. In The Mushroom at the
End of the World we are introduced to the patterned notion that if we want matsutake in
Japan, we must have pine, and if we want pine, we must have human disturbance.
According to Tsing’s forest-research interlocutor, Kato-San, erosion is good, pine
flourishes on mineral soils and that erosion uncovers them. The forest is not a garden,
says Tsing, it has to grow itself, and yet Kato-San helps it along by creating a certain kind
of mess, one that would advantage pine. I’ve also been shown similar ambiguous mycelial
relationally in the work of Paul Stamets, who says that the vast majority of psilocybe are
connected with humans and human activities that are associated with ‘taming’ the land
and thereby creating trails of debris. After the movement of people from Eurasia over the
Bering Strait, says Stamets, many psilocybe-active species came out of the landscape and
proliferated.

again the honey combs

At the close of Carl Jung’s book, Aion, he says that if a person does not know what a thing
is, it is at least an increase in knowledge if they know what it is not. I hope this contrast
between literal and figurative exemplifies such. I’ve no wish to pit one against the other in
this case, it just feels prudent to spend time with what I at least perceive to be a kind of
opposite, a spiral tends to becomes a circle if we roam the edges of a myopic desire for
resolute and fixed answers to such matters.

Transduction has a deep history, it is a tentacular and mycelial world in this sense,
insomuch as when we approach it, we are as liable to find ourselves among a plurality of
possibility as we are a thick cloud of ink and spores (which really is another area of
possibility, regardless of what we can and cannot perceive in its midst). In Stefan
Helmreich’s Transduction essay (ostensibly a review of the uses of transduction in sound
studies) he begins with the ‘received account’ of sound as a form of energy transmitted
through a medium, from amplifier to ear, for example, and with this, what Helmreich calls
a crossing, he reminds us that transduction comes from the Latin, to lead across, to
transfer, so, in essence, he says, it names how sound changes as it traverses media,
passing through transubstantiations that modulate both its matter and
meaning. Helmreich quotes from Jonathan Sterne’s book, The Audible Past, in which
Sterne describes transduction (its mechanical manifestation) as tympanic oscillation in the
ear. So to lay this flat (x plane); sounds as pressure waves reach and pass through ear
drums, during which time they are transduced into (across) neuronal or electrical signals
along a variety of mediums (as ever I find myself wondering what becomes of sound once
it becomes sound). This is a somewhat general and reductive view of hearing and sound*
(though it is relevant also, as Helmreich says, it is the ‘received’ account, weighed down by
its own chimeras), in line with an originating principle of ‘modern’ sound reproduction,
which comes in part from the sound-houses in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis.

* In a recently published article called The Mention of Flies I wrote with the premise that
tinnitus is alive, if only for the simple matter that were I to presume it was dead (there is
of course the position of otherwise/in between, straddling the binary notion that if
something is not alive then it must therefore be dead), that feels even harder to
comprehend. Tinnitus is part of me as much as I am part of it, and the same is felt with
environment. As for the term, ‘alive’, biosemiotician Thomas A. Sebeok writes, to be alive
is to be semiotically active, we’ll come back to this, but what might it mean, to
acknowledge some sense of tinnital life? What might it imply and where might it lead? I
feel that so-called complex systems like tinnitus should not necessarily be 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. Tinnitus (like so much) is well
suited as a verb, a predilection reflected in the words of Cyberneticist Norbert Wiener,
who said we are but pools in a river of ever flowing water. We are not stuff that abides,
but patterns that perpetuate themselves. I’m not here trying to equate tinnitus with
sound and sound alone, nevertheless, I fail to see any reason why we cannot say the same
of sound, again, not granting agency (animacy), but not taking it away either. In another
part of the above mentioned article I attempt to correspond between my tinnitus and the
life of a river, both stable and constantly changing. We of course have literal edges that
we can feel and map, but there are many others that flicker, what we might call edgeless
edges, until language runs out where imagination pours itself into itself. The physical
nature of bodies is constantly renewed and reshaped, transformed as cells are regularly
replaced and sloughed off. Like rivers, we, as ecosystems of ecotones, are inextricable
from the world, the seeds that dimple the surface of the water, the climate and weather,
the season-making orbit of the planets.

Jonathan Sterne makes a variety of pertinent points in warning against fetishisation (a

version of which we’ve met with regard to the propensity of comparing the human body
to an electrical circuit). He says that if the phonograph changed the way we hear, it did so
only because many of the practises, ideas, and constructs associated with sound-
reproduction technologies predated the machines themselves. Like comparing a human to
a battery, such constructs often predate the battery. However the anthropologist Veit
Erlmann makes a good point when he says that Sterne’s comment excludes the conditions
that must be given for something to be recognised, labelled and valorised as audible in the
first place. Why and how do certain orders of knowledge make some aspects of our
auditory experience more worthy of attention than others? Under what conditions does it
become necessary, socially acceptable (or just generally indispensable to what Lorraine
Daston has called a moral economy of science) to think about auditory perception in
technical terms?

Helmreich draws on the philosopher Casey O’Callaghan, for whom sounds are individual
events (this is what I mean about their being as many definitions of sound as there are
sounds in the universe). O’Callaghan says the claim that sounds travel turns out to be an
unnecessary and, indeed, undesirable commitment for a theory of sounds. The event
view, he says, entails no mysteries about sounds and sound experience. As you might have
guessed, we’ll come back to this. Helmreich says that transduction is of keen interest for
those who wish to theorise what it means to encounter sound as an unfolding event. He
describes it, through the work of Gilbert Simondon, as that which denotes a process, be it
physical, biological, mental or social (the energetic is notable by its absence, and indeed
the animate, such things I find, are rarely consciously implicit), in which activity gradually
sets itself in motion, propagating within a given area through a structuration of the
different zones over which it operates. I would say this means that transduction can be
thought of as the manner in which one milieu serves as the basis for another, or
conversely is established amidst another milieu, dissipating and constituting together
(altered environments require adjustability to altered environments, environments
themselves cause adaptation).

Helmreich asks for a transductive anthropology, one that listens closely for telltale
distortions and resistances, turbulence that might reveal the conditions beneath any self-
evident presence. We’ve already touched on sonocytology, but Helmreich draws attention
to the practise in his transduction essay in such a way that not only reflects my concerns
about tinnitus and being alive, but James Hillman’s comprehension of physiognomic lack
in the cosmos and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s grammar of animacy. Transduction, Helmreich
says, vanished as the laboratory auditors (sonocytologists) heard the screaming yeast
cells, eliciting feelings of sympathy and anxiety. This mediating switch from transductive
presence to absence, according to Helmreich, permitted researchers to believe they were
hearing a genuine (there’s that word again, so enmeshed in epiphenomena) auditory
emanation from the world of yeast.

What if we were to think on the presence of yeast in the human gut, the microbiome (let
alone in the wider environment, especially in lichen!), I find it quite fascinating to consider
that yeast does not feel, is not animate, does not communicate in ways we might attend
to and recognise in some way or another. Our large intestines are home to trillions of
bacteria, can we really say that such creatures do not feel, pain or otherwise, do not or
simply cannot convey such experience? Where is the dividing line? Is it always situated in
the same place? If we are anything we are in so many ways our gut, and I think it’s safe to
say that our gut is only part human in terms of a firmly established category. How much of
our language derives from the gut? If we deny this, do we run the risk of gutting the gut?
Anyone who has experienced digestive imbalance may have other words to say about the
sentience and presence of such a life held by life.

decussated characters
In this gut (these guts), we hear James Hillman asking, why do we generally not see or
perceive the intelligence of the planetary persons who display themselves in the world?
Why is the intelligibility of the world not more apparent to us? He ultimately lays blame at
the feet of John Locke, saying that the Lockean theory of perception does not let us see
them, it denies qualities to things, removes intelligibility from their faces. They stand,
dumb and dead, without heat, taste, smell, colour, sound, touch, without everything. The
physiognomy of the world has been removed predominantly to the mind, severing life
from appearance and appearance from reality. A living sense of world requires a
corresponding living organ of soul, by means of which a living world can be perceived (in
which transduction no doubt plays a part). As humans, we know ourselves only insofar as
we know the world, we perceive the world in ourselves, and ourselves in the world, every
new thing, clearly perceived, opens a new organ of perception in us.

A curious taproot (splitting so-called primary and secondary qualities–in other words, in
reality is atoms and void) persists in this quote from Galileo, written in the 17th century:
…Without the senses as our guides, reason or imagination unaided would probably never
arrive at qualities… Hence I think that tastes, odours, colours, and so on are no more than
mere names so far as the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they
reside only in the consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these
qualities would be wiped away and annihilated.

To assume that sound does not move, is this to disguise the marvelous? Forest
consciousness resonates with our guts, which contain strings. We recall the question,
how, if things do not stop pitching about, are we to perceive the equivalences? So many of
the theories and philosophies surrounding dichotomous contentions are want to pit one
against the other rather than galvanise in cooperation. Even the position we might take by
holding Cartesian reason to be the disjunction of subject and object, with resonance akin
to their conjunction (one linked to separation and autonomy, the other to adjacency and
sympathy) is its own binary. On this note, it seems fitting to read from the work of
encyclopaedist, Denis Diderot, who, writing in the late 1700s, compares the fibres of
human organs to vibrating strings. Diderot is here responding to his interlocutor,
D’Alembert, who puts forward the hypothesis that we can only think of one thing at a
time.

The sensitive vibrating string, says Diderot, oscillates and resonates a long time after one
has plucked it. It’s this oscillation, this sort of inevitable resonance, that holds the present
object, that keeps it present, while the understanding is free to consider whichever of the
object’s qualities it wishes. But vibrating strings have yet another property, that of making
others vibrate. It’s in this way the one idea calls up a second, and these two a third, then
all three a fourth, and so it goes, without our being able to set a limit to the ideas that are
aroused and linked in a philosopher who meditates or who listens inwardly in silence and
darkness. This instrument (Diderot is speaking of a clavichord) can make astonishing leaps,
and one idea called up will sometimes start an harmonic at an incomprehensible interval.
If this phenomenon can be observed between resonant strings, why should it not take
place between living and connected points, continuous and sensitive fibres?

Forgive me for absolutely and excitedly falling off the deep end here, but reading through
this I realised what Diderot was presupposing was in accord with certain developments in
superstring theory made by John Hagelin. One string (that lives in three dimensions, up
and down, back and forth, and time–we might think here not so much of a guitar, or
clavichord, string but of the basilar membrane, which vibrates in accord with different
states of thickness) admits two different independent vibrational frequencies. Superstring
theory lives in 8 perpendicular directions in which the string can vibrate, or eight
independent frequencies. The superstring transforms into the string of 24 independent
vibrational states, that transforms itself again into 64 vibrational degrees. The ‘final’ stage
of the transformation of the string in preparation to create the universe gives rise to a
process called space time super-compactification, which has a 192 fold vibrational
structure, 192 frequencies. This is said to be the unified field reverberating in itself, the
myriad ways vibration (as infinite imagination) is guided and guides us along the unstruck
sound of the universe.

commodious radiation
To speculate on whether sound does or does not move (as if there were no other way to
turn) is to risk reducing lattice to line, akin to once more removing consciousness from the
world. It can both delimit soul (a world-denying tendency) and split reasonance (wherein
the world is animated by the same psychologically vibrant realties that human beings
experience in themselves) into resonance or reason. I’ve no wish to deny subjective
experience in this regard, interpretive encounters with waves, but waves also interpret us.
I am not trying to remove sound from the world, regardless of its position as a metaphor.
Equally, I’m not implying that if sound doesn’t move this denies the world totally of its
subjectivity, but it is an inextricable element in such, creating yet more potential and
subtle division between the human self and the encompassing world. As Ursula Le Guin
says in an essay, titled Telling is Listening, listening is not a reaction, it is a connection.
Listening to a conversation or a story, we don’t so much respond as join in, become part of
the action. Such experience takes place within a world soul, a living matrix in which and
with which we participate, articulated through the drift of words, myths, gestures,
dreams, symbols, emotions, energy, imagination (we recall the driftlike avoidance of
categories in relation to studying with vibration, an appearance and reappearance, culture
as nature we might say, a world of bardic reverie as opening), not so much set over and
against the object from a position of conscious autonomy, as embedded in a cosmos of
subjects where boundaries exist, but they are permeable, not absolute.

Listening, Le Guin says, is an act of community, which takes space, time, and
silence. Surely we can participate without completely losing our edges, without negating
the stratified and transformational realities of others, wherein all things are personal,
conscious, multidimensional/directional. As Richard Tarnas says, the ‘modern mind’
believes that to project what is human onto the nonhuman is a basic epistemological
fallacy, ergo, whatever beauty and value human beings may perceive in the universe, that
universe is in itself mere matter and motion, mechanistic and purposeless, ruled by
chance and necessity. Tarnas’s book, Cosmos and Psyche, was published in 2007, and
whilst such views are not as absolute as they seem, the relative nature of enchantment
and disenchantment still feels unbalanced, spinning electric faces are predominantly
confined to the human mind, wherein the conflation of inner and outer often leads to the
largely erroneous pathology of such things as delusion and phantom, real and unreal. We
recall that for Isabelle Stengers, magic is a practise with critical as well as political
relevance, an experiment in learning with the non-human spirited life world. Meaning is
adrift, a will-o’-the-wisp beyond the limitless limits of human consciousness. We forget
the self precisely to recall the self, to practise paradox, unlearning, phase-place of
anamnesis and amnesia as labyrinth, as cinnabar grotto.

In the same essay of Le Guin’s, from the aptly titled book The Wave in the Mind, she also
says that all living beings are oscillators. We vibrate, whether amoeba or human (she also
says that her model for intersubjectivity is amoebas having sex, literally reaching out to
each other and melding their pseudopodia into a connecting channel), we pulse, we move
rhythmically, change rhythmically, vibrating in frequencies on the cosmic, atomic,
molecular, subcellular levels. Constant, delicate throbbing is the process of life made
visible, reasonating with the world in each other in ways that enhance both wisdom and
bewilderment, spiral walking. In mind of Le Guin’s intersubjective amoeba, whilst thinking
back to controlling the behaviour of earthworms with vibrations (Faraday waves and
sonogenetics), and to biosemiotician Thomas A. Sebeok’s equivocation of being alive and
being semiotically active, I can’t help but briefly mention the relational field of quorum
sensing, which is the study of how microbes communicate with each other. We find
ourselves (we are ourselves) a hyper complex biochemical language of bioelectromagnetic
molecules through which infinitesimal cells merge and distend, one example being a
strand of molecular communication that is vital in allowing at least 600 different species of
bacteria to organise themselves into the slimy dental plaque associated with tooth decay.
Every bacterial species has its own dialect (remember Slonczewski’s sci-fi novel Brain
Plague… or perhaps we should say (sf) so far novel, in this instance), and autoinducers,
sensory proteins that acts as ears (ears acts as autoinducers) have led away from the
belief that bacteria could only communicate in molecular signatures that could be
understood by ‘their own kind’, to a far wider stream of communication, a universally
recognised set of electromagnetic signals that has led one researcher to call bacteria
multilingual. It’s held that the field of quorum sensing will be vital in addressing the
teeming communication pathways of ‘superbugs’ that vibrate with dis-ease by
engineering what’s known as ‘acoustic reporter genes’, enabling the detection of bacteria
in the body, particularly the gut, using ultrasound (coherent light cannot penetrate that
far). This means that bacterial cells would be, essentially manipulated, so as to reflect
sound waves back to the researchers, letting them know their location in the body.

riparian corridors
I appreciate that the term event is both gorged and gargantuan, but being as O’Callaghan
considers sound to be an individual event, I feel, in keeping with this notion of quorum
sensing and the teeming life inside a life of the body (but of course orientation in this
regard is not quite as it seems), that visiting the term event in the work of process
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, via Isabelle Stengers, seems apt. Event is the first of
the terms Whitehead associates with what we are aware of in perception, in other words,
what we discern is the specific character of a place through a period of time. We discern
some specific character of an event, but in discerning an event we are also aware of its
significance in relation to the structure of events. The verb ‘to discern’ is interesting, says
Stengers, because it is indeterminate, it can be used in an active sense, which refers it to
the discerning subject, yet Whitehead thwarts this usage. The factor discerned is a part of
what we are aware of in perception. Activity begins when, for one reason or another, we
become interested in what is then selected as ‘what’ we have perceived. In addition, what
we are aware of is not defined by the character that is discerned. The event itself does not
present itself in an isolated mode, for example, auditory experience relates to the fact
that other events, although they are not discerned, include the event of which the sound
is a factor, while this event itself includes others. The name event celebrates the ‘fact’,
says Stengers, that what we discern always has a beyond.

A pertinent example of this in relation to transduction can of course be found among the
electromagnetic spectrum, especially considering how such energy affects and interacts (is
produced) with the human body. Thinking back and forth to the fieldless field for a
moment, and diffraction, the inclusions are the obverse of their potential exclusions, one
way I picture, or to use a phrase of the poet Oswald Egger, one way I observe the obverse,
is with electromagnetic frequencies. EMFS (electromagnetic frequencies) occupy a vast
spectrum, at least from 0hz (how might a ‘negative’ frequency manifest?) to
1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Hz, one sextillion, or 1021, otherwise known as zettahertz.
If we focus for a moment with 60hz, such frequency is thought to have very little
penetration power into the skin, 60hz’s electric field is essentially stopped by surface
charges, but the magnetic field associated with 60hz can penetrate bodies very deeply,
subsequently producing electric fields inside said bodies.

Helmreich writes that transduction is not the really-real material substrate of sound. It is
not the really-real to a now revealed-to-be-phantasmatic immersion. He calls it a
representational recipe with its own rhetorical, historical, and technical starting points.
One of the key assumptions, Helmreich adds, is that sound moves. To exemplify this, he
draws on the work of Tara Rodgers, quote:

…The movement of sound, so central to almost all representations of signal processing,

itself has roots in ideas about travel and voyage that inflect Western epistemologies of
sound more broadly. In late nineteenth and early twentieth-century texts that were
foundational to the fields of acoustics and electroacoustics, and to ideas and machines of
sound synthesis, sound was defined as fluid disturbances that initiate sensory pleasures
and affects. It was also figured as a journey of vibrating particles that voyage back and
forth, outward and home again. . . . Sound and electricity* were both understood as fluid
media and were conceptually linked to each other through water-wave metaphors and
associated terms such as current, channel, and flow.

* See No Vibration Without Electricity for a short list of interactions with electricity that
could serve as viable alternatives to such predominance.

Does assuming that we can speak for sound return us to the Baconian
paradigm (returning the paradigm to us even) of putting nature on the rack? Though the
question of whether a paradigm is essentially a ‘good’ one or an ‘evil’ one is not that
simple (if a word can heal, a word can wound, it’s a poor cart that goes in only one
direction). The line between north and south, angel and demon, one hole and another
hole, yin and yang, is tremulous and oft indistinct, it is the quavering line that Goethe trod
in the fields, leading him to state that optical illusion is optical truth, that colours are the
deeds and sufferings of light, the deeds and sufferings of darkness. There is an amateur in
the chaos, and as Ralph Abraham says, chaos is health. Can we speak with sound and as
sound, from and to sound? A bay is a noun, says Kimmerer, only if water is dead (a gut is
also a channel of water). When bay is a noun it is trapped by the word. Potawatomi uses
the same grammar to address the living world as family, because the living world is family.
Extending from human relatives to all relations, rocks, mountains, water, fire, places,
medicines, song, stories, drums… Sound spirals in between grammatical flexure like a
spring.

To say someone does not or cannot do something is of course not to imply they cannot do
something else, should not do something else. Instead of movement, what of relation,
correspondence, cooperation, or perhaps more alchemical terms, coagulation,
putrefaction, such that tends to coalesce and ever churn… If sound doesn’t move does
that mean we have to shout in order for sound to hear us? If so, how might sound teach
us, saying what needs to be said… A living sense of world requires a corresponding living
organ of soul, by means of which a living world can be perceived
Sound, movement, inertia, stasis, perhaps these interdependent poles flip like the Earth’s
magnetic fields (we discussed how + and – charges can flip among the body in relation to
environment), and what of the unknown in terms of the more unknown, an alchemical
possibility that by a shift in perspective the apparent opposite of something may come
into focus at any moment, bringing to mind the kind of mind that contingency requires. I
can’t say that sound has ever felt like some kind of individual event, available only on
reception. Helmreich says that even the most basic description of sound may be ‘cross-
contaminated’, crosscut with leading questions as ‘it’ cuts across spaces, but this feels
very much part of sound in the world, traversing, flickering and diffracting with various
existences. It is draining to constantly engage in what sound is and is not, and so
Helmreich suggests we think across, to which I would add, we leave open the possibility
that sound is a precipitation of change as sound is changed itself, energies at work in a
situation, coming into balance in between verbs, keeping everything in doubt (that old
Fourierist adage), opposition, temporary stability, stillness, and motion. Rodgers shows us
sounds metaphorical imbrication with the Baconian paradigm, but she also brings to our
attention, for example, Ursula le Guin’s fragile variation on this very belief system, and
this we hold with us as possibility of conscious change and ongoing experience in which to
put nature on the rack is to do the very same thing to ourselves via mediation in which we
slip towards a binary ofonly either engaging with the world or holding it at a distance.
In certain contexts ‘it’, as often as ‘is’, places a barrier between the us and the animate
world. This is all of an ethos, a way of knowing that is a way of living (as Kimmerer says,
using moss as an example, what we need is a new ethic in which we see a roof covered in
moss and we don’t say there is a neglectful home owner, but a fine steward of biodiversity
and water quality…). We are taught in the world by the world, taught of knowing living,
making soul. Saying ‘it’ is often akin to making a living land into a resource, a body into a
commodity (I hope to follow this further in …Monsters, particularly with the work of Silvia
Federici, Carolyn Merchant, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Margaret Wertheim).

fern and slime

Zeno is known for his arguments against the possibility of motion, though we intuit here
an underside, and undermind, as this can really only be so, if taken literally. Rene Guenon
claims that it is doubtful Zeno really intended to deny motion, and that such an unmoved
mover, for Zeno, equates to the understanding that knowledge moves so fast we
ourselves need to move at the same in order to keep up (akin to the quantum Zeno effect,
where measuring a particle frequently enough can cause its time evolution to slow down),
there is no standing still. Zeno sought to challenge the mind only to undermine
(undermind) it, to bring it face to face with a stillness that can’t be debated unless lived,
realised. He began with movement and, without leaving it, dissolved it. Behind such
movement is stillness, process, wherein the movement between one perspective and
another is as subtle and suggestive as perspective itself. We mentioned that a favourite
analogy of Hans Christian Ørsted was that of a fiery path, described by a twirled brand
which itself constitutes an unbroken line more perfectly the faster rotation takes place,
the tone acquiring more solidity the closer its elements move toward each other. In
Ørsted’s vernacular of unified oscillatory interdependence, the energy of nature’s deep
and infinitely incomprehensible reasonance speaks to and through us as vibration. This is
akin to Zeno’s paradox of the arrow that flies and is nonetheless immobile. If a flaming
ember is whirled about rapidly one will no longer see the form of the ember but a circle of
fire, grasping the continuity of motion directly.

In a similar cosmological fashion, Empedocles speaks of endless motion in the same

sentence as total motionlessness, which Peter Kingsley states, is not a matter of theory or
doctrine, but perception. When we are preoccupied, there is always movement, and yet
motionlessness is held to be part of that selfsame reality, the more we try to discover
stillness by leaving movement behind, the more movement we end up creating by running
away from motion. Kingsley’s reading of Empedoclean mysticism relates that through
accepting movement totally we discover nothing but stillness. I’ll further follow
Empedocles’ perceptions of sound in the soon to be published lecture titled Appellations.

lichen and release

It seems to me here that I’m constantly recapitulating Alfred North Whitehead’s notion of
the fallacy of simple location, in which every location involves an aspect of itself in every
other location, every spatio-temporal standpoint, every, occasion, mirroring the world. It’s
no surprise that Isabelle Stengers has written books both on Whitehead and on magic, and
I’m not saying that this is how Whitehead himself identified, but I do see his thinking as
having a decidedly alchemical glint. In his lecture, ‘Nature Alive’, he says that philosophy
begins in wonder, and then, when philosophic thought has done its best, wonder remains.
This reminds us of Stengers’ understanding of pragmatic magic as needing to stay with the
mystery, to not rush reconciliation. All a far cry from O’Callaghan’s claim that his event
view of sound entails no mysteries about sounds and sound experience, which is a claim
much closer, for me at least, to the Cartesian res extensa, in which explaining is to x plane,
to flatten. Mystery is inevitable, for some it’s an affliction (mystery as the opposite of
mastery), I would say it’s a gift (a responsibility to master a drive for mastery, catching up
with the fact that history has turned the senses against themselves so as to control them),
and as ever I fall back into Susan Howe’s feeling that sound is the greatest mystery of
poetry.

Hillman understands Descartes’ res extensa as a product of the absence of the gods, and
of soul*, a mathematical space calculable in forces, adrift with the litter of soulless
objects, where all soul, mind, consciousness, is condensed inside the human brain, putting
nature at the disposal of the human will (man is the measure of all things). The absence of
the gods then, for Hillman, is not only an industrial opportunity for exploitation, but a
hubristic inflation of mortal humans. The cogito sets subject apart from object, and
Hillman (in response to Whitehead) suggests a much needed alteration, that of patior, the
subjective experience of the universal flow of energy. Events are not mere energetic facts
without aim, they are emotional intensities with intention.
*By soul, Hillman is referring to a perspective rather than a substance, he calls this
reflective (mediating events and making differences between ourselves and everything
that happens, we’ve been calling this diffractive–patterns of differences that make a
difference, diffractively reading insights through one another, attentively and carefully
reading for the differences that matter in their fine details, crafting an ethics that is not
predicated on externality, on the outside or reflection, but entanglement, touch,
propinquity), and I see no reason why the two can’t ultimately be part of each other, a
conscious, self-sustaining and imaginative substrate. I bring this up now as I struggle to
relate it to something Helmreich wrote regarding sound, quote: There is
no life (Helmreich’s emphasis) of sound without an apparatus of sensing, and this
transducing apparatus frames and forms effects typically associated with subjective
experience.

It matters what thoughts we use to think thoughts, and if sound is considered an

individual event that unfolds at reception, if waves travel but sound does not, if there is
no life of sound without an apparatus of sensing, what does this mean for the world of
which we are part? Do these ideas erect a firm barrier between one and another? Does
this barrier create things? Does this abstract from the living world part of its animacy? The
unseen energies that Kimmerer and many others are asking us to sit and listen with,
organism and psyche in a participatory universe of soul making, ever weaving a living
bridge of relations where soul can also refer to the unknown component which makes
meaning possible, deepening events into experiences via the intermediary of love as the
imaginative possibility in our natures, experienced through diffractive imaginations.

small plates of teeth

In Madness Rack and Honey, Mary Ruefle says that the highest levels of consciousness are
wordless, that the greatest lunacy of most lyric poems is that they attempt to use words
to convey what cannot be put into words. She says that stars were the first text and that
metaphor is not a literary term, but an event, an exchange of energy wherein everything
in the world is connected. In mind of negative capability (someone capable of remaining in
mystery, without prematurely lunging after certainty), Ruefle has a great take wherein she
considers that if someone is capable of understanding negative capability then they are
perhaps incapable of it by extension. What we might call positive capability could relate to
a time of anxiety, relentlessly propelling the person into the world, but in this experience
they cease to try and understand, and as Adrienne Rich said, for most people, let alone
poets, the problem is not finding an imaginative interest in life, but sustaining the blows of
the material and imaginative challenges of our time.

If we now briefly turn to a different time, that of the 17th century, the time in which
Rodgers is seeking to revaluate certain auditory notions and associations that encircle us,
we find in its ‘heroic’ figures, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, a vehement distrust
of metaphor. Hobbes smells only rot in the use of tropes and other rhetorical figures,
instead of words ‘proper’. He finds them absurd and misleadingly emotional:
…For though it be lawful to say, for example in common speech, the way goeth, or leadeth
hither, ways cannot go, nor proverbs speak, yet in reckoning… and seeking of truth, such
speeches are not to be admitted.

Locke, continuing what we might call this empiricist tradition of lifelessness, shows the
same contempt for figurative speech, which he views as a tool of rhetoric and an enemy of
truth, essentially exhibiting a fear of subjectivism, emotion, and imagination:
….If we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric,
besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence
hath invented, are nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and
thereby mislead the judgement…
Through this we hear a quote from William Blake, circling against such ossified
contentions.

…Cowper (William Cowper) came to me and said. O that I were insane always I will never
rest. Can you not make me truly insane. I will never rest till I am so. O that in the bosom of
god was hid. You retain health Mr Blake and yet you are as mad as any of us all-over us all-
mad as a refuge from unbelief-from Bacon, Newton, and Locke.

metamorphosis as narrative
This lecture has been one long surprise, as I think now we could actually do worse than
turning to Nietzsche, at least for a little while, because poetry, according to Nietzsche,
precedes truth, where truth is just the name for a metaphor that we’ve forgotten is a
metaphor. For Nietzsche, there is no clear divide between inside and outside, such
orientation is akin to a crumpled piece of paper wherein all of language is metaphoric,
where there is no literal language and then metaphoric language. Metaphors, we might
say, architect our thinking, and just so, the poet Barbara Guest says that there is an
invisible architecture supporting the surface of the poem, often interrupting its progress
by way of reaching into it, in search of an identity. Guest goes on to ask, by whom or by
what agency is this decided, by what invisible architecture is the poem developed?
Nietzsche says that we need an illusion to keep society going in the face of the breakdown
threatening it through knowledge. Knowledge of existential vacuity, displacement of
human, the death or silence of god or nature. Something must take the place of god, and
Nietzsche calls it illusion. If we are to invent (which diachronically distends to find out),
such an illusion, he says, then we should arrive at one which is effective, and this should
be possible on the assumption that effective action does not necessarily depend on truth,
since, truth, does not truly exist in any literal, metaphysical, or philosophical sense. No
matter how strongly a thing may be believed, strength of belief is no criterion of truth. But
what is truth, he asks, perhaps a kind of belief that has become a condition of life?
This condition of life is a kind of interstitial sympathy, a reasonance holding things
together as they are kept apart, and it’s this that in Nietzsche comes from art, love,
beauty, from the history of the free spirit, such things that he believed in, but felt no need
to proclaim their absolute metaphysical being. As Barbara Guest says, there is always
something within poetry that desires the invisible, and this reminds me of Whitehead,
who said that philosophy is akin to poetry, as in each case there is reference to form
beyond the direct meanings of words.
Lyn Hejinian speaks with this in her essay, The Rejection of Closure, about the conflict
between a desire to satisfy a demand for closure, for boundedness, for coherence, and
the desire for free, unhampered access to the world, engendering a correspondingly open
response to it. Boundedness of course creates a distinction, between inside and outside,
between coherence and decoherence, whereas the desire for unhampered access, hates
to leave anything out, and this is a position that Hejinian compares to that of Faust and his
rage to know… in which, as long as we keep hearing words, we are convinced there is a
meaning somewhere. Does this create a situation similar to Barad’s politics of subject
formation? Caught between the tensions of lurking ambiguity and maximal excitation, or
sympathy and antipathy, love and strife, the sort of tensions that are so generative that
they can create mandalas, patterns within patterns, sacred as well as secular, but they can
also tear everything down. Is this all to do with keeping the sacred off the radiator?
Hejinian speaks about a reconciliation of the poles as suspended between an Eden of
categorisation of naming (the slow accretion of separation through taxomony), and what
the anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf calls a vast pattern system, a cosmic premonition
of language, of the unknown, vaster world, something he professes to want to leave
unnamed, a world of hyperspace, of higher dimensions, what the mystic Romain Rolland
called Oceanic Feeling, which he described in a letter to Freud as a feeling of being one
with the external world as a whole, and which Freud attempted to explain away by saying
such a feeling was a residue of the infant not yet being able to differentiate themselves
from the world around them, perhaps reminding us of how we referenced the gravity
stage at the end of last week’s lecture.*

*I’m as of yet undecided what to do with the bulk of notes from this lecture, see Throwing
Stones at Nothing.
Hejinian writes about language as both means and medium for attaining knowledge,
coming to know and coming to love, coherence as it enfolds and clasps decoherence, a
hologrammatic essence I would say, of interconnected part-whole-part relationships, so
close to how we’ve been speaking about water, the medium, means and message of life.
in rome, during the time of varro, there were 278 contradictory opinions concerning true
happiness
If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. Change the story
Joseph Campbell
Let’s now briefly return to Whitehead and his book Science and the Modern World (first
published in 1926), in which he detailed how the mechanical laws that describe objects
with simple location in space and time utterly fail to represent natural processes, arguing
that it is only possible to know and understand nature as an organism, as panexperiential.
Whitehead’s organisms thus include everything from the universe to galaxies, stars,
planets, plants, animals, human beings, bacteria, right down to fundamental particles,
bundles of electromagnetic activities themselves vibratory organisms endowed with a
kind of primal consciousness that experience their environment in acts of prehensile
unification. Not only is nature an all-encompassing electromagnetic super-organism then,
but the knower (they who seek to know and are knowing) is also an electromagnetic
organism maximally sensitive and responsive, fully engaged in mind and body, intellect
and feeling, to other organisms, ultimately to all the cosmos.

In an interview with Chloe Zimmerman about her book, A Treatise on Stars, Mei Mei
Berssenbrugge says that she was writing about stars and how to join the stars and the
earth as one ecosystem. Somehow the stars have gotten separated from us and our
articulation of stars is as these gigantic physical processes. Berssenbrugge assumes that
there are gestalts of spirit and gestalts of soul in the heavens just as much as human being
is a gestalt of spirit, that interstellar gas is shared soil, and as Zimmerman says of
Berssenbrugge’s poems, everything seen establishes relation. It’s interesting, thinking
back to sound as an individual event, as Whitehead says that in reality, everything is an
event… Entanglement wasn’t ‘discovered’ until three years after Whitehead died, but he
was very familiar with Einstein, whose work propelled him into metaphysics in part
because he believed the quantum revolution, even in its early stages, already dismantled
the mechanistic worldview. Whitehead subsequently developed a metaphysical
substructure to envelop the spaces between quantum and common sense experience,
leading him to feel that nature was a web of events in a process of complexity tilted
toward beauty, where every event inherits a past and participates in a future… cohering,
to once again quote Mei Mei, the dynamic quanta of infinity, so travel is easy.
O’Callaghan’s understanding of sound as an individual event gives us a chance to cohere
certain contradictions that can manifest when trying to bring together sensible,
imaginative and perceptive realities (soul making as making soul). In order to travel these
layers (with the ease of Mei Mei) we need to, as Tarnas, Kimmerer and others remind us,
listen to other sources of wisdom, to our dreams, stars, intuitions, minerals, plants and
animals, correcting the one sidedness, of our narrow consciousness, embracing night and
day, solar and lunar consciousness… we need to listen to the cosmos in the world, to
subtle patterns expressed in synchronicities, the marvelous, subtle energies, someone
more than an individual event. Any alteration in the human psyche resonates with a
change in the psyche of the world, an immediate intimacy with which our heart is in
rapport like a watching animal, the blood of archetypal mind, reasonances in which to be
is also to be perceived. We recall asking the question, how might vibration perceive us?
We are aesthetically breathed in with the anima mundi, the ensouled world, as images in
the heart of hologrammatic being.

If we think back to the life fields of trees, studied by Saxton Burr, we might consider that
soul is a situational kinship figuration, a self-tuning, detuning zodiac, a concentric and
eccentric orbit in which molecules perceive each other through electromagnetic fields,
reasonating with shared energies. All molecules have their own spectrums of vibrational
frequencies, imagine that we are as sensitive to the fields of other organisms as we are to
the fields of the Sun and the Earth, even distant stars, all without our conscious
knowledge. There is increasing evidence that clusters of galaxies and stars are
interconnected in plasma current circuits spanning hundreds of millions of light years,
perhaps then, galaxies and stars also intercommunicate by electromagnetic fields of
intergalactic dimensions. Participation in this sense can be felt, not as something that
abstracts us from the world, but as guiding us more directly through soul, necessitating an
animated language of generosity, where words are also mythological beings, with electric,
spinning little faces.

I am impossibly indebted to Robin Wall Kimmerer, Isabelle Stengers, Mae Wan Ho, Mary
Midgely, Carl Jung, Lynn Margulis, Kelly Krumrie, James Oschman, Nisha Ramayya, Mei
Mei Berssenbrugge, Jacek Smolicki, Joan Slonczewski, James Hillman, Mary Ruefle, Stefan
Helmreich, Ursula Le Guin, Kelda White, Richard Tarnas, and to all the participants over
the last two years of on vibration. These are the long lasting intimacies of strangers, and
regardless of whether sound does or does not move, we can still intuit, listen, and imagine
with kin in living compost.