11 MAR 2019 07:18:57
the japanese word 'mo' means 'and'. in bashō it is used to link one thing with another: idea – object – observation – sound –
the function of 'mo', like 'and' is perhaps quite open. in bashō it seems it can indicate a sequence in time, a juxtaposition of images, or a concise way to convey experiences of thinking, as elements from the surroundings are received/assembled. it makes a list.
where 'mo' links sounds in the hokku form, it places them together in a field, creating a resonating device. successive sounds may mask the sounds before, but only partially or temporarily: they stay there, available to be re-activated, so that reading them (back and forth) is something like playing a sampler or series of recordings. mo has a flattening effect. in the list, all the elements have an equal weight. the hokku of bashō evoke the democratic soundscape of the omidirectional microphone. this effect can be understood / explicated with a new software instument [which Max just made], which causes all sounds played on a cello to emerge from a speaker at the same amplitude.
[you hear a plane go over, you seem to forget for a moment the sounds of the woodpigeons calling and clattering in the tops of the branches. the light is bright and their grey and purple plumage takes on its particular sheen. one woodpigeon is bowing repeatedly before another, ducking its head or bowing its whole big body, alternately plump and lithe. a plane goes over and the sounds are masked, temporarily. a woodpecker flies in to the top of the Ailanthus altissima and it temporarily occludes the plane.]
[these sounds appear to return, after interruption, in a burst, as if with extra energy]
[a freight train passes. its engine strokes appear in pairs, loud then soft, passing eventually out of earshot. it seems to come from another world or time – remote prairies – 15 August 2023 10:16]
by initially levelling the field of attention, different objects are enabled to emerge (float up) which otherwise are [more or less] systematically overlooked, forgotten, turned down, assigned to secondary status or irrelevance. this (floating) effect (of microphones, softwares, listening tactics) counters the habitual grading associated with tightly edited argumentation.
the bashō texts are curious, in this sense, perhaps: despite rigorous formal constraints, crafting, compression, elements in them are still touched by the partly random quality of perception and indeterminacy of thinking. within them, a small number of objects inter-operate above, we can say maybe electronically, a floating ground
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the tide comes in and the tide goes out. the tide of the west indian ocean creeps in over the long long reefs at shangani in mtwara, tanzania and it mixes without masking the sounds of s breathing in sleep. [field recording, shangani 17-6-11]
[this transition is about the way, as the ocean comes in, it partly registers. it partly overlays the sounds of the land - washing dishes in the small sink, wind shushing in the palm leaves – without replacing or muting them entirely. this interchange is recalled as a pattern of thinking and the way thoughts arrive across time and space as sounds]
[field recording shangani 17-6-11 is a recording of a child sleeping. this time it is sasha, whose breathing can be heard over the sounds of the incoming water. this listening opens, you can say, immediately onto questions of vulnerability. as such it is goes with 'sam breathing, sa riera' as an object or work that opens from the domestic onto a wider world, where matter, sound, safety are not evenly distributed. this comes, perhaps, also from the experience of staying by the shore of the West Indian Ocean, which also appears as a vast opening and zone of contact with histories and geographies that escape encapsulation. you always think of washing up at that small steel sink, with the small splashing sounds made by your hands in the sink, together with the sounds of the wind off the ocean, watching people fishing in canoes on the edge of the distant shimmering reef, hearing the sea coming in. that metonymn extends perhaps also to the small reverberant devices that are being imagined with the poems of Bashō, which also alternate between a sense of internal organisation, and opening to the outside of which they are a part, the way bare life is sometimes said to originate as a kind of pump, with ions passing across aqueous membranes of a cell (Signe Lidén: The intertidal zone)]
each time the tide goes out it exposes the reef to gleaners. for maritime shipping the focus is on the level of the tides, conveyed by vertical charts. for gleaners, migrating birds using the exposed reefs to feed, crab plovers, perhaps for [the] fishers [working in canoes along the seaward edges of the reef], the extent of the [intervening] flats is the thing that makes the difference: it is their areas of interest. less well demarcated than the tide level, which can be more or less accurately defined [although subject to its own set of approximations – although the water is never still – it's always rising and falling at different scales – in swells, waves, ripples, ruffles, minute perturbations], the extent of the tidal flats is harder to pin down: even as the water flows away, it leaves pools, damp patches, rivulets, ephemeral channels, creating temporary bars and hollows. the resulting margins are highly divided, frilled, multiply indented, not easy to trace
[impossible to keep or give an accurate account of]
[driven by the moon, creating unstable relations with solar rhythms, not easy for inexperienced people to predict]
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On the evening of 5 February 2004, at least 21 Chinese illegal immigrants were drowned by an incoming tide at Morecambe Bay in North West England, while harvesting cockles off the Lancashire coast. Fifteen other labourers from the same group managed to return safely to shore.
During the investigation and trial, it emerged that the labourers were inexperienced, spoke little or no English and were unfamiliar with the area.
David Anthony Eden Sr. and David Anthony Eden Jr., a father and son from England, had allegedly arranged to pay a group of Chinese workers £5 per 25 kg (9p per lb) of cockles.[3][4] The workers had been trafficked via containers into Liverpool, and were hired out through local criminal agents of international Chinese triads. The cockles to be collected are best found at low tide on sand flats at Warton Sands, near Hest Bank. Some 30 cockle pickers set out at 4 pm.[3] The favoured area for cockle picking is close to the low tide line near the confluence of the Keer Channel and the Kent Channel, approximately 3.5 kilometres (2.2 mi) north of Morecambe.[2] The Chinese workers were unfamiliar with local geography, language, and custom. They were cut off by the incoming tide in the bay around 9:30 p.m. The workers were all illegal immigrants, mainly from the Fujian province of China, and have been described as being untrained and inexperienced.[5]
The emergency services were alerted by a mobile phone call made by one of the workers, who spoke little English and was only able to say "sinking water" before the call was cut off.
The Morecambe Bay cockling disaster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morecambe_Bay_cockling_disaster
Accessed 15 August 2023
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those shellfish workers are not dressed like david attenborough. they're wearing cheap plastic boots and layers of hand-me-down clothes. you think of Walter Benjamin, trying to walk over the Pyrenees into Spain with a heart condition, in a suit, holding a satchel with the manuscript of the Arcades Project. even those paths, you think, are old paths and they are cultural ways. even that manuscript is travelling precariously on trodden routes. even the ocean has its seaways, we know from the wanderer. the wanderer stirs the water of the seaways with an oar. the mud, you think, has no such ways - it resists memory in the usual ways, it erases as it extends
exposure to alternative metrics - fuzzy logics of the (constant) gradual exposure and (re)veiling of great expanses of the intertidal zone
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[allerdings [Monaí's favorite word, she said], nevertheless, you think now, you are adding, there is deep knowledge of these zones eg the mud flats in Morecambe Bay, and there were other cocklers there who tried to warm [sic] the Chinese workers, who were fatally unprepared and had been told the wrong time for High Tide, and had no chance or adequate equipment to save themselves or be saved. even the mudflats, zones which in some ways seem to escape categories and markers, are areas of particular experiences, collective research, ways of working. there is cultural transmission going on, just as birds of successive generations seem to cross great distances on habitual routes. ]
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material (mud) is not evenly distributed or experienced. these emulsions speak of how people are drawn into the environments in which they find themselves. they come into viscous contacts which can give up a livelihood or set in motion a disastrous collapse of life support. that group were unable to contact help because they could not access the coastguard. they had low battery or credit. when they did get through their call was not understood. it was too late. they were engulfed. the call operator could not understand them. they had accents. the tide came in quickly. they could not move quickly across the mud. they were fatally encumbered. they couldn't swim. they couldn't survive in that system which for them turned out to be a lethal illegible interworking of extractive labour, border controls and environmental flows.
it's so cold and windy on the NW coast of cumbria. the wind blows relentlessly with no shelter. the water is freezing.
shorebirds stand in the shallow water sleeping. they come to rest after long migrations. too tired even to feed, to plunge their beaks into the mud, they stand sleeping in the shallow water by the edge of the bay. others, highly insulated, float on the surface of the sea without losing warmth. [eiders – their calls like woo-oo, woo-oo, rising. Sarah Dalrymple used to imitate them, standing on that gravel spit on Walney Island, curving back like a finger toward Morecambe Bay]
as those things come to you across patches of time and open spaces, they do not fall into ready-made containers or lend themselves to sorting out. they mix unresolvedly in your mind ]among you[
15 AUG 2023 12:33:41