Cedar Roppola

‘The shape of water that can carry its own story’ (or, how a molecule becomes a river and a body becomes water). Dr Alana Brekelmans

1. A Russian literary theorist formulates a typology of narrative time-space[1]. Time-space is what gives narrative meaning. It mediates reader expectations, lends events, in relation to other events, the qualities that let us know when we should laugh or cry. One form of narrative time-space, he argues, is mythic or folkloric time. This is a cyclical structure, resistant to teleology and linearity. It’s marked by a familiar strangeness: events in a place that could be here but not now. Then there is the time of metamorphosis. In these adventures in the everyday, where the boundaries between self and other are flimsy, we shapeshift around crisis.

2. An artist tells me they are working on a project about myth, time, and water. I look at the paintings, the fleshy forms dancing by the river, their bodies contorted in bliss or agony or mimicry of the water itself. I joke that it’s like Norman Lindsay’s sprites got fucked up and had an eco-existential crisis. But this is no horny fantasy of leering satyrs and vulnerable nymphs. It’s not the kind of myth that can easily be compared or made to fit within a typology. Instead, the artist tells me about ‘the shape of water that can carry its own story’.

3. A woman changes into a pike to escape an unwanted marriage[2]. She slips into the water and becomes the water she always already was. When her would-be husband catches her on his line, he does not recognise her. She slips from his grasp and mocks him. He never could see the real her.

4. Some wounds keep a different time, take on a diffuse shape, carry story in a way that resists form and structure. Old-school theorists talk about a shocking event that the brain does not register, a period of latency, then a return, where what did not register initially ruptures into the present moment[3]. But this fails to fully explain the slow accrual of events that pile up as part of the everyday within violent colonial, capitalist, and patriarchal structures: the way these subtle violences of business-as-usual archive in bodies, places, and things[4]. Sometimes it grows into a feeling of a great big stretched-out present, where one finds oneself in a place without genre, ‘flailing’, ‘dogpaddling around a space whose contours remain obscure’[5]. In other instances, the wound makes the genre. It is something that cannot be contained but is embodied, always already in relation, shaped by other times, other bodies[6]. See it? That wound, that story, holding so much, pressing up against some other, taking on new forms?

5.  

6. The dancers warp time, make the present strange. They are tumbled soft and smooth as driftwood by water that can yield or be forceful, give or take life. What is it to feel oneself as fluid, shaped by that which is fluid, as it relates to the surfaces around it? How do our personal archives, our bodily myths, transmute and transubstantiate? What inward or outward alchemy is this?

7. An old fish swims past two younger fish, greeting them as he goes: ‘Morning, how good is the water today?’ The young fish keep swimming for a while in silence. Then one turns to the other and says, ‘What the hell is water?’ It’s an old joke[7], usually told as a lesson in attention, about how often the most familiar things, such as the environments we are surrounded by, are those that are hardest to see. But what if one pays so much attention that the water itself disappears? What the hell is water, but two hydrogen atoms bound to an oxygen atom, flowing in and out of bodies, carrying with it other bodies, other chemical compounds, other stories, carrying dissolved oxygen that passes through the membranes of a young fish’s gill filaments directly into the bloodstream, then, with oxygen removed, is pushed out from under the gill cover to mingle with all that other water?

8. The butoh dancer journeys in excess of any simple mythic structure. The dance is not a redemptive hero’s journey, not only a descent into the underworld and back. It is an emptying into darkness outside of time and space, outside of genre, an art of becoming[8]: becoming water, becoming stone, becoming driftwood. As viewers, we too are becoming-with[9].

9.  Feminist philosophers write that human bodies are not self-contained, discrete, or bounded. They are fluid, leaky, porous, watery things: ‘Blood, bile, intracellular fluid; a small ocean swallowed, a wild wetland in our guts; rivulets forsaken making their way from our insides to out, from watery womb to watery world’[10]. The body drinks, bleeds, sweats, kisses, weeps, pisses, breathes, fucks—exchanging all manner of fluid in cycles with other porous bodies, the earth, and air[11]. In a world of intra-action[12] and lively matter[13], we are bound up in more-than-human, planetary, hydrological cycles. Even the most human of activities extends across vast temporal scales and entangles other beings[14], with ancient minerals in the drinking water, forever chemicals leaching into creek beds, groundwater-dwelling amoebae flushed up nasal passages, gases trapped in ice cores[15]. If we take it seriously, this transcorporeality, there’s an ethical demand to respond to violence with embodied and relational care[16], a set of practices to transform with a transforming world[17].

10. Country asks you to rethink time. This place has its own time, and we come to the edges of its waters, knowing it has long held its own stories and transformed its own grief, even if they might be unknowable to us. There we are, all of us, dancing with our wounds, shapeshifting into some other kin, becoming in relation.

11. An exhibition invites us to think-with emergence. Can we stay present to complexity? Can we imagine the ways a collective might produce properties the single component did not have[18]? Can we move as if things were dynamic processes of becoming, stretching in all temporal directions[19]? There’s a classic example of emergence: a single water molecule is not wet. When billions of H2O molecules come together, there are properties of liquidity, surface tension, and wetness. But I’m no scientist or philosopher, just someone standing in front of an artwork, a dance, a becoming. What it tells me is that water with no fixed form shapes stone, carries its own story, teaches us to grow around wounds, to be in a body becoming other bodies, demands that we act, within this time out of time, as if the future mattered.

[1] Bakhtin, M. M. 1981 [1937–38]. ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’. In The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by M. Holquist, translated by C. Emerson and M. Holquist, 84–258. Austin: University of Texas Press.

[2] Loosely after a poem in The Kalevala. See Lönnrot, E. 1963 [1849]. The Kalevala, or Poems of the Kaleva District, translated by F. P. Magoun Jr. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

[3] Caruth, C. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press; Laplanche, J. 1992. 'Notes on Afterwardsness'. In Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation, Drives, edited by J. Fletcher and M. Stanton, translated by M. Stanton, 217–223. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts.

[4] Cvetkovich, A. 2003. An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.

[5] Berlant, L. 2011. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 199.

[6] Singh, J. 2018. No Archive Will Restore You. punctum books.

[7] Told most famously in Wallace, D. F. 2009. This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. New York: Little, Brown and Company. There is an irony to this citation, I know.

[8] Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari. 1987 [1980]. '1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible'. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by B. Massumi, 232–309. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[9] Haraway, D. J. 2016. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.

[10] Neimanis, A. 2017. Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury, p. 1.

[11] Alaimo, S. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[12] Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.

[13] Bennett, J. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press.

[14] Alaimo 2010.

[15] Neimanis, A. and R. Loewen Walker. 2014. ‘Weathering: Climate Change and the “Thick Time” of Transcorporeality’. Hypatia 29 (3): 559–575.

[16] Puig de la Bellacasa, M. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

[17] Åsberg, C., R. Koobak and E. Johnson. 2011. ‘Beyond the Humanist Imagination’. NORA – Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19 (4): 218–230.

[18] Deacon, T. W. 2011. Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter. New York: W. W. Norton.

[19] brown, a. m. 2017. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds. Chico: AK Press.