The following offers a brief account of the ways in which I was gently pushed and pulled by the reading this week. Movement seems a good place to start this rendering, given that tide prediction is of central importance for coastal navigation. This is a very small “sample” of one of the many currents that I felt moved by and moved through me as I followed Helmreich’s invitation to “channel- surf”( 2009:25) his travelogue of the microbial sea.
I stare at the spine of anthropologist Stefan Helmreich’s ethnography, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas, which is tucked neatly amongst some other books stacked on the corner of my desk. It stares back at me, waiting for a response. My eyes are caught by the jelly fish’s body that is partial hidden under the white crisp font of the book’s title, its iridescent body is suspended in a stretched pose that wraps around the spine of the book. I am carried away, and get carried away by, imaging the experience of touching, feeling the soft and smooth but structured weight of the small clear jelly fishes that commonly live in the shallow Pacific Ocean waters. For me Jelly fish are imponderable beings, so abstractly beautiful in color, shape and undulating movement that they almost are aestheticized in such a way that they slip right out of the category of animal. Indeed, it is these bodies that most acutely stretch across and bend time; they seem to slide between alien life form and ancient animal form, collapsing the past into the present. These bodies hover somewhere where between genomic ghost and unearthly other. Helmreich’s point “that the taxonomy and politics of alien and native species are slippery” ( 2009:26) has worked its way into my experiences of the sea.
I think about jelly fishes awhile longer……………..
Have you ever touched one? Or been touched by one? The ones with color in their bodies sting, the purple ones especially hurt if you rub up aginst them or make the mistake of picking them up out of their watery homes. I have an affinity for the clear medium sized ones; the type that wash up amongst the sea cucumbers and shells during low tide and reconfigure the shores sand into a place prime for touching and collecting oceanic and non oceanic life forms.
Growing up next to “the beach” in Victoria a favorite activity of my brother and I was to head down to the waters during low tide and scavenge the remains left behind by the tides; a wandering that usually culminated in a jelly fish fight or wiping each other with sea cucumbers. Surfing along and anchored in the pages of Helmrich’s work, I can’t help now but think of these adventures as engaging in a type of labour practice not dissimilar to that of the large ocean linear’s that he describes as transporting sea creatures; moving them from “one place to another”. In a way, on a smaller scale I participated in- by acting as a vehicle of transportation- in the formation of these global swells. Helmrich citing, and building upon the work of Arjun Appaduri’s points out that, “The language of “flows,” however, widely adopted in studies of globalizations, often consigns to the background the vehicles that allow such movement to take place” ( 2009: 147). This point draws a sharp breath out of me now, as I stare around my living room, taking in the shells, rocks and bits of drift wood I have collected and taken from the various points in the B.C. coast line over the years, dragging them back in suit cases to my home here in Toronto.
What is it about these forms that compelled me to collect them up and display them?
This museum of objects displayed neatly in my living room are more than neutral items on display, they are mimetic devices, what Levi- Struass in his work, Two Approaches to Studying Myths, aptly dubbed “totemic operators”. I often use these objects to “think with” to tell an “origin story” about who I am and where I am from; the West coast. I feel tangled and moored in the ocean in ways that are too thick to neatly parse out. I am inside the ways I touch and have been touched by the Pacific Ocean, even at the risk of participating in the narrative traditions that are overly romantic about the sea. It is a self conscious journey of sorts where I move between Helmreich’s account and my past experiences, which are being re-worked by his description.
I leave the jelly fish and the beach for a moment………and return to my living room. I walk over to my book shelves.
Perhaps tellingly my pirated sea treasures are positioned next to my books- scattered and rubbing up against- spine on spine. This point of literal contact between the ocean and the literary world offers another movement. It a point of convergences that extends on and draws other forces into the process that move the tide; tidal phenomena after all, are not limited to the oceans, but occur in other systems whenever a gravitational field that varies in time and space is present. Akin to Benjamin, who unpacks his library as a way of seeing the world and the micro biologist who catalogue and sequence microbial forms, both of whom appear inside of Helmreich’s work ( 2009:61). I think about the fate of this book; I wonder where will I place this ethnography? Who is it that lives amongst Helmreich’s work? What histories swirl about and give the book form?
I return to the description Helmreich offer us of himself, sitting and picking through colonies inside the lab. Sitting working he looks into a dish containing a sample taken from Hawaiian waters and, “sees each well as a Russian Doll” ( 2009:60). The image of the Russian doll returns me to earlier readings of the course. Book in hand I scan my book self, skimming past the work of Richard Dawkins till I find, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity, by François Jacob. In his seminal treatise Jacob while grappling with systems of life inside the emerging field of molecular biology, notes that, “there is not one single organization of the living, but a series of organizations fitted into one another like nests of boxes or Russian dolls. Within each, another is hidden” (Jacob 1981: 16). For now I will place Helmriech’s richly detailed ethnography next to François Jacob on my bookshelf.
- All of the photos are of, Gonzales Bay, Victoria, B.C., and were taken by me Dec. 2009.
I like that you pulled out that russian dolls quote, whose reference to Jacob is no doubt intentional. While reading, it led my mind to wander about the layered metaphors that recur in many readings and popular notions of how knowledge is formed. processes of ‘discovery’ peeling back layers of onions, opening russian dolls, digging through archaeologies and genealogies, spiraling up- or down-ward into the infinitely small or the infinitely large (someday I will locate the specific source of that image, I associate it with Pascal… anyone?). Helmreich’s unearths these movements and links them together, explicitly pulling the ends together from alien outer space to microbial spaces, deep space to the spaces of the deep…. In the seas, it seems less about the digging than the surfacing, just as you dive in here, into your associations of the Pacific and sea life, then surface again in your home, with your artifacts. (nice)
You made a rhizome with the ocean!
Seriously, I think the parallels with the sort of ‘carrying the ocean with you’ that Helmreich describes toward the end of the text are really interesting – your rendering suggests a dimension of external artifacts that one who’s lived in proximity to the ocean carries along with themselves, in addition to the saltwater and microbes that make up the majority of our selves…
Great post, I love the idea of coupling the oceanic and the textual.
Growing up near the ocean I too had similar pastimes! I loved going down to the beach (though picture rocky shores as opposed to sandy ones) to check out the kinds of stuff the tides would carry in–fishing net buoys, bicycles, crabs and urchins, jellyfish and snails and once I even found a message in a bottle. The ocean was a infinite source of surprises…(you’re quite right Drew, it is less about the digging and more about the surfacing).
But it was also a place of death. Drowned dogs, beached whales, dolphins trapped in ice floes, people lost at sea and never ever found (freaky), people drowning (Newfoundland has the highest amounts of drowning per capita–double the national average). And sometimes the sea would just grab people and pull them in (rogue waves!). The waves are volatile and precarious. There’s no telling what could happen if someone stood too close to it. Of course I never swam in the ocean either–it was too damn cold. The first time I swam in the ocean was when I visited the gulf islands of British Columbia and was enamored by the temperature of the water. Not warm, but not freeze-your-bones chilly. Thus the ocean for me was always a scary, inhospitable place, and that perhaps explains why I don’t carry its artifacts with me. I don’t have a desire to touch it, or make its materials mine.
However I will say I carry something from the ocean with me, and that’s the sound. The rhythm of the waves is something I wish I heard more often, and I imagine the tide whenever I’m having trouble falling asleep or in desperate need to relax. And this makes me think back to the Kuriyama reading about rhythm and heartbeats, and the sounds of life.