I am going with the divers. To immerse myself in their world, so to speak. The landscape: evanescent jellies over shadowy blue-green depths. Spider crabs over brown boulders. Sound bubbles murmuring like echoes of the lost continent. Muffled pings of distant sonar. Voices of the others, recording as I am now.
We used to play a game in pools. We called it see if you can tell what I am saying. We’d face one another underwater through goggles and the speaker would shout-scream, making exaggerated facial movements. We would interrupt ourselves with eruptions of laughter, come up coughing, decide in unison: try again.
Observations: submerged in this cylindrical ship, we become a collective cyborg. Once called the silent world, it becomes sonorous, an exercise in transduction. Transduce: to alter the physical nature of a signal; to convert variations in one medium into corresponding variations in another medium. Accoustemology: a sonic way of being.
It has been observed that in rural France, the circumference of a village could be defined by the reach of reverberating church bells.
And what are we doing here? If vision is for surfaces, hearing is for the interior. I think we are all here waiting for the sounds of the bells we missed, that we might gain access to a village we haven’t yet imagined.
We are listening. We hope that when we hear it, we will know.
***
Inspired by something I was wondering about last night, related to dreams and echolocation, which led me to Stefan Helmreich’s 2007 article in American Ethnologist, An Anthropologist Underwater: Immersive Soundscapes, Submarine Cyborgs, and Transductive Ethnography. I am intrigued by Helmreich’s idea for an anthropological take on the ecosystem within a submarine.
If town boundaries are defined by an auditory fence, those of us with hearing loss are destined to live outside of the community. Fitting as it feels that way, anyway.
This is a great point, Jeff. I am constantly compelled to wonder over these biases inherent in so many perceived norms which exclude and compromise connection in any number of ways. No doubt this is part of what draws me consistently to these underwater spaces.
The way you write about just anything and make it more interesting is amazing. I feel you could make any topic interesting. Thank you.
I appreciate your presence so much, Gamelihle. Thank you.