Tag: underwater

Holler

From an undersea expanse.

It started above ground. Then we

worked the present’s peace, as

the storm and life went on until

the whole story was underwater.

The lens moved to track the current,

the coral, its choral lives. The lens

was intelligent. It saw us. We

looked back, our entire lives

before us, now beyond speech,

the brave vessels of our knocking

hearts still moving by the word. 

We held new names inside us,

hinting at what we were and to

what we were being returned. 

Down we went. At last, 

there was no time before this

but our remembrance, and some

would make trespass of memory

holding it close, would hear its

first utterance in the water, like

Mother            even now, in

this constant dusk the day 

still breaking in my––– 

But she said:

                        Hush,

don’t speak to me of

souls. Not here, at this

late hour. Only hold.

Soundscapes

Dreaming with echolocation.

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.