I’m wondering how it is possible to listen to data a bit more. I’ve never been entirely opposed to listening to the violence and change possible on our planet in that I’ve long been a fan of the concept of what is ‘probably the loudest piece of music ever written’, Jón Leif’s Hekla. It was a musical volcano, meant to approximate an eruption of the Hekla volcano the composer witnessed in 1947. To convey the indescribable, unquantifiable, un-writable sense of volcanic eruption the composer wrote the score for unattainable or unplayable instruments like massive church bells and rapidly repeating shotguns. The musicians had to make do with rocks and ships’ chains and steel tubing from the Reykjavik dockyards for the 1964 premier of the piece. It was loud but I would argue that it was not noise, which in data terms is defined as meaningless. There can be music in the seismic signals and internal shifts of the planet, I know this from the seismologist I drank with in my prior post. Our environmental data are starting to get louder. It is not noise, either. Just take a look at this intriguing and somehow pleasurable (though it shouldn’t be) project out of the University of Minnesota if you haven’t seen it yet: a student put Northern Hemisphere temperatures since 1880 to music. We can, indeed, listen to our data.

Do we record and focus upon the wrong things while trying to understand the Earth in our era of environmental anxiety? I wonder about this. The sciences are vitally important, but I am thinking I might also be well served in taking physical geology lessons from Björk. She’s marvelous at explicating crystal formations, plate tectonics, or volcanic landscapes in that she clearly annunciates the way that each human life is joined to that of the Earth. Our biographies and that of the planet are tangled together. This is not insignificant and is not outside of either an art museum’s remit or scientific inquiry. Science, whether of the social or harder versions, can be ecopoetic. Our data are lyrical, given the source material.

In The Man with the Compound Eyes: A Novel by Wu Ming-Yi, an earthquake causes a tsunami of plastic to crash upon the coast of Taiwan. The plastics are from one of the five garbage vortexes/plastic gyres/anthropogenic moral quagmires currently circulating in our oceans. The gyres are described in the novel as tragicomic: in a garbage vortex you can find everything you’ve ever thrown away in your life. The TV film crews in Taiwan to record the tsunami’s landfall missed the sound of it entirely. They were too intent upon filming a freak hail storm that preceded it. The Compound Eyes book details other noises from the Earth. None of them are recorded or quantifiable. A team blasting a tunnel is haunted by the sounds of giant, telluric footsteps as they remove the core of a mountain. The ocean is described as sounding different in each place on earth and hence navigable by someone attuned to listen closely enough from the bottom of a boat rather than above deck.

Indigenous refugees without boats cling to the vortex plastic in Wu Ming-Yi’s book, using it as a life raft. It makes me think of the natural ‘rafts’ made from pumice found decades after the cataclysmic tsunamis in 1883 from the volcanic eruption of Krakatau off the coast of Java. There were skeletons on them. Unnatural plastic rafts with living people, natural pumice rafts with dead people…..there’s something there my brain is trying to disentangle but can’t. I instead think of what it must have been like to hear the 1883 Krakatau eruption. It was the loudest sound ever heard in modern history, so loud ‘that it’s inching up against the limits of what we mean by “sound” ’. The sound signified the death of at the very, very least 36,000 people but other estimates are of many multiples of that number. We will never know.

This ‘natural’ photo that I took of the shattered bits of the former Krakatau crater is a lie. It obscures the vast tangle of plastics.

I camped at the newly growing ‘child of Krakatau’ – the living, growing center of the prior crater – for a few nights with a group of volcanologists. The experience was surprisingly not disconcerting. Instead, there was something strangely spellbinding to it and its monitor lizards and toxic degassing and ominous scatter of volcanic bombs. I better understood a line from Michel Serres’ The Natural Contract when he unexpectedly felt joy in an earthquake while in Palo Alto rather than terror. The shores of the shattered Krakatau crater fragments, now islands, are lined thickly with pumice from the 1883 disaster. The pumice is completely choked with plastics. Most of them were linked to human comfort – personal items like toothbrushes and deodorants and creams – yet signify a coming species-wide discomfort. I tried taking photos of the volcanic landscape without the garishness of the plastics and began to realize that was not only futile but also dishonest. The prior disaster and the future one are snarled together there. It’s not a comfortable sound. We should probably listen.

Concentric circles of the local to the larger ripple out from a megapolis like New York. The unnatural and natural are tangled in them.

I live across the street from a garment sweatshop. They make ball gowns and on delivery days dresses wrapped in plastic and bound for department stores are sent fluttering on rope down to the street, six floors below. I’d say they look like birds as they fall but they look like nothing I’ve ever seen so that wouldn’t be true. It is strangely beautiful to watch. The workers are all women. Sometimes there is also a cat that will sit on a fire escape. I never see the women arrive or leave. I wonder if they sleep there from the low glimmer of a television late at night. I watch their labor during the day as I work from my desk. At times we catch one another, co-gazing at the Other. The women smile a little when they see me seeing them, which confuses me as I am conditioned to think of a sweatshop as a place of misery. 

At the end of the street there was once a pond fed by fresh springs. It is now a concrete covered park. As the city grew in the 17th century the Lenape people were pushed aside. The pond was filled with the run off from tanneries and slaughterhouses mixed with laundering suds and dead cats and dogs. In 1803 the decision was made to bury it in soil, though it refused to disappear so people were paid to dump their garbage in it. For one shining moment the area was fashionable but then the fill began to stink and release methane gas and the middle class fled. It became Five Points, the first great slum of the United States. It, in turn, was razed for The Tombs, an infamous prison based on an ancient Egyptian mausoleum. Any building put on the land sinks and sags and is torn down. A plaque states that ‘the city displaced nature’, but displaced nature refused to truly leave. The water continues to come back, just as it did in Superstorm Sandy when the landfilled portions of Manhattan again submerged.

On my desk I have a copy of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins by Anna Tsing. She delves into the natural, the commodity chain, and the global through the lens of fungus. She urges ‘collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth’. She details a mushroom that is said to be the first life to spring from Hiroshima’s devastation. Near my desk I have a mushroom farm in a box. The spores sprang to fresh life and thrived but perhaps I should have plucked them and cooked them days ago because they have started to look wooden and dry. They are beginning to decay. Is it natural, this ‘organic mushroom mini farm’ wrapped in plastic? As natural as we ourselves are, I suppose. The raw materials of capitalism are of course what we call nature, and we are ourselves part of that material.

Those concentric circles? They are not the meditative ones from pebbles tossed into a lake. They are diopter sight lines that look both forward and backward, future and past.