Incidents (of Travel)

“Centuries ago, before language, in villages that were surrounded by deep forests, the adults would take the children to the edge of that forest and pinch their ear, just enough so that it really hurt. This allowed for the children to roam freely up to the barrier of what was considered the safe ground, there on that border they would feel pain and cease their adventuring.”

This is the story that Lucy narrated to me in the car on our way south out of Hobart as we headed towards Margate. Although she brought it up in answer to a question I had posed to her about myth-making – she said she had read it in Martin Warnke’s book the Political Landscape. The Art History of Nature (2004) – in hindsight, I feel she was forewarning me about the day ahead.

She was to take me to the cardinal edges of the city, but instead of pinching my ear at each site, Lucy thrust me outward, or deeply inward. Urging me to follow her line of thinking, we spent the day encircling the outer limits of human understanding by visiting the histories, both past and present, of attempts to reach beyond our sensory capacities through governance, technology, and reverie.

As we drift from site to site, from subject to subject, from object to object, I am reminded of an adventure Lucy and I embarked on two years ago to Bruny Island, off the south-eastern coast of Tasmania. French philosopher, anthropologist, and sociologist Bruno Latour was visiting Australia at the time, and since I have island hopped with Bruno before, and since I’ve never known him to say no to a field trip that involves traveling to “critical zones” with scientists and artists, I knew it would not take much convincing to get him down to Tasmania in conjunction with Ensayos. After our days on Bruny, impeccably organized by Lucy, and with the stellar and erudite company of Greg Lehman (Doctor in Art History and descendant of the Trawulwuy people of North East Tasmania), Peter Hay (poet and geographer) and Denise Milstein (sociologist and writer), Bruno, Denise and I challenged each other to write descriptions of Lucy’s fascinating face. Here is my go:

Morning Attempt at Describing a Face (written on March 7th, 2016)

“A darling countenance; propped so delicately on top a slender body it appears to float into the room. Its loftiness is certainly exacerbated by the frothiness of the long black curls that surround the equilateral triangular constellation, formed by the two iridescent eyes and the definitively small, sharp chin. Clear, yet freckle stained, those feline-like eyes sit uncannily wide apart and mesmerize everyone who stumbles upon their gaze. The petite nose crowns the long wide smile that suddenly, sparks the imagination: I see whiskers! Yes, she is the puss in boots… witty, charming, cunning, infinitely attractive.”

Whenever I’m with Lucy I’m invaded by the sense of being in the company of an innocent trickster. She is virtuous with language, quick to laugh, and exhibits copious amounts of savoir-faire. She effortlessly glides us into restricted areas, she comfortably reclines at any odd site, she cares, yet she knows how to let go.

I learn that volcanism has been a passion of Lucy’s since she was a child, but that what excites her today is the combination of seeing the very elemental materiality of rock and understanding its shape shifting form (some types were once a viscous, fluid material that later solidified) in relation to the built environment, to all the other stuff that we create to facilitate our lives. She sees potential in the architectonics of geological structures sitting incongruously beside urban material.

“If we think of the Earth we pretty much presume it to be a stable thing and yet all the evidence is there that it is really not. It’s alive and changing, and volatile and dangerous, and we live with it, and so things like this are evidence of that. It is an artifact of something that is changing,” Lucy tells me.

“Igneous intrusion,” I hear the words repeat in my head.

"I become a laborer. It's a way of picking up skills," she says. And I snap out of the igneous intrusion loop to remember the question I had posed (to which she is now responding): "I am not an expert bricklayer." We both laugh. 

Somehow, somewhere, I had lapsed back to her description of the moment when the Earth intrudes, when “the inside comes out.”

“Look Lucy, it’s listening,” I say.
“Well, it’s detecting. It’s deciphering...allowing us to have a sonic sense of extraterrestrial activity,” she responds.

Lucy is referring to the radio astronomy antenna that registers the Velar Pulsar, a radio-, optical-, X- and gamma-ray emitting pulsar associated with the Vela Supernova Remnant in the constellation of Vela. The Vela pulsar is the brightest persistent object in the high-energy gamma-ray sky.

Every morning, before dawn, Lucy runs down to the waterfront. Once she gets there, no matter what the temperature, she swims out to a point beyond the bounds of this picture. This daily communion with the icy estuarine waters that flow into the southern oceans is a strong image of the tenor of Lucy’s involvement in the life of different fluid bodies. Her impulse is to conjoin interlocking materials, forces, and concepts, including her own fleshy thinking. This is what makes Lucy’s projects pregnant with meaning, bursting at the seams. Her investigations stretch further than the ideas sparked by merely being interested in a “thing”. As she strives to teach herself and others about what lies beyond the knowable, Lucy braves past the liminal space of the coast.

“A thing I’m thinking at the moment is how might I translate that wave into light, so that it becomes visibly represented,” I heard her say before the wind picked up her words and blew them away. She was referring not to the ocean waves, but to the energy waves that bounced back and forth within a meteor when it hit Western Tasmania. These waves, she tells me, “resounded to the point where the whole thing exploded and vaporized and the meteor material (but also the country rock that it is in contact with) melted, and came down in a shower of what are called impactites, or Darwin glass.” A remarkable event, no doubt. One that can surely be explained away by science, but as I glance over Lucy’s desk, I get the sense that she is instead suspending the scientific accounts to privilege other sources of information.

Considering it a miracle.

Miráculo. Mira culo. To look at the anus. If I follow this poetic drift then a definition of miracle would be a result of looking deep within things, in a visceral way. This is different from navel gazing, I think, because there is nowhere to go from the navel. Self-reflexivity is never going to open up, it’s redundant, ineffectual. Where as to look within, beyond the rim of an opening, is to behold a miracle; to cross a threshold, to step through an aperture, to compromise oneself.

Lucy’s recipe for Quince Jelly:
“Pick as many quinces as you need to fill half a large pot.
Rub the quince fuzz off the fruit and rinse well.
Place quinces in pot, add sugar (approximately half the weight of the quinces).
Pour enough water to just cover quinces and sugar.
Bring pot to the boil and cook until the liquid has reduced, is deep red, and wrinkles when a spoonful of it is poured on to a tilted plate after being in the freezer for a few minutes.
Lift the fruit from the pot and save for other recipes.
Strain the liquid through a sieve, then pour into jars.”