– – –

Note: I’ve included a short explanatory note at the end. You may skip down to the note or wait for it (or ignore it entirely).

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On the ground, within a rectangle of light, I observe the construction of a set of towering pylons, hundreds, glinting steel in the light, weld spatter, power – information, communication I can’t see yet.

The site is at a threshold of light and sound, how I depict my planning, what I’ll translate, how the day’s change in light has already changed ahead of me.

Jenny’s at the other end of the pylon line.

I hear her over the radio.

The forest’s razing dulls out all other sound.

The engineers scale the structures deftly: over scaffolding, straddling beams, a few dangle from ropes, tools between their teeth.

Buzzing saws, the crack and shudder of a felled tree, radio static, engineers shouting to those on the ground, the ground’s vibration, shifting gravel, Jenny’s voice through the static, my heartbeat as I look up.

We reach from this lushness into void for what?

When the van drove into the clearing, freshly cut and muddy, the pylons already towering, as I stepped out and away from the van, looking up at the sky and trees where the pylons would be, wind blew through the forest and into the clearing, sweeping through my hair, along my scalp, I could feel it in my ears – change in pressure, coolness – and I could hear it, the world’s newness, the clear sound of it.

In my trailer, Jenny lies on her back mumbling calculations, waving her hands in the air as if writing on a chalkboard or maneuvering virtual images, a gentle twist of her pincer grip could be a period, an incision, a deletion; she rattles off a series of numbers I don’t follow.

A gravel road winds through the forest from the village, climbs the hillside then over it – several lengths, a stretch of time – down the other slope to the pylon line.

The frequency they’ll emit is not a sound necessarily; the construction itself emits a growing resonance: clanging, assembly, voices and saws, wind whistling through the beams, the beams’ contractions, the hum I anticipate, its patterns mapped in my notes and I hear it as I walk the path along the line, I hear our planned frequency, a future vibration, a time when it reaches me, my body walking in time, passing through waves and wind, mist and low clouds, a group of gnats, the inseparability of my representations and what will be – invisible until received by some machine.

How does information manifest outside this observable universe?

If vibration is fieldless, where might we draw the lines, temporary and otherwise, around ourselves and the world?

I listen without my ears: a buzz at the back of my neck, leaning into a sound’s pull, from my neck to my eyes by way of held breath.

When the towers are completed, they’ll be visible from the village, peeking up over the hilltop, the whole length of them, a series of glittering points in the sun or moonlight – though no mechanical lights will blink from their tops, only inside the stations at the bases.

There’s some level of secrecy here – or there’s much.

A sliding scale of discretion.

To the villagers – I hear them as I walk through town – we’re building a power station, a set of pylons for high capacity electrical wires to strengthen the village’s connection to the grid, or worse, to power something large but not yet built: a loud, polluting factory or a secret military site.

Or it’s radar antennae, low or high frequency frameworks; they call the pylons transmitters, steel works; it’s something about signals and bedrock.

In a way, all of this is true, and the truth is I can’t say.

The engineers ground the pylons both for power and for structural stability, drilling deep into the leveled ground.

Electrical engineers, structural engineers, radar specialists, ones I can’t identify in lab coats, welders, day laborers, truck drivers, computer scientists setting up the system sheds at either end of the pylon line where Jenny’s and my trailers are.

We’re the only ones who live here.

The area is a rectangle cut out of woodlands.

When I begin to create a language, I imagine a set of footpaths leading out.

They walk away from a central conceit – a sound, a cluster of letters, a possible syntax – and wind toward one another, or back where they were, to the center, or out farther, to somewhere else, gone from me forever, or I go with that one, walking until it takes me to a new center, a new network.

I walk along these footpaths in my mind and on the ground.

At night, when the engineers have left and the clearing is mostly quiet but for the hum of our generators, Jenny walks a braided path beneath the pylons, weaving between them, reaching out her arm to let her fingertips brush against their bases, and it’s always too dark and I’m too far away to see her face.

A language is a system, a set of rules.

There must be a pattern: something replicable, replicable scaffolding where parts can be plugged in.

A hierarchy, a structure, a tree-form with larger units made from smaller ones, ways they link up, where they can go in relation to one another, fit inside one another, replace one another.

A language is a set of relations.

In a hierarchical linguistic system, these relations branch like tree branches.

Or they move off each other, infinitely smaller, like roots making their way to water.

But what’s the water?

I look up at the night sky.

The tools I have at my disposal include language spoken and written, that is, words and sentences; symbols; systems of logic; numbers; sound – music, hums, beeps, clicks – both mechanized and from the natural environment, such as insects, birds, wind in leaves, my own breath and utterance; patterns and codes; radar, sonar, lidar, radio; and an assistant, a computer scientist, and I try not to think too hard about why they think I’ll need him.

Codes and mathematics are not all that different from language in theory or at the start; what’s different is the need for absolute replicability and what changes based on their utility and over time.

If I wanted to get back what I sent out, I’d use math.

Perhaps all we want is echo.

Footpaths, systems, branches and roots, a call into cavernous space –

I walk from the village up the road to the clearing carrying my groceries.

My task is to invent a system of communication – linguistic or otherwise – to transmit through the pylons to I don’t know where, to I don’t know who, and see what comes back.

What I send out will affect (create?) what I get back.

What do I want to get back?

What does anyone?

The engineers won’t tell me what they want to find or know; I’ve been given free rein and resources; each decision I make is part of the experiment.

Jenny is at the top of the hill, and she walks down to meet me; we walk the rest of the way together.

I’m comfortable living alongside someone, sitting closely, not knowing what they hold in their heart or mind.

I’m used to it.

Birdsong, wind in leaves.

My heart and mind were filled with things I sloughed off when I first entered the clearing.

The computer scientists are sitting on top of a low box that holds a transformer; Jenny and I sit on the ground in front of them, and I open a bag of cherries.

I’m an expert in communication technologies and constructed languages, but what I’m best at is waiting.

To wait is to let what I’ve held form roots in search of water.

The secret is to hold the right thing.

I hold a piece of chalk and draw what I estimate Jenny’s path beneath the pylons looks like from above or below.

Much of our attention – everyone’s – has been on what’s above.

I try not to guess.

Of course, one outcome is that Jenny and I end up communicating only with each other, transmissions volleying back and forth within our own area, never really leaving the pylons, or, somehow, colliding in space, or at the very threshold of space, becoming scrambled, so what I receive is partly what I sent out an partly what she sent out, the combination creating a third thing, an entirely new form.

The concentric rings of our transmissions will meet and react, refract into unforeseen shapes.

This outcome and my anticipation of it may be part of the experiment.

At dawn the day brightens, and I sit on the steps of my trailer holding a cup of coffee, and I look up at the pylons as they take on the sunlight, transforming from a matte, gray steel to thousands of pinpoints of light, then suddenly the roar of trucks as they burst into the clearing.

Much of my time is spent like this, waiting.

All at once we’ll start – a switch flicked, power through the lines, my computer station blinking to life, parabolic antennae turning in unison here and elsewhere toward invisible (to me) receptors at other points on the planet, satellites in space opening, turning, waiting for me now.

As I wait, I think about what I’ll do when we begin.

In the afternoons Jenny and I walk, following a path in the forest that descends the hillside until it reaches a creek, then it follows the creek and slowly winds back up to our clearing.

We’re walking along the path; it’s overcast; our legs brush against ferns.

In my trailer, on the chalkboard, I draw a set of concentric circles.

I was told Jenny’s instructions are identical to mine but that might not be true.

What would it mean if Jenny and I designed the same thing?

Systems are more infinite than you think.

Do I try to guess what’s opposite, to cover more ground (or air or space) by differing from Jenny?

If it mattered, we wouldn’t be in this position; I’m uncertain of the probability of an identical outcome.

Soon I’ll have to decide.

When I wait, when I sit on the steps of my trailer, or inside at the table, when I stand in the forest near the creek, or in vast echoing spaces – when I wait, the most important thing is that I keep my eyes open.

I’m not permitted to explain exactly what I mean by waiting because that would reveal where I’ve been.

The framework is not made of transparency.

It’s not useful to wonder where Jenny comes from or what brought her here, though when I see her thinking I imagine it’s in the language of mathematics – that she’s constructing a quantifiable, measurable something I don’t know enough about to picture fully, but I see numbers swirling there, and lines, and I wave my hand in front of my eyes and blink, breathe, wipe guesses from my mind.

I’ve never been one to guess.

What does she imagine I’m seeing when she looks at me?

What thought-language manifests from my expression?

In the morning, Jenny is on the roof of her shed in a tangle of wire drilling holes into the thin metal roof, pliers held by her mouth, clipping and twisting wires together, and sending them down to the computer scientist inside who inserts them into a machine.

They call back and forth to each other through the holes, and Jenny lies on her stomach, scoots to the edge, and dangles her head off and into the doorway to see what he’s doing.

The computer scientist climbs onto the roof of the shed and helps Jenny prop up and drill into place a small, secondary parabolic antenna.

The line of pylons is so long I can almost see the slope of the hill, or the slope of the planet – this is an illusion.

The clanking of steel, the flare from a torch, slag and clang, shouts, whir and hum of a pylon firing up, a call out, air horn, wind down, Jenny at the door, chalk falling into the tray, my feet shuffling, creak of the screen door, breeze and shifts in air pressure when Jenny reaches up to pull a bit of leaf from my hair.

My hair tickles my scalp in all this air.

The electricity tickles my body.

My relation to Jenny is a delicate system.

I am not a language.

Once the experiment really begins –

Once the experiment really begins?

I’m assuming the start is when the pylons turn on.

Though my whole life’s been sending messages.

Signal and noise.

Output and delay.

Relay and static.

With my eyes open waiting for what to send before waiting again.

I wait.

I –

On our walk Jenny tells me that an engineer came into her trailer the night before and handed her a packet of papers, asked her for discretion, held his finger to his lips to signal quiet, and she laughed as he slipped out the door.

She says, I dropped the packet on the table and went to bed. In the middle of the night, I shot up awake, startled by an extraordinary pull. The papers were just lists of numbers, some in a table, others simply across or down the page… I thought, this is a joke – a sneaky engineer, a code to be broken? But the numbers resonated, they emitted something, glowed in front of my eyes. I put them back in the envelope. I lay in bed. I thought, I can give them to my computer scientist, I can give them to you, I can try to figure them out myself, I can put them into a computer, I can transmit them into space, I can do nothing, or I can destroy them.

We walk back up the hill and split off at the pylon line.

I’ve had little contact with the engineers.

Jenny doesn’t tell me what she’s decided to do, but this is what I’ve pictured her doing all this time: this is the resonance of my hesitant guessing.

What we’re not permitted to discuss: the project at hand, our pasts – aspects of them that might reveal something about our approaches to this work, like education.

Simply, we don’t know how to communicate with the unknown: gods; the dead; plants, animals, minerals; inhabitants of other planets or space; the interior and secret mind of the person beside us.

This is an old problem.

Especially the search for the language of god – something so perfectly impenetrable it’d break our senses: the sight of it, it on the tongue, in the ear or air, shattering whatever it touches like glass.

I would like to make something perfect, but to state that goal would be to kill it – make nothing, I’d wait forever, die waiting.

To die waiting is also an old problem.

At the restaurant in town, we sit apart from the villagers; I see them looking; I feel their ears leaning in.

I lie down on the bed.

Mostly empty shelves, a table and two chairs, stacks of books and notebooks, a small kitchen, and the chalkboard.

Light comes through the windows’ blinds in lines.

On one side of the chalkboard I write a list of syntactic classes and forms in a column: typographical structures, open lexical classes and closed syntactic ones, morphemes that move words around.

In the middle I write:

input – output, stop
input – output, relay
input – echo
input    output
input – no response

On the other side, I list who I could be talking to.

Jenny is clearly looking.

I worry where the sound will travel.

I try not to worry.

A tickle at the sound in my spine.

One of the pylons turns on.

A low hum.

The trailer vibrates, and my lamp flickers; a pencil rolls to the floor.

Engineers on the ground pry open a transformer; a connection snaps and one’s thrown back.

Something travels through the grass.

The grass stands up, through our feet up our legs an electric hand sliding up my calf, it buzzes, our hair is up like the grass, our arms are at our sides, the trailer’s connection to the grid sparks and pops off, the computer scientist pisses himself, then suddenly it’s black, black night, everything off.

I’m at the threshold of space.

I’m at the threshold of space riding through the edge of light’s light vapor.

Black.

The ground quakes rhythmically, closing in, and hands grab my shoulders, shake me, my eyes open.

I had closed my eyes.

Jenny runs toward me – no, she’s already here, shaking my shoulders, snapping me back like a freed electrical wire.

My hands are burned as black as the base of the transformer.

They tell me we lost everything on the computer.

I tell them there was nothing on the computer.

It’s all in my electrocuted bright and waiting mind.

There’s nothing sinister here or in this experiment – I believe that though my belief is tied to me, to its effects on my own actions, and my actions are in service of the experiment.

The pylons are not on.

How will this change me?

The task is open, but I must be the creator rather than the receiver.

Or I don’t know yet what I’ll receive.

Jenny’s trailer is at the other end of the pylon line.

I watch her from a distance.

She’s busy; she unrolls schematics; she looks up at the pylons.

The engineers swarm the pylons, their tents and work stations, they come and go in vehicles, they meet with the computer scientists – even mine; they mow the clearing – or someone does one day when I’m out walking; they wheel monitors from tent to tent, but they never speak to me.

Jenny? I can’t be sure except for the packet of numbers.

If I were to use numbers, I would have to assign each one a meaning, and then they’d no longer be numbers, not the numbers we know, so there’d be no point to me using them at all unless the method of transmission I select is restricted to numerical input, but then, perhaps, I wouldn’t use that method.

It is possible to design a novel numerical system, however.

Outside my trailer: the clearing, the pylons.

I lie on my back and visualize numbers manifesting on my ceiling, forming themselves into order and representations.

Jenny tells me she dreams she’s swimming, almost nightly, and it’s dark, the sky black, black like she could be in an enclosure, a cave or pool, but there’s enough light to distinguish the water line, to see her legs kicking and arms fanning out in front of her, and she’s absolutely calm, quiet, and fine there, she never tires, and she confesses that when awake her comfort in that space troubles her.

We’re inside her trailer – everything’s covered up.

It’s becoming increasingly difficult for me to tell what should be kept secret.

We’re told to keep our eyes open.

When I create a language, I follow it like a footpath, each step sending vibrations through the imaginary ground, and the vibrations radiate until they make contact with something, come up against it like a wave upon a rock, and I wait until this happens, and then I go – in my mind, with open eyes – find the rock.

I keep this process secret.

When the engineers recruited me for this, they wrote, We would like you to send a message out.

How long will we wait?

An engineer knocks on my door.

He puts his finger to his lips, hands me an envelope that contains papers on which are written numbers.

I give it to my computer scientist.

I’m gone from my trailer for hours at a time, though the door has a small lock.

The engineers gave me the key.

I never lock it.

Jenny is on the top of her trailer adjusting an antenna; hair sticks to the sweat on her face; she squints hard up at the bright sky.

The purpose of secrecy, in this case, is so as not to influence the experiment, but it’s such that we’re not even told what the experiment is.

This is a kind of purity?

This is nonreactive glass.

I never think for a moment I can’t do this.

The nature of my problem is the absence of a solution.

I’m mostly nothing.

I wait, wait, wait.

I wait beneath this impossible sky.

My problem is absence.

I hear a nothingness impossible to imagine.

My feet slide on wet grass.

I hold the problem in my cupped hands.

I remain alert as if at the edge of something I want to be at the edge of, calm before a plunge, confident as a diver, as a bird.

The ends of sentences will be determined by a shift in case at the outset of the next sentence – I scratch this out.

I begin to walk the pylons.

Progress report: Determine the length of time –

Report on my void and absence.

This sentence.

Jenny brings me coffee; my eyes trace a pattern around her body; her hair is tied back with wire.

Jenny says, Listen, I know we’re not supposed to talk about this – I stop her, I pull myself underground.

The computer scientist traces his finger along the tabletop.

The shadows of the pylons are grids we walk through.

At night, out the window, at the other end of the pylon line, Jenny’s window is illuminated, a square of light in the darkness I hold on the tip of my index finger.

Terminal case change, I write beside a list of postpositions, imagining a chain of endings.

An initial message composed of a series of afters.

What beginning am I capable of?

Directive: Create a message.

My efforts resonate throughout the clearing.

In my trailer, a notebook is not where I left it.

A sentence is something that is followed.

A sound adheres to a rule too well.

I’m followed on the path.

The hum of the pylons, wind in leaves, the creek, and these unmistakable footsteps, cracked branches, breathing.

I quicken and branch off.

I know my way back to the clearing.

I don’t look back; I branch again.

A whistle, a call, a flutter of birds flocking out behind me – then the pylons’ alarm stirs all perceptible earth, all I can feel and see, and I’m stopped dead.

He’s upon me.

Hands – mine – over ears – mine.

A shadow, I curl over.

I’m empty, I say, I hold a hollowness I can’t describe.

What I’m good at is waiting.

The alarm adheres to its rule too well.

He shakes me, I fall open.

His mouth open, alarm coming out.

My eyes open in alarm.

Above me the computer scientist waves the packet of numbers in the air – the paper flaps between sonic blasts.

When I’m waiting I must empty myself of any kind of will.

I refuse to hear him, in the trailer.

He takes up a piece of chalk.

The numbers – 

I shake my head.

Listen – 

I am resolutely neutral.

The experiment demands an alternating current.

At one end I’m hollow, a receptor.

At the other all output.

He waves the paper disrupting the light in the room.

Listen – He points to the paper.

Listen – these are Jenny’s numbers.

Who gives something to me or anyone, and what part of any system is mine?

I feel a distance waiting.

My look reaches, hits glass.

A sentence follows but I haven’t even begun.

What beginning my patience is turning into.

The numbers on this paper were never for me but I see them in my sleep, I failed to cloister, I worry the spine of the moved notebook, I eye irregularities, I guess at Jenny’s system, I fail myself.

On the chalkboard I draw a set of concentric circles.

I wait in solitude.

I wait in solitude but for everyone here, but for waves and waves.

Directive: Create a message. Transmit it. If there is a response, engage. If there is no response, create a new message.

Directive: Create a message. If there is a response

Tell me where I am!

I am at the threshold of space.

Directive: If there is a response

What language

Engage

is this

Create a new message.

I work at this task.

My efforts resonate throughout the clearing.

Is a sound the sound or what you imagine it is?

My efforts are manifested in the sound of chalk on the board and my movements inside the trailer, but the meaning of these actions, from these actions, remains hidden.

Hidden from me until I coax it out.

I have a nearly violent patience.

 

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Note:

As a reader, I’m particularly interested in constellations of sources, the information behind the work. But not everyone is – it can spoil the magic? Intellectualize a feeling too far? If you’re in the latter camp, maybe don’t go on. But for those in the former:

This piece might require a bit of explanation as it’s an excerpt of a project currently in motion, and it’s fragmented itself, a fragment of fragments about bits of language and sound. As suggested by its container, a row of trees, this work primarily came out of Patrick Farmer’s On Vibration lectures at SARU. At the same time, a few other things were happening: I had just completed my dissertation – a series of prose poems on measurement and an essay on Gertrude Stein’s semiotics of number – and I wanted to do something with constructed languages. I love the operations of language, syntactic structures, and often when I read, sentences reveal themselves in diagrams and tree forms, phrases bracketed. My favorite words are syntactic ones, deictics and function words like articles, pronouns, and prepositions, sometimes called “little words.” These words don’t mean much and can be more like elements of an equation than meaning-rich nouns and adjectives. Repeating them, like Stein does, feels vibrational to me, a syntactic resonance, an echo – but of what?

During the weeks of the first On Vibration lectures, I also attended a lecture by the scholar Lea Pao on “information” in work by the late German poet Ernst Meister. Meister’s poems enact what Pao calls “a poetics of containment” and are full of little words. Here’s one:

Why
is it
exertion
to get from
nothingness
into nothingness,
instead of the easiest
winged leap?

Is nothing even
supposed to happen?

Why
do I not sit
with the courage of
interruptible air
on your
writing hand?

—from Of Entirety Say the Sentence (tr. Graham Foust and Samuel Frederick, Wave Books, 2015)

I worry I’ll ruin the poem if I go on about it, but I hope you can see a bit of my speaker’s project here – interruptible air hovering over her hand as she works to create a language, or doesn’t: “My problem is absence. // I hear a nothingness impossible to imagine.” A sentence is a container, Pao notes, something that encloses information. But a question opens itself. My speaker’s dialogue with herself here (in a way) is a kind of repetition of questioning, even if the sentences aren’t necessarily questions. She’s sorting through how to have an impossible to imagine dialogue.

Phrases from Farmer’s lectures I’ve mapped in nearby notes include “inevitable resonance,” “speculative listening,” “delicacy of sound waves,” and “what do we want in what we hear.”

My project is working through the following questions (and, also, in a way, Meister’s questions above): What is a sound’s container/containment? And what happens when I attempt to render it in language and in a body in narrative? With sound and with syntactic words there’s a question (or a problem?) of meaning, signification, even visualizability (to quote physicist Niels Bohr) – try to picture the meaning of the word now. What information do I (want from what I) hear? How much of language is echo and diffraction?

Concentric Macroscope (so far) is made from and of these. I’m trying to picture a language that’s all function but with no information. The narrative’s sentences are like the concentric circles of a vibration leading out then back in; the container: the speaker’s project and dialogue with herself; the system in formation, waiting for form, listening.