Notes for Future Landscapes or Screaming Reliefs

Camila Proto

Part 1: A rock that screams

I walk under the harsh surface of this rock formation by the sea. If I walk, it’s by stepping lightly on this hard structure, gently, tip to tip, as if I were a ballerina, and then like a child learning to walk, the whole plant sliding along the dry grooves until it establishes a point in the world. My point in the world. Point by point, foot by foot, the feeling of being whole here and now. It’s certainly a strange image for a Tuesday morning… What is that woman doing, so carefully, on the top of the rock? Tai-chi-chuan? Reflexology? That’s when some curious onlookers approached to ask: why are you putting your foot down like that? After all, it’s just a stone! It’s sad to reduce the Pedra do Arpoador to the banal human expression “it’s just a rock”. While moving, I keep writing in my field notebook with the soles of my feet. There is this unknown texture that inscribes in me so many “pluses” and “minuses” that are hidden in the stone, after all, its wrinkles are its texts, I agree, and my reading of this body of stone must be the least significant so that this word flies over the paper and can translate what is written here. I feel each line and each crevice and each fold in my most sensitive core and I try to transcribe a notation into this notebook. This field notebook. Now. 

 

The rock formation that stretches between the Fort of Copacabana and the Ipanema beach dates back 600 million years when the South American and African continents still formed a single, colossal continental mass. Each line contains an untold story. I walk along it to notice its folds, to listen. Hard and precious, a collection bag of time, its surface opens to me as if it’s littered with elliptical crystals that look like half-open eyes. This surface is its face: exposed to the corrosion of salt and sun, to the abstract stains painted by bird droppings, to the footprints of tourists’ filthy sneakers, to the cuts and nicks and holes of harpoons resting after an eternal afternoon spent harpooning whales. How many eyes can a stone contain? I tread carefully because there’s no intention of leaving it blind. But of course, now and then there’s no escaping the crystals and I hear somewhere from below a painful “ouch”. The stone moans softly, imperceptible due to its size. But I can tell it’s moaning. I feel it. A short vibration in the bowels of its geology, making the piles of feldspar crystals rub together. How are these mineral molecules arranged? Superimposed side by side, like tiny porous tectonic plates, moving millimetrically with every step, every gust of wind… Secretly, the stone dances. That choreography that I listen with the soles of my feet, inviting my own lines to dance, that’s when, but impulso, my fingers move and write something here. I let the pen fly through my fingers, as the words appear freely, giving tone to that embodied dance, proposing an improvising between inscriptions. Timeless inscriptions. 

 

Then I notice its rhythm. As my writing flows free by the vibrations of the rocks moaning, my loose head, ears and thought turns in the direction of a group of boys jumping from the highest point of the stone and falling into the shallow natural pool, showing off daring pirouettes and clever ways of landing. Height seems to make all the difference in this metamorphism of the body, which writhes in the air and transforms each boy into an unidentified soft thing. Quartz molecule. Splash. And the rock that reacts. In this variation of heights, between high and low, the lines of the stone contort into melody, the little crystalline eyes close to listen to the instant of the fall, and it is in the time between the acts of the jump that it becomes possible to hear the stone scream. There! Or, eita! Or wow! Any interjection would fit here as an attempt to represent that height varies like the mouth varies in the opening and closing of a popular expression. The melody is drawn out in the notes of the speech and that stone face takes on a tone. In the distance, I imagine its immense profile emerging from the blue waters for those arriving by boat. A stone that screams!” would say the grandson of the fisherman floating in the distance. Don’t talk nonsense,” would correct the old man exposed to the sun and salt, his skin corroded and rough by time as it translates into dry, deep wrinkles, a stone man with his eyes closed to admire all the fantastic life of his double, his mirror: the Pedra do Arpoador. 

 

I notice that the Pedra do Arpoador is, for the whales that were once harpooned and for the boys who were once jumpers, a living structure, a grandmother or a brother, always ready to tell the stories of those Tuesday mornings, of these days of jumping, of the time when the birds did contemporary live painting happenings, or of the romances between cracks and toes. I write down the notes sung in the telling of those stories: between the lines of a score and a notebook, it’s now the words that contort themselves and take the shape of a landscape, inscribing the sound of the stone in the space of the symbol’s outline. I draw a line. 

 

There are few things I can affirm about this field trip, but one thing is certain: never before has the Arpoador been noticed in this way.

Part 2: Brief considerations on the notation of future landscapes

1)

On the act of noting: notation is the action and effect of (a)noting (marking, taking note, pointing). It is both the sign that modifies the sounds of letters (e.g. accents, tilde, cedilla) and the system for graphically representing elements of a given field of knowledge (e.g. music). Under the exercise of a poetic-speculative field investigation into future landscapes, we compose this neighborhood between scientific annotation and musical notation, in whose interest we write down our impressions by noticing the sound we notice (hear, perceive) in the lines of the rock. In this exercise in which language almost gets in the way, we distinguish three different meanings for the verb noting: the report (our impressions written down in words in a field notebook, which is very common on field trips carried out by scientists), the inscription (of a sound in a musical system, such as the score, for example, which gives it meaning) and the attention (we perceive the vibrations in the lines of the rocks, which are apparently static). It’s interesting to consider that, even in their differences, these three notation exercises only take place when there is a line of force, a current-flow, an invisible something passing by (an impression, a listening, a desire), which cries out for attention. It needs to be noticed. It also necessarily has a mediator, a body-agent, who notices (perceives, writes, locates). In this field notebook, we observe the triple passage, from one noticing to another, as an interlingual and intermedial speculative exercise.

2)

This body of the (a)notator is necessarily an open body. First of all, it is open to the infrasounds and minute vibrations that a landscape emits, to those deep tremors that inhabit our imagination and that make our skin vibrate from the inside out. After all, what can a landscape do?   Secondly, it is open to the incisions that the stylo makes on its fingers, to each scratch that also vibrates the skin, and then this skin that functions as a vibrating channel, an elastic surface (already, and always, porous) that mediates these minimal tremors from the outside in and vice versa. And from this balance come the (a)notations. The landscape is not static, it is not there, a priori. They are forces that use the (a)notator’s body as a means, a springboard for jumping into another materiality, another existence. Because those who (a)note don’t describe, they don’t cast a formed gaze over the landscape; on the contrary, their narrative thinking happens precisely by listening to what resonates within them, these heights and amounts and expanses of land, water or air. Working together with Suely Rolnik’s concept of “vibrating bodies”, we can consider the gesture of (a)notation as a speculative and resonant action, a poetics that opens up paths between humans and non-humans, between observer and observed, between culture and nature. In her words: 

 

(…) thinking consists of “listening” to the effects that the forces of the ambient atmosphere produce in the body, the turbulence they provoke in it and the pulsation of larval worlds that, generated, in this fecundation, announce themselves to the knowledge-of-the-living; “implicating” oneself in the movement of deterritorialization that these germs of the world trigger; and, guided by this listening and implication, “creating” an expression for what asks for passage, so that it gains a concrete body. (ROLNIK, 2018, p. 90) 

 

This open body, of those who note and (a)note, can then deterritorialize note-taking as a descriptive practice. Poetic field notes often speculate on what cannot be seen, but which pulsates. This deterritorialization, at the invitation of Deleuze and Guattari in their Thousand Plateaus (1996), searches the surface of the inscription, the way you pick up a pen, the ink you use, its delirious expressions, its lines of escape, producing new interactions and turning writing into a means and not an end.

3)

On the subject of lines: at this point, we could consider ourselves linealogists: students of lines, as Tim Ingold urges us to do. The time that is line – the line that is sound – the sound that is word. These are compilations and agglomerations of lines that serve as samples for us to understand their composition, their erosion, their contagion. We are talking here about a heterogeneous set of lines: the reliefs that mark their silhouettes in the sky, the scars that mark the palm of my hand, the sketches of words that are drawn on the surface of the paper. These lines, under the gesture of noticing, could then be perceived not as straight lines but as traces and scratches, as vanishing lines. They are erosive lines that we see, melodic lines that we hear, parts of the word when we write. A conversation between Deleuze and Parnet (1998) resonates with the following passage: “A language is criss-crossed by vanishing lines that drive its vocabulary and syntax. (…) It is the pragmatic line, of gravity or celerity, whose ideal poverty commands the richness of the others”. (1) The line that dances under the graffiti to inscribe a sign, which will very soon be located among the sign libraries of humanity. But this movement, the significance of the line, will only happen, and much later, because during the (a)notation what interests is the line’s tracing, as is the risk it inscribed on the surface and on the body of the person who is scratching it. The interpretation of the line can only happen at the risk of losing it forever in the universe of risks, traces-paths, past and future. We have always interpreted lines in the sky, on horizons, in cells, in the shells of certain animals. As Ingold (2015) says: every living being is a line or, rather, a bundle of lines. (2) There are the lines that dance in the brazilian’s artist Tunga work, like magnetic conjunctions of hair and ropes and intertwined spaces that become a single drawing, a single project (which is already open to so many others) (3). There are also the abstract lines that blow in gusts in Murray Schafer’s choral scores, and the voices that modulate with the wind new heights to be reached.(4) In this field notebook, we noticed the lines in their essence as a line: not linear, but extendable, not hard, but malleable, not with a starting point and an endpoint, but as an agglomerate of points, eternally reversing path. Afterall, the line is interesting as an expressive force, as “a drift, a becoming, an experiment, a demonic leap” (PÉLBART, 2007) (5).

4)

In this synesthetic and sensitive neighborhood, where art and science meet in the smooth becoming of a sheet of paper, our space of inscription, we invent a body that (a)notices and also a type of inscription that operates in between. Here, we make audible the force of time, just as we make legible the force of sound. At Deleuze’s invitation, we seek an impossible ear, rather than an absolute one. It is only through this that we will be able to hear the stone scream. We are also looking for delirious writing, rather than syntactic and grammatical writing. By listening through the open channel of the skin, we think without ties to the images of thought; and by inscribing the vibration of the invisible, we free the hand for an inventive gesture, where the line means nothing and can wander across the loose surface but is always about to capture the something that will come through it. Noticing the variations in forces that are at first imperceptible and making them sensitive to us would therefore be a way of following Deleuze in his critique of representative reason, based on this very gesture of (a)notation: a non-representation that violates the dominant models and makes us think of another possible representation, a way of making the difference seen or heard.  According to him, “The conditions of true criticism and true creation are the same: destruction of the image of a thought that presupposes itself, genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself” (DELEUZE, 1988)(6). In this sense, to destroy the idea of a line-result-of-erosion, or a line-drawing-melodic, and superimpose them on a listening-writing practice that lets words dance between sounds and typos, would be a way to force an act of thinking about the existence and composition of such inscriptions.

5)

On the modulation of lines: it is at the invitation of the artist Leandra Lambert, and what she calls “experimented fictions”, that we trace “lines of escape between writings and sounds, images that escape from the vanishing point in the landscape, changes in perspective and perception” (LAMBERT, 2013)(7). This is what we propose when (a) noting a landscape: a rocky line that becomes melodic and then modulates into a word, like mutant lines that can “modulate waves, swells, oceanic hangovers, ruptures in Atlantic coastlines, maelstroms, tsunamis” (Ibid, p. 212). I understand modulating lines as an exercise of intersemiotic translation in between lines, a circular gesture of de-localization, localization and re-localization. The term intersemiotic translation, or transmutation, is first defined by Roman Jakobson, who distinguishes it from interlingual and intralingual translations, and is constituted by the movement between signs, or even from one system of signs to another, such as from poetry to music, from dance to painting… Intersemiotic translation takes place as an operation between codes, or even, making a parallel with the ecosystem model, between heterogeneous species. In this operation between materials, an alternative sequence to the linear, logical time of the social organism is produced, calling into question the notion of history as the logical and true evolution of events. Júlio Plaza, following Jakobson’s proposition, understands that this sequence presents the consciousness of language proper to art, where the notion of evolution, progress or return does not exist, putting in its place the notion of analogical movement and thought, that is, of transformation (PLAZA, 2013, p. 1). The point of modulating a line is to create a kind of ecology between signs, which never ends in itself but, on the contrary, always opens up to the other (near or past). As Julio Plaza says of intersemiotic translation: 

 

It is in this interval between the various codes that a fluid frontier is established between information and ideographic pictoriality, a margin for creation. It is in these intervals that the medium acquires its real dimension, its quality, because each message cannibalistically swallows (like each technology) the previous ones, since they are all formed by the same energy.” (PLAZA, 2013. p. 13)

 

I try to operate this concept like a machine, like an experimental methodology to set lines in motion and consider modulation as something intrinsic to them. This allows us, on the one hand, to understand the line not as something hard, straight, decisive, but as a flow made up of points, a force that aggregates and disaggregates, a path; on the other hand, we can visualize a relief beyond its image drawn on our retinas, because its lines extend to an infinite time, that time of listening to music, that time of listening to a story being told. It is then under this intersemiotic intertwining of modulating lines that future landscapes appear to those who (a)note them with an open body (with their impossible ears and their delirious writing). And only then will it be possible to have something to say about them. 

6)

On the expressive force of the Earth: everything that exists contains latent frequencies, vibrating ghosts, waiting and lurking for a resonance, or, from Tato Taborda’s perspective, a sympathy. During the lockdown caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, we were forced to live inside like never before: to find new places in the living room, the kitchen, the bedroom; to notice shadows and lives that were still unknown in the corners, under the loose tiles. In this unusual movement of going inside, of exploring his own house, he (a)noticed an encounter between the voice emitted by the radio and the glass cabinet, in which, in his words, he heard “the Mi♭4 resting on some shelf or bowl of the glass cabinet activated by an identical note in the melodic line of the speech”. This is what he calls resonance by sympathy, corresponding to “the frequencies of affections that vibrate in me, very spaced out, as I listen to the content of the story” (8). This is Alvin Lucien’s room resonating with its own frequencies and revealing, in this other poetic experiment of enclosure and silence, the tone of each piece of furniture.(9) The radio report then made the shelf vibrate, given its tonic affinity. As Taborda well realizes, there are latent frequencies in things, in rocks, in bodies; and these frequencies can sound, be driven, by other voices, other vibrations, by expressions that secretly try to establish a connection, whether significant or not. The question we’re trying to answer here, based on this principle of resonance through sympathy, is a simple one, with no pretensions whatsoever: how can we make a writing-listening resonate? What notes are hidden beneath the letters and rock lines? But how do we activate them, so that they vibrate with each other in a secret language? Latencies remind us that all bodies, human and non-human, are vibrating. That the landscape is vibrating from sunrise to sunset, and that the stone is therefore screaming in speculation of a milder ray, or plotting a vibrating conversation with those who talk about it. Following the (a)notations of Taborda and Lucier, what matters, as a poetic gesture, is a writing-with, also resonating Haraway’s invitations, to create notes-notations that resonate, through sympathy, the phantom latencies contained in each body of land, in each rock, in each mouth. 

7)

After all, how do you notice time? How to (a)note something that cannot be measured, let alone touched. Time is invisible, just like sound, and that’s why they are forces that inhabit a non-space that is instigating our (a)notation. When music gave up the notion of melody and accompaniment, of theme and development, it left causal chronological time behind. In defense of Deleuzian frugality, Ferraz (2010) comments on artistic sound practices that with “the musical note torn from the melody and practically autonomous, music lost its melodic-rhythmic ground and was thrown into the image of the cosmos”.(10) Its time is expanded and becomes the time of listening to this impossible ear, the time of (a)noticing: an improbable, immeasurable, and infinite time. Perhaps, then, we can liken geological time to the sensitive time of fruition: in order to notice time, you have to prepare a wide-open, resonant body, aware of its own composition of lines, and that the lines it writes are nothing more than interweavings between what stretches between there and here, now and then. 

Part 3: What lies dormant

I auscult to the stone as if it were my beloved’s chest. I crouch down and rest my ear under the deepest crevice, looking for a sigh, a scratch, any sound that might resonate in that space. It’s already time for the tide to come up, and I know that the waves are hitting hard at the bottom of this monolith; I investigate its response to such provocations. From a distance, my funny figure must cause tourists to feel strange: contorted, a body folded into the vibration of the stone, a body harpooning listening to the subtlest infinities of this ancient giant full of secrets. Next to me, on the edge of the rock and the sea, fishermen throw their hooks and children swim. There is a game of overlapping throws, from the ear glued to the groove to the body contorted in the air to that little hook that cuts the wind and falls: three heights of the stone in relation, three strangers improvising different relationships with the stone. Suddenly, a short, rumbling bass shakes the body, the fisherman loses his fish, the child falls on his stomach, I get dizzy. A whale!” shouted the old man, even though we all knew it wasn’t migration season. The snoring of Pedra do Arpoador, at first, didn’t express any emotion, it was just a snore, loud and earthy, a scratching of the tectonic plates, perhaps a single yawn of exhaustion, perhaps even a snore that wakes us up from a good dream, perhaps a comment on the ways of jumping, perhaps a complaint about the itching of the foam, perhaps a cry for life. Through its wrinkles, the stone resounded with the voice of time: a punctual memory, a deep laugh from the one who passively observes life happening under his skin. “A giant, auntie?”, asks me a curious boy, fresh out of the water, who leans on me to bring his ear closer to the stone, imitating my firm and immobile position. “Maybe”, I reply fearlessly, with all my attention focused on the rocky lines, waiting for the next scream. The listening point was such that I didn’t even notice the little black dots coming towards us, approaching us and repeating our same curious position, each one with its own unique flexibility, a bunch of foreigners grouping together, without questioning why, just repeating the position, and settling into a static pose to listen to what the stone had to say. It didn’t matter if what it said meant anything. What mattered was the chance to witness the life of the stone. In the distance, from his little boat, the grandson watches that curious formation happening on the coastal horizon, live, the thousands of body-dots that are folding towards it and extending the stone, “look, Grandpa, the Arpoador”! Grandpa, in his sedimentary time, throws another line into the sea, saying that “it’s her natural process, son, this is the way she grows, just like you will one day”. 

Notes:

1.  G. Deleuze; C. Parnet. Conversações (1998), p. 136.
2. T. Ingold, The Life of Lines (2015), p. 16.
3. I’m referring to the recent retrospective Tunga: magnetic conjunctions, made up of approximately 300 works exhibited at Itaú Cultural and the Tomie Ohtake Institute, where I was able to see his sketches, sketches and notes, and relate my interest in lines to what exists in his work.
4. The Canadian artist, teacher and composer invented the concept of Soundscape, with which he inaugurated, in the academic environment, a way of listening to the world. Although this is now a limited approach to thinking about the relationship between sound and the environment, the way he experimented with scores and reliefs in this approach to musical and geographical lines is really inspiring my own way to listen and write with the world.
5.  P. P Pelbart. Disegno. Desenho. Desígnio, org. E. Derdyk (2007), p. 287
6. G. Deleuze, Diferença e repetição (1988), p. 230-231.
7. L. Lambert. Ouvir na pele o terceiro som. Em: Revista-Valise, n. 5 (2013), p. 206.
8. T. Taborda. Ressonâncias: vibrações por simpatia e frequências de insurgência (2021), p. 34.
9. In his book, Taborda mentions the work I Am Sitting in a Room (1969), by Alvin Lucier, as a poetic experiment carried out to uncover the latent frequencies in the furniture in his bedroom. In the acoustic space of the room, the composer records the phrase “i am sitting in a room” and loops it until the resonance transforms the words into noises that resonate with each piece of furniture. To listen to the full recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAxHlLK3Oyk
10. S. Ferraz.  Deleuze, música, tempo e forças não sonoras. Em: Revista Artefilosofia, n.9 (2010), p. 69.

References:

DELEUZE, Gilles; PARNET, Claire. Conversações. São Paulo: Editora Escuta, 1998.

DELEUZE, Gilles. Diferença e repetição. São Paulo: Paz & Terra, 2018.

DELEUZE, Gilles; GUATTARI, Félix. Mil Platôs: Volume 4. São Paulo: Editora 34, 1996.

FERRAZ, Silvio. Deleuze, música, tempo e forças não sonoras. Em: Revista Artefilosofia, n.9, 2010.

INGOLD, Tim. The Life of Lines. London: Routledge, 2015.

LAMBERT, Letícia. Ouvir na pele o terceiro som. Em: Revista-Valise, n. 5, 2013, p. 206.

PELBART, Peter Pál. A arte de viver nas linhas. Em: Edith Derdyk. (Org). Disegno. Desenho. Desígnio. 1ed.São Paulo: Editora SENAC, 2007, v.1, p. 281-290.

PLAZA, Júlio. Tradução Intersemiótica. São Paulo: Editora Perspectiva, 2013. 

ROLNIK, Suely. Esferas da Insurreição. São Paulo: Editora n-1, 2018.

TABORDA, Tato. Ressonâncias: vibrações por simpatia e frequências de insurgência. Rio de Janeiro: Editora UFRJ, 2021.