Recognition and Imagination

About the piece:

A visual poem uses words, or in this case, punctuation, to create an idea using typographic elements such as the shape of letters and patterns. Because visual poems are free from the goal of making sense in the way prose writing is expected to transmit information, they can open a space for surprise, confusion, and recognition. In this sense, “not knowing” is often as powerful as “knowing”. Poet John Keats wrote in 1817 about this state of “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” calling it “negative capability” Rather than understanding this as a negative, he proposed the situation of being with the mystery as the goal.

Author, musician, and visual artist Gary Barwin often explores the intersection of these dynamics in his work. The image in this visual poem is from a series he created (and continues to create) with many different punctuation marks, the ampersand (&) being one of his favourites. The combination of the ampersand and the question mark appealed to Elee because it challenges binary thinking. Elee combined Gary’s piece with propositions for the viewer to consider related to time and place, tenets of her project Here, Hearing.

Asking “and ?” is a way of thinking through situations that seem to have no simple answer. For example, enjoying soft spring weather and the stunning views of the Salish Sea while recognizing we are in a stage of climate crisis can lead to a moment of cognitive dissonance. How can we carry those conflicting ideas at the same time?

It may seem odd to think of an image or sound or something in a form that doesn’t “look” like a sonnet, as a poem. But Vancouver has a long history of innovation in terms of understanding the sonic ambience as a composition or poetic score. Simon Fraser University professor and composer R. Murray Shafer founded the World Soundscape Project, which includes a repository of audio field recordings and important work recognizing the acoustic environment. Hildegard Westerkamp‘s development of the soundwalk, an ambulatory experience of attending to the sounds around us as a composition, is a practical, embodied way of considering sounds in a specific place. Shafer and Westerkamp, both Vancouverites, influence the international community and created a field of knowledge extending far beyond Canada.

The Reykjavik-based artist angela rawlings, whose work on climate issues moves through form in text, image, sound, performance, and activism, picks up on these resonances, so to speak. They propose in the book The Sound of Mull, an exercise in extended listening that informs the questions Elee wrote to accompany Gary’s visual poem. With INTIME, a physical activity and meditation on geochronology, rawlings invites participants to consider deep time and to extend that attention through the past and future of “envisioned and heard worlds”.

We are used to considering time as fixed and linear. But when we consider time as a spiral or multi-directional map of experience, new possibilities and solutions present themselves. This is not a new idea; mathematics and the sciences prove the concept of non linear time exists and many societies understand the flow of time differently than the Western European/North American business world does. To that end, reconsidering the mandate of linear time can be a decolonization tactic. A poet’s delight is to open new perspectives. Embracing curiosity without a foregone conclusion or intended place of arrival could be seen as a silly exercise (especially at a transit shelter, a place built for waiting for a scheduled bus!) but perhaps this small amount of time travel will make your journey more interesting.