Reservoir

In my Geology 101 classes we’ve been learning about ice age floods. There’s still another lesson to do so I don’t have the full details on it yet, but the story of these huge floods from glacial lakes over the Pacific Northwest of the US is incredible.

During the ice age, in Montana, a lake was created by the large continental glacier which had creeped down from Canada. This was called Glacial Lake Missoula. The ice sheet acted like a dam, so any rivers that passed through that area were interrupted and as a result, tonnes of water built up. This happened over the course of around a century, perhaps.

So we have a huge thing of water, and one day, the dam breaks. Something happens with the glacial dam, and the water all comes rushing out. Like crazy. It takes maybe about 48 hours for this lake, which has been filling up for tens of years, to drain.

The water is rushing rushing rushing over the states of Montana and Idaho, sweeping up loads of debris and violently carving out landscapes. Then it hit a part of the land that it couldn’t pass through as quickly — the Wallula Gap. From there, the water came to a sort-of rest again and created Lake Lewis. The water was still moving slowly through the Wallula Gap, but it created this kind of reservoir because it couldn’t all just rush through in one go.

Moving, but not moving. Compared to how fast the water moved before, this new movement through Wallula Gap must have been deathly slow. When I think about this, I think “oh, the water must have been so bored!” Do you think natural phenomena get bored?

In my Googling, I came across “Lake Retention Time” on Wikipedia. The average amount of time a bit of water spends in a lake, before it leaves. Some lakes have a short retention time, like a few months. Other lakes have a retention time of years, some of them a thousand years. Imagine being in one place for a thousand years, if you lived long enough to notice it. Imagine being a part of Glacial Lake Missoula, and then running running running across hundreds of miles in the space of two days, and then just staying put again, while you slowly wait your turn to leave.

It’s kind of like the pandemic, isn’t it? We’re all in this reservoir and we have to wait our turn to be vaccinated, to pass through that Wallula Gap. It feels like we’re not moving, compared to the pace of life we’ve had before, but we are moving. We’re just in this waiting space.

What other times in my life have I felt like a reservoir?

School, is kind of a reservoir. But it was a good one for me… it was a place where I was developing and moving, but not unleashed on the world yet. I was in the reservoir yet I was dreaming, dreaming of the life that I wanted.

The more I think about this, the more that I feel like life is a series of reservoirs, rather than a big ol’ Missoula Flood. There’s the school reservoir, the university reservoir, then I was ill, that was a reservoir but a much harder one to be in, then there was the Canada reservoir… I guess the “floods” were the spaces inbetween, when the water was passing from one location to the other in one big BLOOMP. Some reservoirs drain slowly and some just burst when the dam breaks.

It’s a much better way to look at things if you think of life as a series of reservoirs than one big flood that gets interrupted. The “holding spaces” are where we spend most of our time. These containers. The floods are those moments when you’re like “oh my god” getting on a plane to your new home country, or when you break up with someone and move out the next month. The fast-moving moments where you can’t quite believe it’s happening.

I like the idea of being in a reservoir and dreaming. Just floating in a body of water which is slowly moving under me, and I look up at the sky, and I’m dreaming.

The Slow Curve Back To Björk

In 2015 my interest in Björk finally blossomed. Up until then there was a vague awareness & appreciation. She was on the edge of some large mystery and I wasn’t entirely ready to go there yet, dark weirdness. When the spark finally hit, I was in love: merging sex, death and science with instrumentation that both pulls from imagined futures and romantic pasts. I mean, she dresses like a galactic moth and her music videos are robots fucking. It seemed on a totally different level from any other artist I listened to. I sat in bed one day and watched the entirety of her concert at the Royal Opera House in 2001.

Musically, I was in the middle of searching for an identity. Identities are always flowing and ever-changing, but I felt like I hadn’t even found the essence with which I was flowing. I hung on to Björk and studied her melody lines and the intricacy of her arrangements. I wanted to sound futuristic, like her. But only in terms of sound. My song content was still deeply entrenched in my life, my experiences, my immediate longings. Stories of me.

After a few attempts to get some sort of electronic pop sound going, I walked away and a few years later, picked up my acoustic guitar again. A producer came along and said “hey, your acoustic songs are so good, I want to help you make them,” and I took that as a clue towards my sound. I left my dreams of becoming some incarnation of Björk on the shelf.

In my research for “Wasted Time” (or should I call it Lost Time? I think a name will emerge the more thinking I do), I came across the work of Timothy Morton. I stumbled on him through the Caitlin DeSilvey essay on Rewilding Time, and happily found that there was correspondence between Morton and Björk made public.

I’ve only just started to dip my toe into Morton’s Dark Ecology, so I can’t fully talk about all the ideas yet, cause I’m still trying to understand them. I think the conversation with Björk is helping, though. Also, they say some interesting things about pop music & songwriting:

What is original does not come from absolute blank nothing (“oblivion”), but from an electromagnetic tenderness— from remembering not forgetting . . . The song as entity is a physical being in its own right

And then Morton goes on to talk about how art helps the “almost-now” eco society to “rediscover enchantment”—

our mission maybe is to allow people to feel this and think this with full crystal clarity, not departing from reason for one second, yet allowing the inner space to sparkle madly

Allowing the inner space to sparkle madly. I love that and I feel like songwriting fits in there, rewilding time fits in there, transforming ways of looking at lost time fits in there, moments of quiet and wilderness fit in there.

Look at this beautiful tiny sparkling void, it isn’t nothing at all, it’s beautiful

And they bring up the North!! Talking about it as a realm of enchantment. As a place where society can maybe learn about the sparkling, magical unknown:

there is part of me that just wanted to talk about elves and sprites. . . you can feel these entities coming out of the rocks up here in the north of england, the pools and fountains. whether you like it or not, believe it or not. irish woman i heard once: “sure i don’t believe in them, but they’re there all the same…” bang on… somehow the further north you go the more vivid it becomes. i expect it’s super vivid in iceland?

Also on the table is the idea that thinking the world is separate and evil actually makes you the evil thing. You are the world and to think evil of it is to make evil of yourself! View time the same way! Lost time? Stuck in a sparkling void? Hate the void and you are the hate! Starting to care for the world begins with being caring — caring for yourself. Love yourself = love your neighbour = love the planet. Narcissism and nihilism and finger-pointing break that down.

What about merging with the void? Merging with care & eroticism towards the wilderness of stale, dormant time? Merging with the unknown, merging and caring about the stillness, the staring out to sea from an unmoving chair by the window?

Also, the song Isobel. Leaving it here for later:

The lyrics also relate to sparkling voids / dark forests / being alone:

in a forest pitch dark / glowed the tiniest spark / it burst into flame / like me / like me / my name isobel / married to myself / my love isobel / living by herself

Is Isobel a character of Björk’s personal mythology?

Finally finally finally, I am still figuring out what Object Oriented Ontology truly means in dumb, pop music terms, but here is a definition of it which I think makes it easy to grasp? Maybe?

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) is Graham Harman’s variant of the Speculative Realism movement. As an enquiry into the existence of objects it gives objects the same importance as humans. In doing so, humans are not all powerful over objects: we co-existing on planet Earth.

That’s from an essay by Joshua Speer. My understanding of OOO (apart from the fact that I love the roundness of three Os together) is that things exist, and without human interest/understanding/gaze, things still exist and have power, timelines, lives. Everything is an object, even concepts and massive things like climate change or Jupiter. Objects are also created from disparate things which can get lumped together — the human species is an object, with its own interactions with the planet which might seem separate from any individual human who is a part of the species. For example, I’m a human writing on my computer, drinking a cup of tea. But as part of the object “human species”, I’m currently devouring the planet’s resources and wearing away the Earth’s climate. This interpretation of OOO might not be perfect, and will probably develop the more I read about it. Currently reading Morton’s Dark Ecology which is helping with that.

So. Back to the Björk. Morton mentions a coral reef in his final email in the chain:

i think of OOO as the discovery of a gigantic sparkling coral reef too deep for most philosophy to notice. sharks floating about, anemomes with tendrils. things that could be alive, could be dead. could be plant, could be animal. could be a whole entity yet made of all kinds of things that don’t add up to it

When I thought of the dark coral reef, I felt it as a place which was deep and secret, which people couldn’t even visit. When we are lonely and within the lake of lost time, we might feel like we’re at a similar place. Not a sparkling coral reef perhaps, but something like it. Something which is unseen by other people, which feels very far away, like the bottom of the Mariana Trench, but at the same time there is something magical and sparkling about it.

I am calling this The Sparkling Dark.

Does being in lost time, the sparkling dark, allow us to access a realm of the magical? Or the mythical? What mundane experiences would back these claims up?

I have got several interviews with people I know coming up, mostly about chronic illness, but also about psychology, unemployment, creativity and recovery. I wonder what we will discover about the sparkling dark then.

To put a very long, rambling story short… from all of this, I realised that Björk is still a huge inspiration to me. She can be an influence even if I’m not emulating her sound. I’m taking a different view now — ecology made pop, art made mainstream, academia in emails about coral reefs and sparkling Nordic landscapes. Philosophy and weirdness and dreaming all whipped up and put on a stage for people to sing and dance along to. That’s what I want to do with this Wasted Time project (which I am now leaning towards calling “Lost Time” instead of Wasted…. ‘wasted’ implies more blame than ‘lost’).

Making the sparkling dark a place to dance in.