Islands
Inquire The Pequod; Or What is an Island?
1. Age of Entanglement:
“Everything is connected to everything else ''
Alexander Humbolt’s observation in mid1800’s in his book Kosmos.
Daily we encounter headlines, book titles, points of cultural wisdom, economic statements - by naturalists, social scientists, biologists, economists, politicians, technologists stating that everything is connected to everything else. (globalization, grids, the web, social media, global interconnectivity, interdisciplinary design, Gaia, the rhizome). Most of these images are ones where any point can be connected to any other, and must be by definition. Many of these images, and metaphors are taken from the study of ecology. In ecological studies the boundaries of relationships between things and creatures are confusing to say the least. Almost all boundaries are ambiguous in ecology and lack stable definitions. Many components of of our contemporary descriptions in politics, economics and philosophy are now based on biological and ecological tropes, metaphors, analogies that point to interconnectedness, indeterminacy, open-endedness and the enfolding of old binaries and dichotomies which previously other metaphors that had an image of separation and individuality had been used.
Up till the-mid-1800’s the master metaphors used in the geopolitical, economic, technological and design languages were geographical metaphors. Geography is the study of (location, location, location), mountains, water areas, places, regions ...In the mid-1800’s led by scientists like Humboldt and Darwin, our new understanding of ecology led to new ecological metaphors that were delivered to our imaginations. Ecological language and its imagininges have been taken as the final synecdoche to describe much of human life; political, social, aesthetics,economic. Identity, difference, us, me, mine, you, anyone, everyone, there seems at times not much left to these. Some have termed our time as the Age of Entanglement; a time of boundaryless boundaries:all is entanglement. However, within ecology we also find that when systems, spontaneous or fabricated, grow and extend in complexity they almost always have a tendency to produce heterogeneity and to form subset or Islands.
2.Geography- Isolate a definition of Island.
(to define:= finis-boundary, end, to mark the limit of)
In spite of clear and well defined boundaries, the island is a fuzzy notion, more metaphor, more imagery, more of a social imagination than a geological fact. It is a geographical reality and at the same time a concept that is used as one of the central metaphors of explanation to describe and define all parts of the world and culture, that we otherwise would have a difficult time describing. Islands have many, often dichotomous definitions and descriptions: Paradise / prison, vulnerable / resilient, utopia / dystopia, definite easily defined boundaries / permeable boundaries, insularity / connectedness, backwaters of biology and culture / cutting edge laboratory of change, stillness / movement…
Definitions, like islands, attempt to cut off, surround this and not that, this ends here, that starts there. This is a limit where one kind of thing begins and another ends. An island's definition is derived from a line seen on a horizontal plane. Horizontal (from horus-boundary, limit). The plain truth. On this plane at a line in the plane one substance ends the other begins, land ends, water begins: the coast-line. Islands have always fascinated the human mind. Islands as opposed to water. The limit is the coastline, which everywhere surrounds dry land, and likewise defines the seas horizontal expansion. The coast where land and water both begin (or end). Islandness gives us language to connect and disconnect parts and wholes, one thing from another. The edge, the shore, this coastline, between the known and the unknown, the living and the dead, sleep and awakeness, foreground and background, inside and outside, surface and depth. We look to land from sea and to sea from land. Things we know are surrounded by things we don't know. Finite surrounded by infinite.
Meta-phore - saying this and meaning that.
In English, and the island languages that worked over these shores: Celtic, Anglo, Saxon, Norman, Irish, Scots, Gallic, Welsh, Breton, Cornish, Cumbric, Pictsh, Norse…
Is-land = Land cut-off from water at coastland, surrounded and isolated by water.
Edge = sharp/ cutting
Coast = cote - outer limit (horizon)
Eg-land = dry ground in a marsh
Old Norse: ey = The moment where land and water blend: literally water land sea-land.
Homographic words with meanings to shift at the touch.
Oresund= the strait, shoreline, edge of a brook
Oratio = oration, a speech, of this and that, or not that
Horizon - limit, boundary
Orison - prayer to that just beyond the limit of...
Utopia - perfect place (T. Moore 1516) - Is precisely that, an ideal that cannot be fully realized, yet being an Island it can serve as an orientation a navigation point, or is it a whale of a story
Eutopia - good place.
What de-fines (marks the limit of) “Island”?
What are the properties of a coastline separating the realm of the sea from the realm of land? Islands, seem to possess an insular capacity to frame (coastline) and simplify (land/water) the seemingly unbounded and complex (marsh, swamp, bog, tides, archipelago) and kindles many metaphors that are useful for describing, defining our common and not so common experiences. One definition of island is that if the coastline can be circumnavigated and the perambulator arrives back at the starting point, then that land is pronounced an island. However, John Venn of Venn diagram fame back in the 1880’s saw an issue with this as he tried to diagram the geography of the planet.
“If circumnavigation alone makes a ‘land’ an ‘island’ then the 18 members of Ferdinand Magellan’s crew who made it back to Portugal after their 3 year voyage should have concluded that the Earth is an Island.”
In the ebb and flow of language there arises on the vertical plane a point of contention concerning the defining of the island. The tide rolls in and up onto what was land. The land’s mass and volume changes. The rise and fall of the tides. The coast or shoreline moves both horizontally and vertically. No longer a clear cut line of demarcation. There is a constant flowing mixing of land and water, waves lapping, tides rising and falling, marsh lands, malleable muddy, murky. Genesis 2, mud made flesh, Argillaceous Adam: clay animated. Clay this inanimate substance where water mixes with earth, and here becomes animated Adam and when unanimated becomes earth. The boundaries, lines, definitions begin to bog down, get in marshy land. Isolator, yet connected, a breeze; The wind, a breath, a spark (spirit) moved - now land-locked.
Darwin started out studying the rise of islands, both living animate coral animals creating inanimate atolls and islands, and volcanic islands; molten moving substance to solid land . And in the 1850’s opened the wide ecological world with his Origin of the Species. Always changing planet, solid earth, liquids to solids, and back, earth mud to life and back, animals and plants changing, evolving. He ended his career studying worms, and how when the lowly annelids work, earth appears. (one of his most popular works and a wonderful read)
In the past month I have been rereading Herman Melville’s leviathan novel Moby Dick or The Whale, written at the same time, almost the same year, as Darwin was writing. The images of Island looms large in the story. ‘Island’ being a geographical or geological metaphor, which has seemingly sharp, easy to see and definite boundaries. Island images have deep roots in our culture to explain many aspects of our shared life and the world around us. Yet today in the age of entanglement to refer to oneself or someone else as an Isolatoe, an individual, is almost to say they have deep psycho-social disturbances. Here is Herman Melville, master of metaphor, expanding the Island analogy at the same time the ecological metaphors were entering the language. 1851
“There now is your insular city of the Manhattoes, belted round by wharves as Indian isles by coral reefs—commerce surrounds it with her surf. Right and left, the streets take you waterward. Its extreme down-town is the battery, where that noble mole is washed by waves, and cooled by breezes, which a few hours previous were out of sight of land. Look at the crowds of water-gazers there.
Circumambulate the city of a dreamy Sabbath afternoon. Go from Corlears Hook to Coenties Slip, and from thence, by Whitehall, northward. What do you see?—Posted like silent sentinels all around the town, stand thousands upon thousands of mortal men fixed in ocean reveries. Some leaning against the spiles; some seated upon the pier-heads; some looking over the bulwarks of ships from China; some high aloft in the rigging, as if striving to get a still better seaward peep. But these are all landsmen; of week days pent up in lath and plaster—tied to counters, nailed to benches, clinched to desks. How then is this? Are the green fields gone? What do they here? “
But look! here come more crowds, pacing straight for the water, and seemingly bound for a dive. Strange! Nothing will content them but the extremest limit of the land; loitering under the shady lee of yonder warehouses will not suffice. No. They must get just as nigh the water as they possibly can without falling in. And there they stand—miles of them—leagues. Inlanders all, they come from lanes and alleys, streets and avenues—north, east, south, and west. Yet here they all unite. Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses of all those ships attract them thither?
Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?
Chief among these motives was the overwhelming idea of the great whale himself. Such a portentous and mysterious monster roused all my curiosity. Then the wild and distant seas where he rolled his island bulk; the undeliverable, nameless perils of the whale; these, with all the attending marvels of a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds, helped to sway me to my wish. With other men, perhaps, such things would not have been inducements; but as for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.” -
We are all geo-graphers of a kind, authors of our life on earth, and make constant causal general distinctions between islands, continental islands, oceanic islands, larger and smaller land masses; all emerging from the oceans depths of life. Islandness sharply, shapely marks the edge, the coast between territory of gnosis - our knowing and our not knowing, our interior and our exterior, our peninsulas jutting into the larger oceans of the world about us. An island’s connection to the mainland is usually hidden below the water level. The riddle of hidden origins, the conundrum is: Islands are connected and detached and isolated, like societies, like individuals.
Melville again; in the chapter titled Knights and Squires:
In like manner, the Greenland whalers sailing out of Hull or London, put in at the Shetland Islands, to receive the full complement of their crew. Upon the passage homewares, they drop them there again. How is it, there is no telling, but Islanders seem to make the best whale men . They were nearly all Islanders in the Pequod, Isolatoes too, I call such, not acknowledging the common continent of men, but each Isolato living on a separate continent of his own. Yet now, federated along one keel, what a set these Isolatoes were! An Anacharsis Cloutz deputation from all the isles of the sea, and all the ends of the earth, accompanying Old Ahab in the Pequod to lay the world’s grievances before that bar from which not very many of them ever came back.``
Islanders, isolotoes sharing life on the deck on the Pequod, all of the same mud on the island earth which in reality is one large landmass, some seen and some unseen.
Age of Islands - Geographical metaphor
Age of Entanglement - Biological / Ecological metaphor
3. The math:
“I am large, I contain multitudes”...“Geography, the world is in it; ...” I chant, copious, the islands beyond, thick as stars in the sky; 1855 Leaves of Grass -Walt Whitman (same time as Darwin and Melville)
(macrobiome/microbiome) Macro Entanglement?
Each piece of earth, each animal is full and complete and a unique ecosystem within their own community of microbes. -
100,000 land masses surrounded by water on planet earth
7,000,000,000- 7 billion people
Each person - contains, is composed of 40 trillion microbes
Our solar system - 9 planets, 150 moons, 1 million asteroids, 1 trillion comets,
Milky way galaxy 100 million stars
In the 1960’s a mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot,asked “How long is the coast of Britain?” A simple seeming question; how long is the coastline? After years of work Madelbrot postulated that in mathematical terms coastlines are infinite. That is, they are not a finite geographical entity from an objective mathematical perspective. Though fundamentally a finite object, the coastline is infinite on the horizontal plane. So the world of Fractals, a part of the tectonic shifts of Chaos theory, was brought to earth.
‘How to perambulate the fractal island of infinity? Zeno’s paradox. The imagined pedestrian would and will never reach her destination of coming back to her starting point. Perhaps even the point at which to start might not be able to be found to point to. Seeing is doubting; the fractal dimension within the mathematics of nature. The closer one gets to border areas, edges, the more jagged it appears, the more infinite it becomes. The fractal concept of island challenges the common notions of boundary and of finite entities.
“Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down on any map; true places never are” Melville
4. Tangle of analogies
If there were no islands we surely would have to make them up. Islands and the study of, and thinking about them, is less about the facts of being an island; what landmass is not an island, more the assertion that there are different ways of conceiving or describing the concept that there is an insular condition, both in turns of individuals and the polis and all the political and economic and social trappings that entails. To say, to affirm, the geographical fact that a certain mass of land based on certain horizontal and vertical coordinates with certain limiting features such as water touching and surrounding land is an island does not, we see, mean much of anything. The island we create is sometimes something else entirely than what we say we see or believe to see.
Not only do we think by means of island (de-fine, describe, delineate, limits, boundaries, points of no return, straight and narrow, isthmus, isolate definitions, to make clear the outline, to specify distinctly, the essential qualities) we also, all of us live on one. All islands have a solid, sub-marine(beneath the water) base. All of earth is one landmass, all connected. Does it mean we are all part of the mainland or connected there below our feet?
Time on our side?
There seems to be something strange about our question; What is an Island, and so something unusual about understanding it. How to get to an understanding of the strangeness of it? It is like St. Augustine in his autobiography asking what is Time:
“For what is time? Who can easily and briefly explain it? Who even in thought can comprehend it, even to the pronouncing of a word concerning it? But what in speaking do we refer to more familiarly and knowingly than time? And certainly we understand when we speak of it; we understand also when we hear it spoken by another. What, then, is time? If no one asks of me, I know; if I wish to explain to him who asks, I know not, yet I say with confidence, that I know that if nothing passed away there would be no past time; and if nothing were coming, there would not be future time; and if nothing were, there would not be present time. Those two times, therefore, past and future, how are they, when even the past now is not and the future is not as yet? But should the present be always present and should it not pass into time past, time truly it could not be, but eternity. If, then, time present,- if it be time-only comes into existence because it passes into time past, how do we say that even. This is, whose cause of being is that it shall not be-namely, so that we cannot truly say that time is, unless because it tends not to be “ (confessions, bk.11 ch24)
I can tell you where an island is, but cannot tell you what an island is. I can point to latitudes and longitudes. I can tell you what time it is but cannot tell you what time is. I can say the day, month, year. I can show you examples of beaches, coast, swamps, estuaries, marshes, bays, seas, oceans, gulfs, atolls, archipelagos, lagoons, sounds, fjords, ponds, lakes, tides, peninsulas. Islands, the definition, like the measurements of it, slips away like shooting stars in August nights.
What is water? (oh no we are not getting into that deep end of hot water, and a sea of trouble)
Island is a word and words have uses. We find, discover, track down, define, meanings of the word island when we look at the circumference of, circumstances it is used in and what the responses are, and with what other words and combination of words it is used. The word island must be connected to another word, to the mainland of words to find the meaning, to define, to separate off it must first be seen as part of; at low tide before hidden by the rising waters or the marshy wetlands, coastal swamps and bogs. Don't let the assumption then rise up that the meaning of the word ‘island’ is something hidden, something under the sea of meanings, landlocked, stranded, deep channels, narrow straits, up the river, a swamp of meanings, isle of hope, tides in, all ships rise, submerged in the vernacular of thought.
Problems arise when we pursue analogies in our language beyond the limits of their usefulness into the marshes and tributaries of the coastline. How and when do we know we are off and into deep water away from sight of land? We don’t - until too late. Our quest is often the monomaniacal one of Captain Ahab with a very mad, yet efficient crew on the decks of our Pequod. On the Pequod is an incredible crew, a collection of maniacs fanatically hunting down a harmless white whale with eminently practical American mechanical efficiency. Quakers, renegades, castaways, cannibals, a crew from every corner of the rounded globe. All under a raving captain. The Pequod sank, only Ishmael survived buoyed up in Queequeg’s casket, the white whale - swims onward.
Language, words are the coastline, getting at that which seems to be about final things, attempting to say that which cannot be said, which can only be gotten to or rather approached by way of analogy, metaphor. Wallace Stevens’ glances toward the shore a palm tree on the coast-line:
“The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.
Analogies constrain us, sink us, set our ships loose from the harbor to sail, our Pequod and crew, our white whale, our Moby Dick. Metaphors, definitions, analogies: all slippery, sloppy, awfully marshy and lots of muck stuck to our boots, easy to get sand in our eyes, lost in the swamp, bogged down, waterlogged, squishy squashy - and all in a totally Human, Humane way-
Tangle of geography ( Why do we not teach and study this most important discipline more?)
5. Becoming - Expert of the coastline.
“There ought to be in everything you write some sign that you come from almost anywhere.” Robert Frost, at Bread Loaf, 1958
“I celebrate myself - (Island geography)
And what I assume you shall assume - (Ecology’s boundlessness)
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
--- (syntheses of geography and ecology: boundaries and boundlessness) Walt again
What constitutes an island is not settled, neither the geographical, or geological identity. It is a real physical reality, a geographical entity and a long elaborate metaphor to explain what we otherwise could not explain without it. ‘Island’ is both part of, and apart from ‘our world’.