The Sensible Dis-appearance

When thinking about decay and maintenance, where my research started when I saw the human shape contrasting with the nature shape within the man-made park, I felt sarcastic. This human action of destroying nature, building city, and then “bring back” nature within human infrastructure to create atmosphere of nature seems arrogant and ironic. How we force our human aesthetic and perspective to interfere with nature phenomenon, and spend unnecessary amount of resources (including nature resources such as water and energy for transportation…) to maintain for a built nature seems ridiculous. How we prevent nature growth, the atmospheric phenomenon, to occur on our infrastructure (even it is in a park), and see decay that need to be eliminated made me analysis the definition, relationship, and reasons behind.

This behind-the scene encounter of trying to relate to both unsettles me and make me question the relationship between decay, growing, and breathing. With the close-reading of “The Life of Plant,” I dive deeper in the idea of decay as growing and exchanging air, containing with and within. Decay and growing isn’t a binary and linear thing, it is the cycle of breathing. I don’t want to separate myself, and extract myself from this phenomenon, neither do I want to fight against time and decay. I decided to collaborate with it.

However, I didn’t know exactly what my role is within this relationship, and what is specifically this relationship and phenomenon. Reflecting on the verb of separating, erasing, pausing; time as a factor, the clear definition of breathing, the common element (informant) became clearer.

Within the reflection of waiting for the ice melt for 5 hours, the process itself seems more beautiful than the goal of letting the ice fully melt. Reconsider the definition of breathing, I found out that this entire process that happens invisibly is an autocatalysis process of exchanging entropy, and water is the agent for this exchange.

In my “triangle of intimacy,” of the autocatalysis reaction, what is the shared center between me, atmosphere, and decay is entropy, within this triangle, what’s shared between me, atmosphere, and the process of exchanging entropy is time.

What exactly is the things and concept we can’t fully understand, out of our reach, untouched, and unseen. How do we approach it, sense it and get closer?

The Score Poetry:

Look at the shape-in-motion of the drop of water,
Where does it come from?
Pause this drop of water, extract the shape within.

Put a hand underneath and hold this drop of water,
Where does it belong?

Hold this shape that the ice once melted into.
What is shared between you?
It is another shape when you are holding it again.

Sense this drop of water, the energy,
the heat that you lent to it.
Feel the heat you lost, the area that becomes wet.
Where does it go?
Does it appear as something else?

Move with this drop of water, follow it with your breath,
along with time.
Imagine this drop of water on your eyelash, in your throat, in your past.
How does it penetrate you?
What is shared between you?

Let it drops randomly on you.
You can’t hold this drop of water forever,
and you can’t hold what it was.
What will it dis-appear into?

Look into the ripple.
Do you see the ripple of the air around it?
What is shared between you?

Do you remember how it vanished from your hand?
How will it vanish again, from the floor?

Will it be part of the air contained in us?
It gently touches the past of itself, part of itself, and the future of us,
in between water, before ice, and after vapor.
What is shared, is always presence.

We are made from the place of dis-appearance, we all belong to it, the things we made, the things we are holding that we thought is us.

It is shared.

The motion flew through us, the uncertain rhythm, the uncertain puddle, and unseen past.
A never-ending flow.

It is around us, exchanging on itself, circulating between us.

It is shared.

We touched the water, and what we haven’t touched?

Close-Read of the Poetry:

Suffocating, breathe blocked by distance, the limit of my mind unsettle the mind.

Trying the remember the sensation archived on my skin, on my body. The numbness, like electricity radiate my limbs.

Feelings and sensation are the most honest things. It is universal, the drop of water must felt me as well. Relations are created, the score is the way of relating with this drop of water to understand entropy. What is being created, the feelings, thoughts, sensation, movement, energy, mutual relations are information entropy. It is uncertain, it varies between different skin, different types of drop of water, different time, and space…

It is how I approach between us, how I sense the distance.

Analysis of Encounter:

Giving non-human informant consent for me is to understand the concept that human can’t ultimately fully interpret. The concept exists, but I can’t sense entropy, touch, or see it. I am close but far away.

From a macro perspective, instead of lending consent to the subject matter, and see myself with intentional approach to study it, which might be arrogant and anthropocentric, I see consent as understanding.

There is no man-made, human nor non-human, we are all part of nature, even man-made structure belongs to nature. There is nothing in this world that belong to us. We, ourselves doesn’t belong to ourselves. We can only understand what we are “designed” to be capable of understanding. We can only analyze what we are capable of. Things we can’t imagine, we can only imagine base on the frustrated distance. The idea of entropy is something neutral and happens every split second. We live within this system every day, yet we can’t fully embody it. The autocatalytic process of the drop of water visualize the process of sensing and entering the untouchable idea of entropy within the process itself. The process enable us to accept the imagination, to be a part of it with sensation, thoughts, and approaching with frustrated/imaginative distance.