Grammar of Water : The nature/culture continuum
Everyone is a born dancer,
Resisting pressures that surround her,
Like fish in water.
The inner ear still has the ocean in it!
We are tuned to receive sound waves through ocean.
We are the waves which have come out of the ocean carrying itself in the spaces surrounding each cell.
Kumar Shahani, The Threshold
Fish, adapted for the buoyancy and movement of water, began their venture into the world above. Through millenia, this daring migration set the stage for an evolutionary narrative that would mold our very essence. The fins that once steered fish through waves metamorphosed into limbs, with bony scales forming the knuckles and fingers on one side, and a soft, supple palm on the other. The nervous system evolved to mirror the branching of a river’s tributaries and the roots of a tree drawing sustenance from the depths of soil—synapses firing, neurons communicating, mapping information across our body.
As Kumar Shahani writes in Notes for an Aesthetic of Cinema Sound:
‘Both the senses of sight and sound, it may be noted, arose out of the need to perceive movement: to locate an object and one’s own relationship to it; to gauge the pressures at work; to achieve points of equilibrium and to move in a controlled manner not only from static point, as we seemed to imagine in our classical civilisations, but to find in these different vibrations, and differences of pressure, the vitality of being itself.’
Amidst this transformation, we halt at the riverbank of being human, sitting cross-legged under the banyan tree as I am while writing this, like all storytellers. But speaking, not with my tongue, but rather through relays through my torso, arm, hands, fingers, neck, head, and face, eyes, mouth, eyebrows… a gestural lexicon signaling the cascading beats of my core - slapping on our bellies or chest to drum before skins were stretched to make drums. Our bodies become the living verses of timeless gestures, in the poetry of our existence.
As a dancer trained in India, I was taught to move in jagged, serpentine lines like twisted branches. Our limbs were trained at a young age to stretch the ligaments of joints so that bodies can flow like the curves of a river to evade the rational will of a straight line.
It is an invocation for us to find circularity in the curves and repetitive imbalances of the dancer’s metric timekeeping of 16 taals (beats). The 16 taals are slowed down, stretched, sped up, and compressed to forge fractals of gestures, a sequence of laya (rhythm), emotions and impulses which nurture the body and to which it returns. In Indian music and dance, a taal is a poetic structure that follows a cyclic rhythm. After varying in intensity across the remaining 15 beats, it always faithfully returns back to its first. Each taal contains ‘claps’ and ‘waves’ that denote which beats are stressed (the claps) and unstressed (the waves), marked on the soft side of the palm. In Teentaal (16 taals), for instance, claps are on beats 1, 5 and 13, with 9 as a wave, an audible emptiness. In this dance, the claps and waves that punctuate the taal become the punctuation marks of a poetry in motion. The claps are the exclamation points, emphasizing the beats with vigor and intensity. The waves, on the other hand, become the spaces between words, allowing emotions to breathe, like the commas and semicolons that shape the flow of a poem.
For a rhythm to occur, the continuous duration must be interrupted, and it must return and continue so that it can be interrupted again. Similarly, water has its own laya (rhythm), existing in taals (beats) of seasonal oscillations between high waters, falling waters, low waters and rising waters, that repeat, return and revolve around each other in the process of their own disappearance.
In the depths of the ocean, where light dissipates into shadows, the interruption and return of clicks, pulses and the audible emptiness is what allows whales ‘to locate an object’ and find their ‘own relationship to it’. By emitting high-frequency clicks and listening intently to the returning echoes, whales form fractals of information constellating in a terrestrial map of the underwater. Much like the beats of a taal, these acoustic pulses are modulated - slowed down, stretched, sped up, and compressed - for whales ‘to move in a controlled manner not only from static point, but to find in these different vibrations, and differences of pressure, the vitality of being itself’.
Whales evolved to lose emphasis on vision and develop echolocation when they left behind terra firma. But their tail, as they propel through the ocean, still carries traces of their ancient, terrestrial heritage. To swim, they dance their tails up and down, rather than back and forth as fishes do. This biomechanical inheritance comes from their land-dwelling ancestors, whose backbones did not naturally bend side to side, but up and down. A whale’s vertebral column undulates up and down in waves as it moves forward. The rhythmic oscillation of senses, as creatures evolve from land to water and back again, are submerged in the way our bodies move through the world. This convergence of past and present in ephemeral performative practice is always in transition, from one beat to another, from one hand gesture to another, from one species to another, before returning back to its first iteration to begin the journey all over again. These drummings, cries, crawls, highs and lows, meanders, body lines moving like a droplet on a spider’s silk thread or a whirlpool's eye, all intimate a matrix of vital signs that await our ability to hear the water’s call. To feel in its vibration and pulse, as it curves uninterrupted, the rhythms that inform dance-making as poetry-making.
Published in Modern Poetry in Translation, Fresh and Salt: Focus on Water