The detritus of the river accumulates on the bank of the Thames, is picked up by tourists and scrap-diggers, the mudlark Victorians, the detectorists with their shiny toys and prizes. Collage, which is to say curation—which is to say ikebana—is perhaps the defining technical paradigm of 20th C art—beginning with Dada, Joyce, into Ashberry, into sampling and hip-hop. Salvaging, schlepping, synthesizing; a logistics endeavour. Half a billion people live in the distributaries of river deltas, which act as sources and depositories for inland water, sediments, and nutrients.
You text me when you see something strange on the New York streets, send prompts for later about work and art. You write me all the time, little recordings of passing moments, ephemera turned solid.
Mark Doty: “This is what history is: All those centuries of bodies, moving over these canals, twisting and blooming into life in these houses, these streets; all that flesh hungering, coming together, separating, continuing, accumulating, relinquishing, aging and breaking down. Bodies as tulips bent to the demands of light, color into blossom, spent.”
Wind, water, and gravitational forces shift deposit weathered organic and inorganic materials, which build up as layers of sediment. This deposition may result in aggradation, the sheer amount of sediment slowly raising the elevation of the riverbed and of its banks. The river may become “choked” by deposits, its passage increasingly blocked. Flood risk rises; voids are filled; compaction creates solid stone.
The white calcium carbonate of chalk is made up from the crushed exoskeletons of marine phytoplankton. Civilization is fueled by the decaying remains of dinosaurs, the Mesozoic plant and animal matter of bog and peat. The white sands of Hawaii composed of coral skeletons digested by parrotfish.
What is the point of collecting—florigelium—without channeling—circuitry? Flowers and cables, bouquets and data. Monsieur Beniamino’s idea, vaguely Buddhist: that the meaning of the Universe is flow; that ethics is a question of what you block and conduit. To pass on the good, and let your body be a cul-de-sac for the rest.
In the process of accumulation and deposition, there is a sedimentation: a tethering of the once-floating, a structuring of the once-fluid. A stream of sense data is converted into schematic ideas, inferences, and concepts: “ideas as connection... like ecologies and networks.”1 Water and nutrients are organized into plants, which grow vertically, against gravity, instead of following gravity’s pull, instead of settling at the lowest point, pooling in the valley between local peaks.
The effects of “now” compound with time, recommending the time-adjusted utilitarianism of Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments: If we follow Singer in abolishing space, as a meaningful discount on moral mattering, then why exempt time? If small diminishments in present growth alters the well-being of a billion future humans, for the sake of a thousand present-day people, have we defected on those to come, have we chosen the wrong side in a trolley problem? Is there a moral mandate to economic and technological advancement?
Kevin Kelly, Wired. Beiser, personal SMS: “looking back i wonder if my entire life is like, some kind of invention of wired magazine / fell for the ‘intersection of art and technology’ meme.”