I want to talk about states of movement: convergence, divergence, and vergence.
We move when the time is right. We ride thermals, invisible forces pushing us sometimes to difficult elevations but always forward. Even when the body does not move, one’s ideas will. Modes of thought can migrate. They can overlay and blend; they can split; they can run untouching but parallel.
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Three hundred species, five thousand million avian bodies mingle biannually, trading gossip and travel stories on and around the Herculean gatekeeper—kestrals, storks, honeybuzzards, terns. The Rock at Gibraltar bears witness to a convergence of difference. Africa waves at Europe. The Mediterranean kisses the Atlantic. But difference need not be divisive! What wonder occurs when so much life is amassed for a single purpose: to move.
We wonder how the adolescent, unmigrated chicks know their path. Some suggest the position of sun, others, the undulating highway of the flock. But perhaps there is another answer: an inherited map, un-experienced but embodied. This is the string that pulls us to one decision or the other; the force that pushes us until we notice it and can choose to push back, or just, away.
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We move away, we remove ourselves from our context. We go to the empty spots on our maps and try to understand the space. We diverge from the path we set for ourselves in order to relearn ourselves. In any case, in every case, we experience a type of isolation.
We go North, where snow conceals any crevice upon which to find purchase; where language is a frozen sea, impenetrable. The extremity of being beyond the familiar forces us to acknowledge how little we actually know apart from our essential instincts. Isolation is not lonely, but a way for things to permeate what is otherwise preoccupied. Unfolding outwards to the peripheries of our focus.
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Wikipedia tells us that vergence is a physical, optical thing – both eyes moving in opposite directions to achieve a binocular whole, but to become one in the mind as well. Knowledge can lace in parallel, separate lines and arrive at the same conclusion. Aby Warburg and Ferdinand de Saussure, separated by land and time and field, each were called upon by ancient Rome and a goddess locked within a poem.
Now, information runs in parallel circuits and engines. The boundaries of authorship have become blurred, contested, open sourced. Disparate topics are suddenly connected by mere synapses. Lisa Robertson tells us this is the beauty of meaning: an immaterial presence circulating culture.
Our work is moved by what we see. By the connections between things and the departures from them, we form our own vergences on the world.
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Sources
“Lords of the Air.” Life on Earth. Writ/Dir David Attenborough. BBC, 1979.
Robertson, Lisa. “Keynote Address.” Liminal Positions Writing Symposium. Emily Carr University of Art and Design. Vancouver. 04 March 2011.
“Vergence” Wikipedia. 2011. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergence
