Mesostics - South Walney Island - September 2017

The use of mesostics as developed by Jackson Mac Low, John Cage and others allows us to read through a text, disrupting some of its more obvious meanings and allowing others to come through.

This seemed useful for dealing with a problematic object such as the writings and research of Niko Tinbergen and colleagues, who used South Walney Island as a field station for many years.

The work on South Walney led to Tinbergen's sharing the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with his mentor and collaborator Konrad Lorenz and the bee researcher Karl von Frisch.

Vinçiane Despret has identified a central tension in the work of these researchers, which typically combines open and surprising approaches to the practice of being with non humans, and a formal and rigid approach to the theory they developed. As a result, their founding contribution to ethology supplies remarkable insights from observation and co-habitation with other animals at the expense of a wider and richer account of non human invention and creativity. At the same time it systematically devalues and excludes observations and contributions from a wider community of interested people: lay experts, amateurs, others. From its origins, behaviourism, which continues to dominate many understandings of what animals - human and not human - are like, is deeply divisive.

The mesostics were chosen as a way to explore the situated practices of listening, thinking, walking, writing in the course of a stay on South Walney Island as part of a residency with Octopus / The Cumbria Wildlife Trust / SoundCamp. The conditions in which these activities take place seem important, as Tinbergen's own writing makes clear in many places. In particular the mesostics evoke the experience of an island that is constantly contracting and dilating with the tides: South Walney is changing all the time from a quite narrow to a quite broad strip of land, at the same time as the intertidal zone shrinks and grows. While you are on the island, you are constantly exposed to this shifting, which brings the sounds of seabirds and water in and out of earshot by imperceptibly slow degrees, so your absent mindedness is continually being recalled.

It turns out that it is quite difficult to determine the edge of land subject to tidal flows. In the case of South Walney this situation is compounded since the West side of the island is being scoured by currents all the time, and re-deposited at the island's southern end. From some perspectives it is this intertidal zone that tends to escape development, ownership and even definition, that leaves it open to transient habitation - whether in the imaginations of visitors and residents of Barrow in Furness across the bay, or by the hundreds of thousands of seabirds that over Winter here or pass through on migration. Not to speak of the colony of Herring and Lesser black-backed gulls, whose size fluctuates in uneasy relation with that of the human population.

All the mesostics in the series have been processed using the Mesostic Poem Generator at http://mesostics.sas.upenn.edu/. This is a javascript version, with some extra functionality, of a Python generator by Nicki Hoffman. It was made by members of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Arts and Sciences Computing group: Clare Din, Andrew Jennings, Brian Kirk, Chris Martin, J. Reuben Wetherbee.

More information on their project: http://mesostics.sas.upenn.edu/about.html

More on mesostics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesostic

Source Texts

1. Niko Tinbergen: The Herring Gull's World - A study of the social behaviour of birds, Collins, London, 1953, p47.

Grant Smith