Tomorrows Ripen Today

I. At the very end—after the last shadow of a flickering moth has flown—an empty chair, facing a screen, greets the departing visitor. On screen, a silent world confronts a vast, seemingly infinite horizon, which faces anyone who would sit in the chair. A walking figure seems now to recede, now to advance, on the featureless salinity of some planetary surface, away from or towards that horizon, and the viewer. The figure, like a particle in an experiment in quantum mechanics, seems to mark a plurality of simultaneous but different truths, one with regards to its position and another concerning its velocity. In the desert sky above this little peripatetic metaphysical drama, the moon, too, multiplies. The full moon acquires, and then loses, its own pale satellites, as if to suggest that no matter where one is, there is always, still, more world. Even the moon is on the run, in search of other worlds.

Still more world. "1

The planet turns on its axis, without anyone’s permission. Every turn, every revolution, is an uprising of the force of gravity, against the cold death of stars. The inevitability of thermodynamic dissipation must again be overcome, each time a life makes its presence felt. Life itself, everywhere, and at all times, is an index of the energy it takes to overcome the onset of entropy. Nothing compels life to be alive other than the refusal to be just dead matter, regardless of what may or may not be inevitable. And that takes energy. It takes energy to persist, in a state of integrity and organisation higher than that of the surrounding cosmic chaos. Why else does art, poetry, language, or the electric charge of any ordinary or extraordinary question exist, if not to be fuel for all those borne aloft by revolutionary planets, whirling in the emptiness of space and time?

In the film Provisions for Everybody, "2 we say,

Fuel thickens over time. A tree takes two million years to turn into a fossil, waits to ignite as a lump of coal, and then turns to ashes in a matter of minutes. In the 1930s, the productivity of the average British miner rose to 300 tons of coal per annum. Three hundred tons of coal lights up as 6600 gigajoules of energy. This energy powered an empire. Six thousand six hundred gigajoules is the energy needed to maintain the basal metabolic rate of 750,000 human beings. It is the amount of calories that one miner, in one part of the world, offers to fire.

The history of the world can also be written as offerings to
Coal. Sugar. Oil. Indigo. Opium. Tea. Coffee. Grain. Meat.

‘How much fuel is burnt in how many vehicles, for a shipment of anything to move from one port to another?’

How long did it take for that fuel to be formed in a hydrocarbon deposit, a gas field, off the coast of Qatar; how long did it take to burn, and at what speed? Given how quickly the millions of years it takes to form a lump of coal, or a litre of gas, is incinerated, how to make provisions for everybody?

In Raqs, having named ourselves after the Arabic word for whirling, movement, dance, we deal in the contemplations of these and other kinetic transformations. Crystals grow, moths flutter, revolutions occur, crowds gather, today’s load lightens, tomorrow’s ripens.

We look around us and see that, like the Buddha said, ‘everything is burning’"3. It is possible to think about everything that burns up in terms of calories and seconds. Even entire worlds.

Entire worlds are on the move.

II. Geological, biological and industrial time overlap here, as everywhere. Cerussite is a mineral, "4 its structure forms over aeons. The peppered moth, "5 on the other hand, has changed colour twice, through natural selection, over the course of a mere 150 years of industrialisation, followed by de-industrialisation.

When soot coated the walls of Manchester, peppered moths of a darker hue began to outnumber the paler ones, as they were better able to disguise themselves against the soot-blackened walls of buildings, and thereby confuse their predators. This was ‘natural selection’ made visible, in actual historic time.

The process continued when de-industrialisation set in. When the factories shut down and the soot was washed away, it became a liability to be a dark-pigmented peppered moth that would stand out against lighter walls. Lighter ones now had a higher chance of survival. And so, through ‘natural selection’, again, the peppered moth lightened up. In Alive With Cerussite and Peppered Moth,"6, a 3D scan of the insect becomes a time signature of evolution, flickering on a giant crystalline structure. It inscribes how industry and biology intersect, as they flit through the deep structures of mineral, geological time.

What happens when we telescope our imaginations to different time scales?

Five thousand years or so ago, pottery, fragments of seals, and one tooth—a molar—belonging to an adult male from the Indus Valley, in present day India and Pakistan, ended up in a burial site at Al Ruwaida, near Ruwais, on the northern coast of Qatar, approximately one hundred and 20 kilometres north of where Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art is located, in Education City, Doha.

They, our possible ancestors from a remote time in South Asia, were here: in this peninsula jutting into the Persian Gulf, before us. Had the burial site not been discovered, the traces would have remained underground, long after us.

The relics were discovered by a Qatari amateur archaeologist named Mohamed Ali Al Sulaiti, "7 who, following the lead of the pioneering centenarian archaeologist Beatrice De Cardi, "8 who directed the development of the National Museum of Qatar (NMoQ), was investigating the ancient links between Qatar and the wider world.

Who did the remains from Al Ruwaida belong to, or, to put it another way, who was the person who belonged to the remains? Was this person a mariner, a merchant, a storyteller, a translator, a potter, an artist, a pilgrim, a priest, a soldier, a person with a broken jaw, a twisted limb, a wounded spine?

When he came to this land, how many embraces did it take for him to turn from a stranger into a friend?

Did anyone ask him
Will you, Belovéd Stranger, ever witness ‘Shahid’ —/ two destinies at last reconciled by exiles? "9

When that unknown, mysterious but perfectly ordinary individual and his companions set sail from a harbour, perhaps somewhere at the mouth of the Indus river in Sindh or Balochistan, or the Great Rann of Kutch, "10 he would have witnessed an expanding horizon before him. With each night of sailing, he would have discovered some stars that stayed constant and others that moved, because the planet turns on its axis without permission."11 He would have felt the touch of winds that turned tail on themselves, known eccentric currents and their wave patterns that carried a changing universe of marine life, indicating that there was, always, still more world.

Sea turns to salt turns to sea as the seasons change. Crossings continue, horizons give way to more expansive horizons, infinities succeed infinities.

That ancient mariner may have spoken an ancient, possibly proto-Dravidian language that has faded into silence in the place where he came from, but remains alive in the consonants of the Malayalam that is spoken in the streets of Qatar, "12 and that together with English and Arabic, introduces our work to the visitor at Mathaf.

For thousands of years, people—like the body attached to that tooth—have made this crossing, like we have: bringing carpets, pictures, stories and taking some home. Sindbad the sailor tells the story of his seven journeys, to Hindbad, the porter on the streets of Baghdad."13 The stories he keeps telling, carried aloft on flying carpets, people the world; here, a parable of a Napoleon stopped in his tracks, there, the adventure of a philosophical housefly that solved a Cartesian equation. The desert and the sea stretch out ahead, the sky above becomes GPS. The beating heart of Scheherazade is a compass, an astrolabe, or perhaps just a clock that marks time, as it ticks through the longitudes of a thousand and one nights.

Stories beget stories.

A 15th-century textbook on navigation imparted the lessons that sailors had learnt across generations in the form of cryptic poems. This is the As-Sufaliyya of the Arab navigator Ahmed Ibn Magid."14 It was apparently on the boat that Vasco Da Gama sailed to India. Maybe it is still in use, at least in the lore of the nakhodas, the boat captains who set sail from the waters of the Persian Gulf to make landfall on the coasts of India and Africa, finding, as they sailed, still more world.

Here is Ibn Magid telling us how to find a cardinal point in the open ocean using stars:

‘The measurements between the two bright nodes of the summer triangle, Vega (Nasr al- Waqi) and Altair (Nasr al-Tir), are “attached” by the close relationship of the movement of one to the other. Whenever one of them travels one isba’ (a unit of distance) the other travels approximately the same.’

This is the Qiyās al-Mu’allaq (logic of attachment), as illustrated by the following poem.

I have travelled the night, watching and yearning
That has ‘attached’ both my eyes and my heart.

I have measured by route on the method
known as Mu’allaq at the end of the month

I have been guided, for it is accurate in everything
as clear as white upon black

On Al-Nasr begins the redness of my eyes
and Al-Tir, the pounding of my heart.”

What happens, however, whenever the heart skips a beat?

The blood makes noise./ The wrong chair simply levitates. / We ask, when market forces flood the gates, why now? "15 Stars move across the sky. People cross oceans. The world turns on its axis. Pixels turn into people. People turn into pixels.

With the rise of digital cultures, millions are connected in real time. They do not necessarily see each other. But they work with and affect each other.

They stand within the footprint of each other’s digital shadows.

These new people, abstract figures of modernity, configured into pixels, are now our daily companions.

While approaching the work we call To People, we filled our digital canvas with them—pixelated renditions of crowds. They bring to mind the crowds that began appearing in city squares, to transform their worlds, their times. They filled up space. They jostled. They overlapped. Sometimes, they cancelled each other out. They shadowed each other. They got pulled, pushed, stretched. At a certain moments, they revealed their basic unit. The pixel. You find that the more you pull, the more the pixel pixelates. The edges blur. They need repair.

The surface needs re-colouring. The surface needs restoring.

The weaving of pixels to form a pattern invokes the ancient art of weaving threads. All kinds of thread: viscose, silk, cotton, wool. Threads move through warp and weft to inscribe the pixel onto a new surface.

This surface snapshots the moment when the crowds reappear. This is what makes the carpets for our time.

The digit, the digital, the binary code of countless ones and zeros, becomes more than just a way of counting infinities by hand."16 It becomes the provisionally permanent answer we muster when we are asked, ‘Raqs, what is your medium? What is your subject? What is your substance?’

In answer, we could say, ‘digital’. As digital as the digits on our hands, as digital as a knot in a weave, as digital as the floating bits of our data bodies, as digital as the fluttering 3D scan of a moth, or the analysis of a crystal’s growth, as digital as the flicker of a light emitting diode, a burst of LED brilliance that can translate pixels of data into the units of an image. What we mean when we say ‘digital’ are its infinite articulations, its countless gestures, all its transitions and translations. This is the oil, the sand, the clay, the thread, the burning ember of our nights and days, the medium of our times.

Media and material diverge, collapse into each other, and reconstitute new patterns of signification in the fabric of old forms—like a medieval form of rhyming aphoristic poetry, a doha, colliding with a 21st century spectrographic analysis of a photographic image to form a pattern that flickers from inside a museum to the skyline of a city called Doha; mimicking its light, playing with its speech, tracing the crest and troughs of its turbulent graph in the world.

III. Let us now read a few Dohas for Doha, in Doha.

For the duration of Still More World at Mathaf, the flickering illumination of a doha hangs in the atrium, animating a large LED screen. It frames the entrance to the exhibition. Words assemble and fly away, letters form patterns and meanings. The spectrograph of an image, contemplating, analysing—kineses of all kinds—acts as a base on which the Doha writes itself. Three more dohas flicker in the last room of the show, approaching the cerussite, and a fifth unfurls itself on a tower by the bay.

These five dohas,"17 five illuminated surfaces, four of them playing on LED screens and the fifth on an architectural facade, bookend still more worlds with text, letter forms and electricity; as if they were a set of electric proverbs, or aphorisms that were attempting to burn themselves into their time. Words and letters form and break, in keeping with the fluctuation of the electric current. They configure themselves to provide multiple possibilities of thought and word play, with succeeding word forms often running counter to, or tangentially towards, the straight line of a first or plain reading.

Dohas woven by Kabir, Rahim sees them in the Stars
Raqs finds them everywhere, in Doha and in Mars

In the forenoon read a doha, and then proceed
raqs, for time to flower, each moment’s desiring is the seed

This doha talks in shadow speech
Where words fail Raqs, let the comma reach.

When nothing else will do, then Raqs
Try a line or two of madness, which is but sanity, redux

Raqs waits for times to ripen
Today’s loads, let tomorrow lighten.

The relationship we trace between today and tomorrow is a story to be told not as one straight line, but as a set of concentric waves, like the ripples radiating from a stone landing in water and dissipating in time; futures nested within yet other futures, worlds nestled within one another. This is the story of the world, and worlds, the ones that are at play now, and the still more of them that are to come.

Our present has provisions for everybody, and our futures are alive with crystals, moths and the moons of moons.

May all our tomorrows ripen.

References

1. The phrase Still More World, which is the title of the Raqs show, arose out of a Skype conversation between Raqs in Delhi and Laura Barlow in Doha, November 2018.
2. Provisions for Everybody, Raqs Media Collective, 2018 [3 videos, large drawing print, 3 dhurrie banners, window drawings on vinyl, found furniture]. The phrase is also a quote and extract from a sentence by George Orwell describing his vision of the future of the world, in his book length essay The Road to Wigan Pier, Victor Gollancz Ltd, London, 1937.
3. Everything is Burning (Sabbam Adittam in Pali) is a phrase attributed to the Buddha, from Āditta-Pariyāya Sutta/The Fire Sermon, spoken by the Buddha (original in Pali), from the Samyutta Nikaya/Connected Discourses of the Pali Canon. The phrase features as a text in a section of the film featured in Provisions for Everybody (Raqs, 2018). The text of this phrase is based on a re-reading of the English rendering by Bhikkhu Bodhi - In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon (Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications, 2005).
4. For mineralogical data on Cerussite crystals, see https://www.mindat.org/min-934.html The Cerussite referenced by Raqs is from the collection of the MIM Museum of Minerals and Mines, Saint Joseph University, Beirut. Palak Jhunjhunwala & Stratis Georgiou of Design Collaborative, London, devised a 3D model of a Cerussite based on Raqs’ notes.
5. For more on the peppered moth and its relationship to industry in Manchester, see ‘Industrial Melanism in the Peppered Moth, Bison betularia: An Excellent Teaching Example of Darwinian Evolution in Action’, by Michael E.N. Majerus in Evolution: Education and Outreach. 2 (1), 2009.
6. 3D Scans of the Peppered Moth (rendered into a video animation) and a Cerussite crystal (rendered into an architectural structure) come together in the work Alive, With Cerussite and Peppered Moth (2018 development of).
7. 3D Scans of the Peppered Moth (rendered into a video animation) and a Cerussite crystal (rendered into an architectural structure) come together in the work Alive, With Cerussite and Peppered Moth (2018 development of).
8. Beatrice de Cardi’s archeological research in Qatar is outlined in Report of the British Archaeological Expedition in Qatar (1973-1974), Beatrice de Cardi, published for the Qatar National Museum by Oxford University Press, 1978.
9. The lines ‘Will you Belovéd Stranger, ever witness Shahid —/ two destinies at last reconciled by exiles’ are from a ghazal by the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali. Ghazal 1: For Edward Said, first published in Agha Shahid Ali’s book of ghazals, Call Me Ishmael Tonight, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004). The lines feature as one of three poetic fragments in Raqs’ Translator's Silence (Lenticular), 2017, (lenticular images on three panels, 56 x 93 cm each). The other fragments are from the work of Rabindranath Tagore, and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. 10
10. The Rann of Kutch is a unique topographical and geological feature in the coastal landscape of the western Indian province of Gujarat. It is submerged under water in some seasons and emerges as dry salted land in other seasons. It is both land and water; both part of the Arabian Sea as well as a fragment of the coast of Gujarat, India.
11. A Planet Turns Without Permission (2018) was shot over two dawns and a full moon night in the Rann of Kutch in the winter of 2017. It is also the work referred to in the opening paragraph of this essay.
12. Malayalam is one of the demographically most significant languages spoken in Qatar. All the wall texts and labels of ‘Still More World’ were translated into Malayalam by Mr Husain K.
13. he story of Sindbad the Sailor and Hindbad the Porter is to be found in ‘The Seven Voyages of Sindbad the Sailor’ which features in Andrew Lang’s edition and translation of the One Thousand and One Nights, The Arabian Nights Entertainments (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898).
14. Al-Sufaliyya, The Poem of Sofala: Arabic Navigation Along the East African Coast in the 15th Century by Ahmad Ibn Magid, translated by Ibrahim Khoury, published by Junta de Investigações Científicas do Ultramar, Coimbra, 1983. For more on Ibn Magid and the As Sufaliyya, see, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Portuguese by G. R. Tibbetts (London: Routledge, 2004).
15. The blood makes noise…Meanwhile elsewhere’ are all phrases formed by the hands of the clock in the work Whenever the Heart Skips a Beat (2011).
16. The business of ‘counting infinities by hand’ refers again to the Untold Intimacy of Digits.
17. These five dohas in English (translated into Arabic by Basel Jbaily and Lina Ramadan) constitute the texts for the five ‘Dohas for Doha’ (2019).