Sonus Maris

The Brain is wider than the Sky
For put them side by side
The one the other will contain
With ease and You, beside
The Brain is deeper than the sea
For hold them Blue to Blue
The one the other will absorb
As Sponges, Buckets do
The Brain is just the weight of God
For, Heft them, Pound for Pound
And they will differ if they do
As Syllable from Sound.

Emily Dickinson, The Brain is wider than the Sky (1862).

We are neurologically predisposed to seek patterns in our surroundings, in fact, pattern recognition is our core cognitive ability, vital to our evolution and survival as a species-as it affords the capacity of prediction.

In life, as in art we take delight in the symmetries, growth patterns, and morphologies of the natural world as through them we recognise our own formation. However, there is a constant flux between the regularity, or predictability of a pattern and instability or turbulence that might threaten to render it indecipherable — to walk this tightrope between order and chaos is one of the central techniques of art, to distill clarity from chaos is the purpose of science.

In 1917 the Russian Formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky made a distinction between
poetry and prose, coining the term Ostranerie (or Defamiliarisation) a device for making strange, to render a common thing in an unfamiliar manner or context to create a fresh perception of it. This trope of making strange with language has recurred throughout the twentieth century, surfacing as Freud’s notion of the Unheimliche (the uncanny) as Berthold Brecht’s Verfremdungeffekt (the estrangement effect) and as Jaques Derrida’s Différance (which hovers somewhere between difference and deferment).

The probabilistic learning that pattern recognition develops is extremely useful in the prosaic world — it is the way we navigate our daily lives. However, in creative practice, we always require a twist to a narrative, a dissonant metaphor in a joke, or an unpredictable note to conclude a melodic series. This is the sweet spot, the point at which our expectations of regularity in a pattern are disrupted — but not too much, just enough to throw the brain into mild confusion. It is the fissure, the reveal, the punchline that reflects back on the narrative arc and plays with our assumptions.

Science is based upon empirical evidence, it observes and carefully quantifies the
complex phenomena that surround us in an attempt to make sense of chaos. At the small end of the scale, each wave that crashes onto the beach at Narrabeen creates a turbulent swirl of sediment, multiplied thousands of times in each individual storm.

The Scientists of the Water Research Laboratory understand these individual events as nonlinear interactions which are difficult, if not impossible to interpret or predict. However, the lab has been monitoring the shifting shoreline at Narrabeen for over 43 years and from this long-term view, it is possible to identify an accumulative effect in which the sand volume rotates between the northern and southern end of the beach in cycles that range between two to seven years.

When considered in conjunction with wave and storm data an overarching mechanism driven by climate emerges — it is our point of view along the axis of the particular to the general that allows us to see the wood from the trees.