Reciprocities

by Paul Carter

In Syzygy Harry Nankin juxtaposes congealed starlight and the silhouettes of communal insects in expanding motion. Besides the obvious contrast of physical scales, there is a contrast of time spans. Much, if not most of the ‘information’ contained in Nankin’s images is invisible to the naked eye. Forty to seventy per cent of the light used to produce the shadow photograms of the Mount Palomar and Siding Spring astro-plates originates beyond the Solar System. Light from the nearer part of our galaxy began its ‘journey’ – although we should think of the photons expanding, insect-like, in all directions – towards ‘us’ at about the time of Australia’s white settlement. Further out: further back – so that, if you could see reflected in those tiny, more distant specks of light a mirror of the time on earth, you could see back to the origins of life. In contrast, caught in the lightning of an exploding flash bulb, the scatter of the insects has no more depth – the social arrangement no greater longevity or legitimacy – than the duration of its illumination.

Obviously, at the heart of Nankin’s desire to repair what he regards as a tragic blindness in contemporary culture towards its origins – and therefore a destructive amnesia regarding our common responsibilities to care for our time- and spacebound world held in common – is a kind of vertiginous willingness to test the extremes of his own proposition: is there any shift of scale, is there any juxtaposition of phenomena in the natural world, that would not on close and sensitive inspection reveal the principle of reciprocity? For it is remarkable that in Nankin’s selection of remembered portions of the night sky – triply remembered if we follow the genealogy of the images (they have their own life time) from a) the negatives of an astral survey conducted between 1948 and 1988, b) the laying of these over unexposed film on certain appropriately starlit nights at Lake Tyrrell and c) the collection of the negatives of the negatives to produce these positive images – one begins to see, much as the Ancients with their animal-ridden imaginations saw scorpions, adders and hunters, the constellation of societies, the hum and buzz of cosmic community.

Nothing in science quite prepared us for this discovery of shared gestalten imprinted on the extremes of matter. Nankin’s insight depended on respecting a Keatsian injunction to lie open, passively and receptively. Keats advised this attitude under the Sun but Nankin and his team of faithful assistants – including the benevolent astronomer Maurizio Toscano, who, like some Chaldean sage, predicted the various alignments, eclipses, elevations and approaches necessary to the optimisation of the image – pegged themselves and their oyster beds of unexposed silver halide-saturated film to the beaches of Lake Tyrrell. The location was critical to this vertiginous experiment – vertigo-inducting because, in a human world rapidly expanding its coefficient of fragmentation, what chance was there that a point of coincidence would be found on the earth’s surface, a convenient focal plane in which a remnant of the original reciprocity between Heaven and Earth might still be made out?

In siting his research, Nankin took a hint from two mid-Victorian papers which the squatter and speculator William Edward Stanbridge published documenting the starlore of the ‘Boorong’ people. These otherwise shadowy traditional owners of the Lake Tyrrell basin were reputed to have exceptional astronomical knowledge, and historian and cultural ecologist John Morieson holds that their starlore was a cryptic guide to the proper constellation of relationships and responsibilities on the ground plane. Nankin’s exploration of the common place – the remnant constellating of life across time and space detectable at Lake Tyrrell – is also a homage to a people who understood the surface of Lake Tyrrell as a reflective surface, as a glass in which to glimpse darkly the divine dance whose puppets we are – or were, until modernity drained the water out of understanding in favour of a dry thinking that dismissed the evidence of reciprocities between the human and nonhuman world as mythological.

The word syzygy refers to the alignment of two or more heavenly bodies but it also aptly describes the method of Nankin’s work. To obtain an image, a number of variables have to be correctly reconciled and aligned. If the night sky is to provide the right amount of light to produce a silhouette of the teeming clusters of galaxies pinpointed on the astro-plates, excessive reflected light from the major planets needs to be avoided. Every emulsion used in traditional photography has a different reciprocity index which must be discovered if there is not to be a fatal ‘loss of information’. Added to this are the other chances that can be foreseen but not calculated – the power and direction of the wind blowing salt particles across the lake bed, experimentally, adding their sodium chloride scatter to the negative galaxies being reproduced; the cheeky clouds,
nurturing apertures to the heavens, then sliding insouciantly over the quiet night sky.

A pataphysical brio accompanies the seriousness of Nankin’s work: in a fallen world where the old reciprocity of Sky and Earth has been forfeited, work – the years’ long refinement of technique, the Chaldean calculations, the ‘alignment’ of human and archival resources – is the necessary pilgrimage that must be undertaken if a glimpse of the old Paradise is to be had. But what prevents this from being simply a religious meditation is its play. Schiller once wrote of a ‘play drive’ that ‘by activating the material drive at the same time as the formal drive … set limits to both.’ The recognition of limits, he considered, gave both ‘the freedom proper to each’. The cryptic, even playful, formal correspondences between the distributions of galaxies and the ‘undescribable blots’ of the insect clusters reconciles these two drives. The limits of demonstration – the fact that so much has to be hinted at but left embedded, in the history of the project, in the poetic analogues between astronomy and photography – is integral to the poise, the restraint and, ultimately, the tragedy that the work stages.

It is perhaps impossible for an artist to think or dream non-reciprocity: the drift of his desire is always to understand the meaning of things, and meanings are strictly unthinkable except in terms of relations lost and found. But insofar as disjunction can be represented, it may be through the tightrope of the poetic operation – the syzygy of elements chancily and calmly balanced in these pool-like, still twinkling, migrating depths – where so much of what is communicated strictly defies imagination. For what in our daylight world prepares us to orient ourselves to these visual patterns: pre-imaginal or post-imaginal, they draw us close to the horizon of poetic thinking, to the mortal zone where these points of light congeal, like remembered time, into tears.