writ in water

[asakiyume]

Wakanomori went for a bike ride beneath high-tension wires and took this photo of the wires reflected in a little stream.



The water is rippling and moving, so the reflection is broken up. It looks ...



... like calligraphy



The very calligraphy that Waka spends his days deciphering and teaching--as in this example, an essay by an 18th-century female scholar, writing on the Kokinshū, an imperially commissioned poetry anthology of 10th-century Japan.



If I can get Waka to read me the water calligraphy, I will tell you what it says. He also took a video in which you can hear the wires singing their high-tension song, which may provide clues to the text.

Comments

[asakiyume]

I was thinking about oral communication versus written communication, how the former implies immediacy (although there are ways around this, as we know from folksongs and children's clapping games being passed down) and the latter implies permanence (although we can preserve oral transmissions too, and written ones can both be destroyed or become inaccessible to us if we lose the key to them). And how a message conveyed on water is almost more oral than written. sovay said she liked the idea of the water writing itself, and that made me think of how I had initially seen the power lines as the writer, but it could be the water itself. Or maybe this act of writing is a collaboration between the power lines, the water, and the sky.