This essay was published along with an annotated libretto of Chimera’s Still Warm Body, as part of the e-flux project “You Can’t Trust Music”, curated by Xenia Benivolski.
The double sacrifice is
already the triple sacrifice
For knowing the double sacrifice
is itself a sacrifice
The first sacrifice consists in
reaching – all the way – and
finding!
While the second sacrifice
is only half-the-way in
Never reaching the called destination
But now — to continue, having once
performed these two eternal sacrifices, is
everytime — of each of its moments —
a new sacrifice which, again, is yet
another sacrifice unless what the
continuation consists of is a
repetition of the initial sacrifice,
which then becomes the eternal
sacrifice, the ever unsacrificed sacrifice,
for which now everything becomes sacrificed.
—“The Double Sacrifice,” Catherine Christer Hennix (1)
In 1665, the Dutch mathematician Christiaan Huygens observed from his sickbed that the pendulums of two clocks mounted to the same surface would reliably swing in unison, regardless of their starting positions. His was an observation of coupled oscillation (2), and of spontaneous self-organization; from the stillness of bed, nature unfurls in empyrean harmony. Huygens’s observation has since provided insight into popularized theories of emergence and synchrony—oft-conjured imagery of audiences spontaneously clapping in unison, or fireflies rhythmically blinking together across a night sky. Perhaps these phenomena reunite us with a teleological drive relating symmetry and synchrony to divine nature, further embedding notions of their intrinsic desirability (3).
In 2002, Yoshiki Kuramoto and Dorjsuren Battogtokh found that a ring of coupled oscillators would divide into two simultaneous spatio-temporal groupings, one coherent and phase-locked, the other incoherent and drifting (4). The groupings evolved simultaneously to produce a third, hybrid state, named two years later by Daniel Abrams and Steven Strogatz as a Chimera State, in which synchrony and asynchrony were shown to co-exist (5).
In 2016, a group of scientists at the University of New Mexico, led by Francesco Sorrentino, conducted a follow-up experiment to Abrams’s and Strogatz’s work, using three swinging platforms (6) and forty-five metronomes (7). In video documentation of the experiment, the control room is dark, save for the glowing blue lights attached to each metronome’s pendulum. The metronomes on the outer right and left platforms oscillate in mirrored anti-phase lockstep, transferring momentum back and forth to each other. Their movements are regular, but minutely imperfect: the smallest environmental and material variables produce aberrations, shifting movement with dust-sized incrementation. With these little changes, the anti-phase lockstep of the left and right platforms influences the metronomes on the middle platform. An air of increasing unpredictability emerges. The oscillations of the pendulums in the central grouping stray from regularity, wildening. As the metronomes to the left and right hulk out a rhythmic huddle, they appear to encourage the metronomes on the central platform, as if building up their emotional momentum. The central grouping of metronomes thus begins to swing polyrhythmically. Their jolting sways are a joyfully indeterminate act of searching: a gleeful rampage, a liberation, a disorientation. Connections emerge and are obliterated; there is no loyalty to past or future synchronization. While the left and right groupings of metronomes trade in predictability, the central grouping of metronomes resist expected movements. Their repetitions delve into small changes, producing undercurrents.
In witnessing repetitive action, one learns to notice aberrations, to look for patterns, and to find oneself reacting emotionally to errancy; we might find ourselves excited, displeased, surprised, or relieved. In his essay “On Reset,” Brian Blanchfield conjures Gertrude Stein’s notion of repetition, which is
…never exact repetition, because the human registering it is different the second time. For her, the practice has implications, self-othering at the mark of the selfsame. … A marcher sounds off in tandem with one earlier in formation, to whom he’s now attuned. Two pairs of others uncannily have their ties blown north; they turn in lockstep away from the rest. Another by himself five rows ahead turns too, though his tie is tucked. The far marchers in the fourth, ninth, and twelfth rows drag their stride when each crosses a certain mark. Implacable. Anticipation tripped by surprise. Again the marcher counts himself and is answered by his partner. And as the troop moves through the course, the course is not used by the passage through. This is a dance (8).
Repetition isn’t threatened by the introduction of aberrant newness, but forged by it; there is self-othering in selfsameness. The Chimera State shows us that actions may be wild(ly different) or out of step, but the (hybrid) body is in a constant process of remaking itself through repetitive acts. Repetition as it pertains to rhythm is never perfectly ordered, but environmentally responsive.
The American jazz drummer, percussionist, professor, inventor, artist, gardener, herbalist, acupuncturist, and martial artist Milford Graves spoke of the heartbeat as the beat-maker (9), inherently asynchronous. The body, according to Graves, doesn’t operate metronomically but adapts to its surroundings and the forces that subtly shift its course. Graves famously set up an electrocardiogram machine in his basement studio after coming across a medical recording of heartbeats (10). In listening to the recordings, he found what he termed secret/possession/ritual rhythms: intuitive, deeply ingrained human rhythms related to the holistic interactivity of the body and the mind (11). Graves recorded the heartbeats of friends, family, students, and visitors over successive decades, producing substantive research into the field of cardiology (12). What he found was that the rhythms of the heart do not just have a pulsebeat, but—using customized software that measures the voltage of a heartbeat’s electrical charge—they carry a drone and a melody too. He found writhing patterns in the spaces between each beat. He made these patterns visible by isolating certain parts of their waveform using vibrational geometry to produce animations of dancing lines—a teeming void.
In their essay, “TransMaterialities: Trans*/Matter/Realities and Queer Political Imaginings,” Karen Barad speaks of the void as the first chaos. They associate it with the vacuum in Quantum Field Theory: a place of ontological indeterminacy. Like silence as an absence of sound, but never the total zero-sum of sound (13), the void/vacuum is not “…(determinately) empty, nor is it (determinately) not empty” (14). The void, the space between existence and non-existence, is “…a lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming. The void is flush with yearning, bursting with innumerable imaginings of what might yet (have) be(en)” (15).
I would like to put forth the idea that the void is the in/determinate third space where the Chimera State, for our admittedly artistic purposes, lives. It is a spatio-temporal space that is not only invested in a continuous cycle of digestion, but also in a continuously shifting, simultaneous state. It is like the wild movements of the central grouping of metronomes; or Graves’ secret/possession/ritual rhythm; or the way in which Hennix’s triple sacrifice emerges through the double sacrifice, itself lingering somewhere within the cycle of the eternal sacrifice, so that the sacrifice remains continuously un-sacrificed. Death undoes life and life undoes death. The Chimera State reveals uroboric cycles and errant locomotion. It treads the muddy passage between mountains carved by fire and water. It’s where you are now, in the dark. Your vision searches for minute differentiation in shadows, inventing stories and confabulations as you strain for definition. “Only the shadows are actualized” (16).
1). Hennix, Poësy Matters and Other Matters, 91.
2). A coupled oscillator occurs when two systems are intertwined to the extent that they mutually exchange energy between one another. This was the first published observation of coupled oscillation.
3). Connecting symmetry to aesthetics is a fairly perilous endeavor and requires lengthy discussion, taking into account the long and diverse discursive history around beauty and irregularity, possibly discussing the Zen Buddhist notion of Fukinsei (不均整), or Adorno’s assertion that, in artistic matters, asymmetry can only be grasped in relation to symmetry (“Asymmetrie ist, ihren kunstsprachlichen Valeurs nach, nur in Relation auf Symmetrie zu begreifen,” Adorno, 237). What is perhaps more at stake here is the simultaneous co-existence of disparate (a)symmetrical, (in)coherent, (a)synchronous forms: whether hybridity denotes a lack of legibility, and whether illegibility renders grotesqueness.
4). Kuramoto and Battogtokh, 1.
5). Abrams and Strogatz.
6). The swinging platforms are also referred to as mechanical oscillators.
7). Blaha et al., 1.
8). Blanchfield, 125.
9). Amiri Baraka speaks about rhythm as fundamental to the body and to life in his 1985 Naropa University lecture on speech, rhythm, sound, and music: “Because the rhythm keeper is what? The heart. That’s the human relationship to rhythm: boom boom boom boom boom boom…When that drum stops in there, that boom boom boom boom boom, then you have ceased to be.” (6:48)
10). Geckeler M.D., 1949. In Nussbaum and Despont’s interview, Geckeler’s album is described as a 7-inch, called “Normal and Abnormal Heart Beats”, released by White Laboratories.
11). As when, for example, Graves drummed in tandem with dancer Min Tanaka’s dance improvisations for neurodivergent children in Japan; Graves said that he was drumming a ritual rhythm, one that the children intuitively understood. Meginsky & Cloaca-Young, Milford Graves: Full Mantis, 00:40 mins.
In conversation with the Vodou priest Jean-Daniel Lafontant, Graves further described possession rhythm in relation to his heartbeat recordings: “These pathological heart rhythms were similar to the rhythms that a drummer gets into when in a state of possession. Everybody thinks a normal heart should beat like ba-boom, ba-boom, ba-boom, but it might not actually beat like that. When a drummer gets into a state of possession you can hear all kinds of heart rhythms, not just ba-boom, ba- boom, ba-boom.” Graves and Lafontant went on to describe the lexicon of sacred percussion—rhythms of possession—in Vodou rituals: sacred rhythms that shift human physicality, vibrations and movement that spur healing, and trance states as well as organization and uprising—as, for example, the Haitian uprising against French colonial oppressors was scored by drumming. Nussbaum and Despont, “Healed by the Beat”.
12). Graves died in February 2021 of congestive heart failure, related to a condition called amyloid cardiomyopathy. His studies into the in-between melodies and states of the human heartbeat were also studies into healing his own heart, and the hearts of others, leading to a patent for the preparation of non-embryonic stem cells with the goal of controlling the degree of their differentiation.
13). As John Cage would have it.
14). Barad, 395.
15. Barad, 396.
16).In The Raw and the Cooked, Levi-Strauss draws a parallel between music and myth in suggesting that both are languages that “transcend articulate expression,” but simultaneously need (and need to be able to deny) a “temporal dimension” in order to unfold. Levi-Strauss, 15. To open up the context of this quote: “Music and mythology bring man face to face with potential objects of which only the shadows are actualized, with conscious approximations (a musical score and a myth cannot be more) of inevitably unconscious truths, which follow from them.” Ibid., 19.