Undulation

Writing as hyperobejct 3

From Seafloor-Invariant Caustics Removal from Underwater Imagery

for Bodhi Hannaford and Seija Kamefuchi

undulate, adj., wavy. — L. undulatus, ‘wavy, undulated’, fr *undula, dimin. of unda, ‘wave’. See undate, -ule and the adj. suffix -ate.

undulate, intr. v., to move in waves. — undulatus. See undulate, adj.
Derivatives: undulat-ed, adv. undulat-ing, adj., undulat-ing-ly, adv. undulat-ion, n., undulat-ory, adj.

undate, adj., wavy. — L. undatus, fr. unda, ‘wave’, which is cogn. with OI. undati, ‘it springs, gushes, moistens’, udan, udakam, ‘water’, Goth. wato, OE. water, ‘water’. See water and adj. suff. -ate and cp. hydra, hydro-, Cp. also abound, abundance, inundate, redound, redundant, sound, ‘to measure’, superabound, superabundance, undine, undose, undulate, undulous, ondograph.

from Klein’s Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language.

Written time subsides back into itself. Time swallows time as light is absorbed into the mottling of the waves.

Waves shorten at the leading edge. Get shorter and steeper until they break. Surging up the beach or collapsing in the open sea, folding over themselves.

Refuse the flatness of linear time, fold duration into a thick, breathing topology. What we call “before” and “after” are local inflections along the surface.

A hyperobject does not endure in time so much as modulate it, generating rhythms that exceed perception. Its presence arrives in waves: delayed, recursive, anticipatory. Effects precede causes in experience, while causes linger long after their supposed conclusion.

Temporal undulation names the strange agency of things that oscillate across time, withdrawing even as they saturate the present. We encounter the crests. The troughs remain withdrawn.

Time, under the pressure of hyperobjects, becomes viscous—less a line than a field of interference patterns. To exist within such a field is not to move forward, but to be carried within overlapping currents, where the future leaks backward and the past has not yet finished happening.

This is time as experienced in a renga 連歌, where the scent of the links can connect across vast spaces and time. The time of the present.

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The Threads

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Dust Waves

Writing 2023
Triangles again
January

First things a
Hot bath shave then
Brush teeth

New year changing
The razor blade for a
Cleaner shave

Lying too flat
The acid creep burns
Waking up

Some acid reflux
Early morning the throat
Sour rough

Coughing phlegm acid
Reflux continuity of change
Does not change

Time’s constant loss
Relative to the cloud flow
Upper atmosphere

Wave’s constant pressure
As the sand slurps up and down
Exposing concealed

No silence complete
It itself as the wave slides
Off and away

Wave sound enclosing
Its own silence and wash
Of gravel on the beach

Water thin over
Stone sliding onto
And into itself

Water at the boundary
Of being and nothingness
At the three point balance

Intermittent solids contain
Their own spaces percolating
And capillary action

Micro surface tensions
Pulling against the sides of the tube
Lifting water to the leaves

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Unexplored

“Set: English for Ensemble. A sequence. The sequel. To follow. A sect.
I collect, I am a collection, I am collected by.”

“Ensemble: French for Set. The whole together. At the same time.
In it together. We are here and we share that we are here.”

Cyan yellow
Magenta with black
For depth

Adding red to green
To blue light in
Photosynthesis

Breath in the
Colour space between
RGB and CYMK¹

Transfinite colour
Between any system
For reproduction

Virtually all of the real
Is irrational and can only be named
Precise measurement blurs

An infinite
Divisible sea
Is subsiding

Cantor dust thinning²
Space with each iteration
Of age over time

Gone given else
Into other into stranger
Into kindness lost

Gone given loss
Into other selves reflection’s
Infinite regress

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Phase transitions

Water medicine
Water tea tepid
Water dust

Any three things
Placed will have tension
Breath water air

Water choosing
Not choosing to³
Claim a state

Ice changing to
Water vapour holding
Light from the surface

Snow absorbing rain
Caught in a phase shift
Back to water

Snow frozen between
Dead leaves the rain
Starting to fall

Surface steam
Obscuring the water
Suddenly clear

Breath vapour
Bound to lung membranes
Tight as skin

Breath vapour⁴
Bound to lung membranes
Tight as skin

Water not
Water not rain
Not fog

Water at the boundary
Of being and nothingness
At the three point balance

Gone clean into the
Space between numbers
Continuous flow

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Ageing

Lying conscious of
The movement of blood and
Bones faint grinding

Struggling to know
What is happening to my
Body as it fails

Older I pause at
The top of the steps looking
For the handrail

Fibroids persistent
Pain in the gut bleeding out
Her womb taken out

Back pain fumbling
To put on my underwear
Pulling it up with my feet

Holding my jaw loose
Avoiding the pain in an
Upper molar

Pain saps strength
A required position
Of perfect stillness

On a bad day
Pain disrupts thought
Sleep inconstant

Getting older
Harder of hearing
Listening to each other

Did you hear me?
Are you listening? Where
Are you drifting?

A child’s loss before
Birth our liquid being
Diminished⁵

Gone slip into some-
Thing else some other
Kind of known

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Three bodies

The three cornered world
Of grass crossing grass with
Contains itself⁶

Triangles built on
Triangles containing
Triangles on edge⁷

Some stable cycles
As three bodies circle among
The infinite possible⁸

Any two points
Are always on
The same line

Two points will
Contain a third
Within

What bird is
That another a
Third or

Following three
Bodies swing together
Then apart again

Squares collapse
Without string connecting
Corner to corner

Walking across the
Punctured plane of the reals
Slipping between shadows

An infinite
Divisible sea
Is subsiding

Number an evenness
Of sound resting in
Even temperament

No common distance
To measure is both
Joined by root two⁹

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Writing Repetition

Writings slow state
Of sunken repetition
And saying again

Writing held in
What the hands know
And have forgotten

Writing the voice
In its absence allowing
Echos to answers

Resonance into
A series of itself the
Repetitions echoing

The excluded
Middle voice of
Birdsong at dusk

The hole connected
Back into the silk
Of the stocking

Repeated small stitching
Eyes ache and fingers sore
Repeating smaller

Gone into giving
Something else is
Forgiven itself

Into given loss
Of a day into itself
The memory sealed

Gone given loss
Into other else same
Cracked symmetries

Gone given loss in
To other selves reflection’s
Infinite regress

Another day just
Not this day but still
We are here

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Cameron, Sharon (1993) Choosing Not Choosing: Dickinson’s Fascicles. University of Chicago Press.

Gooley, Tristan (2016) How to Read Water. Hodder Press.

Harman, Graham (2018) Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. Pelican.

Horton, H. Mack (2025) Linked Verse in Medieval Japan. Columbia.

Klein, Ernest (1971) A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language. Elesevier.

“May this dictionary, which plastically shows the affinity and interrelationship of the nations of the world in the way in which their languages developed, contribute to bringing them nearer to one another in the sincere pursuit of peace on earth — which was one of my cardinal aims in writing this dictionary. Klein’s father, wife, son and two of his three sisters suffered martyrdom in Auschwitz. He moved to Toronto with his surviving sister and brother-in-law in 1951.

Morton, Timothy (2013), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Psychology After the End of the World. University of Minnesota Press.

Sōgi 宗祇, Shōhaku 肖柏, and Sōchō 宗長 translated (1488), Three Poets at Minase 水無瀬三吟百韻. In the Yoko Danno translation published by Isobar Press in Floating Words, 2025.

Soseki Natsume 夏目 漱石 Kusamakura 草枕 translated by Meredith McKinney (1906). Translation published by Penguin 2008.

1. RGB - Red Green Blue. The colour you see on your screen. CYMK - Cyan Yellow Magenta Black. Process colour for printing. Each can represent only a small part of the visual spectrum, and there are colours that can be expressed in RGB but not CYMK and vice versa. Any system can represent only a small part of the world. An infinitely small part. We live inside the world on Duchamp’s infrathins.

2. Cantor dust is a fractal that can be constructed using string rewriting beginning with a cell [0] and iterating the rules.

3. Choosing Not Choosing is the name of a famous book on Emily Dickinson by Sharon Cameron on Emily Dickinson. It could also refer to quantum states.

4. The repetition is intentional, an experiment, it indicates a pause. I may do this more often in the future.

5. Bodhi. For Kasumi.

6. Referencing the old translation of Soseki Natsume’s Kusamakura as The Grass Pillow by Alan Turney.
”...I suppose you could say that an artist is a person who lives in the triangle which remains after the angle which we may call common sense has been removed from this four-cornered world.”

7. A Sierpinski gasket can be generated by a fractal tree.

8. The three body problem. Finnish scholar Seija Kamefuchi worked on the three body problem while at the Bohr institute. She tried to teach me the math that she used.

9. The square root of two, which shows up quickly when playing with right angled triangles, is an irrational number. There are more irrational numbers than rational numbers. See https://mathhints.com/intermediate-algebra/complex-numbers/