jellyfish cuffing and/or pocketing around (?)

…..but also, reposting from a previous comment, but foregrounding again because of its resonance with  the river eddy diagrams ……. eddy-currents, from electro-magnetic field experiments….




what I'm wondering/wandering a bit with is the lack in the scientific diagrams of river eddies/eddy currents… that place where the where the lines denoting an eddy current and electromagnetic field meet…. there is surplus intuited to be generated in that criss-crossing,  but they can't quite draw lines for that what is generated in that contrast of forces……

(again, thinking with eddies and lint, explored in earlier posts)

but when i see a jellyfish in movement… the surplus seems to be back, or in a way that can supplement what isn't as easily accounted for by such drawings….
(maybe?)



….
the enabling of thinking with a movement.  I like that in the full surround of water, i can't rely on a contrast of material (such as a rock/river/paddle edge) to distract me from the contrast of forces (maybe) … or the how of these differentiating forces…or what is maybe being generated

maybe…


….. the full surround of water requires a bit more imagining with, in the contractions, the propulsions, the pocketing and cuffing around…… all occurring without the benefit of silt or earthy moraines to show or 'lint' the meeting of jellyfish membrane and water.

the rippling around is less capturable on a visual scale, but the propulsion testifies to the work of the water currents and contractions at play.

eee….are they a pocket? they cup atop the water, and they have a pocket-ness.  they are defined as bell-shaped…. they hold….around.…. but their is a doubling contraction….. they are pocket in a pocket… but that pocket-ness becomes a cuffing(ness) of both/and, when the relational movements are activated.

the evidence of the propulsion complicating how pocket and cuff are usually differentiated. but their capacities do differentiated. what a pocket is supposed to be able to do, is 'more than' here. can this simply be attributed to the doubling of the pocket? or does this complicate what a pocket is presumed to do?  or maybe…not.

the pocket holds but not captures. it settles, but doesn't trap. but cuff folds in and out, in and with 'out', in and with 'outside' becoming inside (?) or and in with out with surplus? maybe? or I don't know. I won't talk about folds. there are real writers with real books about that ; )

some words from the scientist… :

If you've ever watched a jellyfish swim, you know its movement relies on opening and closing its bell. The animals have a ring of muscles around the edges of their bell — when they tighten these muscles, the bell contracts. This contraction forces out water that was stored inside the bell.

"They have radial symmetry, so when contract all the way around, they shed this doughnut-shaped body of fluid that is spinning around itself," said Brad Gemmell, a marine biologist with the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. "They shed these vortex rings behind them, and this shedding creates some thrust."

After boosting forward in the contraction phase, jellyfish relax their muscles and open their bell, before snapping their bell shut again.

To estimate the swimming efficiently of jellyfish (and other animals), researchers often calculate the Froude number, a dimensionless metric originally designed to quantify the propulsion performance of ships. Based on this number, jellyfish have a swimming efficiency of 0.09–0.53, compared with the 0.8 Froude efficiency of many fish. But there are a few issues with this metric, including that it doesn't account for the metabolic energy demand of swimming or the relaxation phase in jellyfish swimming.

[…]

They discovered that jellyfish swim using a dual-propulsion system that involves two vortices. As the first vortex (the "starting vortex") pinches off, a second vortex forms, spinning in the opposite direction (the "stopping vortex"). When the animal relaxes its muscles and opens its bell, the stopping vortex moves up underneath the jellyfish, giving it a secondary push.

This second thrust comes essentially free, Gemmell said, since it occurs during the relaxation phase. What's more, it accounts for 30 percent of the distance travelled by the jellyfish for each movement cycle.

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so why the jellyfish? it's fun to think with.. and read to, too. but maybe also because the cuff(ing) is not so easily extracted from the relation(s) that activates it.  the relational movement and contrast of forces is what  activates the propulsion. it's not that certain configuration of a form, is present. having two pockets is not what creates 'the cuff'. the relation between the movements/forces is what activates the cuffness in the 'seemingly only pockets' of the jellyfish's anatomy. outside of the movement, the cuffing doesn't exist. the lines in scientific diagrams sometimes make it to easy to forget that there is a surplus being generated and not being accounted for…..

but of course, I don't know. I really don't know.  just wondering/wandering. maybe.  I just know that
Confirming certain forms are present that 'look like a cuff', settles my thoughts. But eddies and lint are this enabling 'knot' in my thinking right now, because it feels like i can feel out for more potentialities for what a cuff can do, by paying more attention to what they generate and trying to craft with that… instead.

and sorry for continuing, but:

this piece is its eddies.  

but further still, it uses the 'lint' of the recording process/field as a technique to increase the eddy-ing of the preceding eddies (or recordings).

for those unfamiliar with the set up: "The piece features Lucier recording himself narrating a text, and then playing the tape recording back into the room, and re-recording it. The new recording is then played back and re-recorded, and this process is repeated."

stopping only because I've already written to much  // but there is a lot to be explored here… maybe.


….but just.. one last needling thing…. I'm not approaching lint as a 'trace', or as a metaphor. it's not a stand-in for something else, and especially not for the cuff. 

...lint like the moraines of a glacier, fabric lint in a pocket, or sonic lint that accumulates in a space without a finished ceiling, or with the effects of a fan overhead during a lecture…. lint, whether corporeal or not, is something new, generated in the cuffing. Rather then thinking of it as something 'left behind' from what was passing through, or a degraded piece of what was there, i feel like it has its own consistency and differentiating qualities. even if it contains materials shared with the original cuff, it is not the cuff. it doesn't have the capacities of the cuff, or more importantly, the relational movements that activate a cuff(ing). But it feels like it has other capacities, rather then simply being a passive residue. or maybe not. I don't know. nothing certain here, only rambles and wanderings. But there seems to be a potential kind of diagramming that the lint(ing) reveals in how it has come together. not the mechanical how strictly, but the way that surplus emerged. although I don't know if lint is surplus. it may be what is generated in the contrast, as a kind of necessity of what needed to be created so that a movements of a greater degree of contrast, could persist. the stutter only possible through the splutter. or I don't know. both surplus and expiration. or is it both a surplus and a terminus? I don't know. is the sonic 'ringing in the ear' after a particularly loud concert a linting, of a kind (though, admittedly a more poetic way of thinking  the death of sound-sensitive cells in the cochlea).

only wondering.  running away now. 

this was my intro, now making my ending:

…….when you lack more trackable/traceable surfaces, whether river's edge with sand bank, or rippling lake surface with air and undercurrents --- 'how' is the eddy eddying, or cuffs cuffing…. how do those movements differentiate from pocket, fold and pleat. and can lint help show where these movements are or have occurred, even if they are moving in im-perceptable ways…or less visually confirmed ways.

could the idea of building 'lint traps' unlock techniques for feeling out for a less easily perceived cuff(ing)s ---- across a multiplicity of scales and rhythms, textures, sounds, smell, balance, taste, inertia……

there are literal traps for lint, in a drier ….  so yes, the slow dissolution of clothing evidenced in lint. But I'm a little interested in how the lint produced by dryers is accelerating a process already happening in clothes already. It accelerates linting, the contrasts in the tumbling of metal surround and air and cloths against cloths, accelerating and foregrounding at a greater scale, what is already happening in your pocket, all the time. what would a lint trap for sonic, water, olfactory cuffing(s) look like. or rather 'how' would it…. and how would that how maybe foreground a greater understanding of the cuffs and pockets that produced that lint?

tangent.