“Did you know that a wave is a dynamic system in catastrophe?” ₁

A




A collision of competing forces influenced by the tides, the wind, the ocean floor.

B




Its breaks a tidalectic, as Kamau Brathwaite would put it, an ongoing answer to its own collision. ₂

C




“The cross-section of the wave is parabolic” (both in the literary and the optical sense), with two basic forms, each reliant on the other.

D




“As the second form is produced from the first,” cybernetician Stafford Beer describes, “there is a moment when the wave holds the two forms . . . as the second form takes over, the wave begins to break . . .”

E




Cybernetics—defined as the “control and communication between animal and machine”—stems from the Greek word kubernèsis, meaning “the act of piloting a vessel.”

F




Figuratively, kubernèsis means “the act of directing, governing.” ₃

G




In Greek antiquity, lyric poets would often allegorize city-states as ships. Alcaeus fr. 326:

“I cannot make sense of the clash of the winds
One wave whirls from this side,
Another wave comes from the other, and we in the middle
Are borne in our dark ship
Toiling ever on in this great storm.
The swell has taken the mast
And the sail is completely transparent—
There are great tears through it
And the anchors have broken free . . .”

H




Cybernetic theory is dialectical in nature, a response to change that anticipates future change.

I




Despite the ship’s charted trajectory, the tears of its sail, the winds, the swell, propose their own course, their own path.

J




To Alcaeus, the ship is an “ideology materialized”—a stand-in for the state—marking a perilous future (with us, “we,” in the middle). ₄

K




Marx, also concerned with dialectical processes, may have interpreted the ship’s peril as a kind of historical reality, a promise even.

L




The contradictory interests of the storm and the ship’s route conjoin into a succinct progression; a steered median within and among other medians, a dialectical materialism drawn from instability.

M




Brathwaite’s tidalectics, a play on Marx, locates transformative difference elsewhere.

For Brathwaite (to extend Alcaeus’s metaphor), futurity is in the ship’s ripples—bumping, bending, spreading, merging within the water—edging against their surroundings.

Ripples vector into their own chaos. Like waves, they wane in and out of record. Dislocated, renewed, conjoined in form; dynamic systems in catastrophe, repeated.

_Did you know that a wave is a dynamic system in catastrophe?_
By Gerardo Ismael Madera

Published by Screen Door, Brooklyn, 2024.

Typeset in Sub-marine.

Re-drawn by Gerardo Ismael Madera in collaboration with Nat Pyper, the font Sub-marine (download) is based on an unidentified typeface that appears throughout Kamau Brathwaite’s “Sycorax Video Style,” a poetic style he developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s using system fonts and word processors to create visual poems that are meant to be read aloud.

+++

Kamau Brathwaite:

“. . . The Caribbean, although artificially divided into English speaking, French speaking, Dutch speaking, Spanish speaking, is really part of a whole underground continent of thought and feeling and history . . . That [3,000 mile] arch . . . is really part of a cordillera that once stretched from the gulf of Honduras, from Yucatán, right out into what I call Atlantis. And about a million years ago there was this perturbation of the atmosphere, this cataclysm, which destroyed the cordillera at right angles to the Andes and the Rockies and left us with only the tips of mountain tops, which our islands are, but which means that under the water—sub-marine—there is a whole unity of Caribbean which we must always remember.” ₅

+++

Notes

1. Stafford Beer, _Designing Freedom_ (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1993).

2. Anna Reckin “Tidalectic Lectures: Kamau Brathwaite’s Prose/Poetry as Sound-Space,” _Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal_, Volume 1, Issue 1 (December 2003).

3. Tiqqun, _The Cybernetic Hypothesis_ (c. 2010).

4. Ibid.

5. Kamau Brathwaite in conversation with Edward Baugh, “Caribbean Writers and Their Art: History, the Caribbean and the Imagination” (University of Miami English Department, 1991).