Manifold | Nilüfer Şaşmazer

The Soul of Humankind, The Breath of the World

The Six Elements Air Is Made of: Wind
The Soul of Humankind, The Breath of the World

Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn't see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind
 
Yes, and how many times must a man look up
Before he can see the sky?
And how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
 
Yes, and how many deaths will it take 'til he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind

—Bob Dylan, Blowin' In The Wind¹

Giant waves have formed as a result of strong winds; the waves crashing over land have caused a flood along the coastline; the storm has impeded daily life and activities; boats have sustained heavy damage; trees have been brought down; the awnings of all businesses along the beach have been torn apart; the effects of the downpour and storm have intensified by midday; the weather has caused disruptions delaying traffic; pedestrians have experienced difficulties walking due to the storm; from the early morning hours, the wind gushes caused by the storm have reached speeds of up to 80-90 km per hour; fruit trees have been uprooted; roofs have been blown off; caravans have been overturned; the effects of the storm have dwindled in the evening hours...

None of these expressions are unfamiliar to Istanbulites; in fact, hearing them on the evening news is nothing short of run-of-the-mill, and would hardly deserve dwelling upon. Yet, even by the standards of Istanbul, the city where I was born and raised, the lodos wind, whose name derives from Notus himself, the god of the south wind in Greek mythology, is a particularly infamous natural phenomenon. Judging from local urban legends, which have it that court proceedings were adjourned in Byzantium, and kadis refrained from taking decisions in Ottoman times during lodos storms, the latter’s nasty effects, causing headaches, shortness of breath, weakness, dizziness, and unleashing all sorts of other evils must have been notorious since time immemorial... No less than the tramontana wind, blowing down from the Pyrenees, which the Catalans believe to drive people mad and, as far as rumour goes, was what prompted Salvador Dalí to move to Barcelona, lodos, too, is best avoided.

Ever since antiquity, people have been acquainted with how directly the weather may affect humans’ both physical and mental health, and which behaviours ought to be adopted (or avoided) in which weather conditions. Hippocrates provided lengthy recipes and recommendations to that avail in his compendium On Airs, Waters, and Places, one of the earliest written sources on the subject. Among the recommendations to physicians imparted therein, one consists in administering to the patient the "change of air" treatment method. As to how valid this particular recommendation may remain nowadays, that is rather disputable. Because the "air" itself has now "changed" quite a lot as it is, due to the doings of humankind. Accordingly, neither the definition nor the rhythm of the seasons are what they used to be anymore. As a matter of fact, we have only just left in our wake the hottest year ever observed since records began being kept in 1850. And yet even hotter days are waiting in store ahead of us. In the geographic position where we stand – which would be expected to sustain (and provide) all four seasons as one independent weather post each – what we currently observe is nothing but a bizarre, undetermined, mild climate, prevailing virtually all year round. Furthermore, the severe consequences of this irreversible rise in global temperatures are there, on our screens and news broadcasts, every day for us to see. Ruthless, even lethal winds, cyclones and hurricanes battering human settlements are both rising in number and gaining strength at an alarming rate all across the globe. So much so that the scientific community has recently begun discussing whether the five-category Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, which meteorologists began resorting to in the 1970s, should now include a sixth one. Briefly put, the point where we currently stand is beyond known categories.

While scales and categories are thus being put to the test, in the interval that separates today from tomorrow, Australian artist Cameron Robbins has embarked on a project that involves keeping a record of the weather through the next fifty years at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Tasmania. Initiated in 2018, this project consists in a recording device. Data regarding local wind values, obtained from a nine-metre tower built outside the museum, directly sets into motion a drawing machine inside the venue, which thus maps the weather on a day-to-day basis. The speed of the wind determines the movement of the pencil, while its direction does the orientation of the drawing board, and an electrical system causes a five-metre piece of watercolour paper to slide ever so slightly. This drawing device both operates with the wind as its power source, and keeps a record of the latter. More or less the size of a capacious room, this installation, which the artist titled Wind Section Instrumental, will keep operating for the next 45 years as a weather station, transcribing, with the help of ink on a five-metre piece of paper, weather systems and events in a changing climate framework, granting visibility to our new normal.

We may smell the wind, hear it, feel its touch on our skin, in some cases even taste it; but seeing it is impossible short of the presence of an object. Its very invisibility enables the wind to take on a different guise at every turn: clouds briskly receding into the distance, a kite flying high in the air, a tree whose branches are bent, a curtain blowing from an open window, a fluttering flag, flying skirts, flapping notebook pages, a plastic bag caught up in a small tornado forming at the corner of the street, a sailboat heeling over, waves breaking against the shore... As phrased by French philosopher Luce Irigaray in her book The forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger, "this element, irreducibly constitutive of the whole, compels neither the faculty of perception nor that of knowledge to recognize it. Always there, it allows itself to be forgotten." Today, notwithstanding the catastrophic exceptions which some provinces of China, yellowed by air pollution, constitute, neither indeed do we see the air, or the danger it withholds, with the naked eye.

With his 2017 work Western Flag (Spindletop, Texas), Irish artist John Gerrard crystallizes the principal factor which triggers the climate crisis – carbon dioxide gas – through the image of a coal-black flag flailing in the wind: the flagpole standing in the middle of a wasteland and the black smoke that it emits, assuming the shape of a streamer, hint at the climate crisis, which we may easily neglect for lack of seeing it with our bare eyes. The location where the flagpole is raised in this image is actually a vast oil field named Spindletop, which was discovered in Texas at the dawn of the 20^th century. Home to one of the largest oil wells in the world, and – at a particular point in time – allowing for the extraction of approximately 100 thousand barrels of oil per day, this site grew into becoming one of the most emblematic icons of the oil-fuelled production boom that occurred in the USA between 1901 and 1940. Using real-time graphic files to produce a simulation of the site, Gerrard provides an almost flawless live feed of the area, running the entire duration of the work’s exhibition, with the help of images obtained from an extensive photographic scan (allowing for an information flow of 50 frames per second). This allows the viewers to watch the passing of the sunrise or sunset, lights, shadows, clouds, wind, etc. over the area, as if they were indeed "there". As for the flag itself, it is an entirely digital creation. The seven distinct holes out of which the smoke that forms the banner spurts are reminiscent of the breaths of angelic creatures (in some cases, depictions of God itself) blowing winds towards the Earth from various directions, which often appear on the margins of ancient maps. This crumbling, disintegrating, possibly coughing and spluttering flag is, sadly, a perfect depiction of our diseased Earth. The world is now on fire, and smoke rising everywhere. We no longer speak of "global warming," nor yet of "global heating," but currently refer to the phenomenon as "global boiling"... Therefore, this flag, which the artist intended as a depiction, an embodiment of the global crisis, may perhaps be considered in substance as an incarnation of the new world order, or a monument to the Anthropocene epoch; yet it would not be straying far from the truth to argue that it also constitutes a form of lament for irreversible losses.

Like all other elements, air, which is to say, wind, obeys a bipolar structure: it may be either soft or violent, freshening or stunning, life-giving or lethal. Not only in the context of mythological tales, but in that of the sacred texts of monotheistic religions too, wind or storm is often associated with God's wrath: the Yakuts, an ethnic group upholding shamanistic beliefs, avoid whistling in order not to upset the sleeping winds;² in the fabulations of antiquity, winds constitute means of expressing the anger and jealousy of the gods; and in the Bible, God puts Babylon under strain by means of a destroying wind. On the other hand, wind also provides a way of becoming one with God and the universe. For not only the pneuma [breath of life], i.e. the generative principle that regulates the individual as well as the universe, but the cosmic murmur³ – whatever it might be called, whether it be the Holy Spirit, prana or Qi – which appears in every ancient belief system as well, encompass both the living breath of humankind and the wind of the world. In his work titled Ascension, British artist Anish Kapoor breathtakingly granted visibility to this ancient association: exhibited for the first time at the Basilica di San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice in 2011, this installation consists of a column of smoke rising upwards from a large circular base. This is a work that simultaneously inspires awe and terror in the viewer, as what is assumed to be abstract and intangible is transformed into an entity that may be seen, heard, and, should you dare, touched. Made of the same stuff as the wind, as though some sort of umbilical cord, this vortex of smoke connects the mundane to the sacred, the inside to the outside, emptiness to fullness, and presence to absence. Whether we believe in God, spirits or science, it is hard to escape the feeling that this work connects our body with a being greater than ourselves. Accordingly, as it stresses the metaphysical dimension of what is mundane, this work also provides a suitable ground for thought and dialogue on imagining a world we would become one with rather than exploit.

I was rather taken aback when I learned that the permanent winds which blow from east to west across the equatorial belt are straightforwardly called "trade winds" in English, rather than “alizé” or any other designation. However, what is perhaps truly astonishing is the fact that, these winds having unabatedly propelled the ships that led to the colonisation of the Americas for centuries, the creation of modern empires, and of the political geography which still prevails nowadays, was so umbilically connected with the trade routes thus formed. Today, the trade winds, in their literal rather than metaphorical sense, are still blowing, more ferociously than ever. As people are being displaced as a consequence of the exploitation of natural resources brought about by capitalism across entire geographical areas, so the lives of those displaced are upheaved when they capsize on their journeys to places where they might possibly live. Under these conditions, while transnational corporations and the Pentagon alone are still responsible for no less than 70 per cent of global carbon emissions, is it actually up to us to wait for a grassroots wind of change to alleviate the warming of the seas, the melting of glaciers, air pollution, ecocide and the global boiling that materialises before our eyes in increasingly frequent wildfires? Or today, 62 years later, will we be able to raise the questions that Bob Dylan already asked, only this time louder and insistently enough?

1. Penned by Bob Dylan in 1962, these critical lyrics have been widely embraced by spokespersons for the struggle for human rights over the years. In my opinion, they may still apply to, and be used in the context of numerous local or global socio-political problems nowadays, from the Palestinian issue to global warming.

2. André Schaeffner, Origine des instruments de musique [The Origin of Musical instruments: An Ethnological Introduction to the History of Instrumental Music], 232. Quoted by: Gaston Bachelard, L’air et les songes: Essai sur l’imagination du mouvement [Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement], 262.

3. The English word wind derives from a Proto-Germanic root, winda, which also means blowing. I chose this word because in Turkish, üflemek, or its variant, üfürmek, not only describes the hum produced by the wind but also evokes the üfürükçü, that is, a person who recites prayers for the sick, claiming that their murmur alone will heal them.