Writing With Water: Rising Tides, Shifting Shorelines, and Movements at the Floe Edge

• In Event: Wild Thinking With Water: Dreams and Possibilities for Qualitative Inquiry

Abstract

Purpose and Perspectives
This is a stream-of-consciousness writing that aims to flow like the water—with the water—rising with the tides—shifting back and forth across shorelines—across the page—breaking apart at the floe edge where the water meets the ice. The purpose is to write with water—with others who also write about water and sing about water and think methodology through water—because as I read out loud and sing out loud with them, I keep thinking that we are not paying enough attention to what the waters are already telling us—about research inquiries, yes—but, more importantly, about more-than-methodological responsibilities to the fragile planet we share. Like James Joyce—‘All day I hear the noise of waters’. Perhaps this is because the waters are rising—and as the waters keep rising, they keep trouble at the front of my mind—trouble in methodology, trouble for women, and trouble for our more-than-human world—these are not separate concerns in posthuman perspectives in the Anthropocene. So in thinking with posthumanism I try to write posthumanism.

Mode of Inquiry and Data Sources
I attempt to do this by experimenting with stream-of-consciousness-water-writings as a mode of inquiry. I follow Virginia Woolf who also wrote in streams-of-consciousness about water and that seemed to be generative for her at first because one time in To the Lighthouse she wrote that it was like ‘the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land.’ We need more thoughts about water but there have already been so many thoughts about water. Kate Chopin wrote about water and her character awakened and walked into water but Virginia Woolf did that in real life and water is about feminism and posthumanism and those can be the same thing which probably means that Kate and Virginia would be even sadder today if they knew how much consciousness raising needs to be done because not only are women still in trouble but now the water is, too. As I write with the water I also write with James Joyce—he described the noises of the sea as monotones—but instead of monotones I think through photographs that are monochromes because those words sound the same but they are different and, as Pablo Neruda tells me, ‘eres hija del mar’—yes, I am a daughter of the sea. And as such these images and writings and water-thinkings are, I suppose, the ‘data.’

Findings and Significance
I find that writing with water and thinking with water through photographs amidst rising tides raises questions about what methodology is and what it is for and why it is needed and how it might respond to shifting eroding disappearing shorelines the increasingly precarious floe edges where the ice meets the water and sometimes breaks away but doesn’t come back because we are hurting the earth and if that’s not significant then I don’t know what is.

Author

• Jasmine Ulmer, Wayne State University