DRINKING PRECAMBRIAN DRAGON’S BREATH
October 002021
Inwood Hill Park, Manhattan
Late October, a time when "the veil between worlds is thin," we paused at a place where the veil between the Anthropocene and Precambrian worlds is nonexistent.
For this event, we enjoyed informal tea drinking while slowly observing the ongoing arrival of 1.1 billion year old bedrock—Fordham Gneiss—into the present moments of life in New York City. This deep time traveler arches up and out of Shorakapok (aka Inwood Hill Park). It is a twisting dragon formed from some of the oldest rock on planet Earth. And it summons us to feel our intense entanglements with uneven speeds, forces, and scales of time as they interact around and within us.
Fordham Gneiss dates to the Precambrian Period when Earth's atmosphere held far less oxygen than today. Much less than the amount of oxygen in the water we use to make tea.
Projecting our imaginations into the incredibly different Earth of the Precambrian, we drank Precambrian Dragon's Breath in a cup of tea. Sitting with the massive, material reality of 1.1 billion years of continuous planetary transformation, we viewed Precambrian Dragon's emergence from deep within the earth, into the Anthropocene.
Our aims are to acknowledge our human reliance on highly variable planetary systems (such as atmospheric oxygen), and to draw creative sustenance from the strange, modest ways that we participate in the open cosmos of becoming.
Today’s event unfolds through four practices of observation.
The artwork consists of these observational practice, and a set of letterpress printed instructions.
images courtesy Ayano Matsumae
PRACTICE I: ARRIVE: SENSE SEASON’S HINGE
Here at the end of October, when the veil between worlds is thin, we invite you to use your body’s five senses to arrive here and now.
To notice the distinctly local and variable conditions affecting this place.
To accompany this process, we will serve each of you a cup of hojicha (roasted green tea), which we invite you to drink in silence.
This pause to arrive will be five minutes long. We will mark the start and end of this passage of time with a bell.
While you are enjoying your tea, you may want to focus on body sensations, one by one:
...sounds of wind through drying leaves
...Temperature of air, wind on your skin
...smells in air that signal the changing season, the time of day
You might want to focus on hues, saturation and textures of colors that you see on trees, in the water, sky
...and the taste of tea, it’s texture, color, how it resonates with surroundings
...where it hits your tongue, bitterness, smoothness
...the ways that these moments and sensations are set into motion by this place and are unrepeatable.
...the conditions change
...sounds rise and fall, temperature, pressure or wind will vary.
We will ring the bell again in five minutes.
PRACTICE 2 INVITE: SUMMON PRECAMBRIAN DRAGON
Inwood Hill Park is a special place. It shimmers between the Precambrian and the Anthropocene.
Here, the veil between these two worlds--separated by over a billion human years—is especially thin.
We sit on indigenous land known as Shorakapok.
Across the creek is one of the oldest rock formations in the world. An outcropping of Fordham Gneiss over a billion years old. The Columbia Rowing team first painted the Gneiss with the large letter “C” in 1952.
The Anthropocene and the Precambrian are unfolding concurrently here, co-existing.
It is rare to be able to see Fordham gneiss bedrock exposed at the Earth’s surface.
It formed around 1.1 billion years ago, in the pre-Cambrian era, during a period of continental shift.
At that time, the continent of North America lay beneath a shallow sea, an ancient precursor to the Atlantic Ocean.
During this continental shift, a landmass collided with North America and formed a mountain range.
This collision is known as the Grenville Orogeny.
It occurred at a time when life on earth consisted of algae and bacteria.
Multi-celled organisms were just beginning to evolve.
Take in the view of the Precambrian world as it becomes our own.
Then, please close your eyes and
Summon. The precambrian dragon:
Rodinia. An ancient super continent in motion. Algae. Bacteria. No plants, no animals. No complex life.
Young EARTH. The shallow seas colored black.
Close to the origins of this planet.
And to the dark enigma of the cosmos.
Please open your eyes and let’s welcome this planetary elder.
1.1 billion years of material transformations and forces accumulate here.
They rise from the water in a rippling wave form. Tilted and twisted, through, and by time.
They course deep under our city
then Surface right here
breeching dragon form.
The Precambrian Dragon.
PRACTICE 3 CO-EXIST: DRINKING PRECAMBRIAN DRAGON’S BREATH
While drinking our next cup of tea, we have the opportunity to sense, intimately, one small aspect of the precambrian dragon’s world:
How the low oxygen environment of the Precambrian is imaginatively similar to the water we will use today to make tea.
In the early days of the Precambrian Dragon’s life, the oxygen level in Earth’s atmosphere was very low, only 0.1% oxygen.
Precambrian air could not support our life, or the complex biological life that surrounds us.
Today, we breathe air that is composed of 21% oxygen.
Over a billion years ago, the geologic realities of the precambrian set into motion material processes that, today, allow the Earth to support complex biological life.
Now, for a moment, we will taste our co-existence with the precambrian world.
We will drink the precambrian atmosphere, in a cup of tea, as the breath of the Precambrian Dragon.
Gyokuro tea is thick. Almost soup-like. Viscous. Low-oxygen. Please have a first, small sip. Hold the tea on your tongue. Before swallowing, breathe.
Feel on your tongue and in your breath, the scope and scale of difference between a precambrian atmosphere of nearly no oxygen, and today’s oxygen-rich, life-affording atmosphere.
Drinking gyokuro tea in this way, we invite you to imaginatively drink Precambrian Dragon's Breath.
With a second sip, open a portal between our Precambrian origins and our Anthropocene lives today. Establish a link with ongoing geologic transformation.
When you swallow this liquid, swallow it as the ancient breath of the precambrian dragon.
Imagine it passing through our shared geologic body—transforming through deep time—into the breathable atmosphere of Earth today.
Liquid...solid...air...breath.
And as you finish precambrian dragon’s breath, link yourself to
all of the inhales and exhales
that have coursed through trillions of evolving lungs
incredibly
for the past 1.1 billion years,
as they become your own.
Drinking precambrian dragon’s breath, we entangle ourselves intensely with our planet’s uneven speeds, forces, and scales of time.
As they interact with each other, with us, and within us.
PRACTICE 4 INTENTION: INTERWOVEN AWARENESS
We greet the precambrian dragon from across 1.1 billion years of evolution. Surfacing here, precambrian dragon invites us to breathe in our belonging to vast processes of endless making and unmaking. The wisdom of the Precambrian dragon is the wisdom of continuous change and transformation.
We conclude, then, with a celebration of the making and unmaking that is existence--the making and unmaking that was precambrian Earth, the making and unmaking that is now the Anthropocene, and the making and unmaking of new configurations of things and beings to come, beyond the Anthropocene.
As artists|humans, we draw creative sustenance and encouragement from precambrian dragon’s breath.
Because, like Precambraian dragon, we also participate—in strange and powerful ways—in a cosmos of continuous becoming.