Cusp & Other Poems, January--May 2022

cusp

go to school, go to work,

kick the can, never crush it

play the song, leave the fray,

the self, swaddled in ivy

sweep your missing tail

across the leaves

 

let go of the song, let the bells mumble,

drunk on cloud-cover, the diamond idle,

allow a silken kimono, swaddle the skull,

eye-holes sprouting

tentacles of ivy

 

count as far backwards

all generations, alien ancestors

as count forward, into darkness

sound the font of every sun,

even the one which sieves

all laws of matter

up through thought, base of the spine,

sprouts through your ears

this aleatory, bristling,

widdershin canticle

spiralling inward

invisible ivy

*

 Bucza

through a broken window

corneal blisters, heaven's brooding,

 pinkish cloud, down in my heart,

         toe-jam, sciatica

            tingling droplets of rain wrought

   grubbily in the war gloom

            clenched in lacqeured finger-nails

                                             a handkerchief

 how you've come to sing me

      one last cante jondo through unmoving lips

          breaking into constitutional flames

  these worlds apart at all seams

      I have never, will never

see the like of your light again

        as it crushes me

     silence of the severed oak

 

may 5

 

 *

what is weaving the sky
Mayfalls gently

day number 10

*

chirality balls

 

when you are walking forward

at a good clip, the pivot to walk backwards

happens smoothly, whilst

walking backward, at a good clip

the swivel to straight

takes slightly more time, effort

risk of instability. why?

it's all about habits, training

--they may even be the same--

discipline is like water,

follows the routine: bless your anatomy

that guides the filtration, flow --

bless also the observation

that this is truly weird.

entropy topples ideas,

displaces direction.

when you seek the open

you are most alone.

the last thing

you thought.

 

* 

 

 

 

before the chips

 

a psy-fi poem for Ilaria Boffa

 

before the chips,

installed to prevent

child abductions,

we never could tell

when personal

informational cloud

fields were merging.

now we can even drive

personal informational

fields together by

algorithmic expansion

of contact frequency

so quickly that repulsion

begins unconsciously

and individual fields

contract, retract &

we subjects,

formerly sociable,

push apart, long

before we even meet.

personal informational

shields bind us.

markets enjoin,

keep us apart,

(each class without

knowledge of classes

ideally remains 

classless, alone)

alternative social

gravitationals.

honestly?

before the chips,

t'was hard to know.

 

 *

argonautical

 

dear there lonely in the grave unwritten

poems do frolic despite the clouds of mourning

gather and drift apart as faces do

and as words cohering vagrant sentence

thumb some ride beyond twilight and dawn

 

(dream poem under the hill)

 

may 14, 2022

 

 *

 

so many more pairs of you 

argos panoptis, guardian of the flock

 

 1)  to the so many more pairs of your eyes come sights

you never sought, as so many new or not so new

pairs of eyes cross, meet, turn away,

linger, avert, downcast, as so many do

normally, timidly, confused (thoughts far off)

on the right, on the left, male & female, undecided,

in process, the rooted & the transient

lockstep scandal gradient orbs

unknown, trudging, aimless

or purposely pushing prams,

children dressed as unicorns & pandas,

the black leather-clad fashion bicyclist

with spiked collar, a death's head helm

  silver    bracelets    gaunt    adult

pours the cocktails, shaken

2)  so many more pairs of legs, arms

hands potential to be clasped, rebound,

for the longer or shorter relations, triggered,

or to be avoided if there be no point

in our congregation, indeliberate, unawares

 our blues on ice, our clouds without tether

3) to the so many more pairs of ears

come both known & unfamiliar birds, sirens

as in every mind nest exotic memories

that will never reach any other place in time

dwelling nevertheless in the present invisible,

acorn or robin's egg fallen on cement

this sound too that streams between planes,

drones, the vehicles of our mad demise they devise,

let us be no better or worse for knowing

4) to all the countless unravelling narrative baskets,

torn & on the mend, I pledge some bills I don't have,

and a traveler's sense of grace, that you too, like all the forlorn,

in this placental sweat bag our bodies secrete around our form,

will resurrect in sunlight of this life, carrying on,

sleeping beneath these ever-turning, elegant phases of moon,

(they are elegant, are they not, when thought about, no?)

 

may you be well remembered or well forgotten, shone upon

equally as lost to darkness, forever therein found

 

 *

 

Money Pox.

We've all got it.

We all don't got it.

Money Pox.

Killing in the markets

and schools of the USA,

killing in, Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine.

Money Pox, oily oligarchs,

phony pharma.

Money Pox, day & night.

Nobody doing right.

 

*

 

 

 sore wing's hole

inasmuch as

there persists an I

thrown over ages & climbs

good as that less bad one

can be the dream-hoard

or dream-herd, heard of ears

the bull-roarer wind in the chimney chute

flapping it's gaspier outlays

inasmuch as over the landfill

they name several settlements

razed for cornfield apartment complex

missiled into submission

this I cannot go on defending for many thems

when the garden of disenchantment

sprigs forth such varieties of brand

species sub-colonial simples

and complexity flowers

spoken of as if language's

naming owns when it's all

air in the sore wing's hole

 

*

 

Pharoah's Tarot, a new album on Akashic Records; in celebration of the music of Pharoah Sanders (October 13, 1940--September 24, 2022)

  

     

 https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/pharoahs-tarot

It's a very awkward moment to contemplate addressing you here in words about two events that I could not find myself able to speak about while alive, namely, the effect of Pharoah Sanders work on my life and the speechlessness that a personally felt death presents. I did not know Farell Sanders in any way, familiarly speaking. We never met. I saw him play once (ask me about that later) with Sun Ra's Arkestra in Oakland and at Knitting Factory (when there was the Knit, in Manhattan, that was it) some years later. It didn't matter much that we never met, I mean. I had always been meeting with this message here and there beyond. Because his tenor, meaning being polysemous here, caught me very early on through his almost miraculous (and to me, then, anonymous) appearance in the albums of John and Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, Sun Ra and then through his own albums as band leader, blowing these multi-voiced multiphonics, creating a feather shredding voice of flight with the reed. Peace is the will of the people and the will of the land. I quote, without quotation marks, the motto we hear in the album Jewels of Thought Jewels of Thought album. Jewels of Thought. It's almost incantatory. In the work of Pharoah Sanders I always found contemplation, passion, desire and discipline to be rather unbelievably resolved on the teeter, in the flow and ebb. How he ever managed to come to terms with trauma and make them resources for a progressive mantra sand-painting constantly blowing itself to scatter after assembling the ecstatic icon and re-casting it once again is something I mainly only experience in his music and a few others. That love and peace and spirit played itself out in the sensual and conflictual worlds of the sounds he released and organically organized. Full stop to fathom with reverence. And make reference to the fact that Pharoah's Book was always on the table of my life. I'd always return to Pharoah's book in times of the need for gnosis. Pure medicine. So I threw together my cards to make Pharoah's Tarot. One of the albums I heard made by Pharoah called Pharoah I actually heard in Berlin at the home of Anzu Furukawa on an LP that was stamped with the name of her old company Dance Love Machine. Sometimes, I feel so good, giving love to you. I hope and I pray you feel the same as I do. 

   https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/pharoahs-tarot

 Instrumentation: acoustic & electric guitar, zither, mandolin, cumbus, ebow, voices, ocarina, bird whistles, field recordings, media captures (interviews with PS)

 

The Perfect Storm: Collected Acousmatic Works with Voice 2020​-​2022

 

The Perfect Storm gathers together various pieces commissioned or requested of me between 2020 and 2021 inasmuch as they called for me to write and voice my writings in the form of an acousmatic composition insofar as I was able to come up with something that got published. And then there are two unsolicited original compositions (Sky Burial and Storm Within Storm). They are all soundscapes with voice-overs or utterances back-dropped by field recordings and incidental musics created from non-musical source materials. I should supply the texts for eager readers and I will attempt to do so before the automated publication date on July 31, 2022.

Black Holes Have Emotions is based on a suggestion of an AI GTP-3 that black holes indeed have emotions and upon the suggestion of Marjorie VH that I speak to the subject of Gray Angels.

Going is a collages of voice fragments and sounds aired by Joanne Schumann's very thought-fanning Earlids project.

Power Over Energy was commissioned by Rafal Iwanski for a compilation of Polish electronic music which occured at the time when I wrote the texts that I recite in the piece. The title is cribbed from Douglas Kahn's essay on something that connects to everything.

Sky Burial is an homage to fallen paratroopers addicted to thrills and death-rattle feats of risk like jumping out of planes and very much a meditation on the Conference of the Birds, Surrhawardi, the birds within us after and before the Sufi tradtions, before and after paleontology, the flightless birds of the Imagination.

Permanent Arrival. This song speaks for itself, I hope. There's no Walker Conkrite for Gypsies. Case forever undisclosed.

Storm Within Storm is the most recent and still the most innocent. It's karma is evolving. They used to say at a glatial rate when somehting was moving slowly.

The Way of All Cacti is where it's at. You thrive in the desert mainly because other predators and parasites can't figure out how to manage the same. Sounds like being a poet to me. 

DNIPRO Дніпро: Out Now on Akashic Records.

    

    "nice destructive and disturbing timbres. Interesting work" -- Bjorn Cloppenburg. 

"Dreamlike. More perfect music for letting the mind wander." -- Rudy Carrera 

 "wonderful free music, great sound and feel" -- No Mates Ensemble

  Please listen here:  https://jeffgburekprojects.bandcamp.com/album/dnipro

        These are intentional structures of tone, timbre & noise which dance on the edges of the various abysses of our times. And I do intend them as dances.

       Working on this album in difficult, evolving circumstances, taking a title from the river we call Dnieper, in English, a body of water that in some sense divides Ukraine into contesting spheres, I find myself at the end of another meditation on vigilance. These are soundscapes of imaginary river out there. Once called Amber Road, where they met, traded horses, other things. Born out of the idea of Democritus, water, wired Lucretian flux, refered to by early Greeks as Βορυσθένης and the late Greeks called it  Δάναπρις -- Danapris

       Dnipro is a force of nature, let's say. Forces of nature both provide and abraid. 

      Many rivers to cross. The river not only as an arbitrary border for human conflict hashtag whatever but the locus of modern nation state colonialist models for morals actions as a overflow structure border that erases borders by fiat lux, water from underground, Vulkanic upticks. It renders those states very vulnerable who know nothing about climate change, toxicity of the water and soil. War only further aggravates and further pollutes.   

    All wars are wars against all living creatures, our extended biome, wars push the ecocidal envelope & meter us closer to the edge of no return regarding climate change. “Every major city in Ukraine, other than Kharkiv, Odessa and Lviv, are on the Dnipro. Naturally, such a situation creates problems in terms of pollution if not managed properly..." "Laboratory tests have found as many as 161 pollutants in the water. Of these, Deputy Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources Mykhailo Khorev identified 19 particularly dangerous pollutants, of which nine are pharmaceutical drugs, including antibiotics, anti-depressants, and steroids. This “cocktail” of drugs and chemicals contributes to the particularly heavy buildup of algae observed this year... (2021). War comes on with death, destruction, displacement of species, invisible extinctions. I seek to embrace a brighter message in the light of peace making and peace offerings and through immersion in my work, I find balance that I can share with you (between improvisation and forethought), by means of synthesizer and a klang of prepared guitar, ebow, touches of reverb & radio, my reportage from the fronts within me.  

-- Jeff Gburek, 05.05.22

Thanks to Karolina Ossowska for preparing the cover image. The graffitti is my fault, not hers.

Shorter promo paragraph: 

  

These are intentional structures of tone, timbre & noise which dance on the edges of the various abysses of our times. And I do intend them as dances. Taking a title from the river we call Dnieper, in English, a body of water that in some sense divides Ukraine into contesting spheres, I find myself at the end of another meditation on vigilance. Here are soundscapes of calibrated noise, scenes of the river not only as an arbitrary border for human conflict but for memories, pleasures of life, then lost. All wars are war against all living creatures, our extended biome, pushing the ecocidal envelope, closer to the edge of no reply. I seek to embrace & transmit a brighter message in the light of peace-making and peace offerings and through immersion in my work, I find balance that I can share with you (between improvisation and forethought), by means of synthesizer and a klang of prepared guitar, ebow, touches of reverb & radio, my reportage from the fronts within me.  -- Jeff Gburek, 05.05.22

Eye walks the line: Notes on Slojterdijk, Kafka, Chubby Checker & the Limbo Bar.

 

 

"Don't touch that limbo bar!

You'll be a limbo star!

  How low can you go?"-- 

 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiGhPD0GXhM

 

Sly Stone wanted to take us higher. 

  Johnny Cash walks the line.

 Chubby Checker asked "'how low can you go",

  singing the classic crossover carribean rock and roll tune I heard on the scribbled over 45 rpm record one of my parents bought probably when they themselves were teenagers. I was not yet teen-aged. I was much lower than bar 13. And the limbo seemed an athletic dance where unlike the pole-vault, the high-bar jump, the aim was to go to the other extreme, to get down, go backwards. I may have wondered back then why the limbo bar was not featured in the Olympics because I tried it and it was no mean feat. This word "limbo" also being very Catholic = the interzone on the margins of hell, a holding cell where defunct unbapitized children wound-up on the outskirts of Dante's Inferno, waiting until the end times -- this word also caused strange feelings, despair, anxiety of birthright. This was long before I learned that the limbo dance was something carried over from the slave-ships where the African had to get into tight places for transport or become defunct, although doubtless some decided that it might be just as well to fall and splinter into salty sea or hummus right there. While others took the chance, ducked under, into the holds, cramped, bleeding, waiting to get to the other side. This was the challenge, the death-trip, the no-bullshit ritual passage to another life, a chance to escape. Life must have seemed sweet and worth the effort. Many did bend over backwards and survived to tell their tales. Somewhere the African survivors became Carribeans and memorialized their endurance feat in a dance, this dance of the inverted yogi, a lean behind the center of ventral gravity, into horizontal catabasis, and far below the average norms of those supermen who aimed for the verticality of stars and vagrant heavens. And yet it was a feat of acrobatic depth and concern, fitting with the themes which the German philosopher with the Dutch name, Peter Sloterdijk, speaks about at some length -- 600 or more pages -- I believe -- in his tome with the title ripped from Rilke's Archaic Torso poem, YOU MUST CHANGE YOUR LIFE. He sought to explain our obsession with sports, training, coaches, capitalism and competion, dieting, excersise, fitness by the concept of ANTHROPOTECHNICS. The straight and narrow. The line we all walk or simulate in order to get the job.

We are led in this century, according to Sloterdijk, into regimes of discipline, self-regulation, asceticism and he explains in a familiar Nietzschean slalom how we adopted or carried these regimes over from the dynamics described in the Genaology of Morals and other books we have forgotten about since those times began when mentioning Nietzsche was tantamount to endorsing various fascisms. My personal view is that our fascisms are in our sporting facilities, our police, quite often in our music, academies, our heavy metals, our pavement. But looking more carefully we can see it in our literature and in every competitive, exceptionalist endeavor of human beings whose lack of existential groundedness results in their own desires to lord it over other species, enslave minorities, reduce competitors to dust and ruin the planetary balance that supports life itself. Ooooops. You raving genome of indeterminate evolutionary origin, you did it again.  

 

Here are some passages from Slojterdijk's magnum opus in the translations I have from Wieland Hoban (mentioned in this blog as the live acrobatic translator of Helmut Lachenmann) http://transparent-abelard.blogspot.com/2019/12/art-is-broken-form-of-magic-on-margins.html

"In his case, the dawn of the acrobats is already several degrees brighter and clearer, which is why one can make out the scenery in something close to daylight. There is no need to explain in detail here that Kafka was an advocate of gymnastic exercises, vegetarian diets and ideologies of hygiene that were typical of the time. In the collection of statements he excerpted from his octavo notebooks and arranged in a numbered list (later edited and published by Max Brod under the title Betrachtungen uher Sunde, Leid, Hoffnung und den wahren Weg [Observations on Sin, Suffering, Hope and theTrue Path]), the first entry reads:

 The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope.

The rope can only function as a metaphor for acrobatism if one imagines it stretched out; one must therefore pay attention to the sources of tension, its anchors and its modalities of power transfer. As long as the rope's tension was produced with metaphysical intentions, one had to suppose the existence of a pull from the world above to explain its particular form of intensity. Ordinary existence came into contact with this pull from above through the ubiquitous example of the saints, who, owing to efforts that people liked to term superhuman, were occasionally permitted to approach the impossible. We must not forget that superhomo is an arch-Christian word in which the high Middle Ages uttered its most intense concern - it was first used for the French king St Louis IX in the late thirteenth century! The exhaustion of such an otherworldly pole becomes most apparent in the fact that ever fewer people strive to walk the tightrope
  

Existence as such is an acrobatic achievement, and no one can say with certainty what training provides the necessary skills to master this discipline. Hence the acrobat no longer knows what exercises keep him from falling - aside from constant vigilance.This fading level of artistedom by no means indicates a loss of this phenomenon's significance; on the contrary, it reveals how aspects of the artiste spread to affect all aspects of life. The great subject of the arts and philosophies of the twentieth century - the discovery of the ordinary - draws its energy from the dawn of the acrobats, which ensues in parallel with it. It is only because the esotericism of our time exposes the equivalence of ordinariness and acrobatics that its investigations produce non-trivial results."

 

In these few passages I merely draw attention to the dynamic of stumbling. In Kafka's world it seems clear that many strivings are doomed from the outset as Promethean (the problem of the Titans, as the paleo-Luciferians, is vast and the tragedy of this class struggle is well expressed in Pavese's Dialoghi con Leuco https://sysprv.com/leuco.html), as the result of Babelic over-reaching. Kafka describes it however typically as tragi-comic. The tight-rope, like the limbo bar, the parallel bars, are set in absurdly variable proportions of relativistic distantiation. The distances correspond to the continually changing levels of judgment, paradox, double-standard, ficklenes and hypocisy we see in our value systems. Don't be too high falultin' in your speech; don't use 50 cent or 50 dollar words. Don't dumb down your discourse. Don't offend anyone. Don't be scared to alienate. Don't be a coward. Don't speak out of turn. Stop virtue signalling. Know your place in the world. Speak truth to power. We are all given these impossible tasks to achieve, we are asked to achieve them by those who most likely did not and cannot succeed themselves. We have to make something of ourselves. Don't be too ambitious. You are even asked not to take yourself so damn seriously. But when you are too non-chalant, you will ge the hammer for being obscure, chastized for not "living up to your potential" -- as if anyone really understands "potential" outside of market concerns. We live daily in a world of climate catastrophe, world leaders of lies and subterfuge, petty control freaks. Maybe the truth is that you should not change your life at all but just attain to consciousness of what it means to be alive. Just have a good time and don't muck it up for other creatures who have the same rights to this life as you, whether they resemble you or not, whether you see them or not. 

 

Stumble and be happy. What you stumbled over is another form of life. It likely preceded you by millions of years. Rejoice and tread lightly. Share the insight.
  And let's twist again

End the global fossil fuel addiction that fuels Every War Machine. An article via the Nation by Svitlana Romanko

Only yesterday I remarked that if we can think of Putin's invasion as paradoxically strengthening NATO then we might say that Putin is bringin a turn for the Green in global politics, help us emerge from the fossil fuel sleep. Before I reddened in the cheek with my naivete, I pinched myself, as if to say, weirder things have happened. All things bring about their opposites. That is, if all things remain recognizable as what they are to us. I'm not much inclined for metaphysics in thought process any longer. I do pay attention to the Mercury in rettograde. 

I don't know how ya'll are feeling about gun violence, wars declared, undeclared, tension but...

Maybe it's time to legislate a full stop to the manufacture of destruction. Here's an argument that edges toward saying the conflict in Ukraine could trigger a green re-evaluation, if not a revolution.
 

“End the global fossil fuel addiction that fuels Putin’s war machine.”

    "The Russian invasion of our country is funded and fueled by the coal, oil, and gas industries that also drive the climate crisis. The import of all fossil fuels from Russia must be banned, as must any investment in Russia. This is urgent and necessary, to stop the existential threat to my nation. But it is just the beginning. We need to phase out all fossil fuels globally if we are to stop the existential threat to our planet.

     As a Ukrainian, it is very difficult for me that the planet-saving transition to clean energy might come, finally, at a cost that has been paid by my compatriots with their lives and the devastation of our country. But perhaps because I live on the front line, I see clearly that this is a decisive point in modern history. We can make the wrong turn back to fossil-fueled colonialism. Or we can properly start the green transition. The fight for Ukraine’s freedom can lead us to what science has told us we must do: stop burning coal, oil, and gas right now."

    Please read the full article here:

  https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/ukraine-war-climate-fossil-fuel/?utm_source=Sailthru&fbclid=IwAR2_c9NaVDLG1oMpBoGSbPbQzWmV7o0qK1m-8e7_sTF7QagVEd5tfbyFkcw

  And listen to some music by another Ukrainian Svitlana Niaino   

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8fDpQVCZDc

 

 

 

Just read the amazing essay: "False Passives" by Anna Badkhen. We all might be Climate Hostages, Climate Refugees without even knowing it.

Industry, climate change, extraction of resources, colonialism. social injustice. What's the connection?

     Industry, our technological life-style, our culture of convenience and comfort needs (infinite) resources extracted from (finite) locations appropriated by colonizers (foreigners) who displace native peoples (muting or destroying indigenous cultures) or removing them by genocide or enslavement (stripping them of identity, renaming them, mangling their psyches). Industry blossoms into poisonous world-engulfing culture of machines and exploitation and conformists. Indigenous people's lands are looted, infrastructures built up fall into neglect and the people, finding themselves in unliveable zones, begin to migrate to the nations of their former occupiers and exploiters, who, ironically, won't let them inside. 

 Anna Badkhen paints the pictures in depth.

https://emergencemagazine.org/essay/false-passives/?fbclid=IwAR21bVPCnZMiVqh8Yoc48xhDtdutwPQUEWYblDMEGbXCTChIa_lvUfrnoYw

     An excerpt from this very fine essay linking climate change, migration, geology, colonialism

  "The UN Environmental Migration Portal adds that “in the context of climate change, some populations might not be able to move due [to] lack of resources, disability or social reasons (e.g., gender issues), and other[s] might choose not to move due [to] cultural reasons, such as the ancestral links people have with their land.” Might not be able to or might choose not to: how uncharacteristically vague for NGO-speak; how definition washes out into the indefinite, undefinable, actually and acutely human.

    It is impossible to estimate how many people fit the description of “trapped populations,” writes the International Organization for Migration. “They are highly vulnerable populations, but data to inform action and protection are scarce”—though the World Bank by some means has calculated that by 2050 “trapped populations” will number 140 million people.

    Note the adjectival construct “trapped.” Linguists call such constructs false passives, or stative or static passives, or resultative passives. “Trapped” represents a result, but it conceals the cause, obscures the continuing fault that is creating both the climate catastrophe from which people might need to (and might not be able to, or might choose not to) migrate, and the conditions that prevent them from doing so, that force them to be static. It does not address the unabating gap between the mostly white power structures that generate and foster and exacerbate climate inequality and the mostly poor, mostly Black and Brown communities that bear its brunt.

    One policy paper I read warned that “trapped populations” was a label that “may reduce or remove an individual’s agency and independence in determining their own destiny.” (Another term relief organizations use to describe people who cannot, or do not, leave environments imperiled by climate change is “climate hostages.”) But it is the racist world order, which centers and upholds extractive industries and largely temperate-climate powers, that really does most of the determining. Scientists predict that almost one-fifth of our planet will be unlivable by 2070, at which time, unless they will have moved by then, 3.5 billion people—half of the world’s population today—will live in the unlivable zone. And why would they not have moved? “Trapped populations”: the term ignores the cognitive rift between the axiom that migration is a primary form of climate adaptation and the actuality that most destination geographies for migrants are responsible for the unfolding climate catastrophe and do all they can to keep out the people whose lives they have imperiled: they are doing the trapping. "

      Also worth checking out, this article wherein a Korean research team uses computer modelling of the Earth's climatic history and correlates these with paleontological data concerning human habitations. Astronomically related periods of climate change influenced human evolution, where we could live and who among the hominin would adapt and move out of their niches, determining and shaping the paths we wander

  https://phys.org/news/2022-04-early-human-habitats-linked-climate.html?fbclid=IwAR28ZnDAtl7JUBd-8iWBW4oZ49YYVasdWOaflGVc-3mNMuYmrYlFzJDLgHI

    "Even though different groups of archaic humans preferred different climatic environments, their habitats all responded to climate shifts caused by astronomical changes in earth's axis wobble, tilt, and orbital eccentricity with timescales ranging from 21 to 400 thousand years," said Axel Timmermann, lead author of the study and Director of the IBS Center for Climate Physics (ICCP) at Pusan National University in South Korea."