skywritings

boxing day beasts

2011-12-29T18:02:00.000Z

underground

2011-12-18T00:06:00.000Z

'Underground: the title of a painting of great beauty. It is before you now. Notice how the blue and red lines of light reach out in wonderful curves and ovals, while a great yellow circle completes the design. It is a masterpiece of formal fluency and, although the people of Mouldwarp are considered to be devoid of spiritual genius, there are some who believe this to be their sacred symbol of harmony. It is true that certain spirit names have been deciphered - angel, temple, white city, gospel oak and the legendary seven sisters - but the central purpose of the painting is still disputed'. (1)

'lines along the third dimension indicate

connections through time: here, the King's Cross fire

leads to wartime bivouacs on station platforms

and further still, to children singing on a sunlit hill' (2)

'The Guests are scattered thro' the land,

For the Eye altering alters all;

The Senses roll themselves in fear

And the flat Earth becomes a Ball' (3)

1. Peter Ackroyd, The Plato Papers, London: Chatto & Windus, 1999, 26.

2. Michael Donaghy, 'Poem on the Underground', Collected Poems, London: Picador, 2009, 196.

3. William Blake, 'The Mental Traveller' (1863).

Images: Harry Beck's London Underground map (the original version was drawn up in 1935); and Simon Patterson's lithograph The Great Bear (1992), which places me in Max Wall, just along the line from Tony Hancock and Bernard Manning. For a detailed version of Patterson's lithograph, and some thoughtful perceptions by Maeve Conway Fried, see here. For short essays on Patterson and The Great Bear, see here and here. Thanks to Sebastian Groes, The Making of London: London in Contemporary Literature, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

shadowlands

2011-12-05T19:35:00.000Z

I have been reading Sukhdev Sandhu's brilliant book Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night (Verso, 2010), an Artangel commission exploring and articulating the experiences of some of those people who inhabit the city's nocturnal edgelands. Avian police. Cleaners. Samaritans in a Soho call centre. An exorcist. 'Flushers' in Joseph Bazalgette's drains below London. Mini-cab drivers. 'Graffers' (graffiti artists). Bargers. An urban fox-hunter cum suburban sniper-marksman. 'Sleep technicians' researching insomnia and apnoea in a hospital ward. And the nocturnal prayers of the nuns of Tyburn and a friar in Camden Town. As an ec-centric map of London, it provides a startling displacement of the familiar, exposing shadowlands and invisible under-worlds, and offering a compassionate critique of some of the day-world's blind spots.

"It's rare nowadays to hear anyone talk about 'night time in London'. That phrase, and its suggestion of a distinct, cordoned-off territory in which we may immerse ourselves in strange possibilities or make ourselves susceptible to off-kilter enchantments, seems rather old-fashioned. It has been emperilled by New Labour's vision of London - a blinging, pigeon-free, glass-fronted, private-finance-initiative-funded, cappuccino-sipping, Barcelona-mimicking, Euro-piazza festooned, Vanity Fair-endorsed, live-forever, things-can-only-get-better fantasia. The city in recent years has witnessed a bevy of real-estate moguls, foreign investors and film directors trading in a slicked-up form of commodity urbanism; equally, the 'London night' has morphed into, and been rebranded, as 'London nightlife'' (12).

this is a poem (for athens)

2011-11-28T16:11:00.001Z

ghost flock (last song)

2011-11-19T18:07:00.000Z

The images above are all from Ghosts of Gone Birds, a recent exhibition of outstanding contemporary work curated by Ceri Levy at the Rochelle School in East London (2-23 November 2011): both an activist conservation project involving almost 200 artists, and an attempt to 'breathe artistic life back into extinct bird species' through each artist adopting a particular disappeared bird.

In addition, the exhibition aimed to raise awareness of and money for the BirdLife Preventing Extinctions programme.

The title of this post combines the names of two exquisite pieces of work from the exhibition: Alisdair Wallace's 'Ghost Flock', and Andrea Roe's 'Last Song: The Grand Cayman Thrush'.

For further details of Ghosts of Gone Birds, see here.

For a fine blog post that sets Ghosts of Gone Birds alongside two other recent exhibitions - Katri Suonion's 'Bird Hospital' at the Kuopoio Art Museum in Finland, and Bill Burns' brilliant 'The Museum of Safety Gear for Small Animals' at the Arnolfini in Bristol - see Sue Palmer's 'To the window flown' in her Inquiline here.

nothing but theatre (for the time being)

2011-11-12T22:08:00.000Z

‘And now in the twenty-first century, what we’recalling an age of terror, it would seem for the time being, which is the timeof theatre, that the perilous tension is worse, even more ambiguous, withinnumerable bodies dying […]. Whatever the reasons for it […] the paranoia isgrowing, what with tunnelled networks, stateless, like dreadnaughts spreadingdread, with conspiracy theories and secrecies, homeland security dubious andeverything out of sight. If you really think it over, how does any theatre, bywhatever theatrical means, really match up with that, or the pervasiveness ofseeming that, in the material world, not virtual at all, appears in actuality – now a perversion ofseeming? - to make it nothing but theatre’

(Blau 2006: 243).

In recent days, as anotheryear comes to an end and a new one begins, I have been re-visiting more than adecade’s worth of issues of PerformanceResearch, from ‘The Temper of the Times’ to ‘Lexicon’. Perhaps inevitablythis immersive return has stimulated a great deal of reflection: in particular,on performance and theatre (the latter so often constituted as performance’sshameful ‘other’, to be denied or repressed); on the nature of the ‘event’ andthe im/possibility of its inscription; and on events in my own life and in thewider world that run parallel to and inform my evolving involvement in thejournal and other sites for research, collaboration and purposeful play.

In this time of apparently ‘nothing but theatre’ in thetheatres of international politics and war, nonetheless all sorts of otherperformative events insistently leak into embodied experience and historiesfrom the policed parameters of pervasive and perverse ‘seeming’. The ‘nothingbut’ in Blau’s ‘nothing but theatre’ knowingly summons the ghosts of ongoinganti-theatrical prejudice, from Michael Fried to Marina Abramovic (at leastuntil recently with Marina). Like most prejudices, it unwittingly constitutesphantasms of the particular modes of practice being rejected, while overlookingother modes: in this context, other ‘theatres’ hosting their own critique,other economies of representation aware of the disastrous paraphernalia ofpretence (‘To Hide, to Show: that is theatrality’, Lyotard 1997: 282), and ofthe enabling possibilities of playing or flirting with mimesis’s seams and itsinevitable compromise. And it is precisely these other theatres in an expandedfield of performance, in themselves ‘anti-theatres’, that Performance Research has endeavoured to create critical spaces for.The five essays that follow employ diverse modes of writing (into and after)the event, in order to unfold the ‘nothing but’ and touch on theparticularities of some of these other practices, including work made by BorisNieslony, Victoria, Forster and Heighes, Ernst Fischer, Needcompany, EinarSchleef, Christoph Marthaler, René Pollesch, Kattrin Deufert and ThomasPlischke.

For my own part, inre-reading these past issues I am thrown back on memories of ‘temporary zonesof meeting’ (Allsopp) over the past decade that ghost my psyche still; and theytrack me, dog me ‘in the material world’. Most of them are traces of encounterevents in localised, ‘marginal’ contexts – catalytic flarings into appearanceof the sublime and unpredictable, the anomalous and interruptive, thepolyphonous and contradictory, the untimely in the everyday, theheart-quickening, the disorienting, the irrecuperable, the not-yet-known, themore-than-one, the so-much-more-than-me. If my enumeration of some of them hereseems narcissistic, ‘nothing but theatre’, forgive me, my intention iselsewhere, far from ‘me’. As occasions of and provocations to identity anddifference, interaction and exchange, the dramaturgies of these activevanishings seem to me to stage performative topographies of hopes and fears,desires and incredulities aplenty. ‘Seized with the promise of alterity’(Kear), they ‘strike’ me, and prise ‘me’ open to the world. And theproliferative ambiguities, indeterminacies and oscillations of these momentaryand momentous razor kites over the ‘mountain of dust’ (Deufert & Plischke)demand the fidelity of an attentive self-in-process.

***

Bush fires en route to the horsesnear Perth in Western Australia, the fireball that shot across the road infront of us like a missile and incinerated a small wooden bridge.

WatchingAustralian Rules Football at the MCG in Melbourne with Mark M, who taught me tosee artistry and choreography - to paraphrase the sports writer RichardWilliams describing Zidane, to perceive the ways in which certain playmakershave the capacity to see ‘time and space and angles where we see onlyconfusion’.

Tracking Pete Goss’s astonishing catamaran leaving Dartmouth forthe last time on its first and final voyage, flying jauntily past Start Point infull sail towards the horizon and its fate.

Squatting with a group of othersover a pavement-level grating in Barcelona to glimpse odd fragments of BorisNieslony’s mysterious and profoundly unsettling actions in an undergroundspace.

Sliding a block of ice through the streets of Barcelona to Las Ramblaswith Gregg and Gary, in an attempt to re-member the river that once ran down tothe sea.

The breakdown into a state of dis/grace finally triggered by Lars VonTrier’s film The Idiots, followed bya month of sub-Blakean wanderings, visions and encounters around Britain.

Fainting during a question about ethics at the end of a paper on animals andthe event of alterity that I had just presented at PSi in Aberystwyth.

Thehumbling clear-sightedness and courage of Jane, Tom, Rosemary, as they preparedfor death while their bodies were consumed by cancers.

The ‘shock and awe’ ofwatching lumbering B52s taking off from a Gloucestershire airbase at dusk, enroute to Baghdad to bomb the Iraqi people into ‘democracy’, our every movetracked by a night-vision-equipped soldier on the other side of the perimeterfence.

Witnessing the extinguishing of a belching fire in an industrialworkshop on the outskirts of Exeter during an early morning drift with themembers of Wrights & Sites.

Being herded with other audience memberstowards our seats by a gaggle of no-nonsense geese before a Théâtre Zingaroshow at Aubervilliers in Paris.

Holding the hand of a fearful friend astogether we watched live feed images of the cauterisation of anomalous cells onher cervix on a colour monitor.

The rolling thunder of the moon’s shadow, theumbra, racing across the Devon countryside along the ‘path of totality’ duringthe 1999 eclipse - it swept away my legs and knocked me to the ground, literally.

The excessive responses to the foot and mouth outbreak in Devon, the pyres andmass burials.

The uncertain pleasures of watching my 78 year-old father playinga disorderly drunk in an amateur production of a play appropriately called Kindly Leave the Stage in the civictheatre in Maidstone.

Anne K showing me the scar tissue where her breast hadbeen, in her luminous flat overlooking the West Pier in Brighton, not longbefore she died.

Admiring the elegance of the way Pina Bausch smoked her cigaretteoutside the stage door of Sadler’s Wells.

Playing a tape of a nightingale’ssong to a lion in the Zagreb zoo, holding it to its ear on the other side ofinadequate looking bars, then smelling its breath as it turned and fixed mewith its eyes.

Standing on top of a vast rubbish mountain near the suburb ofNovi Zagreb with Croatian performance artist Damir Bartol Indos, as he conveyedhis desire to make a performance right there atop the tip, amongst the methaneexplosions, feral pigs and gulls.

Instinctively ducking to avoid a burningbarrel bobbing towards me through the packed crowd on the back of a man runningblind in Ottery St Mary.

Hurriedly texting Alan Read and other Londoners on themorning of the London bombings, my mind full of dread-ful possibilities.

Anocturnal electrical storm over the bay of Castellamare, west of Palermo,burning ephemeral images of coast and sea and sky onto my retina, and my failedattempts to photograph the lightning.

Instances of the compassion, generosity,violence and pride of Palermo, its palpable sense of loss and possibility; andthen the energy expended by so many Palermitans enacting Lampedusa’sparadoxical contention in The Leopardthat ‘everything must change in order for things to stay the same’.

Thewide-eyed man in combat fatigues who burst into our living room late one nightduring Match of the Day, a bloodiedkitchen knife held out towards me in his open hand, his jacket blackened withblood from his stab wounds.

Throwing water over Gary’s torso, steaming in thecold Devon night air, while we sang: ‘Oooh baby baby it’s a wild world’.

Shivering with Sue in the hide at dawn on the Somerset levels - then the suddenroar of more than six million starlings taking off, the blackened sky, thedeafening vortex of this unimaginably complex, surf-like ‘murmuration’, and itsgradual dispersal into silence.

***

In addition, perhaps thesefragments and the following texts in this section relate to a performanceepistemology of the kind outlined by David George in the very first issue of Performance Research:

‘Asan epistemology, performance offers a rediscovery of the now; relocation in thehere; return to the primacy of experience, of the event; a rediscovery that allknowledge exists on the threshold of and in the interaction between subject andobject; a rediscovery of ambiguity, of contradiction, of difference; areassertion that things – and people – are what they do’ (George 1996: 25).

However, beyond or beneaththe neat knowingness of this analysis, some genuine mysteries remain for me asto why these memories now, and whatkinds of performance interventions they seem to invite. To quote the words ofthat celebrated cartographer of modes of knowing, former US Secretary of Statefor Defence Donald Rumsfeld:

‘Thereare known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are knownunknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. Butthere are also unknown unknowns. These are the things we don’t know we don’tknow’ (quoted in Zizek 2004: 9).

As Slavoj Zizek points outin his book about Iraq, Rumsfeld forgot to add a crucial fourth term: ‘’theunknown knowns’, the things that we do not know that we know’ (ibid), in otherwords, the unconscious: ‘the knowledge which does not know itself […] thedisavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not aware of adhering to ourselves’(ibid: 10). They are uncontrollable because there is no awareness of theirexistence. Perhaps immersion in certain activities – talking, listening,writing, playing, dreaming, the eruptive event of encountering another,attention to ‘intensities and irritations’ (Primavesi) of all kinds – cangenerate frictions and short-circuits to unsettle or jolt them a little, toallow us to glimpse their dynamic contours out of our peripheral vision, toknow something of them ‘feelingly’. If my engagement in Performance Research as an editor and writer has taught me anything,it is this: perhaps one can learn how not to know fully what one is doing andstill keep on doing it, knowing that all sorts of provisional knowledgesflicker and take shape, for the time being, and that ultimately the unconsciouswill always make a fool out of the expert.

References

Blau, Herbert (2006).‘Seeming, Seeming: The Illusion of Enough’, in Alan Ackerman & MartinPuchner (eds), Against Theatre: CreativeDestructions on the Modernist Stage, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,231-47

George, David (1996).‘Performance Epistemology’, PerformanceResearch 1:1 (‘The Temper of the Times’), Spring, 16-25

Lyotard, Jean François(1997). ‘The Tooth, the Palm’ [1977], in Timothy Mottram (ed.), Mimesis, Masochism, and Mime: The Politicsof Theatricality in Contemporary Thought, Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 282-8

Zizek, Slavoj (2004). Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, London: Verso

___________________________________________

This text was first written in January 2007 as mypreface to a group of essays on theatre to be included in an anthology about contemporary performance, A Critical Decade: The Performance Research Reader. Some years down the track, it now seemsunlikely that the Reader will ever be published, although this text resonates for mestill …

Photograph of starlings over Rome by Richard Barnes

the sea: wave 1

2011-10-21T14:15:00.000+01:00

The following sequence of texts - 'The Sea: 6 Waves' - were co-written a couple of year ago with my friends the artists and performance makers Cupola Bobber (Tyler Myers and Stephen Fiehn) as part of a 'Reading Companion' for their performance Way Out West, The Sea Whispered Me, which toured internationally in 2009-10. Published in April 2009, the Reading Companion is an exquisite 24" x 36" double-sided colour poster in which the texts are laid out to take on the shapes of the landscape - Sea, Mountain, Cloud, etc.

Other contributors of additional texts in the Reading Companion were Ian Abbott, Alice Booth, Simon Bowes, Lucy Cash, Karen Christopher, Ezra Clayton Daniels, Zach Dodson, Jeff Harms, CJ Mitchell, and Bryan Saner. The poster was designed by Zach Dodson and illustrated by Ezra Claytan Daniels.

To view the poster, and to order a copy, see here.

The collaborative writing process was simply structured and wholly pleasurable. Over a period of some months, Tyler and Stephen would send me a textual 'wave', and I'd respond, bouncing another one back across the Atlantic to their base in Chicago. A slow writing into and out of what lapped or crashed on to each other's virtual shorelines.

My heartfelt thanks to Tyler and Stephen for letting me post these texts here, and for inviting me to collaborate in the first place, in this play-fully dialogic way.

_______________________________________

Weresolve to believe these people who eat their lunch in silence in theirsea-facing cars arenʼtwaiting for it to do anything in particular. They are not keeping watch over anunruly neighbor, they arenʼtexpecting any event at all. They are just sitting at the edge and looking outprecisely because nothing much will happen beyond the slow mechanical play ofcloud, sky, and water. Speakingof fishermen who catch no fish, Sebald says, “I do not believe these men sithere all day and all night waiting so as not to miss the time when the whitingpass.” (1)

It should first be noted that I amspeaking out of place and that I am not The Sea. I am an imposter with a bluesuit on, standing in the middle of the Atlantic, yelling: “I am the sea too” atthe passing ships. I have been here - listening - for quite a long time. Iimagine that I will be here until my senses cease to work, The Sea has so muchto say. Sometimes the gossip from town(s), about the crabs that tickle thebelly, about so many clouds (they can be ornery), and ...

I will have you believe that TheSea has just whispered to me: “I have yet to find a home.” I will have youbelieve that The Sea has just whispered exactly that, and also that I have inreturn asked the following: “What do you mean? You are The Sea.” The Sea lookeddown and examined its shoe. It rubbed its forehead. Then it said:

“Iʼm not so sure I can answerthat simply, but I will try. I am contained, controlled by gravity and otherforces, I go where they direct me. But, I am constantly working to find my waybeyond my borders. Sometimes I think I have finally broken through, but Ialways find there is a new shore waiting for me. There are some people who havebuilt their houses close to me, and sometimes during the night after they haveleft I sneak into their homes, wet the pages of their libraries, wash overtheir cutlery, take the fruit out of the bowls sitting on their kitchencounters, wash the floor boards and retreat back to my side of the border thatmarks me. “

With a wistful note in this last,The Sea trailed off. I took my sky blue kerchief out of my jacket pocket (matchesmy carnation), and made it ready should it be needed (my manners are superb.) Iasked: Why? The Sea started with a faraway look:

“Way out West, way out West, there…”, but then stopped. I readied the kerchief, but after a dramatic pause and afew false starts, The Sea continued:

“If there is a shoreline I willset myself to it, that is my lot. Several billion years of work, digging in thesand, moving it, putting it somewhere else. Knowing this, the men along theshoreline have built walls to protect their towns from me. They are alsoconstantly working, building me new buildings of the same towns a littlefurther west, something to look forward to. They dig and they build walls and Islowly grind them down to dust (wet dust), and then they rebuild their churchesand stores and streets and towers, and I work away at it; and so on and so on.This is just what I do and I cannot speak for them. I am always on the move, Ihave yet to be at rest and feel as if rest will never come. Sometimes it maylook like I am calm, or at rest, but I am still working. One would think that Iwould grow tired, or that my age would keep me from working, but I do not thinkin terms of tired or age or anything really, because I donʼt have the ability to knowif I canʼt go on. Itʼs only that Iʼll go on. Itʼs alright with me.”

Noting a break in the monologue, Isaw a chance to tell The Sea about the delightful little town of my childhood …there was the small “playground” that was a patch of sometimes muddy earth nextto Mr. Cooperʼs store, and hide and seek with the two neighbor kids and theirimaginary friends, and there was my father’s study and the set ofencyclopedias, the 4th of July parades with the Indians with the muskets, theabandoned house in the woods where we dug out a fort, the bananas with honeyand milk weʼd eat on the picnic morning in the new sunlight, the door jam with myheight and corresponding year, the red toothbrush I got at the dentist office(the dentist office smelled like no other place Iʼve ever been.) Just then Inoticed The Sea had stopped listening, so I carried on in myhead but let The Sea have silence. I was lost trying to remember the layout ofevery house and apartment I had ever lived in when the sea broke in.

“I have found a set of steps on thecoast just north of Blackpool, I believe they call this area Cleveleys. I spenda great part of my days trying to climb these steps. That is, to really climbthem the way they were intended to be climbed (one step at a time.) It alwaysgoes like this: I step up three stairs, and just as I reach for the fourth, Iam pulled back to my body. I guess that I cannot go anywhere unless it (all ofit) also goes with me. Sometimes I imagine that I am walking up the steps andonto the land, and through the town past the church, through the pastures onthe other side, over the privets, and up the mountain to get a look at whateveryone is looking at when they are looking at me. Because I have no sense ofit. Imagine, all eyes on you, and never knowing why. But, if I am on themountain, what am I looking at?”

What indeed, I thought. I thought,can I short circuit my brain by looking at my hand? I watched The Sea.Concentrated on its face. Concentrated on the creases around its eyes, and theyseemed to brace themselves for something; looking, but not outward. That lookan old Wyoming sheep herder might give when asked if there is anything theyregret about a life lived in a trailer in the mountains watching sheep. Andtheir answer is the coffee. The Sea concluded:

“We all walk in mysteries. We aresurrounded by an atmosphere about which we still know nothing at all. We do notknow what stirs in it and how it is connected with our intelligence. This muchis certain, under particular conditions the antennae of our souls are able toreach out beyond their physical limitations (2). These are the shores of dreaming.”

(1) WG Sebald, TheRings of Saturn, London: Harvill Press, 1998, p. 52.

(2) Goethe, letter of 23 July 1820, quoted in ‘The Writing ofStones’, Cabinet no. 29 (‘Sloth’),Spring 2008, p. 39.

the sea: wave 2

2011-10-21T14:05:00.000+01:00

After a while, I startedto describe my own dreams, and how this personal night-time theatre wasregularly awash with a Sea bearing the flotsam and jetsam of stories and peopleand creatures of all kinds. The Sea’s words had stirred some sort of ‘antennae’within me, and I wanted to share something of my own walks in mysteries, onunfamiliar shores.

“You are often there in mydreams”, I confessed, smiling a little shyly at this sudden intimacy. “So muchso that sometimes I wake up drenched, my skin salty, the skin on my fingertipspuckered and ridged like … prunes … or those little sand ridges that look likewaves in the desert. Often when I sleep I swim, supported on your surface likea bird on a sea of air; sometimes I even walk through the forests and valleysand dunes beneath you”.

The Sea watched me for amoment, then closed its eyes slowly as I continued.

“Once while floating on myback – on your back - looking at thenight sky, a zebra standing in a dinghy floated past. He was singing softly andrather beautifully from the Book of Common Prayer, from the section on ‘prayersto be used at sea’: “They that go down tothe sea in ships: And occupy their business in great waters; These men see theworks of the Lord: and his wonders in the deep …” When he saw me, the zebrastopped singing, and politely asked: “I’m a little lost. Do you know how to getto the Sea of Serenity?” “Um, I think it’s up there”, I replied, pointing tothe moon. “Oh”, he said. We both looked up at the moon, a bright saucer of creamyblue.

“Look, there it is”, I continued, “can you see? Between the Sea ofTranquility and the Sea of Cold. There are dozens of seas up there, as well aslakes and bays and marshes. Did you know? Beautiful names, my mother taught me.The Sea of Crises. The Sea of Fertility. The Sea of Ingenuity. The Sea ofNectar. The Serpent Sea. The Sea of Moisture. There are Seas of Islands, ofVapors, and of Showers. The Sea of the Edge is one of my favorites… And thenthere’s The Bay of Dew. The Marsh of Sleep …” “Oh”, he said, “oh”. Then silenceas we both gazed upwards, our faces catching the light.

After a while the zebradrifted off again, his quiet song slowly picking up again before trailing awayon the breeze, little waves tapping out a rhythm on the dinghy’s hull: “For at his word the stormy wind ariseth:Which lifteth up the waves thereof. They are carried up to the heaven, and downagain to the deep: Their soul melteth away because of the trouble. They reel toand fro …” I watched his stripy silhouette dissolve into darkness, then theglow of his boat’s luminescent trail - a silvery line like a snail’s track, ora con trail in the sky, until it disappeared too”.

The Sea was barely moving,comfortable now. Another pause, then I started again, my voice little more thana murmur: “Once, when swimming far from shore, dazzled by all kinds of radiantfish that seem to acknowledge me as some sort of fellow fish, suddenly Irealise that something is missing. A rope trails from my ankle. I reach downand pull it in, hand over hand. I can see through the water that there isnothing there. Just a rope with a frayed knot at its end. Now I know: I have noconception of where my boat is. It has gone, and I am alone. The sky seemsvast, and so does the Sea. I spin and try to stand up in the water, to seefurther around me, but it’s futile. So I tread water, just my head pokingthrough the surface. The rest of me forms a tiny hole in the immensity of theSea, a hole in the shape of me in a place with no name, a place on no known map…

“In another dream, I wade through warm surf on to a whitebeach and find a wooden sign on a stake driven into the sand at the water’sedge. It bears the words: “BENVENUTO ALL’ISOLA DEI NOSTRI SOGNI PROSCRITTI. M.Polo”. Welcome to the Island of Our Forbidden Dreams. There is no sign of Marcoon the beach. Just a huge bird, still as a statue, a gull of some kind, staringat me with eyes like wells. Around the bird, little eddies of sand – tinyeruptions like nervous whirlpools – fizz up for a moment then disappear”.

The Sea may well have beensleeping by now, it was hard to tell. It certainly looked peaceful, and thesoft rise and fall of its waters suggested a deep-breathing ripple passingthrough its body. So I kept talking, thinking that somehow my words were a kindof lullaby, and that if I stopped the Sea would wake up startled at the absenceof the sound of my voice – like a baby or a grandparent when the conversationsuddenly ends or the TV is finally turned off. Or a bit like my friends who havelived by the sea for years; whenever they travel inland, they find it hard tosleep at night without the sea’s sounds – they say that the absence of itscontinuous russssshhh unsettles them.

“Once I even met a blinddolphin; she floated through the air several feet above the water’s surface,under a silk umbrella. Although she was blind, she moved straight towards meand hovered above me. She softly pressed her nipple into my mouth, and I drankher milk. Don’t ask me what it means.

“In one of the dreams Iremember most clearly, and it’s a recurrent one, the Sea has vanished suddenly- and completely - and its exposed bed is dotted with people out walking,inspecting what it has left behind. (Perhaps in the dream you’ve gone to themountain to look at what everyone is looking at? Maybe. If you have, I guesswhat you see from up there is just a sea of people where you once were …)Anyway, so the Sea’s vanished, and there are all sorts of people out there,bent over inspecting a patch of ground, or a piece of driftwood the size of asmall tree. Or a bloated purple jelly-fish, scratching at the sand around itwith their feet. I can see laughing kids with buckets and spades making castlesand cities, and dads sculpting mermaids with shells in their hair, and writingmessages in huge letters for the sky. Huddled figures have gathered beside apool and they stare into it in silence, as though it is infinitely deep, or theplug hole through which the Sea has departed.

As far as the eye can see,thousands of shiny fish pulse on the sand, clasping and unclasping likefingerless silver hands. Perched on some rocks is a wreck of a wooden schoonerencrusted with barnacles, its cabin draped in fine weed, like Christmasdecorations; its tattered sails slap and dance in the breeze. Closer to theshore a blue yacht lies on its side, its mast pointing to the sky at an angleof, say, ten o’clock; it looks like a weird oversized sun-dial. Elsewhere thereis a beached whale and its cub, breathing heavily, with a man posing for aphoto next to the mother’s soft eye: as the shutter closes, the whale blinks.The air is full of birds …

I stand transfixed on the shore watching all of thisactivity, too frightened to walk out on to the sea bed and join the otherpeople. For I’m terrified of the possibility of the Sea’s sudden return. Your return … Perhaps that low smudgystrip of grey cloud on the horizon is in fact a thundering wall of waterhundreds of feet high … Nobody seems to notice except me, they just carry onregardless. I stand there, trembling like a hobbled racehorse”.

By now the Sea was fastasleep, as still as oil. Not a whiff of breeze to ruffle its surface, whichglistened like an infinite expanse of beaten copper in the last of thesunlight. In the silence I became aware again of this mysterious pulsing lifeall around me. A primordial flux. With the moon now rising, I remembered thatin Greek cosmology everything begins when Eros issues from the egg of Night,which floats upon Chaos. Something like that. I half expected the zebra todrift into view.

Having got going, I continued ...

the sea: wave 3

2011-10-21T14:01:00.000+01:00

“In the bedroom, laying, lookingup, I watched as the sea moved in from one corner of the ceiling graduallyfilling the frame. A moderate breeze, small waves, becoming larger: fairlyfrequent horses. A memory floats across the ceiling in bits and pieces, alongwith the other drifters: the By-The-Wind-Sailors, the violet sea snail floatingon its bed of foam, and the shipworm burrowed into a piece of wood. In theirmidst a whale bone floats to the surface, and on it a engraving made by an idlewhaler during his leisure hours, struggling to battle the soul shatteringmonotony of the open sea by keeping his mind occupied with the work of hishands. And on it he carved a picture of an unfinished heart shaped room, andpainstakingly rendered every tiny detail the he could remember. He worked on itfor thirty years.”

What does this sea remember? Attimes, by the sound of it, the sea remembers quite a lot. At times its goodmemory does not make for a good story because it goes on and on with long listsof things that have passed through it, or troubles itself with correctlypronouncing the sound of every wave. Hereʼs what itʼs saying:

A red toothbrush, A set ofencyclopedias with pages folded over at the corners, An Umbrella, A woodenchair. Sand. Sand. A Building built out of sand as if it were stone. Unreadletters. And the parish churches of: St. Leonard, St. Martin, St. Bartholomew,St. Michael, St. Peter, St. Mary, St. Patrick, St. John, St. Nicholas, St.Felix, A Hankie, Laurel and Hardy, Morecambe and Wise, Gilbert and George,Tree.

His heart beating to a memory:

A room,

a girl,

a quiet night after work,

away from the sea,

looking forward,

an adventure.

The Sea, now deep in sleep,mumbled something about when it was little, many years ago. Its mother aglacier, and its father the sun. Its twin, the desert (fraternal), and itsgodfather the moon who continues to look after it.

I closed my eyes, looking forsleep myself, and tried to breathe quietly. I let my body float belly up, mynose and mouth above the surface but my ears just below it. I listened to thenow deafening sound of my quiet breath and my mind was full and movingfrantically from one thought to another. To calm myself, I decided to makemyself listen to the stories in The Sea (instead of me), and count them.Stories told by all the stuff people have given it, or that it has taken. Allthe things forgotten in it or thrown to it for losing. Innumerable cast-offs,messages, and yesterdays gone off on an adventure; those things finding somerest in its methodical movements and temperate depths.

These things and their storiesdrift by in the current, like clouds in the jet stream, headed somewhere theocean is taking them. They are quiet, but you can hear them if you tilt yourhead just right and listen for the sounds of the water. I want it to be alullaby, a drifting cloud atlas of things that once were, or things that areheaded somewhere else with the delusion of purpose. Stories of doing things,making progress, something to look forward to. I counted the objects and thestories they told.

The shaved off whiskers belongingto a wrinkled face, remnants of sideburns grown reaching for a remembered gait.

Had I forgotten where I started?Itʼs been so many years and Iʼve gotten good at getting by … but where was Iheaded when I started this? Now, the things that rile me, the things that seemto draw out the most of my tired emotion, are the things that have to do withhow people are to me. Not about whatʼs said, or whatʼs done. I enjoy outrightoffense and let it pass for low, but search for offense and in those momentswhere it isnʼt clear enough, where I can pounce on it. Perhaps this is now my onlyskill? Pouncing where I can point to the slightest whisper of disrespect?Perhaps I would be further along in this if I instead suffered quietly. Insteadbit my tongue and knew better. There is a pleasure in that. There is pleasurethere?

All three skipping stones youskipped.

Picnic, family, little ones,passing on the art of the skipped stone.

A bingo card with two almostbingos, both needing the number 12.

A last dollar, a last hope. Adelusion perhaps, but it seemed possible. It needed to be possible and thingsthat need to be possible sometimes seem as if they are inevitable, that for thestory to end right it must be the way itʼll go. Deux ex machina. Theway things end. But, of course, the world is harsher than that. Rather, ourdelusions donʼt allow us the reality and so make it seem harsh, when really it ismechanical. It is. Our perception of it is the thing that is relative to ourwant. And money can help you make the world seem to be however you want it. Onelast shot, a last dollar, but the number 12.

(Indecipherable.)

A watch inscribed, “In honor of 50years served. Thanks.”

End of a pier. Tears remembering alife adding salty water to salty water. A remembrance regretted from this newsolitude.

A box of childhood things. Afloating casket of what was.

A doll, forced on me by my mother,then loved because of a perceived kindred suffering. A gum wrapper from a pieceof gum that Tony (TONY!) gave me at recess one day (still smells of grape.) Amagazine picture of a Backstreet Boy that had been in the back pocket everydayof grades 6-8. Half of a friendship necklace heart bought to share with SheriRoss, the one I stopped wearing without explanation to Sheri, who only noticeda few days later in the lunch line. A matchbox time capsule made at school inthe 5th grade. Nothing in it. Wanted to save the moment. Dad left that day. Andmom was happy. And my older sister too. Everything was going to be okay.

The rock you used to keep yourbook open that day.

The novel was a mystery, awho-done-it, and the day was partly cloudy. Clouds floating overhead, sometimesblocking the sun, making you chilly, sometimes not, making you sweat. You werehalf reading, half watching your lover out of the corner of your eye. Feelinglucky. To be here. To be here with them. To be happy. To have a fish to cooktonight. To have The Sea in front of you, plodding along at your toes.

A worn and rubbed icon of St.Michael Archangel. Or maybe St. Anthony.

A Spanish sailorʼs gift from his mother, setoff on an adventure as the sailor sank in the hull of a frigate. He wasthinking about what heʼll miss, about the couch, about the smell of the garden in summer, aboutthe way the bed sheets feel after a day spent with hands in soil.

Boots, soles worn through. Moneyenough for five pair stuffed in the insole.

A bit of a breather. To see windin their hair with sunshine. A little bit of sunshine. A few days time livedwithout soot on her face to mark my kiss. A few days time where she doesnʼt mention whatʼs needed, whatʼs been bought, and what isnʼt left. A few days timewhen they arenʼt embarrassed by their clothes, to see them look at the sky instead ofthe ground, to get to see the way the Big Wheel makes their eyes big. A fewdays where we can wake up together in the morning, and get some breakfast,together, no whistles telling us weʼre late. No Bolton sun rising and spreading usout. Something to look ...

Sleep found me there. Then therewas the zebra, again, and an anxious search for the drain at the bottom. Theplace that leads somewhere else. My body was there floating, aBy-The-Wind-Sailor, and my mind to, in the flotsam and jetsam of my mind. Was Ilooking for new happiness, or replaying old trauma?

I woke up and there was sun. TheSea was moving more than last night, but not violently, a sort of slow swellingand contracting that lifted me straight up and then gently dropped me straightdown. I kept my eyes closed for a while. Feigning sleep. Wanting to continuethis moment. Not wanting to break it.

the sea: wave 4

2011-10-21T13:56:00.000+01:00

Noticing, looking up withmy eyes still closed as I was, that the sky was above, as it is, and that thesky was something too. That it was like The Sea but with more uncertainty. TheSea’s reflection in a dusty mirror, the something on the other side of ourconscious world, a world that only rises a few stories above the ground, a thinmembrane covering this earth. Planes and submarines, fish and birds, our wasteand our carbon dioxide.

There is sand in this Sea, and it used to be a parishchurch, or some other thing, and there is dust in the air, and it used to bethe sand that used to be the parish church. And that sand was in this Sea, andnow that sand is in the air, and it’s moving around this earth and finding thefolds of our Sunday best, the gaps in our windows, our momentarily open doors.It has not given up, it can’t, like machinery. And it has been everywhere …everywhere and elsewhere, seeking its place, and this journey isn’t entropy,this journey is the system. We chase out of our bedrooms buildings of the lastmillennium with a broom and a dustpan, their slow insistence on coming in.There are particles of sand, dust, everywhere. Breaking free of the cornerstone with the help of the water, the other stones. Setting off on an adventureof currents, ground even smaller climbing some far off shore, seizing the wind,travelling inland. The grains struggle to remake the Sea’s image on land,drenching landscapes in the dryness of desert dust, homing in on our freshlybuilt free radicals, the clock of timing the struggle started with the lastcoat of paint.

*****

Elsew/here the sanddrawing is now complete. Over the last week, the shaven-headed monks in thesaffron robes have patiently tap-tap-tapped millions of grains of coloured sandoff the tips of crafted copper tubes into complex geometrical patterns. Thesand flowed like liquid paint. White, black, and three distinct shades each ofred, yellow, green and blue: fourteen colours in all. A pure experience ofcolour, and an elaborately imagined sacred space. While they worked, the monkswore linen masks to cover their mouths and noses, so that their breath wouldnot disturb the sand. They have been building an elaborate spherical cosmic mapfrom the centre outwards. Circle square square square circle circle, a spirallingform structurally similar to the petals of a flower.

For the monks itrepresents a movement through levels of confusion towards enlightenment: anunfolding from two dimensions to many. In short, it is a cosmogram, its widththe size of an adult human, with the emblem of a deity at its very centre. Inthis case, the deity is a goddess, both protective and given to explosive rage.It is said she is dark blue, has three eyes, and rides on a mule through a seaof blood encircled by the fire of wisdom. The sun nestles in her navel, asickle moon arcs across her forehead. She is associated with healing throughknowledge, and is consulted through a system of divination by dice.

The finished mandala isconsecrated through prayer, chanting, meditation, and a series ofvisualisations. Each particle of pigment is charged to contain the image in itsentirety, each fragment the whole, each grain a macrocosm, like the individualshards of a shattered hologram. One of the monks scatters a handful ofsix-sided ivory die to one side; the meanings of the numbers and symbols inthis particular configuration are discussed at length. Suddenly, one of theyounger monks sneezes massively, theatrically; the others laugh.

Finally, in aritual that stages the impermanence of all things, the monks dismantle thedrawing by sweeping the sand into small piles. It’s a very practical dispersalof the image, almost casual. Four little grey piles are left, like tiny cartoonvolcanos. The monks bless each of the piles, bag them up, and carry them on theshort walk to the meeting point of river and sea. One final monotonal chantdescribes a teardrop shed into an ocean of suffering, and suffering’s release.Then four monks wade into the surf up to their knees and pour the sand into thewater. Slowly, they release dry into wet, all the while visualising eachcoloured particle’s infinite possible trajectories, carried by the sea’scurrents and flows to every corner of the world. They stand in silence, theends of their robes bobbing on tiny waves like slopping pools of ochre wine inslow-motion.

On these journeys, thereis time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, thephases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give. ‘Seesoo,hrss, rsseis, oos …’ (1)

*****

Elsew/here a fleet ofsteam dredgers removes tons of granite and flint shingle from the seabedbeneath the cliffs to provide material for a new sea wall further down thecoast. God-fearing fishermen with furrowed brows look on from their village atthe foot of the cliffs, wondering what repercussions this might have, this‘tampering with nature’, this modern arrogance to dream of ‘playing god’. Nogood will come of it, they say. Look at them: they couldn’t navigate a turdaround a pisspot, they say. Some years later ferocious winter storms whip thesea into a frenzy, and the slate sky is thick with spindthrift, like a snowstorm. As dusk falls, towering black waves blast away at the unprotectedvillage. Never seen anything like it, they say, like the end of the world.

Overnight most of the community’s buildings are devastated, gouged and pulpedto dust by the walls of driving water. The whitewashed slate-roofed fishermen’scottages, all of them decapitated and ground down. The small grey stone inn,its fireplace doused forever. The workshop for making lobster pots and mendingnets. The stables and piggery. The chapel. The tiny Post Office shop. Thevillage hall, for community meetings and wedding receptions and evenings ofsongs and shanties. (Remember? ‘I mustdown to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky / And all I ask is a tallship and a star to steer her by / And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song andthe white sail’s shaking / And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawnbreaking’). All dust now, carried away tirelessly by the sea. Even thebeach is gone.

Every now and then deep inthe churning bay, minute sandy particles and splinters fleetingly reconfigureto form the skeletal outlines of what they were once part of – a shed, akitchen, the furniture of a bedroom – before a fresh undersea gust tearsthrough these ghostly outlines, shattering them anew, and the grains disperseand disappear into the ocean’s depths.

On this journey, there istime but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, thephases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.

*****

Elsew/here a ghost netdrifts across the ocean’s surface, a floating island unconsciously gatheringits catch. From a distance it looks like a small reef breaching the surface.Close up, it’s another story. Caught in the net’s mesh are seaweed, drift wood,plastic bottles, lengths of blue polymer twine, twisted drinks cans, a paintcan half full of toxic sludge, empty crisp packets, an aerosol can, dead fish,various bird carcasses, a dolphin cub, and a fluttering tern, its feet caughtin the fine nylon filaments: its wings are the only visible sign of life.

Thisis how it happens. A length of pelagic drift netting, one of the instruments ofchoice for those barely-legal fishing fleets engaged in a kind of maritimestrip-mining, breaks loose and floats free. As it drifts it entraps whatever itencounters, gradually ballooning until its mass of waste and putrefying fleshfinally sinks beneath its own weight. Over time, this material then breaks downor falls free to allow the net to rise to the surface once more - and the cyclebegins again.

Elsew/here dozens ofrusting metal barrels dumped out at sea are washed on shore by a terrifyingfreak wave. Some of the containers carry the stencilled word RIFIUTI on theirruptured flanks; others carry a warning symbol that looks like a three-bladespinning propeller or fan, black on a yellow background. Nearby, a man with hishead swathed in blue cloth and an automatic weapon slung over his shoulderstares out to sea; he chews his khat leaf and spits on the sand. (2)

Elsew/here an innocuousbrown glass bottle is washed ashore on an island beach. Over the next threedays, eight people from a tiny tribal community will drink from it and die. (3)

On these journeys, thereis time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, thephases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give.

*****

Elsew/here, another kindof sea far inland. The travellers arrive in ones and twos, sometimes a smallvan arrives in a dust cloud and disgorges an unsteady gaggle of people,shrouded against the sun. They carry light bags for the journey, just thebarest of essentials. They have long since said goodbye to their families.Those that stay behind never say their son or daughter or husband ‘left’ or‘migrated’; they refer to them as ‘the burnt ones’, those that have burnt thelaw, the past. At the meeting point in the dunes a man in sunglasses shows themthe pre-fabricated kit from which they will build the boat. As he explains theprocess, he traces lines and swirls in the sand with a stick. Lengths ofuntreated pine are laid out on the ground; to one side on a white cloth, avariety of bolts, screws, two screwdrivers, a hammer, some bags of plasticballast. The wood looks like the ruptured rib cage of some extinct beast,bleached by the sun, then buried by the tidal movements of the sand, and onlynow disinterred.

Many of them have never seen the sea; with diverse images of‘boat’ in their minds, they start to assemble this mysterious thing in whichthey will entrust their hopes and their lives. Gradually separate pieces arelinked together and the boat’s outline emerges. Their tap-tap-tapping issometimes interrupted by the low throb of a military plane scouring the dunes;they hide under camouflaged tarpaulins, or lie flat on the sand to try to makethemselves invisible, just more fragments of unremarkable desert flotsam. Whenthe boat is finished, they stand around it with a mixture of astonishment andtrepidation. In silence they wait huddled against the cold night until dawn,unable to sleep, then at first light they drag the boat through the sandtowards the sea. We go looking for our lives, they say.

On these journeys, thereis time but not a thing by which to tell it, save the passage of the sun, thephases of the moon, and the patient pulse of the sea’s pull and give. Soo,siessr, ssrh, oosees … seesoo, hrss, rsseis, oos …

(1) James Joyce, Ulysses,London: Penguin, 1992, p. 62.

(2) See, for example, Jonathan Clayton, ‘Somalia’s secret dumpsof toxic waste washed ashore by tsunami’, TheTimes, 4 March 2005.

(3) See, for example, Sanjib Kumar Roy, ‘Bottled chemical onbeach kills tribe members’, The Guardian,12 December 2008.

the sea: wave 5

2011-10-21T13:00:00.000+01:00

Elsew/here I could hear particles that are in that air … that they havesomething to say to the particles that are below me, in the water. That thosethat have entered the sieve of The Sea, and through its motion (longing for theland) have been ground so light as to wash up somewhere to be taken up by thewind, that spoon the sky uses to stir, lift, and mix. The greater the scale ofyour vision (in your head), the less the descriptor entropy becomesappropriate. There are so many things happening. And we arenʼt in control. And that is beautiful. That means thesmall moments of our lives exist in a system, and what joy they bring isperfect and especially enigmatic. This is a permission to look at the world, open to feeling, like yourself a net,things to remember, or interest, or excitement; the beauty is in the collectionof things that you become. A collage. A good diary never makes that much senseto the little brother. Like a walk, ice cream, a performance, a book, or apainting ... the things they stand for, remembered.

Elsew/here: The sun goes down. The sky and sea become indistinguishable.

As if there were waves of darkness in the air, darkness moved on,covering houses, hills, trees, as waves wash round the sides of some sunken ship… The light had faded from the tool house wall and the adderʼs skin hung from the nail empty. All colors in theroom had overflown their banks. The precise brush stroke was swollen andlopsided; cupboards and chairs melted their brown masses into one hugeobscurity. (2)

Elsew/here, like a grain of salt becomes known by every molecule ofwater in a boiling pot and has the effect of raising the boiling temperature ofthat water, so is the effect of our buildings on The Sea. And just as theboiling potʼs water becomes vapor slowly, sending it andits humid saltiness into the air introducing itself to the air in the same waythe salt met the water. All at once, a chemical wicking at light speed. As muchas the waterʼs mood affects the land, so it affects theair, and in this way great changes happen slowly. Like the Seaʼs assault on our shores, The Sea is content withslowness. It takes the parish churches of our towns, as it always has, andintroduces them to the air, the clouds, and those grains that were walls thatprotected our worship, or our thoughts, come back to us and try to find theirway into the folds of our clothes, moving with an assist from the breath ofwind to find the spaces at the threshold of our houses, to re-occupy. Stone isour most permanent building material, but its life isnʼt the width of a human hair on a 300 foot timeline of this world. It maybe that you are breathing the parish church of St. James right now, a lonemicroscopic particle that remembers finding a hair in your nostril, now a partof you. And its time with you will be relative to the start of a blink of aneye. But that doesnʼt mean it doesnʼt happen. The gravity of a moment isnʼt judged in terms of its duration.

Elsew/here entropy is a microscopic phenomenon. Such a thing does notexist when viewing the earth from space, or the universe from the stars, orspace from the edge of space. Matter has no death.

Elsew/here particles cluster into voices: (in order of encounter) StanLaurel, Paul Valéry, Stan Laurel, Herman Melville.

Well I couldn't help it, I was dreaming I was awake. And then I woke upand found myself asleep. (Laurel) I was walking on the very edge of the sea. Iwas following an endless shore … This is not a dream I am telling you. I wasgoing I know not whither overflowing with life, half intoxicated with my youth.The air deliciously rude and pure, pressing against my face and limbs,confronted me – an impalpable hero that I must vanquish in order to advance.And this resistance, ever overcome, made of me too at every step an imaginaryhero, victorious over the wind, and rich in energies that were ever reborn,ever equal to the power of the invisible adversary …

That is just what youth is. I trod firmly the winding beach, beaten andhardened by the waves. All things around me were simple and pure: the sky, thesand, the water. I watched as they came from the offing, those mighty shapeswhich seem to be running from the coast of Libya, charioting their glisteningsummits, their hollow valleys, their relentless energy from Africa all the wayto Attica across the immense liquid expanse. At last they come upon theirobstacle, the very plinth of Hellas; they shatter themselves against thosesubmarine foundations; they recoil in disorder towards the origin of theirmotion. When the waves are thus destroyed and confounded, yet seized in turn bythose that follow them, it is as though the forms of the deep were engaged instrife. One sees white horsemen leaping beyond themselves, and all those envoysof the inexhaustible sea perishing and reappearing, with a monotonous tumult, on a gentle almost imperceptible slope, which alltheir vehemence, though it come from the mostremote horizon, will yet never be able to surmount … (2)

Do you believe me or believe what I see? (Laurel) … consider them boththe sea and the land; and do you not find an analogy for something insideyourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in thesoul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, butencompassed by all the horrors of the half known life ...

Elsew/here the Sea is massive and its featureless-ness helps us tounderstand the size of those systems at play on this planet, whereas landbetrays us into the lullaby of geographic specificity. Humanity is just asgeographic as land, and we are function of these systems, and the motion ofthese systems is whatʼs awesome, andmy impact, your impact, on these systems is nano, but the crater of impact isnʼt the measure of meaning, itʼs only a physical resonance. What is beautiful is inside you, theviewer. And to feel beauty is great, but not material, and not truth, and noteternal. In fact, beauty does not exist where one can smell eternity.

Elsew/here things are remembered, and their pattern comes together likea cloud atlas. A system viewed too closely for connections reveals none. Latentconnections are like mist. Heat the air with your breath and they disappearlike so much vapor. Intentions turning into words often sound like pain. Keepyour love locked down. Internalizing the world happens like a collage, not likethe linearity of external living.

Elsew/here erosion reveals fossils. Layers working back on themselves,patterns appear in complex systems when given the chance (time).

Elsew/here … “in the space of a few minutes, the bright sky darkened anda wind came up, blowing the dust across the arid land in sinister spirals. Thelast flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all contoursdisappeared in the grayish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon lashed bystrong, unrelenting gusts. I crouched behind a rampart of tree stumps that hadbeen bulldozed into long lines after the great hurricane. As darkness closed infrom the horizon like a noose being tightened, I tried in vain to make out,through the swirling and ever denser obscurement, landmarks that a short whileago still stood out clearly, but with each passing moment the space aroundbecame more constricted. Even in my immediate vicinity I could soon notdistinguish any line or shape at all. The mealy dust streamed from left toright, from right to left, to and fro on every side, rising on high andpowdering down, nothing but a dancing grainy whirl for what must have been anhour, while further inland, as I later learnt, a heavy thunderstorm had broken.

When the worst was over, the wavy drifts of sand that had buried the brokentimber emerged from the gloom. Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, Icrawled out of the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of acaravan that had come to grief in the desert. A deathly silence prevailed.There was not a breath, not a birdsong to be heard, not a rustle, nothing. Andalthough it now grew lighter once more, the sun, which was at its zenith,remained hidden behind the banners of pollen-fine dust that hung for a longtime in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth hasground itself down.” (4)

(1) Virginia Woolf, TheWaves, Orlando: Harcourt Inc., 2006, p. 174.

(2) Paul Valéry, Dialogues,Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, pp. 111-12.

(3) Herman Melville, MobyDick, New York: Norton & Company Inc, p. 236.

(4) WG Sebald, TheRings of Saturn, London: Harvill Press, 1998, p. 229.

the sea: wave 6

2011-10-21T11:00:00.000+01:00

Lulled by the Sea’s rolland curl, its breath synced with mine, I return to my dream of floating farfrom land, the boat long gone, just me and the Sea and the sky. A me-shapedhole in the vastness of the Sea, two turbulences enmeshed with each other in anameless place on no known map. The tight breath and anxious splash andoh-my-God of my earlier corkscrewing desire to stand up and out of the waterand see where I am, to orient myself, are now released. Soft. My thoughts arefluid, nomadic, provisional: they flutter and drift and unravel in a wakingthat is brushed by wet sleep, carried on the currents of association, verysmall, very quiet, a slow swarm, the little by little suddenly. I have theimpression the Sea can somehow hear my thoughts.

In the Mandaean sect inthe region of the Iran-Iraq border, newly ordained priests marry a cloud, astand-in for a wife in the other world. The Mandaeans’ holy scriptures tell thestory of Dinanukht, half-man, half-book, who sits by the waters between theworlds and reads himself … (1)

Movement andtransformation. The resilient persistence of matter, its survival, its memory -and yet the bottom line is that the only constant is mobility, change. It’s allcircuits and flows in the mortality of forms, and the unpredictable migrationsof their constituent parts. There are the remains of sea creatures in desertsand on mountain tops. Shells on Everest. And a tiny bead of sweat on a foreheadmight contain something of the exhaled vapour of another person or creaturefrom long ago and far away. A glass of water here now is informed by the past.Perhaps it holds molecules evaporated from a glacier, a tree, tears, mist,snow, fog, ice, a cough, the gurgle of a new-born child ‘trailing clouds ofglory’ or someone’s final sigh. Maybe even molecules from Archimedes’ bathwater. Countless micro-moments of time, from yesterday or centuries ago on theother side of this blue ball, potentially co-existing in the same smallcontainer. The glass itself was once sand. It’s almost promiscuous, thisco-mingling, and there’s joy in that thought.

I was born by the river in a little tent

Oh and just like the river I’ve been running eversince

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will (2)

Researchers estimate that12 million tons of Sahara dust drops out of the air onto the Brazilianrainforests of the Amazon basin every year. Great plume-like vortices ofaeolian sand that rise from the desert and drift west, only the finestphosphate-rich particles making it across to South America. Shamans too ride onwhirlwinds; the way out of the world, or into another world, is through thevortex … (3)

If we could only let go ofour compulsion to dress transience in mourning, and instead confer value onimpermanence and change, might we not inherit the earth? Why not lament(briefly) the very notion of permanence and move on? ‘God’, ‘Truth’, ‘Progress’- looks to me like these are all cover stories, formative human delusions.Funny stories to tell ourselves, aren’t they – funny peculiar if not funnyha-ha. Let their heart-break go. Why not? It would be an act of kindness. Ofrealistic optimism. And an occasion for invention. We’ve been pointing in thewrong direction. Let’s use the fact of transience for our fictions. That’s theway to turn a death story into a life story. If you want to be remembered, giveyourself away. La la laaaa la laaaa lalalaaaa, oh yes it will.

The words of MeisterEckhardt: ‘the humble man is he who is watered with grace’ …

Beginnings and endings,all endings in reality new beginnings. Hourglasses eternally emptying out andbeing turned over again and again. At first the Earth was a smouldering spherecondensed from interstellar gas, its atmosphere a toxic soup of hot vapour. Formaybe half a billion years. Then eventually as the Earth began to cool itrained for maybe 12,000 years, and the Sea came into being ... As we fade anddie, us humans, the hot-house internal fever of our living bodies begins tocool from its regular 98.6 degrees Farhenheit, and eventually we become food,then soil, then … The spilling of seeds …

In the past, when peopledied at home, a lighted match was applied to the big toe. The toe would blisterwhether the person was dead or still alive; but if they were dead, the blisterwould fill with gas and burst.

After he died, Alexanderthe Great was shipped back from Babylon in a vat of honey. Nelson came back toEngland from Trafalgar in a keg of rum. A temporary suspension, of matter andtime.

There’s an invisible hazein the air and in the water – the water in that glass, this Sea, thatsky-mountain cloud, in all water – a haze of stuff too small for these eyes tosee: the dust of anything and everything, the ghostly traces of what is carriedin the wind and the rain and the rivers and here, right here in the Sea.Dancing sediment. Ejecta. Dejecta. Rejecta. A kind of soil, life’s compost.Trace elements of Newton’s apple. Or of Darwin’s busy worms, their castings thesource of his consolation and inspiration in his final years of life: blind machinesfor making soil (aren’t we all?); digestion as restoration, the lifedestruction makes possible. (‘Never say higher or lower’, Darwin once wrote inthe margins of a book). Weregularly inhale air-borne fragments of vehicle tires. Possibly dinosaurs. Dodos.Certainly powdered insects’ wings. Powdered people. Debris dispersed and afloatand en route to who knows where. How to read and map and re-member theseatomised histories, and our place in their foldings and unfoldings andbecomings. ‘Galloping horses ofthe departed century, I will consult ashes, stars, and flights of birds’. (4)

‘Air routinely carriesintimate fragments of rug, dung, carcasses, leaves and leaf hairs, coral, coal,skin, sweat, soap, silt, pollen, algae, bacteria, spores, soot, ammonia, andspit, as well as salt crystals from ocean white-caps, dust scraped off distantmountains, micro bits of cooled magma from volcanoes and charredmicro-fragments from tropical forest fires. These sorts of things can add up.At dusk the particles meet rising water vapour, stick together, and fall: thatis when they will bury you. Soil bacteria eat what they can, and the rest of itstays put if there’s no wind. After thirty years, there is a new inch oftopsoil … We live on dead people’s heads […] Time: you can’t chock the wheels.We sprout, ripen, fall, and roll under the turf again at a stroke: Surely, thepeople is grass […]’. (5)

A thousand years ago, insilent-order Benedictine monasteries, monks communicated through hand signals.If you wanted honey, you put your finger on your tongue. If you needed acandle, you blew on your index finger … Where are those breaths now?

It was said of Confucius,and there was no higher praise: He knows where the wind comes from. It was saidof Lao-Tzu that he spent 81 years in the womb before being born …

Everything is still,everything moves. Floating here, treading water, pulled down by my body’sweight, buoyed up by a cushion of liquid. Up-down, gravity and lightness. Theim/possible dance. Everything that is dances this dance. The structure of aday. Organic life cycles. Weather systems. Social histories. Religions.Civilisations. Mushroom cloud. Smoke from a cigarette. A glance. A memory,bursting to the surface like the fin of a fish, then gone. Every breath is initself a wave, a weather system, a life cycle of rising up and falling away.The inhalation can be a falling away, the exhalation an effortless rising up.Body weather. The wind in my heart – the dust in my head. Internal oceans,deserts, fronts, cloud formations, floods, droughts, turbulences, seasonal lowsand highs. A synoptic chart of the soul, written in and on the body. Upsidedown, inside out.

The wind in the trees, theoxygenated ocean of air in which we swim or sink; an economy of exchange, insideand outside touching and blurring, like lovers. The tree-like structures of thelungs, of blood vessel and nervous systems, of river deltas and tributaries, oflightning strikes, synaptic connectivities and divisions. The arc of a thought.Like lovers.

Resemblances, analogies,metaphors: ‘like’ does not collapse difference and create the same, for thein-between is unstable, potential, the coexistence of near and far, like andnot-like, identity and difference. The Sea is like the sky, the desert like theSea, only … different. Like is a gap. Everything happens in the gap. Mind thegap, you could fall into it.

It is said that when thephilosopher Empedocles (the originator of the concept of the four elements:fire, air, water, earth) dived into the spurting liquid magma of Mt. Etna’scrater, his own ‘Eureka!’ moment at the age of 60 or was it 109, the volcanopromptly spat out one of his bronze shoes …

Falling down. Fallingsick. Sinking. Coming up for air. Climbing back up. Standing up. Settling down. Falling in love. Freefalling. Rising into love. Defying gravity. Gravity rises, lightness falls.

‘We don’t fall in rowslike hay, but we fall. Once we get here, we spend forever on the globe, most ofit tucked under. While we breathe, we open time like a path in the grass. Weopen time as a boat’s stem slits the crest of the present’. (6)

Oh there been times that I thought I couldn’t lastfor long

But now I think I’m able to carry on …

Treading water. Leaving notrace. A little dance written on the wind.

Did you know that camels,the great anomalously-shaped, grace-ful ‘ships of the desert’, the two-humpedBactrian model like mobile model mountain ranges, leave oh so delicate lotuspad-prints in the sand for the wind to wipe away? (7)

Everything is still,everything moves. Sea. Sand. Sky. Air. Pulse. Breath.

It’s been a long, a long time coming

But I know a change gonna come, oh yes it will …

(1) Eliot Weinberger, ‘Mandaeans’, An Elemental Thing, New York: New Directions, pp. 100, 103.

(2) Sam Cooke, AChange is Gonna Come, 1964.

(3) Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Vortex’, An Elemental Thing, op. cit., 2007, p. 126.

(4) Czeslaw Milosz, ‘The Unveiling’ (from The Rising of the Sun), in Collected Poems: 1931-1987, London:Penguin, 1988, pp. 124, 153.

(5) Annie Dillard, Forthe Time Being, New York: Vintage Books, 1999, pp. 124, 153.

(6) Annie Dillard, Forthe Time Being, op. cit., p. 203.

(7) Eliot Weinberger, ‘The Sahara’, An Elemental Thing, op. cit., p. 186.

the sea: cloud (an epilogue)

2011-10-21T10:30:00.000+01:00

Cloud,from old english Clud [mass of rock or earth]

CloudSeed #1

Dirtfrom the construction site where buildings are beginning to be formed lifts upand moves into the atmosphere. Once a part of the earth's crust now set looseinto the air: a potential staging ground for the condensation of water vapor;seeds for the formation of a cloud.

Nomore permanent that anything else. Everything is a momentary apparition. Oh,but beauty. My eyes open each morning, and some mornings are full, like a songthat makes me sing along. I am here. I am here. And it will not be forever.Thankfully. Because there is too much to see, and nothing would be worth tryingto remember if my eyes will open every morning like a hose spraying infinitenows. Nothing is worth feeling if it can be felt anytime, always.

Cloudseed #2

Aman who spent half of his Saturday afternoon kicking a can down the promenadecomes home and shakes his jacket before hanging it on the coat rack. Small crystalsof salt, deposited on his jacket from the spray of the sea are set loose,moving out of the open window and into the atmosphere. The salt crystalsmix with the dust from the construction site, more water vapor condenses,freezes and the cloud is growing.

Andlooking at The Sea. Looking at the sea. From up here. “And now we arehere. The dinner is ready and we cannot eat. The meat sits in the white lake ofits dish. The wine waits.”[1]

“Who watched the forms of the clouds over thispart of the earth a thousand years ago? Who watches them today?”[2]We will watchand we will try to hold on, but surely they will change. We will cry – tears falling upinto the sky – cuss – spittle flying under the clouds'haunted arches – we will roll in the meadow inhaling the mistwhile stains form on our trousers – whelm of joy mixed with dread – we will lay onour backs looking up listening to the sound of the blades of grass flitteringin the wind and remember nothing is worth feeling if it can be felt anytime,always.

CloudSeed #3

Sittingat the bar at dusk, watching the dusty antiques on the wall lose theirdefinition with the fading of the light; a mass was forming before thedrunkards’ eyes. Looking down at his drink, trying to avoidthe scene, he suddenly felt an absence forming behind him. He fell of hisstool, bumped off a table and a couple of chairs before he stumbled out thedoor. It was dampoutside; it was as if the clouds were sleeping in the street. Trying to makeout the shadowy forms through the misty veil before his eyes, he picked a pointand staggered towards it. After walking for some time, bumpingoff of various landmarks-changing his course with each bump, he could feel hisbody gaining weight from the droplets of water collecting on his skin andclothing, after some time he was swimming in the cloud and after some time hewas becoming it.

“What is in any [Sea] ocean but a multitude ofdrops?”[3] An awesome body of matter all tangled up more incapable of seeming anobject than land, but then there’s air, The Sea as the entropicmiddle. And this, viewed from a distance, the edge of the universe perhaps,looks like Brownian motion, all of it bouncing around and against itself,changing course, the collection of these glancing blows becoming lives. Matterdrifting in the system with the illusion of acting. But one cannot bounce offof belief - and vicious acts, or virtuous acts, are precipitated by belief. Butwithout invoking some grand narrative in which to protect our fragility, why can’t small joy bejoy? We can drift, and appreciate the view, and seek to collect these viewsinto a remembered joy, always more possibility in the future, until there is nomore future. Smiling into the face of a finite existence of little lastingresult, manufacturing small meanings that add up, a joy in having participatedinstead of being frozen in the want of gifted meaning.

CloudSeed #4

Downbelow a couple is sleeping side-by-side covers up to their chins. Clouds areforming in front of their mouths with the rise and fall of their chests. Quietly, whilethey dream their bodies are regenerating tissues. They wake up inthe morning look in the mirror, see themselves the same face, look at eachother say “good morning” seeing nothingas changed, maybe only the date on the calendar, but everything has changed.Everything. Clouds. Each morning we wake up and meet our self ...meet the world. Our mostly-water bodies, our loose collection of matter,regenerating always. Clouds. “ We are all potential fossils stillcarrying within our bodies the crudities of former existences, the marks of theworld in which living creatures flow with little more consistency than cloudsfrom age to age.”[4] But only the crud, none of the actual stuff.And still our hearts hurt when they are broken. Still we collect something.Small, tiny in fact, but ours (us).

Anobject is like a pattern of movement instead of a solid separate thing thatexists autonomously. [5] Look through the microscope and pickyour favorite, follow it closely, like a star, like drift wood, like amaybe-face in a cloud. Organization used to be understood as order. Databases,cordoned off, categorized. But clouds. Leaving those things we collect wherethey lay, and giving them keywords, signs, so that we might search for themlater, the algorithm, the duplicitous web (put it in the cloud), cloudcomputing, more reliable, and more appropriate to our shifting understanding ofrelationships; time going by, entropic ephemeral re-structuring. Us to the world,us to nature, coffee to the morning, the world to the world.

“As for astronomy, the difficulty of recognizingthe movement of the earth consisted in renouncing the immediate feeling of theimmobility of the earth and the similar feeling of the movement of the planets,so for history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of the person tothe laws of space, time, and causes consists in renouncing the immediatefeeling of the independence of one’s person. In the first case, the needwas to renounce the consciousness of a nonexistent immobility in space andrecognize a movement we do not feel; in the present case, it is just asnecessary to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we donot feel.”[6]

Cloudsare like momentary apparitions; their possibility is in the air always, likemist settling down in the cool evening before burning off in new sun. A cloudlooks like an object, but isn’t it really just the way air lookswhen the atmosphere conspires to make it so? I am a cloud.

[1]Strand, Mark. Reasons For Moving, Darker& The Sargentville Notebook, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006, p. 75

[2]Thoreau, Henry David. Autumn From theJournal of Henry David Thoreau. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin &Co., 1892, p. 429

[3]Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas, NewYork: Random House, 2004. p. 509

[4]Eisley, Loren. The Immense Journey, New York: Vintage, 1959.

[5]Bohm, David. On Creativity. London:Routledge, 1998.

[6]Tolstoy, Leo. War and Peace. NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007, p.1214

This epilogue text is by Stephen Fiehn & Tyler Myers / Cupola Bobber.

amplifier worship VI

2011-10-03T21:53:00.000+01:00

This past weekend I was in Kuopio in eastern central Finland for the ANTI Festival. Primarily to prepare a review article about this 10th anniversary festival, which included work by Blast Theory, Mammalian Diving Reflex, Gaetan Rusquet, Aaron Williamson, Lone Twin (Beastie), TRYST, and the extraordinary Finnish vocal performer Juha Valkeapaa - but also, and more personally, to support friends involved in the '100 Year Old Rock & Roll Band' (Sue, Joff, Simon) and to watch their multi-generational gang's one-off performance of a single song.

By a huge distance, Kuopio is the furthest north I've ever traveled; it's hundred of miles north of Helsinki and St Petersburg, on a similar latitude to the southern edge of Iceland. And it is exquisitely beautiful - surrounded by lakes and forests, a grid city with every other street a pedestrian lane (the 'rannikatu', originally fire barriers between the wooden houses).

As someone apparently profoundly 'southern' - born below the equator in the southern part of Africa, and with many later years spent in Australia: a child of light and heat - the north intrigues and puzzles me. People are markedly different, and part of this surely relates to the rigours of the climate and the landscape - weeks of no sunlight in winter, temperatures of -30, daylight throughout the night in mid-summer, etc. To generalise wildly, taciturn introverted men of great privacy, deflecting engagement, but with flashes of dry and eccentric humour; and warm and open women, welcoming and often hilarious. I've never encountered such polarised gender characteristics.

Meanwhile, in this apparently subdued and orderly context, there is a deep-seated fascination with heavy metal and hard rock, as there is in other Nordic countries (for example, the infamous and occasionally psychotic 'black metal' of Norway's Mayhem and other extreme bands). Kuopio's walls, youth clubs and bars are plastered with posters for metal gigs; and music mags are awash with ads for bands with ominous names, most of them in English, often accompanied by contrivedly and overtly theatrical 'scary' images.

Lots of kids in coffee shops with studded leathers, with 'Six Feet Under' scrawled across their backs. And some of the wildest haircuts I've ever seen - towering gelled mohicans, and one tall thin streak of a guy munching a doughnut by a supermarket with a good three feet of vertical quiff bolt upright above him, as if he'd inserted his fingers into a plug socket.

Here's a swift selection of some of the band names I spotted:

Human Waste Disposal Unit. Disease of the Nation. No Signs of Life. One Morning Left. Wolves in the Throne Room. Klamydia. Rise to Remain. Anal Thunder. Fleshpress. Dark Buddha Rising. Sunk. Dead in the Water. Throat. A bunch of these bands were performing at a festival called 'Amplifier Worship VI', its logo an inverted cross.

Hard to bring this submerged (and often comic, intentionally or otherwise) shadow world of apocalyptic paganism and the aggressive living dead into any kind of meaningful dialogue with what I could access wandering the oh so peaceful streets of a place like Kuopio. I could only guess at what fuels these fascinations and energies, how the psyche gets to want to hover there, in a very particular kind of ANTI, of an evening.

Hey, whatever keeps you going on those long winter nights ...

all'alba (on fire)

2011-09-11T17:21:00.002+01:00

'It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire,

in measures being kindled and in measures going out' (Heraclitus)

Whenever I go to Sicily, I take with me some writings by Annie Dillard. Her disposition, language and challenge somehow dovetail with the light, the blazing sea, the awakening of body, senses, perceptions. The invitation to rise with the sun, and to slow down into an amplified, extravagant, elemental everyday: rock, salt, sky, glare, water, skin, shadow. To be awake, there where you are, with the gods of the day:

'These are morning matters, pictures you dream as the final wave heaves you up on the sand to the bright light and drying air. You remember pressure, and a curved sleep you rested against, soft, like a scallop in its shell. But the air hardens your skin; you stand; you leave the lighted shore to explore some dim headland, and soon you're lost in the leafy interior, intent, remembering nothing ...

Kazantzakis says that when he was young he had canary and a globe. When he freed the canary, it would perch on the globe and sing ...

Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will and sense them. The least we can do is try to be there ...

The whole show has been on fire since the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames ...

I walk out; I see something, some event that would have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten bell'.

(Pilgrim at Tinker Creek)

strive to be (no one is innoce)

2011-08-27T12:15:00.018+01:00

summer drift

2011-08-22T13:39:00.006+01:00

quiet riot (the interrupters)

2011-08-12T16:17:00.025+01:00

Top: Message board - David Levene's image of post-it notes on a boarded-up Poundland in Peckham, damaged in rioting: one of many such impromptu message boards on hoardings around London

Below: Broom army - Andrew Bayles' viral iPhone photograph of the armed mob assembled to clear up the streets in Clapham: a kind of beneficent Home Guard community spirit mobilised to reinstate orderly shopping

As the English judicial system moves into disproportionately punitive mode (6 months for nicking a bottle of water etc.), here are some links with perspectives on community and violence that seem well worth pondering right now: a YouTube interview with a guy on the street in Hackney; Russell Brand and Shiv Malik in the Guardian; a poem for Tariq Jahan by Carol Ann Duffy; Kenan Malik's 'Five quick points about the riots;' Nina Power on some of the broader contexts for social unrest; Owen Hatherley on the punitive eviction of rioters' families from their homes; Chris Goode's compassionate, thoughtful 'Language teaching' from August 9th on his extraordinary blog; and Charlie Brooker's corrosive satire on bringing back capital punishment.

For me, the most extraordinary propositions, provocations and invitations about how to meet endemic violence without producing further violence (or simply pasting some one-eyed cartoon morality on to people's actions and demonising them) come in a recently released documentary film The Interrupters, directed by Steve James with Alex Kotlowitz. It's about a project called CeaseFire set up in the south side of Chicago to 'interrupt' spiraling gang-related and other violence. And in truth it's one of the most remarkable films I've ever seen, with some genuinely astonishing people of great wisdom, compassion and clarity of perception. They include the epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, who set up CeaseFire, and the four 'interrupters' we follow in the film - Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams, Tio Hardiman and Eddie Bocanegra - all four of whom were formerly involved in street crime or gang violence, and all of whom are just extraordinary.

Please try to see it. It is brilliant and timely, and shines a rather different light on a lot of the odious moral 'blame & shame' bullshit hovering in British politics, the media and elsewhere right now, and on the possibility of change. It offers an anti-toxin full of real intelligence, heart and humanity. A wake-up call.

Here's a trailer for the film. Here's a clip of Ameena Matthews speaking on the street at a prayer vigil. And here's Andrew Anthony's fine piece from the Guardian last week.

P.S. As a crunchy addendum to the British riot-related material above, here's a link to Slavoj Zizek's account of the riots as an expression of 'revolt without revolution', of his sense of broader political contexts, and of the inadequacy of both conservative and liberal responses: 'Shoplifters of the World Unite' in the London Review of Books, 19 August.

tree of life

2011-08-08T15:49:00.017+01:00

Last night I went to see Terence Malick's extraordinarily ambitious film The Tree of Life, an epic and exquisitely composed meditation on metaphysics, meaning, family and childhood, time, memory, love, loss, change, creation, connectivity, belief, grace, the cycles and phenomena of nature, the miraculous in the everyday (amongst other things).

In one of the deeply troubling scenes in which Brad Pitt's tyrannical father instils fear at the family dinner table, demanding a silence that is a violent silencing for his wife and children, a man in the front row of the cinema leaped to his feet to confront a woman who had been rustling a paper bag three rows back. It had been going on for a while, and it was a bit irritating and distracting. He had clearly reached a breaking point.

He marched round to her, stood directly in front of her, and said, quite loudly and aggressively, with much finger waving: 'Could you stop that now. I have had enough. I didn't come here to listen to you scrunching your bag, I came here to watch this film ... So stop ... If you do it again, you're out'. Silence as he returned to his seat. After a moment the woman, noticeably upset, turned to her friend or son, whispered something, and scurried up the aisle. A few minutes later she returned and they both left discreetly.

Without a whiff of self-consciousness or irony, this man had re-staged something of the explicit violence from the fiction onscreen. And somehow in our silence we were all complicit in his repressive aggression. Of course he had a right to ask her to be quieter; but was that the way to do it? Was there not another way in which the barely sublimated violence of threat would avoid being racheted up, but instead would be defused or transformed?

When the lights came up at the end of the film, the finger-wagger's face was still red with anger.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in London, riots and looting and fire. Sirens and police helicopters. Further afield, a young English guy has polar bear teeth removed from his skull. And a British soldier in Afghanistan is reported to have kept trophy fingers from the Taliban ...

*****

I remembered an incident on a London bus a couple of years ago. Two kids in school uniform boarded a crowded bus - not enough seats, so one of them sat in the luggage area near the front of the bus, her legs swinging, humming along to her iPod. At the next stop the driver turned to her and told her she couldn't sit there, it wasn't allowed. She ignored him, and comically hummed a bit louder. He shouted, 'You can't sit there. Get off please. You'll have to stand'. No response. The driver insisted, telling her he wasn't going to continue unless she moved. She said, 'Oh just drive the bus will you, or dyou want me to do it'. 'Just get down! It's not allowed!'

Then a sudden explosion, a massive gear change that shifted everything. Her friend, who'd been watching this impasse develop, rushed along the aisle from his seat near the back, and started punching the perspex screen protecting the driver, shouting and trying to smash his way in. The driver flinched and reared away from the perspex, his back pressed against the door. A stationary bus full of frightened people staring at their hands and out the window. Hoping the perspex would hold, wishing it would all stop. The girl went to the front to stop her friend, pulled him away, calmed him down, sent him back to his seat; then she went back to sit in the luggage rack.

A woman in her 60s, at the front right next to the girl, suddenly stood up and very quietly, very lightly, said, 'Hey why don't you have my seat. Please. It's fine. You sit here'. The girl, wide-eyed at this response, said no I can't do that, thanks but I can't take your seat, you're ... Then the woman with a smile: 'No, it's fine, really, really, please sit here, I'll stand. Go on. I'd just like to go home'. She then hugged the girl, held her warmly for a few disarming moments, and then they exchanged smiles and places. The girl now puzzled, calmer, seated. The pressure of the situation released and dispersed.

The bus started up and we were off again.

The woman took up the position the girl had been in, holding the railing by the luggage rack - then after a few moments dropping her bum into it for a moment, swinging her legs, softly laughing at the logic of taking up this same position when there are no seats and your body wants to sit down. A brilliant, funny, human moment of recognition. Then she stood up again, and the journey continued. The same, but different, more awake.

For Peter Bradshaw's 5-star review of Malick's The Tree of Life in the Guardian, see here.

For Jason Solomon's review in the Observer, with a trailer for the film, see here.

For Anthony Lane's review in the New Yorker, see here

wood (for the trees)

2011-08-03T15:34:00.030+01:00

Am just beginning work with the designer Kevin Mount on a new book, about Lone Twin's Boat Project, and immersing myself in wood as a material - in Chinese culture, conceived as the 'fifth element' - and related readings, all of them unfamiliar and wholly fascinating. Colin Tudge's The Secret Life of Trees, Roger Deakin's Wildwood: a journey through trees, George Nakashima's The Soul of a Tree, Harvey Green's Wood: Craft, Culture, History, R. Bruce Hoadley's Understanding Wood, and, for a wider discussion about the histories and tacit knowledges of the craft of making something well, Richard Sennett's extraordinary book The Craftsman.

Working my way through the catalogue of the 1,200 odd donations of wood made to the Boat Project, I've assembled an initial listing of the kinds of wood that will be present in this exquisitely crafted floating archive of objects and stories:

aframosa, American white oak, apple, ash, bamboo, beech, birch, boxwood, cedar, cherry, chestnut, crab apple, douglas fir/pine, ebony, elder, elm, eucalyptus, fuchsia, hawthorn, hazel, holly, iroko (African 'teak'), iron bark, juniper, kauri, laylandii, lime, mahogany, maple, monkey puzzle, oak, olive, padauk (African wood), parana pine, pear, pine, plum, plywood, redbeckia, redwood, rosewood, Russian oak, sandalwood, sapele (African wood), satin wood, sequoia, silver birch, spruce, strawberry tree, sycamore, teak, walnut, willow, yew.

In the last couple of weeks, I have also enjoyed stimulating email exchanges with Bryan Saner in Chicago, and the British furniture designer Matthew Burt who conceives of wood as 'recycled sunshine and rainwater'. A couple of days ago, Matthew described to me at some length his enduring fascination with and enthusiasm for the 'end grain of timber':

"It looks into the time taken to grow the material and each tree has its own unique narrative. I have one piece whose entire front is made of lots of small blocks of end grain. This particular tree was growing out of a bank alongside a track in Somerset. It curved towards the sun and as a consequence had a large “belly” at its front. It fell down in a storm, toppling forwards, no longer able to support its ample belly; it was subsequently sawn, and revealed annular rings/ growth rings that were about 13mm apart in this front part of the tree. The rings at its back side, where it took the strain, were only 2mm apart.

Solitary grown ash trees often pick up nutrients in their old age that begin to discolour their grain. These colours often add interest to the timber, and in the case of these old ashes they impart a greenish brown series of streaks which timber merchants, not slow to embellish their product with silky marketing words, refer to as “olive” and then charge twice as much as normal ash. This tree was very olived and because it was straining to support its considerable belly, the back part of the tree had stress ripples running through its grain. The tree was also curved because of its hungry pursuit of the sun. Hence this tree was olived, curved, rippled with hugely varying widths of growth rings. A story in itself.

Add to this that it had been growing in this spot since the battle of Trafalgar and you begin to get a feel how precious this material is. So when you look at the end grain blocks that make up the front panel of the “bench chest” made out of this particular tree, you are looking into the time taken to grow this wood and the story it tells. In some ways the piece is a memorial to the tree, and hopefully an eloquent one.

Enough".

edge to eye (seconds out)

2011-07-29T16:46:00.027+01:00

Images from a day-long drift in East London's edgelands, then into the centre of the city along its central river artery, on bikes & other modes of transport: Richmond to Stratford - the Olympic site (thousands of construction workers arriving on trains and buses, a huge crowd of blokes smoking, drinking coffee, eating before their shift: one guy doing all three simultaneously, burger, fag, plastic-lidded takeaway cup; then a flood of people in hi-vis jackets climbing up the steps behind the station, like a sort of slo-mo industrial Busby Berkeley-scale postmodern/pedestrian choreography; two bouncers in suits and shades checking their passes at the gate).

Then past the View Tube, deserted at this hour, still only 7.00-ish, and on to Hackney Marsh - Leyton - Walthamstow - Lea Valley - the rare 'delights' of the Lea Valley industrial estate / London Waste 'eco-park' (about which Iain Sinclair writes with such corrosive and enraged melancholy in London Orbital) - Meridian Way - Enfield Lock - Cheshunt, and a perfectly sculpted Mr Whippy from a narrow boat on the canal, sold to us by a man drinking both a glass of white wine and a can of Tennant's.

Back down along Lea Valley to Stratford - Bow - Poplar - Isle of Dogs - Canary Wharf and St Catherine's Dock on one side, on the other a more immediate face-off with the 02 arena (another Sinclair target, the 'sorry meniscus', a 'genetically modified mollusc', a 'blob of congealed correction fluid', the 'Doom of Discovery' 'tricked out with yellow cocktail sticks' etc.).

Then underground through the Greenwich foot tunnel to the south side of the river - Greenwich - Deptford - along the Thames through the City to the West End & London Eye on a nippy clipper - and finally Waterloo to Richmond.

So, a giant L reversed, west to east to north to south to west

bike
train
bike
train
bike
boat
bike
train
bike

a new fire (unknown fields)

2011-07-12T19:45:00.074+01:00

'The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the colour, the smell of the earth. Blast area. Fire area. Body-burn area'

(Don DeLillo, End Zone)

Am just back from a wonderfully provocative and engaging day-long symposium at the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, London: 'Unknown Fields: from the Atomic to the Cosmic' - an open forum prelude to an adventurous 'nomadic design studio' field trip for architecture students and others, taking them from the Chernobyl exclusion zone and Pripyat to the Baikonur Cosmodrome and on to the Aral Sea. The fourth in a series of annual expeditions organised by Liam Young & Kate Davies (as Unknown Fields), this year's journey marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first manned space flight and the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster. Earlier Unknown Fields 'trajectories' involved field trips to the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Galapagos Islands (2008), the Arctic Circle (2009), and the West Australian outback (2010).

The symposium, shoe-horned uncomfortably and bum-numbingly into the Architectural Association's tiny library, brought together an intriguing group of presenters - artists, writers, film makers - to discuss the legacies of technologies' past optimisms, cultural manifestations of the possibilities and fears around nuclear power and space travel, and some of the emerging scenarios in our collective environmental and political future(s) and imaginings.

Leading off in the 'Atomic' section of the symposium, the Oxford-based environmental anthropologist Peter Wynn-Kirby described Japan's evolving cultural relations with nuclear power - the continuing paradox of fear and need - with reference to Godzilla movies and other stagings of post-war nuclear trauma, performative workings-through of what Susan Sontag called 'imagination of disaster' (in a 1965 essay in which she explains fantasy functionally as a process of 'inurement'). Wynn-Kirby touched on the horrifying story of the Japanese tuna trawler the Lucky Dragon no. 5, unwittingly caught in a blizzard of radioactive ash in March 1954 after the vast 'Bravo' thermonuclear test by the American military in the Pacific near Bikini atoll in early 1954, and the radioactive trail they took back to port in their contaminated catch, boat and blistered bodies. He also provided invaluable contexts for contemporary reworkings of anxiety in the wake of the Tohoku/Fukushima disaster via accounts of the fear induced by radiation's uncanny invisibility, default governmental and industry denials and cover-ups, the discourse of nuclear power as 'clean and green', the problems of waste disposal (Zonabend's 'filth everlasting', Hall's 'ultimate litter') in the light of most people's 'forward time horizon' of approximately 100 years, rather than the thousands of generations that constitute a nuclear half-life. After tracking the volume and trajectories of trans-national flows of nuclear waste, he offered a terrifying listing of disposal and dispersal strategies for such waste adopted or proposed thus far, including sea dumping/ejection into space, dumping on the Antarctic ice sheet, insertion into tectonic plates, embedding in 'inert silt' at the bottom of the Pacific, and long-term 'containment' in repositories such as Yucca Mountain in the USA.

The poet Mario Petrucci, author of the brilliant act of re-membering Chernobyl, Heavy Water, presented an intellectually energised paper entitled 'Chernobyl and the stories of knowledge', touching on e.g. denial as a synergy of four factors or 'pests' - the 'destructive meme', 'radical inertia' (deeply ingrained resistance to change, adapted and modified from Ivan Illich), the 'framed question' (with an agenda, assuming only certain possible 'answers'), and 'unaccounted positive feedback' (the nuclear industry as an accelerant on resource requirements); art as transformation with the potential to dent radical inertia, shed light on unaccounted positive feedback, create 'meme-proof' experiences (irreducible to single meanings, thriving on ambiguity) - art as something that might help us 'bear it' and 're-boot consciousness'.

As well as a critique of short-termism and free-market economics, Petrucci was exploring how artists might 'understand' Chernobyl in all of its actively destructive psychic gravity; he posited a model of knowledge as qualitative, engaging intellect, imagination and a responsibility to bear witness (to re-member, so that those who have been 'exposed to the invisible should never become so'). If both art and science contain 'alertness nutrients' and 'psychic nutrients', he suggested, we might approach them with the quality of attention Levertov demanded: 'poets must give us imagination of peace to oust imagination of disaster'. He quoted the Australian poet Les Murray: 'Only poetry recognises and maintains the centrality of absolutely everywhere'. Petrucci's final words were a request to us to expand skepticism to include skepticism towards our own doubts, and a loop back to a quote from David Bohm he had cited earlier: 'Studying the distractions is part of the process'.

Next up was the film maker Michael Madsen, whose recent documentary Into Eternity focuses on the Onkolo Nuclear Waste Repository in Finland. Madsen provided contexts for his remarkable film about Onkolo (which means 'hiding place'): as a self-monitoring construction design to contain some of Finland's nuclear waste, intended to last for up to 100,000 years, and thus 'possibly the first post-human structure' (a quotation from a critic's review of his film); the finite life-span of our own civilisation, and the impossibility of imagining that far into the future (and therefore of acting wholly responsibly). Madsen went on to offer a swift history of radiation since the 1880s, with 'knowledge' at every point assumed to be 'complete' before new unforeseen elements were discovered to destabilise the parameters of the known. Before showing the trailer to his film, with its bewildering account of this peculiar subterranean 'afterworld', he talked of nuclear waste as 'a new kind of fire', the first humans have encountered in our species' history that is inextinguishable (quoting the nuclear physicist Dr Hans Bethe?); and of the emergence of a 'nuclear priesthood', 'protectors' who 'know' and act on our behalf.

Will Wiles, author of Care for Wooden Floors and a forthcoming book Toxic Tourism, explored our culture's fascination with such places as Chernobyl, Pripyat, Baikonur and the Aral Sea, referencing Christopher Woodward's In Ruins and Brian Dillon's notion of 'ruin lust', from the Romantics' sublime apocalyptism to a post-industrial return to the monumentality of ruins in the work of, for example, Robert Smithson and Gordon Matta-Clark - Spiral Jetty as a 'dialectical ruin' projected into the future in deep geological time. Wiles alluded to Virilio's Bunker Archaeology (with its analysis of 'aberrant monuments' reflecting a loss of faith in modernism), the Mir Space Station ('ruins of the future', the discarded waste products of civilisations and ideologies), the work of Jane & Louise Wilson, and the wave of urban explorers and art photographers (e.g. Christopher Payne's abandoned asylums). Discarded systems and technologies, and a sense of loss at their passing, with an attendant appraisal of current systems: the rust belt, old mental health infrastructures, and the grander ruin of Soviet civilisation (with its grand project of 'taming nature' - and class), with Pripyat as 'the Vatican of ruins'. If (Soviet) modernism's sense of control - its huge-scale interventions 'to make the world a better place' - was now lost, then an outline of the post-human seems to inhabit the devastated ruins of control.

After a short and frankly borderline bonkers presentation by Oliver Goodhall ('Nuclear is good'), an anomalous pro-nuclear presence in this company who looked so far out of his depth that for much of his presentation I, and others, took it to be a not-very-good parody by a rabbit caught in the headlights (was this an adventurous, dialogic choice in terms of the event's curation, or a ludicrous misfire? hard to tell, although Oliver wasn't really up to the task of a genuinely provocative counter-discursive intervention in the context), it was on to the extraordinary Swiss scientific illustrator and activist artist Cornelia Hesse-Honneger, one of the core reasons (along with Petrucci, Madsen and Louise K. Wilson) for my presence at the symposium on this first day of my annual leave.

For many years, Hesse-Honneger has been making detailed taxonomic drawings and paintings of mutated insects, their deformities the result of exposure to mutogenic chemicals, in particular low-level radiation. As well as detailing the ways in which true bugs (her 'favorite' bio-indicators) and other insects have been 'disturbed' - deformed feelers, wings, eyes etc. - she mapped the evolution of her own work before and after Chernobyl, and in particular her systematic projects around nuclear power stations in Sweden, the Swiss Alps, France, the Ukraine, the UK etc. These ongoing studies focus on the gathering of quantitative data and the production of qualitative material in her exquisite paintings of insects and plants in those areas where the weather trajectories down-wind of nuclear power stations and reprocessing plants overlap.

In 1990, she spent just 10 minutes in Pripyat, in a silence without birds, with only the music from loudspeakers.

Hesse-Honneger was at pains to differentiate between the toxicity of low doses of 'artificial' (man-made) radiation and 'natural' radiation (e.g. in the granite-rich geologies of South-West England or the Alps), and to point out the degree to which the 300,000 + publications by independent scientists about the harmful effects of low-level radiation from Chernobyl have been systematically devalued and ignored by state- and industry-sanctioned scientists, and the funding of those researchers rendered 'difficult'. Ultimately she brought her presentation to a close with a series of wholly alarming images of facial deformities in Iraqi children, the victims of the obscenity of depleted uranium weaponry, and a forceful account of the degree of such contamination (and resultant deformities) in Afghanistan and areas of the former Yugoslavia, as well as in uranium mining communities in Africa, Australia and the USA. Nuclear waste, she suggested, was now dispersed and located within human beings, to calamitous effect.

The 'Cosmic' section of the symposium felt significantly curtailed, an after-thought in the shape and weight of the day; a number of advertised speakers weren't able to attend (artist Alicia Framis, designer Regina Pledszus, 'experience designer' Nelly Ben Hayoun), and the looser-than-loose managing and chairing of earlier sessions meant that the day was hours behind schedule, time was running out on the room, the energies of those attending were flagging, etc. The critical mass and gravity of the 'Atomic' presentations created a kind of imbalance overall, and we never really made it off the ground in this second part.

Nonetheless there were three engaging contributions, beginning with a short and quietly enthusiastic presentation by comic illustrator and animator Paul Duffield, reflecting on the impact of Carl Sagan's series Cosmos and continuing SETI research on his approach to visual storytelling, in particular in his visual poem Signal. Then on to Mark Pilkington, 'UFO folklorist', curator, editor of Strange Attractor, occasional contributor to the Fortean Times, and musician, who sprinted through some of the core ground of his stimulating and often hilarious road trip book Mirage Men: A Journey into Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs. From the development of covert military technologies during the Cold War, via Kenneth Arnold's sightings of UFOs in 1947, and an increasing number of flying saucer stories and films (including The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951), to a perceived intelligence and security problem, the classified RAND document of 1950 entitled 'The exploitation of superstitions for the purposes of psychological warfare', the CIA's increasing involvement, and the planting of stories in the media triggered by the RAND proposals (e.g. the April 1952 issue of Life magazine with its cover shot of Marilyn Monroe and the title 'There is a case for interplanetary saucers'). A heady and hugely entertaining cocktail of institutional paranoia and psy-ops disinformation strategies, 'black' military technologies research, conspiracy theories, ufologists and popular culture forms. One sensed he could have gone on for days.

Finally, the British artist Louise K. Wilson offered a brief introduction to aspects of her own work; sensitive to the fatigued overload of her audience, Louise cut her presentation short while still managing to cover a lot of ground and articulate a number of generative ideas. The notion of an artist's 'passport of admission' to sites, many of them contested or largely inaccessible; Kim Sawchuck's notion of 'bio-tourism', trajectories into internal spaces through e.g. MR scans and dream registers; Virilio's 'museum of accidents', and the body's own flaws and faultlines; Steve Goodman's 'sonic warfare' and 'the politics of frequency'; 'auralisation', as a sonic equivalent to visualisation; the stimulus provided by Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard's Four Rooms CD (2006), recorded in abandoned social spaces in and around Pripyat - a swimming pool, a church, a theatre auditorium, a gymnasium - using a version of Alvin Lucier's mirroring acoustic techniques to explore these spaces' psycho-acoustic qualities, the spectral traces of inaudible and invisible dangers.

Louise described her approach to locations via something akin to auscultation: an attentive and patient listening in to an architectural body, a documenting of the specific acoustic signatures of ruins, a gathering of reverberant 'impulse responses' often from derelict Cold War sites: a decommissioned Cumbrian missile site, Orford Ness and the National Trust's 'continued ruination' policy, Woomera and Nurrungar in South Australia, Aldermaston.

As we left, almost 3 hours after the scheduled ending of the symposium, Louise was setting up a contact microphone workshop for the Unknown Fields trajectory travelers, who were leaving the following morning; she played some recordings of limpets moving in hyper slo-mo on a rock, liquid and percussive sounds like the accelerated machinic groans and cracks of icebergs - them limpits are sure as hell busy. Cornelia Hesse-Honneger stood up to formally warn the travelers that Chernobyl still posed very real risks to health, and that they should take every precaution - air filter masks, clothes and shoes to be abandoned on emerging from the site, etc.: 'Don't touch anything'. Liam Young and Kate Davies smiled, said it's fine, every person will have full kit, a protective body suit, a face mask, gloves, we're on top of it, it's all fine. On my way out, in the doorway one of the students was asking Hesse-Honneger for some final advice: 'So do you think it's possible to take samples from the Chernobyl site? I'd very much like to'.

and now for dessert ...

2011-06-30T18:45:00.010+01:00

"It only remains to speak of the desserts, something for which the City is famous. The cassata is a symbol of this reputation. But in its triumph of triglycerides and colours baroquely assembled, the cassata merely represents that with the City-dwellers wish to display of themselves. The equivalent to the traditional cart, a mass of ornaments and plumes.

In contrast with the joyous extroversion of the classic cassata, maybe the almost black-and-white sobriety of the cassata al forno needs to be considered; here the outside envelope of tender pastry is content to screen the treasure of ricotta within. The fact is, if it is possible to trace one characteristic the City-dwellers all have in common, it must definitely be found in the introversion of the cassata al forno, more than in the extroversion of the traditional cassata, a dessert that is all facade.

As a general rule, the cassata is an old-fashioned sweet that is only bought as a present, to discharge an obligation, to make a payment in kind for some professional service. The same holds true for the buccellato, a repulsive variant on the strudel; it is given as a present at Christmas, a tiny bit of it is eaten and the rest goes into the dustbin before Epiphany.

This is because on the Island pastries, almost all of them of Arab inspiration, are very high in calories. They might well represent a nutritional experiment for astronauts, the way they address the need to contain the maximum nutritive value in the minimum bulk. A slice of cassata is the equivalent of a full meal.

The same is true of cannoli (cream horns) and other local specialities - line them all up and they make a whole nursery rhyme of assorted sugars adapted to the various times of year and the requirements of the calendar: melon ice, blancmange, martorana fruit, lamb-shaped meringues, kubbaita, honeycake, candied chestnuts, puma, 'ncilippati, sugar babies, mustazzola, cuccia (made with wheat flour, milk, sugar and cinnamon), minne de vergine, 'patate', sfinci di San Giuseppe, keys of St Peter, Sacred Hearts, Turks' heads, sammartinelli, reginelle and lastly the latest fantastic invention from a pastry cook in Via Colonna Rotta: the torta Setteveli, a chocolate confection destined to outlast the vagaries of time and taste.

The requirement for lightness envisaged by modern life leaves us to predict the extinction, or the preservation in a museum, of many of these sweet specialities. This fate has recently overtaken the 'Triumph of Greed', a high calorie bombe of green pistachio, compared with which the cassata is dieters' food. The last people to make it were the nuns in the Convent of the Virgins, at the back of the Teatro Biondo, and then only to order. A City legend claims that the milk used for the ricotta was produced by the nuns personally. Today the weight and elaboration of the 'Triumph of Greed' is still remembered, but even this memory will have been lost in a few years' time."

From Roberto Alajmo, Palermo, trans. Guido Waldman, London: Haus Publishing, 2010

good luck everybody

2011-06-29T10:14:00.025+01:00

‘We've come a long way to be here and what's more we've come a long way to be here together’ (Lone Twin, On Everest).

As Gregg Whelan points out in one of the interviews in this book, the phrase ‘Good luck everybody’ has often been spoken at the beginning of Lone Twin performances, framing the event ‘in a way that suggests that even in reading a text there’s something at stake that has to do with well-being’.

On one level it contains a serious proposition - this shared encounter might just help a little, it suggests - and at the same time of course it is also a joke: a semi-formal civic pleasantry marking the beginning of a collective ‘adventure’, a small playful wish that all of those present and implicated will have the wherewithal to make it through ‘safely’ to its ending.

This phrase, co-opted as part of the title of this book, encapsulates in miniature certain characteristics at the heart of Lone Twin’s work. As an utterance it references other social situations that are a bit like their brand of performance – gigs, sport, stand-up, public speeches or presentations, long excursions, and so on. In these social events, journeys and rituals, something is to be worked through and transformed, for they are undertakings in which effort will need to be expended in order to attain a position in which something has shifted; and the possibility of failure is always there like a shadow.

The phrase also suggests that art making is always, and before all else, a social practice, made in the company of others; and that language is a core component of the give-and-take of social relationality, its dynamic play. These words invite imaginative complicity and a willingness to be implicated, to go for the ride.

Finally, and paradoxically, this phrase embeds humour within the tissue of something being fully committed to and invested in collectively, a humour that exposes and undoes something of the absurdity of received versions of ‘heroism’. For, like the performers, we are invited to be participants in a task that is both meaningful and insubstantial, gravitied and at the same time as light and throwaway as a gag or a game. (How many football coaches have uttered this phrase as their players jog out on to the pitch to engage in something that’s both utterly ‘serious’ and ridiculous?).

True seriousness admits and is contoured by laughter, lightness and folly; whereas earnestness is monotonal and monolithic, and gravity invariably wins. For all that’s at stake, for all of the real effort required and expended, perhaps there is liberation in conceiving of such work with both an immersive, blooded belief and the pleasure of a letting-go-lightly that is in the most affirmative and radical sense ‘child-like’.

As Tom Waits once said in an interview about song writing, ‘Children make up the best songs anyway. Better than grown-ups. Kids are always working on songs and throwing them away, like little origami things or paper airplanes. They don’t care if they lose it; they’ll just make another one …’

Reflecting on the devising process for Lone Twin Theatre’s Alice Bell in 2006, David Williams suggests that, within Whelan and Winters’ approach: ‘“naivety” and the “amateur” are qualities to be worked and affirmed and celebrated, and it’s often uncomfortable in terms of my own received ideas. It’s like hanging out with two disarmingly smart kids whose perceptions unsettle and surprise, and invite me into elsewhere and otherwise’.

This book, co-edited by two academics with an ongoing engagement in Lone Twin’s work, one of them as a long-term collaborator, is the first major publication to reflect upon Lone Twin’s protean body of work, and detail the development of its core concerns, processes and forms; its intellectual, aesthetic and social contexts; its continuities and evolutions; its perceptions, humour and paradoxes.

Furthermore this book is another kind of collaborative and collective ‘adventure’ in which you, the readers, will determine what’s at stake in its matter for you - what matters - and what’s disposable, the stuff of paper planes. At its outset, and as a way of marking the transition to the core materials it contains, we would like to take this opportunity to wish you a safe and pleasurable passage through its pages.

Good luck everybody…

_______________________________________

Extract from the introduction by David Williams & Carl Lavery to a new book, Good Luck Everybody: Lone Twin - Journeys, Performances, Conversations, Aberystwyth: PR Books, 2011. Designed by Kevin Mount. 364 pp. ISBN: 978-1-906499-02-0

Introduction © David Williams & Carl Lavery / PR Books 2011

Book launched in May 2011 at the Anatomy Theatre, King's College, University of London

Contributors include: Emma Brodzinski, John Hall, Daniel Ladnar, Barry Laing, Carl Lavery, Larry Lynch, Esther Pilkington, Rebecca Shatwell, Nina Tecklenburg, Patrick Primavesi, Alan Read, Gregg Whelan, David Williams, Gary Winters

** For further details, and to buy the book via the CPR's online bookshop, see here

those dancing days (3): night/sky

2011-06-27T20:43:00.015+01:00

Images from Avalon, Shangri-La, The Common, The Unfair Ground, and Arcadia (Glastonbury Festival, 2011): at the top, Tim Etchells' installed LED text

those dancing days (2)

2011-06-27T20:29:00.003+01:00

those dancing days (1)

2011-06-27T14:27:00.018+01:00

Some Glastonbury bands, 2011 - from the top: Stockholm's Those Dancing Days, TV On The Radio, Warpaint (Theresa Wayman and Jenny Lee Lindberg), Fleet Foxes (Robin Pecknold and Josh Tillmans), The Master Musicians of Joujouka (watched by Cerys Matthews), James Vincent McMorrow's guitarist & drummer, John Grant (singing Sigourney Weaver), James Blake & flaring punters, 'like a waterfall in slow motion' ...

performing the holes

2011-05-26T12:27:00.007+01:00

Inter-views and the flower mind:
an exploded view of Goat Island’s films

‘The challenge is to find a way to let the film perform the holes, the gaps, and the specific absences by which it takes shape’ – Trinh T. Minh-ha

‘Treachery is beautiful if it makes us sing’ – Jean Genet

‘Is that everything? It seemed like he said quite a bit more than that’ – ‘Bob’ (Bill Murray) to a translator in Sofia Coppola’s film Lost In Translation

By way of a preface to what follows, I’d like to begin by quoting at some length from an interview by Elizabeth Dungan with the filmmaker and cultural theorist Trinh Minh-ha. Alluding to the accelerated tempo-rhythms of cinema for instant consumption, and the temporal and perceptual propositions of Zen Buddhism and its paradoxical rhythms, Trinh describes her own approach to cinema as a site for what Matthew Goulish, in another context, has called ‘slow thinking’:

In times of coercive politics and transnational terror, slowing down so as to learn to listen anew is a necessity ... The question is not so much to produce a new image as to provoke, to facilitate, and to solicit a new seeing. Science without conscience, politics without ethics, technology without poetry result in deadly short-circuits. We've had to learn this, not only through disastrous political events, but more intimately through one's own body when it is under stress - the wired-up body that takes months to wind down, to recover, or to find its own rhythm. Non-being is what we use in working with being ... when we start taking care of this utter silence, life speaks to us in a different language, one in which we catch glimpses of stillness in movement and feel movement arising in stillness. Velocity in stillness ... Speed is here not opposed to slowness, for it is in stillness that one may be said to truly find speed. And rather than merely going against speed, stillness contains speed and determines its quality. Speed at its best … is still speed. The speed of a flower mind.

(Trinh T. Minh-ha, 'Still Speed', The Digital Film Event, London & New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 13).

Inter-view

As Gilles Deleuze once pointed out in conversation with Claire Parnet, in French there are two terms for ‘interview’: entrevue and entretien. Entrevue, from the verb entrevoir - to see or encounter one another, to meet. Entretien, from the verb entretenir – to maintain, cultivate, sustain or prolong: a ‘holding together’ that nourishes (‘that’s enter-tain-ment’). Both terms contain a sense of relationality and between-ness (the mutuality and exchange of entre-/inter-), and implicate the senses: of sight (-vue/view) and touch (-tien, from the verb tenir, to hold and to see). Both terms also suggest something uncertain, partial, incompletely or fleetingly or suddenly perceived, the glimpse of a possibility to be discovered in the in-between. So the interview is posited as the possibility of a ‘third space’ of seeing, holding, and tactile feeling, both in the dynamic axis between and in a vector of futurity, a forward looking (dialogue as the possibility of fore-sight). Something happens in this dialogical spacing: the event of a felt sighting and sounding of resonances between.

Perhaps it is possible to conceive of these films as ‘inter-views’, as articulated in the terms above, with or in response to the work of Goat Island. Rather than proposing documentation of live performances, it’s important to recognize the status of the films as creative dialogues or responses - in part inspired and encouraged by the core Goat Island proposition of the ‘creative response’, a generative compositional strategy and disposition returned to repeatedly in the company’s processes of making and teaching. The films are also translations, proceeding through both loyalty (to the spirit, enquiry and affective architectures of the ‘original’ live performances) and betrayal (transformation as becoming, a ‘treachery’ that can ‘make us sing’ what Paul Celan called ‘the singable remains’ – Singbarer Rest - rather than transformation as a failure to reproduce the selfsame). For in these films fragments of performance actions, images, texts, sounds are displaced, transformed and reconfigured in new architectural assemblages within which the spectator is implicated spatially, affectively, and corporeally.

In It’s Aching Like Birds, for example, filmed in the gym building in Chicago where Goat Island used to rehearse, a complex architecture of interrelated spaces is elaborated: the penumbral basketball court, with its subaquatic tonality, and an assortment of weathered attic spaces, lockers and corridors. As spectators we are asked to navigate the relations between spaces, things, materials, feels, and our own associations and memories: of childhood, disjunctions in scale, enclosure/entrapment, falling, cars, family, landscapes, weather, Pina Bausch choreographies, loss, care, the mortality of all things and forms, and so on.

In my uncertain memories of Goat Island’s live work, including It’s An Earthquake In My Heart (2001) from which these materials are sourced and reinvented, I was always more interested in what they did rather than what they meant; or rather, perhaps, my conviction was that their meanings resided precisely in what they did. These intensely physicalised ensemble performances were characterized by a continuous shifting of modes, a dizzying density of intertexts proliferating and unraveling, and meanings skidding, fracturing, realigning and multiplying in excess. And perhaps above all for me, in this vertiginous layering and mutability, a profound sense of moments of stillness arising in movement, and velocity in slowness and suspension. The work created spaces for thought in all of its rhythms; and attention itself became a material to work and at play in these performances.

A further paradox: in Goat Island’s work concept and form generated spaces of affect, sensed intensities that remained mysterious, un-settled, vibrant in the domain of intuition. They offered an exposure that was also a veiling, enabling not ‘readings’ (the drive to decipher, to decode the legible), but a listening to resonant alterity in the image and in representation’s seams, and an attention to multiplicity and an openness to the passage of elsew/here and other/wise. In my memories, within the pieces themselves the precise location and formation of sharp-edged clarities, flarings into visibility, intervals, blurs, holes, absences, entrance and exit points, slide on unstable ground; but rhythms – and the hum of relations of speed and stillness - linger effortlessly, helping to focus, disperse and prolong precisely accented networks of relationships.

*****

Inter-rupt

When Lucy Cash first sent me these films on DVD, she wrote a note on the back of a postcard of Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter: an exploded view (1991). While watching the films, I kept returning in my mind to this image and my embodied experience of that work in the Tate Gallery, London. Here was a garden shed and its contents blown up for Parker by the British Army, its fragments then collected and reassembled as a proliferative mobile, atomized and suspended. In this way matter is anatomized in terms of its processes of flux and transformation. Material becomes molecular, dynamic, nomadising, its ‘fall-out’ moving imperceptibly and incessantly in a relational field. There were ghost architectures, disappearances, emergences. Inertia was released, fixity animated and refashioned as multiplicity, in process, caught in a liminal meanwhile of both flying and falling. The big bang. Still speed.

*****

Inter-act

In Daynightly They re-school you The Bears Polka – the title itself a montaging of fragments from a Celan poem - the two unedited camera shots place us im/possibly in the wall between two discreet and connected interiors, a classroom and a hallway with a descending staircase in the background. Invited to ‘hold together’ these two antipodal spaces, we are the very locus of montage and passage: an affective, embodied conduit, a connective tissue seeing and feeling between. As an installed work, the film concretised this spatial dynamic, with the two screens placed on either side of the spectators; here, with the DVD on my laptop, my eyes flit between congruent spaces on the screen in a micro-dance of separation and reparation.

In A Last, A Quartet, four screens juxtapose different rhythms and temporalities, as well as diverse modes of performing and spectating. We are invited to navigate routes and connectivities between two interior spaces - the main hall at Pulaski Park in Chicago and a corridor along its outer edge – and two areas of woodland. Minute shifts in filtered light and sound in the fixed exterior shots offer attenuated, contemplative rhythms of change, punctuated by the passage of a chestnut horse led by someone on foot, then an anomalous trotting grey, saddled but lacking a rider. The radical alterity – energetically, rhythmically, ontologically - of the untimely event/advent of an animal. In the main hall, two fencers practice a small desultory duel with swords and helmets, before the camera pans left to focus on the members of the company performing the precisely detailed and modulated choreographies of the ‘dome dance’ from The Lastmaker. The revolve of the camera ultimately describes a circular trajectory paralleling the interior of a dome, a shadow architecture informing the choreography. Meanwhile, in the corridor shot, a range of materials from The Lastmaker are refashioned and montaged into an intricately layered choreography of fragments disposed along a linear axis of passage.

As performance, these materials occur in multiple modes: functional tasks (carrying, moving objects), rehearsed or internalized markings of a performance deferred or to come (a restrained version of Mark Jeffery’s hybrid of St Francis and Larry Grayson; Matthew Goulish’s timed song), detailed choreographies (including that of the hand-held camera in its movements to and fro, and its longing return to the space of light-breeze-flowers-outside through the corridor’s window: this choreography reflects the sense of an embodied consciousness and kinaesthetic intelligence behind the mechanical eye of the lens), a stand-in (the small girl), and various modes of something akin to acting (including Karen Christopher’s uncanny channeling of Lenny Bruce’s last performance, Matthew’s heightened and interrupted recital of a section of Robert Creeley’s poem ‘Bresson’s Movies’), and so on.

The dispersed, relational architecture of the film constructs an assemblage of rhythms and angles of incidence within which there can be no singular, privileged position or mode of viewing. Its cubist, multi-perspectival form and layered temporalities undo the apparent fixity of film, and the protean micro-shifts of the ‘live’ unfold into proliferative differences in the loop of a formally doubled repetition. In addition, circularity and linearity are set in frictional counterpoint in the spaces, the set up and trajectories of individual cameras (two outside shut-off in a fixed position, one rotating in an interrupted 360 degree pan, one moving freely although constrained within a narrow linear architecture), and the use of multiples of single unedited 16mm shots. Linear progression pulses, decays into aleatory forks and curves, and unfolds into becomings through repetition. Singularity becomes multiplicity. The predicament of watchers here gives us agency, and makes of us performers. And throughout the film we encounter, glimpse, sense, remember, overlook, forget in an open field of multiple entrances and exits – a flow meeting other flows in an immersive assemblage of intensities for the activation of memory, intuition, the ‘in-sight’ of connectivity and possibility. To borrow a phrase from Deleuze in The Logic of Sense (1990) in which he endeavours to define ethics, the invitation or challenge is above all ‘not to be unworthy of what happens to us’.

When the red curtains are fully closed – formal bracketings at the beginning, middle and end of A Last, A Quartet – and we are confronted with this cultural sign of ending (the final curtain) and anticipation (the show to come), at moments it’s impossible to tell which side of the curtain we are on. Are we waiting to go on, or to watch what will be revealed? We wait in stillness in the landscape of the inter-, the trans-, the passage, our thoughts traveling at the speed(s) of a flower mind. Meanwhile the sun sinks ever lower behind the trees, and the white dog watches: ‘Keep on walking, keep on walking. To be new in ending is not the only thing to do. White dog, tell me, where is the door?’

Essay published in the catalogue/ booklet accompanying the release of Goat Island: A Last A Quartet, a DVD of four Goat Island films by Lucy Cash; launched at PSi, Utrecht, May 2011. Photo © John W Sisson Jr / Goat Island, 2009

asleep in sodium

2011-05-21T22:25:00.007+01:00

'Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve themselves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium'.

Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street (1973)

glimpses

2011-05-15T23:03:00.005+01:00

1001 chairs (free ai weiwei)

2011-04-17T22:29:00.013+01:00

On the way across London to watch a football game, we joined a small silent demonstration outside the Chinese Embassy in Great Portland Street - a protest in response to the detention of celebrated Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and a group of his collaborators (Wen Tao, Hu Mingfen, Liu Zhenggang, and Zhang Jingsong). Ai Weiwei was stopped at an airport in Beijing on his way to Hong Kong on 3 April, and has been held incommunicado ever since. As yet his family has received no formal notice of his detention. Meanwhile, State-sanctioned newspapers in China have published claims that Ai has 'confessed' to bigamy, tax evasion, plagiarism and the distribution of pornography. In truth, it seems evident that he is being detained because of his high-profile political activism, and as a warning against dissent in China.

Sunday's bring-a-chair protest, staged internationally as a homage to Ai's 2007 Documenta installation 1001 Chairs, was triggered on Facebook and Twitter to occur outside Chinese embassies worldwide. In London the embassy itself looks wholly unprepossessing, its facade somewhat worse for wear: dingy lace curtains, a plastic water bottle on a 2nd-storey window ledge - apparently no one 'at home'. A solitary policeman outside the front door, wishing he was elsewhere. Small TV crews from Channel 4 and Al-Jazeera. Someone passed some sunflower seeds around. After about half an hour, a young Chinese musician rocked up with her violin and patent-leather shoes, and proceeded to play defiant, high-speed Bach to the building and to passers-by.

For the freeaiweiwei website, see here

For further details of the 'Free Ai Weiwei' activities worldwide, see here and here

For the Guardian's account of protests worldwide, see here

For the Independent's description of the use of social media to organise this protest, see here

For a recent Time Out interview with Ai Weiwei, see here

For Rachel Carr's fine images of the London protest, see here

For other images of this weekend's protests internationally, including Junyi Chew's in London, see here

The images below are of a Chinese protester on Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds installation in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, London; and of Sunday's protest in Hong Kong.

red & black (extra time)

2011-04-17T21:21:00.014+01:00

Images from Arsenal v Liverpool, The Emirates, London - Sunday 17 April 2011. From the top: outside the ground ('Victory Through Harmony'); a minute's silence; Van Persie free-kick; Suarez free-kick; Kuyt's penalty in the 12th minute of extra time (102 mins) - the last kick of the game, leveling the score at 1-1, and effectively bringing to an end Arsene Wenger's team's possibility of winning the title this year; Liverpool celebrations with their fans; Meireles (with serious tatts), Kuyt & Reina leaving the pitch; Emirates sky (actually this is from the end of the desultory Arsenal match against Blackburn two weeks ago, but it fits the mood).

wild food

2011-04-16T21:30:00.000+01:00

hot house dreaming

2011-04-05T21:39:00.024+01:00

still speed

2011-04-04T18:24:00.015+01:00

'In times of coercive politics and transnational terror, slowing down so as to learn to listen anew is a necessity ... The question is not so much to produce a new image as to provoke, to facilitate, and to solicit a new seeing. Science without conscience, politics without ethics, technology without poetry result in deadly short-circuits. We've had to learn this, not only through disastrous political events, but more intimately through one's own body when it is under stress - the wired-up body that takes months to wind down, to recover, or to find its own rhythm. Non-being is what we use in working with being ... when we start taking care of this utter silence, life speaks to us in a different language, one in which we catch glimpses of stillness in movement and feel movement arising in stillness. Velocity in stillness ... Speed is here not opposed to slowness, for it is in stillness that one may be said to truly find speed. And rather than merely going against speed, stillness contains speed and determines its quality. Speed at its best … is still speed. The speed of a flower mind.'

Trinh T. Minh-ha, 'Still Speed', The Digital Film Event, 2005.

for the little people ...

2011-03-27T17:48:00.006+01:00

how to work better

2011-03-03T17:39:00.008Z

Peter Fischli & David Weiss' ten-point manifesto comes from one of my favourite shows of the past few years, Flowers and Questions: A Retrospective at Tate Modern, London, 2006-7. For a fine text by the artist Ryan Gander about this manifesto, 'Working It Out', see here. Gander writes: "I like it quite simply because it acknowledges their awareness of the idea of practice rather than production, which indirectly points to the main aspect of what they do that I find really endearing. It's relatively easy to stumble around making a successful work now and again, sandwiched between disasters that never leave the studio, but it's hard to attain good practice. Their's isn't about making good artworks, but about how to mould the conditions for artworks to be made possible".

Sister Corita's 'manifesto' (bottom image), the Art Department rules from the Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, in the late 1960s, is drawn from Julie Ault's exquisite book about this genuinely remarkable teacher-artist-nun, Come Alive! The Spirited Art of Sister Corita, London: Four Corners Books, 2007.

sky mirror

2011-02-27T21:47:00.003Z