life in the day

'When I was a child I always felt as if I was on the verge of discovering something. I thought that if I was patient things would show more of themselves than other people could see. Looking at the colours in an ice cream I caught my breath just as if I had jumped into cold water up to the waist: they had somehow been made fluorescent by the sky at Skegness: it had entered them. After that, appearances had for me a kind of perilous promise, an allure, an immanence. Most children feel like that, I suppose'.

*****

'So we went, as he put it, arseholing down the M6 with the radio turned up full: AC/DC, Kate Bush, Bowie's 'Station to Station' already a nostalgia number. 

How many times, coming back after a hard day like that, has there seemed to be something utterly significant in the curve of a cooling tower, or the way a field, between two factories, reddened in the evening light, rises to meet the locks on a disused canal? Motorway bridges, smoke, spires, glow in the sun: it is a kind of psychic illumination. The music is immanent in the light, the day immanent in the music: life in the day. It is to do with being alive, but I am never sure how. 

Ever since Gaz had fallen off into the sea I had felt an overpowering, almost hallucinogenic sense of happiness, which this time lasted as far as Bolton'.

Extracts from M. John Harrison's novel, Climbers (Gollancz, 1989). 

For a fine article about Mike Harrison's work, see Richard Lea, 'M John Harrison: a life in writing', The Guardian, 20 July 2012, here. "A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself. Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that."

Photo by muskrat

shuttle 16:2: tracking

Photos by David Mcnew, David Roossien, Alberto Arzoz, Richard Misrach; tracks by animals including kangaroo rats, a desert tortoise, various insects, and vehicles; marks made in the Mojave, Imperial Dunes, Black Rock, Tenere/Sahara and Namibian deserts, and on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah

shuttle 2: look again

A long day of meetings during which, at times, inevitably my attention drifted. Exhaustion rather than boredom took me elsew/here, into the refuge of daydream. At one point, desert memories unfolded in the overcast Surrey afternoon - rather different 'meetings' - in particular, during one hot afternoon in February 1985, driving yee-haa on an ochre dirt road north of Coober Pedy on the way towards Alice Springs, kicking up billowing clouds of dust. Then a blow-out, skid, judder to a halt, engine cut, sudden silence: the second puncture of the journey, no more spare tires. Oh shit. Within half an hour or so, P hitches a ride with a passing truck; R and I sit in the car on the side of the track with all of the doors open, seats angled back, shades not quite up to the glare off the bonnet. It is unbelievably hot and still. Not even a fly.

After a while, off to one side we watch a willy willy move langorously across the desert scrub, then wind its way towards us: a dust devil tilting and flexing like a tree in light wind, a spindly beige Giacometti figure leaning slowly one way and then the other. It is beautiful, and oddly funny; and we are hypnotised by it, transfixed - not even moving when it becomes apparent that it is heading straight at us. I am struck by the fact that this particulate whirlpool is revolving anti-clockwise. With a sudden roar and sand-blast sting, it passes right through the centre of the car, in through one door, out the other - right through us - whip-snap-ripping clothing and plastic bags and a hissing newspaper and a map and my hat, which fly up and out in a vortex of grit and dust like a great co(s)mic spin dryer before being deposited with apparent care over bushes and sand and road in a wide arc of perfectly spaced debris. The dust settles. Without a word we sit in the car covered in a fine layer of crystalline red, astonished, watching this tiny tornado wander off and finally, mysteriously, dematerialise.

In the rear view mirror, way in the distance, I see the rippled dust cloud of an approaching vehicle. We get out to watch its approach, shaking the sand out of our shorts and hair. Then more wide-eyed astonishment as a startling electric pink Holden ute flares into view: a grinning aboriginal driver with his foot flat down on the accelerator, two boys with him on the front seat, a group of women and kids standing on the flatbed, riding it like pony trick riders or surfers. We wave excitedly. They slow for a moment as they pass us, shouting, waving, laughing fit to bust a gut. Clearly we are the funniest thing they've seen for quite a while. Then they too disappear in a fleeting conjuror's fog, like a glorious rose space ship trailing clouds of glory, and the air is full of dancing ochre ...

Later I remember that there are also dust devils on Mars ...
_______________________  

The following text is taken from a longer polemical piece on place, originally written in Australia and published in 1998. Although many things have moved on significantly in the intervening years in Australia, the song hovers and lingers still. In what follows, I take ‘Australia’ (like ‘America’ or ‘Europe’) to be both a geophysical site and a set of ideas or constitutive myths jostling for position. 

'The more our desert, the more we must rage: which rage is love' (James Hillman)

In traditional Aboriginal cultures in Australia, in which identities are inseparably imbricated in places, one’s ‘country’ constitutes a series of texts, mappae mundi of lore/law. Creation myths, sacred teachings, cultural histories and geographies are inscribed on the ‘maternal’ body of the land itself. Physiographic features record the exploits of totemic ancestors, which may be read, like Braille, and re-animated in the present. ‘Here and there they discarded pieces of their body – organs, limbs, hair, lice, skin, nails and teeth which metamorphose into physical features of the landscape’ (Mundine 1996: 46): rock formations, trees, river courses, waterholes, and so on. 

In Pierre Nora’s formulation, such interconnected features comprise ‘milieux de mémoire, real environments of memory’, rather than ‘lieux de mémoire’, isolated monuments (Nora 1989: 7). For journeys through these places, with the narrative song cycles that articulate their numinosity for the initiated, constitute performative re-makings, re-earthings, re-memberings of originary happenings here now, fusing place, body and spirit at the intersection of secular and sacred time. To walk the story is to revisit and rehearse corporeally the itineraries of a tradition that maps the complex interrelatedness of cultural spaces and identities, pasts and possible futures. To walk the story is to privilege the route, to inhabit the space between here and there, between dwelling and travelling, and to respect its ‘logic of intensities’: an ‘eco-logic’, the evolutive process of which ‘seeks to grasp existence in the very act of its constitution; it is a process of “setting into being”’ (Guattari 1989: 136). To walk the story is to attend to landscape as inscape, and to take (a) place in the world.

In an essay entitled ‘Teatrum nondum cognitorum’ (‘Theatre of the not yet known’) about the limits of cartography as representation, Paul Foss proposes a psychogeography of Australia in terms of its early explorers’ and colonisers’ dis-placed relationships to their spatial environments, and the subsequent cultural impact of their narratives on modern Australians (Foss 1981). Foss describes a constructed ‘antipodal space’ – the other hemisphere, the place of the other – as being historically defined in terms of void, lack, or absence: a non-place, a tabula rasa on which to project anxieties and fantasies. From the moment of so-called discovery, European explorers chose to perceive this ‘Great Southern Land’ as a place of no visible contents, no inhabitants, no water, no inland seas, no songbirds: a stretch of nothing, a scorched and smouldering vacuum, a place of disappearance, a vanishing-point. Terra nullius, they called it, ascribing its features with names that memorialize their own sense of being ‘out of place’: Mount Misery, Cape Catastrophe, Lake Disappointment and Useless Loop.

In such a limbo, there could be ‘nothing out there’. Ideal for castaways – or for penal colonies to rid the so-called civilized world of its ‘waste’. Imperial history taught Australians to view their island as a ‘waste-land’, an excess of space, way beyond the comprehension and possessive hunger of the representatives of an expanding empire. You can’t possess it, went the story, but it may just possess and consume you – like so many of its early explorers, who entered this lacuna in the assumed order of Harmonious Creation and ‘died of landscape’ (Stow 1969).

Contemporary Australia is an island continent – a term which in itself, of course, infers both isolation and size – within which urban places still cling to the coastal strips: ‘to the outer rim as if ready to depart’ (Ireland 1980: 310). For Australia is built around an interior that, through European lenses, remains unplaceable (atopian), unknowable, terrifying, to be kept outside: the ‘out-back’, the ‘dead centre’. Culturally, it seems, many Australians feel obliged to look ‘out’ rather than ‘in’, thereby privileging insularity to the detriment of interiority and futurity. As novelist David Ireland wrote in A Woman of the Future: ‘Australia sits … on the comfortable coast of life, where its settled nature is steeped in the past. The future is the greatest problem. The future is at the centre of Australia’s problems’ (Ireland 1980: 187).

Over the last 50 years or so, this central ‘void’ has been increasingly colonised – by British nuclear test sites, American tracking installations, multinational mining concerns, vast properties – then abandoned to create new wastelands, toxic no-go zones like Maralinga or Wittenoom. Meanwhile the notion of an empty centre of deserts, desertion and desolation stubbornly persists, despite the fact that this is only a simulacrum of the void, a construction. Of course countless peoples, cultures, creatures, places do exist there; it is not empty at all. 

‘The very habit and faculty that makes apprehensible to us what is known and expected dulls our sensitivity to other forms, even with the most obvious. We must rub our eyes and look again, clear our minds of what we are looking for to see what is there’ (Malouf 1994: 130).

If they remain largely ‘unseen’, as do Aboriginal peoples and their claims to the places and lives stolen from them for so many on the ‘comfortable coast of life’, perhaps this lack of recognition stems from more than blinkered or flawed perception. It relates to a refusal to look in, or behind, to the enduring shadows. To listen to the ‘empty space’ at the heart, and to apprehend it as a dynamic place for re-reading and re-writing histories and geographies: a theatre of the not yet known, where everything is (to be) decided. 

References 

Foss, Paul (1981). ‘Teatrum nondum cognitorum’, The Foreign Bodies Papers, Sydney: Local Consumption Papers, Sydney University

Guattari, Félix (1989). ‘The Three Ecologies’, trans. Chris Turner, New Formations 8 (Summer)

Hillman, James (1989). A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman (ed. Thomas Moore), London: Routledge

Ireland, David (1980). A Woman of the Future, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Malouf, David (1994). Remembering Babylon, London: Vintage

Mundine, Djon (1996). ‘Without land we are nothing. Without land we are a lost people …’, in V. Somerset (ed.), Spirit + Place: Art in Australia 1861-1996, Sydney: Museum of Contemporary Art

Nora, Pierre (1989). ‘Between memory and history: les lieux de mémoire’, Representations 26

Stow, Randolph (1969). ‘The singing bones’, in A Counterfeit Silence, Sydney: Angus & Robertson 
_______________________

Originally publication: David Williams, ‘Frontwords’, Performance Research 3:2, Summer 1998 (‘On Place’), v-viii

For Arizona storm chaser Mike Olbinski's extraordinary timelapse images of the Phoenix Haboob of 5 July 2011, see here. For other timelapse sequences of dust storms, supercells etc., see Mike's website here.

shuttle 1: what will be ...

‘ … can't tell what's right, better hit the ground running …’

(Calexico, ‘Quattro’)

‘We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world’ (Robert M Pirsig, Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, New York: Bantam, 1981, p, 6)

"American cars invariably carry the names of animals, or aggression and, if possible, a combination of the two: Impala, Thunderbird, Stingray, Mustang, Firebird, Charger, Corvette. In Albuquerque I hire a beast, a powder-blue Ford Mustang, and slipping a cassette into the stereo drive out along the interstate into the New Mexico desert. 

The desert seduces us with the idea that we can start out over again, begin from zero: a myth dear to the hygienic rationality of pure reason and not completely absent from the demonic aestheticism of Nietzschean thought. But it can also suggest the idea of the infinite, the infinite language of Jewish thinking where, unlike the rational finality of Greek logos, we are always dealing with the question of what will be: an infinite future that conceals its origins, where the inscription of sense never concludes; for writing “is not a mirror. To write is to confront an unknown face’ (Edmond Jabès).  

In the end we recognize that there is no possibility of going back, of starting over again. All we can do is confront ourselves and our histories. In the clear light of the desert, where our actions are overexposed, where, among the bits and pieces of our existence, time and space dissolve into one another and the wind blowing up from the past uncovers patterns in the deposits of our lives, we find ourselves in a landscape where there is no interpretation seemingly powerful enough to present itself as the unique truth. 

The metaphor of the desert – a privileged topology for the nomadic sentiments of modern thought – can also become the place where we get lost, where our existence is swallowed up and cancelled. For the moment, the only truth on which we can rely is the immediate contact between the asphalt and the wheels of our car as we move between towns, motels, TV screens and billboards, elaborating local “maps that matter”, travelling down the provisional road we construct between what has already occurred and the possible …"

Iain Chambers, Border Dialogues: journeys in postmodernity, London & New York: Routledge, 1990, 87-8
_________________________

'"In the Mojave Desert, on the border of Nevada and California stands a phone booth. The glass is shattered and the frame has six bullet holes". Each day, there are over one hundred phone calls from every single continent, most often wrong numbers ... "Over the past few years, the aluminum phone booth, which is owned by Pacific Bell, has become the great switchboard of the world".

It is the focalisation point of the multiple solitude of the invisible community inhabiting the limbs of virtual space. Sometimes, as if by miracle, someone answers: "I am here", and the unknown caller replies: "I'm glad you're there, that you answered".

Paul Virilio (quoting Jean-Paul Dubois), 'The Twilight of the Grounds', in The Desert, London & New York: Fondation Cartier/Thames & Hudson, 2000, 111
_________________________

For driving music, see here: a video of Quattro by Tucson residents Calexico

For an earlier post about driving to work elsew/here, through the deserts of West London, see here