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.

dwelling

for derek jarman (1)
________________________________________

'The more brilliant the light, the deeper the shadows'
(Leonardo da Vinci)

'If a garden isn't shaggy, forget it' (Derek Jarman)

A bright Sunday, the day after my brother's wedding, driving south through Kent from Maidstone across the Romney Marshes to the coast at Dungeness. A perfect langourous summer's day, all sky and heat haze and car bonnet glare, one of so few this summer. We go in search of Derek Jarman's house, Prospect Cottage, and its garden.

After ye oaste house and orchard gentility of much of Kent, Dungeness offers an unfamiliar landscape, profoundly un-English. Jarman aptly called it 'otherworldly', and this is something to do with the conjunction of topography, texture and a particular quality of light. At this time of year, it's dry, blasted, salt burnt. Naked. Flayed by light and sky. A desiccated and flattened version of Tarkovsky's 'zone'.
Tiny bungalow dwellings with the edges of their gardens undifferentiated from the shingle and couch grass surroundings: no fences, so no way of knowing where they 'begin' and 'end'. Everything looks provisional, temporary in this exposed edge-land. On the sea side of the road opposite the houses, a scattering of old corrugated iron fishermen's sheds leaning at unlikely angles, barely standing, propped up - some roofless and shattered, all weathered and rusted. Makeshift make do.
Old fishing boats beached and abandoned, lolling on their sides, their wooden hulls sanded bare by the elements and the bitter easterlies that cut through this place in the winter. Some of these vessels have holes punched in their sides, or planks ripped off for other scavenger purposes. Jammed winches trailing fractured chains, petrol containers, a rusting boiler as if dropped from the sky. Sparse and surreal vegetation, with the extraordinarily intricate convolutions of the giant sea kale predominating, each plant bearing a spray of pea-like seeds. A vast shingle beach stretching away in both directions, the white cliffs no more than a tiny smudged line to the east; the ground slides and gives way with every step - one step takes two, three. Container ships ploughing the Channel on the horizon. Then there's the sky ...

The locals call it 'The Ness'.
It feels like a pioneer landscape, this 'nature reserve' on the lip of England: a place of adventurers, eccentrics, outcasts, borderline outlaws, fugitives. Tough. Last gasp. Out of time (or rather imbricated in a complex layering of different temporalities - as Tacita Dean writes, Dungeness feels '1970s and Dickensian, prehistoric and Elizabethan, second world war and futuristic'). You expect to stumble across the horns of a steer. Or Harry Dean Stanton, unshaven and shirtless in a crumpled suit and dusty cowboy boots, scouring the stones for something even he doesn't know. (Or Derek Jarman in a jellaba ...) Echoes of the dust bowl of depression era America, or of some Death Valley gold-panning settlement. More than a whiff of Steinbeck's Cannery Row here. Or maybe the desolate white trash dunes and fisherfolk-surfy-biker wastelands of Tim Winton's Lancelin, north of Perth in Western Australia. A scoured and bleached moonscape barely animated by the cries of gulls and the slurrrsshh of the sea.

It is terribly beautiful, like a muted, over-exposed apocalypse. Or, as Jarman puts it: 'This landscape is like the face you overlook, the face of an angel with a naughty smile. There is very little to interrupt you here, just the wind, which, like the mistral, can drive you slightly mad' (Garden).
Jarman's former home is unmistakeable: an exquisite pitch black structure with a corrugated roof and bright yellow window frames and front door - a minimalist aesthetic with maximalist impact. It looks both new born and ancient. Fragile and resilient. On its south-facing side wall, black metal lettering on a black-tarred clapboard surface from roof to knee height: the text appears mildly dyslexic to modern eyes. It is The Sunne Rising, a poem by John Donne:
Busie old foole, unruly Sunne,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windowes, and through curtaines call on us?
Must to thy motion lovers' seasons run?
Sawcy pedantique wretch, go chide
Late schoole boyes and sowre prentices,
Goe tell Court-huntsmen, that the King will ride,
Call countrey ants to harvest offices;
Love, all alike, no season knowes, nor clyme,
Nor houres, dayes, moneths, which are the rags of time ...
Thou sunne art halfe as happy as wee,
In that the world's contracted thus.
Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee
To warme the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art every where;
This bed thy centre is, these walls thy spheare.
The garden: at the front, a sea of Californian poppies on a bed of shingle, some elder, gorse and dog rose. Elsewhere, scattered amongst the sparse plants and the raised beds between wooden sleepers, a great deal of metal rusted a deep flaky ochre: chains, wires, abandoned bits of machinery and old busted tools. Sea-smoothed driftwood and lichened stone. Cork. Shell. Flint. Circles of dolmen-like wood, foliage, stone: some magic at work. Every pebble different, every one the same. Material imagination.
Everything here has been found, salvaged, re-cycled from this sea-edge place, and is both displaced and quite at home. A manifest testament to qualities of patience, economy, playful invention and a quiet contemplative thusness. For the garden stages a deep acceptance of being here in all modesty and attentiveness. Taking time to make space. Slow time, still moves. A bricoleur Picasso meets the Zen garden.
Jarman bought the house in 1986 for £750; he was scouting for bluebells with Tilda Swinton and Keith Collins for a film shoot. He called it his 'paradise at the fifth quarter', a place where he could walk in the 'Gethsemane and Eden' of his garden and 'hold the hands of dead friends' (Garden).
(Once, when my mother was very ill in hospital, she told me that her mother had just visited her, what a shame I'd missed her. She had knocked on the window, told her that she should 'come out into the garden', it was good out there, and it was time. Her mother had died more than ten years beforehand).

*****

And all the while, rarely out of sight, rarely out of mind, the monolithic nuclear power station, Dungeness B. A mile or so away, just beyond the twin lighthouses, one black, one black and white. This Ness 'monster' hums silently, invisibly pumping vast quantities of electrical energy into the ranks of pylons arcing north across the plain. Another kind of sunne rising to warme the world. The triumph of the nookular in this temple of 20th century technology alongside the wreckage of earlier technologies, now redundant.
A large party of Chinese people are picnicking and swimming on the shore below the power station's beach-side perimeter wall. Seems a strange place to set up barbecues, and an even stranger place to swim. Perhaps they work at the power station, and it's just part of the everyday, its awe and mysteries and fears long since annulled by familiarity and habit. Perhaps the water's warmer there, flushed by some steaming subaquatic outlet ...
On the road back across the gravel-pit flatlands towards Lydd and Rye, off to the right you can just see the 'sound mirrors' at Denge that Tacita Dean has described and filmed. Huge curved concrete walls, listening devices built in the wake of World War 1 for the acoustic detection of possible aerial invaders from Europe. A kind of lo-tech early warning system, wholly inadequate to the task; they picked up wind and birds and passing trawlers, and were soon abandoned to be replaced by radar. As Dean suggests, they were left there and linger still, 'solemnly eavesdropping on the sounds of Dungeness into the next century'.

*****

I have been reading Adrian Heathfield & Tehching Hsieh's Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (LADA/MIT Press, 2009), a wonderful new book about Taiwanese-American artist Hsieh's extraordinary year-long performances from the late 1970s to the end of the 1990s. Alongside superb documentation of Hsieh's body of work, and quite brilliant texts by Adrian Heathfield, Tim Etchells and others, there's an exquisite sequence of open letters to Hsieh by Peggy Phelan. Entitled 'Dwelling', these letters weave together memories of a fleeting encounter with Hsieh with meditations on history, war, intimacy and dwelling. Phelan first met him during his year-long 'Outside' project, when he was living rough on the streets of New York - a work in which she says he 'measured unenclosure as the concept of radical freedom'.

At that time she had no idea he was an artist. She bought him a cup of coffee.

Three short passages in Phelan's texts made me think of Derek Jarman during his final years of life at Prospect Cottage, and of the unaccommodated and provisional 'outside' that is the Ness. Hsieh and Jarman are such different artists, almost polar opposites in some ways - and yet both move me profoundly in the clarity of their purpose, their integrity, and the questions they ask about art and life:

Here's the first fragment from Phelan:

All history is moody ... No wonder it is so difficult to dwell only within the borders of fact when the seeping event we call History pours into us, again and again. It is exhausting ...
Yes we want to be protected from some aspects of the outside, but we also want, at times, to test ourselves against these same conditions, even to be undone by them. Mountain climbers, hurricane stalkers, tornado fanatics, deep-sea divers, and astronauts remind us that we also desire to be free of shelter and to dwell, even momentarily, beyond our habitual habitations. How much of this adventuring is based on the desire to live to tell how we survived that parting of the sea, the opening of the oozing seam between life and death? The act and the tale of the act are linked in ways that give shelter to each other' (343).

Secondly, in response to Heidegger's essay 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking':

'Dwelling-in is part of our plight, for we are called from our essential homelessness to the foundational force of our mortality ceaselessly ... The Red Sea parted and we were suspended between water and land, from the footing we dream our homes will give us, and the floods that gather whether we move out or if we stay in. To embrace requires both a reaching out and a burrowing in. I handed you the coffee; you drank. And in the steam, we found our dwelling ... What is our plight? To be fully alive requires that we risk dwelling in an architecture of steam. Weather, air, the inconsistency of those who cross our paths, the enigmatic nature of our own hearts, the thoughts that will not settle into prose, the rhythm of our exhausting vulnerability. Of course we cannot sustain all this, and so we approach life, and the live, in bits and pieces. Here and there, we fall alone, although we hope we are together, through the clouds of our densest dreams. You took the cup, cracked the lid; the steam escaped and enveloped us'.

And finally, she signs off her last letter to Hsieh as follows:

'Every embrace is both a reaching out, Tehching, and a burrowing in, Mr Hsieh. Encircled still by that billowing ring of steam, I sign this with profound thanks and admiration. And I yield again to the gap, and fend off the flood with the merest of whispers: the lullaby we hum with wordless

Love'
_______________________________________

References

Dean, Tacita (2000). 'Sound Mirrors', in Tacita Dean, Barcelona: ACTAR

Heathfield, Adrian & Tehching Hsieh (2009). Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, London: LADA/MIT Press

Jarman, Derek (1995). Chroma: A Book of Colour, June '93, London: Vintage

----- (1995). Derek Jarman's Garden, with photos by Howard Sooley, London: Thames & Hudson

Tehching Hsieh's DVD-Rom is available from Hsieh's 'One Year Performance' website here; or through the Live Art Development Agency's online 'Unbound' bookshop here

inbound flight

Photographs taken during a Glasgow/London HR flight: the final few minutes of descent over the centre of London: a line west along the river from the Millennium Dome via the City, the Oval, the London Eye, Battersea Power Station, Fulham's Craven Cottage, Kew Gardens, Sion House, Isleworth etc. (19 May 2010)

your moon in bella luna and (love dog)

Lonely little love dog that.

No one knows the name of.
I know why you cry out.
Desperate and devout.

Timid little teether.
Your eyes set on the ether.
Your moon in bella luna and.
Howling hallelujah ...

Nameless you above me.
Come lay me low and love me.
This lonely little love dog.
That no one knows the name of.

Curse me out in free verse.
Wrap me up and reverse this.
Patience is a virtue.
Until it's silence burns you.

And something slow.
Has started in me as.
Shameless as an ocean.
Mirrored in devotion.

Something slow.
Has sparked up in me.
As dog cries for a master.
Sparks are whirling faster ...

Lonely little love dog.
That no one knows the ways of.
Where the land is low is.
Where the bones'll show through.

Lonely little love dog.
That no one knows the days of.
Where the land is low is.
Where the water flows to.
And holds you.

'Love Dog', tv on the radio / tunde adebimpe, dear science (2008)

For tv on the radio's myspace site, see here

Photos: Bantham, Devon, 31 December 2008

for sue