how do you say goodbye?

For Jane 

 

These texts are a response to travelling to Chicago for the 2003 Goat Island summer school at the School of the Art Institute. Two weeks in an American city I had never visited before, although it left its fingerprints all over my imagination. I read this text as a final presentation on the last day of the summer school, with unedited video footage of the city accompanying me on Bryan Saner’s laptop.

 

The presentation was prompted by certain lingering feelings from the school: by the work itself, by conversations, and by Mark Jeffery’s presentation on endings. It was also informed by the particular group of collaborators, a sense of a wider community of ‘goats’, and certain events at home while I was away. What follows is written in fragments, the ‘little by little suddenly’; it includes extracts from a number of found texts, emails, a letter, some bendings of the truth, the odd out-and-out lie. It’s an attempt to be playful in a purposeful way. It touches on displacement, connection, transformation, ephemerality, and the ways in which memory had taken (a) place for me in Chicago. It’s an attempt to re-member.

 

Let’s start with two poets who wrote in French. Firstly, Charles Baudelaire: ‘Countless layers of ideas, images, feelings have fallen successively on your mind as soft as light. It seems that each buries the preceding, but none has really perished’.

 

Secondly, Edmond Jabès: ‘There are no words for adieu’.

 

*****

 

What is a goat? (1)

A while ago, you asked me: what is a goat? I’m not entirely sure, a goat is many things, and probably not a thing at all, more a process or an event – but here are four qualities I’ve come to suspect are at work, or at play, here:

 

1.  A goat is a kid who has matured somewhat.

2.  It is said that goats were implicated somehow at the very beginnings of theatre. The word ‘tragedy’ means something like ‘goat singing’, but I’m unclear as to whether it was the goats themselves who sang, or whether song hovered in the air around them as they munched – the good citizens of Athens bursting into song in their honour. En-chanted goats, literally. But it may well have been neither of these, maybe this is just a trick of memory …

3.  Never leave a goat unattended in your garden. It will eat everything and anything, including your laundry.

4.  Sometimes a goat isn’t a goat at all. It’s a bird.

 

Skywalk

A few days after my arrival, Matthew lent me a book called Chicago’s Famous Buildings: the first of a number of thoughtful generosities, exchanges and circulations. Coming from a small village in the south-west of England where tall means 6 foot 2 and the bus leaves for town on Tuesdays, it was with some wide-eyed bewilderment that I read pioneering architect Louis Sullivan’s account of the chief characteristic of the tall building: its loftiness.

 

‘Loftiness is the very organ-tone in its appeal. It must be in turn the dominant chord in the architect’s expression of it, the true excitant of his imagination. It must be tall, every inch of it tall. The force and power of altitude must be in it, the glory and pride of exaltation must be in it. It must be every inch a proud and soaring thing, rising in sheer exultation that from bottom to top it is a unit without a single dissenting line …’

 

By this point, there was some excitant in my own imagination, and I felt the urge to experience loftiness such as this, within which every inch of it was tall. Feeling relatively brave, I chose the second tallest building in the city. My ears popped in the elevator on the way up. Then, from an open platform called ‘the skywalk’, I surveyed the city. I saw a man floating alone in a pool on top of a high-rise building. I saw a peregrine falcon riding the thermals, spiraling still as a stone above Michigan Avenue. I saw many things from up there.

 

And here’s some of what I didn’t see but might have seen from up there. I didn’t see but might have seen a lot of things from up there.

 

A young woman rocking backwards and forwards in the subway, singing the spiritual ‘Silver and Gold’.

Spray can marks on a railway-line wall that read: ‘Chica, estas fuerte!’

A man in a leather jacket carried inches above the sidewalk by a silver heart-shaped balloon.

Isabella Rossellini at Virgin Records, she’s just bought a Björk DVD.

Two guys locked in conversation, passing an old man begging, and not hearing his plea: ‘But I voted Republican!’

A white T-shirt with the Innuit word in black: QUINUITUQ.

A black dog chasing a white plastic bag.

A man trying to inhale the world.

John Dillinger reading the sports section of a newspaper before heading on to the Biograph movie theatre.

Two cigarettes in the ashtray.

An old man with a very long beard, playing ‘Yesterday’ on a saw.

A girl with a box bearing the words: ‘Kit for paddling through stars floating on a lake’.

A man with a fire in his head.

A neon sign that reads LET’S DANCE, only the final E is missing.

A man barely able to stand up after breakfast at Lou Mitchell’s. The waitress clears away his half-finished meal, and asks him: ‘Would you like the complementary ice cream?’

Indiana Jones at the Oriental Institute.

A man at dawn whispering to the lake through a megaphone: ‘The air is filled with the moves of you’, he says.

A woman who cooks curries that make her friends hallucinate.

A man whistling and sawing away at the branch he’s sitting on.

The smell of chocolate hanging heavy in the air over the river.

A man on a cellphone in a hotel lobby: ‘We are all Americans at puberty’, he explains, ‘we die French’.

A woman who keeps valium in her sugar tin.

A jetlagged man who wakes at 4.33 a.m. precisely, sees the time and thinks he’s at a performance – or perhaps is one.

An old man directing the traffic with his stick.

Two nuns on a pedalo in the lake.

A woman wearing a necklace made out of pistachio shells.

A runaway horse skidding through the suburban mall.

 

The way she laughed.

 

‘There is no place not the reflection of another. It is the reflected place we must discover. The place within the place’ (Edmond Jabès).

 

Exactitude

As I walk at ground level, Chicago triggers memories, although I’ve never been here before. ‘Like those birds that lay their eggs in other species’ nests, memory produces in a place that does not belong to it’ (Michel de Certeau). Memory as cuckoo.

 

I walk and walk, and try to arrive, and one day something arrives at me. A feather floats down from a lofty building and lands in front of me …

 

Then I see that there are others falling out of the sky, a slow silent downpour.

 

‘FEATHER’: from a Greek root meaning ‘wing’

·      appendage, plumage, display, decoration, mark of honour, badge of a fool, emblem of cowardice (a white feather in a game bird’s tail is a mark of inferior breeding): a commodity (‘to feather one’s nest’): a tuft of hair on humans and horses

·      a very small part of anything, almost weightless, of little strength or importance: lightness, discretion, secrecy, flimsiness, a trifle

·      weaponry (arrows), ballistics: to pierce or wound (‘to bury an arrow to the feather’)

·      a blemish, flaw, imperfection having a feather-like appearance (in an eye, or a precious stone)

·      hunting: quivering movement of a hound’s tail and body while searching for the trail

·      related to wealth, health, weather (‘in fine or high feather’)

·      in writing, a quill: usually a swan or goose

 

I remember Italo Calvino: ‘For the ancient Egyptians, exactitude was symbolized by a feather that served as a weight on scales used for the weighing of souls. This light feather was called Maat, the goddess of scales. The hieroglyph for Maat also stood for a unit of length – the 33 cms of the standard brick – and for the fundamental note of the flute’ (Six Memos for the Next Millennium).

 

Questions for psychics (1)

Almost every day during my walk back from the studio, in a gallery space in Greektown, I am handed a piece of paper in the street.  On the third or fourth occasion, when I have a little pile of Jeanina flyers, I think what the hell, and I give her a call. I get her answerphone, and feel slightly disappointed that she didn’t know I was going to call, but leave her a message anyway. For I have one free question: ‘Hi Jeanina, I have a question for you, well, several of course, but here’s one for starters. It doesn’t quite fit the list of what you can tell me, but anyway, here goes … Umm … what is a goat?’

 

Now and now and now

Some years ago, we met in London and she took me to see a German film, Himmeln über Berlin (‘Wings of Desire’). Broadly, it’s about angels hovering around the city of Berlin before the fall of the wall. They are able to hear and see everything in people’s embodied lives, to record but barely able to intervene. One of the angels is frustrated by his detachment from the world of the material, the temporal, the human. He yearns to be able to say, ‘’Now and now and now’, and no longer ‘since always’ and forever’’. He longs to be weighted, gravitied, attached to the earth. In one sequence, he comes across a man who has just been knocked off his motorcycle by a Mercedes; the man is badly injured and in shock. The angel comforts and calms him through a whispered list planted in the man’s consciousness: an orienting list of particular places and things the man has loved, a map of coordinates and phenomena and everyday fragilities. After a few words, the man’s voice picks up the list, they are now his own thoughts, and the angel walks slowly away listening to him whisper these words:

 

‘The fire on the cattle range. The potato in the ashes. The boathouse floating in the lake. The Southern Cross. The Far East. The Great North. The Wild West. The Great Bear Lake. Tristan da Cunha. The Mississippi Delta. Stromboli. The old houses of Charlottenburg. Albert Camus. The morning light. The child’s eyes. The swim in the waterfall. The stains from the first raindrops. The sun. The bread and wine. Hopping. Easter. The veins of the leaves. The colour of stones. The pebbles on the stream bed. The white tablecloth outdoors. The dream of a house inside the house. The loved one asleep in the next room. The peaceful Sunday. The horizon. The light from the room shining in the garden. The night flight. Riding a bicycle with no hands. The beautiful stranger. My father. My mother. My wife. My child …’

 

My favorite place (luck days)

Every day when I go and check my email, I find a text from someone who has been working on the same computer, a Korean woman studying English in Chicago. I have come to think that her words are left there deliberately, as messages for me. This is what she left for me yesterday:

 

‘My Favorite Place. Ka Mir Park, Jul. 4, 2003

One of my favorite pace is empty swimming pool. I used to go to swimming pool in the morning. Some luck days, there where no people in the swimming pool except me. When I swam alone, the feeling was really gorgeous. The surface of water looked really peaceful. The feeling that when I divided the calm surface of the water, I cannot expression by word. Just I cat say that I love it so much. And I do not have to worry about next me, it made me relief. Some time, there are many people in a swimming pool I have to hurry up even I stay in short of breath. When I depressed I saw the dull, it makes myfelling much better. That lucky days, I spent hole day in good mood from the feeling of swimming pool’.

 

What is a goat? (2)

In Michel Tournier’s novel Friday, Andoar was born on a tropical island, the very same island on which Robinson Crusoe was stranded – and although Andoar ended up as a kite, he was of mixed human/goat heritage. The human side comes from Friday, whose own ancestors (we are told) were probably coastal Indians from the central part of Chile. Friday was playful, light, solar; he greeted everything with laughter, not a naïve laughter but one that emerged from a sophisticated form of acceptance. In his eyes, there is always ‘a hint of derision, a touch of mockery defeated by the drollery of everything he sees’. Friday was aerial: for example, he had a passion for shooting arrows to see how far and long they could fly. As for the goat side of the mix, we know that Andoar’s other parent was a powerful and fearless goat with startling green eyes and a terrible smell which, we are told, could be detected from a great distance.

 

But to understand Andoar, you have to know not only the elements of his hybrid crossing, but also the miraculous circumstances of his birth. After several combative encounters between Friday and the goat, they engage in a great final contest. At the end of it, entwined in each other’s bodies, they tumble over a cliff and emerge as a new composite creature. Andoar (and/or) consists of the man formerly known as Friday, now thoroughly impregnated with eau de goat and sporting an aerial accessory – the old goat’s skin, now scraped, cured and polished, is attached to a frame of twigs and connected by a vine to the old Friday’s ankle. Andoar spends his days ‘battling with the tricks of the wind, diving to its sudden gusts, turning when it veered, sinking when it slackened, and in a soaring bound regaining the altitude it had lost’, as the more terrestrial parts of his body and its awkward shadow dance alongside on the sand.

 

Tournier’s novel as a whole is a tale of how to become solar, ‘an angel of helium’. And I am drawn to Andoar because of his talent for boundless flight, for lightness and mobility, while retaining some contact with the ground. Andoar activates the wish to fly, to extend the limits of one’s current embodiment; to escape the confines of biography, culture, training; to expand the horizon of the conceivable. Andoar’s mobility activates a desire for what Tournier calls ’something else’. He offers encouragement for the space to become otherwise. For the exercising of faculties. For playing around. For shuffling the deck. For changing places. For messing with things. For responding to shifts outside and in. For keeping one’s foot in contact with one’s shadow on the ground …

 

Encounters and crossings bring new things into being. A goat-man-kite becoming.

 

Specific natures

Opposite my apartment on State Street, just underneath a sign for Ossama’s Hair Designs, there’s a vacant storefront. Above the windows in gold letters: ‘Incomparable Quality’ – ‘Impeccable Fashions’ – ‘Exclusive Styles’. In two neighboring windows, two life-sized casts of human bodies – a naked man and a naked woman, lying down on their backs beside each other. Asleep. Or dead, maybe. Each body is caked with earth, and inlaid from head to toe with thousands of grass seedlings. In this piece (‘Specific natures: a living installation’) and other work by the two British artists Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey, the grass grows to the point of its natural depletion, then withers and dies. On my first day in Chicago, the specific form of each body was visible, the grass no more than stubble length: a beginning. By this morning, all distinguishing features have been blurred and concealed by the grass. They are now generic bodies, ungendered, turfed outlines.

 

I imagine two goats grazing in the vacant storefront on State Street, quietly discussing their meal, ignoring the traffic, the passersby. ‘Mmmmmhhmmm, this grass is incomparable, impeccable. How’s yours, gonzo?’ ‘Exclusivo, compadre. Hey hey, ain’t this the life’. I imagine the grass spreading gradually out of the storefront, across the sidewalk, making its way oh so slowly up something really very lofty … grass that is every inch a proud and soaring thing …

 

How deep in your mouth (laughtears)

I loved it when she laughed. It was like discovering a tree was still alive, although it had no leaves because it was winter.

 

At her 21^st birthday party, she laughed as if laughing was the joke, and the joke was spinning the world around faster and faster so that only the joke held and didn’t get dizzy, it just threw off light and flecks of laughter and grains of sugar and with its head back swallowed vino spumante, and played with the bubbles and gave them to her friends with a kiss when they joined in her laughter.

 

We were partners for about two years when we were undergraduates. I studied French, she studied German. We have been friends for almost a quarter of a century. Then a year ago, she became ill. Last Thursday I dedicated my talk about animals to her. She was the person who told me that Kafka called his cough ‘the animal’. Earlier this week on Monday morning, this email from her sister fell out of the sky and landed in front of me in Chicago. A breathturn.

 

            Dear David

            Jane finally died at 1.15 this morning. She had spent the previous couple of days in a coma and was very peaceful. Whilst we are devastated at losing her, we are all relieved that her suffering is over. She has been so incredibly brave over the last 13 months, but has had to put up with more than any one person should have to bear.

            I got your email yesterday evening, having been in the hospice for the past few days and nights, and fortunately I spoke to Kate who was there last night and made sure that she whispered your message into Jane’s ear. I believe she could hear us right up until the end, and we have been reading and chatting to her for the last few days. I like to think that she heard your message.

            I will let you know what the funeral arrangements are once they are organized – I don’t expect you to fly back, but I am sure that you will want to think of her at that time and maybe mark it in your own way.

            Much love, C x

 

A few months ago, in late spring, I sent Jane the following text from a section called ‘Our Cancer’ in Matthew Goulish’s book (Matthew is quoting Odysseas Elytis); Bryan Saner spoke a version of this text at the end of Goat Island’s The Sea and Poison:

 

‘I felt abandoned by everything. A great sorrow fell upon my soul. I walked across the fields without salvation. I pulled a branch from some unknown bush, broke it, and brought it to my upper lip. I understood immediately that all people are innocent. We walk thousands of years. We call the sky ‘sky’ and the sea ‘sea’. All things will change one day, and we too with them’.

 

I mentioned the goats, told her about coming to Chicago for the summer school. Some days later, she phoned me with a question: ‘What is a goat?’

 

I loved it when she laughed.

 

Questions for psychics (2)

I try Jeanina three more times. Always the answerphone, never anyone there to respond. As my questions remain unanswered, I figure I still have one free question each time I call.

 

Here are my questions:

1.  ‘Jeanina – I want to be milked from the udders of a cow. I want a pine tree to grow inside me. I want to hang by my fingertips between the tops of two mountains … And you?’

2.  ‘Hi Jeanina, me again … what if I just suck?’

3.  ‘How do you say goodbye?’

 

The only dream worth having

Dear David

 

There are other worlds. Other kinds of dreams. Dreams in which failure is feasible. Honorable. Sometimes even worth striving for. Worlds in which recognition is not the only barometer of brilliance or human worth. There are plenty of warriors whom I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less ‘successful’ in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.

 

The only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you’re alive and die only when you’re dead.

 

Which means exactly what?

 

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated nor complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try to understand. To never look away. And never to forget.

 

What is a goat? (3)

Before I left, you asked me: what is a goat? I’m not entirely sure, a goat is many things, and probably not a thing at all, more a process or an event, but here are some qualities I’ve come to believe or suspect are at work, or at play, here:

 

A goat is the mystery of an encounter.

A goat is responsibility in the face-to-face.

A goat is connection and exchange.

 

A goat is attentiveness, exactitude/imprecision, interruption, contradiction, invitation, possibility, small miracle, crossing, overflowing.

 

A goat is a widening of wishes.

A goat is loftiness in small things.

A goat is an active vanishing.

A goat is the arrival of memory.

A goat is a letter to the dead, and a letter to the future.

 

A goat is a sensuality accomplice for the one that is one of a kind.

 

A goat is a breathturn.

 

Goat is also a verb: to goat. To goat is to be light (embodied, gravitied light – light as a bird, not light as a feather: Paul Valéry). To goat is to hold on tightly and let go lightly. To goat is to fall into the open, to fly a little with one’s foot touching one’s shadow – a shaggy, raveled thing – on the ground. To goat is to give the gift that gives.

 

To goat is to graze.

To goat is to laugh.

To goat is to whisper.

To goat is to listen.

 

*****

 

Chicago, SAIC, 25 July 2003. Includes texts from Italo Calvino (Six Memos for the Next Millennium), Peter Handke/Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire), Jane Bennett (The Enchantment of Modern Life), Matthew Goulish (39 Microlectures in proximity of performance), John Berger (To the Wedding), Arundhati Roy (The End of Imagination), Charles Baudelaire. Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan, Roland Barthes, Alfonso Lingis, James Joyce, Deborah Levy, Ka Mir Park.

 

the tears of things (for pina)

'I'm not interested in how people move, but in what moves them ... We are very transparent. The way somebody walks or the way people carry their necks tells you something about the way they live or about the things that have happened to them. Somehow everything is visible - even when we cling to certain things ... Everything I do is about relationships, childhood, fear of death, and how much we all want to be loved' (Pina Bausch).
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In no particular order, some images, culled from a reservoir that has coloured and buoyed my imagination for 20 years or more. These (and others) are indelibly etched into my psyche, and they proliferate and animate still: in my 20s and 30s, this work changed everything for me...

A group of women scurry across a leaf-strewn floor in pursuit of a man who plays the same short extract from Bartok's Bluebeard on tape. Rewind, replay, shuffle. Later, a slow somnambulist dance of partners, the women bowed and passive, their faces hidden, the almost-naked men masquerading their bodies - performing body-building poses to the audience, displaying them to both comic and alarming excess (1).

A woman in her underpants walks through a field of carnations playing an accordion. Around the edge of the field, guards patrol with alsatians on leashes. Later, Lutz Forster 'signs' the Gershwin song The man I love. Comedy and pathos in this overlaying of nostalgic heterosexual song and signing. The overlay doubles and re-doubles the song's lyrics, making them un-familiar and re-writing them. The male body mimes and 'tells' - through an iconic corporeal discourse of a possible love to which a dominant ideology is metaphorically 'deaf'. Forster himself is both source and site of the narrative, and detached from it, consciously showing/dis-playing it to us (2).

A group of besuited men repeatedly touch a solitary woman (Meryl Tankard) like a child - pinch her cheek, tousle her hair, pat her. Cumulatively over time, their actions constitute a kind of rape; intimate, patronising 'affection' is defamiliarised through repetition to reveal the shadows this infantilising tactile economy suppresses (3).

Two dinner-suited men, smug, self-congratulatory, mask-like smiles, posturing an image of suave gentility, wealth, sophistication. Then they squirt or dribble little fountains of champagne from their mouths - straight up, splashing down over their faces and suits, 'wetting themselves', like children. A kind of critical comic display of the infantile drives that underlie and inform their masquerade (4).

An environment of towering, bristling cacti, peopled by a discontinuous dream-like array of figures. Couples waltz. Passers-by pass by. A woman in bra and pants hangs immobile and upside down, her body apparently suspended from a cactus's spikes. A man force-feeds a woman, like a goose, coercing and constructing her; she lies inert. A man in a balaclava wheels another woman around the space in a glass tank of water; it's uncertain whether she has drowned or is dreaming, her body literally floating through space. A man in a skirt, shades and a leather jacket dances alone. A woman with two black shoes in her mouth struggles repeatedly to lift herself from the floor. A blindfolded man dances alone, a tea bag held over each eye by a red cloth, his partner a tea towel. Then there's a dancing pantomime walrus, and a group standing as if ready for a rather odd family portrait: a masked woman (one of those 2-dimensional Victorian paper cut-outs sometimes used for parties); two others beside her, their hats suspended above their heads, as they wriggle to fit inside them; and a slumped woman on a chair in front, her hair covering her face (5).

A man struggles across a field with an enormous wardrobe balanced precariously on his back. A drunken woman with a bottle in her hand shouts and lurches at the centre of a flock of sheep; the sheep respond to her every move, instantly and collectively, her impulses rippling out through this animal corps de ballet. A man, gravity-bound, chases a flock of starlings as they swoop and soar. Dominique Mercy in a ball gown, pinned to the wall of a room by a model helicopter hovering in front of him, buzzing him, its whirring blades pushing an updraft under his skirt (6).

A woman with impossibly long limbs and hair, a spectral somnambulist presence in a white night slip, dances through a maze of tables and chairs in a deserted cafe. A man clears her passage, his attention to his task all-consuming and selfless (7).

The everyday defamiliarised. The image as aggregation: the conjunction of bodies, objects, rhythms, music, space as psychic landscape. Even smell (the peaty earth in Rights of Spring). Bachelard's 'material imagination'. Brecht's gestus ablaze, signalling through the flames (8). Accumulation and repetition (what repetition?) Masquerade. The voyeuristic economy of spectating: the 'dis-play' of performing. Montage. E-motion: the continuous leak of affect. Excess. A corrosive theatricality. Irreducible ambiguity. Layers of fragmented narrative. Reversals. Ec-static exposures, uninsulated. Identities on the move. Possible worlds. The heart-land laid bare, in its resilience and fragility.

Love's work, its grain, its shapes.
The tears of things.

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Notes
(1) Bluebeard.
(2) Nelken.
(3) Kontakthof.
(4) Two Cigarettes in the Dark.
(5) Ahnen.
(6) Die Klage der Kaiserin ('The Lament of the Empress').
(7) Cafe Muller.
(8) 'Gestus is at once gesture and gist, attitude and point: one aspect of the relation between two people, studied singly, cut to essentials and physically or verbally expressed. It excludes the psychological, the sub-conscious, the metaphysical unless they can be conveyed in concrete terms' (Brecht).

Images: Pina Bausch (photo by Donata Wenders, 2004); Nelken at Sadler's Wells, 2005 (photo by Tristram Kenton); Ten Chi, 2004.

To watch Lutz Forster's The man I love (from Chantal Akerman's 1982 film One day Pina asked me...), see here

For a listing of other Pina Bausch materials on YouTube, see here

Obituaries for Pina Bausch: Guardian, Independent, Times, New York Times

shuttle 20: singing (faith & peaches)

'A song ain't nothin' in the world but a story just wrote with music to it' (Hank Williams, 1952)
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Rebecca Solnit: - ' ... there is no adequate response in our vernacular to this landscape, nothing can touch the authenticity around it - thus the neon of Vegas, the motels of Flagstaff, the diners of Elko, the pink flamingos on the banks of a river named after a German who never saw it [the Humboldt].

At the most breathtaking landscapes of the West, people usually say something profoundly banal or trivial, not so much because they are not impressed, but because they know their words can't measure up to it, and it is more respectful not to try. In some way, banality becomes a refuge from fear of the sublime, overwhelming scale of the land.

Only the splenetics of country music seems to describe it: The eternal story of country songs is about someone who took refuge in the house of love, only the house fell apart, and so the singer is lost in the vastness again, and alone. Never mind their obsessive boy-girl front - they're songs about the pain of freedom, the loneliness of independence, about aftermath, irretrievable loss, fall from grace. If you don't believe the lyrics, the violins and guitars will tell you so.

Like pastoral poetry, country music (before positive thinking ruined it in recent years) is usually about the past, though the past seen more through bitterness than pastoral nostalgia. The singer is leaving, being left, or looking back, and the lyrics are full of midnight trains and lost highways, rambling men, walking after midnight, coming back to see their sweetheart wed another. A passionate love for geography is buried in all this bile, so that the songs of loss are rich too, rich in place names, travels, and atmospheres ...

The basic gesture of American society is a kind of atomisation, an expansion into what was always imagined as an expanding universe. That expansion was tragic in all Old World narratives, and America was settled by outcasts for whom tragedy became opportunity. Even framed as 'progress' and 'manifest destiny', that gesture is one of loneliness, and of conflict resolved by space rather than society - room to swing your arm. Tragedy, our ability to fall out of society and into the landscape, has been the content of American optimism'.

Extract from Rebecca Solnit, 'The Name of the Snake', in Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 199, 184-5
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For today's driving music, the  14-minute looping heartbeat and visionary minimalism of Gillian Welch's 'I Dream A Highway' (from Time: The Revelator), listen here. For lyrics, see here

Gillian Welch: - 'Our palette is so minimal. We have four microphones, two voices and two guitars. That's how we make records and it freaks people out. I've come to believe that there's this other element, which is the sum of its parts - things like the air, the room, the atmosphere. These things enable us to make these little landscapes and soundscapes, which is interesting to us. Once your frame of reference adjusts to the fact that there's so little going on, the music can become very rich and panoramic, at least that's the hope'.

On driving across the USA: 'We were watching the road signs go by, which is a beautiful lesson in American poetry. You forget how beautiful the place names and the words are that you see when you're driving around. It's a great crash course in language'.

On her diverse audience: 'Those guys [hippies, country folk, hardcore rock & punk enthusiasts] say ours is the only folk music because they see the kind of gnarly, dark shit in there ... We sent the lyrics for this record [The Harrow and the Harvest] to the artist who did the cover - he's a metal artist, quite well known, and his covers usually have decomposing skulls and stuff, and he was like, "Man, this shit is dark!"'
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Photographs below: William Egglestone

being prey

'The form of the monster ... was forever before my eyes, and I raved incessantly concerning him' (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein).

'Large predators like lions and crocodiles present an important test for us. An ecosystem’s ability to support large predators is a mark of its ecological integrity. Crocodiles and other creatures that can take human life also present a test of our acceptance of our ecological identity. When they’re allowed to live freely, these creatures indicate our preparedness to coexist with the otherness of the earth, and to recognize ourselves in mutual, ecological terms, as part of the food chain, eaten as well as eater' (Val Plumwood, 'Being Prey', 2000).
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Carnivorous creatures are in the news in Australia over the holiday period. A stray alligator - an escaped pet? - wanders into a camp site in New South Wales (30 December) and is restrained with a volleyball net. A group of kayakers are circled and nudged by a great white off Sydney (28 December); one of them is knocked off his kayak but scrambles to safety. A 51 year old man is taken by a great white off Rockingham, south of Perth in Western Australia (27 December).

Sharks in particular tended to catch my somewhat paranoid imagination during my 14 years in Australia (and they still do, pathetically). Friends regaled me with terrible tales of narrow escapes and crunched surfboards and lost limbs; with more than a wink-wink ooo-er hint of 'get-a-life-Daveo', they liked to feed my wide-eyed fafucksake Englishness, within which a hedgehog is about as scary as it gets; and it was fed. In the end, I was always a little wary swimming and body surfing, much as I loved it; encounters with the sea were invariably coloured with a certain frisson. And while watching the surfers at Margaret River in W.A. or at Bell's Beach in Victoria, I often found myself scanning the water's surface for a shadowy presence. Although I saw countless darkly ominous 'shapes' (usually clumps of seaweed pulsing in the currents), I never really saw a shark.

I have a weird file of cuttings about sharks and other rather extreme human/animal encounters. Many of them from Australia: crocodile attacks; snake and shark incidents; even a kangaroo and a feral camel assault. Images of sharks hunting in swarming shoals of sardines, rolling and morphing in waves, like starlings. And a clipping about a fisherman who fell off the back of commercial boat in the sea off Queensland, the other crew members only noticing his absence when they arrived back at Townsville. Prolonged searches, but no sign of him. A few days later the same boat returned to the processing plant with the day's catch, including a huge cod; when they cut it open, they found the missing man's head in its stomach.

Stuff about Antoine Yates, who kept a fully grown Bengal tiger ('Ming') in his Harlem apartment for a couple of years until 2003, until suspicions were triggered when he went to hospital with enormous 'pit bull' bites in his thigh. An image of Damien Hurst's 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (1992), the glass-cased tiger shark floating in formaldehyde in the shark-infested waters of the Saatchi collection; and a print-out of a New York Times article about Hirst's replacement of the decaying original shark with a 25-30 year old female caught specifically for Hirst off Queensland in 2006.

There's a copy of a long article about the increase in shark attacks off Australia in 2000-1, in which a South Australian diver Geoff Grocke describes how a fellow diver was 'played with' for over an hour by a great white: 'It held him down, lay on top of him, dragged him along the bottom, knocked him around like crazy. He punched it as hard as he could, but it was like it was laughing at him. It knocked his mask off ... he felt around and put it back on. When he could see, there was this head about half-a-metre away, just looking at him. He crawled from rock to rock trying to escape, but it just kept after him. He told us he was hysterical, howling and screaming into his mask. In the end, it just got sick of him and swam off. He wasn't the same after that; he gave up diving for a while, and now he won't even talk about it' (Frank Robson, 'The fatal shores', The Age magazine, Australia, 3 February 2001. Hilariously, The Age's colour supplement is called 'Good Weekend').

Then there are all sorts of loosely related bits and pieces, including a cutting of AC Grayling on 'Loss': 'To take life in armfuls, to embrace and accept it, to leap into it with energy and relish, is of course to invite trouble of all the familiar kinds. But the cost of avoiding trouble is a terrible one: it is the cost of having trodden the planet for humanity's brief allotment of less than 1,000 months, without really having lived' (Guardian, 4 August 2001).

Pride of place goes to an astonishing, wise text called 'Being Prey' by the late environmentalist and ecofeminist Val Plumwood, sent on to me years ago by Adrian Heathfield (download it here). I recommend it for a little Christmas reading, for it is a text in which all sorts of assumptions are turned on their heads in bewildering and humbling ways.

The file's most recent addition, from October this year, is an image of a young Irish surfer riding a wave off the coast of Perth with a 500 lb great white lurking in the green wall of the wave alongside him, as if it's surfing too, like a dolphin. (Or is it a bleached log, an innocuous bit of flotsam drifting around the Indian Ocean? In truth, it's hard to tell from the image). The surfer had been unaware of the shark's presence until he was shown the photograph later. The caption above the image, inevitably sensationalist: 'White Terror: Surfer shares wave with killer shark' (Guardian, 4 October 2008).
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'Watson and the Shark' (1778), by John Singleton Copley: National Gallery of Art, Washington. Brook Watson was 14 years old when a shark in Havana harbour took his right foot. Years later, as Alderman of London, he commissioned this painting; he also put a shark in his coat of arms. (Source: Thomas B. Allen, Shark Attacks, New York, Lyons Press, 2001).

To access an edited online version of Frank Robson's 'The fatal shores' (from the Sydney Morning Herald, 3 Feb 2001), see here

black dog, white dog

Amores Perros (film). Dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000

‘Deliver my soul from the sword: my darling from the power of the dog’ (Psalms xxii, 16)

The Spanish title of the Mexican film Amores Perros translates as ‘lousy love affairs’ or more literally, ‘dog loves’ (Smith 2003: 9): ‘amor es perros’, ‘love is dogs’. In English-speaking countries internationally, where the film’s representations of dog fighting were controversial, it was released with the subtitle ‘Love’s a bitch’. Set in Mexico City, the film interweaves three narratives of love, desire, betrayal and loss, each of its three ‘chapters’ connected by an explosive car crash that implicates the central characters. In each episode, extreme situations are fueled by aberrant, destructive (‘animal’) behaviour, and violence simply serves to generate violence.

The working title of Guillermo Arriago Jordán’s original script was ‘Black Dog/White Dog’ (‘Perro negro/perro blanco’, quoted in Smith 2003: 32), and the tripartite narrative structure is informed by a complex web of doublings, in particular between rich and poor, and human and animal. This somewhat Manichean structure (which owes a great deal to television melodrama) is undercut by the ambiguous moral status of the characters – both human and animal - and the interpenetration of narratives, with some formal repetition of the same sequence from differing perspectives: the car crash, in particular. Although the meanings of events become unstable and proliferative, nonetheless a particular moralistic vision resides, a poetic justice of ‘pride before a fall’ and of violence revisiting its perpetrators and ‘biting them back’.

A core component in the construction of this contemporary morality tale of troubled mexicanidad lies in its representation of dogs. For they are centrally involved in all three episodes, and numerous parallels are established between human protagonists and their canine companions. All of them are imbricated in dog-eat-dog economic systems and their attendant anomie and violence. All of their identities are fragile and damaged, and they transform and unravel in the reiterated narrative arc of an enforced reversal of status (existential, moral, economic, and so on).

The first dog we encounter is the ambivalent Cofi, a black mongrel with more than a hint of Rottweiler: a devoted pet, a vicious killer, and, as an indomitable fighter, a meal ticket for Octavio (Gael García). He exploits the dog’s ferocious fighting abilities for financial gain before Cofi is shot during an illegal fight in an abandoned swimming pool by the aggrieved owner of his opponent. In the film’s opening scene, a high-speed chase sequence that culminates in the first of four perspectives on the car crash, Octavio’s friend Jorge desperately tends to the wounded dog in the back seat of Octavio’s speeding car with a group of gun-toting gangsters in pursuit.

Then there is Richi, the white poodle of model Valeria (Goya Toledo), the beautiful mistress of unfaithful, married advertising executive Daniel. Richi is utterly infantilised by Valeria who confers on him the surrogate child role that Deleuze and Guattari disdainfully dismissed as that of ‘the Oedipal family animal, a mere poodle’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 250). There are evident metaphorical echoes in the fates of the model and her pampered lapdog as both of them fall dramatically from ‘grace’. Valeria’s demise is prefigured in her initial, innocuous, high-heeled trip on a hole in the shiny parquet floor of the new ‘dream home’ apartment Daniel has bought for her. In the wake of her car crash and subsequent surgery, eventually a gangrenous leg is amputated, and she is callously abandoned by her advertising company as the model-of-choice for a perfume called ‘Enchant’. Then with the swift and self-destructive collapse of her relationship with Daniel, she falls out of the world into devastated isolation as an invalid. Similarly Richi the poodle disappears into the hole in the floorboards, a ‘wound’ in the polished and orderly surface that has now spread, like Valeria’s gangrene. In turn, the dog falls into an ‘underworld’ of darkness, disorientation, horror and abjection. His scuffling subterranean whimpers as he tries to escape the rats proliferating just below the surface parallel Valeria’s psychic state, her slide into dismembered inarticulacy in a black hole of despair, buried alive with no possibility of escape. In Arriaga’s script, although not in the finished film, Valeria has terminated a pregnancy fathered by Daniel, and the loss of her ickle poodle represents another child, another ‘limb’ lost.

Finally, an itinerant loner, hitman and former guerrilla El Chivo (‘The Goat’: Emilio Echevarría) moves through the city with his entourage of stray dogs, a makeshift ‘family’ of mongrels including Flor (‘Flower’), Frijol (‘Bean’) and Gringuita: his ‘babies’. For much of the film, his attentive and generous co-existence with this ragged assortment of dogs sits in stark opposition to the dispassionate brutality of his work as a contract killer, and their interdependent companionship as outsiders lends frail dignity to Roger Grenier’s perception that: ‘A pet is a protection against life’s insults, a defence against the world, the somewhat vain conviction of being truly loved, a way of being both less alone and more alone’ (Grenier 2000: 23).

The fourth and final version of the car crash is seen from El Chivo’s perspective, and it is the only scene in the film in which the central characters from all three narratives coincide (or ‘collide’). It is also the trigger for a proliferation of parallels between narratives. Octavio is dragged bleeding and broken from the wreck of his car, leaving a trail of blood on the ground like so many of the dogs we have seen hauled from the dog fights. While his friend Jorge lies bloodied and dead in the front seat, Valeria screams and smears blood on her car window as her shattered body flails to break free from its entrapment in her shattered car. These most vulnerable, animal moments of ‘bare life’ are staged in public. The dog Cofi is dumped on the street with his open gun-shot wounds, then retrieved by El Chivo who carries him home and nurses him back to health: an echo of Daniel caring for the crippled Valeria. Finally El Chivo’s entire ‘family’ of dogs is slaughtered by Cofi, a horrifying massacre of the innocents that constitutes a traumatic turning point for the Lear-like vagrant: a transitional moment of reckoning en route to some sort of redemption. Ultimately he spares Cofi, renounces his life as a contract killer, and at the end of the film walks away with the loping dog into a parched, grey, featureless wasteland, an old man and his dog setting off towards a symbolic desert and an uncertain future beyond the city.

In a documentary supplement to the DVD about the making of Amores Perros, director Alejandro González Iñárritu reaffirms the metaphorical parallels and moralities enacted in the film’s narratives: ‘In this film, love and relationships with dogs are very deep. Dogs slowly resemble their owners, all owners look like their dogs and vice versa, and here dogs redeem humans, as in El Chivo’s case. There is a grand lesson in that sense’ (‘Behind the Scenes’, Amores Perros DVD 2001). He also discusses the controversial dog fighting sequences, an entirely masculine domain in the film, a theatre of harrowing, excessive machismo in which human beings fight vicariously through their canine stand-ins, then literally with each other. Each encounter is like a car crash in miniature, its impact substantially heightened by Martín Hernández’s soundtrack which interweaves ambient traffic noises, dog barks, and music. In his insistence on the humane nature of the treatment of the dogs in the filming of the fight sequences, González Iñárritu foregrounds the illusionist capacities of framing, shooting and editing, and the actual safety of those involved : ‘the same way I’d avoid hurting somebody in a car accident’ (quoted in Romney 2000). In this way, he forges a conscious connection between the dog fights and central car-crash. Perhaps inevitably, González Iñárritu tried to downplay the attention the fight sequences attracted internationally: ‘I wanted to make a film about Mexico City, where there are millions of dogs. The dogfight is a cruel reality. But more than the fights, we were interested in the relations between dogs and people’ (in Romney 2000).

As Smith points out in his monograph about Amores Perros (2003: 59 ff), critical responses varied enormously, reflecting national emphases and obsessions. So, for example, in dog-loving Britain, censors, critics and the RSPCA tended to focus centrally on the brutality of the dog fights, locating them as the purported ‘content’ of the film (a response that González Iñárritu was at pains to deny), thereby displacing the fictional instances of human suffering represented. There are contesting realities at play in the exchanges between the director and his British critics, who questioned the relationship between what is represented as ‘real’ and the reality of processes and actions on the film set; the bottom-line reality for them related to the apparent baiting or goading of live animals.

In the face of the initial misgivings of the British Board of Film Classification, González Iñárritu insisted it was all make-believe, simply an illusionist construction of the real: ‘the camera lies’, he reminded his knockers, ‘we used hand-held cameras to make it look a lot more dramatic. The dogs were just playing’ (quoted in Smith 2003: 60). In the recording of the fight sequences, animal combatants reportedly wore clear plastic gumshields to protect themselves and prevent them from hurting each other. Other dogs were sedated and made-up to ‘play dead’. The documentary supplement on the DVD includes a startling sequence that perhaps lends some support to the director’s play-ful perspective; two snarling dogs hurtle at each other in what seems to be unbridled, pent-up aggression, then as they meet one of them immediately mounts the other from behind and tries to have hurried, animated sex with it. Yet it’s hard to tell whether this is libidinous play or utter confusion on the dog’s part; it seems somewhat disoriented and fried by the heat of the situation.

Further ambiguities abound. According to González Iñárritu, the film’s dog trainers Larry Casanova and Ernesto Aparicio are ‘respected in animal welfare circles’ (Romney 2000), and used their own animals. However in the same interview he admits: ‘Thirty per cent of the people in the movie are real people from the dogfighting world, and we used some real fighting dogs. It’s shown the way they do it […] The people can be dangerous […] but I don’t judge them. For them it’s like bullfighting or going fishing – for them it’s natural, something you do on a Sunday’ (ibid). Furthermore, González Iñárritu admits that he was afraid of handling the dogs himself, for some of them were all too obviously dangerous: ‘These dogs are real motherfuckers’ (ibid). As opposed to make-believe motherfuckers, I guess. It seems he was not wholly convinced that all of the dogs on the film set were ‘just playing’ …

References
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Grenier, Roger (2000). The Difficulty of Being a Dog (trans. Alice Kaplan), Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Romney, Jonathan (2000). ‘Going to the dogs’ (interview with Alejandro González Iñárritu), The Guardian, 22 August
Smith, Paul Julian (2003). Amores Perros, London: British Film Institute (BFI Modern Classics)