a recollection of dry fire

A long bike trip with Sue to Kensal Green cemetery in North London, in search of something I first read about some year's ago in Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory. His account of a particular encounter in the 1990s, en route to a funeral with his friend the photographer Marc Atkins, has lingered with me. 

Initially Sinclair is dismissive of the pretensions of some of the cemetery's inhabitants, their 'pyramids and stone mansions whose original pomposity had been weathered by long indifference into something more democratic: a sanctuary for wild nature, a trysting place for work-experience vampires. Irrelevant memory doses. Boasts and titles and meaningless dates'. Then -

"I spotted one particular stone angel that had to be photographed: a robed hermaphrodite tangled in the bare Medea branches of a tree. The image was entirely mythical. The tree devoured the stone like a recollection of dry fire. Like Actaeon, the voyeur, turned into a stag: trapped, as it were, by the wonder of a site unexpectedly encountered. Like Ezra Pound's obsession with the girl who becomes a tree:

            The tree has entered my hands,
            The sap has ascended my arms,
            The tree has grown in my breast -
            Downward,
            The branches grow out of me, like arms.

The angel's hands were gone, her face was hidden; the branches spread out above her like electrified hair. Her wings, tangled in the thicket, were a useless decoration ..." (350).

There are countless angels in Kensal Green cemetery, immobile flocks of them in varying states of eroded, gravitied flight, but Thomas Raphael's winged companion was nowhere to be found. Eventually we met a passing 'friend' of the cemetery, who explained that the tree had died some time ago, and the masonry of the angel itself had been significantly damaged. He offered to show us what remained. I thanked him and declined, for it seemed most fitting to retain Sinclair's account of his Ovidian encounter and Atkins' photograph as the enduring mnemonic traces of a vision now disappeared - an active vanishing.

Text extract from Iain Sinclair, Lights Out For The Territory, London: Granta, 1997. Photo: Marc Atkins

the sea: wave 3

“In the bedroom, laying, looking up, I watched as the sea moved in from one corner of the ceiling gradually filling the frame. A moderate breeze, small waves, becoming larger: fairly frequent horses. A memory floats across the ceiling in bits and pieces, along with the other drifters: the By-The-Wind-Sailors, the violet sea snail floating on its bed of foam, and the shipworm burrowed into a piece of wood. In their midst a whale bone floats to the surface, and on it a engraving made by an idle whaler during his leisure hours, struggling to battle the soul shattering monotony of the open sea by keeping his mind occupied with the work of his hands. And on it he carved a picture of an unfinished heart shaped room, and painstakingly rendered every tiny detail the he could remember. He worked on it for thirty years.”

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

A red toothbrush, A set of encyclopedias with pages folded over at the corners, An Umbrella, A wooden chair. Sand. Sand. A Building built out of sand as if it were stone. Unread letters. 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 a glacier, and its father the sun. Its twin, the desert (fraternal), and its godfather the moon who continues to look after it.

I closed my eyes, looking for sleep myself, and tried to breathe quietly. I let my body float belly up, my nose and mouth above the surface but my ears just below it. I listened to the now deafening sound of my quiet breath and my mind was full and moving frantically from one thought to another. To calm myself, I decided to make myself 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. All the things forgotten in it or thrown to it for losing. Innumerable cast-offs, messages, and yesterdays gone off on an adventure; those things finding some rest in its methodical movements and temperate depths.

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

#1

The shaved off whiskers belonging to 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 I headed when I started this? Now, the things that rile me, the things that seem to draw out the most of my tired emotion, are the things that have to do with how people are to me. Not about whatʼs said, or whatʼs done. I enjoy outright offense and let it pass for low, but search for offense and in those moments where it isnʼt clear enough, where I can pounce on it. Perhaps this is now my only skill? Pouncing where I can point to the slightest whisper of disrespect? Perhaps I would be further along in this if I instead suffered quietly. Instead bit my tongue and knew better. There is a pleasure in that. There is pleasure there?

#2

All three skipping stones you skipped.

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

#3

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

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

#4

(Indecipherable.)

#5

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

End of a pier. Tears remembering a life adding salty water to salty water. A remembrance regretted from this new solitude.

#6

A box of childhood things. A floating 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 piece of gum that Tony (TONY!) gave me at recess one day (still smells of grape.) A magazine picture of a Backstreet Boy that had been in the back pocket everyday of grades 6-8. Half of a friendship necklace heart bought to share with Sheri Ross, the one I stopped wearing without explanation to Sheri, who only noticed a few days later in the lunch line. A matchbox time capsule made at school in the 5th grade. Nothing in it. Wanted to save the moment. Dad left that day. And mom was happy. And my older sister too. Everything was going to be okay.

#7

The rock you used to keep your book open that day.

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

#8

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

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

#9

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

A bit of a breather. To see wind in their hair with sunshine. A little bit of sunshine. A few days time lived without 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 time when they arenʼt embarrassed by their clothes, to see them look at the sky instead of the ground, to get to see the way the Big Wheel makes their eyes big. A few days 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 us out. Something to look ...

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

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

the sea: wave 5

Elsew/here I could hear particles that are in that air … that they have something to say to the particles that are below me, in the water. That those that have entered the sieve of The Sea, and through its motion (longing for the land) have been ground so light as to wash up somewhere to be taken up by the wind, that spoon the sky uses to stir, lift, and mix. The greater the scale of your vision (in your head), the less the descriptor entropy becomes appropriate. There are so many things happening. And we arenʼt in control. And that is beautiful. That means the small moments of our lives exist in a system, and what joy they bring is perfect 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 collection of things that you become. A collage. A good diary never makes that much sense to the little brother. Like a walk, ice cream, a performance, a book, or a painting ... 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 the room had overflown their banks. The precise brush stroke was swollen and lopsided; cupboards and chairs melted their brown masses into one huge obscurity. (2)

Elsew/here, like a grain of salt becomes known by every molecule of water in a boiling pot and has the effect of raising the boiling temperature of that water, so is the effect of our buildings on The Sea. And just as the boiling potʼs water becomes vapor slowly, sending it and its humid saltiness into the air introducing itself to the air in the same way the salt met the water. All at once, a chemical wicking at light speed. As much as the waterʼs mood affects the land, so it affects the air, and in this way great changes happen slowly. Like the Seaʼs assault on our shores, The Sea is content with slowness. It takes the parish churches of our towns, as it always has, and introduces them to the air, the clouds, and those grains that were walls that protected our worship, or our thoughts, come back to us and try to find their way into the folds of our clothes, moving with an assist from the breath of wind to find the spaces at the threshold of our houses, to re-occupy. Stone is our most permanent building material, but its life isnʼt the width of a human hair on a 300 foot timeline of this world. It may be that you are breathing the parish church of St. James right now, a lone microscopic particle that remembers finding a hair in your nostril, now a part of you. And its time with you will be relative to the start of a blink of an eye. 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 not exist when viewing the earth from space, or the universe from the stars, or space from the edge of space. Matter has no death.

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

Well I couldn't help it, I was dreaming I was awake. And then I woke up and found myself asleep. (Laurel) I was walking on the very edge of the sea. I was following an endless shore … This is not a dream I am telling you. I was going 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 imaginary hero, 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 and hardened by the waves. All things around me were simple and pure: the sky, the sand, the water. I watched as they came from the offing, those mighty shapes which seem to be running from the coast of Libya, charioting their glistening summits, their hollow valleys, their relentless energy from Africa all the way to Attica across the immense liquid expanse. At last they come upon their obstacle, the very plinth of Hellas; they shatter themselves against those submarine foundations; they recoil in disorder towards the origin of their motion. When the waves are thus destroyed and confounded, yet seized in turn by those that follow them, it is as though the forms of the deep were engaged in strife. One sees white horsemen leaping beyond themselves, and all those envoys of the inexhaustible sea perishing and reappearing, with a monotonous tumult, on a gentle almost imperceptible slope, which all their vehemence, though it come from the most remote horizon, will yet never be able to surmount … (2)

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

Elsew/here the Sea is massive and its featureless-ness helps us to understand the size of those systems at play on this planet, whereas land betrays us into the lullaby of geographic specificity. Humanity is just as geographic as land, and we are function of these systems, and the motion of these systems is whatʼs awesome, and my 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, the viewer. And to feel beauty is great, but not material, and not truth, and not eternal. In fact, beauty does not exist where one can smell eternity.

Elsew/here things are remembered, and their pattern comes together like a cloud atlas. A system viewed too closely for connections reveals none. Latent connections are like mist. Heat the air with your breath and they disappear like so much vapor. Intentions turning into words often sound like pain. Keep your love locked down. Internalizing the world happens like a collage, not like the 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 and a wind came up, blowing the dust across the arid land in sinister spirals. The last flickering remnants of daylight were being extinguished and all contours disappeared in the grayish-brown, smothering gloom that was soon lashed by strong, unrelenting gusts. I crouched behind a rampart of tree stumps that had been bulldozed into long lines after the great hurricane. As darkness closed in from 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 while ago still stood out clearly, but with each passing moment the space around became more constricted. Even in my immediate vicinity I could soon not distinguish any line or shape at all. The mealy dust streamed from left to right, from right to left, to and fro on every side, rising on high and powdering down, nothing but a dancing grainy whirl for what must have been an hour, 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 broken timber emerged from the gloom. Gasping for breath, my mouth and throat dry, I crawled out of the hollow that had formed around me like the last survivor of a caravan 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. And although 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 long time in the air. This, I thought, will be what is left after the earth has ground itself down.” (4)

---

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

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

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

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

shuttle 17: rocking (in time)

'It was the high point of his morning. Change the canaries. Feed the mule. Stand transfixed for half an hour' 

(Sam Shepard, Motel Chronicles & Hawk Moon, London: Faber, 1982)
_________________________

'"The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question? Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field" ... 

Every lost moment is the life. It's unknowable except to us, each of us inexpressibly, this man, that woman. Childhood is lost life reclaimed every second, he said. Two infants alone in a room, in dimmest light, twins, laughing. Thirty years later, one in Chicago, one in Hong Kong, they are the issue of that moment. 

A moment, a thought, here and gone, each of us, on a street somewhere, and this is everything. I wondered what he meant by everything. It's what we call self, the true life, he said, the essential being. It's self in the soft wallow of what it knows, and what it knows is that it will not live forever ...

The landscape began to seem normal, distance was normal, heat was weather and weather was heat. I began to understand what he meant when he said that time is blind here. Beyond the local shrubs and cactus, only waves of space, occasional far thunder, the wait for rain, the gaze across the hills to a mountain range that was there yesterday, lost today in lifeless skies'. 

(Don DeLillo, Point Omega, London: Picador, 2010)
_________________________ 

Bill Viola - ‘In 1981, I made a videotape in Japan, Hatsu Yume ('First Dream'), in which there is one sequence where a fixed camera views a rock on a mountainside over a long period of time. When it comes on the screen, the images are moving 20 times normal speed, and gradually, in a series of stages, it slows down to real-time, and eventually to extreme slow-motion.

People usually describe that scene by saying, “ … the part where the people are all slowed down while moving round the rock”. What I looked at in that scene is the rock, not so much the people. I thought it would be interesting to show a rock in slow motion. All that is really happening is that the rock’s time, its rate of change, exceeds the sampling rate (the recording time of the video), whereas the people are within that range. So the rock just sits there, high speed, slow speed … it doesn’t matter.

I think about time in that way. There are windows or wavelengths of perception. They are simultaneous and interwoven at any one moment, but we are tuned only to a certain frequency range. This is directly related to scale changes in space or sound, proportion in architecture and music. A fly lives for a week or two, and a rock exists for thousands or millions of years’.

From Bill Viola (1995), Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994, London: Thames & Hudson / Anthony d’Offay Gallery, 151
_________________________

'Hatsu yume' is a Japanese term for the first prophetic dream in the new year. Viola: 'I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite - darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water; it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish; darkness is the death of man'.

Photo at top: Ansel Adams, 'Rock and Cloud, King's River Canyon' (California), 1936. 


Left: Glen Baxter drawing

“I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite — darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water — it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish — darkness is the death of man.” - See more at: http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/artwork/9443-hatsu-yume-first-dream#sthash.UnxqBMN7.dpuf

“I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite — darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water — it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish — darkness is the death of man.” - See more at: http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/artwork/9443-hatsu-yume-first-dream#sthash.UnxqBMN7.dpuf

“I was thinking about light and its relation to water and to life, and also its opposite — darkness or the night and death. Video treats light like water — it becomes fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish — darkness is the death of man.” - See more at: http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/artwork/9443-hatsu-yume-first-dream#sthash.UnxqBMN7.dpuf

stone shadow

Over a period of 36 hours in the last couple of days, I've traveled from London to Aberystwyth via Birmingham, and back again - all the while reading JG Ballard and the papers, and listening to PJ Harvey's Let England Shake and Gillian Welch. I was also trying out, for the first time, the 'distressed analogue' possibilities of the Hipstamatic photographic app on my iPhone.

On the way there, I carried the pebble from the beach at Aldeburgh (see 1st Feb post, 'I hear these voices'). My half-arsed homage to Richard Long's Crossing Stones entailed depositing it on the beach in Aber, & exchanging it for another stone to take back - circuitously, eventually, who knows when - to Suffolk.

What follows is a long-ish chronological sequence of images from the journey. In large part, rather murky, sub-aquatic glimpses and fragments of Britain from the train as I passed into and out of cities and night. A sort of flip-book of shadows and flickering light, with a fleeting and surreal burst of apricot sunshine on arrival at the sea in West Wales.

Oh the epiphany of the sea ...

Somehow weather, music, Ballard, newspaper (Bahrain, Libya, Tory government cuts, Berlusconi's trial - the 'usual' heady cocktail in these profoundly unusual times), and something parading as 'coffee' conspired to colour my mood and these images - in particular, PJ's devastatingly beautiful, sombre songs:

& the birds are silent in the branches
& the insects are courting in the bushes
& by the shores of lovely lakes
heavy stones are falling