something out of nothing

'You gather things up like a person who leaves a burning house, which means very randomly ... I am not seeking an answer. I just want to say, "This is very odd, indeed"' (WG Sebald)

I have been re-reading texts by and interviews with WG Sebald. Alongside the uncanny repetitions and correspondences, the looping narrative structures, the mysterious photographs that act like 'barriers or weirs which stem the flow' and 'slow down the speed of reading' (Sebald), the displacements, double binds, silent catastrophes, spectral (re-)apparitions, somnambulist circlings and vertigo, the constellations of melancholic stones and dust and fog of this 'ghost hunter', I have been struck by his accounts of the 'questionable business' of writing and its compulsive, draining 'preoccupation with making something out of nothing'.

In an interview with Eleanor Wachtel (1997): 'Once you get hold of a thread you want to pull it out and you want to see, you know, what the colours of the pattern are. And the more difficult it gets ... the more intrigued you become, the more you know that there is something buried there. And the less you want to give up on it".

Later in the same interview: 'It is a characteristic of our species, in evolutionary terms, that we are a species in despair, for a number of reasons. Because we have created an environment for us which isn't what it should be. And we're out of our depth all the time. We're living exactly on the borderline between the natural world from which we are being driven out, or we're driving ourselves out of it, and that other world which is generated by our brain cells. And so clearly that fault line runs right through our emotional and physical makeup. And probably where these tectonic plates rub up against each other is where the sources of pain are. Memory is one of those phenomena. It's what qualifies us as emotional creatures, psychozootica or however one might describe them. And I think there is no way in which we can escape it. The only thing that you can do, and that most people seem to be able to do very successfully, is to subdue it. . And if you can do that by, I don't know, playing baseball or watching football on television, then that's possibly a good thing, I don't know".

Eleanor Wachsel: "What do you do?"

Sebald: "I walk with the dog. But that doesn't really get me off the hook. And I have, in fact, not a great desire to be let off the hook. I think we have to try to stay upright through all that, if it's at all possible".

From a public discussion with Joseph Cuomo (2001): "I never liked doing things systematically. Not even my PhD research was done systematically. It was always done in a random, haphazard fashion. And the more I got on, the more I feel that, really, one can only find something in that way, i.e., in the same way in which, say, a dog runs through the field. If you look at a dog following the advice of his nose, he traverses a patch of land in a completely unplottable manner. And he invariably finds what he's looking for. I think that, as I've always had dogs, I've learnt from them how to do this ...

"And so you then have a small amount of material, and you accumulate things, and it grows; one thing takes you to another, and you make something out of these haphazardly assembled materials. And, as they have been assembled in this random fashion, you have to strain your imagination in order to create a connection between the two things ... You have to take heterogeneous materials in order to get your mind to do something that it hasn't done before. That's how I thought about it. Then, of course, curiosity gets the better of you...".

From The Rings of Saturn, in a section related to Michael Hamburger:"For days and weeks one racks one's brains to no avail, and, if asked, one could not say whether one goes on writing purely out of habit, or a craving for admiration, or because one knows not how to do anything other, or out of sheer wonderment, despair or outrage, any more than one could say whether writing renders one more perceptive or more insane. Perhaps we all lose our sense of reality to the precise degree to which we are engrossed in our work, and perhaps that is why we see in the increasing complexity of our mental constructs a means for greater understanding, even while intuitively we know that we shall never be able to fathom the imponderables that govern our course through life".

And finally, in the same book, Sebald returns to the recurrent trope of writing and/as weaving: "That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, it is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread".

 

(text from 2018)

lean-into

Notes from the introduction to a presentation by Sue Palmer and David Williams, as part of the 'Ecology and Environment' lecture series hosted by the Department of Theatre, Film and Television, Aberystwyth University, December 2012. With many thanks to Carl Lavery for inviting us ...

‘Everything’s a question of how you lean’ (John Berger)

We are ‘lean-into animals’ - that's our name for an imaginary band we have: and this is our first gig …

We've borrowed this term from Monty Roberts (the ‘horse whisperer’), who uses it to describe horses - they are also called by him ‘into pressure animals’. His core philosophy is about creating conditions for a horse’s learning, and then getting out of the way: a useful pedagogical model for us all ... 

Roberts has suggested that there are three spatial zones in our interaction with horses: (1) a zone of awareness (the furthest), in which one's presence is acknowledged, but it remains too far away to have an impact on a horse’s movements; (2) a decision-making zone (closer, although in the countryside it could still be quite a long way away), in which one can influence a horse’s movements and choices – this is the zone of most ground work and schooling with horses; and (3) an ‘into pressure zone’, also called the ‘lean-into’ zone. 

'Leaning-into' comprises a horse's leaning back into predators to protect themselves. Think of when a horse has its hoof on your foot - you push against its flank, it leans back; or if you want a horse to move away from a wall and you try to push it, it will push back. The term refers to an instinctive, passive/aggressive, defensive ‘leaning’ into the source of pressure (just as in touching the horse's flank with your heel). Of course there are many different kinds of pressure at play in working with and riding horses (from direct eye contact, to the bit), and many different kinds of responses. And this is a source of a great deal of misunderstanding and miscommunication when people start to work with horses.

Our partial understanding (and misappropriation) of this term comes from our own contact with horses, as well as dogs and cats (which we conceive of as lean-into animals too), and our own desire – for contact, meeting, sharing, and so on. I (mis)understand leaning-into as an improvised dance of responsiveness, a bit like Steve Paxton’s contact improvisation. 

For me, it is also a kind of dynamic suspension between falling and flying, an im/balance provoked that leads to adjustments in one’s default settings. It suggests following the gravitational pull of an-other - ‘what grabs you’, your interests - letting it take you to see what it does, rather than trying to explain it (away) or collapse it into some pre-existing grid of 'knowledge'. It’s related to placing attention outside of yourself there-where-you-are, giving over some of your weight to this ‘elsewhere’, meeting and riding its currents and contours. So it’s about encounter, accompaniment, and displacement off one’s own axis towards an engagement with aspects of the world: ecologies of (inter)connectedness, if you like. 

John Berger has also written about leaning, in ways that explore the relations between riding a motorbike, writing and living (in To The Wedding, Pages of the Wound and elsewhere). In these texts, he considers the relations between inertia, gravity, energy, momentum and grace:

“Everything’s a question of how you lean … If anything on wheels wants to corner or change direction, a centrifugal force comes into play. This force tries to pull us out of the bend into the straight, according to a law called the Law of Inertia, which always wants energy to save itself. In a corner situation it’s the straight that demands least energy and so our fight starts. By tipping our weight over into the bend, we shift the bike’s centre of gravity and this counteracts the centrifugal force and the Law of Inertia! … Speed has everything to do with mass and weight, and is often though of as brutal (and it can be), but it can also whisper of an extraordinary tenderness’’.

For me, as someone interested in writing - writing's difficulties and possibilities, what it can do - it is also about relations between the ‘leanings’ of lived experience/events  and writing. Berger also writes about the differences between riding a motorbike and writing a poem:

"Writing a poem is the opposite of riding a motorbike. Riding, you negotiate at high speed around every fact you meet. Body and machine follow your eyes that find their way through, untouched. Your sense of freedom comes from the fact that the wait between decision and consequence is minimal ... Poems are helpless before the facts. Helpless, but not without endurance, for everything resists them. They find names for consequences, not for decisions. Writing a poem you listen to everything save what is happening now ... On a bike the rider weaves through, and poems head in the opposite direction. Yet shared sometimes between the two, as they pass, there is the same pity of it. And in that ... the same love".

So two quite different modes of experience, usually thought of as mutually exclusive. Two different kinds of attention, intuition, embodiment, exposure, 'weaving', translation, serious play. Riding - related to speed, mechanics, a short circuiting of the time lapse between internal impulse, reflex/decision and consequence: a visual, tactile, rhythmic, intimate engagement with the outside world and its material phenomena. Writing - slow resistant work, the site of memory, association, a listening internally that removes one from the here-now. Berger endeavours to bring these two apparent 'opposites' into conjunction, suggesting the possibility of them meeting and connecting fleetingly in tenderness, compassion, love.

Maybe the notion of 'leaning-into' also relates to some texts I’m working on at the moment about falling, and the relations between adjusting balance in the orientation of ‘leaning’, the point of suspension, and the irretrievable moment(um) of falling. James Hillman writes about falling into the underworld, into psyche; Helene Cixous writes about falling into the 'school of dreams'. Falling as deepening, growth: a ‘falling into place’. 

Where do representation and writing ‘lean’ and where do they ‘fall’? Or, more broadly, to borrow a phrase from Herbert Blau, how does one navigate some ‘liveable unison between panic and grace’?

Today we are going to talk about some of our own leanings, what and where we ‘lean-into’ in recent projects we have worked on individually …

For further details of Sue Palmer's projects, with links to video materials, see here and here 

For footage of Little Tich leaning, see here (thanks to Sophie Nield for the link)