The Library of Last Resort (Cover)
This appeared today. More details on the Sticky Pages site.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Monday, November 08, 2010
Wednesday, November 03, 2010
The Appointment (for Nelly)
Antwerp seems designed to thwart the visitor. In the car, the streets lead you a dance and suddenly you’re back on the road heading out. Come in by train and there’s always the nagging uncertainty of which station you’re after – a moment’s indecision and it’s only another few hours until Amsterdam.
Once you’re in, there’s the diamond district: men with wide-brimmed hats, beards, walking with unfathomable purpose. They disappear down side roads or through pincoded doorways. Invisibility and CCTV go hand in hand – you’re being watched (by whom?). A stone’s throw away and it’s porn stores and peep shows. Here you pay to go in and watch other people. It’s a different system of exchange, the body as commodity. The girls in the windows have fake tans and fake skin. An effect of the light? It seems plastified, they’re real living dolls. There are prices in the windows on cheap boards, the type you get in tacky restaurants or downmarket barbers.
But we weren’t here for diamonds or girls – it was Art we were after. A different racket entirely (forgetting Damien Hirst). We traipsed around trying to read the map as well as the odd landmark looming over the rooftops. As so often it was not quite where we thought it was or the map suggested.
Up some stairs and there’s a woman in a lurid cardigan left holding the baby. Not what we’d expected either. After a little misunderstanding she realised we were among the ‘Invited’. A green stamp applied to the hand. Suitably stigmatized we prepared to enter.
A thread of lights led the way downstairs. Obviously the disused cellars of some municipal building. Grand once upon a time but now down on its luck. We find ourselves in a circular rooom with corridors and rooms leading off. I follow my nose – perhaps unwise in such surroundings: rat space, urinous corners, and what other horrors were lurking in wait? Another corridor with pipes and cables running its length – it felt like entering a flayed limb. And, finally, there it is: the purpose of our visit.
He was lying in a bed, propped up on pillows, as I recall only part of the torso was visible above the sheet. It didn’t seem appropriate to take pictures. Were we meant to be here? Had we ignored visiting hours? A thin cable plugged into the wall ran along the floor and disappeared (worryingly) under the sheet. The face was disturbing, too. An uncanny mixture of gaunt messiah and child molester. The skin seemed familiar – that unreal quality – not sex trade here but jaundiced corpse.
Then the voice started on an endless monologue. I leant against the door jamb appalled and amused by turns. Pinter, Beckett, graveyard humour plus that old uncle who bores you stiff. Didn’t he go on? That deadpan voice – I tried to place the accent – could it even be someone I recognised? Alan Bennett on a bad day, Robert Wyatt ... one of the voices between tracks on Dark Side of the Moon. Flat, lifeless, passionless. A has-been knowing it had all been said before and was going to be said all over again. Molloy in his mother’s room. The womb:tomb. My end is in my beginning. To kingdom come. Amen. I began to be aware of a slight movement under the sheets. A pump I supposed. Not the life support machine of a hospital but a mechanical parody of lungs. Creepy stuff.
I left before he finished (he was finished anyway). Walking away I looked back. Still there. Good bye. Come again. It was like exiting a burial chamber in a pyramid or an NHS ward savaged by cuts. Too raw for me, perhaps, the memories of a cremation just the week before. I’m squeamish, truth be told, dislike doctors’ surgeries, dentists - even taking the cats to the vet gives me the jitters.
We made it back to street level, up into thin grey Flemish light. We talked about the show – seventeeth century anatomy lessons, public executions, morgues, memento mori, old-fashioned Chamber of Horrors and the ghost train. I’m glad such art exists and that someone’s doing it – but I wouldn’t want it in the living room, dear. And thank God I didn’t take the kids.
Riddles of Form: Eileen Myles issue
In the circumstances what better to do than post another in the series Riddles of Form? I spent yesterday morning looking at the few poems by Eileen Myles I could track down in anthologies. Here, then, is a reading of ‘New England Wind’ – I’m getting it out of Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry but the poem was originally published in the volume Not Me. At least I think so.
Here’s the first verse:
Remember me this summer
under the eaves again
stretched out against
the sky again
like Orion’s moon
Relatively short lines (not as short, though, I see compared to what she’s using in Sorry, Tree). I notice the soft closing syllables of “remember” and “summer”, written yet hardly spoken, as if already in danger of being forgotten. There’s a visual ‘echo’ of a ‘me’, glimpsed like a figure in long grass playing hide and seek with the reader:
Re/me/mber me this sum/me/r
Such an effect is - I suspect - alien to Myles’ intentions (in interviews she argues for a reading that gets more the onward movement of the phrasing rather than staying on the printed page) but it’s there all the same. More certain – in its uncertainty – is the role of “remember”. Is that an imperative voice – to remember for a future occasion? Or is that the nostalgic voice of reminiscence? I like the way “under” then echoes “summer” as the poem starts to work its own internal sound logics of remembrance. And the long vowel of “eaves” suggesting perhaps the lazy ‘ease’ of elongated hours.
stretched out against
the sky again
It’s “against” that’s the key word here. How it evicts the predictable “below”. “Against” suggests some opposition, defiance even? The lines don’t so much allude to as tempt Eliot’s Prufrock –
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky ...
or Auden’s
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
which finishes its first verse with the poet’s feet pointing “to the rising moon”. Such academic truffling feels, though, like a distraction from the ongoing movement of the poem.
I’m more interested in the inner dynamics of Myles’ poem, the “again” – “against” – “again” repetition, closing lines 2, 3 and 4. It’s an effect similar to knocking your head against something hard – a low beam perhaps, the type you’d find up in an attic room. I don’t want to cheapen the poem by such comparisons. Rather to suggest the physicality of Myles’ writing – finding in poetic terms tangible feelings.
As for “Orion's moon” I’m not sure he – or it – has one. A visual reading would notice the rising ‘O’ working typographically (and still a presence in verses 3 and 4). Or is it simply the moon coinciding with the constellation raising, in turn, questions of belonging and possessing that are pertinent to the poem. The moment of perception, too, such vast distances (which are also times) telescoped by Myles’s eye. The human ephemeral set against the stellar eternal.
On to verse two:
When a breeze crawls
down a screen, pip, zing
or is that a cat
crawling up
The act of remembering (repetition) and now another logic to the poem: up/down. Eileen lying down/Eileen looking up. Now a breeze “crawls/down” or it’s “a cat/crawling up”.
Abrasive s/z consonants suggest the scraping and scratching involved. And ‘or’ (to my ear) threads “crawls” ... “or” ... “crawling”. Against this there’s the almost comical drumming effect of “is that a cat”. Originally I typed the line “or is it a cat” only to notice that you’d lose the rat-a-tat-tat rhythm. Comical, too, the “pip, zing” and it’s something I like about Myles’ poems – being unashamed to include such ‘stoopid’ effects (“Mm-err” in ‘Dear Andrea’, “spea/spep/spe” ‘For Jordana’,‘Ooh’ as a title – all in Sorry, Tree). That said, “pip, zing” is pretty damned close to the sound I hear tugging a roller blind on a velux. The catch gives then there’s the quick whip as the blind coils up. Not so stupid at all. And all along we’re shifting ground – is the initial simile carried over from verse one or are we into a new line of thought? Needless to say, this is the kind of fun you get reading Myles’ poems.
Next, the strange verse three.
Oh was I alone in the
first room I ever
had or who would’ve
writ this then? Me too
when I am mad
More indecisions. A first room (a womb, even?) by implication a sense of Self and individuality. It’s hard to keep out Woolf’s famous formulation for the woman writer – a room of one’s own – despite Myles’ hip disregard for such limits. In The Importance of Being Iceland I like the defiant attitude:
It’s a little like the way I think of my own “studio”. Where I do my work. It’s no place and everyplace and it’s made out of language and goes where it goes. ‘The Time of Craft’ (315)
The Self estranged – shown in the weird grammatical warp and what seems to be a sudden interruption by another voice (“Me too/when I am mad”). The effect is complex and suggests the poem/poet has company – rather like a Berrigan sonnet slamming another’s words or lines into his own (who do words belong to anyway?). Or to invite in another poet – Ashbery – it’s that effect of voice tone: the questioning sigh cut by the crazed rejoinder. And what about “writ” – yanking the poem into a different period and register of language. Disorientating and deliberately so.
Verse three:
O leave me alone with
my aching head,
panicky panicky
no where to go
pretty north & silly
From the regret sighful (“Oh”) to the more overtly poetic “O”. The suggestion of a pose? However, it’s a hangover rather than Keatsian weltschmerz. I like the scuttle of the repeated “panicky” (again, again) in contrast to the sorrowful long ‘o’s that resound through lines one and four. But what about “pretty north & silly”? More Icelandic antics? An insider phrase (à la Gertrude Stein) or a Barabara Guest-type gesture all New York quirky? Or are we back in the library with our copy of Hamlet – “I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is / southerly ...”. This for a poem entitled, ‘New England Wind’. Hmmm. And also the deliberation about whether or not to be ... alone. Hmmm again.
Finally, the long closing verse (the anthology breaks at line 9 but I sense it all comes as one).
The other night
under the eaves
in a rain at 4 o’clock
I woke up it was
so sexy; listened so
careful in the world
the next day
for who also heard it
dreamy-eyed, who could’ve
come up or I come down
for once from
the sky
to be what
fell
A sudden access to energy, the core memory, what the other verses have been preliminary to. How a poem can negotiate an opening.
It’s the “remember” of line one with “other” replacing “under”. There are the long ‘o’s of arousal working with the threading long ‘e’s: “eaves” ... “sexy” ... “dreamy”. A palpable erotic excitement, risk, dare, frisson. There’s the possibility of shared aloneness – who, together-apart, heard that rain and might have ...? – and of the miraculous declaring itself in the everyday:
And we, who think of ascending
happiness, then would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls.
Rilke, of course, bringing to a close his Tenth Elegy. Did Myles have this in mind? I wonder. The language does. Possibly, too, Guest’s confusions of love’s ups and downs –
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Parachutes? No matter, what counts is Myles’ teasing apart of ‘befell’ in the senses of to fall to, to happen, to occur. Luck, chance, Fate ... embodied in oneself or another. And the rhythm of the last four lines – dwelling in the expansive sounds of “sky” and “be” right as the poem narrows down to deliver: “fell”.
And believe it or not, right at this moment – yesterday – as I was finishing these notes the copy of Sorry, Tree fell through the letter box.
A book may befall, too.
Here’s the first verse:
Remember me this summer
under the eaves again
stretched out against
the sky again
like Orion’s moon
Relatively short lines (not as short, though, I see compared to what she’s using in Sorry, Tree). I notice the soft closing syllables of “remember” and “summer”, written yet hardly spoken, as if already in danger of being forgotten. There’s a visual ‘echo’ of a ‘me’, glimpsed like a figure in long grass playing hide and seek with the reader:
Re/me/mber me this sum/me/r
Such an effect is - I suspect - alien to Myles’ intentions (in interviews she argues for a reading that gets more the onward movement of the phrasing rather than staying on the printed page) but it’s there all the same. More certain – in its uncertainty – is the role of “remember”. Is that an imperative voice – to remember for a future occasion? Or is that the nostalgic voice of reminiscence? I like the way “under” then echoes “summer” as the poem starts to work its own internal sound logics of remembrance. And the long vowel of “eaves” suggesting perhaps the lazy ‘ease’ of elongated hours.
stretched out against
the sky again
It’s “against” that’s the key word here. How it evicts the predictable “below”. “Against” suggests some opposition, defiance even? The lines don’t so much allude to as tempt Eliot’s Prufrock –
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky ...
or Auden’s
Out on the lawn I lie in bed,
Vega conspicuous overhead
which finishes its first verse with the poet’s feet pointing “to the rising moon”. Such academic truffling feels, though, like a distraction from the ongoing movement of the poem.
I’m more interested in the inner dynamics of Myles’ poem, the “again” – “against” – “again” repetition, closing lines 2, 3 and 4. It’s an effect similar to knocking your head against something hard – a low beam perhaps, the type you’d find up in an attic room. I don’t want to cheapen the poem by such comparisons. Rather to suggest the physicality of Myles’ writing – finding in poetic terms tangible feelings.
As for “Orion's moon” I’m not sure he – or it – has one. A visual reading would notice the rising ‘O’ working typographically (and still a presence in verses 3 and 4). Or is it simply the moon coinciding with the constellation raising, in turn, questions of belonging and possessing that are pertinent to the poem. The moment of perception, too, such vast distances (which are also times) telescoped by Myles’s eye. The human ephemeral set against the stellar eternal.
On to verse two:
When a breeze crawls
down a screen, pip, zing
or is that a cat
crawling up
The act of remembering (repetition) and now another logic to the poem: up/down. Eileen lying down/Eileen looking up. Now a breeze “crawls/down” or it’s “a cat/crawling up”.
Abrasive s/z consonants suggest the scraping and scratching involved. And ‘or’ (to my ear) threads “crawls” ... “or” ... “crawling”. Against this there’s the almost comical drumming effect of “is that a cat”. Originally I typed the line “or is it a cat” only to notice that you’d lose the rat-a-tat-tat rhythm. Comical, too, the “pip, zing” and it’s something I like about Myles’ poems – being unashamed to include such ‘stoopid’ effects (“Mm-err” in ‘Dear Andrea’, “spea/spep/spe” ‘For Jordana’,‘Ooh’ as a title – all in Sorry, Tree). That said, “pip, zing” is pretty damned close to the sound I hear tugging a roller blind on a velux. The catch gives then there’s the quick whip as the blind coils up. Not so stupid at all. And all along we’re shifting ground – is the initial simile carried over from verse one or are we into a new line of thought? Needless to say, this is the kind of fun you get reading Myles’ poems.
Next, the strange verse three.
Oh was I alone in the
first room I ever
had or who would’ve
writ this then? Me too
when I am mad
More indecisions. A first room (a womb, even?) by implication a sense of Self and individuality. It’s hard to keep out Woolf’s famous formulation for the woman writer – a room of one’s own – despite Myles’ hip disregard for such limits. In The Importance of Being Iceland I like the defiant attitude:
It’s a little like the way I think of my own “studio”. Where I do my work. It’s no place and everyplace and it’s made out of language and goes where it goes. ‘The Time of Craft’ (315)
The Self estranged – shown in the weird grammatical warp and what seems to be a sudden interruption by another voice (“Me too/when I am mad”). The effect is complex and suggests the poem/poet has company – rather like a Berrigan sonnet slamming another’s words or lines into his own (who do words belong to anyway?). Or to invite in another poet – Ashbery – it’s that effect of voice tone: the questioning sigh cut by the crazed rejoinder. And what about “writ” – yanking the poem into a different period and register of language. Disorientating and deliberately so.
Verse three:
O leave me alone with
my aching head,
panicky panicky
no where to go
pretty north & silly
From the regret sighful (“Oh”) to the more overtly poetic “O”. The suggestion of a pose? However, it’s a hangover rather than Keatsian weltschmerz. I like the scuttle of the repeated “panicky” (again, again) in contrast to the sorrowful long ‘o’s that resound through lines one and four. But what about “pretty north & silly”? More Icelandic antics? An insider phrase (à la Gertrude Stein) or a Barabara Guest-type gesture all New York quirky? Or are we back in the library with our copy of Hamlet – “I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is / southerly ...”. This for a poem entitled, ‘New England Wind’. Hmmm. And also the deliberation about whether or not to be ... alone. Hmmm again.
Finally, the long closing verse (the anthology breaks at line 9 but I sense it all comes as one).
The other night
under the eaves
in a rain at 4 o’clock
I woke up it was
so sexy; listened so
careful in the world
the next day
for who also heard it
dreamy-eyed, who could’ve
come up or I come down
for once from
the sky
to be what
fell
A sudden access to energy, the core memory, what the other verses have been preliminary to. How a poem can negotiate an opening.
It’s the “remember” of line one with “other” replacing “under”. There are the long ‘o’s of arousal working with the threading long ‘e’s: “eaves” ... “sexy” ... “dreamy”. A palpable erotic excitement, risk, dare, frisson. There’s the possibility of shared aloneness – who, together-apart, heard that rain and might have ...? – and of the miraculous declaring itself in the everyday:
And we, who think of ascending
happiness, then would feel
the emotion that almost startles
when happiness falls.
Rilke, of course, bringing to a close his Tenth Elegy. Did Myles have this in mind? I wonder. The language does. Possibly, too, Guest’s confusions of love’s ups and downs –
Parachutes, my love, could carry us higher.
Parachutes? No matter, what counts is Myles’ teasing apart of ‘befell’ in the senses of to fall to, to happen, to occur. Luck, chance, Fate ... embodied in oneself or another. And the rhythm of the last four lines – dwelling in the expansive sounds of “sky” and “be” right as the poem narrows down to deliver: “fell”.
And believe it or not, right at this moment – yesterday – as I was finishing these notes the copy of Sorry, Tree fell through the letter box.
A book may befall, too.
Desert Island Discs isn't known for its political incisiveness but it was fun listening to Nick Clegg squirm in response to Kirsty Wark's deceptively affable questions.* He's an Old Wet (like myself) and thus knows the value of good education. How, then, to wriggle out of the coalition plans concerning university funding? Even that famous Public School savoir-faire and ability to bullshit seemed to fail him. You could imagine him thinking what a fool he'd been in agreeing to go on - what was this? - worse than bloody Paxman on Newsnight ...
___
* Was Wark showing some Caledonian solidarity with the humiliated and departed Brown?
°
More politics ... I'm starting to grade essays on Gulliver's Travels. I turn to page 139 of the cheap Penguin edition. It's worth giving in full - the Brobdingnag King is addressing Gulliver:
"... My little friend Grildrig, you have made a most admirable panegyric upon your country; you have clearly proved that ignorance, idleness, and vice, may be sometimes the only ingredients for qualifying a legislator; that laws are best explained, interpreted, and applied by those whose interest and abilities lie in perverting, confounding, and eluding them. I observe among you some lines of an institution, which in its original might have been tolerable, but these half erased, and the rest wholly blurred and blotted by corruptions. It doth not appear from all you have said, how any one virtue is required towards the procurement of any one station among you; much less that men are ennobled on account of their virtue, that priests are advanced for their piety or learning, soldiers for their conduct or valour, judges for their integrity, senators for the love of their country, or counsellors for their wisdom. As for yourself (continued the King) who have spent the greatest part of your life in travelling, I am well disposed to hope you may hitherto have escaped many vices of your country. But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wringed and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."
Cup of tea anyone?
Monday, November 01, 2010
Notes while watching Rivers and Tides
(DVD)
Goldsworthy is instructive – “if I don’t make a work I don’t know myself”.
On first hearing I thought he said “mould” for “know”. The mishearing is revealing. For Goldsworthy working with materials is also a process of self-fashioning and discovery. Speaking of the rock he’s struggling with on the beach in Nova Scotia: “it grew in proportion to my understanding of the stone ... obviously I don’t understand it well enough.” It takes at least four attempts.
The camera in close-up shows his hands at work. Chipped and bruised fingernails, sticking plasters, fingers that are testament to the work.
One thinks of the smallness of human hands, of how soon they weary and of how little time is granted to their activity ... One asks about the owner of these hands. Who is this man? (1)
As Goldsworthy says of the strange landscape in which he finds himself “I am so out of touch with it” – that word “touch” – and as he sets to work “I have shook hands with the place” – that word “hands”. The obligation to refuse gloves (loss of ‘feel’ for the materials at hand at the risk of numbness from the cold). “You never shake someone’s hand with a glove”. In any case, “good art keeps you warm”.
Two axes at work. Horizontal: the physical space of the landscape (hillside, moor, forest, beach); vertical: the time of the making. He gets up early, keeps looking over his shoulder at the inevitable return of the tide, feels against his cheek slight breezes that will jeopardise the fabric of twigs.
Space is time. The landscape Goldsworthy walks across is sedimented meaning. Centuries of sheep farming have sculpted the moors. Goldsworthy is suspicious of stability, undermines idioms, nothing is “set in stone”. Stone is fluid. He pounds pebbles for their red iron pigment before moulding it into a ball that’s lobbed into the river. Particles disperse. Blood red veins marble the skin of the water.
Hence, it is impossible for you to take up the most insignificant pebble at your feet, without being able to read, if you like, this curious lesson in it. You look upon it at first as if it were earth only. Nay, it answers, ‘I am not earth – I am earth and air in one; part of that blue heaven which you love, and long for, is already in me: it is all my life – without it I should be nothing, and able for nothing ... but, because there is, according to my need and place in creation, a kind of soul in me, I have become capable of good, and helpful in the circles of vitality’. (2)
Although Nature has no need of Goldsworthy, he needs Nature. He denies the “woolly” thinking of pastoralism preferring the “darker side”. The gaping mouth / hole / vagina in a tree trunk is a way to come to terms with underlying rhythms of change and loss. Here he runs out of words.
Much of Goldsworthy’s work is a way of fusing writing and drawing. His walls, ribbons and garlands are writhing lines of Blakean delight in energy. River meanders, serpent coils, twirls of micro-organisms, tendrils. String theories sounding through the universe.
From another angle he’s rooted in an English folk tradition. Ophelia gathering flowers to strew for rituals that seem to have been forgotten but continue to haunt buried in collective memory. Goldsworthy gives his works as “gifts” but on the understanding that they will be returned, otherwise:
Those are pearls that were his eyes;/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange (3)
The rock cone disappears to the eye beneath the waves only to allow a more profound sense of things to surface. The driftwood dome circles with the incoming tide becoming something ‘other’ rather than merely broken. The work initiates the unforeseen. “The very thing that brings the work to life is that which causes its death” – yet the unmaking shapes anew.
The work is not pre-existent, a conception awaiting execution. It emerges only in the hands-on engagement with landscape, materials, physical ‘know-how’ and improvisation. Even with the most resilient material there is an inherent fragility and risk. Goldsworthy takes a work to the “very edge of collapse”. From the start, the invigorating uncertainties of the open air were preferred to the stuffy studios of art college orthodoxy.
But what – exactly – is the work? The cones, for instance, left like “guardians”, markers confirming a connection with place. Wordsworth left poems on stones. Richard Skelton records in charged locations to return and leave his sounds to decompose.
I perceived decay had made progress ... – many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms. (4)
A poem, a song, a sculpture - just so many empty snail shells? Fashioned then abandoned. A leaving behind.
Yet the vital role of the photograph or film as documentation. Goldsworthy’s slide archive dates back to art school. It’s his way of understanding his work (the gap between the making and the “return of the images”). Also, one assumes, a way to quantify and assure gallery value. At what point does Land Art fall back into Sunday afternoon strolls? Impromptu stick tents for the kids, beachcombing, drawing in the sand? His wife’s question as he leaves the house and his mock pompous retort: “I am an intuitive artist ...”.
Economy of means: Goldsworthy lies prone in the falling rain. Is he thinking of a new work? Resting? A sequence spliced in from Tarkovsky's Mirror? He gets up and there it is – a shadow of himself left on the unmoistened ground. Another: he casts a huge snowball up into the air so the crystals form a cloud and disperse as a glittering mist. The camera does not simply record but becomes the medium – the possibility – for such work. I’m reminded of Anna Theresa de Keersmaker dancing a mandala in the forest. Art as choreography. One more: the stone wall running from the motorway to the river and then into the woods. The tracking bird’s eye view offers another dimension to the ground level work.
Another way of looking ... a cone standing immobile within the walls of the gallery. How different to the one being seen coming into being. The decisions, indecisions, chippings, refittings ... 'It' is a sum of its failures. Is. Is not.
Another way of looking ... a cone seen at a distance as against close up. Suddenly entirety gives way to discrete fragments and the spaces within. The whole is punctuated with holes. By extension, Goldsworthy’s works are so often not things-in-themselves but take place in participation with their surroundings. The stonewall circle, its ‘O’ reframing the undulating line of the horizon. The hollowed ‘O’s of intense red pigment depend upon the grey rocks and the mottlings of moss and fungi.
The camera in close-up shows his hands at work. Chipped and bruised fingernails, sticking plasters, fingers that are testament to the work.
One thinks of the smallness of human hands, of how soon they weary and of how little time is granted to their activity ... One asks about the owner of these hands. Who is this man? (1)
As Goldsworthy says of the strange landscape in which he finds himself “I am so out of touch with it” – that word “touch” – and as he sets to work “I have shook hands with the place” – that word “hands”. The obligation to refuse gloves (loss of ‘feel’ for the materials at hand at the risk of numbness from the cold). “You never shake someone’s hand with a glove”. In any case, “good art keeps you warm”.
Two axes at work. Horizontal: the physical space of the landscape (hillside, moor, forest, beach); vertical: the time of the making. He gets up early, keeps looking over his shoulder at the inevitable return of the tide, feels against his cheek slight breezes that will jeopardise the fabric of twigs.
Space is time. The landscape Goldsworthy walks across is sedimented meaning. Centuries of sheep farming have sculpted the moors. Goldsworthy is suspicious of stability, undermines idioms, nothing is “set in stone”. Stone is fluid. He pounds pebbles for their red iron pigment before moulding it into a ball that’s lobbed into the river. Particles disperse. Blood red veins marble the skin of the water.
Hence, it is impossible for you to take up the most insignificant pebble at your feet, without being able to read, if you like, this curious lesson in it. You look upon it at first as if it were earth only. Nay, it answers, ‘I am not earth – I am earth and air in one; part of that blue heaven which you love, and long for, is already in me: it is all my life – without it I should be nothing, and able for nothing ... but, because there is, according to my need and place in creation, a kind of soul in me, I have become capable of good, and helpful in the circles of vitality’. (2)
Although Nature has no need of Goldsworthy, he needs Nature. He denies the “woolly” thinking of pastoralism preferring the “darker side”. The gaping mouth / hole / vagina in a tree trunk is a way to come to terms with underlying rhythms of change and loss. Here he runs out of words.
Much of Goldsworthy’s work is a way of fusing writing and drawing. His walls, ribbons and garlands are writhing lines of Blakean delight in energy. River meanders, serpent coils, twirls of micro-organisms, tendrils. String theories sounding through the universe.
From another angle he’s rooted in an English folk tradition. Ophelia gathering flowers to strew for rituals that seem to have been forgotten but continue to haunt buried in collective memory. Goldsworthy gives his works as “gifts” but on the understanding that they will be returned, otherwise:
Those are pearls that were his eyes;/Nothing of him that doth fade/But doth suffer a sea change/Into something rich and strange (3)
The rock cone disappears to the eye beneath the waves only to allow a more profound sense of things to surface. The driftwood dome circles with the incoming tide becoming something ‘other’ rather than merely broken. The work initiates the unforeseen. “The very thing that brings the work to life is that which causes its death” – yet the unmaking shapes anew.
The work is not pre-existent, a conception awaiting execution. It emerges only in the hands-on engagement with landscape, materials, physical ‘know-how’ and improvisation. Even with the most resilient material there is an inherent fragility and risk. Goldsworthy takes a work to the “very edge of collapse”. From the start, the invigorating uncertainties of the open air were preferred to the stuffy studios of art college orthodoxy.
But what – exactly – is the work? The cones, for instance, left like “guardians”, markers confirming a connection with place. Wordsworth left poems on stones. Richard Skelton records in charged locations to return and leave his sounds to decompose.
I perceived decay had made progress ... – many a window showed black gaps deprived of glass; and slates jutted off, here and there, beyond the right line of the roof, to be gradually worked off in coming autumn storms. (4)
A poem, a song, a sculpture - just so many empty snail shells? Fashioned then abandoned. A leaving behind.
Yet the vital role of the photograph or film as documentation. Goldsworthy’s slide archive dates back to art school. It’s his way of understanding his work (the gap between the making and the “return of the images”). Also, one assumes, a way to quantify and assure gallery value. At what point does Land Art fall back into Sunday afternoon strolls? Impromptu stick tents for the kids, beachcombing, drawing in the sand? His wife’s question as he leaves the house and his mock pompous retort: “I am an intuitive artist ...”.
Economy of means: Goldsworthy lies prone in the falling rain. Is he thinking of a new work? Resting? A sequence spliced in from Tarkovsky's Mirror? He gets up and there it is – a shadow of himself left on the unmoistened ground. Another: he casts a huge snowball up into the air so the crystals form a cloud and disperse as a glittering mist. The camera does not simply record but becomes the medium – the possibility – for such work. I’m reminded of Anna Theresa de Keersmaker dancing a mandala in the forest. Art as choreography. One more: the stone wall running from the motorway to the river and then into the woods. The tracking bird’s eye view offers another dimension to the ground level work.
Another way of looking ... a cone standing immobile within the walls of the gallery. How different to the one being seen coming into being. The decisions, indecisions, chippings, refittings ... 'It' is a sum of its failures. Is. Is not.
Another way of looking ... a cone seen at a distance as against close up. Suddenly entirety gives way to discrete fragments and the spaces within. The whole is punctuated with holes. By extension, Goldsworthy’s works are so often not things-in-themselves but take place in participation with their surroundings. The stonewall circle, its ‘O’ reframing the undulating line of the horizon. The hollowed ‘O’s of intense red pigment depend upon the grey rocks and the mottlings of moss and fungi.
°°°
ice rock petal dust snow twig wool branch
sun wind tide
°°°
“The stone is speaking” (Goldsworthy)
“Clay is earth’s mouth” (Eileen Myles, quoting)
°°°
°°°
1. Rilke, The Rodin Book
2. Ruskin, The Work of Iron
3. Shakespeare, The Tempest
4. E. Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Just Chipping Away
The past week (and a bit) I’ve been reading Eileen Myles (The Importance of Being Iceland) enjoying the exhiliration of her voice and rhythm of her thinking. That’s a phrase: as is the phrase in the phrasing. A stance and a way of coming in at it.
So many lines come off the page, make you raise your eyes, pause, lift the lid off the can of life. Such as? Poetry and the window. And she’s so right – who wouldn’t want to write in their right/wrong mind? And her way of seizing an occasion – accident, vomiting, life crisis etc. – it all feeds in. And why it’s imperative I read some of her poems (Sorry, Tree might arrive tomorrow).
Knowing I am not – or so I’d assume – her ‘intended’ audience. (Male, 46, GSOH, straight, square, unhip). Or perhaps that’s the point. Why I need ‘my’ Iceland. To see what it feels to be glacial, volcanic, in the making, out on the northern margins of the maps. The trope of frozen wastes in 19thC fiction as the female landscape. Ms. Mary Shelley Godwin Wollstonecraft Frankenstein Creature frozen out, on thin ice, cold shouldered by the patriarchal Big Society. Slippery when wet. Here are new temperature logics: hot (erotic) with cold not as its opposite. ‘Cool’ won’t do either (too 50’s jazz-jism & birth) but ‘cold’ as positive CHILL. Degree zero. Think. Begin again.
The Importance of Being ... invites Wildean earnestness. However, Myles is also going-a-Bunburying: off to Iceland (in the footsteps of Mr W.H.) writing poetry. Each of these essays are excuses to be elsewhere, become-another only to find out who you ‘really’ are all along.
In the absence of an index, I offer my own fingering through the pages – those places where I paused:
On Robert Walser (17) his work’s “permeable borders” and “sudden shifts of mood”. On writers not being “smart” (18). On Iceland where “all languages were other languages”. On having work to do and being thankful for “the focus” (32). On libraries not being too beautiful. On an “ecology of sound” and what English does to languages. On Robert Smithson and what she notes in his work – “the earth is a dot, he wrote” (87). On the “very soul of poetry” being the list (97). On Ted Berrigan and Jimmy Schuyler and Alice Notley and Ann Lauterbach. On How To Write An Avant-Garde Poem and knowing when to let poems alone and windows and her “whirligig mind” and using what you’ve got and learning to bear silence. On Bjork and Bob Dylan and writing when you’re moving and how your mother can spoil a sunset (169). On the sincerity of the touch of a foot in the night (180). On writing by hand and poetry being “an opportunity to change the locks continually” (193). On the difficulty of even having a thought these days. On craft and her studio. On quilts. On giving a month or a day. On clay being “mud’s mouth” (323). On browser art and living in the throat and not being able to do everything and ...
“the impossibility of that choice, of the everything when I was young, that choice made me a poet because I could have some purchase on everything and do a little bit of it all the day. Just chipping away...” (255).
Out at 7:30, the streets fogged. Parked cars invisible after 100 yards. It’s still. A Day After feeling. A pinch and a punch for the first of the month. Walking past houses that are still asleep. The bright pots of flowers on the concrete steps – in memoriam. Past the house of the woman who’s lost her mind (she calls out to passersby to remind her it’s Monday). Voices within. A luminous green skeleton hangs in the door one down.
Last night there were only two calls. Each time a small gang of kids in sheets and make-up. In the shadows a group of parents just making sure. “Hallowe’en!” ... “Trick or treat!”. I distribute sweets and close the door. It’s a ritual that has nothing to do with Belgian society or culture. The masks, witch hats and other paraphenalia confirm encroaching Americanisation and cynical consumerism. Even in England I don’t remember it being much of an occasion – Guy Fawkes and fireworks, yes. Then again, that’s an unlikely tradition to take root here.
No one is queuing in the bread shop. I ask for“un six cereales et deux pistolets”. The woman behind the counter is puzzled and I explain – “je suis seul ce weekend ... les filles sont à Paris”. “Ah – c’est comme ça pour vous artistes” is her reply – disconcerting or inaccurate or perhaps she’s confusing me with someone else? Two cents change.
And so today. Just me and the two cats.
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