07/17-18
On the plane, coming over the edge of Hudson’s Bay, magical blues, teals, light to dark, and the red the permanent twilight to the north, must be about two a.m. local time, maybe three, and the sun glow never leaving, why I picked this side of the plane, and a strange cloud format over the land like round white humps, making me wonder if it’s really ice, what can account for such a still pattern....
And then the flight attendant passing, about the third, to ask me to lower my window shade, and then a general announcement that we should all lower our window shades, and I point out that I have picked this side of the plane, and a window seat (and for that matter about two minutes after the bookings opened on line) precisely to look out the window, otherwise the aisle would be more comfortable. Then the next time around, try a perky woman of a certain age, But Hudson’s Bay is so lovely!!! Until the time after that, I just get a dirty look....
Funny how directive flying has become. And you hardly dare talk back. And too, they inform you how unhealthy it is, but that some spa somewhere has designed exercises just for them, that you can do without your fellow passengers thinking you’re a total nutter.... except of course, there isn’t room to do them at all...
Makes it hard to attain to that sense of contemplative dislocation travel and its landscape bring me....

Now, bright sunlight, and everyone with their shades up again. Coming from Scotland over England, from emptiness and a few roads, to a land everywhere spoken for, in human terms. Just over Lancaster now, seems strange the idea that I will be flying back this exact same route. But love this moment of seeing the pattern of the land, and the sense, so different from Anglo-America, of a land use pattern that has grown up through a long history, so that a depth of history is visible in the landscape, with, I suppose, its negotiation of oppressions, rebellions, peace, war, abundance, scarcity, etc. etc., not just that moment of imposition from the outside so typical of back home, the mile by mile grid pattern that erases the history beneath it, which is, of course, as long a history as any really... with Mexico and Central America different, of course, I can see the pattern of centuries, millennia, of growth from the inside there too....

07/23
And now almost a week in Huddersfield. Not doing anything specific, rushing off to give readings and workshops, like the last two times, but still planning thinking thinking planning, or just plain talking, so that I feel strangely run off my feet, an intensity that sometimes makes it difficult to think, or more I think, to know what I’m thinking, that secondary process which generates work.... except I know of course, that what I’m doing will process somewhere in my mind and generate something sooner or later, just not what yet... so I’ve barely even caught up with writing in my journal much less e-mail to the kids, haven’t really, much less to friends, but some lovely walks, a beautiful high moorland area here in Meltham where Bob and Taru live....

The ideas around When Bill Danced the War, I think quite amazing, think will work, trying for an installation that can stand, but into which live performers can be introduced, like the idea very much, but already can see a live performance/cd working no matter what, heard the piece with me reading it for the first time, so that was really quite amazing, could see/hear its weaknesses and strengths in quite a different way.... so loved that too.... think maybe it’s something I should do more, record work as I think I have it edited for performance so that I can heighten ways that make it work, especially in terms of making the narrative through line clear, as well as emphasizing rhythms...
The rhythms too, of Bill making it clear to me for the first time that it will work with music, and when I hear music that has, in fact, nothing to do with it, not specifically, but within its mood, with it, that it will work, that it can in fact be made more clear, something that I had really never guessed at, though obviously Keith had, and others too, over time... asking me if I’d ever worked with music, and me doubting it could work....

Am sitting looking out the window of the room I will be in for the next five months, or most of it, right now, out past a church steeple onto the moor, everything intensely green, intensely grey, one sunny day so far, the first I was here, and that one hot, the rest, rain and chill, chill and rain, so that I wonder why I brought what I brought.... but lots of opportunities to get whatever stuff I may happen to need at charity shops, but weird that, that so often you pack for the weather you don’t get, and yet you could....

And some profound images/ideas.... but none of them able to surface into my mind amid the busyness....

07/25
Two quiet days. Yesterday in York. Don’t know why I felt I had to go back. Don’t really like the city all that much. A lot of the “outdoor mall” feel to it. The one you find everywhere, same shops, same cafes, Body Shop, Starbuck’s, Armani, you name it. What I felt going through Europe with Lee five years ago. York, mall with half timbered houses and cathedral; Florence, mall with Michelangelo; Venice, mall with canals, etc. etc. that afflicts small cities. Big ones, Paris, Rome, New York, have it too in sections, but the urban intensity of millions of people just having to live together, changes the energy. But love the sense of over the top tourist “fun” anyway. Like growing up near Coney Island. More in seaside towns though. Climbed up to the top of York minster. Then, thought I should have just gotten on the Yorkshire Eye with the rest of the tourists.
Lot of time in the chapter house. Which I just love. What I probably went back for. And not the medieval sense of going to hell. Not really. Though there is some of that ferocity in all these people. Their noise, their silence, about the Day of Judgement and all that, pulling faces, looking fierce or sad.... but more it’s the sense of being real, of being your neighbours, so much the village, the town, and yet, as if the wider world view is not of them going to some permanent heaven or hell, but emanating into the future into now, whispering, talking, singing to us, and the canons of the Church still meeting there, led there by the Green Man, his emblems his face emanating from circles of green within the entrance way.... as if it is the Green Man who captures our mortality.... an amazing space....
Centres me here somehow....
Will go back....

07/28
And the strangest of dreams last night.... won some sort of special Caribbean holiday, or not won so much as got it for a very low rate, then turned out to be in shared accommodation, four people to a quite small room, and it was three young women, laughing gossiping, doing their hair with loud blow dryers, until I complained this was not what I had signed on for, only I was told that yes, I had, but they could get me a tent out in the courtyard, to which I consented of course. Turned out to be far away in front of another building where I noticed things were quite strange, and there were extrusions of what appeared to be raw lobster meat or eggs lying about. Then saw someone chased by a giant lobster. Only to discover that the young women were being brought there so that they could mate with the lobsters, only when giving birth to these half lobster creatures the humans died. So I went about a process of organizing rebellion, particularly against the men – and it was men – who were organizing this. Have forgotten what they got out of it though. Then, at the last of the dream, I discovered about twenty women, who had in fact survived the birth process, and were not part lobster themselves, with breasts full of sea water and fish..... but also sealike in their slowed rhythms, their silence fish blooded....
Very Aliens – but what was that about?
And then, ending the day with migraine. So maybe that’s all. Alien ocean lobster migraine. With blowdryers.
And then, finding the most wonderful old derelict house as part of the Close to the Bone, Staying on (or is it Straying From?) The Path video project. A manor house like place with outbuildings, that sense of urban decay that always moves me....

08/01
And this now just to start. At Newhouse now, the old originally mediaeval manor house in Taru’s family’s possession. One of those things to which quite the story is attached, between its mediaeval beginnings, its Jacobean, Elizabethan then Victorian additions, but also how it came into the family possession. And me staying in a room under the “priest hole”, from which there is a record of a priest being taken out and killed.

Residency seeming to be going well. Three or four projects already on the go, all of which I think will work. One free wheeling thing based on maps, in which the process will make the project, another, of course, When Bill Danced the War, which I think will be magnificent. And, I suppose, is the one I am most staked on, the most mine, but also, or perhaps more, what I’ve wanted to do since I left here five years ago. And always, when I thought of looking into doing it in Canada, wanting to do it here instead, if there was a way. And now there is.

But loving the map thing too. Stone circles, maybe.... and canals... and being completely open ended.

08/03
And yesterday a long walk with Di and Persephone Plum down by the Huddersfield Broad Canal. Don’t really know what the difference between broad and narrow really is in these cases, but there are two of them, the broad and the narrow. Somehow important to do, and will somehow mean something. At the moment, another one which is just a mix of impressions. Rural. Urban. Urban. Rural. All combined together in a way that doesn’t happen in Anglo-America, someone else remarking on that, I think at the Newhouse party, can’t quite remember. The thing about the endless megalopolis without breaks for real country that happens in particular in the States. Whereas here, it’s all mixed up together, but never the sense of endless space either. Or for that matter, the sense of order imposed from outside in not inside out, that I remarked on during the flight. Back to that sense of a land spoken for, I even said it, Everything is spoken for, I said, I think the first day, to Bob, a sense even in the plane, or more than anywhere in the plane, I don’t know.... and back to that, how the order comes over generations, centuries, millennia. Something there in Mexico too, something I say often enough, England reminds me of Mexico, as my two long term experiences with that sense of inside out ordering, though Mexico still has wider broader spaces, in terms of mountains and jungles.... and somehow, that being there on an intimate scale in the canal. Can’t wait to see what that does together with the stone circles....
But for the moment, it’s the abstract in them that I’ve loved. Landscape, but also, and this goes back to paintings I did in Mexico, the combination of the organic with the technological. But very close together, and very, in energy terms maybe, low tech. But it’s the locks, the gears to use them, their teeth, their form. And attracting me to take photos. That’s it right now, mostly photos, not writing.
And strange photos at that....

And then there’s finding a trainer floating in the canal... and remembering that piece, started here on the last residency during a workshop out in one of the outlying towns, Mirfield maybe (or some other M), during one of those exercises I’d set to right about an object (one object, one place, one time) about Lee losing his shoe in Fish Creek, one that I’d liked and didn’t know what to do with, that finally found a version that has worked its way into the Last Taxi manuscript, about how we started telling Soggy Shoe stories about where that trainer might have gone.... until “we told that shoe all the way to the Atlantic/ and across” – so I loved finding that, can pretend it’s Lee’s shoe in the Canal, though he’s more than ten years too old to really appreciate the joke... but it’s one of those things we loved to do when he was younger, make up stories in series, that shoe which I felt so good he hadn’t gone into the creek after, or the bugs.... makes me miss him.... even his young man self....

And then there’s the sense of the Yorkminster chapter house that keeps coming back. Emerging as I watched the Kelman Group work yesterday. Mostly as they worked in a door frame. A seventeenth, sixteenth, fifteenth, who knows, century doorframe here at Newhouse.
Older than Sor Juana I just thought for some reason. Older than Sor Juana....
But asking too - the doorframe being once a frame of a door onto the outside world, now part of the wall to the other unrenovated part of Newhouse, and such for at least three hundred years, and next to it, also, embedded in the wall, an ornately carved railing - and asking what that railing was, was it onto the outside too, and Bob thought yes, though Taru didn’t know, then decided it had to be it was a “dole railing”, where the poor of the parish came to receive alms.
So that’s the “on the dole” thing is it? I said. But what an amazing thing. That they had those. And such elaborate wood bars....
Think that’s the chapter house thing, that I can see some of those people as beggars some as merchants, some watching others take the dole, some taking it, with spite some, with pity or self pity others, all whispered by those emergent heads down the centuries, And how did you act and how did you act and how did you act, huhhhhh???? Which sin was yours which sin was yours which sin was yours, full still with gossip each one......

And then, to do a piece on a door frame....hmmmmm......

And thinking of the door frame of the Guadalajara hotel room. And then realizing, this room is exactly the same size and shape, but in mirror reverse. And with windows....hmmmmm....

08/05
And today, feeling truly lousy, bad diarrhea lousy, intestine emptying diarrhea lousy, making me think of the times it happens back home, and is it this rheumatoid thing, or just stress or a release therefrom and I don’t know....but quite heavy in any case, so not doing anything today, lying around, mostly outside in the garden, which is gorgeous here at Newhouse, but also inside, having just taken ibuprofen with codeine, as my hip joints ache too, so maybe as well that will slow things down codeine halting peristalsis and all that, and then, too, there’s the question of whether it’s all migraine related....
Or as Keith said, since we had prawn curry last night – Just one prawn....
And it’s Mickey’s birthday....maybe that still playing its part...

08/07
And yesterday, very good work on bill danced the war with Keith, plus the press release. Something about getting the rhythm going, makes it all seem possible, not just possible, powerful.
Fills me with a kind of joy to think it can be done. To feel it being done. Then some archival native drumming arriving on a CD so we listened to that...

Then there’s today, with the filming of Straying from the Path...first that witch’s house we found, then back over to Beaumont Park, the one I found by accident, which seemed so mysterious and menacing, down to a clavichord playing “Greensleeves” which just turned out to be the ice cream truck, because that’s what they play here....
Only this day bright...and enjoying the stop go go stop rhythm of filming anything, its strange mechanics...with Al and her rapid fire directions, and Kath having to hang out at the top of a cliff to throw her fairy tale wedding dress off so it could be filmed...and Kath standing as still as possible while Al and Di ran around her while a slowed down camera filmed...so that they could become mysterious black shadows...
And a marvellous mystery in these woods still, even without Greensleeves, or with Greensleeves demystified. For me mostly in the hanging masks...

08/11
And trying to think this morning as we’re about to take our second walk along the canal, about our first one, what it meant to take the walk we did along the canal. Only, there’s just this feeling I have that there is so much coming in that it’s having time to be digested. So found that I loved the canal, the feeling of the urban and the rural together, so that it will be important as a feeling of landscape, but not necessarily immediately, or definitely not, immediately available for narrative purposes....but visually, extraordinary, love the photos I took there, the sense of the form....like the paintings I did in Mexico. That combination of the organic and the machine. The big ones that Lupe has.

Which brings me to another topic.... Old work, and how to get it here. Or not it, its documentation. All this thinking about maps bringing me back to A Tolerable Margin of Joy, and all that work way back when. Not Mexico, Toronto. Like finding the old slides from Women Artists Together, and the piece I wrote for our performance when I never wrote at all if I could avoid it. And finding that at least for that, as in writing up the chickens performance, my voice is much the same. So strange that. And now, back to mapping, and thinking, how many was it, 32 or 36 small oval reliefs that I did in the mid seventies when I was represented by Le Cadre Gallery. And how much I loved them, some of my absolutely favourite work in fact, and now, except for the ones that were sold or given as gifts then, and the two I have in the attic in Calgary, existing simply as slides.....the rest, in the attic of the cabin we built in Ontario, I am sure, by now, eaten by porcupines....
Would be weird indeed to see what that is like, document that....especially since I’ve done so much work, even those, with found objects....though those, mostly marble chips and collage, more found objects in the later stuff, like the one at Mickey’s, with the hunters cap the old barbed wire and bones, that was shone in the Brooklyn show, almost my favourite from that series, and allowed to get so dusty, but dust and kitchen grease, that I’m not sure it can be cleaned.... but why am I going on about this....
What I was starting off thinking about was not about the reality of those reliefs with the maps tucked in, maps that moved from the extreme north to the urban areas of Toronto, in the maximum magnification those maps come in, so that individual houses can be seen, symbols are worked out for houses etc. with no particular interest in the mountains, which I might now find interesting with all the lines for increase in elevation like for the moors here, or for that time we were trying to see if we could walk overland over the continental divide to Canal Flats from Calgary, so you would know whether a trail would be easy or hard, how high the passes you would have to go through would be, but more just a fascination with the human marking of the landscape through houses and roads, and where in Canada they finally disappear as you move north, and the title and the other elements of the collage coming from that preoccupation of the time when Mark was still tiny, with what it was moved the people around us, just sitting in parks or the plainest of campgrounds sometimes on flat fields with almost no trees as we still camped in the tent on top of the landrover Tom had brought to Mexico, where we had taken it all over, and which we always regretted selling, what it was that moved people, to loving just the camp fire, the small walk by the river, each other, moved them to some kind of understanding of the place around them, how there was always something, in that remarking and remaking of space, that moved to joy. But still being also moved to joy where there was a place that human habitation ran out, and that having something to do with the old world new world, that isn’t an old world new world not really, thing, that came up in the conversation yesterday, that is back to that sense of lines of imposition not growth, as well as Keith’s sense of making place. How do you make a place, come to inhabit it? That sense of making marking and remarking....

08/12
my sense of narrative seems to be getting fulfilled in my dreams. At least here at Newhouse. Last night it started out with a long section involving being around a group of people in a hotel, including a group of young women, one of whose fathers was or seemed to be, a famous journalist, who dumped water on my computer, then when the screen came up blank, it turned out to be the wrong computer, lots of texture to the room, to the gossip, and to me trying to make myself known as a writer....
Then the second segment, around being a groom for horse races but wearing some sort of special costume, and then at the last their being a ceremony and instead of getting one with brightness and dignity getting one with little ducks.... then, as the races started, in some kind of sports demonstration, there was a game of volleyball or karate demo or some such going on and one young woman made a bad move, and was struck a killer blow by another, because the one was careless, but then it later came up whether she was killed intentionally, and some of it having to do with her working for people with different interests, different horses, and sabotaging one or another horse, and on top of it having an affair with one member of the couple she was mostly working for, first thought being that it was the husband, then the wife. And somewhere in all of this there’s me, trying to get out of my house and finding myself needing to get where I needed to be on time with a van that won’t work, or won’t be appropriately steered, and a friend finally getting it fixed, and there I am in the back with someone else driving, when the same young woman who appeared to have accidentally killed the other, leaps in, after tossing the driver out, and we start necking as the van drives itself down the sidewalk until one of us finally takes control, and all the time nervous that we will be caught by the cops or run someone over, but not doing anything to stop it....
Which is where things ended, except to note that there was a middle section, or part of the hotel section, in Brooklyn, with an older couple looking for a house in the heights and me recommending houses that were of old friends, except it was really bob and taru’s old house here, the gatehouse they rented, and all of that full of envy for the couple that could buy this giant brooklyn townhouse, and were somehow more known or something, than me, but all of it too, with a sense of nostalgia, not so much for childhood as for beginnings, early beginnings with some fifteen, twenty, twenty-five even thirty years lived and sixty ahead, and not the other way around....
And writing this all down because it seems to happen every night....and I don’t bother....but now, seeing too, plot elements from various mystery fiction things I’ve read....wondering, since I’m barely having time to do relaxation reading – or any other – but lots of thinking and thinking looking and looking....am I making up by creating plot driven narratives in my dreams? Even if I never write plot driven narratives....
And a part that I didn’t remember, remembered because of reading...that during the hotel part, when the van wouldn’t work, I had to get a coat and bought one from the hotel for eighty-five dollars....a fur coat, of a marvellous fur, some kind of sheep, gentle texture, soft, beige coloured in stripes of fur and leather, and then discovering I already had a second I hadn’t had to pay for...and then there was how lovely I thought them, but somehow regretted having to spend the money....and again, what is that about....and why does it almost seem to have the most nostalgia attached....something about Tom somehow, who was, of course, alive throughout....and this section remembered because of remembering Lee’s fox hat that Jenny tore apart the one bought in Quebec City the summer we drove out to Maine to put together the memorial for Bill and all hell broke loose, and the hat torn apart just when he would finally want it for snowboarding....and something about Tom in that, in buying that, too....but something too, logical in its loss to the dog he always wanted....

Then yesterday, there was the second canal walk....so much to think about there, and in all of this....but for the moment, we will leave the shit beds – the huge sewage management drums and beds and and and, that take up so much space at that end of the canal, and just remark on two things, one so fitting with making, marking, remaking, remarking, that was Luca at walk’s end, when we were trying to figure out what to do next time, sitting down on what had been a low stone wall after which there was no tow path going up the Calder River, and he took a piece of charcoal from where a fire had been made in a hollow place on the wall’s top, and he drew a surprisingly proportional map of where we were and where we had come from and where we would like to go....and then Plum came, and with both hands erased it all....perfect moments in the making and unmaking of human space, the known map....
And then there were the beautiful country aspects of it....or one aspect of it....Coming to a place with floating leaves, elongated like stereotypical leaves, but thick and floating like lily pads....and dragonflies coming in to rest upon the leaves or upon the water, slowing down the day the way dragonflies always do even if science says they can fly at 50k an hour....and then noticing that they were all dipping their tails in the water....and thinking, I’ve never seen that before....and Luca asking about it....and saying: They must be laying their eggs....that’s where the ovipositors are...though not at all sure I knew what I was talking about....
Then looking it up this morning on the net to find out that it’s true, that they were laying their eggs in the water or on the leaves....and strangest of all, that they were all doing it, every dragon fly in that area....and then, how many dragonflies I’ve seen....wondering at how I’ve never seen this....and, of course, trying to take photos, but doubt any are close enough to tell dragonfly from leaf....
But this time, that is the memory that stays....one of complete metamorphosis....

And maybe too, one of ironic metamorphosis....the pictures I took of the white morning glory, the one I thought had black spots, that I’d never seen one like it, so that I took the photo, and then found it wasn’t a case of having black spots, but holes, without doubt made by one or another snail or slug from this rainy summer’s profusion of them....a plain flower made an exotic one through slug action....

08/13
And another one of these great narrative dreams. This time about houses and robberies, and the ducks, ending with a rescue at sea whose financing was appealed for by Denzel Washington, and the end was to find a group of children still alive in the wreck after months even years in a self-contained world, and then, Tom was alive and we were watching a show together, and I had two houses one with a young woman staying in it, who I had placed there after one of the robberies, robberies and shipwrecks being connected, only when a bomb came into the restaurant where we were with Denzel, I couldn’t see the show and no one would move over, I refused to let the bomb explode, and went back to the other house to see the young woman who greeted me in an old shirt, and we made love....end of story....only writing this down because I keep having these weird complex dreams....so why not?
And what the hell is with the young women?? Except that I think it’s Jean before she went crazy.

Then there was telling Bob and Taru about her in the car when there was this interview with a singer who “knew the Fonz”, the interviewer would be right back to talk about her “knowing the Fonz” and I said, “Yeah, me too, I knew the Fonz....”, then clarified that I wasn’t kidding, I knew the Fonz, that Henry Winkler was in the experimental theatre group with Jean and Maro back in New York in the sixties, and that five years later she was in a mental hospital and he was in Hollywood.
And everyone joking about whether there’s a moral in that for those who still do experimental theatre.....

But something to think about too, as I do When Bill Danced the War. How even if I did do my share of making speeches...back that time with Jean and Maro and The American Pig, and for that matter Henry Winkler, it’s the only time I was ever dragged on stage in those years, at Yale, and Off-Off Broadway...to talk about how my brother was over in Vietnam, and how, when I came back from Mexico to see him off, when I told him I had the contacts to get him to Canada, he admitted to me, just as he was leaving, that he was more terrified of leaving the US than going to war...something that has seemed to me always such a quintessential American thing, that terror of elsewhere, as it seemed even then, I was in Mexico after all...and then when we did it on stage, the director of Yale drama school, famous but whose name goes by me right at the moment, he said he liked the play but thought that moment of social realism was over the top, didn’t seem very realistic to him that such a thing could happen at all....
and we’re back to that thing about how saying it really happened is no defense for not doing something well enough to make people believe you....which is why as far as I’m concerned you have to make sure people know when the unusual is true, have to say it in some self conscious way (which, of course, can be just oh, so trendily post-modern) because the failure to ring true to your audience is often enough about their failure to believe in the possibility of changing the metanarrative, which is why I open that one story “The problem with this story is that it’s true....”
And how I believe that the current preference for nonfiction is as much about the need to measure the world through documentation at a time when the master narratives are up for grabs, and therefore, why the issue of truth, or perhaps the authenticity of the voice which speaks it, back to When Bill Danced the War, is so important to me....

And then, getting ready to leave Newhouse. Going over to the new section to photograph. Taking pictures of the Medieval wattle and daub. Touching it. Moving that. Somehow, the fact of the grass, that someone kneaded that grass into that mud, that clay, or pushed the mud over it, moves somehow....more vulnerable than a work of art...and I guess it’s that....the finger prints probably still there....how this has lasted....
And what does that say about a sense of place.....

journal © copyright sarah murphy 2007