Arts Council England Fellowship at The Word Hoard
Artist in Residence 2007
fellowship
journals
17th june - 13th august 2007
fellowship
journals
14th august - 1st september 2007
fellowship
journals
23rd september - 12th
november 2007
fellowship
journals
from 13th november 2007
12th
september 2007
M(otherboard)
still
falling through time very slowly, vast journeys around every thought, but
still in motion, it's almost hard to remember what we actually did though
talking a lot was part of all of it. but we also ventured out of photoshop
to begin collaging with hands, glue, torn paper, pastels, tissue and enlarged
photocopies of photographs from our canal walks. this was excellent, but
it was also interesting then to take digital images of these and see what
the software did to them when they were printed. the result was another
stage, as the colour range was altered and we could zoom in on parts of
the handmade collages, so there emerged a good serial process into and out
of the various meanings of digital that created a sense of perspective about
falling into place, which was what we
wanted at the outset but didn't have a clear idea how to achieve. something
about the meanings of messing about and multi-perspectival
approaches being very close together, a matter of focus. more writing
too, by dianne this time, in response to the first sets of collages.
linked serendipitously to this was our attendance at the absolutely crammed opening of the new Impressions Gallery in Bradford, where we were able to look at Liza Dracup's lovely Sharpe's Wood exhibition and feel a little encouraged about our own photographic efforts. we also managed to drink large amounts of the apparently ceaseless supply of Cava and feel great about the optimism of a new gallery opening in a city centre with lovely pink walls in the foyer.
and then, after some false starts, epically recording when bill danced the war on 11th september and all our work coming into focus, realising its form in the last take on the last day of work.
Sarah’s Journal – Seventh Installment
09/2
This day, it seems, a day without wine or thoughts....though the latter is
never really true, in fact went over both the door frames piece, and Bill,
but yes, the sense of being very laid back, very much in some other, some
different, place....at least now, by evening, earlier, the same homesickness
for the home that cannot be..
And that, of course, going into the last of the August journal yesterday,
sent off to the Word Hoard....And yesterday, there was Bob’s big 40th
surprise birthday bash....an amazing party, and then that it actually did
manage to be a surprise....
And me the surprise of the bus driver, because there was no one else on the
bus, driving me to exactly where I was going, along yet another canal....
And all of us at the Word Hoard giving Bob one of the canal drain reflection
images, framing it, and then later thinking: I hope he doesn’t think
we’re trying to say it’s all down the drain from here (which,
of course, as someone who started writing late, after fifteen years in the
visual arts I don’t think, especially as I published my first book at
41)....and then hearing him talking about how, if at this moment he were to
die, he would feel he had accomplished what he’d needed to, and that
sense of having old friends around....and thinking, no, I don’t feel
that way, because there’s always that sense of how I could plan out
forty more years of work as of tomorrow morning and I don’t have the
time, but there is the sense of, really looking at it, I have to this point
done what I’ve needed to do....and having had that at other moments
in my life....and feeling that in particular about doing When Bill Danced
the War here and now....that sense of something I always knew I had to say,
I think I’ve said this before, that it was somehow, that piece a promise
I made to him when I started writing, in fact, knew it was something he’d
told me about story that started me writing....I even remember the precise
moment, when I burst into tears over my old electric typewriter while writing
that first “Revolutionary Tourism” article I wrote in Calgary,
before my decision to leave the visual arts for three months (hah!) to write
an article on the Mexican student movement....the one that still hasn’t
been written....and what I’d just written was a paraphrase of Fidel
Castro’s 2nd Havana address, in which I said, so While that great humanity
may have said enough! (Basta! like my main character in Itzel) and started
to move, this was has eaten too much, and has burped! And why it was there
that I thought of what I owed Bill, I have no idea....
And now, looking out across the moors, practically invisible in haze, drizzle with sun and high wind going on, so that’s it’s light, cheerful – makes you want to take deep breaths for the scent of the rain – acogedor – as they say in Spanish, that sense, nothing fierce in it, makes you feel warm and welcome, grabs you and welcomes you....
And then, a long walk inside the rain that had started down by eleven this morning. With Dylan the old springer spaniel, a great dog I sometimes wind up calling Jenny, though Dyl is certainly better behaved, at least with other dogs, mellow mellow mellow would be the word, but me, of course, doing my what is over the next rise the next curve etc. etc. winding up not lost again, but in that why did I ever start up this hill when I could have gone on the flat kind of state, then walking through farmer’s fields, but that were right of ways, just hard to figure out how to use them, very English and all that, that right to roam business and that right of ways must be maintained, love it really....but still the worry of being run over by a cow like one of those lovely big horned long haired Aberdeen Angus (though more likely a sheep).
09/03
Last night the narrative dream just of the walk I took yesterday afternoon,
along the old railway cut, and then back up over a hill through woods and
fields – and no, the wrong season for daffodils.....
But somehow a plot unfolding, things hidden on the old engine turntable, along
the old line....
09/04
Waking up this morning at 6:30 directly from a dream with a horrendous cramp
in my leg, actually shouting Oh Shit, before getting up out of bed to stand
up to relieve the cramp and then to massage it out, and the dream with Lee
jumping together with friends directly from a motel balcony into a river/swimming
pool, which despite not appearing deep at all was always deep enough –
a metaphor for Lee’s life so far, in its way – and then asking
me to join them doing it and knowing I was too old and should refuse, so I
did, then went down in a very nice huipil, to discover that all the women
wore similar dresses as part of a religious ceremony, so we had to decide
what to call them, and I insisted on huipil to generalize that word, rather
than to use, say, kaftan, and then suddenly we were in a restaurant and I
had to talk to a lawyer, an old Texan, who wanted to take over the duck suit,
as the only Jim Bean (isn’t that a whiskey?) lawyer willing to do it......
And yesterday, meeting Kath, and talking about Apocalypto....and I won’t
go into that, I won’t I won’t I won’t....but a horrible
film, and the level of primitivization and disrespect for Mayan culture amazing....think
I was so mad when I saw it (which I did, of course, because of writing The
Woman Who Drove Around) that I have pages of diatribe....but I guess five
quick things:
1. Sacrifice was of kings not villagers in outlying villages
2. Cities actually have neighbourhoods, and you have to walk through them
at length to get in and out – it’s not one pyramid dead bodies
and a jungle
3. How could any group of people who hunted (and there was no sign of the
agriculture that actually sustained the Maya in the village) not know of a
very large city less than three days straight run away from them?
4. How did those guys manage to run for so long, anyway?
5. My favourite touch, the wife giving birth inside the rising water of the
cenote while awaiting rescue....
And waking up, now, closer to eight, sick to my stomach...
And this, after collages today:
The great problem of life is that you cannot unknow what you know. It is not
a joke. Nor is it simple. It is not that 2+2 = 4 which is easy enough to forget.
It is the sound of a language that cannot then be rendered once more simply
sound, no matter how beautiful. That you will never again be able to say.
Oh, Spanish, such a beautiful language. Or that the shape of a letter will
never again simply be a shape without what it signifies. So that I ask you
about this. What barrier is it that you have crossed when you look here. Or
failed to have crossed. Do you even, know what you see? Can you yet dismantle
the shape, make it other than what it is, close to what it is. Undo industry,
war, death....the fact of this place. Make it unlovely. Like my brother says:
urban history is made possible by the trap. He meant the plumber’s trap.
The elbow under your sink that will not let the sewer gas reenter your kitchen.
I mean the trap of ideology, of language. That will not let the waste of industrialization,
the death, the horror, reenter your mind. Even still. As it still goes on.
Postindustry only in your imagination. Not in the clothes you wear.
If any number whose square is a negative is an imaginary number. What then
is the square of your reflection????
That of course somehow supposed to be the drain/reflection addressing you....but
not really what I want, interesting thoughts though.
09/05
Dream: that I was on a plane, somehow through New Orleans, but destined to
overwinter in Moscow, but was stopping somewhere in Italy for the trial of
“Carlos”, who I then thought was “Carlos the Jackal”,
some sort of vaguely left but fairly nasty type, who even I might call a terrorist,
not just a guerrilla if you know what I mean, someone I would have liked by
nature, then turned out he was on the plane, and me and a woman very like
Dusty from the Morocco trip had been flirting with him, sending off little
plastic umbrellas or harpoons from little launchers, and talking with him,
etc. very dapper smallish lovely youngish man, and there were questions about
why he was being tried in Italy not “America”, and some saying
it should have been “America”, and no, why did they just get to
claim their own “war criminals” and try them when they hadn’t
even signed on to the UN treaty, and then leaving the plane at a stopover
to buy books and a coat for the Moscow winter, and running into some Chilean
friends, who informed me that this Carlos was Carlos Galindez or some such
name, a man implicated in the killing of Letelier (this is a total fiction
by the way), and here I’d been talking with him telling him about my
life and not even asking him what it was he’d done, and realizing I’d
been grilled by an expert agent, but still not wanting to recommend the death
penalty, and then the trial, where witnesses walked around a reconstructed
Chilean concentration camp in the mud and left messages under things and in
things -- as in a collage -- about what they wanted done to this man, and
me not leaving a message even though I had been invited as someone who worked
in solidarity to say something, and then talking to this guy and informing
him I had said nothing one way or the other because he had said nothing to
me, and while I knew neither Letelier nor Moffitt (think that’s the
spelling, think it’s Ronnie Moffitt) they were important to me as figures,
and I knew the Institute for Policy Studies where Moffitt worked, not because
I’d worked there but because I’d stopped there during Washington
meeting during the Anti-Vietnam War years, and that yes, I had organized against
the war, and then, why had he done it anyway, and him, because he was young
and stupid and he hadn’t told me what he’d done because he liked
me and didn’t want me to think ill of him, and me explaining this to
the Chileans, and them, especially Hugo Serpa, and Recabarren, telling me
that he was just an expert manipulator and was leading me on, and me that
I believed he should get ten years, and them, not death but yes life without
parole, if he wanted to do something useful with the rest of his life, let
him do it from jail, but no, they were not in favour of the death penalty,
and then a debate on the concept of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission
a la South Africa, which has of course never happened in Chile where impunity
reigns....and waking up somewhere in there...and oh, yes, I did get the winter
coat....
Maybe it’s all about circles. Not paths at all. Circles. Not squares.
Circles. Their magic. But also their guilt. It’s hard to explain that.
But it’s there. You get used to how people talk about them. Circles
are good. Squares are bad. But it’s to the circle we owe the damage.
And the magic. And the awe.
I’ve seen it. The canal drains. The engine pistons. The old railway
turntable. The mill stone. I am only waiting for the stone circle. Like the
medicine wheel. The one that worships the directions. The compass rose.
And the day spent working on collages. Physical collages. A lot of fun that.
Working that in between world. But leaving me thinking again. Just thinking.
In visual terms. No words. How things work together.
And this from Wikipedia on imaginary numbers:
From complex algebra, one knows that multiplying the imaginary unit quantity
"i" by itself four times will result in the number 1 (identity).
Thus, calculus can be represented by the algebraic properties of the imaginary
unit quantity (this was exploited by Charles Proteus Steinmetz).
Although Descartes originally used the term "imaginary number" to
mean what is currently meant by the term "complex number", the term
"imaginary number" today usually means a complex number with a real
part equal to 0, that is, a number of the form i y. Zero (0) is the only number
that is both real and imaginary.
Somehow imaginary numbers seeming important to the drainholes and their reflections
that I am working with....
But also, the other side, the reality, the physicality of the other side,
the pastels, the action of tearing paper...and what a pleasure it was to be
with Keith and Di in Calder Graphics today, selecting art supplies, selecting
pastels....their colour, their texture....
09/07
Last night a dream in which I had to repeatedly shoot and shoot and shoot
the same man who was busy trying to kill the women he had married or was trying
to marry. A man who seemed quite interesting on the surface. And me backed
by other men and women, though sometimes I would wind up having to shoot someone
who did not believe me about this man, and all of it wandering in the universe
of the lines of force in Keith’s collages and the dark holes in mine.
Very strange....
And Keith’s collages, lovely, lively, bright....but with a marvellous
depth of world in them, and mine, dark dark, the drain holes dark, and the
funny thing, that in the one shot where the sky shows above the wall and the
drains, it was such a damn bright day...
And thinking too, yesterday, at the Word Hoard, how I could keep working and
working and working on the collage I have made over the last couple of days,
a piece I quite like and have quite liked doing, both starting by breaking
down the square edges of the paper by tearing, all drain holes and reflections,
the building them back up with repeated images of drain holes (and keith finding
in trying to print a sheet for me of smaller images a way of repeating and
repeating the one domino image to make it become a kind of blanket weaving
wall paper bed spread hallucination of entrance and exit) until it seems to
almost be exactly, exactly, exactly, what I want, but not quite....and then
on another working with pastels on a recycled paper which has a bit of grab
and which also prints well, just seeing how the pastel pushes the space exactly
level with the picture plane, and experimenting with that, loving it, but
not knowing if the one technique wants using in the other, or if it will push
it too far into insane busyness, but loving now how it is both reflection
and motherboard, machine and organic, and thinking the stuff on imaginary
numbers, and then the impulse to make some of the holes real and mounting
the thing so that it would have holes, or even using pieces of cardboard to
bring spaces forward and back of each other in real space, and back to imaginary
numbers again, and then thinking but that spoils the sense of reflection,
especially with this imagining Magritte, What if I put blue sky in them thing,
because after all like i just said it was an incredibly blue sky day which
you would detect if you examined them in the depth of the shadows on the photos,
but which otherwise is invisible in a kind of brown grey olive eggplant mustard
(oh those colours again, like in that piece in Last Taxi) of the walls and
the drain holes of the canal, but thinking too, that could just take away
the wonderful depth that the photos gave these things, or maybe adding real
elements like dried grass or seeds, so then just thinking too, there’s
something, something small, this needs, I could spend days just watching it,
until I could do something that would make it perfect, and no one but me would
know.....
Then thinking of my piece “Perfection is a Fungus” (as is perfectionism)
and thinking about that again, the growing fungus of perfect circles.....can
I incorporate this????
Most likely I can title it (M)otherboard, maybe write in that thing about
how Zero is the only number that is both real and imaginary....I like that,
as I do the four times the imaginary is identity.....
09/08
And just to note: now trying to figure out a grant appication, what to send,
how to send it....will put notes into Last Taxi files....but always, I wind
up liking the work as I put it together, a good thing given Beth wants to
publish it, but also, the exhausted feeling that there’s a lot left
to do...
And then, answering Rosemary about what the stone circles will be like....and
this line coming into mind to compliment 0 as real and imaginary:
There is no innocence in circles....
Having something to do with what I wrote above, that making the circle the
symbol of connection, which works, except it does not answer the question:
of what kind....as in the question of gearing....
09/09
Last night a dream of Bernardine Dorn and Bill Ayers. Who knows where that
was coming from. Big adventure subtext as usual. But then, that Ayers had
died. Woke up thinking about them, and about that era, of course. But wondered
why them, I don’t think I’ve ever met Ayers, and Bernardine only
twice....
09/10
And last night it was Mike again, a combination actually of Mike and of another
old friend, and at one point having to drive with a young friend to Santa
Fe from New York, saying he would just drive overnight, and me saying, you
mean two days....solid...and then mysteries again...
09/11
And then yesterday, while recording Bill, found that Shaun had brought a bunch
of radio broadcasts, and one quoting Todd Gitlin, who has become such an America
firster and who absolutely hates Bill Ayers, and then, yesterday too, after
the dream (funny how dreams make you think of things, but maybe it’s
just all Bill, and it taking me back to that first era of political activism
when I was leaving home), talking to Keith about the Weather People in the
context of people deciding to take the most extreme and sometimes damaging
(to others as well as themselves) positions out of a kind of well meaning
blindness....but also how so many of them were the children of privilege....which,
among other things I think makes people blind to the problems of power, in
part because I think they believe they deserve it...that it is natural to
them....and that leads to paternalism and thinking you know what’s best
and reeducation and and and and....and certainly Ayers was among those people....but
also Gilbert, who’s serving the three consecutive life sentences and
who was always such a thoughtful, kind, man....my favourite in fact of all
the people on my regional SDS committee when I was organizer, and who I brought
into the organization....
And then remembering the last time I saw him, when I was going back to Mexico
after the massacre in Tlatelolco in ‘68....Good Luck, Sarah. This is
the closest we’ve ever come to sending someone off to the front....
Dreams of a woman with an allergy that meant she must abort a pregnancy...PKU,
I think it’s called phenylketonuria, something like that, but a real
syndrome that kills babies if undiscovered, don’t think it has any form
of adult onset, though I keep seeing products with allergy alerts about being
a source of phenyl something or others. But the dream concentrating on how
this young woman was about to become frighteningly ill but didn’t want
to abort the child....strange dream for today....for 9/11--
And once more going in to record Bill today in just a few minutes, also it’s
own irony.
And back now, and it all going exceptionally well, as we knew it could (but
not that it would, you never do) from yesterday, when we had a wonderful breakthrough
recording, making all of us quite high on it, in fact, then today, the
last one just doing it. All of it coming together for all of us, I think.
After the first take seemed overly strained as I was fighting a coughing fit
throughout, not just a cough but that sense that you could start coughing
and not stop, and then for the second one equipped with water and sugar free
cough candies. Funny though, as I thought before listening to it, that the
fact I was getting a cold had made my voice too flat, too inexpressive, and
instead discovered that the burr from the scratchy throat seemed to actually
add to the emotion....and then somehow the coordination with Keith and Shaun
just being on, so feeling really good about that....that this thing becomes
possible, now, and there being something really resonant about doing it today
of all days....
And remembering Mickey’s call that I still have the recording of. How
she was laughing....before the towers fell....That giggle and We’re
having a real terrorist attack....
She for sure wasn’t asking Why do they hate us so much....another quote
from Bush Shaun had yesterday...and remembering Tim just saying: If he can’t
figure that one out, he’s automatically too stupid to be president....as
if it should be on a presidential IQ test....
26th
september 2007
a marvellous wet, lost day in derbyshire, finding arbor low and the nine
ladies, very different places one from the other. overall, a big clarifying
blast from the high rainy changeable peak district weather, and the two
places so calming and full of a sense of connection, almost a sense of a
way to define place itself, because they go back so far and are so alive
in the present. or at least a kind of standard by which to judge all places,
against the sense of warmth and love in those stones, their welcoming exposure.
then to sheffield for the very first gig by army of briars and a torrential set from the great paul hession with hans-peter hiby, all at freenoise. more inspiring information and also a sense of context for our version of when bill danced the war. hopefully it'll get on at freenoise too.
and on that subject, we are getting close to a final mix of bill and working on the artwork for a cd issue of the piece, possibly by the end of october, or if not mid-november. all this still engrossing and promoting of disorientation and memory confusion: when did we do what in the intense weave of it all, and how do we reflect this in language? and a slight sense of getting lost inside our own projects, too much work to document, trying to keep everything in motion. sarah's gone to london to canada house today, so we are here catching up with ourselves.
9th
october 2007
a pause came along and inserted itself in the process while we realised
we had to catch up with our various projects and move them towards completion,
if not actually complete them. so a lot of mulling over and discussing
has taken place but a lot less new work has arisen because of this.
instead we are close to a final master of Bill and
have laid plans for falling into place that may result
in a big landscape book with a CD in the back. and the effect of visiting
arbor low is slowly percolating through our heads as a kind of filter
through which to assess the power of our work, while photographs of
its stones are suggesting all sorts of possible interpretations through
collage and Pollock-style dripping of paint. and there's writing to
edit onto them too somehow. plus we plugged in our graphics tablet to
the PC and began a new (for us) process of graffitti over images, getting
our hands into the (m)other board.
so, not exactly a rest but a kind of assessment and consolidation, to give what happens next a good focus.
Sarah’s Journal – Eighth Installment
09/17
And getting back last night to an e-mail from Danny Millstone, that Tim had
been hospitalized in emergency at Bellevue.
And just saw an e-mail from Dan coming in....to go look....
Nothing more yet....
And, of course, sleeping horribly badly last night, and all of it after a day of just feeling that something was off somewhere in my life not here.....weird how that happens....so when I saw the note that just said Tim, became really scared....but by no means as bad as it could be, I suppose, and then thinking, looking at the above....if nothing had happened I would just have put it down to that kind of general concern at being so far away.....and thought nothing of it....
Noting
too, right now when I have five minutes before going into the Word Hoard to
participate in the mixing of Bill, how I have simply stopped writing here
for almost a week, and yes, I do know why....intellectually overwhelmed really,
between Bill and Close to the Bone, and the stuff with Leila around narrative
interruption, that invitation for an exhibit, and sending her photos....and
all of it deserving commentary....and now this....maybe work on that stuff
tomorrow, get my head a little clear before Arbor Low on Wednesday....
And now, Outta here....
And just now back, not knowing if there’s any e-mail yet. But over at the Hoard, Keith mixing Bill, and all of it so strange, listening to the tape, remembering the kitchen, remembering walking along the promenade, all of it somehow so overwhelming....and such sadness right now, and knowing that it’s about Tim, though I’m very hopeful nothing is really going to happen...
This
removed from a note to Nora at West Words, the Writers Guild of Alberta newsletter....because,
besides the note from Dan, there was a note from Nora and I just accepted
doing a small article on “truth” – narrative truth, in any
case – or truth and narrative structure –
....I recognize as well that the demand for factual truth beyond a shadow
of a doubt can be a form of manipulation and intellectual coercion (as in
-- did Rigoberta Menchu lie when she said her brother was burned to death
rather than shot, being used to discredit what she said was happening in Guatemala,
when in fact what was happening in Guatemala was far worse than what she had
said or than could be documented before the worst of the civil war was over
– in other words you accuse one well known rebel person, who you charge
with being perfect, of a small lie in order to cover up the larger ones of
those in power which are used to cover up horrible circumstances, then try
to get others to not even look into the circumstances because after all that
person lied and can’t be trusted so let’s not look to see how
many people the military and paramilitaries actually burned alive....or just
killed, which turned out to be 200,000 according to the Truth Commissions,
not 35,000 as the right wing American guy said in his book accusing Rigoberta
Menchu and ohoh, I can feel myself getting going already) -- so I can find
truth and narrative a hard issue to address --
and isn’t it just so very clear why I took that loop in thought and
time out of the e-mail, as it’s not part of what I’ll address
at all.....but such an interesting topic....because the accusations against
Menchu also have made her work unteachable unless you teach the conflict around
her as well....which of course is interesting in itself, but not straightforward
at all.....
and the note from Dan just saying that Tim had taken the medicine from Emergency, and appeared coherent though tired...
And
quickly now, once more on truth but also on zero – a strange thing I
realized in reading 1491, a good but, I think, a very masculinist book: he
talks about the difference between zero and nothing, to explain how important
a concept it is, and uses the question simply of taking an average to show
what he means, how, if you don’t average in the zeros you wind up with
a false totality, a false sum, and thinking reading him, that he often does
that himself, around women among other things, that he simply discounts those
areas of endeavour that at the moment do not interest him, despite being involved
in the revindication of the complexity of the history of the Americas –
and then there is all that stuff around academics always saying that you cannot
argue from silence, which makes for a false totality again, because the unknown
is therefore discounted, and the known, however small, then stands for the
whole, despite the so-called known so often simply being an assumption, and
what that made me think of was how truth, will always be a combination of
fact and imagination, because there is always so much more unknown than known,
but it means we have to have a loyalty to fact where we can, if only because
through fact we can acknowledge, sometimes unknown to us, new possibilities....
And then thinking of mulitplying by zero and returning to nothing, and how
often we do that with what we think we know. When all we have done is multiply
by zero and now have nothing at all.....
And who knows if the above will make sense to anyone but me, except that maybe
I can expand it to make sense.....probably, as usual, by telling a story....
And then there’s that sense of multiplying not by zero but by the imaginary in the canal drains. And then, the above, truth and zero as real and imaginary. Canal drains canal drains (of which there is a great deal I need to write....)
So will throw in another piece of e-mail but this time that I did send, to remind me. This time to Leila, about narrative interruption....so different from truth and narrative arc. She’s doing an exhibit with photos covered with a scrim with words.
Must
note though first, that we can do a 12 page booklet for the CD of Bill....in
full colour....and that right now a concept for the art work is escaping me....and
continues to escape me.....
Because aesthetically and thematically I think, dark and constrained, then
I listen and I hear the resilience and I think bright and loose —
is there a happy medium? Or an unhappy one for that matter?
And
note too, in the San Mateo Victory stuff, his photos of the shipwreck, that
it went aground on an island off Korea on my birthday. April 5, 1954. Just
looked this up on the net and it was still there. A huge operation for the
Navy, over a month to refloat it, and then its continuing to be a working
vessel until, I think, ‘96. But this either brought Bill home, or he
was home. With us. With me.
And was it the story of the Korean children? The one of giving them food and
blankets. The one that got him tried for mutiny and piracy on the high seas?
Which must have happened in an American court? Maybe California? The one that
I have always said happened in port? Did it happen instead from this shipwrecked
ship? Certainly you can see the need in the faces of the children surrounding
the ship? Did it then bring into question laws of salvage and assertions that
a grounded ship really was at sea? And other things I’ll never know
– except that it seems to have brought Bill home. Or what I think of
as home. Surely Kiyo, his Japanese wife would not.
But it makes the order of the narrative in that album so different, changes the valence of its meanings (truth and narrative arc again).
And
then, there was finding the message on the back of the photo from Kiyo. The
one I have somehow almost always interpreted as a bar-girl image. So westernized,
and so gorgeous. But so, Hey sailor. And then to turn it over and see the
lipstick kiss. So brilliantly perfect. Just like her smooth English handwriting.
So that it seems to travel across time. To my beloved husband....and looking
at the pictures, seeing how happy they were. And yet, with that strange feeling,
that look of living in a fantasy, a strange upbeat postwar fantasy with its
overlay of sadness. Bill so dapper, Kiyo so fashionable, so swirly. All so
Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. Bill’s studied poses, and Kiyo’s
too. Like South Pacific. I would swear there is one picture of Bill in an
early “Hawaiian shirt”. Then thinking of the way I found all those
wonderful fifties accoutrements in his house when I went through it. Brass
shaving kits. The collection of caps. Amazing really. That sense of hope.
Makes me want to cry. And yes, use that photo album in the CD. And of course,
it’s the centre of that one piece in Duck Blind. (The book that will
use the suit over the duck decoys as a frame.....)
And then there’s tomorrow. On the moors. And you might be shutting’t’water,
off, Di says to Keith, It’s getting cold....as it is, almost to freezing.
But wish I could figure out how to do that thing with the Yorkshire ‘t’
instead of the.
09/19
And today, the trip, amazing (almost as good as strange or gorgeous that)....between
cold and rain and getting lost, the sense of place going back and back and
back....both in human time and rock time.....as if I/we could be both elsewhere
and when....and then things just shining shining....and whirring....
And the sense like a vision of moving back with the rocks....
09/21
And now, back from Sheffield and the Army of Briars + gig, and just too much
caffeine, lattes teas lattes teas again, so that I’m absolutely on edge,
and about to call Lee, see how he’s doing. Again, very beautiful last
night, three very different groups.....Army of Briars very strong, and the
last one too, with the one in middle less so, a band that either makes its
own instruments or just uses odd things like the fifties whhhooooeeeeee long
antenna radio frequency invention used in sci-fi of the time, so it was more
the show, the visuals than the music or just let’s say sound, with one
of the guys no matter what it was, long radio antennas pool cues with cymbals
attached or the guts of small music boxes using the way he played them (or
with them) to make sure his audience would never be able to think of the word
wanker in quite the same way again....makes me think that guy should head
a group called The Penile Implants....
and enough of that....
But this strange caffeine anxiety keeping me away from the slow thought I
seem to need....
So back to what I said I was going to do, might as well tuck in here the e-mails I wrote to Leila back exactly a week ago on the 14th – will leave them complete as I’m feeling too lazy or hazy or something to take out the pieces I really want, the ones I want to remember....but basically that’s about the circling again....for the blanket canal image....
Hi,
Leila--
Actually, I quite love the images with the scrim. It might take away some
of the impact [of the photo underneath], but it may also add another kind
especially if people can get close to the scrim because it will add a tactile
sense of both intimacy and distance. Think it depends on what you want. Or
maybe, in documenting the exhibit you can use the photos in a variety of ways.
In any case, I would love to participate [in the exhibit on narrative disruption].
Not quite sure with what, but maybe we can brainstorm some ideas. Some thoughts
I've had have to do with some very strange collages I've been doing using
photos with drain holes from the early industrial canals here, as well as
the ones of the locks that are on the website. Some of this might work with
the sense of the rupture of narrative with industrialization, etc. etc. etc.,
or maybe something more political like the teacher's strike in Oaxaca (have
some great ones of the tent city in the zocalo). I'll send on another e-mail
(it's easier for me to attach images through another program as they're easier
to shrink for convenience that way) attaching one more moor image, from under
a bridge, just because it's got gorgeous purple heather, and a couple of the
collages just so you can see them....but also, my favourite drain hole plus
reflections, and this marvellous weird photo that happened when, because I
wanted various sizes of hole imagery, we put together a .jpeg repeating the
images and it became a blanket. Think you'll love it, as you have that wonderful
sense of the real becoming abstract becoming tapestry....
love, and let's talk again soon....
xoxo
So here are these, a few more than I thought I would include, but they kind
of explain each other. The collage photos are not good but give an idea of
what I've been doing. Included too a couple of fireweed (called rosebay willow
herb here would you believe) growing out of an old rusted pipe along a wall
entrance way we saw just after leaving the canal. One of the great old cliches
of the organic overcoming whatever humans put in its way -- but a rather lovely
example thereof. The more I think about the idea of narrative rupture (or
perhaps its failure to do so), the more I like the idea of the image of the
drains become a blanket, to do with English canals and the making of cloth
made from cotton made by slaves kidnapped out of Africa to the Caribbean and
the kids dying in the mills which are along the canals in order to ship the
cloth and the arising union movements and whatever it is that arises and drains
away.......and and and and obviously the horrors of the interweaving of early
globalization, in other words -- what still goes on today, and which, even
interrupted (I've just been reading a book on the movement which ended the
slave trade in Britain), always seems to reweave itself into a new form.....in
any case....let me know what you think.....
xoxo
And
Leila’s answer to all this was just Wow! in the subject line, and asking
if I wanted to do something with her on photo or video become textile. Leaving
me to think about it a lot. Such that I began composing something in my mind
last week, then looked at the stuff with Close to the Bone, and started to
write and think about my refusal of fairy tale, and then came Bill again and
trying to figure out the art work for that (as we still are), and I left it.
Something about being a simple story. With my life the opposite, either too
complex or too distracted. This is a very simple story, really. I think the
first line was. Giving me a voice and an opening paragraph. But all of it
gone now. But it will come back, I think, when my mind can really just go
there.
Because the image has such power for me. And its repetition. Becoming that
sense of the African blanket. The woven textile. The triangular trade. The
ongoing facts and numbers of globalization. So that I think you could work
computer numbers, those numbers consistently generated by computers into a
textile too. But also. Just that thing of text and textile. That textile is
a form of text, as it was in the Andes. And also the beauty of those reflections.
The sense of the shamanic entering of the water as a way of breaking through
time. So that too, it becomes a kind of seeing through consumerism to the
human net, seeing ourselves, the best of ourselves, I suppose, in time. That
there was beauty, that there is beauty, in that thing that has been made.
And the strength of that contradiction, perhaps the strongest in my life,
and that it is so strong in that image. And in that image repeated. So that
I keep coming back to it. So that I suppose it is the seeing through that
represents the disruption of the narrative of globalization. Both that it
is new and that it is good for us. That thing that we are all reflected in
that circle – in its combination of the absent and the full –
hole and whole -- and that we have to make ourselves known. So that I want
to work with that image more. With the mask that comes out in the real collage
I have been making. To expand that. And to work too with expanding that textile
image. Maybe even to make printed textiles. As part of Falling into Place.
And then too, there’s the thing about what I’ve been (we’ve
been) thinking about the art work for Bill pulling me too toward that sense
of circling. Always circling. And circling that dialogue of defeat and resilience,
finally of survival.
2pm–7 Calgary time: Did what I was waiting for. Just talked to Lee. Doing okay. Helped him order a snowboard. He’s out to Whistler in November.
Then
ended up reading about Adam Rickwood. Youngest person to die in custody here.
Secure custody. Hours after something called “nose distraction”.
Some form of tweaking, punching, kids in the nose. Guess the pain is supposed
to distract them. But not clear from what. Sounds more like angry crazy prison
guards angry at not being shown sufficient deference. Kids being inappropriately
deferential and all that.
Started thinking about what could have happened to Lee if he’s ever
fallen into a system like that. And how close he came. All those years of
facing down people who would not, and it is would not, not could not, understand
what was going on for him, or even attempt it. And that still marks him, at
least in his inability to accept how able and intelligent he is. And then
remembering my own narrow escapes from the downward spiral of trying to be
heard and not being listened to and speaking louder until you shout and that’s
called violence and then you’re restrained and then you act against
the restraints and and and.....or maybe it’s just running away.... while
those on the other side describe you as incorrigible. And then there’s
the quiet of self harm as the only way to deal with the energy. And how some,
unable to escape the spiral do manage suicide.
All makes me want to throw up. And all because I had to look it up because
there was this article and I couldn’t believe that any system would
allow a vulnerable boy, a child, accused but not convicted of anything, of
being punched in the nose (or close to it), or that any system could use such
an awful euphemism for such a particularly horrible form of corporal punishment
as “nose restraint”. But I had to know if it was true.....
Going
over photographs now. Struck by the day at the Word Hoard, with Close to the
Bone. The photos of the photocopies of the dresses. And yes, photocopies.
Taken of the cloth directly onto the machines – so weirdly intimate
– and animate.
(And yes, it was a decision to say weirdly instead of strangely....use strange
and strangely so much....goes back I think to Spanish – ¡que extraño!
– and all that. But funny, I do not mind using the same simply expletive
words – lovely, strange, wonderful, all of those – think I’m
supposed to though – but love the sense of it – the kind of –
insert sensation here, come on, you know what it is.....)
And
yes, you do know what it is....that weirdness that strangeness, those dresses....c’mon,
c’mon, y’do y’do....
But hard to get to – that thing — let me tell you....that strange
(see?) love and fear and just avoidance of the fairy tale...as if the combination
of power and insipidity in it just makes you sick, precisely like ingesting
some witches potion....but why I think we all got involved in the power of
the dresses of the cloth....
And as for me the days we’ve been writing on this stuff just coming
up with weird shit, menarche and the red of blood mickey painted in red standing
in the door of her room after her abortion....all the things that become the
fear of the flesh that are always there in fairy tales.....always something
that remarks on the body, ingesting into the body.....snow white and rose
red and all that and our professor of Medieval Spanish literature at the University
of Toronto saying with absolute security that the red rose is the red of menstrual
blood, and the white of semen.....but then, you take that, and you enforce
upon it the fact that she cannot choose, that women are still brought up to
believe that they do not choose, and you have the formula for disaster, as
if, you smell not of roses but of meat and are just waiting in the meat locker,
blood red, to be chosen.....
Yuck, and where did that come from????
09/22
Early, just a slow glow on the day. Misty out toward the moor, but that yellowish
early morning sun through mist shining over the roofs. And thinking of how
still, the narrative dreaming continues, but not so close to the surface.
So that I don’t remember them as I was before. Much more the normal
pattern of my dreaming. Except I know Bill was there last night. And Tim.
And something about the promenade. Makes me start thinking about it all again.
Feeling the weight of it. How strong it is. When Bill Danced the War, and
all I am learning from doing it. How it internalizes in my body. Even the
reading, the thinking -- the photograph album, 1491, all of it of some sort
of piece.
And
going back to wondering. Thinking of that image of the kiss again. Back to
whatever did happen to Kiyo? And did they stay in touch? At all? Or did he
just not come back? And what could that have meant? And somewhere do I have
a Japanese half brother or sister? And did Bill ever go to see her again?
And was he on his way back to her when he just happened to stop in Montero’s
and met Mickey? And me again.
And then thinking: would he have been better off. No more Mickey. Never any
Mariam. Maybe. But I wouldn’t have been. And maybe that’s enough.
And suddenly the conviction, enough to say it here: I have been a good daughter.
And still, so much about Bill I need to write about. Renewing confidence in Duck Blind.
Keith wants to use the cover of Bill’s photo album, with its oh so fifties design for the cover of the CD booklet. I’ve been imagining the stark white of the page of Kiyo’s kiss with its sepia edges and bright pink mouth, plus collage behind, Nagasaki, what? that explains it. The last thing you want is someone thinking the CD’s an album of sentimental sailors songs to the gal he left behind. So maybe the photo album is right. As it generalizes things more. Can work with the photos of the imagination, not just of the real album. Works better perhaps. We’ll see.
And thinking too, in that sudden image in my mind of Bill’s house. The ‘46 pickup, the American eagles, that brass instrument that measures the heel of a boat embedded on the house front. Maybe what I like in the wonderful warmth of Keith’s playing, the warmth sometimes in my voice, in the recording, the warmth even sometimes in the rhythms Shaun works with, though that seems the most bleak, but that struggle of the warmth with the bleakness of what is going on, is that it seems to shelter Bill. Like giving him back all those blankets he must have given those kids.....
And
thinking suddenly of Bill Conroy [Bill’s friend the decoy carver] as
another one of Bill’s poor dumb sons of bitches, who came to see what
he was up against. When he saw that the first “man” he killed,
who helped kill 85 out of the 100 men he went into the jungles of Vietnam
with, was just a twelve year old kid. With photos of his family in his pockets.
And telling me he thought of taking them. Not as a souvenir of conquest. But
to try to understand the meaning of what he’d done. If it could tell
him anything of why he was there. Why they were all there. Why most of the
men (kids again really, he was eighteen) he came there with were dead. And
then for him the consequences of exposure to the chemicals of defoliation.
The leukemia he had. At least that’s always what he said he thought
it was....
And always, what about the consequences for the others. For the Vietnamese....
And now night coming home. My fingers practically refusing the keyboard....even though I want to write more about that....will leave it....
And tomorrow. Lucero’s birthday.
journal © copyright sarah murphy 2007
