Seeing Swifts

Common sense and a sense of humour are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humour is just common sense, dancing.

William James

14 July 2014

Watching swifts far above me, against a hazy blue sky. It is early morning and this blue sky is a sign of a beautiful day to come.

Swifts, tumbling, soaring. Their flight is elating. They fly so high that they come in and out of my range of vision, sometimes they're there, sometimes they're not. Tiny tumbling black spots in my eye. When they're closer I can see the crescent arc of their wings.

When they're gone my eyes are searching and the tiny shapes of stuff on my eye and the imaginary residue of stuff in my eye and on my brain become visible in the searching, against a blue sky. Barely discernible shapes and fuzzy motions that I may or may not have invented. Tiny shapes moving in my eyes, tumbling and elating in their freedom and flight, and the flight of the swifts blur with my own looking – all that activity. Swifts of and in my eyes, my flight with them.

There's nothing passive about seeing.

home space

There's been a process unfolding within and around me, as I adjust to having a new home, and fill it physically and psychically.
Encouraged by a lovely compliment from Rita Evans - I begin to let more of the fruits of this process appear on here.
I have felt as if my home space has become the outer limits of my psyche, and within these walls all is creativity and play. To take it beyond these walls is to make it something else, but that's ok, I have encouragement.

(below) Shapes intersecting, things intersecting as they are in this particular moment.

Chillies and umbrella 

and bananas and daffodils

colour connections

and sunshine

a kind of writing

discarded yarn, like a kind of writing:




 yarn and inner tube... lines of the week's activity

Cornwall 2012

 

Small Interventions

We are having a very wet summer.

I am thinking about nature again, and about small things, and about Richard Long's work, and about attention to that which is at hand and the non-exceptional. I am also learning about light levels with my macro lens.

Oracle/Soap Dish*

*Perhaps each one of these should have a title that refers to something 'culturally produced', like, Oracle, or, Soap Dish. I'm thinking about the language of titles and what that makes of an image, or brings to the image. The relationship of nouns to phenomena. What comes first, the noun or the thing?

Nebulae/Paperback

Closet/Electrical Device

Participant/Car Seat

Rushes/Flight Attendant

Howler/Sweeties

Wharf/Beach Ball

Mammal/Safety Cover

Island/Petal

Vestibule/Coat

Packet/Surface

Getting Into Natural History

I've been away, and pondering on this notion of natural history (since I'm writing a thesis on Adorno's take on it). A new found fascination for animal classification and the natural world as object of study is burgeoning, though these pictures don't really reflect that as they are still very romantic and I'm not sure they pull off any convincing scientific objectivity. Wow, without even trying the dualism/opposition is set up! It's not a dualism that I'm interested in - the affirmation of an opposition between subjective and scientific ways of seeing the natural world. It's the entwinement of the two that is interesting, triggering thoughts on culture/nature as one and semiotics. 

I'm thinking to keep and collect the references to NH and animals... see what they grow into. Reading Afterall today, I was enjoying this article by Francis McKee on Minerva Cuevas: Anarchy in the Hive, with its introductory discussion of a cultural tradition of anthropomorphism being replaced by science, which does of course mean that science has retained something of the function of the old anthropomorphism to society, whatever that was.