Birthday Sunflower

Through various practices in my life at the moment, I am getting better at understanding what it means to meditate - or what it means to me: going into myself, searching for the quieter tuned in side of existing. I am thinking about how this state has happened by itself in my past, and always accompanied by great creative inspiration. When that feeling of inspiration and connectedness with the world is not there, I wonder what happened.

So, I am getting better at seeing that stresses and worries, too many distractions etc. etc. are what take us away from that quiet space, but it takes experience to be able to recognise it in order to learn to prioritise it.

Which comes first - the quiet connectedness with the world or the looking? Looking - a concentrated focusing on the things in the world, probably through beauty, though I don't think beauty has a fixed meaning - I am talking about the feeling of the beautiful whereby feelings come with and cause actions from us. The inside/outside thing again, human skin as interface: do we find beauty in looking or does the beautiful find us?

These are of a sunflower that a dear friend gave me for my birthday.

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

Cornish Landscape IV

I've been meaning to continue this small project I set myself in December, to blog a series on my thoughts and experiences of (the) Cornish landscape after a trip I made there. I've had the following post in mind for over a month, and inevitably it has now changed as what seems interesting to me enough to post has changed with the subsequent delay.

The previous posts were made with the landscape still very much fresh in mind. I had been grappling with different ideas of what contemporary landscape is, and how different places present it as art. The Peter Lanyon retrospective at Tate St. Ives was fantastic and felt by far the most stimulating to me personally, out of all the art I saw there.

I'll just put down the notes that I took at the time as I think trying to render it a smooth essay would fail to retain the freshness of my response at the time.

Constructionist? Of landscape - of perceptions of landscape? History of construction. 
"impurities" -> localisation
reference
development
breakthrough
abstraction


How to integrate references (D. Dalwood)
Thought shapes - Ben Nicholson - psychology of perception


Danger and potential of abstraction


"to create complex weathered surfaces." Wall text 1952-1955
          experience of moving through a landscape - phenomenological.


Mine as the social world, sociality, monuments
"shame" in/on the landscape
Social markers within the paintings


A [symbol]? gesture/abstracted can share meanings.
The social - death, loss, shares meaning with wind, waves.
J. of anger too.


Linking the ancient throughout.
Boundaries between painting, collage and construction.
Red signs like map route-ing on top.
Integrating objects - hosepipe.
Modern materials - melted polystyrene.

It's funny putting it in italics - such an old device to indicate a different voice, a handwritten personal voice. Anyway it's appropriate here, and helps to mark the passing of time.

Looking at the notes, I see my interest in integrating a practice of art with sociality - the lives of people, their experiences, and where that crosses into a politics and practice towards flourishing lives. Lanyon painted with these issues in mind. His use of abstraction wasn't allowed to become divorced from the landscape - the abstraction was materialist, and within that landscape he directly invoked the lives of the people who inhabited and sculpted it - most obviously by painting the old tin mines of Cornwall. The black mark of this scar on the landscape was said by Lanyon to retain some of the shame of the horrors of the tin mining industry and the lives lost underground and undersea.

I don't know if painting can be said to affect sociality but it lends itself well to a kind of tacit exploration of that experience.

 

(Apologies for the poor quality, I lifted the image from the internet. Source: the arts desk)

The Sky's The Limit

Crossing the bridge this morning I watched a small gull swoop down from on high, loitering slightly over the surface of the Thames, flying artfully -twist- playfully.

I thought about how that must feel, and I thought that the bird was my outer limits of experience, taking me flying while I sit in the bus.

I want to revive the ancient art of augury. (Maybe not the bit about entrails though).

Last Batches of Bodmin #4

Finally:

Moorhen Blues

The sound of a moorhen crying from the other side of the river during my run this morning was a jolt. It was the sound of an animal communicating in a language I will never understand. It was a very lonely feeling.

I also saw a giant fish leap out of the water.

Observations #3

Ach Thoughts.

I am deliberating over how much word I want to put on the blog. For the sake of visitors I tend to think pictures and minimal writing is enough; sometimes though I am in the mood to talk.

I just went off on one with an opinion on someone else's blog:

Jane McCoy's post brushing off the chips

I read myself in your excellent blogpost, not just in the persona but in the analysing it after. I've spent good hours negotiating the 'show myself/hide myself' dichotemy and thought I might share some thoughts with you (if you don't mind).

1) Coolness is always as we perceive. I have on several occasions been informed that it was me who appeared 'cool' at school despite the fact I was a nervous wreck. I am at the conclusion that everyone feels sensitive in the end, it just varies how we display it.

2) I come to the belief that there is something inherent to art-production that is about uncovering/covering or hiding/showing. It lead me to Heidegger.. blah blah and too much intellectualising later, I feel that the process of making art is experienced within us bodily as we bodily become extensions of the object we wish to manifest (or something..). Anyway, what I'm (taking too long) saying is that the negativity we experience is a crucial part of the dialectic and life and art-making - the boundaries, the retraction, assessment, etc. etc. Our abilities to be self-critical are not just psychologically the 'tortured artist' stereotype but just a necessary part of bringing something into the world. Being sensitive to it is because making art fine tunes our listening abilities precisely for this making process (and responding to the world around). If we had no doubt then we would be running ourselves and our art riot all over the world - a violent and monolithic way of making a mark. Ok, maybe I will make this into my own blog post... not sure... sorry to impose.... Keep up the good work, I like your drawings.

I have decided to re-post it here because it collates some of my thinking on this subject of disclosure, uncovering, truth, the ground of truth.. and the role of doubt in this process. Having suffered from doubt in various forms of discomfort/self abasement, it comes to me as something in the end that must be necessary. There is nothing more grounding than the continual return to making, producing, thinking, writing - even if this production is just the debris or excess of a kind of striving, aspiration.

Was writing a little recently on the violence of totality and the drive towards totalisation. I come to this from reading some discussions on the nature of knowledge (being a drive towards co-opting every 'thing' out there into the system of knowledge), and I live this through the disappointment of hearing sentences that I have somehow heard before, and before, and before... I'm not asking for pure originality (what's that?!) but instead am just recognising how homogeneous we insist on being in the name of our insertion into the world. I make a case for subtlety, listening, small things, sensitivities, taking the time to respond honestly, a commitment to letting ourselves respond.

(This last paragraph is woefully without references and steps rudely onto Derrida's toes. I will return to it as I think Derrida is right and that there is nothing really grounding beneath it all. But this is another post.... ach! thoughts!)

And More Pigeons

Yes I may be pushing up against the line between absurdity and boredom, but I am still very much in love with pigeons. It could be a little harmless anthropomorphism, it could be an attraction to their purely instinctual being. They seem to embody 'flow'. In groups their spacial awareness causes them to make evenly balanced patterns best seen from above.

And finding the odd squashed one on the road still affects me.

Derrida Drawing

Not sure if this will work but anyway...



..it's the product of the last talk on Derrida I attended at LSE, over a year ago now. I don't know if it works because the pencil is too fine really for the scan, but maybe the general idea is there - responding to the discussion with both words and doodles or free-flowing pencil marks, like automatic drawing...

Solid

Solid, a bit out there on a limb.

Thought Themes To Build On (1)

Current topics of interest:

crystalise - a moment in time, of time, a realising, the birth of a structure
revelation as disclosure, uncovering
phenomenological description vs writerly imagination
mothering, mothership, as a state and concept
facing the world with our viewfinders already configured to see according to the structures we already know
destroying structures, destroying worldviews, in order to see reality again

the experience of being absolutely structureless and out in the world
despair

rebuilding

Hermeneutics

4th June 2009

Souvlaki yoghurt round our lips, cold flat chips left neglected, perhaps my writing is nothing more than an excersize in self-deception. Effect, building a life, beer to drink.

Eleni's Dog

I passed Eleni's dog today - the stray she loves - as I was walking to the street with the minaret. It was foraging in a half moon of turf land that accidentally carries sounds like an amphitheatre and always needs its grass cut. The dog looked busy enough, with its small head perched on a big barrel body and a kind of permanent grin on its face; familiar looking wiry biscuit-coloured fur; short legs to trot around the harbour with, unkempt nails tapping on the paving. A mutt's life, that black gummy grin still hanging in the air after the dog has gone. Tourists stood nearby taking photographs of the decrepit houses crumbling above us under the sun.

I looked at the dog and remembered how Eleni had been telling me one evening about it. We were sitting on the harbour with our backs to the people and watching night creep up at us from the sea, watching as the world beneath the water's surface disappeared and the waves transformed themselves into brooding slow-moving beasts, blackening. Eleni told me about how the dog would come and sit beside her to share the view and she made the sound of the dog's sigh. And with a jolt, just like that, the two were one!

Iannis' Fishes

Iannis told me a story one evening about the fishes in the harbour. He warned me first that he had gotten this information from someone else, another friend and so could not verify it, but he felt it to be true.

He said that someone had found some fishes in the far corner of the harbour drinking rum and getting a bit rowdy one night. They were only medium size and had thought that they were safe from human eyes but the drinking had addled their brains and they had not reacted to being spotted quick enough. That's youth for you.

Mystical Tsikoudia

Am enjoying thinking about mysticism and drinking tsikoudia, Greek raki.

Some pleasant concepts that deserve more attention from me:

the occult
revelation,
revelation as truth in religion, in Heidegger
anxiety as a groundless state of fundamental truth of Being (more Heidegger)

empathy, sympathy, love, relating
relating as primary means of being-in-the-world
magic
magic from David Abram
recent advances in technology and brain science
recent advances in psychology, behavioural science
epiphany
religious ecstacy

I'm buzzing off connections in a little-bit-drunk-kind-of-way. Finished the beautiful Kazantzakis' God's Pauper today and Dermot Moran's chapter on Heidegger. Revelation as truth, revelation as beauty. Lovely.

Muted Colours

A feature on the BBC photo blog has resonated with me this morning. It is about muted colours in photography. Here in Greece we have been experiencing Summer proper and the period between 3pm and 6pm - siesta - has struck me for its muted colours too, though of a different sort to the photo I show here. Under the strength of the sun at this time it is difficult to raise our eyes as the brightness is overpowering, and in the squint the world becomes either flattened black shadow or bleached bright glare.

The two sides of the line again; the view rendered black or white, hot or cold, though both light and shadow as difficult to see into, as the other, against the other.

Siesta time here is also gloriously silent.

Indolence and Liminality

Pulled this card from the deck recently. Made me laugh.

Found myself (while) looking into a comment I read about going from A to B and thinking about liminality. It's an incredible concept, traversing such exciting explorations as drawing, anthropology, structuralism, religion, and so on. I am gathering words to stew over during my evening: empathy, criticality, indolence and liminality. I think it might be time for some new labels.

Am remembering Keats' diligent indolence.