Work Lines III (continuous update)

Edward Abbey

Mugabe and the White African, Channel 4

The fold of one 'half' over the other - a geological fold, physical land based in my imagination.
The camera, we/I moves from the partition (head on) between the halves and takes the dominant's side.
Woman is folded over,
unseen unheard from beneath Man's enfoldment.
Man seeks/achieves transcendence by overcoming Woman (animal) - Woman seeks transcendence by overcoming her animality. Again, Man's viewpoint - Woman nothing more than animal. To what extent is our language of this talk contributing to this understanding?
Language - rational, of man's domain?
Where is Woman subsumed? Within language?
Investigate animality.

The difference between knowing something through language and learning something through experience.
Investing the material with the spiritual - sacred earth vs. sacred thought, sacred feeling, sacred energy.
The feeling of fabric against skin - erotic, not because it fits idea of the erotic.
The moment of realisation - crystallisation, condensement, reification of new reality where the elements/conditions rearranged.

Division between sensible and conceptual/Idea - how this translates into 'eco', Natural, concepts of.

"The proper test is not that of finality, but of progress."
A.N. Whitehead, Process and Reality, Free Press corrected edition, p14

Quite nice having only limited powers of perception or sensitivity to things. Less responsibility to the chains of effect that lead out of every event, moment, thing.

Sensitivity: to take on - suffer - great imprints from things; to be impressed upon in great depth and length by the imprint of things.
- Not only prone to being hurt.

How do you make a structure? How do you make a visual representation of a structure?
Doomed to fail.
Francis Alÿs a structuralist - the pictures, the walking. Re-inscribing structure(s).

A painting reduces all elements, conditions, to an equality of substance and makes possible the re-rendering of both visible and invisible components on this new plane, for the ready communication of this portrayal and recreation within this new plane's substance.
The absurdity of trying to represent, make real/sensible structures, that are inherently non-representable. Or even just obscured too much for us to recognise this structual form. If it exists, visibly/sensibly or not, can we re-present it in sensible form?
By attempting, Man exercises his capacity for freedom and action and the right to transcend it, change it, have control of his destination.

Continuity? Consistency?

I haven't posted for three months. The lack of continuity bothers me, but I don't necessarily think inspiration should be forced. My main reasoning was that I haven't had easy internet access. And when studying I think things are going in rather than coming out. Now I'm wandering if I'll start to produce again...

I started this blog last year when I was still in Crete, and it amazes me now how far away that world seems. I miss all the creative activity and the great openness I felt. England, the winter, the loss of light, and work work work have dampened me somewhat. I still hold aloft the ideal of that wonderful sense of inspiration again.

Is this an end post, a new beginning post or just a stop gap?

Snatched London in the Autumn

Some quick randoms...

Docklands

Yesterday I went on an excursion to London's Docklands.


Thames and ancient sewer brickwork:




Thames and the disturbance from a passing boat:




Quite different from Crete's Sea

Found on the Other Side of a 'To Do' List

Horror of groundlessness, of the reset button, of losing yourself in the attempt to uncover that elusive something worth believing in.
The reset button puts us back at the rawness of the experience, it sweeps away the illusions, self-fufilling structures of being that justify their own existance, the structures built to give us something to hold on to. We wipe them away and there is nothing to hide behind and the rawness of our response comes.

Observations #2

I'm getting tardy I know, but there are reasons.
Some observations recently in words:

So many birds in cages, birds singing gloriously, nailed to a crumbling wall, above the ancient woman who keeps them there.
Birds in cages outside the petshop. Chorus of competing singing and chirping to the accompaniment of terrifying Greek traffic on a tuesday morning. Birds calling to be noticed in cages.

A lone cockroach outside the supermarket. Retreating from the pavement as we pass. Returns to its position when we are gone.

A basketball court at night with the stars just visible despite the floodlight. Tall metal arms holding the hoops and their shadows falling over the court, one arm's shadow intersecting with an oilstain, interconnected, a centipede makes a quick scuttle across both and into the dark on the other side.

A rusty drain pipe protruding from the middle of a balcony four floors above us. Showering the street with soapy water. At midnight there were rivers of the stuff making inky landscapes all over our walk home.

A fish with a tail of fine silk billowing out behind it, locked in a never ending forward motion in a glass bowl. Glassy eyes that don't register me.

Market Day

Everything is a sensual feast at the moment and with it comes the urge to preserve or possess it all. I think that might need investigating - possession - a sign of the times or inheritance..? In my small way I wonder if my wish to hold on is because the date of my departure from Greece is looming ever closer.

Today C and I went to the λαϊκή ('leiki' - street market) and gawped at the amazing array of fresh produce. We talked of bringing our cameras next week to mark my final visit and try and save something of the visual experience. It was the fish that caught my eyes the most. Plump, compact, tiny bodies seemingly pushing out at their taught skin; the silver and yellow and black and blue shimmering; the shape of many of them slippery on top of each other; the death that their prettiness distracts me from until wide open jelly eyes stare me right in the face. Pools of bloody water collecting in plastic buckets under the table.

In the heat all smells are pungent, lettuces reek, parsley - fennel - celery emanate, peaches and nectarines drift down the busy corridor of humans pushing past each other, trolleys over sandled feet and body odor as normal as toothy grins and rough hands throwing bags of produce from the scales to the customer. I can let most of the noises ride past me as I don't understand much of the Greek.

There was an enormous woman in a bright red dress. Her flesh was visible underneath the thin layer, rolling, and she had no apology for it. I smile, this red is dazzling and suits the market. Mushrooms, peppers haphazardly splayed over everything, live rabbits to coo over, thyme, olives in vats, sweaty feta cheese, tomatoes tomatoes tomatoes, cucumber, cherries, potatoes, errant snails moving in their boxes. When we cleared the stalls the heat was unbearable.

Untitled #1

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.

Silver

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.

Am feeling slightly anxious about a new phenomenon I seem to have gotten myself into: deportation countdown. On Twitter I am recieving regular updates from Anselme Noumbiwa as he reaches the climax of his asylum bid to stay in the UK. It is pretty horrible and I'm at a loss to add anything here to round this entry or the story off.



Some more fish swimming together.

(found it, here are some snippets)
The Dividing Line, 2007

When I think of a line on a page, or canvas, I imagine a miniature version of myself struggling to take hold of the line with my hands. It becomes a rope, or unwieldy tentacle, of which I must wrestle off of its grounding surface. I seize it with effort and tear it from the page, pulling it up as we would rip off embedded wires, the paint encrusted nails pinging dramatically and flying off to scatter into dark corners. In my hands it is rounded and slippery with a certain life force of its own. It flexes on its own accord and takes all my might to keep it under control.

Once I have released it from the surface it becomes a journey for me to undertake. I travel the length of the cord with my hands doing the walking. The line moves between my hands like a tug of war team might hope for, the slack - the distance travelled - discarded behind, fallen and forgotten, tamed but coiled, twitching. I pull, and is it me that moves forward or the line that pushes towards me? I don’t know. There are feet, but perhaps in this imagined world they are many and don’t only stand on a base but push out in all directions to define the whole sphere of spatial extent. The journey travelled, always seen linear – A to B. This terrible three dimensional snake whips up around me carving its way through a thought space, a nowhere place.
...

Sometimes I am allowed to come back down to earth and two feet plant themselves, imaginatively, on a bank on the side of a ravine. This line has morphed into a chasm of depth, with a bottomless view, for me to look fearfully over. I am so small, and it has roared open, a hairline crack grown catastrophic. The wind blows and threatens to take me over the edge. This line is no less scary, but I am no longer wielding it; I now grip the turf and feel condors soar over currents, their beady eyes watching me on my level, indifferent to the fathoms below.

...


It should go next to one of my drawings really.

JG Ballard is dead. Last time I was in London I spent a whole afternoon reading his autobiography in the Angel branch of Waterstones, after K told me that Empire of the Sun was loosely based on his own childhood. I enjoyed his observations of post-war England: drab, exhausted. While I was reading there was a sales assistant with lots of personality making herself known in that way where a person/we/you seem to occupy far more space, physically and sonically, than might be considered appropriate for a sales assistant at work, unless I have antiquated ideas of service that is. But I think she might have been behind the display of queer titles on the mezzanine that I thought was very good.

Sorry about the Empire link, the film is amazing, haven't read the book yet, I just don't mind a bit of tacky electro every now and then.