THE ANTHOLOGY / UWE Art and Visual Culture Publication / 2020 by UWE Bristol

I have been trying to imagine a

<Chimera>.

This is an impossible task and has become more of a frustrating obsession.

I’ve given myself specific and certain limitations to this imagining exercise.

For this

must extend beyond its definition.

As most things do.

that cannot be imagined.

I am trying to imagine a

For the common definition of

<Chimera> = a

hybrid beast of other known

animals associated with Greek mythology.

So my problem is, how do I imagine something that I don’t know.

If all I can imagine is all that I know,

Then all imagination is remembering.

This thought leads me into a vacuum of confusion.

This is when I ask my friend, (who is much better at imagining than I,)

“Google,

Google replies with the same theory.

“A hybrid mythological animal.”

Bad google.

This is not what I asked for.

I am trying to imagine a

<Chimera>.

Not remember one.

In a vast virtual field I shout into the void, typing in again, praying to the algorithm gods Imagine a

Yet I doubt the transmission of my cries can be translated into an

<sound=reflect>

((<echo>))((<echo/>)) <sound/>

That would fall upon the ears of the answer I'm searching for.

[error 4O4 location could not be found]

Within my limited algorithmic reach I decide to give in, I loosen my grip on this task.

Try to imagine a

<Chimera>.

This

can be a hybrid of known forms, yet each element hybridised into a whole must become unknown.

Ah.

But at what point do the known forms become a

And when do these forms become unknown as they are digested into the

body?

And at what proximity between forms does a

manifest? Are not all forms, known and unknown, enmeshed in some way or another that could be compared to the wholeness of a singular body? Is hybridisation strictly physical or can it drift through the realm of intangible experience? Are chimerical bodies formulated and finished products, a contained system of definite bodies that can amount to a whole? At what point do we mark the beginning and end of hybridisation?

And if all this is judged by the human lifespan and the human mind, then we may be unable to recognise where each body begins and ends. For many years humans lived unaware of their bacterial inhabitants inside their own bodies, accounting for more cellular fragments than the illusioned “host”, until combining our bodies and minds into a technology that could reveal that you are less of yourself and more of the other bits you contain. Is the human being not a <Chimera>

A viscous soup of synthetic organic spiritual digital

temporal

mythological

material?

Depending on the answer to these questions, either everything could be a <Chimera>

or almost nothing could not be.

I don’t know. Let’s have a look.

Where can I find a known form that I can hybridise and test these hypotheses. I’ll ask Google.

Okay. Let’s narrow that down a bit.

mechanical

Something simple.

Okay that is not much better. More specific.

Okay that is slightly better, but still too large a sample size for any human to consume. But google can.

In the click of a button, Google evokes the power of the vast neural-network. Each pixel of data from all 4,500,000,000 results is analysed through the eyes of the machine, then like an apex predator ensnaring its prey, data is swallowed whole, regurgitated, chewed up, lumpy sticky bits, and cells stick to its teeth and tongue, and cling to its cheek, and the rest is spewed out and amalgamated, congealed into one form.

Google asks,

“is this what you were looking for?”

Ok. This is a good start.

Most humans and machines would agree that this is a dog. Some humans may even be able to recognise it as some smaller, more rounded breed of <Bernese Mountain Dog>

Although a peculiar looking one at that.

This form is not just a singular dog. Not only is it the hybridisation of all 15,900,000 images of

but it has also a complex mixture of

a body constructed through human programmed algorithms of recognition and generative efficiency in producing approximations of this specific breed of canine, one that has been produced through thousand years of natural and artificial selection, and subsequent digital documentation that has led to the body in this image.

Now let’s further this hybridisation.

I will now algorithmically merge this dog with another known form.

Humans and machines will tend to differ in opinion of what this creature is.

Though it is certainly a

as I am certain most things are, its forms still remain known.

A human can detect a known form in this image in the face of the dog. Yes, two eyes where they are expected to be, a nose between underneath, all assembled across a narrowed furry face, all according to plan there. The human is sure of this until a short glance below the dog head is an unexpectedly small rounded body and below a curious flat tail hangs, and this less furry and more feathered body perches on what could be a tree branch? A suspicious, uncanny crow perhaps that fell into this image generating swamp? A machine however (if algorithmically inclined) would be able to evaluate this and precisely state that this being contains = 0.5830078125 pixel cells

0.5 =

with a dash of

0.641=

thrown

in for good

measure.

Ah. Now that makes more sense. Now let’s add something else.

<Chimera_body/> <Insert= element>

<element=Â

<Backpack=0.9>

Though not as obviously detectable, the elements of a backpack and its synthetic materials have replaced the furry feathers of the creature. It might even have a zip. The dog is still identifiable in the face, and the posture and positioning of the body interacting with the other forms in the image suggest the remnants of the owl. Fragments of evolutionary and algorithmic, cellular pixelated debris, still vaguely detectable within a body.

So is a

only what can be visibly detected?

Is a

just an epidermal skin that can be visually picked apart, assorted and assigned value based on visibility?

The

I am trying to imagine is surely much more

complex than its exterior, is therefore harder to imagine.

What if we could visibly account for the invisible elements, such as microorganisms that are part of a body. Let’s see... <Chimera_body/> <Insert= element> <element= +

<Bacteria=0.877>

<Backpack=0.9>

Though this image of our

has

been quite drastically transformed, it has, its

metamorphosis,

become

unrecognisable,

yet

still

composition

the

forms

holds

previously generated ancestors.

While the machine may be able to determine this creature's ancestry,

similar

quite similar to

it’s

<human>

almost certainly could not look at this image and conceive any notion of a bernese mountain dog nor owl or backpack within these pixels.

And though it is bacteria that has entirely transformed this body, it is not entirely recognisable as a bacterium either. This may be instead recognised by a

<Human>

as a birds-eye view of an open teapot revealing a tea-stained small intestine.

This itself is also a

an inanimate organ-filled vessel being, experienced through the eyes of some bird who happened to

fly

overhead

across

this

bizarre scene.

Now this projected imaginings have now become absorbed into the chimeras makeup and become a part of its being.

<Chimera_body/>

<Insert= element> <element= +

<Bacteria=0.877>

<Backpack=0.9>

When a complex body is digitally subjected to

<Human>

imaginings,

it becomes irreversibly

encased in an ill fitting flesh.

The slippery anthropocentric skin has for many years been stretched through time across many beings, scapes and objects, even before digitisation, though it is technology that has rendered this unavoidably skin visible.

It is the inescapable need of the

<Human>

attempt to understand an othered

body by the observers own personal construction of misunderstood meaning and illusioned order. The evolved eye is trained to recognise and detect this logic even in absence of reason, for the brain detests an orderless vacuum.

The brain will even unconsciously fill gaps and holes in seemingly nonsensical images, forming a hallucinated whole out of scattered disparate parts and pixels. It is an evolutionary tool that detects and recognises fractured and occluded forms and reassembles them into cohesive and logical figures, in order to render an approximation of reality containing only known and understandable forms comprehensible to the subjective viewer.

This is an algorithm known as Â Â [surface interpolation=]

Surfaces and bodies are defined as ordered through systems of power, and are often interpreted through inbuilt

societal,

historical,

physical

and

mental

programming. Unordered or incongruent surfaces are rendered as dangerous and harmful, and so are reassembled or rendered unrecognisable.

With the advent of digital image generation and manipulation, bodies are increasingly more malleable, in both their extension and compression. As more organic data is translated and uploaded to the ever expanding cloud, the machine imagines bodies to be an uncertain surface that can easily be rendered more or less congruently. For this, the machine uses a similar process of imagining to that of the human. Though it is a tool developed by humans in order to extend our ability to generate imaginings, it can only approximate an already flawed human logic. This results in forms infested with wormholes and bodies that ooze out into a chaotic void between accepted and detectable reality, and so sometimes churns out images like the above or something like this.

Here the machine has attempted to imagine a

<Human>

And here you are trying to imagine it as one too.

For both the machine and the eye have automatically generated some sort of vague cognitive arrangement within the human-esque puddle of limbs, the orgy of globular protrusions branching off and melting into other similar body-ish lumps that could amount to a person/s.

The only difference is that when I ask the machine what this image contains they reply,

â&#x20AC;&#x153;I am able to determine with 90.82% certainty that this image contains the element= <Human>.â&#x20AC;?

Whilst the

<Human>

is unable to appropriately quantify their certain uncertainty.

Though they may protest and reject this image as depicting their kin, it perhaps illustrates

in a form more representative in many ways than we are able to always identify.

This image is an amalgamation of multiple forms that have existed through time and space, and have been eternally memorialised as data.

Instead of being captured as a solid, individually identifiable form, as is often the preferred mode for Â

the

<Human>

representation and recognition,

<Human>

body has been exposed as a chimerical multitudinal network

flesh

intertwined

with

environment,

movement, experience, and object. It depicts the

<Human>

as a fluid and fluctuating, social, spatiotemporal organic and digital artefact that changes over time. All illusions of consistency, and binary order have dissolved into the fleshy pixel protoplasm.

Using more input data than a

<Human>

ever could amass and retain,

the

has generated a long-exposure screenshot of expanding human digitisation.

Its algorithm reveals not only our intrinsic, multiplicate, and inconstant cyber nature, but also reflects our systems of power.

For each time I ask for

Google will reply,

Hm.

It appears the

has come to understand that this neural zoo of pale-pink, bare and bulbous, globoids, is an accurate and analogous physical representation of the <Human>Â Â

A code buried deep within transcribes <Human body/> <Surface> <elements> <skin=white> <ethnicity=european>

Here the machine has clearly replicated, albeit somewhat abstracted, the defective logic inbuilt into many minds and machines. <Human body/> <Surface> <elements> <skin=white> <ethnicity=european> <Detect=(other)> <Action=(delete)>

In these

certain surfaces have been submerged and others assimilated into its epidermis and the binary othering of accepted and unaccepted bodies is clearly reflected in these pools of pale flesh.

and

evolve alongside each other, exchanges across vast networks of organic and digital sensory systems occur. These exchanges produce multitudes of data that form multiple

imagined chimeras, each competing for

data-space, colliding at hyperspeed. The virtual space between the boundaries of known and unknown have produced a claustrophobic infinity, and has dissolved into a shapeshifting uncontainable mass.

Ah.

Here lies the chimera I am trying to imagine. Â [file located]Â

Within this volatile mass, a chimerical body of monumental expansion and contraction is gestating. An embryonic being only recently conceived through the merging of digital and organic bodies, objects and scapes.

As it develops it will require an input of more conscious, sustainable, and sensitive data in order for it to progress, and burst out as a fruitful, multiplied and open expanse. It is entirely dependent on each body it contains.

This requires that each node within the

develops an understanding of its entire potential for connectivity.

Through image reassembling lies the power of understanding. Images and imaginings can be broken down and reformed. We must hold accountability for the content we digest and the data we produce, for it can grow into an ever-consuming, destructive body. Within chaos we can find acceptance and understanding of complete rhizomatic and communal actualisation. As we begin to further merge into this growing online body, a mass cycle of constant deprogramming and reprogramming must take place.

Though as temporal and physical Â <Humans>

our chronic mortality may not allow us to be consciously present for the birth of this new being, even if we are able to advance our lifespan through new technology.

Yet in our immortalised data, we will each

become

absorbed

unimaginable final product.

into

itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s

Bibliography Brooks, M., (2017). Artificial ignorance. New Scientist. 236. 28-33. 10.1016/S0262-4079(17)31972-3. Godfrey-Smith, P. (2017) Other Minds: The Octopus and the Evolution of Intelligent Life. illustrated ed. : William Collins. Harari, Y. N., (2016) Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. : Random House. Haraway, D.J., (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. : Duke University Press. Heaven, D. (2017) Artificial Incompetence. New Scientist [online]. 236, pp. 23-30. [Accessed 2020]. Kroker, A. & Weinstein, M. A., (1994). Data Trash: The Theory of Virtual Class. s.l.:St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kroker, A., (2014). Exits to the Posthuman Future. s.l.:John Wiley & Sons, 2014. Lee, N, ed. (2016) Google It: Total Information Awareness. illustrated ed. Morozov, E., (2012). The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. s.l.:PublicAffairs. Nguyen, A., Yosinski, J. and Clune, J. (2015) Deep Neural Networks Are Easily Fooled: High Confidence Predictions For Unrecognizable Images. Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition [online]. 10 (11) [Accessed 02 February 2020]. Noble, S. U., (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. :NYU Press. Plagemann, C., Ganapathi, V., Koller, D. & Thrun, S., (2010). Real-time Identification and Localization of Body Parts from Depth Images. A nchorage, International Conference on Robotics and Automation. Priest, G., (2016). Towards Non-being: The Logic and Metaphysics of Intentionality. illustrated ed. s.l.:Oxford University Press. Ramachandran, V. S. & Rogers-Ramachandran, D., (2005). Mind the Gap - The brain, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Scientific American, 1 April. Ritts, Z., and Miessen, M. (2019) Para-platforms on the Spatial Politics of Right-wing Populism. illustrated ed. : Sternberg Press. Steyerl, H., (2017). Signal and Noise. : Verso Books. Yong, E. (2016). I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life. : Random House.

Amber Bower 15013657 AVC TEXT I have been looking at the imposition of time and the feeling of itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heavy construct in daily routines. I am interested in the commitment one has to time, the marriage between a person and timekeeping. How I approached this is by incorporating a daily task into my routine, committing to fulfilling this task each day within my studio. For 7 months and 2 days I marked moments in time on a roll of paper with black paint and a paintbrush, counting the marks each day and documenting them in a journal. The marks have become repetitive and continuous, mimicking the character of time itself. With this Lived Performance my relationship with time has changed, our daily lives come with repetitive routines, the nature of bringing my art practice into this same formula, found me becoming emotionally and physically immersed in my artwork. This year, my boyfriend went to work away, leaving us in a long distance relationship, the time we spent apart was as ubiquitous as these black marks I was making. The remnants of his presence, letters and cereal boxes, have come into my practice as a representation of the time and space between us. I have translated moments in time into marks on paper, and occasionally tattooed lines on my body, and time of separation with my partner through using objective representation to form a bastion against the vast expanses of time. I am scarred by time.

Marking Tme (2019-2020) by Amber Bower. Black Marks on white paper with acrylic paint, Photograph of an Installation where the paper is covering a living space.

X: Finished Work early today, it was stress. So they say.1 Y: So gross, I’m so sorry. Start harvesting. X: I still have the bum mentality. Some small fragments may still remain. Y: Thursday today, so only one more day of dossing about.

X: I remember you asking my goals, I just wish I could do the same for you.

Suggested per day.2.

Not yet.

Y: Probably was a load of mish mash. Variety is the spice of life. X: Hedonism is a fucking curse. Good to know. Y: What a fucking nightmare.3. You missed your alarm.4. 1.Cinnamon Chips, Harvest Morn (Best Before: 05/03/2021) 1.1. The imposition of time on the everyday bleeds through our routines and habits. As societal beings we feel it’s heavy construct4.3., the marriage between a person and time keeping is the relationship between a puppet and the puppetmaster. 1.2. Wake up, eat breakfast, brush teeth, just a part of a mirage of time. 2. Granola Golden Crunch, Quaker Oats (Best Before: Unknown) 2.1. Everyday black marks were made, over and over and over and over again2.2.. Like Time, I wanted my artwork to become a part of my everyday life. 5.1. 2.1.1. Tehching Hsieh said “Life is a life sentence; life is passing time; life is freethinking.” 2.1. 7 months and 2 days of Marking Time in my studio2..2.1. 2.2 Over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. 2.2.1. Excluding weekends, and holidays, and days I missed. 3. Letter #1 From Adam 3.1. Tracking Time is a fucking nightmare. 4. Cheerios, Nestle (Best Before: 11/2020) 4.1. Though days may vary, we are habitual beings with certain centrepoints to our lives. 4.2. With marking black lines on a roll of paper, it becomes repetitive and continous10.1.2.. Though each mark is created with the same formula, they appear differnt on the page, this mimicking the character of time. 4.3. Time weighs down on us, commitment and routine like dumbells we have to carry. 4.3.1. “Time weighs down on you like an old ambiguous dream.” (Murakami, 2002.)

X: I know I don’t verbalise or show how much you mean to me.

Y: My night thoughts would linger, I sleep a lot better now.5.

Rated by you.

In a dry, dark place.

X: Really hope you’re well and happy. Can choke if you’re unhappy. Y: I have no inherent stress to beat me.6. Love to hear your comments.5.1.1. X: My headspace has changed so much in the last two weeks. A move forward is needed. Y: Don’t really remember.7. Every single shape. X: Can you imagine? Using only the very best. 5. Letter #1 From Adam 5.1. I started dreaming about the black marks. They were so ingrained in my everyday. I thought about them constantly, talked about them and dreamt about them, I feel a loss now my commitment is over. 5.1.1. My friends would talk about them, ask about them, message me about them. 5.1.1.1. 30/09/19 - 518 Marks, Phoebe responds with a ‘heart eyes’ emoji. 5.1.1.2. 10/10/19 - 805 Marks, “Big Day” said Lewis. 5.1.1.3. 09/12/19 - 51 Marks, “Slow day darl’?” Lewis checks up again. 5.1.1.4. 01/05/20 - 283 Marks, “No way” Harry responds to the last day of my Lived Performance. 5.1.1.5. 01/05/20 - 283 Marks, “Is that the last one!!” Georgie exclaims. 5.2. Writing Letters now a days is a very rare form of communication, as it has a long time scale between replies, and we are used to the instant gratification of texts and online messaging. I was interested in the reasons for choosing thing way of communicating between Adam and I. The letters where stamps of moments in time, the moments where we wrote the letters, and our feelings then were captured in what we wrote. They can be reflected on and be insightful to small fragments of captured time. 6. Letter #1 From Adam 6.1. This mark making had a polarising effect on my mental health. It was calming to have a committing act to perform everyday, that did not swindle or change. Juxtaposing this, it in a way numbed my ability to think creatively in any other element of my practice. Now that my practice of Mark making has come to an end I feel an emptiness yet relief. 6.2. “Time steals some things, but gives us back others. Making Time our ally is the important part of our work.” (Murakami, 2017.) 6.3.1. The protagonist in Murakami’s Killing Commendatore explains whilst painting a portrait of a young girl, that with art practice comes some days of creative progression and breakthrough, but other days where there is a feeling of stand still, or even moving backwards. Both days are relevant and necessary. 7. Letter #1 From Adam 7.1. The character of Nakata in Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore cannot hold memories, as a repercussion to an accident that happened to him when he was young. With this inability to create, form or hold new memories, it becomes more apparent throughout the novel that Nakata can only live in the present day, where his idea of Time is much different and simpler than it is to most.

Y: Life isn’t all about progression.8. This advice does not have a beneficial effect. X: What a beautiful surprise.

Highlighted in bold.9.

Y: Just need to stick to a routine or something.10. Altering one of these may or may not be suitable for typical values. X: I can imagine how hard all this has been for you.

Y: It’s a beautiful day, what happened to April showers.

X: I promise I will make it up to you.11.

Y: Once again I’m sure I’ll swing back into it.

On an average adult.

Enjoy as part of this product.

Widely recycled.

Although every effort has been made.

8. Letter #1 From Adam 8.1.With performing the painting of marks everyday, it became more apparent that there was a contradiction of progression. 8.2. Flowing through the rolls of paper there is an obvious progression in the count of marks appearing on the paper. Yet, there is no progression in developing the practice. 9. Coco Pops, Kelloggs (Best Before: 27/11/2020) 9.1. The text is divided into ‘X:’, ‘Y:’, Bold Italic and Footnotes. Please read in the order you please. 9.1.1.1. Read the Text first and then the Footnotes; Alternatively read the Footnotes then the Text; Alternate to that, read ‘X:’ first then ‘Y:’ and then the Bold Italics and then the Footnotes; Opposed to that, read ‘Y:’ then the Bold Italic then ‘X:’ and then the Footnotes; You could also interject the Footnotes where they are referred to in the Text; You may want to read from the end to the beginning. It does not matter. 9.2. The idea that there is no strict structure to this piece is to imitate Time with a lack of direction. Time is fluid, and it is our commiment to time that is restrictive and holds it in a form. 9.3. In Kafka on the Shore, there is use of Bold text to interpret ‘The boy named Crow’ a character or an aspect of Kafka’s subconscience. ‘The boy named crow’ seems to be more of an idea rather than being bound to physicality. 9.3.1. This character interjects in second person, as a form of subjective outlook or adviser to Kafka. 9.3.2. With the written piece I have formed, the Bold text can be interpretted as a third character, or the conscience of either character ‘X:’ or ‘Y:’ 10. Letter #3 From Adam 10.1. The Commenatore is a characterised idea, from Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami. 10.1.1. Ideas cannot fathom time. “Time is a foreign concept to ideas.”(Murakami, 2017.) 10.1.2. A custom is a habitual practice. With custom comes the commited, the normal, the established. The commited, the normal and the established can only come to place over time. Without time, practice cannot mature into custom. 10.1.2.1. “Fair enough, where there is no time, there can be no custom.”(Murakami, 2017.) 11. Letter #2 From Adam 11.1. Being in a commitment brings comfort, but also brings a lot of room for disappointment. 11.2. When I began my Lived Performance, I thought I would be completely dedicated and it would be calming, instead it was hard and strenuous and I missed a lot of days, which brought guilt and frustration. The Time I missed became more pronounced in my memory, than the days I succeeded.

X: But truly, I really wish I could see you. We invite you to. Y: Maybe if you take your glasses off it’s us. Fortified with artificial colours. X: Still really love the painting you gave me.12.

Y: I can’ believe how good the weather’s been recently, for a whole year and a half.

X: I’ve included Kafka’s Metamorphosis, I wouldn’t recommend the ready, but I remember you wanting to.

Contributes to the maintenance.

You will find it is important to maintain.13.

Please return it, we will be please ro replace or refund. Y: Should never have been given that. Has been shown a high risk factor. X: Thank you for making me feel good about myself. 14. If you are not entirely satisfied. Y: There is an end to every tunnel. Move back 7 places. 12. Letter #2 From Adam 12.1. Artists like Tehching Hsieh and On Kawara make their practice an element of their everyday life. Though this can be true for most artists, these two in particular take it to another level where they treat their practice the same way as they treat sleeping, eating and washing. It becomes another element to their everyday practice of life. 12.1.1. One Year Performance 1980-1981, Tehching Hsieh - “All Art Comes From Life”. 12.1.2. POSTCARDS: I GOT UP 1969-1979, On Kawara. 13. Granola Golden Crunch, Quaker Oats (Best Before: Unknown), Wheat Bisks, Harvest Morn (Best Before: 04/2021) 13.1. There is a Japanese practice in Zen that consists of repetitive action in painting Ensō circles. These circles are meant to be formed from one stroke, the mind will be calm allowing the body to create. 13.1.1. Practicing this everyday and maintaining the commitment is seen to be a form of meditation, as the approach is the same, but the outcome is different, teaching one to let go of perfection.14.1. 13.1.2. The circles are never ‘corrected’ after the one stroke, as it is a capsule for a moment in Time. 14. Letter #2 From Adam 14.1. Within a relationship, we resort to the same arguments like the practicing of Ensō Circles. They are never perfected, each has a different detail, yet resembles in shape. They are circles, they are round, but they have gaps and scratches where the brush bristles hit at the surface of the paper. We practice them regularly, always the same shape. We mimic what we have already done, for the sake of the commitment.

X: Thanks for your constant support, it is slighty intelligible. Kick-starts your morning. Y: In my last attempt. Roll the dice. X: But know that it couldn’t have come at a better time.15. In the development of goodness. Y: Hope you’re swell, from the bottomest depth of my pineal gland. The reference intake advice. X: It has been helpful in realising my self-worth. Added a hint of natural flavouring. Y: Never thought I’d say that. All rights reserved.16. X: So nice to be back. Try new options.17. 15. Letter #3 From Adam 15.1. The Tall One and The Brawny One. 15.1.1. Haruki Murakami writes without a sense of Time and restriction. His magical realism doesn’t commit a prescribed chronology. 15.1.2. Kafka on the Shore depicts two Japanese World War II Soldiers who guide Kafka in the present day (some 60 years after World War II) to a Timeless World, where he is greeted by younger versions of people he knows in the ‘Real’ world, blending together different timezones. 15.1.2.1. “Time is not much of a factor here” (Murakami, 2002). 16. Coco Pops, Kelloggs (Best Before: 11/2020) 16.1. My practice has been drawn to the keeping of Time, Marking it with a notch of paint on paper, and watching the marks add up, whilst documenting the accounts into journals. 16.2. The juxtaposition of the structural time of the journals and the sporadic nature of time itself reflects on the two ideas that ive been exploring and drawing on from murakami that time can be relevant and at the same time irrelevant. Much like what is seen in his Timeless World in Kafka on the Shore. 17. Cheerios, Nestle (Best Before: 04/2020) 17.1. Commitments are a humanistic way of finding structure and balance in Time, which by itself is non-existent. 17.2. This Lived Performance of Marking Time and counting the marks was my own unecessary way of feeling connected with Time. 17.3. Using words from Cereal Boxes bring an adjacency between the commital routine of the Marking Time and the mundane routine of having breakfast each mornig.

Bibliography Harvest Morn, (Best Before: 05/03/2021). Cinnamon Chips. Harvest Morn, (Best Before: 04/2021). Wheat Bisks. Hsieh, T., 2017. [online] Tehchinghsieh.com. Available at: <https://www.tehchinghsieh.com/ doing-time> [Accessed 21 April 2020]. Kelloggs. (Best Before: 11/2020). Coco Pops. Murakami, H., 2020. Haruki Murakami. [online] Daily Routines. Available at: <https://dailyroutines.typepad.com/daily_routines/2007/07/haruki-murakami.html> [Accessed 22 May 2020]. Murakami, H., Bar, N., Dean, S. and Gabriel, P., 2005. Kafka On The Shore. London: Vintage. Murakami, H., 2020. The Running Novelist. [online] The New Yorker. Available at: <https:// www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/06/09/the-running-novelist> [Accessed 11 May 2020]. Murakami, H. and Rubin, J., 2003. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. London: Vintage. Nestle, (Best Before: 04/2020). Cheerios. Robinson, A., 2019. Letter #1. From Adam to Amber. Robinson, A., 2020. Letter #2. From Adam to Amber. Robinson, A., 2020. Letter #3. From Adam to Amber. Quaker Oats, (Best Before: Unknown). Granola Golden Crunch. Yeung, V., 2016. Time and Timelessness: A Study of Narrative Structure in Murakami Harukiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Kafka on the Shore. Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 49(1), pp.145-160.

NOTE -SPECTACLE IS READ AS “BLANK”

The Spectacle

A book exploring the parameters of ‘Spectacle’ -The Precursor to Human

The air felt thick and yeasty, like rising dough. The ground was salty and red. The smog was low and orange, and across from the land there were oceans that were vacant and blue. But there was no green. Photosynthesis hadn’t started yet, so it could not form. This red, orange, blue world was lacking. But to imagine the discovery of a new colour. How could you fathom?

It was hot and lightning cracked the weighted sky. It was like this for a long time. Still and desperately uncomfortable.

The simple cells squatted in this murky broth, just waiting for growth. Waiting for movement, for motion and for the loudness that was about to arrive.

------------HUMAN WORLD in fossilised memory

Something is happening I think you should look It pulls like a hair pulled from your throat. Something is happening I think you should look Your brain stretches forward while your feet are still. It disjoins as it travels ahead. A gap opens between your body and your mind, Something is happening I think you should look Absorption -will be what you think about when your body gets sucked in. Like when you watch wet cheerios sink into the milk of your breakfast that you left too long. Plunk. You fit quite neatly into this engulfed form. Something is happening I think you should look

Figure 1-Grand Canyon

‘Before the Grand Canyon, the body learns its true size.’[7]

Ann-Marie had never visited the Grand Canyon but it’s a poignant example of immensity and when you encounter immensity you encounter your own limits. It is known to be a monumental theatre. With it's exaggerations and multitudes -it includes such lessons. Having only experienced small things, Ann-Marie just felt small in that frustrating way. Not in the ways of feeling placed in the world. When you are exasperating that you are five and three quarters, not five. There is no smallness that leads to epiphanies. You are just quite small. If a great scale can clarify human dimensions, it also can tell you of bigger things. It’s this numinous interaction with the world that engineers the Spectacle. Even when not imposed by volume. There is an emotion of solidated smallness, which comforts. When appart of applause. Chorus to sound, a crowd can feel to be a Spectacle. To feel small in a reverberating noise, one that echoes down miles of streets. A weighted sound that can make you feel lighter. Contextualising your own life by scale, while forgetting your singular worries. Left with a bbbbbbb in your ear -let the connection fill you. --

‘Nothing succeeds like excess -Wilde’[7] Simon had been in many crowds before, concerts, bars, Rev’s, simply the commute to work can be a very crowded experience. I certainly wouldn’t distinguish them by the title of spectacle. Yet this one was different. There was purpose and movement, the crowd swelled. Like a school of fish, you were dragged in by gathered anticipation. Simon was moved by this collective form, he began to cry. It was beautiful. --

The Crowd effect It felt like rapture Or probably only what I could imagine rapure to be Imagined conceptualisation designed by my interpretations That's what it can be. Limited by what I can conceive It felt like rapture, Rapture of the freeway. It was like rhythm Hypnotic Narcotic It played all bodies A kind of order. --------Dust like bread crumbs coated the tape player. The same lazy fingerprints disturbed the surface, as someone had half hazardly tried to sweep it with heavy wrists. The cassette inside -although it had been carefully rewound with a bic pen-was struggling to play. As it sung with a crunch and the now familiar four cords, that continued to loop. This was like the memory of the event, yet not unpleasant. Loops are a reinforcing action : -It is as if, by the last note you need to check the first line. Just in case it has already been forgotten. My ears still hummed an echo of the Spectacle - its small song. A ringing in my ear. Rewind stop Play A quiet haunt

-------“I am immersed by the notion that something is happening, I think I should look” SPECTACLE -is like a tranceperhaps an event of suspension. It is not biased in its captivation, you are not a good person or a bad person for watching. It takes you regardless A foolish trance

--Why is it that when you see heads turning you also want to look, am I that much of a sheep that I just follow the rest. Or is it that beautifully taught trait of deep paranoia in missing out in life, missing seeing something that someone else got to see. -------‘Anna did not reply; she had forgotten to listen’ [5] Eyes move faster than your mind, a reflex that can be regrettable

For when in suspended animation you are victim to it.

To those who watch bodies pulled from rivers Why does the sight pull? Is it like the mud that sucks as they are dredged? Why can't you move yourself to look away? --Eyes don't always let you not look. It is a frequent mistake to believe you have control over what you see. Sometimes they choose -Trance Am I away from my body or am I only my body. Reduced Devolved. I have been swallowed. I can see out of my eyes, Hear out of my ears, But I am contained. To move my mouth would be too much to ask. To twitch my fingers would be a grievance. And to look away would be a miracle. These were the tales of Enthralment. --------Why is it that some memories like how to complete Pythagoras theorem, just disappear from our minds, as soon as we are told them- despite the upcoming assessment.

Yet other moments stick. An unfair bias but even advert jingles hold up longer than theorems. And what about intense moments: Sometimes they are so overwhelming the world drips down the walls around you and fades away. The only thing visible being the exact overwhelming thing. Other times it sticks in your mind vividly: the sound of a blue fly hitting the glass, the thin striped corduroy trousers, the feel of wool, the crumbs, the old receipts, and the other blethering things in your pocket. Utterly useless information but seared into your mind after bearing witness to Spectacle. -Spectacle has an aesthetic virtue of rareness in time and only lingers because it ends ‘I remember his holding forth to me about what an honest thing a firework was. It was so patently just an ephemeral spurt of beauty of which in a moment nothing more was left, - Iris Murdoch’[7] --

(A fantasy event with the possibility of S pectacle) The Bright Blue Meteor A Spectacle created by it’s action of falling -before then it’s just a rock. “It was 4:23 PM, in Battersea, when people first started noticing the imminent form heading towards them. A form moving so fast, that its readable speed became slowed. Like a fighter jet or bullets in movies. But before anyone could register the sight of the blue shape hurrtalling before them. It had plopped into the Thames. I expected great waves, but it was thrown at such a force that it cut through it.

Nothing more than the surface water sloshing aside, as if it were a sea creature just below the waves. And that was it. People stood with mouths open. The now unassuming sight before them, contradicting what they had all just witnessed. The only change was that the water became a couple of degrees warmer. It's bizarre that the difference between chilly and lukewarm could signify such an ammencity.Rob- “No, it’s not a S pectacle. You just made that up.” Tim- “Why do you not think these are logical. If a spectacle is what you have described it to be; unordinary, big, crowd drawing but not lasting… Does this not make this a spectacle?” Rob- “It would be, if that wasn’t so utterly inconceivable.” Tim- “Isn’t the grand canyons size and the width of the arctic's ice inconceivable until you witness it. Stop arguing and accept that this is a spectacle” ----------

Blind old man trying to experience spectacle . -I can’t describe it. It’s too difficult to explain captivation to you. --I fell back slightly as if shock could be a physical force. Lightly stumbling against the man with a cane who stood next to me on the bridge. “Did you see that?!” “Uuhhmmm no” “Oh fuck”- realisation crawled over him as he saw that he’d acccidentaly been addressing a blind man. I'm a bad person ---- “I'm so sorry.” “Most people are fools, it’s okay..” That comment would have made him feel guilty but he was occupied, eyes widening at the sight in front of him. -“Can I get past?” “What? You really don't know what's happening, do you?”, he said with raised brows that looked ready to pop off the top of his head. “No not a clue, do you want to inform me?” “Something huge just fell from the sky and just landed in the water!” “Bizzare, was it a rock?” “What? A rock ...I guess it could have been.” “......Meteorite.” “How are you so calm about this?!”

With a sighing breath -“I can’t visualise the shock, so why should I even be scared?” --------

The human experience of Death as a Spectacle ----The moment of my death looms ahead of me like the loss of my virginity did, as childbirth does. It’s very close now. I think my mouth is full of ashes, it’s like a paste pooling in my tongue as I clack it against the wet roof of my mouth. --------

There was a body like a sapling pulled from the earth. Pale and displaced, the stiff skin made the corpse look like it was carved from ivory. What a sad ornament. It was bruised like a forceps baby[2], falling loose as every bone had been unfastened. His neck faced upwards, the chin raised above the vent of his last fi ght. T he cured wound opened inward; to a dark elderberry Place.’[2] -------------------

‘Is Being of much activity’[ 1] a nd dying being the halting of activity : Perspiring- the body relaxes. Digestion slows, the heart quickens but then has to stop too. This system of movement must end. Built kinetic energy falling short in it’s release, like the short circuiting of a Panasonic Plasma. An everyday fizzle of energy.

-------Some deaths are Spectacles to crowds, to mass viewings and engagement. Other deaths just slip away.

Death is the last S pectacle. It is the last human experience we might have and therefore, it is poignant.

(back cover of book)

Debord is not relevant to this book

AFTER THE HUMAN WORLD Not to impose my imagination on you but this is the post human experience This does not hold questioning against the existence of god- please have this quarrel amongst yourself and not lay the blame entirely upon this text. He was fashioned with bones and stood up on one end. Maybe he was once human. “With ‘the vanishing present world there opens up a permanent beyond” [ 3] ,said the talking skeleton of Monty Don. “But ‘ Turkish Delight, for example, which no longer exists is something I will sorely miss.” This is an odd comment for a five thousand year old skeleton, that can no longer recall the feeling of eating and a humanity which has slipped away. This is why I question my body. My fingers trace its circumference. The only confirmation of my body is the touch of my own skin to skin, but I'm no longer certain if I’m just imagining it. It is as if skin, ‘a fragile container, no longer guaranteed the integrity of one's’[ 11] parameters. How strange, maybe it’s not there at all. :The collapse of the border between inside and outside.

I don’t remember before. I only remember waking here in this barren land with the feeling of loss heavy in the air. The days are so thin, stretched until time pours through them. ‘Yesterday, like today.’[10] - Plenty of time to muse on the meaning of absence. Maybe that’s the reason why I am here: left to ponder the emptiness. In recognition that something is missing.

The sound of humanity ending rattled in his skull (that being the only thing left inside his chalk formed head). Bit-ba -brroom A dumb sound to remain after the existance and now absance of all that noise. The sound sits on my pink tongue like a piece of gum that I am trying not to swallow. What a dumb thing to think about, from someone who has no tounge and no throat to get it caught in. It would just fall back and drop out of my spine.

I sit down, my coccyx sinking into the warm, wet, soil. A feeling that makes me question if I have shat myself. “Why couldn't I be sat on a cloud while playing a golden harp as it’s meant to be?” I look at the earth around me, at its layers of compressed geological time. What a lot of death just for this.

It’s far too wet. The mud is slick against my white bones. It feels malleable. I push and shape the wet clay with my hands, it moves as if it’s too easy to please. Perfectly complying to my pressure, just happy to buckle under me.

Hard “Why is this bit hard?” I press at it but it does not move. Hmm. Why is the ground hard just in this spot?

Curious. I use my hard carbon fingers to pierce the wet earth surrounding it. Searching for its edges, so as to grip it. I delve into the wet, one ulna and radius deep. Got it. Now grasping the only solid thing, in this forsaken world. I pull it up and out. Producing a wonderful sucking and squelching sound as it’s plucked from its hole.

It’s a book.

I wonder who wrote this devilish story that managed to exist longer than it’s race.

*Turning the book over* “Who is Debord? I guess he is not relevant.

Bibliography 1-Sterne, L. (1967) The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd. 2-Heaney, S. (1975) North. London: Faber and Faber Ltd. 3-Palmer, K. (2015) End Matter.London:Artangel and Book Works. 4-MacNeil, K. (2011) These Islands We Sing. Edinburgh: Polygon Books. 5-Bowen, E. (2012) The Death of the Heart. London: Vintage. Books. 6-Beckett, S. (2009) Endgame. London: Faber and Faber Ltd. 7-Mau, B., Rockwell, D. (2006) Spectacle. London: Phaidon Press Ltd. 8-Cambridge Dictionary (2020) Dictionary. Available from: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/spectacle [Accessed 31 March 2020]. 10-Hunter, M. (2017) The End We Start From. London: Picador. 11-Kristeva, J. (1982) Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection.University of Colombia Press. 12-The White Review (2015) Interview with Katrina Palmer. A vailable from: https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-katrina-palmer/ [Accessed 1 May 2020]. 13-Tutuola, A. (2014) The Palm-Wine Drinkard. London: Faber and Faber Ltd. Debord, G. (2012) Society of the Spectacle. Second edition. Eastbourne: Soul Bay Press. Barnes, D. (2016) Ladies Almanack. C hicago:Martino Publishing. Figure 1- WilliamNews. (2019) Water Conservation Measures Initiated at Grand Canyon.A vailable from:https://www.williamsnews.com/news/2019/oct/10/water-conservation-measures-initiated-grand-c anyon/[Accessed 16 April 2020].

Encased in Rock I forget how adamant I was that there was no more to see than the shapes on the cave wall1. We would spend hours watching shadows thrown by the flames, they were beau@ful. I would wander off into the dark, feeling the rough rockfaces, searching for something unknown; callused fingers tracing along the walls and sending debris scaDering across the cave floor. It was liveable and it was all I knew, so it was okay. There was the dark, the tunnels, the fire, the shadows on the wall and the drips of water falling from cave ceiling to floor. The drip drip dripping echoing through the tunnels, distor@ng, and warping into something terrifying. The @me between each droplet feeling like an eternity yet only las@ng a second, every silence, a violent assault on the mind2. It was constant, something dangerous, but we knew there was no risk of it changing our lives. Water weeping through the cracks and seeping into the depths. We couldn’t see it ever so slowly changing the form of our home. Stalagmites and stalac@tes forming like teeth, making the gullet of the earth uninhabitable. We never saw them slowly bi@ng down on us. For all of this, we feared water, yet we didn’t know that the cave we called home was formed by it, nor that our cave was the only one. That life down in the dark was meant to be innate, yet it felt so unnatural. I was once malleable, but forced myself into square moulds and hardened my flesh in the depths of the fire. I became the very bricks that held me back, raising walls to desperately convince myself that I couldn’t be that thing. Building them, @ghter and @ghter, taller and taller un@l my arms pressed firmly into my chest, clasped over the heart, diaphragm aching from the unrelen@ng pressure. The breaths became short, drowning in the unknown and gasping for air. I did what I was meant to, I was so sure of it. Looking up, drained eyes couldn’t see beyond this self-made cell3. It stretched so high, concealing the self from the world and the world from the self. Fingers bled from fu@le aDempts to tear a way out of this self-imposed solitary, but to no avail. They began to claw at the skin and found it so much easier to break than those biDer walls. It took the uDer darkness of being trapped in a cell, inside a cave, deep underground, to accept the vivid world others had spoken of. Constric@ng any hope of movement was the only hope to stay down there, but finally embracing the soundness of straying from the ingrained scripts, I felt water start to drip down the bricks. It smoothed their touch on the skin and granted me the space to move, the space to chisel at the mortar and bricks, cracking off chunks using the very tools I used to construct those walls. Beyond those strict barriers of my own mind and body, lay what I’d been concealing for so long. A curiosity about a forbidden world so terrifying and bright, so full of unknowns yet impossible to turn down. Of a soR warmth, nothing like the s@nging and bi@ng and crackling heat I’d felt all my life. Clambering over rocks almost unworn by human feet and stumbling out into the open to be embraced by this overwhelming newness. It was so invi@ng but it blinded me, eyes screaming for the dark they knew, a river of anxiety in the mind and caverns of dread in the stomach. Yet, now encompassed in light, there was no going back.

(LeMoine, 2020) Plato’s cave allegory taken in a modern context. I’ve further adapted it to ﬁt my own narra@ve 1

(Joseph, 2014) “Some@mes quiet is violent”

(Foucault, 1975) self-discipline within a panop@con prison

That river in the mind was the obstacle that I feared so dearly, all of the knowledge of what could happen and what could be; yet embracing that fear was my salva@on, my route to finding a myriad of colour and life and joy and possibility. Jumping into the freezing depths, and lecng the current take me to places unknown, it washed the dirt and mud and dried blood from my skin and began to heal the calluses and scars on my fingers. My gaze soRened, and I learned to relax; to breathe in soR air and gaze at the sky, floa@ng downstream in the gentle currents. To be human is to be so many things, and to be able to explore so many experiences, yet this outside world had been hidden by fear. The freedom to watch the shadows cast by the fire had been an illusion to keep us from what was real. It took pain and strength to break from it and aRer seeing something so clearly in the light of day, it becomes impossible to go back underground. I saw that life had so much diversity, when before I could only see shadow and light. It feels like a kindness to go back and tell of the world over ground, yet, once again, I’m blinded. My eyes so used to the sunshine I can’t imagine how I ever navigated that dark labyrinth with such ease, now stumbling over boulders I used to be able to see. Eventually, I see the fire, ligh@ng the grey faces of those surrounding it. I tell my great stories of the embrace of the sun on the skin and the wind in the hair and the sound of the birds4 but in their dull eyes, I become a madman. I become an anarchist, intent on making this safe, sweltering place collapse in on itself, crushing the en@re world. For if this were true, surely, we would know. We would have known for someone would have told us. “There is only the light from the fire and the shadows it casts” they say, “everybody knows that”. Yet they forget the many who have told them before and the many who have been killed for it5. I don’t know how I lived down there. The caves were a mould, and the fire, a kiln. Peoples’ childlike curiosity was replaced by fear, cas@ng them into conformity6, making them terrified of devia@ng from what was expected. If we don’t conform, the system doesn’t work. They forget that the system was built to keep them underground, heat growing so slowly they don’t no@ce un@l they become something hard and unyielding; bricks in a wall constructed to keep them segregated, so scared of falling and smashing into fragments or making the en@re wall collapse. To be what we are expected to be is so much safer, a brick in the wall. Deconstruct the harshness, learn to absorb the impact rather than shaDering and sending shrapnel flying. Staying complacent with what is known is only safe in the short run. Fed knowledge to keep us docile and seeing others purely through the prescribed lenses of hate and mistrust coerces us into rejec@ng anyone who refuses to harden in the depths of the fire7. Clay forced into a prescribed mould will either crack or break the form made to contain it8, the choice is in breaking the self or breaking the system.

(Louis Stevenson, 1994) poe@c inﬂuence on rhythm and ﬂow

(SenneD, 2013) “Thinking that you know what other people are like without knowing them”

(Foucault, 1975)

(Foucault, 1975) the idea that knowledge is locked in an in@mate rela@onship with power. Knowledge is wriDen by those in power in order to keep said power 7

(Grippo, 1980) Life, Death, Resurrec@on. Red beans germina@ng, breaking out of a lead case and scaDering across the table. Objects interac@ng and exer@ng energy on one another and crea@ng visual poetry 8

Eroded by Waves We are rivers carving into rock, the veins of the earth, keeping the world moving. Springs bubble up from the depths, joining with different streams and together, we become an unstoppable force. We alter the landscape and are a sanctuary for so much life. For now, the banks control us, limi@ng our movements. Feeling secure, they don’t no@ce us slowly ea@ng away at them. When something is so harsh and ageless, any inch of change feels cataclysmic9, yet when it’s slow and gradual, that change is leR unno@ced and unchallenged, accepted into the veins of the collec@ve consciousness10. A rock doesn’t feel a soR drop of rain, nor will it feel a thousand, but their gentle touch will slowly, slowly re-form it. Over @me, water dictates its movement, what is perceived to be weak, ea@ng away at the strong and eternal. They are opposing forces in a seemingly pointless baDle, yet the slow, steady, and persistent will triumph over the blindly confident 11. There is a power in soRness12. In such a harsh world, to be kind is an act of rebellion. When taught to harden up, showing vulnerability is seen as weakness by those who perceive themselves to be strong. Yet these people oRen shaDer under the slightest blow, the fragments tearing into those closest to them. Anything that strays from their percep@on of the world is a sugges@on of the unknown therefore terrifying, yet instead of embracing this aporia13, they reject it. To fight cruelty with soRness is to care for and protect the self while resis@ng those who preach against kindness and compassion. Be recep@ve, be open and come along for the ride. With exposure, harsh ideas can begin to soRen and mould into something new but some@mes a storm is needed to eat away at the harsh cliffs of hate14. Accept that nothing is forever, for even words cut into stone will fade in the rain. Castle ruins liDer the landscape, remnants of what once was. Some destroyed by gunpowder and force, others by the wind and the rain slowly ea@ng away at their outdated walls. These are remnants of a forgoDen world that s@ll somehow stand tall and proud. Below them, an angry sea baDling a coastline, white waves crashing onto chalk, baDering the cliff face. You decide to look away, for water is no match for rock. “This castle has stood for a thousand years” you cry “and it shall stand for a thousand more”. Your castle is built on founda@ons of hate and mistrust. Sturdy founda@ons, yes, but outdated and unsafe, not meant to withstand the receding coastline nobody saw coming. Your ancestors ignored it when they first saw the sea creeping over the horizon, and with each genera@on, you were taught that the ocean was a myth. It was nothing to worry about, but here you stand. Metres away from disaster and s@ll so sure that you’re safe. Disregarding the threat is so much easier than admicng

(Cage, 1987) As Slow As Possible

(SenneD, 2013) “The challenge is to respond to others on their own terms”

(Aesop, 1930) “Slow and steady wins the race”

(Mathis) Radical soRness

(Derrida, 1993) The concept of Aporia as an impasse or puzzlement as a state that one should feel pride in experiencing, and confusion and doubt not as dead ends but evidence of the adulthood of the mind 13

(SenneD, 2013)

the danger. You become blind with ignorance, refusing to acknowledge the cliff edge growing steadily closer to your home. You forget that when the castle was built, the coast was beyond the horizon15. Even during clement weather, the gentle waves eat away at the base of the cliff and send large sheets of white rock cascading into the water. But this isn’t a temperate summer aRernoon. You’re stuck in the middle of a storm yet s@ll claim that the sun is shining. You were raised to believe that we were nothing to fear. You underes@mated something you blindly assumed to be harmless, but now, we are a tempest surrounding your decaying castle ruin. One day soon, your castle will crumble with the chalk and be swallowed by the bellowing, swelling water below. The bricks will retreat into the sea, firing the furnace of our anger, and baDering the cliff face that held them. They will wear down each other’s jagged and scarred faces un@l they are smooth and soR. And eventually, when the seas calm and the clouds part, they will seDle into the ocean bed, finally able to rest and re-join the earth.

Submerged in Water The people I fight alongside are the most genuine and fearless I’ve ever known, so confident in being themselves aRer such a long @me of that fear dicta@ng their every move. The self so compacted and under so much pressure and heat down underground becomes so incredibly concentrated, so pure and honest that to keep it hidden is uDerly impossible. It forms something more valuable than any gemstone and with a fiercer bite than any diamond. History is wriDen through the eyes of the victor, and it’s almost @me to write our own. But there is a danger in seDling to the ocean bed to rest. Our job is not yet done, nor will it ever be. Our ideas will be covered with the sediment of those of others, becoming swallowed into the depths, and solidified in the heat of the earth over hundreds of thousands of years. Eventually, we will be brought back to the surface, only to be torn down by whatever revolu@on for freedom the people of that @me need. If we become hard, we become complacent, and we become stupid16. Keep moving, keep the waters muddy and embrace the fear that comes with looking into the unknown17. Crystal clear waters breed certainty and assurance but finding beauty in sending wisps of smoky sediment floa@ng keeps the curiosity alive. Watch it dance, dance with it. Find the possibili@es in uncertainty and explore the unfamiliar sense of unknowing, only to find more of it. Never be content with what you think you know because there is always more to learn. Without discomfort, there is no growth18, and without growth, we become stagnant and rancid. To be soR is to be adaptable, and to be adaptable is to be sustainable. Keep moving, get caught in the ocean currents. Evaporate and rain down on the earth, seep between the rock and soRen the faces of bricks holding others back. Bleed through castle walls and taunt them with the echo of our voices. The drip drip 15

(Cage, 1987) Time becomes an abstract when there is enough of it

(Foucault, 1975) Don’t become the power that restricts knowledge out of fear of losing that power

(Derrida, 1993)

(MoMa, 2010) Marina Abramović, The only way to ﬁnd ones strength is to push oneself to discomfort and vulnerability 18

drip of water on stone.

Really I must buy a pencil.

â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;And here - let us examine it tenderly, let us touch it with reverence - is the only spoil we have retrieved from all the treasures of the city, a lead pencil.â&#x20AC;&#x2122; Virginia Woolf on street haunting.

In the writing of this text I have visited/ not visited many places. Online/offline. Virtually/in reality. Read this text however you would like. Read it in an order, read the sentences in lines, read across the text, read it however you desire. Make a shortcut, cut through it, make yourself an alleyway, dwell for longer on the parts that catch your eye. This text is all edges, this text is the space past the outline, but it’s right in front of you.

Online I have walked for four and a half hours through London. Offline I have walked for an hour each day, starting and ending at my house. You don’t need instruction on how to read, you don’t need instruction on how to walk. You have the freedom to read however you would like, you can move however you would like. Mary Paterson looks at the relationship between live art and its audiences writes in her text, A Navigation Through Unbound, ‘Read this text paragraph by paragraph; and/ or line by line; and/ or one word at a time, chosen by accident.’ Although, sometimes instruction is good, if you don’t know where to start. Take Robert Macfarlane for example, his instruction for a walk is used at the beginning of Psychogeography. ‘Unfold a street map of London, place a glass, rim down, anywhere on the map, and draw round its edge. Pick up the map, go out into the city, and walk the circle, keeping as close as you can to the curve. Catch the textual run-off of the streets; the graffiti, the branded litter, the snatches of conversation. Cut for sign. Log the data stream. Be alert to the happenstance of metaphors, watch for visual rhymes, coincidences, analogies, family resembalances, the changing moods of the street. Complete the circle and the record ends. Walking makes for content: footage for footage.’ Even in the ‘space’ there is something. Perec observes, ‘There’s nothing ectoplasmic about space; it has edges, it doesn’t go off in all directions, it does all that needs to be done for railway lines to meet well short of infinity’. Just because you think of the space as the outer edges does not mean that nothing is there.

I I I I

walk. stop. wait. walk.

I live on a line that is unclear, yet I follow it unfalteringly. Trapped in the lines that I travel, I cannot deviate, it is set.

I like to take trips. Not long ones, usually only a day. Sometimes I stay for two, in an attempt to break away from the lines.

I walk in length around the harbour. Standing looking out to sea, watching big boats glide across the horizon. Mrs Booth stands next to me. We talk together for a while until a couple come around the corner, they look at me oddly.

I don’t want to be stuck on the same line like Mrs Booth I think, as I get on my train home.

But what about the paths we make for ourselves? The paths we make in our desire to live outside of these grids.

The walk from the station to my house passes me by. Before I know it I’m looking in my bag for my keys; they’re in my pocket.

In Flâneuse, Lauren Elkin says, ‘I walk because I like it. I like the rhythm of it. Walking is mapping with your feet. Walking helps me feel at home. Sometimes I walk because I have things on my mind. I walk because it confersor restores-a feeling of placeness.’ Well, I walk to get to places, I walk because I have the time, I walk to see, I walk for an hour, I walk to the shops, I walk around the block, I walk on boxing day, I walk because I like it. The description of the street is one universally understood, we have all moved in these spaces. We follow the lines laid out for us. In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, we are run through the layout of the street, ‘The parallel alignment of two series of buildings defines what is known as a street The street is a space bordered, generally on its two longest sides, by houses; the street is what separates houses from each other, and also what enables us to get from one house to another, by going either along across the street.’. This is not unfamiliar. Without even taking it in we move in the grid already set for us. Ann Carrington was commissioned to make Mrs Booth in 2009. Turner would stay with Mrs Booth when he went to Margate and they eventually lived with one another until his death. Mrs Booth stands forever looking at ‘the sea and sky beloved of Turner’. Robert Macfarlane describes desire paths as ‘freewill ways’. Paths that are made over time by the desire of the walker to wander and create their own way away from the designs and plans of the city. If you take a walk around your city or town you will start to notice them everywhere. You probably take these paths without even realising, an easy way to get home, cut across the grass and miss out the pavement.

I overhear a conversation between two women and a man in the Britannia Inn. They are sitting down for lunch and sheltering from the storm outside, having liver and bacon pie for lunch with mash, not chips.

The lifts took you up so quick my ears popped on the way and my stomach dropped on the way down…it was foggy, we couldn’t see much but we have been to the top... And the pier before the fire, have you ever been? Went to the end, I leant over and saw the wooden stilts, holding me up, over the water, played the 2p slots and went back to the hotel... I took the grandkids up the old lighthouse last summer, you can see the new one from the top, it’s very steep mind but I was determined, you know, what’s the point in visiting these places if you don’t go to the top, if you don’t go to the top, don’t go to the end, you’ve not really been, complete the circuit, earn the badge, power hums along the lines, we hum along the lines. But what if we forgot about the verticals and horizontals. Play with the space and ooo here we go, yep he ordered the pie with mash, mines just with salad.

Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities, ‘Nothing of the city touches the earth except those long flamingo legs on which it rests...’. A pier is an extension of the land, a protrusion of timber and concrete, or as Farley and Roberts put it, ‘…pieces of England stepping in to the snotgrey Irish Sea…’. You can walk out and along, getting further and further from the land, but not. Walk out into the sea, stay bone dry. Drink your hot chocolate on an incoming wave. You look through the wooden slats down into the underbelly, ‘ancient, decayed, like a beached shipwreck.’. The pier acts as a horizontal skyscraper, we look out the end on to the sea as we would look out a window onto a sprawling city scape. In Dungeness there is a lack of pier. The land simply drops off into the sea. A bench sits at the end of a long wooden walk way that takes you out to the very edge. Just because it is the end of the line does not make it any less. Power hums along the lines, Derek Jarman says, ‘…to keep the fish and chips a-frying.’ It seems to me a place of ends, a final destination, the edge of the land.

M.C Escher’s engravings have no ending, horizontals and verticals become one, you must get used to, as Perec says, ‘a state of weightlessness’ There is no end to a line, no point of completion. You move forward. The lines bend and go back on themselves.

When I return, nothing new. The buildings that stand have stood still since the 1930s. This place was not made for walking. But I persist, making my way up the busy road through the fumes and traffic, I need to get to the shops before they close. A propeller. A jet. An engine. A soft rumbling that starts in the distance and draws closer. Muting everything. Drowning out any other noise. It passes over head and the sound starts to ebb, but not before the rumbling starts again.

A line is present in the grass. A patch worn down on the hill from eager trainers. They sit on fold out chairs, lining the edge of the field. Flask in one hand, camera in the other. I stand on the hill rocking from one foot to the other. A plane goes over into land, hands go up to faces, cameras are lifted, knees bend and lift bodies upward. This repeats every minute or so. I feel as if I am a spectator to the spectating of plane spotting.

The Golden Mile is the name of the stretch of the Great West Road north of Brentford. Most of the buildings there were built in the 1930s for industry purposes, some now stand empty, others have been repurposed as studios for production companies or are used as car show rooms. No one really walks around here, unless it is to get to work or down to the canal. In 1997 Wolfgang Tillmans took to plane watching and photographed the concorde, a turbojet plane. ‘...to watch it in the air, landing or taking-off is a strange and free spectacle, a super modern anachronism and an image of desire to overcome time and distance through technology.’ To walk is to have no desire to overcome time or distance but rather to take in all that is around you. When visiting the flight path there is the feeling that the line the planes are travelling on can be seen. Lining yourself up in front of them, they arrive, one after the other. This line is made physical in the walking of the flight path, I found a blog online of a man who is an avid walker, ‘Arriving planes funnel in to a focal point near Fulham, then follow a rigid westward line across the suburbs for eight miles before touching down. Half the time they arrive on the northern runway, 27R, and half the time they arrive on the southern runway, 27L.’ In Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure, she walks the streets of London, catching glimpses into other lives. ‘Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give oneself the illusion that one is not tethered to a single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and minds of others.’ Watching the plane spotters watching the planes it is easy to become muddled in my act as a spectator, I find myself watching the planes and reacting, and watching the reactions of plane spotters react to the planes overhead.

I walk down the slope in low tide. 3 steps are visible, disappearing into the brown water. The mud either side looks as if it is in perpetual motion, sliding continuously, in deep waves, high crevices. This land is fleeting. I have only ever seen these steps twice. Only been once, and will probably never return. There is no proof of another before me, and my footprints will disappear at 23:26.

Across from me are archways. Pressed deep into the stone. Rising up up up out of the water. I imagine myself under these archways. My feet slipping and sinking into the muddy bank, hands gripping at the brick. The estuary licks at my feet, beckoning me in. Big enough for me, but not big enough for two.

High above is a bridge, ferrying people to and from the city centre. To my left and right I see bridges, some straight, some arched. Some wooden, some metal, suspended high above the water. Running, walking, cycling. Somewhere to be. I stand beneath, listening to the heavy foot fall, breathing in the smell of the low tide. The thick pervasive smell of the mud, the heady smell of fauna, warming up in the sun. Across and up, two people sit out on their balcony watching the travellers on the bridge, watching the cars go by, watching me watching them.

The surrounding area of the estuary is fleeting. The water rises up twice a day to wash away all that was before. In The Edge Of The Sea, Carson talks about the joining of the land and the sea, ‘I felt a strong sense of interchangeability of land and sea in this marginal world of the shore, and of the links between the life of the two. There was also an awareness of the past and of the continuing flow of time, obliterating much that had gone before...’. 04:53 2.86 Low Tide 11:08 9.53 High Tide 18:20 3.21 Low Tide 23:26 9.5 High Tide Estuary tides for the 22.4.20.

‘The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,’ Marco answers, but by the line of the arch that they form.’ Calvino conjures up images of majestic towering buildings, maze like cities, layers upon layers of intricate detail. It forces me to look at my own city, to search out the beauty in every stone that builds an arch, that builds a bridge.

In Patrick Keiller’s film, London, we are taken on a journey through the city. Shown shop fronts, canals, office blocks, parks, bridges. Our journey is narrated by a past lover of Robinson’s. The narrator recites Rimbauds poem The Bridges, ‘some straight, some arched, others descending at oblique angles to the first’, as we are shown foot and vehicle bridges crossing Londons Thames. Robinson is a flâneur. A person that meanders, catching the textual run-off of the street. The term flâneur was described by Baudelaire, in the 1800s, as, ‘a gentleman stroller of the streets’. Virginia Woolf called herself a ‘street haunter’ and women have used the word ‘flâneuse’, for their own version of psychogeography. This is maybe an issue for another text, to think of the women that haunt the streets, observing and taking notes...

An alleyway is a secret. Known only to the locals of the area. A small, narrow passage between the houses, between the gardens. It would not be seen unless someone was caught entering one end or appearing from another. I remember it so clearly, as if I am standing at the entrance of it. Two thirds of the way down the dead end road. Not the only alleyway out of this street but the most used. It’s about thirty metres long and about one and a half metres wide. Half-way down on both sides there is a break in the wall, a gap to chuck your rubbish in. There is always an upturned trolley or a black bin bag of clothes, lying strewn across the path.

I always look for alleyways. And I always take them. Suddenly there’s a shortcut. A cheat. I move off the map, into a secret. Slip to the edge. Not a path of my own making, but it will do.

I spent my childhood hanging around this alleyway, in the dead end street, a safe place for kids to play, no cars passing through. In Edgelands the feeling of this space is put perfectly into words, ‘We might have come up with the term ‘edgelands’ ourselves. Anyone who has spent a childhood mooching around the fringes of English towns and cities, where urban and rural negotiate and renegotiate their borders, might have come up with the word. If you know those places where overspill housing estates break into scrubland, wasteland; if you know these underdeveloped, unwatched territories, you know that they have ‘edge’. Thinking of alleyways made me think of Mark Leckey’s show at the Tate Britain in 2019/20. One day in December I spent a couple of hours, sat on a wooden floor, under a motorway bridge on the M53, in the centre of London. The feeling of nostalgia was so overwhelming. Days and nights spent hanging around with no where to go. The spaces that we can call ‘edgelands’ are spaces that people are pushed into and that are often forgotten. After the alleyway is the garage on the corner and after that is the business park and after that the retail park, all edgelands. I don’t need to be there, I can walk it in my mind. I know it like the back of my hand, which I know pretty well. In Invisible Cities, Calvino muses on how quickly the places we know so well can become simply a background image, ‘For everyone, sooner or later, the day comes when we bring our gaze down along the drainpipes and we can no longer detach it from the cobblestones.’ Search for an alleyway. Explore a place, see somewhere in a new way. Take a left. Take every alleyway you come across. Find something unexpected. Take a pencil and record what you see, what you hear, what you smell. Taking the shortcut, can often lead to a long way. It is an edgeland that is in plain site.

REFERENCES: Ann Carrington, Mrs Booth, 2009 Derek Jarman, Modern Nature, 1991 Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, 1974 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1997 Lauren Elkin, Flâneuse, 2016 Mark Leckey, O’Magic Power of Bleakness, Tate Britain 2019/20 Mary Paterson, A Navigation Through Unbound, 2009/10 Patrick Keiller, London (film), 1994 Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness, 2012 Rachel L. Carson, The Edge of the Sea, 1955 Robert Macfarlane, article-theguardian.com, 2018 Virginia Woolf, Street Haunting: A London Adventure, 1930 Wolfgang Tillmans, Concorde, 1997 4K Urban Life, youtube.com-London, Great Britan, 2019 FURTHER READING: Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography, 2018 Michael De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 1988 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust, 2001 W G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1999

HEART BLOCK bradyarrhythmia for short

When I go to the Doctors they run an ECG. We check the arrhythmia, fluttering on graph, listen on headphones as the beat continuously falls more out of pace with itself, each time greater than the last time I took care to listen to it. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t listen to it as often as I should anymore, I never find it has anything important to say. Only mutters and murmurs under itsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; breath, cursing at me for my weakness.

I need a new heart and I want one untouched. A heart is the size of a fist when you clench your hands tight and dig fingernails into palm, and I can only picture dirty nails digging into my heart, into my new heart, and how damaged it could become before I even get any use of it. All I want is a clean heart, a fresh start.

The Doctors say they can't do this, they can't promise that I'll get a fresh untouched heart when it's hard enough to get a new heart to begin with, but that's not good enough. My heart is clean and untouched, so why should I settle for one any less? I'd rather have a sick heart than a dirty one. Doctors promise me they use the best care available, the best tools, the most hygienic practice, but it's not enough.

I have been told by the doctors and the patients and people alike that I am strong for going through this.1 But I struggle with this - with this notion that a replacement is a declaration of strength as opposed to the exploitation of my own weakness. Would it even be an improvement? How can I hold this guarantee? I sign

One set of messages of the society we live in is: Consume. Grow. Do what you want. Amuse yourselves. The very working of this economic system, which has bestowed these unprecedented liberties, most cherished in the form of physical mobility and material prosperity, depends on encouraging people to defy limits.... Hence much of recent discourse about the body, reimagined as the instrument with which to enact, increasingly, various programs of self-improvement. - Susan Sontag, Illness as a Metaphor 1

the paperwork and the forms assuring me of the chances of failure, of giving up the one that’s lived and died me only to be rejected by this new, foreign heart.

I press my pen so hard on the paperwork that the ink seeps through and the fountain pen tears through the page and they have to print me new forms not once but twice, and I still feel the precision in every pen stroke pushing and testing the paper for weakness.

When I return home I continue to read papers I’ve already signed, agreements I’m already bonded to. Then I read articles online, repeating the same statistics and facts with more adjectives and less verbs. Then I read journals, adding emotions and auras to the text, turning fact into background noise. Then I read descriptions on Amazon, then I read my credit card statement, then I read the receipts for dozens more books to tell me the same few facts about heart transplants; 1) it will hurt, 2) I will never be the same, 3) that I will die. All of these things exist in the abstract, on no kind of timeline, but they are certain as well. I wish I had guarantees, a certain amount of time to mark the remains of my life by, but that’d provide too much comfort I think.2 When I return to the doctors, I feel as if I have a better grasp on the procedure than the officiant dictating the timeline to me before I swipe my card through their machine. I take my last few hours with my own heart solemnly, listening only to its weak murmurs and feeling my pulse in my neck, my wrists, my fingertips, and wondering if it’ll ever feel the same again. Before I go into the surgery I ask if I can keep it, my heart, if it can be mine once more, if I could put it

Apprehensions of Sicknes, before we can cal it a sicknes; we are not sure we are ill; one hand askes the other by the pulse. - John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions 2

in a jar and sit with it and have dinner and watch TV and get to know it better now that it’s no longer a part of me. The Doctors say they don’t know why not.

Waking up after is agony. What happened in between going in that bright white room asleep and exiting the same but patchworked together is irrelevant, I know it all, even in my sleep, and have written it over hundreds of times. This pain after is new, something you can never quite prepare for until it happens. It feels like birth, like eating dirt, like a wooden spike driven through my chest. Something foreign inside of my chest, bones barring it in to keep it from bursting forth. 3

I learn to regret what I gave up at this time, rapidly. I miss low levels of ache as opposed to this acute pain, the possible infection, rejection, sudden death and such. I miss the comfort in knowing how to define my pain. I stay another week or so with nothing to report. My life feels duller now, too preoccupied with the intense shaking in my chest, happening on and on. It keeps me from sleeping, makes it hard to eat when my hands shake so suddenly, deafens out nurses’ words as I’m too preoccupied with the thumping.

When they bring me my heart back it feels like a reunion. The two of us look so different, I, weary in my textured hospital socks with cheeks blushing from the strangeness inside me, and it, able to gaze upon me after all. I realize that in all this time, all these appointments, that I’ve had scans and diagrams and photos of it taken, while it’s never seen me at all. I wonder if it’s disappointed, to only know me physically after we’ve parted ways.

It is as if the old year is being burned out of me through fever and the new one will come in renewed, because any illness that doesn’t kill you sets you on fire and then you start over, just like that. - Anne Boyer, What Cancer Takes Away 3

I slip my sneakers over the socks, determined to take them home regardless of regulations. My heart is in a small jar about the size of my forearm, brined in some sort of solution that I can only guess is suitable. I realize how little I know about what makes my heart comfortable outside me, that I could never make another bath for it should that jar break, and I push that thought aside as I slip the jar into my inner coat pocket, pressing the cool glass into my thin t-shirt. It hurts a little, but I don’t mind, finding comfort in having my heart close again.

Once I’m home, bedrest still, awaiting a rejection of the new organ hooked up to my veins, I find myself carrying my heart everywhere with me. 4 To the kitchen, to my bed, and to the bathroom, the bed again. My days are mostly spent in this cycle, so I suppose to carry it everywhere isn’t difficult. It’s like old times, albeit I feel stronger and warmer, let’s not consider that for too long. Watching my heart is a comfort, learning of it and its behaviors in new ways as it grows more foreign in others. An attempt to maintain our status quo: I care for it and it keeps me company in exchange. As time goes on this grows more difficult. As much as I fear infection inside of me, it’s difficult to deny that I’m more capable now than I’ve been in months. 5 It doesn’t seem likely this new heart will cast me aside, or if it does, there’s no telling when, and I find myself growing fond of it. Maybe not of it, but of the freedom it allows me. I wonder if the doctors maybe didn’t spend all that time finding me a match in vain, if their science was accurate. I never saw so much expression in an inanimate thing before, and we all know how much expression they have! I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store. - Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wallpaper 5 The most common causes of death following a transplant are infection and rejection… many heart transplant recipients lead a long and productive life. - Apollo Hospitals, Facts on Heart Transplant Surgery & Procedure 4

My heart, my old heart, doesn’t seem fond of this new development, but it keeps quiet, only whispering to itself as I walk out the door, and creating awkward pauses over dinner. Jealousy maybe, a desire to crawl back into where it was safe and comfortable, and knowing that that’s no longer an option.6 I keep waiting for it to tell me what’s wrong, but it only ever mutters to itself as the jar rolls off of its pillow in my bed.

One day over oatmeal, my old heart sitting on the kitchen counter, I say I’m going out, the first time I’ve been out for anything since the surgery. It says nothing, no bubbles arising from the jar, not even a whisper as I close the door behind me on my way out. Out I go and I stay out, and it’s good, I feel good. I can’t do the things I wish I could, drink or dance without feeling winded, but I try to all the same. It’s good and it’s new, so foreign but good nonetheless.

I return to my flat with my shoes in my hands and I miss my key hook, but I pay no mind to my keys as they clatter on the wood. My old heart is sitting in its jar at the other end of the table, lights on, waiting for me to come home. “When will you come to bed? When will you hold me again? You’re like a stranger to me.” I don’t know, I don’t know, I know.

The rational explanation of why I feel dead half the time does little to mediate the irrational horror of existing as if I do not. Here we are, here I am, alone and myself, half of me fallen off, half of us gone. - Anne Boyer, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

With Thanks To

Ashery, Oreet, director. Revisiting Genesis. Revisiting Genesis, revisitinggenesis.net/. “Art Now: Jesse Darling: The Ballad of Saint Jerome – Exhibition at Tate Britain.” The Tate, www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/jesse-darling. Boyer, Anne. The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019. Boyer, Anne. “What Cancer Takes Away.” The New Yorker, 8 Apr. 2019, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/04/15/what-cancer-takes-away#. Donne, John, and Elizabeth Savage. Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. 1975. Emin, Tracey, director. Why I Never Became A Dancer. Vimeo, 1995, vimeo.com/79687251. “Facts on Heart Transplant Surgery & Procedure.” Apollo Hospitals, www.apollohospitals.com/departments/transplantation/organ-specific-transplantcare/heart/heart-transplant-facts. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. Yellow Wallpaper. Simon & Brown, 2018. Gondry, Michel, director. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Focus Features, 2004. Misbehaving Bodies: Jo Spence and Oreet Ashery (2019) [Exhibition] The Wellcome Collection, London. 30 May 2019 - 26 January 2020 Sontag, Susan. Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors. Penguin, 2013. The Antlers. Hospice, Frenchkiss Records, 2008

3. AVC text by Robert Mills

The Book of Anxiety 1. Dogs; holy and anxious I can hear a dog bark somewhere in the city. It is said that when the sixteenth century kabbalist Rabbi Isaac Luria heard a dog bark, he would bow, as he believed that a fragment of the divine resided in every piece of crea>on, even in dogs1. My granddaughter who lives in a caravan under the M32 had a beloved dog for a short while. He was a large lean black mongrel, a street dog from Spain. Although young, he’d had a hard life and was anxious, but totally devoted to her. They looked aHer each other, slept together, kept each other safe, but then he died of kidney failure. My grandmother who lived alone on the Somerset Levels had a small dog called Bill. Gran was old, blind and incapable of managing Bill who would escape from her coKage and roam the local farms and woods. This was why Gran had such a large circle of local acquaintances. Everyone had experienced bringing the dog back to her. This was Bill’s giH. Decades later, I was in a pub about ﬁve miles away. ChaQng to the barmaid, I men>oned my grandmother. “I don’t remember her,” she said and then paused. “Did she have a liKle dog?” I returned to the monastery2 late at night with the abbot, Fr Paolo. As we climbed the steps, a dog barked, and then appeared out of the darkness, gree>ng Paolo with enthusiasm. “I don’t understand why this dog loves me so,” he said. “Why shouldn’t he?” “Because a year ago, we had three dogs. A bitch and her two sons. But they were very aggressive to visitors. And also, when she was hot, the other two were constantly trying to mount her. This is a monastery and it wasn’t acceptable. Nobody is interested in giving homes to half wild dogs in Syria. The only solu>on was to kill the female and one of the males. I couldn’t ask one of the community to do such a terrible thing. I had to

do it myself. It was a great sin. And this remaining dog saw me do it. Yet he loves me.” “Of course he does,” I replied. “We humans are very clear that you are top dog here. Now he knows you’re top dog too and he’s very anxious to let you know that he knows.” I think I must be closed to the divine as I have no desire to own a dog.

2. The Asda Cafe I feel so anxious. Mum and Dad were anxious about absolutely everything. Every emo>on and feeling was translated into anxiety; sadness, anger, hope, even joy. So I decided to ask the shaman who hangs out in the Asda Cafe most aHernoons, and see what he advised about my anxiety. I found him in the corner reading a racing newspaper and making notes in a liKle book. He said, “You need to consult the wisdom of your ancestors3.” “But the ancestors I am aware of were devoid of wisdom. Mostly they were miserable, judgemental and anxious.” “Then go back beyond memory. How about her?” he said, poin>ng to a woman who had just come in. She wore a grubby brown smock, men’s boots and a shawl. Nobody else seemed to no>ce her. I went over to her and sat down. “Hello,” I said. “Can you help me deal with my anxiety?” She smiled and leaned towards me. She smelled preKy bad. “Tell me dear, are you saved? Have you given your life to Jesus and do you believe that He4 died for your sins?” “No. I don’t believe any of that stuff.” She scowled. “In that case you will be cast into ‘the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone’ as was prophesied by St John in the Book of Revela>on5. There you will suffer for all eternity and every sin and perversion and whoredom and idolatry and sorcery and lewdness that you have commiKed will be accounted and special torments will be heaped on you. Furthermore, know you that there is no >me to lose, as we are in the Last Days and that there are signs that the end is near; plagues, famines, earthquakes, wars and rumours of wars prophesied by Jesus in the Gospel of MaKhew6 are all come to pass, not to men>on the perilous >mes men>oned by St Paul to Timothy when men like you ‘creep into houses and lead cap>ve silly women laden with sins, led away with diverse lusts’7, and not forgeQng the baKle against Gog and Magog prophesied by Ezekiel8 which

clearly refers to the present wars against Boney9 and the Pope. ” She paused to take breath. “Repent! Offer up your sinful life to the Lord and humbly ask for His forgiveness.” “No I won’t.” I replied. “Then I would suggest your anxiety is en>rely jus>fied. Almighty God has offered you eternal life, washed clean of sin by the precious blood of our dear Saviour and if you persist in hardening your heart against Him, He will cast you into the pit with all the other unbelievers, heathens, idolaters, perverts, liber>nes, magicians, fornicators, sodomites, witches, ar>sts, papists, Jews, Turks and apostates.” This was a lot of informa>on, but eventually I replied; “God must be a cruel monster if most of his crea>on is going to end up in unending torment.” “How dare you blaspheme the Most High. He can do whatever He likes with His Crea>on. If you don’t submit to the Truth, He will undoubtedly consign you to excrucia>ng torments forever. Anxious? If I was you I’d be absolutely terrified.” Then, trooping into the Asda Cafe, came a whole crowd of frightened people, old and young, women and men, all my ancestors from her >me to mine including one or two I had known, and they all cried to me in unison to be afraid of Death and Judgement; some indeed weren’t sure why, but they knew fear was necessary, and they pleaded with me to join them, some pulling on the sleeve of my jacket or trying to stroke my face and I understood that my reluctance to engage with God’s blackmail was as terrifying to them as God’s threats themselves. Then they shrank back from me as though I was diseased, and started hassling other people in the Asda Cafe. As I slipped out I spoKed the shaman who winked at me, and ever since I have been unwilling to visit the Asda Cafe in case any of those people are s>ll there.

3. Adonis10 Hello. Is that the Samaritans? ... Well, this is embarrassing but I’m in trouble with two women. One’s my step-mother Zephanie and the other’s her friend Dita.... No I don’t feel suicidal right now. You see, what happened was ... What am I feeling? Well, a bit of a mess really. Depressed. I don’t know who I am. I certainly don’t feel like a grown-up. You see, my birth mother was murdered by

my dad who was also her dad, and he would have murdered me too if Dita hadn’t rescued me when I was a baby.... Bloody right. Absolutely trauma>c. And now Zeph and Dita both want me to have sex with them.... No, I’m not making all this up.... O.K. you can connect me with a male volunteer if you like, but I’m not geQng off on telling you this, honest.11 Why would I make it up? And there’s lots of stuff I don’t want to tell you and won’t.... Am I at risk? Well, Dita’s boyfriend Arry is very threatening ....no not her husband, that’s Harry. Arry is her boyfriend. He’s a pig farmer. He’s a bully. And I think Zeph wants me dead even though she loves me. You see, Zeph’s a Goth and they make a fe>sh out of death..... You keep on asking me about feelings. I’ve told you, I feel confused and depressed. Zeph’s my step mum and she’s always adored me, but I’m not her liKle boy anymore and I now want to keep her at arm’s length, especially when she starts being seduc>ve or sugges>ng suicide pacts. But I don’t feel like an adult either. Or a man12. She just keeps wan>ng to drag me down with her.... Well, actually, I prefer to hang out with Dita. She’s promised to teach me manhood but that prospect is terrifying too13. I’m almost more scared of her than of Zeph. She’s frighteningly beau>ful. You should see her in her underwear. She’s got this girdle14 .... No, no, no, please don’t cut me off. CLICK.

4. ArCﬁcial Intelligence Implants I’ve got a lot of problems but I’m managing my life preKy well really,15 considering the chem trails, food addi>ves, coronavirus, AI implants and the power of the Illumina>. I only found out about AI implants recently. Apparently, scien>sts in Israel funded by Elon Musk have found a way of using nanotechnology to modify the DNA of potatoes so that when one eats a por>on of fries for example, minute molecular size processors get absorbed and enter the blood stream and build up in the brain. Here they are designed to form minute nodes or coagula>ons and when they reach a certain cri>cal point, they become subject to neuromodulators which can be used by outside agents to manipulate moods, emo>ons, opinions, thoughts and purchasing choices. This all has big implica>ons. If communists got hold of AI implants,

they could make us all fall in love with Rebecca Long-Bailey or George Soros. On the other hand, under ethical control they could be used to wean fundamentalists oﬀ Islam or turn Ex>nc>on Rebellion fana>cs into normal ci>zens16. Concerning AI implants, the cri>cal issue is who controls them. Us or Them. Some>mes, I have a sense that they are already building up in my brain. They will be in your brains too. AI implants aren’t going away. They’re building up in my brain.

5. Everything is on Fire and I am in the Corner. Everything is on fire and I am in the corner, for I can back away no further and I have no protec>on except my skin which seems complete for now, while in front of me is smoke and fire and mess and radia>on, trouble, lies, abuse, heat, coldness, uncertainty, redness, black fumes, flames which erupt here and there unpredictably, vile smells, sulphur like hell or volcanoes that could erupt at any moment – have erupted without warning, threatening me with annihila>on, flames with strange textures that aren’t like flames at all, moKled things that burst out with super heated steam unbearable, threatening to strip the skin from my body while the nuclear device cooks my organs and I feel them change and dissolve within me as I scan the zone for an escape route, but there is none and even if there was, I would bring unknown trouble with me; cancers and tumours, malignant >ssue, inflamma>ons, highly infec>ous diseases17 and other things that are worse, and for which there are no treatments except spells and prayers against malign spirits which even if they are not real, behave as if they are real and think they are real, but they’re not, so magic works very well, and nobody will help me to get away from my fatal corner for fear of these disasters, and not just medical ones, for I might bring greater troubles with me; ungraspable darkness, voids, terrible “things”, spiritual hopelessness,

The Infernal Corner

despair, irredeemable curses, banishment to regions of abject and perpetual torment in lakes of burning pitch that slowly suck a person in and from which there is no escape for all eternity, such as was prophesied by the re>red American merchant seaman who I met at the Petra Hostel in Jerusalem about sixteen years ago, and which has been described by mys>cs and painted on church walls for two thousand years so that we can remember to be always unsure of our salva>on, and willing to be totally obedient to the authori>es, no maKer how corrupt, dishonest, rapacious, arrogant, misogynis>c, gluKonous, thieving, lazy, proud, avaricious, angry, unhygienic, hypocri>cal, or violent they might be towards us, because they are en>tled to rule over us and always have been and always will be forever, so the best we can do is to get on their side and hope that if we are useful and fight their wars and work hard and vote for them and pay the rent on >me and pay our taxes, which they don’t but never mind, and not cause trouble, then they might leave us alone a bit and we can dream of one day being complete and beau>ful and fashionable and hip and rich and ar>s>c and wise and not like what we are now but something different and maybe there will be a new world for us one day, either on Earth or on Mars and scien>sts will abolish death and invent special food to make us young again with lots of sexual charisma and endless beau>ful and willing partners to choose from, but oh fuck, I’m s>ll stuck in this corner and I can’t see any way to escape, and the more I weep and fret and yearn and moan and call out and despair and hope and tense my body against the searing heat, the hoKer it gets while spots of molten metal s>ck to my skin and something strikes my back as though it would flay me alive while a sinister rumble starts in the distance, slowly geQng louder which means something is surely about to happen, either bad in which case I may die or be subjected to worse torments, or good, in which case I will be rescued and cared for, my scorched skin will be treated with unguents and medicinal herbs by wise and empathic prac>>oners, my thirst will be quenched by damsels carrying in flagons of cool juices and dis>lla>ons, and my brow will be mopped by a lovely nurse who whispers that all my tortures are over, but this hasn’t happened yet and the rumble is geQng louder and closer, the ground is star>ng to shake, crying and screams can be heard and the fires con>nue unabated, along with the smoke and the mess and

radia>on, trouble, lies, abuse, heat, coldness, uncertainty, redness, black fumes, ﬂames which erupt here and there unpredictably, vile smells ...

6. Two large things clamped to my chest Last night I dreamed that two large things clamped themselves to my chest. I didn’t know what they were and I was afraid to push them oﬀ in case I injured myself. In the sketch, they look like two big wobbly breasts, but they weren’t mine and were in the wrong posi>on.

I got them off me eventually but I was frightened and found it hard to sleep again. I like to claim that I don’t fear death but I do and maybe they were to do with that. Or perhaps they were my mother’s breasts and she was trying to climb onto me, which is worse. I’m wri>ng this quite late and am reluctant to sleep. But I must sleep. What happens now? The following night, I remember two dreams. In one, I am visi>ng a house full of Jews. There’s a big room full of people, mostly old, including Esther Golan who I met in Jerusalem years ago. They are very welcoming and friendly. The other dream concerned a derelict and partly demolished house. Inside I spot a corner cupboard clumsily fixed high on a wall. Although in an old style, it’s only a cheaply made thing, made out of plywood. I manage to detach it from the wall, but I’m afraid passersby will report me for stealing, so I abandon it. I’m sure Esther is dead by now, and I think both dreams are about death and my fear of it. Esther came from Germany as a fiHeen year old in the Kindertransport18 of 1939. Perhaps the room of people were those she leH

behind; a house of death, full of folk who no longer had occasion to fear death. Trying to salvage a useless and valueless thing from a house about to be demolished also speaks to me of death. Am I the protagonist in the dream, or am I the house, or the cupboard? Probably all of them.19

7. Final Chapters The ﬁnal chapters are not available. The pages seem to be stuck together20. Keep social distance21. I’m geQng a large dog. 22.

End Notes23 1 I can’t remember where I heard this, but it was probably visi>ng Safed in Israel/Pales>ne where Luria died.

The idea that even lowly and unclean objects that are outside the boundaries are also infused with the divine is an aKrac>ve one. Some of my pain>ngs in “ Book” show people responding to unspeciﬁed events outside the picture’s border and maybe this refers to the same idea; that there is an unseen world that we might occasionally glimpse “outside the frame”.

I am no longer very religious and whatever happens outside the frame has no good/ bad, holy/ demonic value for me. But it is s>ll possible to be fascinated by the border and my characters oHen have diﬃculty being contained by the edge of the pain>ng.

2 Deir Mar Musa in Syria. Paolo was later abducted and probably murdered. He was someone else who ignored

the frame. He considered himself the spiritual brother of several signiﬁcant Muslim scholars, both Sunni and Shia, which is why he was regarded with great suspicion by his own hierarchy and probably why he was killed by Daesh. 3 I’ve met several Bri>sh shamans and they generally emphasise the importance of ancestor wisdom.

Confusing. 4 Some puritan writers used to use capital leKers on any preposi>ons referring to God. It was a mark of

reverence and an aﬀecta>on. 5 Revela>on ch. 20, v.10 These four quota>ons are from the King James transla>on of the Bible, a huge

resource for me, both in terms of ideas, language and images. 6 MaKhew, ch. 24, v. 6-7

7 Paul’s Second LeKer to Timothy, ch. 3, v. 1-7

8 Ezekiel, ch. 38.

9 Napoleon Bonaparte.* In every age, including our own, Chris>an fana>cs have iden>ﬁed the signs of the

“Last Days” just prior to Armageddon as NOW in their own >me. This lady obviously lives in the early 1800’s. I was once ea>ng supper with Paolo, who wasn’t a fana>c, and I asked him, “When will the Last Days be.” He replied “Between that glass and the plate,” a Zen answer.

10 There’s nothing worse than explana>ons, so anyone wan>ng to see how the Samaritans caller corresponds with the myth of Adonis, and whether Zephanie, Dita and Arry the pig-farmer could possibly have anything to do with Persephone, Aphrodite and Ares, can check Graves (1955, p. 73 – 75). 11 Having once been a Samaritans volunteer, I can conﬁrm that a big problem is the inappropriate use of the

service by men who want to talk to a female volunteer about their sexual fantasies. 12 Every male who fails to detach from a needy and inappropriately seduc>ve mother is in danger of being an

“eternal child”, trapped in adolescence and eternally torn between ero>c hope on one side (Aphrodite) and suicidal melancholy on the other (Persephone). Adonis is seen by Jungians as represen>ng this archetype. See Segal (1999, p. 105 – 111.) The Jungian “eternal child” is the theme of my “Death of Adonis” pain>ngs and I deal with the myth in my “Life of Adonis” piece.

13 In the myth, the dispute between Aphrodite and Persephone as to which of them should ‘have’ Adonis was

adjudicated by Calliope, the muse of oratory. (Graves, p. 74). For some reason, the 19th century American inventor of the steam organ named it the ‘Calliope’, maybe in a vain aKempt to give some class to such a raucous and unmusical contrap>on. Here I depict Calliope playing her Calliope as Dita and Zeph approach her for judgement.

14 Regarding Dita’s magic girdle, see Graves (1955, p. 74).

15 One plan I have for transcending the situa>on is volunteering on Project Orion. Given President Trump’s

distaste for interna>onal trea>es, it’s only a maKer of >me before space vehicles powered by nuclear explosions become feasible again and suddenly, travel to Mars and Saturn becomes a possibility. As soon as that happens, I’m oﬀ.** 16 The Prime Minister’s special advisor Dominic Cummings has apparently already set up an AI implant unit at

a secret loca>on in Whitehall, and is currently using it, via the canteens of various ministries, to sort out the Civil Service. Some have suggested that AI implants account for the weird inﬂuence he has over the Prime Minister, but I think that’s a bit farfetched. 17 These could include covid virus, kidney failure, boils, epidermal cysts, malignant melanomas, osteoporosis,

prolapses, epilepsy, mul>ple sclerosis, Parkinson’s palsy, demen>a, thrombosis, subarachnoid haemorrhage, transient ischemic aKacks, meningi>s, brain abscesses, paralysis, arteriosclerosis, myocardial infarc>ons, incompetent heart valves, myocardi>s, pericardi>s, embolisms, aneurysms, varicose veins, Addison’s disease, haemoly>c anaemias, overac>ve thyroids, lupus, gallstones, intes>nal obstruc>ons, intussuscep>ons, ﬁbroids, enlarged prostates, gonorrhoea, and other things that are worse. 18 The “Kindertransport” was a project to bring endangered Jewish children from Germany, Czechoslovakia,

Poland and Austria to Britain in 1938 and 1939. Much of Bri>sh society was unenthusias>c about the project rather like our reluctance today to assist unaccompanied Syrian minors stuck in refugee camps. However about ten thousand children were saved. See hKps://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/06/thekindertransport-children-80-years-on-we-thought-we-were-going-on-an-adventure 19 Dreams are an important source for my pain>ng and Carl Jung’s ideas about dreams as a gateway to the

collec>ve unconscious I ﬁnd very interes>ng. See Jung (1959, p. 21). Ar>st Clare Dudeney had a similar inspira>on and curated a group exhibi>on on this subject in 2017 ; see www. claredudeney.com › events › indreams

20 This is a bit like the forbidden door at Bluebeard’s castle. Bartok’s opera ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’ has a series of

doors, the last of which leads into horror. While some like Marina Warner (1995, p.243) rightly cri>cise the misogynis>c view that this is a moral tale about the dangers of female curiosity, and leaving to one side the fact that Bluebeard is a patriarchal mass murderer, it may s>ll be advisable to leave some doors unopened. My video, ‘Bluebeard’s Doors’ is on Vimeo. The other resonance is with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses which refers to forbidden chapters of the Koran. The ﬁnal chapters of my “Book” are unopenable.*** 21 Plague is sweeping across the Earth, so be anxious. Most of us will catch Covid disease and this might be

soHening us up for something really serious. All we can do is stock up with canned food, long life milk, shot-gun cartridges, gin, biscuits, coffee, paracetamol, ibuprofen, tea, amphetamines, coke, chocolate, toilet rolls and cheese. Then isolate. Keep a pick-axe handle in the corner behind the front door because as shortages increase, there will be hoards of homeless people, the unprepared, con-men, fana>cs, fundamentalists, feminists, Methodists, socialists and officials knocking on your door, wan>ng some or all of your stuff. It would be handy to have a large dog, such as a German shepherd. I would also have a stash of cigareKes and tobacco, even if you don’t smoke, as these are useful for bartering when the money system breaks down. The other important thing is to get rid of any dependants; elderly parents, children, lodgers, needy friends, or lovers. If you manage all that, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about. 22 Staffordshire Bull Terriers are good; also Caucasian Shepherd Dogs which are best in thinly populated areas,

American Pit Bulls the incorrect training of which is suicidal for both passers-by and owners, RoKweilers who can’t take a joke, Dobermans who are unstoppable in pairs, Alaskan Malamutes who seem related to wolves, or Russian Black Terriers which are the only breed originally developed to hunt humans. hKps://petolog.com/ ar>cles/most-dangerous-dogs.html

When Alexander Pope published his sa>rical epic “The Dunciad” between 1728 and 1743, he devoted most of his energy to footnotes and spoof learned apparatus. 23

Footnotes to the Endnotes * Bruce Chatwin, author of “In Patagonia” and “On the Black Hill”, remembers being threatened by his Aunt Grace with the spectre of Bonaparte as a child in the 1940’s. ‘One evening, when I'd misbehaved in the bath, she cried, ''Stop that, or Boney will get you!''’ hKp://movies2.ny>mes.com/books/00/03/19/specials/chatwinwriter.html ** Project Orion was a real U.S. opera>on to design and build space vehicles powered by nuclear explosions ini>ated in 1958. It was led by Ted Taylor of General Atomics Corp and Bri>sh Physicist Freeman Dyson who died recently when he was very old. The project was suspended in 1963 in response to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. (Radford 2020) *** The pages are stuck together; some of their edges might be prized apart, but nothing is legible or coherent, while other pages are burnt or leaking oily and foul-smelling moisture. Maybe they are abandoned projects, mistakes, dead ends and discredited material. Or perhaps their subject was not appropriate for public view, things reserved for the highly instructed, ini>ates and people who had made certain preparatory oaths. Or maybe the pages were just toxic, infected with dangerous opinions which could spread and cause great sadness or social discomfort. Just don’t open them. Keep social distance. I’m geQng a large dog.

AVC Text Bibliography Anon. (1967) The Bible Authorized (King James) version. London: Collins. Beckett, S (1938) Murphy. London: Routledge. Beckett, S. (1955) Molloy. London: Routledge. Fine, L. (2003) Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos; Isaac Luria and his Kabbalistic Fellowship. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Graves, R. (1955) The Greek Myths. Harmondswoth: Penguin. Hasek, J. (1974) The Good Soldier Svejk. Translated by B. Jones, Harmondsworth: Penguin

Tina Salvidge AVC TEXT

There were more questions than answers1(with apologies to Johnny Nash)

Prologue

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …….”2

Charles Dickens

Interlude

Johnny Nash was a popular 1970s melodic reggae (known as rock steady) singer famous

for hit singles such as “I can see clearly now” and “There are more questions than answers”  Pictures in my mind that will not show  There are more questions than answers  And the more I find out the less I know  Yeah, the more I find out the less I know 2

Charles Dickens author - opening lines to A Tale of Two Cities a novel that was my A level text in 1976

Part I Science

I was going to start with science as3 I like to read or listen to people that I think are cleverer than me, who can put forward a convincing argument or authoritative turn of phrase. I can inwardly digest it all then ruminate, then dig a little deeper and discover that they only seem to know and actually the form is stronger than the content.

I was going to deliberate 4something substantial, I could feel it in my bones. Extraordinary events interpreted through an “ology” - Ontology, the philosophical study of the nature of being, becoming, existence, or reality.

I was going to contemplate something significant – some great metaphysical idea that I could grapple with and wrestle to the ground. Maybe a little bit pompous and erudite (but in a good way) something that germinated and grew and then flowered into a cascade of ideas and materiality.

I was going to explain metapsychosis5, but unfortunately something kept poking awkwardly in my left eyeball until I couldn’t ignore it anymore (the poking not the metapsychosis).

(Tears fill my eyes as swift the boat flies 3 the

Government appears to be guided by so many scientific experts, even Dominic

Cummings, and I listen and think “they must know”, but deep down I know that they don’t and what will be my life-raft post Covid 19?

on the science that treats the reality of being (Gk ontos – being; logos – discourse). “It is part of the major branch of philosophy known as metaphysics. Ontology deals with questions about what things exist or can be said to exist, and how such entities can be grouped according to similarities and differences,” my 1966 Collins Dictionary says 5

as the supposed action of one mind upon another without any known physical means of communication, or its effect (see also psychosis and telepathy)

And speeds me away so far from your shore6)

I thought that 7 8 9science was clear and logical and fact driven (Rovelli clearly thought that science and philosophy were linked). I assumed that integrating Science, Art and Time – what a grand sweep of a statement that was – would be powerful discourse that (like throwing salt over your left shoulder) could blind the devil. However, a group who blithely talk about joining forces to produce works of “collective genius” lead me to stumble blindly into a cabal of old snake oil salesmen.

I was going to explain that10 11on the 20th February 2020 telescopes detected the biggest explosion since the Big Bang, spotted by scientists viewing the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster and concluding that the wall of a cavity in it had been sculpted by emissions from a gargantuan black hole. “In some ways this lines of a melancholic and nostalgic traditional Scottish song, often sung in Gaelic about crofters having to leave the island of Lismore on the West Coast of Scotland due to the English land reforms which resulted in poverty and starvation for many. Popularised by Kenneth McKellar and his White Heather Club and often sung on television in the 1960’s which I would watch with my family on New Year’s Eve 6

7 Carlo

Rovelli a quantum physicist and philosopher, the author of Seven Brief Lessons on

Physics and Reality is Not What it Seems, as discussed by the Cosmos Café crew (see 8 below) would help me understand “Science” 8a

Public Access podcast by six men (generally with beards) discussing matters of science,

art and time that I blundered across, might enlighten me. Material was free to download and use as long as credit was given. I hereby give them credit https://www.cosmos.coop/about/ 9 the

Cosmos Café mission statement “We’re a community of writers, artists, programmers,

designers, philosophers, and otherwise ordinary people who feel passionately about exploring the depths and potentials of our shared reality, joining forces to produce works of collective genius that elicit the best in us” was misleading at best and dangerous at worst 10 the

Big Bang Theory is a TV sitcom show, but Wikipedia describes the Big Bang as a

cosmological model of the observable universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large scale evolution. Rovelli points out in Journey to Quantum Gravity that when the idea that the universe had emerged from a Big Bang began to be accepted, Pope Pius XII declared, in a public address on 22 November 1951, that the theory confirmed the account of Creation given in Genesis. The scientist Lemaitre was so concerned he persuaded the scientific adviser to the Pope to advise the Pope to refrain from making references to links between divine creation and the Big Bang. The Catholic Church never again made allusion to Creation and the Big Bang 11 as reportedwww.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51669384

telescopes detected the

biggest explosion since Big Bang (Jonathan Amos 28 February 2020)

blast is similar to the eruption of the Mount St Helens volcano in 1980 which ripped off the top of the mountain”

I was going to discuss Einstein’s scientific fact that all things are made of atoms, those little particles that move around in perpetual motion attracting each other when they are a little distance apart but repelling upon being squeezed into one another.

Now there was a proper statement – a hook on which to hang my metaphorical hat - I was going to square up Object Orientated Ontology (with its ideas and interrogations contemplating what exists) for a fight with Science.

I was going to ask if 12there was any science in science fiction? Why are we constantly propounding more questions then we can answer and continually sounding like an echo chamber in the forest, observing a solid purple candyfloss of sweet and sour taste in the fish hooked mouth of art and experience? Compare and contrast with swarm robot drones. I was going to do all these things - but hang on a second………I am no longer certain that there is a connection to investigate. Or that scientific analysis of the natural world, quantum physics and cowboys computes in any logical way or category of thing? (As quiet you sleep in dreams that are sweet My dear island home Lismore.)13

I was going to be the most brilliant scientific adviser and visionary ………….but my right eyeball started to twitch and blink so I rubbed it.

Part II Murmuration

swarm robotics are a field of multi-robotics in which large number of robots are coordinated in a distributed and decentralised way? They are and are based on the use of local rules, inspired by social insects to achieve complex tasks (https://doi.org/10.5402/2013/608164) 13

See footnote 6

Wait, I think the twitching has stopped. (Is this the part where it all comes together?) Is this the future of another practice and knowing based on the rules of a starling murmuration - which are separation, alignment and then cohesion?

I wonder if the shapes of14 15 the starlings colliding in space now have some deeper communication in the 21st century. The flocking of the birds to roost on the Somerset Levels appears, like a bad simulacrum, to reference a Hitchcock film, and is all encompassing (some say sacred) and performs a spectacle for the gathered human crowd.

I observe that the flock 16search for a safe haven, away from predators, with safety in numbers communicating through a mathematical equation of one bird viewing only a maximum of seven others within the 100,000 swarm. Or are the shapes they create just an uninformed exploration of wind and rain directions ,driven by solar and lunar theories, whilst time and space and relativity organise their own joke? Perhaps their dense mass is an echo of an alien intelligence thwarted by scientists?

(And high on the wing the mavis17 would sing

14 an

Oh joy be with you, Lismore)18

image or representation of someone or something are an unsatisfactory imitation or

substitute (see also Baudrillard) 15

the sudden waves of birds gathering, watching, and attacking in Alfred Hitchcock’s film The Birds made in 1963 and based on a Daphne Du Maurier short story ever answer the question: "What do the birds want?" (Wikipedia entry) 16 is

like an alien intelligence threatening mankind’s place in the universe and manifested as a

huge Black Cloud that blocks out the sun. Similarities to The Dark Cloud (described by Richard Dawkins as one of the greatest works of science fiction ever written)by Sir Fred Hoyle (1957 astronomer, cosmologist, writer and broadcaster) are clear 17

which is a popular name for the song thrush, from the old french “mauris”, thrush See footnote 6

I sense that 19 20,down on the Levels, nature is presented as both a sublime trope and an eccentric, narcissistic, nostalgic trip to the centre of the earth and back again. It exists within the conundrum of mathematical and scientific equations of the collective (defying and defining the spatial scale) and the communal brain of the black cloudlike flight. A rapid response of individuals within the flock via transmission of local behavioural reactions at a micro scale but with a global outcome (like domain astronomy).

I grasp at the sublime 21(with a wink to those first Romantic artists) to evoke the extreme aspects of nature; more recently evolved in art to highlight the natural limitations of our knowledge: “when we are confronted with something that’s beyond our limits of acceptability, or that threatens to expose some repressed thing, then we have this feeling of the uncanny”. Ultimately at the sublime’s core is a “removal” from the forms of understanding provided by secular, scientific and rational world views.

Maybe I have to start thinking 22 23not about correlationism (and not about the effects things have on us) but about how objects exist, act and “live” beyond the realm of human perception. Existing in realms inaccessible to humans. Existing without impositions from me. Harman disputes mainstream scientific materialists who reduce all objects to their physical or sometimes mathematical micro components. He posits that “there is a permanent trench war between the tiniest, as championed by science, and the largest -a human 19 a

change in path of one bird in the flock will impact on exactly seven birds surrounding it,

regardless of the size of the flock and changes in the flight path and will happen very similarly to the way a single electron spins within a metal line up when a magnetic field is created (Pys.org Study to find European Starlings flocking patterns March 2012 ) 20 domain

astronomy, the study of how astronomical objects, especially those beyond the

Solar System, will change with time. This may be due to movement or changes in the object itself. Common targets included are supernovae, novas, flare stars, blazars and active galactic nuclei. 21 with

a nod to the artist Mike Kelley and the uncanny (as quoted in Simon Morley’s article

“Staring into the contemporary abyss The contemporary sublime”) 22

like Graham Harman a philosopher who writes extensively about Object Orientated

Ontology 23 about The

Big Idea and what is object-orientated ontology? By Dylan Kerr

centred perspective championed by the humanities- the avoidance of this trench war is by ways of objects is a method”. In other words that things, animals and other non-human entities experience their existence in a way that lies outside our own species-centric definition of consciousness.

Can I accept that human knowledge is finite and that things in themselves can be thought but never known?

(Dawning would bring the lilt and the ring

Of laughter at milking; music galore)24

Wait - something’s happened to my ear now and you sound a bit fuzzy.

Part III Nostalgia

If you shout really loud and enunciate clearly I might be able to hear you.

I have a question25 - is memory an object -or as scientists assess merely an adjustment of the connections between neurons in the brain changing the way they communicate? If everything is an object – concepts, music, ocean waves, mucus, God, - then so is memory and as such can withdraw not only from us but from one another. We become the mediator of the memory’s existence rather than the memory being the mediator of our existence. (Gone are the days along the green braes

24 See 25 for

footnote 6

Object Orientated Ontology is it possible to imagine a whole world that is hidden from

humans? The answer is yes

Gone the warm hearts behind every door)26

I am going to remember my Dad who liked cowboy films because Science and Nature are too big to deal with anymore and I can attempt to negotiate this memory’s existence on a micro scale.

I’ve read that 27 28 as you age you become more nostalgic and reliant on memory (ironically the most transient of senses). When faced with one’s own mortality one reverts to nostalgia as a move toward meaning restoration and it’s been said that nostalgia also fortifies against death anxiety (and who isn’t anxious about that? )

I used to watch Cowboy films on Saturday afternoons with my Dad when I was a child. In his last days I feared the visits to his dementia home but we would again watch old films together. I watched the human mind dull and disorientated but, grasping at an ingrained social performance, appearing to be the self it always was in isolated flashes and gestures. A drug induced hyper authenticity of observational intensity, where reality was reinterpreted and reabsorbed into layers of stinking flesh that lay decaying.

I witnessed how 29 30my Dad couldn’t rely on recollection in the later stages but was somehow hard wired, deep down, to touch upon some occasional spark of self. Research suggests that music is important to this sense of identity and long lost tunes reconnect you with (for example) a moment of 26

See footnote 6

27 the

rich repertoire of nostalgic remembrances may replenish the lost sense of meaning

imparted by mortality threat (Finding Meaning in Nostalgia article by Sedikides and Wildschut in Review of General psychology 2018 vol22.no1) 28 the

same research suggests that Nostalgia shields against mortality-prompted threat to

meaning in life, against mortality- prompted threat to collective identity, against mortalityprompted accessibility of death thoughts, and against mortality-prompted death anxiety 29

music in care homes is extraordinarily effective at bringing people together and

stimulating memories and musical memory is a form of implicit memory www.england.nhhs.uk/blog/music-and-dementia-a-powerful-connector/ 30 the

song We’ll Meet Again was pivotal to the BBC's Wartime Broadcasting Service (WTBS),

designed to provide public information and morale-boosting broadcasts for 100 days after a nuclear attack, as a key part of their playlist

everyone pulling together in the War, or happiness or youth, or watching Western films. I’d forgotten that the song We’ll Meet Again was used to accompany a nuclear holocaust at the end of Dr Strangelove and it seems apt to now be the earwig song of the Covid 19 crisis. I find it intensely annoying that it’s the Number 1 of the Coronavirus Charts and has been cynically manipulated to somehow link Boris with VE day and the “fight” against the Virus.

'Till the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away31

For my generation we should be humming Northern Soul and Punk.

and There's no future  And England's dreaming

Don't be told what you want  Don't be told what you need

There's no future  No future  No future for you32

Epilogue

the song gave its name to the 1943 musical film We'll Meet Again in which Dame Vera Lynn played the lead role. Lynn's recording is featured in the final scene of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove - with a bitter irony, as the song accompanies a Nuclear Holocaust which wipes out humanity. Is she still alive? Perhaps Boris will give her a call 31

God Save the Queen by The Sex Pistols

Samuel Beckett’s33 character Cream declaims in The Old Tune34

…. “ the moon is the moon and cheese is cheese what do they take us for, didn’t it always exist the moon wasn’t it always there as large as life and what did it ever mean only fantasy and delusion, Gorman, fantasy and delusion.(Pauses)”..

Samuel Beckett Irish playwright – a recognised genius. The Old Tune was recently performed in London and will be one of the last plays I will see in a very long time due to lockdown 34

ditto

(Now sadly I gaze, but ever I’ll praise The isle of my heart Lismore.)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS Boym,S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. USA:Basic Books

Carrington,L. (2005) The Hearing Trumpet.London:Penguin Classics Hoyle,F. (2010) The Black Cloud. (2nd ed) London:Penguin Classics Lem,Stanislaw. (1970) Solaris.London:Faber &Faber Osborne,P.(2013) Anywhere or not at All Philosophy of Contemporary Art.London:Verso Rovelli,C. (2017) Reality is not what it seems The Journey to Quantum Gravity. Penguin London:Random House UK ARTICLES Ange,O. Berliner, D. Anthropology of Nostalgia- anthropology as Nostalgia introduction Baldwin,J. (2020) Is God an Object? Interview with Graham Harman. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume16 (No 1), 1-23 Barad,K. Erasers and Erasures Social Studies of Science Vol 42 no 3 Baumgartner,B. (2012) Potentiality of the Present:Exploring Speculative Realism via Spatial Theory. Human Geography. Vol5.(No1),36-41 Davis, L. A Beloved Duck Gets Cooked On forms and influences The Virginia Quarterly Review Vol 95 Iss2 134 Harman,G. (2014) Materialism is Not the Solution On Matter, Form and Mimesis. The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics. No.47, 94-110 Harman,G. (2011) The Road to Objects. Continent.3.1, 171-179 Kerr,D. (2016) What is Object-Orientated Ontology? A quick-and-dirty Guide to the Philosophical Movement sweeping the Art World. www.artspace.com/magazine/ interviews_features/the_big_idea/a-guide-to-object-orientated-ontology-art-53690 accessed online 14.3.20 Kimbell,L.(2013) The Object Strikes Back:An interview with Graham Harman. Design and Culture. Vol 5(No1) 1-12 Margalit, A. (2019) Psychoanalytic Dialogues. The International Journal of Relational Perspectives. ISSN1048-1885 1940-92222 Nostalgia Morley,S. (2010) Staring into the abyss â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The contemporary sublime. Tate-issue 20autumn 2010 https://www.tate.org.uk accessed 28.3.20 Navarro,I. Matia,F. (2012) Review Article An Introduction to Swarm Robotics. Hindawi Publishing Corporation ISRN Robotics. Volume 2013, Article ID 608164, 1-10 Rovelli,C. (2018) Physics Needs Philosophy.Philosophy Needs Physics. Found Phys. Vol48, 481-491 Sedikides,C. Wildschut,T.(2018) Finding Meaning in Nostalgia. Review of General Psychology. Vol2.(No1), 48-61 Van Fraassen,B. (2010) Rovelliâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s World. Found Phys. Vol40, 390-417 WEBSITES

Cosmos Café: Integrating Science Art and Time by Cosmos Cooperative https:archive.org/ details/ic-cosmos-café-025-i see also https://www.cosmos.coop/about/ accessed 27.2.20 www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51669384 Telescopes detect biggest explosion since Big Bang Jonathan Amos 28 February 2020 accessed 28.2.20 https://www.england.nhs.uk/blog/music-and-dementia-a-powerful-connector/ 15February 2018 Blog Alistair Burns and Shelagh Morris accessed 11.3.20 https://www.infiniteconversations.com/t/convening-a-cosmos-wisdom-council/1841 Marco V Morelli founder and CCO of Cosmos Cooperative accessed 15.3.20 https://www.metapsychosis.com/creative-agents/john-davis Journal of Consciousness, Literature and Art John Davis member of Cosmos Cooperative accessed 15.3.20 See also www.geoffreyedwards.org Geoffrey Edwards on Infinite Conversations Senior Scientist PhD in Astrophysics member of Cosmos Cooperative accessed 15.3.20 RELEVANT EXHIBITIONS Mark Leckey O______Magic Power _______Of Bleakness. Tate Britain October 2019 British Surrealism Dulwich Picture Gallery. March 2020 Angelica Mesiti Assembly. Venice Biennale October 2019 Alina Szapocznikow. Hauser & Wirth London March 2020 Mary Flowers When Fire Burns Cotton Bristol Museum January 2020 PLAYS AND FILMS Samuel Beckett – Endgame, Eh Joe ?, The Old Tune, Endgame, Rough for Theatre 2, Not I, Rockaby, Catastrophe seen at Criterion, National Theatre, Brockley Jack Theatres London various dates January – March 2020 Forced Entertainment To Move in Time by Tim Etchells (2019) February Arnolfini In Vitro and Sci-Fi Triology directors Larissa Sansour & Søren Lindseen at Palestinian film festival Watershed Bristol 2020