change
This is the third attempt. Structure can go hang - whatever points I can hit.
Relaxing - ageing - animating - end of poetry - unpolished/unfinished/rough - anger - fear - illogic/unreasoning - boredom - stories - collision
Dragonflies. I wish I'd listened to myself walking back from Glasson to Lancaster and laid by the towpath watching. Colours. Careless bullying flight that doesn't have to watch where it's going. Burr and direct sun. It would have taken longer to get back the day would have been shorter. Dozens.
The world's an intractable mass of abstract rules. I still can't think logically or use deductive or inductive reasoning. My reasoning isn't really reasoning. It's leaps from one thing to another. Conventional logic and reasoning always seemed tricky. Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into an anti-science rant. The achievements of mathematics, medicine and science over the last couple of thousand years speak for themselves. As do the efforts of religions to avoid having to prove themselves. It's just that there are things that I'm not very good at.
Maths is a good example. At school I constantly invented my own forms of logic and maths. They seemed no more random than the rules we had thrown at us. The rules I'd invent were not the ones I'd use in school, you had to make some sort of effort. But sometimes when I was staring out of the window or at the way light reflected off my desk part of me might be working out the problems using my alternate system.
Addition.
Adding two single-figure numbers, 0-9, was simple. They formed a double-figure number with the smallest number first, unless it happened to be zero. So 1+7 was 17, 9+3 was 39, 0+2 was 20, and so on.
Adding a single-figure number to a double-figure number was a little more complex. The single figure was halved if it was even. Or if it was odd, then one was taken away, the remainder halved and one of those halves had the one returned to it. In either case the single-figure number became two single-figure numbers. These were then added to each number in the double-figure number. Where the single-figure numbers had come from an odd number the larger was added to the first number in the double-figure number. So 3+17 was 38 - 3 became 2 and 1, 2 was added to the 1 in 17, and 1 was added to the 7. Zero of course added nothing to either, and adding 1 meant adding 1 to the first number and nothing to the second. So 20+1 was 30. But in the event that either number of the double-figure would become 10 or greater there were new rules again. For instance if I added 6+39, then it was clearly a case of adding 3+3 and 3+9. But 3+9 is 12. So 3+3 was 6, I took 3+9 at this stage to be 12 (rather than 39 as you might have expected) - making 6+39 into 612. A similar thing would happen if the first number added to more than 10. 9+72 would be 126, or sometimes 216 if I felt there had to be a strict symmetry to the rules.
And so it expanded, ever more complex and illogical.
It didn't help my school work that my writing of numbers was virtually unintelligible and that I have a kind of number blindness whereby I can get perfectly straightforward sums hopelessly wrong because throughout I've assumed that a particular number, say 8, is another number, say 6.
I've started filming the wind. One of the images I certainly want, and which we're entering the right time of year to capture, is the movement of clouds. Especially the slow mutations of high, heavy, architectural clouds, like floating stone islands or icebergs kilometres across. This has been a longstanding obsession as readers of santiago's dead wasp will probably know. Clouds are one of the few upsides to autumn - make sure you make time to sit somewhere for an hour or two watching the sky in the next couple of months. Take your cameras, camcorders, sketchbooks with you if you must.
H'm, now here's a dilemma, my mind's going off in three different directions. Annoying as it might get I'm going to try and follow all the threads separately at the same time. First, while on the one hand I'd advise you to take any opportunity you can to practice whatever artistic form you chose, on the other hand if you don't need to then don't bother. You can spend a lot of time accomplishing nothing, expending a lot of energy, and generally making what ought to be pleasurable experiences unpleasant, by trying to create when you'd be better sitting back and watching the dust spin.
There are a whole lot more images beside clouds that I'll gather for this piece. And it's going to take time, some of the ideas sketched out to date simply can't be shot until late spring. Now the significant thing that you won't have picked up on is in that "whole lot more images". A recent animation, which will be posted here once the copyright busting music's been replaced by something less likely to result in legal action, marked a new stage in my filmmaking. Both by being not-shit, and by being the first time that the whole process was approached with a clear visual sensibility rather than linguistic. And importantly also with a clear sense of development in time (not necessarily narrative), and without feeling the need to project any sense of self.
The idea of filming the wind came from a fleeting comment in Derek Jarman's Modern Nature. Yes, Jarman again, what of it? He mentions seeing Joris Ivens last film A Tale Of The Wind, which both sparked the idea of filming something that can't be seen, and made me look up both Joris Ivens and information about the film. After all you don't want to go about remaking someone else's work, only worse. The simplicity of the idea, again the removal of ego from the process while combined with images drawn childhood onwards are the attractions.
But ego's always there. One of the reasons I didn't worry too much about things not working when I was young, the reason I didn't feel the need to practice my writing all the time, the reason I was happy to stand watching long grass blowing like huge crowds racing was that I knew from about the age of five that I was going to do great things. Life is a long time and I knew I was going to have plenty of it, a positive conviction that I simply couldn't be harmed. Now I've started to relax for other reasons I'm not really sure of. And yet there's still that belief in being different and special to underpin it.
What's always been most fascinating about film and photography for me has been light and colour, the ability to represent texture. And yet so many films are weightless in a bad way. Flat images drifting with no purpose, supported by simplistic conceptions of narrative and character, but with the essential nature of film - the visual - neglected. And that's not a matter of money, it's a matter of ability. It's a shame there are so few artists, and so little scope for the distribution of their work.
Then there's something about bringing something to life in a slightly transformed state, intensifying certain aspects of it, which is fascinating and satisfying in itself, with no need for an audience. Before showing off to family and friends, long before using art for status, one of the first impulses is to impress yourself. If you can capture just a little of what makes a stone under water so orange brown and vibrant alive then you've really achieved something, and it doesn't much matter if no one else sees it.
The relaxation is odd. Maybe it's the result of the CBT over the last few months, maybe it's the effect of ecstasy/MDMA, or most likely maybe it's just getting older and not giving so much of a fuck. Or to clarify, not giving so much of a fuck about myself. I can still get angry, but I don't have to feel guilty or worry about getting angry. The anger is still unpleasant to feel, but it's not intensified by a whole lot of self-hatred, attempts to control the anger, guilt and frustration that I can't control the anger, and fear that the anger's wrong. It's like I spent most of my life since I was about 14 walking down the street clinging onto street furniture - bins, lamp posts, railings, bollards - and unable to let go of one thing until I was holding on to another. It's time-consuming and impossible. Now I don't even have to touch the railings. I can go where I want, at what pace I want.
Which is why it's going to interesting to get back to writing poetry when the MA gets underway. It was so personal, so demonstrative of a persona, and so determindly clinging to experiences that it was like beating myself up. It's been a whole lot better doing things that I simply can't do very well, where I still have years of learning ahead of me. Be it film or photography, audio poetry or making sculptural forms, I'm basically shit at these things and very much shooting in the dark. It's why I've been ripping apart the way I write. It's to learn what the fuck it is I'm doing, why it matters, and how to enjoy doing it again.
The ego, instead of trying to please other people and show itself in its best light, now wants to please itself by exploring things outside of itself. Once I would have just stared at the clouds. Then I would have drawn them and written about them. Then they would have been drawn into some great philosophical metaphor simply to show off. More recently I would have written about them or taken photos simply because I had to, or felt I had to. Now I'm happy again to simply watch them.
*Ahem* Anyway, one of the cool things over the last year or so is the way that doing art has become play again.
Instead of watching the dragonflies I got bored. It's a loss that happened a long time ago, but didn't become apparent until recently. I used to be able to walk and switch off my sense of time and awareness of the physical minutae I was feeling. But somehow that's gone, and it means that walks I would have happily extended indefinitely now get truncated. But very recently I've developed a strategy that's very close to what I used to do when I lived in the countryside. Back then I'd walk the hills talking to myself, trying to work out personal, ethical, aesthetic problems from different angles. But when I moved to the city I got more self-conscious about being seen jabbering away. Now though I've started to create stories and fantasies in my head to divert my attention from whatever I'm finding difficult. Whether it be feet hurting, some wanker on a bike narrowly missing you on the pavement, or just plain boredom, then going someplace else in your head helps a lot.
Much simpler might be to carry music wherever you go, but some places it's just not smart to walk about wearing your iPod, other places you actually want to hear what's around you, and sometimes your batteries just won't hold out. Personally I use music to make the walk to work a pleasurable part of the day before I have to sit down inside, pretend I'm busy, and talk to people on the phone. *Brr*
In combination with writing music also helps me relax physically in the evening. It's difficult to tell right now whether OM or the last four paragraphs (including this one) have caused the warm loosening and wellbeing from my brain through my shoulders.
The sun's been warm the last three days after about midday and half the time in work's been spent gazing out of the window watching the clouds and planning sequences for the film about wind. The beauty of planning this film being that I can plan all I want but I actually control very little of the process. I'm dependent on the weather, the light, being in the right place. The length of scenes, their rhythm, and countless other aspects depend wholly on the characteristics of the objects I'm filming and the strength of the wind. I won't be directing anything, I'll be stealing and domesticating glimpses of something powerful, like a Prometheus of this Atlantic island. Instead of fire here's wind for your ships.
My favourite coast is always bleak and exposed.
Relaxing - ageing - animating - end of poetry - unpolished/unfinished/rough - anger - fear - illogic/unreasoning - boredom - stories - collision
Dragonflies. I wish I'd listened to myself walking back from Glasson to Lancaster and laid by the towpath watching. Colours. Careless bullying flight that doesn't have to watch where it's going. Burr and direct sun. It would have taken longer to get back the day would have been shorter. Dozens.
The world's an intractable mass of abstract rules. I still can't think logically or use deductive or inductive reasoning. My reasoning isn't really reasoning. It's leaps from one thing to another. Conventional logic and reasoning always seemed tricky. Don't worry, this isn't going to turn into an anti-science rant. The achievements of mathematics, medicine and science over the last couple of thousand years speak for themselves. As do the efforts of religions to avoid having to prove themselves. It's just that there are things that I'm not very good at.
Maths is a good example. At school I constantly invented my own forms of logic and maths. They seemed no more random than the rules we had thrown at us. The rules I'd invent were not the ones I'd use in school, you had to make some sort of effort. But sometimes when I was staring out of the window or at the way light reflected off my desk part of me might be working out the problems using my alternate system.
Addition.
Adding two single-figure numbers, 0-9, was simple. They formed a double-figure number with the smallest number first, unless it happened to be zero. So 1+7 was 17, 9+3 was 39, 0+2 was 20, and so on.
Adding a single-figure number to a double-figure number was a little more complex. The single figure was halved if it was even. Or if it was odd, then one was taken away, the remainder halved and one of those halves had the one returned to it. In either case the single-figure number became two single-figure numbers. These were then added to each number in the double-figure number. Where the single-figure numbers had come from an odd number the larger was added to the first number in the double-figure number. So 3+17 was 38 - 3 became 2 and 1, 2 was added to the 1 in 17, and 1 was added to the 7. Zero of course added nothing to either, and adding 1 meant adding 1 to the first number and nothing to the second. So 20+1 was 30. But in the event that either number of the double-figure would become 10 or greater there were new rules again. For instance if I added 6+39, then it was clearly a case of adding 3+3 and 3+9. But 3+9 is 12. So 3+3 was 6, I took 3+9 at this stage to be 12 (rather than 39 as you might have expected) - making 6+39 into 612. A similar thing would happen if the first number added to more than 10. 9+72 would be 126, or sometimes 216 if I felt there had to be a strict symmetry to the rules.
And so it expanded, ever more complex and illogical.
It didn't help my school work that my writing of numbers was virtually unintelligible and that I have a kind of number blindness whereby I can get perfectly straightforward sums hopelessly wrong because throughout I've assumed that a particular number, say 8, is another number, say 6.
I've started filming the wind. One of the images I certainly want, and which we're entering the right time of year to capture, is the movement of clouds. Especially the slow mutations of high, heavy, architectural clouds, like floating stone islands or icebergs kilometres across. This has been a longstanding obsession as readers of santiago's dead wasp will probably know. Clouds are one of the few upsides to autumn - make sure you make time to sit somewhere for an hour or two watching the sky in the next couple of months. Take your cameras, camcorders, sketchbooks with you if you must.
H'm, now here's a dilemma, my mind's going off in three different directions. Annoying as it might get I'm going to try and follow all the threads separately at the same time. First, while on the one hand I'd advise you to take any opportunity you can to practice whatever artistic form you chose, on the other hand if you don't need to then don't bother. You can spend a lot of time accomplishing nothing, expending a lot of energy, and generally making what ought to be pleasurable experiences unpleasant, by trying to create when you'd be better sitting back and watching the dust spin.
There are a whole lot more images beside clouds that I'll gather for this piece. And it's going to take time, some of the ideas sketched out to date simply can't be shot until late spring. Now the significant thing that you won't have picked up on is in that "whole lot more images". A recent animation, which will be posted here once the copyright busting music's been replaced by something less likely to result in legal action, marked a new stage in my filmmaking. Both by being not-shit, and by being the first time that the whole process was approached with a clear visual sensibility rather than linguistic. And importantly also with a clear sense of development in time (not necessarily narrative), and without feeling the need to project any sense of self.
The idea of filming the wind came from a fleeting comment in Derek Jarman's Modern Nature. Yes, Jarman again, what of it? He mentions seeing Joris Ivens last film A Tale Of The Wind, which both sparked the idea of filming something that can't be seen, and made me look up both Joris Ivens and information about the film. After all you don't want to go about remaking someone else's work, only worse. The simplicity of the idea, again the removal of ego from the process while combined with images drawn childhood onwards are the attractions.
But ego's always there. One of the reasons I didn't worry too much about things not working when I was young, the reason I didn't feel the need to practice my writing all the time, the reason I was happy to stand watching long grass blowing like huge crowds racing was that I knew from about the age of five that I was going to do great things. Life is a long time and I knew I was going to have plenty of it, a positive conviction that I simply couldn't be harmed. Now I've started to relax for other reasons I'm not really sure of. And yet there's still that belief in being different and special to underpin it.
What's always been most fascinating about film and photography for me has been light and colour, the ability to represent texture. And yet so many films are weightless in a bad way. Flat images drifting with no purpose, supported by simplistic conceptions of narrative and character, but with the essential nature of film - the visual - neglected. And that's not a matter of money, it's a matter of ability. It's a shame there are so few artists, and so little scope for the distribution of their work.
Then there's something about bringing something to life in a slightly transformed state, intensifying certain aspects of it, which is fascinating and satisfying in itself, with no need for an audience. Before showing off to family and friends, long before using art for status, one of the first impulses is to impress yourself. If you can capture just a little of what makes a stone under water so orange brown and vibrant alive then you've really achieved something, and it doesn't much matter if no one else sees it.
The relaxation is odd. Maybe it's the result of the CBT over the last few months, maybe it's the effect of ecstasy/MDMA, or most likely maybe it's just getting older and not giving so much of a fuck. Or to clarify, not giving so much of a fuck about myself. I can still get angry, but I don't have to feel guilty or worry about getting angry. The anger is still unpleasant to feel, but it's not intensified by a whole lot of self-hatred, attempts to control the anger, guilt and frustration that I can't control the anger, and fear that the anger's wrong. It's like I spent most of my life since I was about 14 walking down the street clinging onto street furniture - bins, lamp posts, railings, bollards - and unable to let go of one thing until I was holding on to another. It's time-consuming and impossible. Now I don't even have to touch the railings. I can go where I want, at what pace I want.
Which is why it's going to interesting to get back to writing poetry when the MA gets underway. It was so personal, so demonstrative of a persona, and so determindly clinging to experiences that it was like beating myself up. It's been a whole lot better doing things that I simply can't do very well, where I still have years of learning ahead of me. Be it film or photography, audio poetry or making sculptural forms, I'm basically shit at these things and very much shooting in the dark. It's why I've been ripping apart the way I write. It's to learn what the fuck it is I'm doing, why it matters, and how to enjoy doing it again.
The ego, instead of trying to please other people and show itself in its best light, now wants to please itself by exploring things outside of itself. Once I would have just stared at the clouds. Then I would have drawn them and written about them. Then they would have been drawn into some great philosophical metaphor simply to show off. More recently I would have written about them or taken photos simply because I had to, or felt I had to. Now I'm happy again to simply watch them.
*Ahem* Anyway, one of the cool things over the last year or so is the way that doing art has become play again.
Instead of watching the dragonflies I got bored. It's a loss that happened a long time ago, but didn't become apparent until recently. I used to be able to walk and switch off my sense of time and awareness of the physical minutae I was feeling. But somehow that's gone, and it means that walks I would have happily extended indefinitely now get truncated. But very recently I've developed a strategy that's very close to what I used to do when I lived in the countryside. Back then I'd walk the hills talking to myself, trying to work out personal, ethical, aesthetic problems from different angles. But when I moved to the city I got more self-conscious about being seen jabbering away. Now though I've started to create stories and fantasies in my head to divert my attention from whatever I'm finding difficult. Whether it be feet hurting, some wanker on a bike narrowly missing you on the pavement, or just plain boredom, then going someplace else in your head helps a lot.
Much simpler might be to carry music wherever you go, but some places it's just not smart to walk about wearing your iPod, other places you actually want to hear what's around you, and sometimes your batteries just won't hold out. Personally I use music to make the walk to work a pleasurable part of the day before I have to sit down inside, pretend I'm busy, and talk to people on the phone. *Brr*
In combination with writing music also helps me relax physically in the evening. It's difficult to tell right now whether OM or the last four paragraphs (including this one) have caused the warm loosening and wellbeing from my brain through my shoulders.
The sun's been warm the last three days after about midday and half the time in work's been spent gazing out of the window watching the clouds and planning sequences for the film about wind. The beauty of planning this film being that I can plan all I want but I actually control very little of the process. I'm dependent on the weather, the light, being in the right place. The length of scenes, their rhythm, and countless other aspects depend wholly on the characteristics of the objects I'm filming and the strength of the wind. I won't be directing anything, I'll be stealing and domesticating glimpses of something powerful, like a Prometheus of this Atlantic island. Instead of fire here's wind for your ships.
My favourite coast is always bleak and exposed.
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