finding beauty

Three themes which might all be the same theme. Nostalgia and how to avoid it. Beauty and where to find it. My ambivalence about writing.

Walking along the coast yesterday between Lancaster and Sunderland Point I passed The Golden Ball a pub locally known as Snatchems. Just past it despite the rain and thaw the road was covered in a sheet of ice around four centimetres thick for perhaps thirty metres.

The ice was special. Just by being there. The surface was slippery and my feet were already wet. I was trying to follow a trail to Heysham. At this stage not quite an hour out of Lancaster I could have turned back. The coastal road here can be be prone to flooding and I couldn't tell whether the tide was turning and causing the river to rise. If I went on and couldn't find the path I might have to turn back. Having to cross ice with water rising over the road would be dangerous.

But the ice was special. Beautiful. I crossed carefully. A car passed slowly the opposite way. Neither of us were fully in control of our movements on the ice.

As a child I found it strange that accepted ideas of beauty didn't seem to include things that I found fascinating like rust stains or broken bricks. I was also aware that things I found unbearable like the sound of a metal dustpan scraping clinker from a fire grate could have an attraction for others. My motivation for sometimes setting the fire in the morning before I set out for school was not to take responsibility but to confront my distaste for the sound.

There have been times when I've felt sad for good things that have happened in the past. Almost a retrospective jealousy of myself. Certainly a regret that whatever experience it is has passed and can't be repeated or returned to. This hasn't happened for a long time. Your definition may vary but this is what I understand by nostalgia.

Living in the countryside there were many unlikely sources of beauty. Dead sheep. The sound of rocks thrown in fresh cow shit. Limestone turned from white to dark grey by rain. Soot burning just where the fire back curved into the chimney. Half-eaten voles left by the cat.

It's probably no surprise to regular readers of santiago's dead wasp that I have an ambivalence about writing in general and literature in particular. I find it a very static form. There is also something about text on a page that feels less physically present here and now, more connected to the past. I've tried to overcome these static, insubstantial, backward-looking qualities with very little success for a long time. More recently sound and visual work and performance have felt like they come closer to what I want to achieve.

But there's an ambivalence here too. This is an ambivalence about recording work, creating any kind of documentation. My favourite medium is performance. Particularly improvising soundworks. Here there is no finished work. The piece is always in the process of becoming and has a particularly strong relationship to the space, the time and the people there. Moments that work well can be magical.

But because those moments are so particular to the circumstances of their creation they can't be repeated. I prefer the intensity of present moments that matter now but might be indefinable or inert if they are defined. The documentation of such moments - an audio recording of a performance, a photograph, a series of words that can't be improved set down on paper - will only be a documentation of part of the experience. Work that can survive in isolation is of course a wonderful and important thing. But it will always be lacking something.

Unknown to me the route to Heysham was for cyclists rather than walkers. Shortly after the ice sheet I came to a narrow road with no pavement or verge. Left turned out to be the direction I would have taken by cycle if I'd known where I was going. Right took me to a main road leading to Heysham or back to Lancaster but again with nowhere for walkers to go. I decided to turn round.

Back at the ice sheet I found I could walk on the grass on the river side of the road - my right. A shape like a plastic bag or a large rock ahead of me turned out to be a swan. It lay on its front with its neck and head stretched out. It was dead. But again there was a beauty to it. I should say there were more than two dozen live swans grazing in the area.

For me all this ties together. I think that the reason I haven't felt nostalgic for a long time is that I've been too busy either experiencing new things or learning to find and appreciate small moments of beauty when they happen. And that I've learned not to try and hold on to those moments. If the present is rich and beautiful then the past can't overshadow it.

I'm aware that writing is more than a frozen moment. I'm aware that good writing or good art of any kind can exist outside of the circumstances of its creation. My ambivalence is to do with how I read and how I write rather than some universal law.

But at present for me the state of mind that prevents nostalgia and finds beauty everywhere is also the state of mind that finds the written word stilted and flat.

Earlier in the walk there was a sudden impact in a tree ahead and something on the edge of vision. A squirrel that had evidently jumped around a metre or more across the path from the branches of one tree to another ran through the tree into another and for a short while followed me along in the trees and bushes. I laughed with the sheer joy of it.