in love with living

Yesterday I visited the Text Festival again with my mother. It was great to spend more time looking round. This time I was also amazed by the amount of space my visual poem boxes have.

I'm beginning to have vague ideas about how I'd like to develop my visual poems in three-dimensional spaces. Although the photos here don't really indicate anything about those ideas.

I'll write more about the most recent visit to the festival later. I'll write a little more about the visual poems here later in in the post.

What I'm actually more interested in here is how much I've started to enjoy just being alive in the last couple of years.

In some ways my twitter feed is the best account of the sense of wonder, and love of being alive I feel. Even if it isn't always apparent.

After I got back from Bury I had some dinner, then because it was still light decided to go for a walk. I went via Dudley Road and College Road near my flat up to Chorlton, then onto the Fallowfield Loop coming off on Withington Road and heading back home.

Along the way I sent four tweets because there were things I saw I just wanted to share. When I got home I thought it might be nice for once to expand on them a little.

So, the four tweets were:

Teen girl half-heartedly tries to tackle football from teen boy

Around half metre of tree trunk wrapped in green string

Rusted springs from burned out mattress

Fox crosses path halfway then pauses & runs back into trees

That first one. It was a nice scene just behind Unicorn. And it was all the information that was needed:

Teen girl half-heartedly tries to tackle football from teen boy

What won't be apparent is how much of a change this is from the way I would have described the scene at different times in the past.

Once I would have given very minute descriptions of appearances and actions. At another time I might have been more minimal but out of a misguided sense of demonstrating my liberalism would have made a point of talking about race.

For a long time there would have been an explicit sneer about the difference between the sexes and an unnecessary dig at males in general.

But none of that matters any more. Which isn't trying trying to make myself out to be a better person. It's just that I'm more interested in the event itself, I liked seeing it, it was a beautiful moment - and then I'd walked past and other stuff was distracting me. It doesn't need any interpretation or extrapolation.

Further along - on Keppel Road for those of you who care about this shit I passed this:

Around half metre of tree trunk wrapped in green string

A young tree with a long section of its trunk wrapped with that hairy green garden twine. It was wrapped closely, no evident gaps between each turn of the string as it spiralled up the trunk. I didn't notice how it was fastened at either end.

Again, once I might have tried to interpret who did it or why, or tried to have drawn some moral or lesson from it. Especially that moral or lesson.

But when you do that you close down the experience for other people.

It's become a cliche to quote George Orwell, 'Good prose is like a windowpane.' I also have my doubts about whether it's actually possible to achieve that state. But I do feel that the writer - or at least their moral judgements - should get out of the way as much as they can.

When I was on the Fallowfield Loop I saw a couple of things around the same time I wanted to tweet. I ended up tweeting the second of them first:

Rusted springs from burned out mattress

This was the toughest tweet. There was so much more I could describe. The way the fabric of the mattress that had been on the ground was still intact if a little scorched. The way the mattress was still intact other than having the fabric and stuffing burned. And more.

Here's a great example of the writer having to get in the way. I had to decide what was most important to me - the mattress form, the fabric remaining, the fact it had been burned, or the springs and the rust.

If I'd had my camera I'd have been tempted to take a photo instead. There would have still been editorial decisions but it would have been easier to frame more of the aspects of the mattress that other people might find more interesting.

Then finally:

Fox crosses path halfway then pauses & runs back into trees

Though like I say - seen before the mattress. Not much more to say about this.

There was at least one more similar occurrence I might have tweeted but didn't. A black and white cat crossed the path of the Fallowfield Loop somewhere behind me when I turned to look back.

Then a ginger cat emerged from the same long grass and bushes the first cat had come from and followed it. After a short pause the ginger cat came running out chased by the black and white cat. They sat staring at each other on opposite sides of the path before the black and white cat went back into the undergrowth.

I don't know where the ginger cat went after that - I turned away and then it was gone.

But the whole encounter made me laugh with pleasure. The whole evening was beautiful.

I met some friends on their way home a little later on. We stopped and talked briefly - they initially thought I might be high - which I wasn't. Although these days I can get that sensation without drugs - just from life, the things that happen - or from music.

On Friday despite hardly even drinking and not having had pills I felt well high off Scout Niblett's performance at Islington Mill. It was fucking great actually.

But meeting my friends I was really quite hyper and spent my time enthusing about the beauty of these small unimportant moments. It's hard to convey these feelings in words - you have to do it in part through actions and expression too.

So, the visual poems on bananas. I know it's not original. Tonico Lemos Auad (images here) made images on bananas ten years ago, and isn't the only one. I also had in mind Philip Davenport's Heart Shape Pornography which is equally old.

But that's jumping ahead. I wanted to write a blogpost about how much I love just being in the world. But I knew I'd go on and on and wanted to break it up with images. And I didn't have any.

So I spent time last night trying to create some visual poems. At the time I thought I had nothing - but this morning looking again a handful of forms jumped out.

I experimented with drawing them on folded card and printing them on card from my skin before wondering if I could mark them on bananas and scan them. Having marked the bananas I was about to scan the first one when I figured it might be better to just photograph them. So I did.

Which brings us right here. Innit great?