Categories
Art Creation Creativity David Abram Earnestness Generativity Meaning Nature Patience Spell of The Sensuous

Oh, Hello (Leagrave to Harlington Walk)

This post is part of a series of reflections/walks/land art pieces which I’m filing here and on Instagram as a project under the title Spell of The Sensuous. Route info & GPX for the walk itself can be found here.

Just past Willow Farm, heading toward the Harlington Mill Nurseries, a woman strides towards me with her with her shaggy, long-haired German Shepherd. She too is somewhat shaggy looking: deeply tanned, blunt featured, piercing blue eyes. She asks me if the footpaths and bridleways have been comfortable to pass through, not too snaggy with brambles and nettles. I see the blades of some long-handled pruning shears poking out of her rucksack.

On this Sunday afternoon when lots of people are in the pubs of Harlington watching the football, or at home, she is out clearing country paths for Max and I.

I thank her for doing this, and as I walk away, but only later recognising how deep that gratitude runs. This unnamed human creature is a Path-Clearer. I think of everyone involved in the conservation, preservation, and repair of these routes I use to walk through the countryside. It is valuable work. 

 You know sometimes you can get a tune stuck in your head, which is called an earworm. Or a thought, which is called a thoughtworm (it’s not, but maybe it should be). What about if you get a catchphrase or a meme stuck in your head? Such is the case with Oh, Hello

It’s not a catchphrase most people on this island would recognise, coming as it does from a series of skits created by Nick Kroll and John Mulaney in a Comedy Central Series that ran from 2013-2015. I have just discovered the Kroll Show via a recommendation from Stephen Metcalf of The Culture Gabfest, and all thirty episodes have been a near-constant delight.

The Oh, Hello segments, where Kroll plays the 70-something Gil Faizon, and Mulaney, his sidekick George St. Geegland make me feel gleefully happy. Everyone bangs on about how Mulaney is the genius of this comedy duo, but I think Kroll is a particular kind of genius too. I get the sense that one aspect of his genius is to be a path-clearer, to not get in the way of other comedians, to enjoy their spotlight when they’re basking in it too. 

Their Too Much Tuna skits are the acme of their genius. When writing this, I thought I might spell out why the two minute sketch below is not only hilarious but profoundly symbolic and symptomatic of our current cultural and political climate, but then I realised I could save myself the work of doing that by just playing the thing to you.

Feel free to email though if you need a breakdown, though I fear it might kill some of the joy of just vibing with the piece. And if you don’t just-vibe with it, my longwinded explanation probably wouldn’t amplify that for you anyway.

They say that if you have an earworm, you should sing the whole song from start to finish as it’s the subconscious mind’s way of trying to remember or hold onto the rest of the song. Not sure if that’s the case, but what do you do with a thoughtworm? Or in this case: a kind of comic meme? In the last few weeks Faizon & Geegland’s Oh, Hello has been playing in my ears at the oddest of times. It’s also become a kind of sonic ligament in my relationship with Max.  

So maybe I don’t entirely want to get rid of the spell of those words, but rather pay homage to them. And this is how you do that: 

1/ Stopping to give Max some water, you admire the concentric beauty of a number of tiny pine cones scattered throughout a small grove of pine, the clump so dense that you have to waddle into it to do your collecting. 

2/ You fill a bag with your pine cones, and then continue along the route of your walk, hoping to find a spot where you might spell something out with your cones. Barton Hills National Nature Reserve seems like a fitting canvas.

3/ A woman smoking with a table of pals at the pub where I stop to get a tea asks me why I’m hoiking around a Waitrose bag packed to the brim with small pinecones. I tell her that just five minutes away from this pub where she is sitting with her family, these pine cones all but carpet certain patches of ground. She looks at me as if I am talking about a distant planet. Her daughter admires Max’s haircut. 

4/ Barton Hills Nature Reserve is a beautiful series of hills and vistas. Are not these milk thistle ((Silybum marianum) bracts, below, as gorgeous as stars? See how they also mimic or advertise their own remedial properties – for other than being used to treat the bubonic plague and promote digestive health, they are equally good as galactagogues: catalysts for increasing the production of breastmilk in nursing mothers. 

 5/ I start the spell as the sun begins to set. When it is made, a very happy, loved-up Jamaican couple in their 40s stroll past. They spot the piece and somehow it adds to their enjoyment of the place and each other. This is an added bonus. 

6/ Spell made. Max and I continue with our walk, back to Leagrave (we did this walk back-to-front, starting at Harlington, which is more ensconced in countryside than the once-small village of Leagrave, now just another suburb of Luton). 

“Consider the pine tree!” riffs Seth Godin, in one of his marvellous audio essays gathered as Akimbo (the one I am listening to is on “Genius”): 

“Not just any pine tree, the Jack Pine. If the weather gets hot or dry, the Jack Pine starts producing pine cones. Two kinds: male at the top, female at the bottom, so they don’t self-pollinate. Hundreds of pine cones. If one of the seeds at the top of the tree gets fortunate, it will get pollinated, by some pollen from a different Jack Pine tree. And then, more than a year later, that pine cone will land on the ground. And then, perhaps, there’ll be a fire. Because it takes a fire, or a heat of over 120 degrees for that pine cone to open up, and spread its seed. And then, then, it starts to get interesting. Because that seed might land on fertile ground, because there has been a fire. And it might germinate and grow. But it’s right next to hundreds, or thousands of other Jack Pine seeds. And a ratchet kicks in, so that if a tree is one inch taller than the tree next to it, it gets more sun, so it grows a little bit faster. And now it’s two inches taller, or a foot taller, or three feet taller. And then all the other pine trees fail to grow. And that is why the earth isn’t covered from top to bottom with pine trees. Because only one in a million actually goes up.”

And the other 999,999? 

They too existed. 

Two of them even had and extra-carefully-chosen pride of place in forming the “comma” of my temporary piece of land art, the comma separating but also holding together the  OH and HELLO.

All of it created with pine cones near Barton-Le-Clay (Streatley) on Sunday 15th September, 2019, at four minutes to seven in the evening.

 

 

 

Categories
Control Creation Creativity David Abram Earnestness Everything Is Waiting For You Flow Nature Spell of The Sensuous

The Spell of The Sensuous (Chorleywood to Chesham Walk)

A few weeks ago I was wandering around a part of the countryside that I know very well -the Chilterns- on a route I’ve walked dozens of times (Chorleywood to Chesham), when I spotted Jesus.

Not the historical or spiritual figurehead, he of a million paintings, cards, and stained-glass windows: Jesus the Original God-Botherer (OGB), Jesus the martyr, dying on a cross purportedly for our sins (still not sure why he needed to do that). This was not a supernatural or otherworldly visitation, it was very much part of this earthly realm: 33 stones shaped into that provocative name. For it provokes something in all of us, whether positive or negative: JESUS. There he/it was on, announcing his name from the earth beneath my feet.

I paused for a moment to take it in, enjoying as much as anything else the pleasure of finding those familiar man-made letters out here in the predominantly unlettered countryside; enjoying the built-in ephemerality of this construction, and wondering about the inner life of the person who had gathered and made this modest, but possibly also agenda-led, piece of land art.

The small valley in which the work was situated has always gladdened my heart. Every time I emerge from the descent through the woods into the expanse of this space it feels like a kind of home-coming. For some reason, largely due to juxtaposition, this particular patch of ground feels grand-canyonesque when you step into it, even though it probably only stretches 600 yards in either direction. Which is also to say, using the language of psychology, that some kind of positive priming was already at work before those stones “spoke” to me.

A few minutes later, I came across another piece, presumably by the same artist, this time in slightly larger stones sunk slightly in the grass, and arranged with even greater finesse:

Please take a moment to admire the beautiful interlocking bottom of the U, as if the two stones that contribute to the formation of this letter were just waiting to be intertwined with each other in a chiasm of smooth hard flesh. And what about that knurled , almost flame-shaped stone which makes up the top of the second S? A stone that also looks a bit like the head of a wolf or one of its canine cousins?

This second betokening of Jesus was a much more chunky, shout-it-from-the-rooftops version of the first. So I stood before it, as one might stand before a piece of sculpture in a gallery, not really thinking of much, but enjoying its resonances in a slightly ambivalent way, as well as its temporary presence in the landscape that I was passing through. I took a picture of it on my phone and moved on.

Heading in the direction of Hill Farm, I came across the third Jesus. This one on a bench. One of those very simple countryside benches made of a single slab of wood held up about two feet off the ground by two blocks on either end.

Perhaps because this was the third piece of land art I’d discovered in less than half an hour, I walked around the stones this time, taking them in from a few different angles.

Seen from this vantage point, turned upside down, the stones, with a small nudge here and there, might appear quite happy to shift into a slightly different, but not wholly unrelated pattern.

Hopefully this wasn’t too deliberate a desecration of the original artist’s work. Was I not making SENSE of JESUS for myself, albeit by moving the original letters around rather than setting up my own word(s) in a separate, quasi-critical relationship to the first word?

This kind of reconfiguring comes very naturally to us human animals, entranced as we sometimes still can be by the symbolic layers of the nonhuman world around us.  Is not paint just pigment moved around: suspended by us in a binder such as acrylic, polyurethane, or oils, mobilised by further diluents, and then transferred by brush, finger, or another mark-maker onto the grey or white weave of a canvas? Similarly, but even more elementally, pencils leave their graphite trails when applied to a slightly abrasive surface like paper.

I decided to repeat this game, by placing myself on the other side of the word so that my new perspective once again shifted SENSE into a kind of dissolving non-sense (i.e. ƎSNƎS) before the stones finally settled into the next configuration (below):

No one but the stones and I were cognizant of this edgy little metamorphosis from JESUS (or S∩SƎſ) to SENSE and ƎSNƎS, and finally to DOORS. What we (myself, the stones, the landscape) bore witness to, was in some way the bony skeleton of a poem: a mythical or historical figure’s name, the SENSE we make of it, which also acts as a DOOR to a new realm of perception or understanding, through which we might pass and perhaps in some way re-embody ourselves.

I say no-one else witnessed this, but Max was of course there, taking in this curious pushing around of the material of his world (rocks, stones, grass, dirt) into configurations that were possibly as dumb to him as words themselves. Who knows what a dog hears when we try and interact with them through our symbolic language.

There was also another man, a dog-walker, who traipsed past as I was looking at the third JESUS and asked me if I had made the stone composition, the question igniting a flickering of shame, replaced quickly by relief when I was able to say no I hadn’t. Perhaps for this reason, I then somewhat akwardly tried to explain to him (just in case he was aligned to JESUS in ways I was not) that I quite liked the word, shaped as it was, but didn’t really know what to “make” of it, or “do” with it. He didn’t either, so turned his attention back to his dog and walked on.

The stones continued to rattle around in my head for a few days after that, until I realised what it was about them that I found so affecting.

For I had clearly been moved by those three configurations of Jesus, even if not in the way intended by their maker. I suspect the Stone Gatherer might have wanted his or her work to prod my conscience or “soul” in the ways of rudimentary marketing, evangelizing me into rethinking my relationship with churches and biblical verse. No longer seeing them as calming, restorative places or mythopoetic literature, but rather the literal manifestation of a patriarchal deity and his specific purposes for our lives (mainly, as far as I can tell, serving Him).

On the Metropolitan line an hour earlier, a less charming, more bombastic version of this call-for-contemplation had caught my eye in a postcard that combined the usual culpability maneuver with a line from Hebrews 3:15 (see accompanying photograph).

The language of the card was very familiar. It’s message something along the lines of:

“Yo, sinners! Jesus died on the cross for us, and then instead of hanging out in heaven with his Pa, returned to earth so that we might know it was not just sleight-of-hand or mouth on his part, but THE REAL DEAL. So here’s a (Christ-ian) invitation to worship him [followed by the line from the Bible]: Today if you will hear his voice, harden not your hearts, as in the provocation.

Unlike the stone configurations, this was just semantic litter, a man-made imposition slotted adjacent to a view through the tube window that had, to my eyes, more “Jesus” in it, animistically speaking (trees blurring past in glorious shades of  green and burgundy), than a thousand instances of printed religious propaganda.

The reason I found the Jesus signs affecting and moving but the tube postcard mere debris, was I think due to the fact that the former held within it “the spell of the sensuous”, whereas the latter was merely another piece of human advertising.

In David Abram’s life-changing book The Spell of The Sensuous, Abram shows us in searing prose how our estrangement from the world around us, not just from each other, but from our nonhuman environment can in part be traced back to the invention of writing, and the ways in which early pictographic and ideographic writing systems were gradually replaced by an entirely abstract alphabet, by phonetic scripts that no longer held any associations for us with our natural environment.

Although we make this claim for our species, we were not the first to “write” ourselves onto our environment:

“The earthly terrain in which we find ourselves, and upon which we depend for all our nourishment, is shot through with suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert, to the black slash burned by lightning into the trunk of an old elm. The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind; it is this script that was studied by the ancient “augurs,” who could read therein the course of the future. Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves they consume. Wolves urinate on specific stumps and stones to mark off their territory. And today you read these printed words as tribal hunters once read the tracks of deer, moose, and bear printed in the soil of the forest floor. ”

By extension, “our first writing, clearly, was our own tracks, our footprints, our handprints in mud or ash pressed upon the rock. Later, perhaps, we found that by copying the distinctive prints and scratches made by other animals we could gain a new power; here was a method of identifying with the other animal, taking on its expressive magic in order to learn of its whereabouts, to draw it near, to make it appear.”

A trace of this magical thinking still remains in the Jesus Stones. But unfortunately, as our letters became untethered from the things they had first pictured, so we too lost touch with the more-than-human world, to a point where today if we get to experience the nonhuman environment, it is mainly through reading about it via our denatured alphabet, or looking at flattened versions of it on our screens.

Abrams traces this state of affairs back to Socrates’ assertion in Plato’s Phaedrus, one of the founding texts of our modern civilization that he would rather stay in the city than go for a walk in the countryside: “I’m a lover of learning, and trees and open country won’t teach me anything, whereas men in the town do.”

In that simple, but dualistic declaration, we as a species step away from millions of years of interconnection and profound affiliation with our natural world and all the other species living within it, to assert that we are now super-special Great Apes, with a newly-invented abstract writing system, allowing us to stand separate, as well as superior to every other natural phenomena on this planet. You want to know where our desecration and annihilation of the planet and everything nonhuman on it begins? It begins here.

“Socrates,” writes Abram, “may be recognised as the hinge on which the sensuous mimetic, profoundly embodied style of consciousness proper to orality, gave way to the more detached, abstract mode of thinking engendered by alphabetic literacy.” Plato, just like the alphabet itself, is not interested in specific rivers, rocks, trees and stones, as your or I might be when walking from Chorleywood to Chesham, but rather the pure Idea (eidos) or unchanging essence of The River, The Rock, The stone, The Truth.

Two and a half thousand years later, Big Data has a similar view of human animals and their world. We all now hover in this strangely timeless, dimensionless, virtual existence of abstract worlds, entirely mediated by letters and numbers. We are all to some extent, and often to a very great extent, profoundly estranged and alienated from the world around us, as well as ourselves. Thought, our closest ally, is perceived linguistically too, as a series of word-encoded permutations drifting through the mind like Very Important Clouds.

“This new, seemingly autonomous, reflective awareness is called, by Socrates, the psychê, a term he thus twists from its earlier, Homeric significance as the invisible breath that animates the living body and that remains, as kind of wraith or ghost, after the body’s death. (The term psychê was derived from an older Greek term, psychein, which meant “to breathe” or “to blow”.) For Plato, as for Socrates, the psychê is now that aspect of oneself that is refined and strengthened by turning away from the ordinary sensory world in order to contemplate the intelligible Ideas, the pure and eternal forms that, alone, truly exist. The Socratic-Platonic psychê, in other words, is none other than the literate intellect, that part of the self that is born and strengthened in relation to the written letters.”

And yet.

And yet, all is not lost. For as Abram suggests, the deep history of our abstract writing systems still points, even in a very withered state, to the sensuous, embodied forms of animism that are deeply connected to our creaturely experience.

“As a Zuñi elder focuses her eyes upon a cactus and hears the cactus begin to speak, so we focus our eyes upon these printed marks and immediately hear voices. We hear spoken words, witness strange scenes or visions, even experience other lives. As nonhuman animals, plants, and even “inanimate” rivers once spoke to our tribal ancestors, so the “inert” letters on the page now speak to us! This is a form of animism that we take for granted, but it is animism nonetheless—as mysterious as a talking stone.”

If you take a moment to think about it, this is utterly magical. Hence the “spell” of the sensuous. “Perhaps the most succinct evidence for the potent magic of written letters,” writes Abram, is to be found in the ambiguous meaning of that common English word:

“As the roman alphabet spread through oral Europe, the Old English word “spell,” which had meant simply to recite a story or tale, took on the new double meaning: on the one hand, it now meant to arrange, in the proper order, the written letters that constitute the name of a thing or a person; on the other, it signified a magic formula or charm. Yet these two meanings were not nearly as distinct as they have come to seem to us today. For to assemble the letters that make up the name of a thing, in the correct order, was precisely to effect a magic, to establish a new kind of influence over that entity, to summon it forth! To spell, to correctly arrange the letters to form a name or a phrase, seemed thus at the same time to cast a spell, to exert a new and lasting power over the things spelled. Yet we can now realize that to learn to spell was also, and more profoundly, to step under the influence of the written letters ourselves, to cast a spell upon our own senses. It was to exchange the wild and multiplicitous magic of an intelligent natural world for the more concentrated and refined magic of the written word.”

WOW.

This seems like incredibly rich territory for making art, but equally for learning to live again through every pore of our body as we once did, but very rarely do now. To live within and in the embrace of the natural world, as opposed to one (or a million) steps removed from it with our word-focused, abstract-making eyes and minds.

What Abram’s book makes me want to do is spell a few things out to myself, to other passing human animals, but equally to the nonhuman, animate world that surrounds us. But not on a screen as I am doing here. No one reads or cares about screenwords anymore. And not through paints or pencils, either. Rather, I think I’m going to follow in the footsteps of the Jesus Artist, and other Environmental Artists like him/her, using materials found on-site, but focusing mainly on words. Because words, for me, and for others (I’m thinking here of Hughes’ Thought Fox, but maybe poets in general) point to experience in a very real and alive way. Especially so, perhaps, when they are formed by and through living materials?

If and when I do some of this, I shall write of the walks where the spell-making occurs, including images of “spells” cast here, and in an Instagram account called @spellofthesensuous.

Categories
ADHD Earnestness

Terra Cognita: The Importance of Being Earnest

I don’t think I realised how nourishing a single poem might be until I started learning them by heart. Just a couple of lines of language, returned to, day in day out, engaged with earnestly, like prayer, or telling someone you love them.

We’re not very comfortable with earnestness anymore, are we? Maybe because blinkered zealotry often tags along with it, the kind of zealotry that brings big buildings with lots of people in them crashing down to the ground. Only the very uncool are allowed to be earnest: the religious and religiose, teenage outcasts, birdwatchers, vegans and the like. But one cannot pray or love ironically, even if you’re not exactly sure what either of these enterprises entail. A certain amount of conviction is required to do these kinds of activities.

There’s much solace in this recognition of how “little” one needs to be happy. How the right amount of little can seem a lot. I feel this solace every time I pick up my oft-folded, timeworn 3 x 5 card on which I’ve written this week’s poem, and set out for a walk around the block, or even a pacing session in the garden, committing a few more words to memory. And in doing so: hearing, seeing, feeling certain lines anew.

David Whyte affirms that everything is waiting for you, but if this “everything” happens to be the entire language lode of the human species, not just waiting but ever-available to us, through a split-second Google search at any moment of the day, on almost any device, are we not going to gorge ourselves silly on information?

And in that gorging, will we at times (if not almost always) forget to taste, to savour, to chew? To pause? To put down the fork? To honour, experience and enjoy? All the things we do when we’re learning a poem we love. It’s incredibly simple, we’re just putting down the fork between each mouthful and giving ourselves as fully as possible up to pleasures of language and what it can do for us, or we for it.

I am incredibly greedy for information: “new” ideas, mental-kicks and tricks. This doesn’t sound like a problem until you rephrase it as my brain, through the use of technology, is becoming more and more quick-click stimulant- searching, and less and less able to go deep, to get truly to the heart of a poem, or a story, which only a very close, time-invested reading of a text will provide.

Larry Rosen gets to the nub of it, for me, when he diagnoses chronic screen-grazers (that would be all of us then) as having a variant of ADHD.  The “deficit” comes from the misconception that we are able to multitask:

Research tells us there is no such thing as multitasking – that all we can really do is task switch. In other words people lack the ability to pay full attention to two tasks at a time.

Recently, “just for fun”, I’ve been trying to track the amount of task-switching I do during an hour online. The hyperlinked internet is of course designed almost entirely for task-switching and thus mind-addling. It is an ADHD-generating media. Are the costs of multi-tasking ever equal to their benefits? Here are the costs, you tell me:

  1. Attention difficulties
  2. Poor decision making
  3. Lack of depth of material
  4. Information overload
  5. Internet addiction
  6. Poor sleep habits
  7. Overuse of caffeine

It don’t look good. But thankfully, there is always language for us to use and be used by. Poetry seems to have become my Ritalin, what’s yours?