Vulgar Errors residency in progress
I have been working on some text pieces for my upcoming residency. These pair quotes form Thomas Browne with contemporary newspaper headlines or political quotes about working or worklessness.
A short video sketch ‘F is for work’ stands alone with nothing really to do with Thomas Browne, but as my ideas are progressing Browne and the headlines are mingling more. Possibly I am moving away from considering work as such and towards the work resonating with the more general contemporary environment/ideas about working, Britishness, migrants, disability…a rhetoric of people needing to contribute. One text from Browne keeps coming into my head. He gives the phrase ‘Not to harbour swallows in our houses’ as an example of a metaphor (from the writings of Pythagoras) that has at times been taken as a literal truth. The metaphor is to do with not taking people in who will take advantage of you. This seems to resonate, for me, with contemporary rhetoric by papers such as the Daily Mail talking about migrants ‘swarming’ or ‘flocking’ to the UK.
Hugh and I have been talking a bit about metaphor in language and literal truth. Also about the difference between words and images. Hugh suggests that at Browne’s time: “There seems to have been a sense in which pictures were given more credence than what people said or even wrote. This was in a time when most of the painted images people saw represented biblical events etc. And Browne writes about griffins, the phoenix etc, and how people believed they were true creatures because depicted in Egyptian hieroglyphics.”
Another text piece I am working on pairs the words “Err to speak” with “Eyes nor sight.” This is from two Thomas Browne quotes:
1) “Error, to speak largely, is a false judgment of things”
2)”…that they have eyes, but no sight, some neither eyes nor sight”
In one of Browne’s chapters that Hugh has pointed me towards, Browne writes about depicting Adam and whether he should have a navel.
Hugh writes:
“I’ve been ploughing through some obscurer passages of the Pseudodoxia, with Browne wrestling with whether pictures show truth, mainly to do with religious imagery of course, paintings showing Adam with a navel, for example – a paradox that doesn’t really arise until you start showing pictures of him rather than just describing him in text. He wonders why Jesus has long hair, although not why his ethnicity is not Middle Eastern in Italian or northern European art.”
He wonders what similar pictograms we have today that we take too unquestioningly, suggesting that possibly the ‘truth’ we are shown in nature documentaries is one fertile area. So now I am also starting to look at nature documentaries and maybe bringing in some images to pair with my texts.
Amelia Crouch
