Leaden and Deadly
My leather bound
feet pierce the cold
body of water.
My weight drags me.
My hair swirls around my panicked face,
mouth full of algae
and oily water.
Layers of cloth are black and heavy.
My high heals are no longer sexy,
they are leaden and deadly.
Leaden and deadly
Leaden and deadly
They thrash, clanking corrugated iron,
my coat is a shroud and my jeans are sodden.
Flesh pin pricked and frozen
but adrenalin makes me feel on fire.
Suddenly, without control, I surface
Gasping I raise a hand
and squeeze the water from my stinging eyes.
I can see the edge.
The dock is near enough
to swim to
but as I struggle forward,
breathless,
I sense its height.
Too high for me to reach,
Too high
I can never get out,
nothing to grasp, (fuck)
I know I am stuck
and I start to sink again.
Cold black. A small light behind
The surface hints
that there is life,
acknowledgement
and power.
But it cannot wake up,
It cannot register.
It cannot turn on.
Ca Ca Ca Ca
Ca Ca Ca Ca
Ce Ce Ce Ce Ce Ce
Ce Ce Ce Ce Ce Ce
Communication is communion
Communication is communion
Communication is communion
Communication is communion
Drowning
Still from Jubilee, Derek Jarman, 1977. Bod, Crabs and Mad take the body of man they had seduced and killed to dump in the estuary of the underground river the Neckinger next to Butlers Wharf. The river takes its names from ‘The Devil’s Neck Tie’.
The times the fire brigade came to quench the fire were finite. The docks closed and moved down stream to Tillbury where the water was deeper. Industry left and the wealth drained from the area, leaving empty space for artists. We all know that story.
Anne Bean, Echoing Tower Bridge 1977.
I remember reading an article by Anne Bean. She recounted a performance she made when she was at Butlers Wharf that involved jumping in to the Thames, swimming around, setting off fire works. I’ve stood at this point on the Thames. Sometimes when the tide is out I walk right under Tower bridge were the silt is viscous and unforgiving. But I have never walked into the water. Not yet.
On her web site Anne Bean writes:
When I met Paul Burwell at Butlers Wharf in 1976 I was exploring sound as shadows, using a drum-kit with metal drumsticks wired to a car battery, which I drummed to close different circuits to create changing light patterns so that shadows danced around the room depending on which circuit was closed. I worked with Paul to make the system more complex and then we used it in an event when the kit was strapped onto a boat and rowed under Tower Bridge, with Paul drumming to create both echoes and shadows.
“This duo Paul Burwell and Anne Bean, have performed in many contexts and environments. They just did a recent performance at Tower Bridge in which PB drummed in a rowing boat with drums and cymbals wired up so that they lit up with the contact of his metallised drum sticks. AB swam and vocalised around the boat with two fish attached to her shoulders and red life boat lights attached to her ankles. The whole scene was lit by flashing lights from river boats and spot lights from the balcony of the warehouse/studio they use. ‘Pulp’ is a new venture and their single captures the intensity of their live performance. I was stunned.”
D I Fanzine
From <http://annebeanarchive.com/1977-echoing-tower-bridge/>
The Bow Gamelan Ensemble; Anne Bean, Paul Burwell and Richard Wilson.
I am a poor swimmer. I jump in, get thrown on rocks and cut my knees, swim into jelly fish. I have underwater scars. When I see the tide out in Bermondsey, or further down the river in Deptford or Greenwhich, I see the spoils of industry littering the river bed. Rotten hunks of wood, entropic concrete chutes, sharp oxidized caryatids, corrugated iron, chains and bones. I could never get in. But I imagine it, I imagine jumping into the decommissioned docks at the nadir of industrial decline. It feels cathartic. Romantic. Indulgent. Needed. I imagine what I am wearing. The water is water. It is the Thames, but it is also time. It is the constant flow of needs, duties, nature, culture, dirt and desire. It is people, it is a mass of people that are so many they aren’t people any more. It is nothingness.
The area sparked with associations. On the river bank stood Butlers Wharf, the former studios hosting a whole generation of artists and film makers, inlcuding Derek Jarman, Jo Stockham, William Raban, Anne Bean, Stephen Cripps.
‘Cripps at the Acme: Drawings & Performances’ The Acme Gallery, London, 1980. Photo: Rita Harris/Jonathan Harvey.
Cripps work combined fire, performance, machinery and sound. In his notes he writes “Sound: Physical air waves tangible visible” and” A speaker being subjected to extreme distortion throws out ball bearings onto percussion [instrument]”. He lived in a shed inside Butlers Wharf until a fire (believed to have been started as a way to clear the studios and claim insurance before the area was redeveloped) forced the artists to leave. He died in 1982 aged 29.
Stills from Jubilee, Derek Jarman, 1978, which was shot in and around Butlers Wharf and the surrounding area. Fire recurs as a theme, razing houses to the ground, forming ritualistic settings. Fire as burning Dionysion dreams, wild celebration and sacrifice, but also a vital element for vigil and survival.
Fire at Butler’s Wharf, 1979. Photograph Fran Cottell.
The fire that forced the artists to leave the studios, leaving the area to be redeveloped by Terrance Conran. Bermondsey was always on fire. In June 1861 there was a blaze called The Great Tooley Street Fire that raged for two whole weeks.
In March 1931 a huge fire ran through the warehouses coinciding with freezing weather. Water pumped onto the building from boats froze on contact creating a fantasy cocktail of smoke and ice.
Still from Jubilee, Derek Jarman, 1978
Dum sigillum summi Patris, Conductus for two voices, Perotin, ca 1200.
Cross Bones Grave Yard, a formal burial ground for ‘outcasts’ in Southwark. Thought to be the final resting place for the ‘Winchester Geese’, medieval sex workers licenced by the Bishop of Winchester to work in the area. It is now a memorial garden. Photograph: Fay Nicolson.
A Parish is a church territorial unit.
St Mary Magdalene Church sits at the bottom of Bermondsey street. It is formed of temporal fragments, with the west wall dating from 1291, the main hulk of the building from 1680, and the tower from 1830. In 2013 glass panels were inserted into its facade. They are modern and transparent, etched with words from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians ‘He tore down the wall we used to keep each other at a distance’.
Bermondsey wall, Galleywall, barriers built to block the tidal streams and partition the uncertain marsh land. We clambered upon these and used them as conduits.
St Mary Magdalene was built for the lay brethren who lived and worked on the lands of Bermondsey Abbey, one of the largest Cluniac orders in Europe in the middle ages. The Cluniacs, dressed head to toe in black, did no manual labour, just reprographics and song – spreading the scripture through repetition, calling out to god, or warning against him, through scribe and sound. Throats and chapels as amplifiers. Melismatic signifiers extenuated across western scales.
As the years pass the abbey grows, brick upon brick, the city rises, cathedrals loom, architecture blooms towards the sky.
Voices too begin to layer. The monophonic becomes polyphonic.
Music, like maths for the body, articulates a more sublime order through harmonic parallels, 3rds and 5ths.
The liturgies grow increasingly ornate, golden, embossed, curlicued. The feasting becomes gluttonous and the glass becomes stained.
A Parish is a church territorial unit.
How does a church own a territory? How does land belong to god, or those who do his work?
Frankalmoin – Give me your land and I’ll pray for you, I’ll for your soul.
Frankalmoin – possession of land in exchange for prayer. If the alms are pure all services provided will be of a specifically spiritual nature. If the alms are perpetual the grant is intended to be in effect forever.
From malefactors to benefactors. Land is Prayer and Prayer is Song.
The sacred taper’s lights are gone,
Grey moss has clad the altar-stone,
The holy image is o’erthrown,
The bell has ceased to toll:
The long-ribb’d aisles are burst and shrunk,
The holy shrine to ruin sunk,
Departed is the pious monk;
God’s blessing on his soul!”
