What The Matter Is

GOOD TO BE HOME. On the train back from Edinburgh I took great care to restrain myself from just moving straight on to the next thing on the list. A list to end all lists has been accumulating in my absence, but Edinburgh needed some thinking through on the train.

Things do need thinking through. And writing down, ideally.

On Friday afternoon I visited Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden and forgot both my notebook and my painkillers. The absence of each had a similar effect. I can’t manage the pressure of dumbness very well. I write a lot of things down on a daily basis so I have them recorded, and at a place like Little Sparta (that’s what his home’s called) it’s headache-inducing to let things go by unrecorded.

It isn’t that I liked everything I saw. A lot of it I straightforwardly disliked. But the garden contained certain difficult to recollect sensations and sentiments, and if I’d had a pen and paper I could have tried to gather them down into words and leave them there, and carry on with an unclouded head. Having no means of noting anything down, I had to contain all these things throughout the hours I was there, and continually risk losing them without using them up properly. I mentioned the other day in an interview at The Other Room in Manchester the need to mop up World, and the hope that language might be able to do that. And the hope above all that poetry – language redoubled – might be able to mop up more World still.

Details of the works in the show, corresponding to the photos I posted on Wednesday. We tried Making Ends Meet for the first time this afternoon – I’ll write more about it on the train home tomorrow.

* Days, Time’s Mice

Lines 44-45 of Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem Le Bestiaire (1911) read: Belles journées, souris du temps, Vous rongez peu à peu ma vie. (Beautiful days, time’s mice, gnawing little by little my life away.)

* Doing Things with Words

J.L. Austin’s lectures How to do Things with Words (1955) identify certain categories of utterance that affect rather than describe their context.

* Doing Words with Things

Doing Words with Things shares its title with my collaborative performance between a sculptor and a signer of British Sign Language, resulting in conversations made of wire. Performance at London Word Festival (Apr 2011).

* Third Word Bird

Pencil marks resulting from my performance of Third Word Bird, Icelandic Embassy, London with Maintenant and 3:AM Magazine (2010).

* Tag

Peter Dreher’s painting series Tag um Tag ist Guter Tag (Day by Day is a Good Day, 1974-ongoing) comprises nearly 4,000 numbered paintings of the same empty glass.

* Each to Each

Each to Each originated as a sculptural installation of the same name, created for the Citations Lifted Loose exhibition, part of the Concrete and Glass Festival (2008).

* Making Ends Meet

Visitors whistle to one another in pairs, one note at a time.

THESE ARE NOT POEMS is installed! And the vinyl lettering arrived after all. Here are my five completed “shelf poems”.

It’s a brief show – closes again on the 19th – but do come and have a look if you’re in Edinburgh. It’s here:

TotalKunst Gallery
3 Bristo Place
Edinburgh
EH1 1EY

Time for bed now. There’s a maybug outside the window. Maybugs are good things, too heavy to be realistic moths at all.

The train window next to me reads EMERGENCY EXIT. It’s written on the outside of the glass, and from in here it’s backwards even though we’re the ones who’d need to exit. But it isn’t an exit at all – it’s a fixed pane with glass that looks very very strong. You wouldn’t want to try and break it without a very serious emergency on your hands. My back aches. It’s lovely, out the window, it’s getting Scottish. And there’s a telecom tower taller than the clouds.

But today has been shaken and damaged by things not working. Complicated and uninteresting administrative things variously involving a touring exhibition, a text submission, a contract to sign, a scheduling difficulty, and most of all the vinyl lettering for tomorrow’s show, heartbreakingly lost in the post for the second time in a fortnight. The guaranteed overnight courier didn’t materialize, and the artwork doesn’t work without the vinyl. All this and no proper internet access to monitor things and try to get them straight. I slept very little last night, I couldn’t concentrate on getting sleepy.

Standing at the station earlier today with my coat falling down its own sleeves dragged by heavy bags badly packed, my suitcase toppling at every move, tapping emails into my phone and getting all the touchscreen spellings wrong, I thought it was probably time to slow down.

When everything works, the breakneck speed feels good, like the quiet rustle of apparatus working smoothly. When things break, all the speed catches up with itself and trips over. I do worry about the long-term effects of trying to fit too many things into the month, the week, the day, especially when I know blank time is the most productive. People need to be slow sometimes.

Then I got an email from a friend saying hello. We met up last week, and I described to her the work for the Edinburgh show. She feels, incredibly to me on days like this, that what I’m trying to do is worthwhile. I’d told her it sometimes feels like pretending. She told me about floatation devices in the sea, viewed from the shore.

I’ve just noticed the EMERGENCY EXIT is in vinyl lettering. Lucky train.

I’m in Bury today and tomorrow getting started on the #dawnchorus Twitter project initiated by Natasha Vicars and Mary Paterson. We’re looking at ways to use the platform to create a collaborative dawn performance. I’ve never used Twitter before – I set up an account a year or two ago to track the gradual fall of several hair grips from my hair, but in the end I never did it, and the account has been dormant ever since. This project’s a good way (back) in, because we’re thinking about how to use the existing structure to develop an intervention with a new set of structures and relations.

We talked a lot about Twitter, but we also talked about dawn (I didn’t know dawn light counted as twilight too), and about birds. People tend to have good stories about birds. Darwin broke many hearts when he pronounced the dawn chorus a territorial showdown and not the celebration of a new day’s hope. Birds don’t hope, he said. My new garden shares a blackbird with the adjoining gardens. It’s the only one there so it gets the best worms. You see them in its beak. A lovely dawn story emerged about a father feeding his new baby at five every morning, by a window looking over an empty street.

Now and again we stopped to write 140 characters or less about our relationship with Twitter, to see how it changed as the day progressed.

Here’s how mine developed between 10:30am and 5:30pm. My relationship with Twitter is…

-1- not very much of a relationship. Mainly, worries about writing too much, about starting and never going on, about getting etiquettes wrong.

-2- I DIDN’T DIE I’M STILL HERE THIS IS MY TREE

-3- under construction. If I can ignore the graphic design – that’s a big if – I might let it be a good place for short poems with ragged edges.

-4- to do with gardens and birds and dawn. Nice. I wonder if getting my phone out to tweet these things will spoil them. The screen’s so bright.

You can see I’m not yet wholeheartedly resolved, but there’s still time and I do want to find a way to like it. (2 isn’t as weird as it sounds: it’s a quote from Natasha, who was paraphrasing what Darwin claimed birds mean when they tweet at dawn. It gets cold at night so some of the birds die before sunrise. I suppose it’s just re-tweeting a re-tweeted re-tweet. Sorry.)

I’m writing this in the lobby of a conference centre in Manchester where I’ve found free wifi. Above me a large brass sphere has been swinging through space with great composure, at odds with the thin music being piped into the room. If I crane my neck to the right I can read a brass plaque beside me: “THE FOUCAULT PENDULUM. The pendulum swings in a place which retains a fixed orientation in space while the earth rotates beneath it. As a result the end points of the pendulum bob’s swing trace out a circular path.” So the earth’s been moving all this time. Even though there’s easy-clean carpet on the floor and tinned music in the air and I’m staring at a shiny screen.

ps. VINYL SAGA UPDATE: this morning I phoned the vinyl people from the tram between Manchester Piccadilly and Bury. They were happy to recut the titles and express courier them straight to Edinburgh so it all arrives at the gallery tomorrow. All fingers crossed. I wonder if the first copy is sitting on my doorstep back at home by now..