It’s been interesting reading other artists’ blogs – I’ve come across several (Barefoot Blindfold, a project by Anne-Marie Culhane and Paul Conneally, or Phil Illingworth’s Notes from an obsessive/compulsive butterfly), where the focus is pulled away from the visual to draw out other senses, or the visual is emphasised in unexpected ways (Kyra Pollitt’s wonderful People of the Eye).
I started writing here as I wanted to extend how I connect into the (art-)world, virtually, while I am pretty much housebound. So yesterday, in far-off and probably one-sided sync with Barefoot Blindfold, I sat outside just after 5 am, propped up against the house-wall, with my eyes closed, to listen.
I like birdsong as much as the next person, esp. in spring, but the quality of concentrated attention naturally deepened the experience. A blackbird’s clear tune and ducks’ calls from the nearby park were the only ones I could identify. There were some funny, kind of rasping bird-sounds, and the tiniest, high-pitched tweet which seemed to travel on a thin line into my left ear, where it almost stung. A couple of times it got quiet and I thought, oh, that’s it, but then one bird started up again and others joined in.
And while I wasn’t blindfolded or barefoot (I feel cold by default nowadays and my feet would have touched cement), wasn’t in Loughborough with the group and traffic noises underlayed my dawn chorus, I wouldn’t otherwise have sat outside, fully alert for close to half an hour in the crisp morning air, and thought about how individual birds’ trills and warbles seem to traverse space like ribbons, interweaving and making dense textures. I remembered a song from my childhood (Amsel, Drossel, Fink und Star, und die ganze Vogelschar… which I need to look up) and pondered how in Renaissance paintings of the Annunciation the moment the Virgin Mary conceives is often represented by a straight line from a white dove (Holy Ghost) into her right ear… Then I went back to bed, happy.
My hearing seems to have become more acute since I fell ill, to the extent that noise can make me feel nauseated; but it is also the last moderatively active pursuit when I’m exhausted. A couple of weeks ago I was crushed by the weight of ever more extreme fatigue (I’m calling it a healing crisis), worse than it had been in years. For hours on end I couldn’t speak, couldn’t read, think, daydream, not even watch the tele. I lay on my bed, so tired I couldn’t move a limb, even turning over an exertion beyond the pale. One ear stayed tuned to the radio. For a while the voices flowed, then, gradually, sentences swerved and washed away, words bobbed along new currents and that last zooming in of conscious energies failed too, even though I was still awake.
(I apologise, can’t work out why the first three links sometimes work, sometimes don’t, no matter how often I type in the address, it keeps coming up minus the word ‘projects’, but you’ll know how to find the artists’ blogs on the a-n website.)
