Stating/Showing

The sun is facing us so we must be heading west for a while. Cathie is her name and her surname is Fields. She lives just over the hill in to the sun.

“There is a perfect hill of pine to my right, crafted by the landscape, which dances around in the pallet of green in the breaking evening sun before it’s setting. And then a tunnel in to browns and greys and yellows and blues. The falsity of late summer that looks warm but hides rain around the corner and damp under your feet. And the train still hums on.”

The whole journey now sets itself in reverse and all the hilly hill hills look vaguely familiar as they roll in to one. Two, three green brown jade-of-purple heather and heath. The clouds too take on similar shapes, setting the horizon as something altogether inspirational, so to speak.

So, to speak is to sit across from someone you’re not sure about, you have a memory of them starting a business in Yoga and or in Palates but you have never been ever so sure of the difference, and of the difference in her. So you speak to her and you ask “how the Yolates business going?” – and she gives you a funny look whilst shoving yet more free paella in to her mouth and washing it down with bread.

This was an art exercise. For us to arrive and climb the stairs, after each flight there was a taster of a menu built up from what the building had to offer – each doorway opening on to a free sample of publication and construction and printing press and chalkboard. We dined in the end at the very top. Two artists were in the guise of chefs cooking a rice dish. We sat on a long thin table. On this table the woman sat opposite me. And conversation eventually flowed after we disregarded the idea of us being placed in a social experiment.

We were fooled by the food as it took us to somewhere exotic via the heavy vegan desert. Upon descending the stairs we took another door on to another street and it soon became evident who was the most prepared. I pulled out my umbrella to shelter from the rain. The woman, she stood as if naked for want of being dry against the sky. The sky, well, that was littered with disused buildings: once printing presses and publishers – brass signs disguising the real goings on and the real deal inside. We then went our separate ways and I won’t see her again until I forget what it is she actually does. When we do meet it will merely be a repeated performance – a repeat journey.

We’re now exposed to the maintenance tracks. Such observations would be impossible if there were but a break in the clouds in the sky for the sun: now more houses, more settlements and more trees and common land in between are set behind us. And there’s a constant black line that floats beside me on the other side of re-enforced glass – it’s not that comforting though it keeps disappearing above the window frame.

THE CUMBRIA ENERGY CENTRE

“We’re now exposed to the maintenance tracks. Such observations would be impossible if there were but a break in the clouds in the sky for the sun: now more houses, more settlements and more trees and common land in between are set behind us. And there’s a constant black line that floats beside me on the other side of re-enforced glass – it’s not that comforting though it keeps disappearing above the window frame.”

There’s an age where both Ine and Pie go well together and a new form of energy is created. Right now I am around ten minutes from the border between Scotland and England, heading south east of Dumfries towards the next stop, which is Carlisle. My final destination, after meandering through the hills of Ayrshire down in to the valleys of the Lake District and through to the northern hills of Lancashire, is eventually Manchester.

There was an age when this journey would have been altogether more troublesome and harder to navigate. As the window set to my right dost frame each scene as I occasionally look out, the landscape escaping before my eyes, there’s a hill another hill a town a townhouse a church a paddock a river lake tree forest fence and field. All rolled in to one and relative to us as a travelling hanger of internal sound.

We are not reserved – just quiet

Before all these ‘objects’ of the landscape, the very fabric of a traveller’s horizon would have been North South East and West by way of tree, hill, lake and track – all forayed before each step forward. And none of these tunnels or bridges would ever have existed. Right now I think of the short walk books my father keeps in his trunk at the top of the stairs, behind where the dog used to sleep.

The page says jump (with a smile) It was on a walk through the Peak District that I lost one of these books. He blames me as he entrusted the book in my hands. I was the navigator following the instructions set before me with each turning page.

“Walk three miles east of the pink tree set before you and come to a fence two metres in height. From this fence head down a track through a stile and over a dry stonewall. From here see the tip of a reservoir to your left. Follow its line around North West arriving at a dam. Scale the dam reaching midway between water and stone. Jump off in to the water and swim to the shore on the Eastern side. Once there head north to a second stile…”

And so on. I do this with a smile of course, as I’d rather forget how I left the book, having survived its rigorous instructions, on the top of the car – we set off, the gravel underneath us crunching and expanding space beneath our tyres, the book flew off the roof caught by the Winter’s afternoon sky.

And we are now in England and the accent is altogether different. Carlisle is as grey as Glasgow’s West End on a sunny day and from here the world seems to be not so much as awake as the humdrum of the engine I sit behind. I am facing north west now and there’s not a stile in sight, just more bridges and tunnels that disguise our guise as a linear travelling collective machine.

Len had my laughter

Flash film lens camera axiom action location difference description words and conversation. An autobiographical fiction…

I remember then match sticks making a composition of a house and a lane and a tree in the background and then Len laughs at the revelation of his creation. In the Crux of Sheffield, there’s a hill so steep that your bike would have to be pushed, not ridden, on the return home.

Len held the can of my laughter. Len’s brother was Jack. I wear Jack’s jumper and laugh. And talk in to the camera with the affect of conversation.

What happened?

Sat in this place we face one another with teacups and sauces and crumpets in the middle, and a shiny Mongolian teapot reflecting our convex torsos noses knees and shoulders – knees and toes. We begin to write down every detail of the character in front of us, drawing out physicality on the surface using words that describe our knowledge of one another. At first a tip of the head the brow the cheekbone and mouth and ears connecting the odd smile. Then eyes come with a flash of further description.

Then comes laughter how do you describe this in words without alluding to your history?

The crux of this is the edited character that comes after, the muffled voice and the sound of exultation in between. There’s a place called Crux too. This is important in terms of location, so take note…

“After the written description I take it upon myself to speak directly in to the camera. Little do I know that this camera focuses on my mouth alone: whilst brandishing my characterisation in to the lens, Len’s laughter escapes. A willowing dip in sensibility, a slight whine and then a realisation that gobbles up the sound and swallows only to let it go again – to exasperate – again: such an incantation this is! I let it go again, knowing it’s exacting affect, its altitude in decibels – the intensity of two sources – a logarithm of gut throat and rhyme.”

A climbing hill ends with the next horizon revealing itself – it cackles at you and makes you more aware. So, when speaking in to the camera I will be aware of myself. I will laugh. But then what is the difference between giving you this laughter and describing it? What is fiction thereof and what is empirical evidence of something that has sound?

To edit text you first have to edit film. So – edit the film, re-play the film and decipher the words spoken. Then use these words as a final draft.

Then comes an installation.
First a photograph that’s relevant
Then the full description written by the other
Then the film that is mixed between an edit and the full version
Then the edited text at the other end
Perhaps unrelated sound

“He lent me his jacket and we took to the outside air to collect light that would otherwise be lost if not for the refracting glass of snow. Snow is soon then ice and all angles of thought are different from before. He sings and slips ahead in to the night. I have his jacket still – I wear it with such memories as below…”

A friend worthwhile for festivities: I was never allowed in his kitchen though for some reason – it was just this one room – one room that soon became two.

The first time I visited his flat was on a darkened icy December evening ridden with more snowfall – his belongings littered the close; you followed them up the stairs to his front door that was usually ajar with paraphernalia. When inside you made your way through curtains draped across collected junk – books piled in corners and framed photographs and drawings from artist friends decadent upon the walls. There was no central heating; only warmth from a small electric heater burning the smell of his floor and drapery, from elegant damp, into the dry comforting crisp of sheep’s rug ash wood and oak recline. There was one curtain in the room that covered just one of two magnificent single glazed windows – the other was simply left bare. After watching the snow fall outside your eyes would follow shelf upon shelf of sheet music making their way to a grand piano crushed in the corner behind the door, through which you walked in. Upon greeting you he disappeared into the kitchen.

I took this absence for my collected observation. A low light dangles from the high ceiling above; reaching the coffee table in the middle of the room, save for a few hitches on the metric scale. The table is cluttered with half made Christmas decorations, glass spherical paperweights, broken ceramic pots and teacups accompanied by an ashtray containing change from the day’s cigarettes.

I was presented with wine complete with a mug decorated with lights and birds and trees. He played the piano as I gazed around the ornaments that danced with every note he delicately placed upon each string.

Preceding the second visit, we met in a second hand bookshop that sold sheet music. A dusty old man who spend most of our visit on the phone to his younger lover – I was listening in – sold us a collection of Bach (1685 – 1750), some Czech composer, a neat bit of Debussy (1862 – 1918), and an almanac on Peruvian interior design.

We arrived back to his flat. Heater on, coffee table set he shuffled again to the piano. Heater pulled closer to my feet, coffee table redressed, I sat on the sofa again, busying myself fixing his broken ceramic objects. One ceramic container had the function of keeping the smaller – yet anything but negligible – pieces that would in the end complete each puzzle. The objects re-formed themselves by way of my fingers as his hands recited the sheet music in front of him. Several compositions later a teapot, a fish ornament, and a few cups and sauces lay in front of me.

I stood up, stretched, turned the low orange light on at the wire and swung it as a pendulum, then crossed to the other side of the coffee table to catch it. There I let the light go again, across the paperweights, dancing its way through each reflection, up in to the air to where I sat before. It was then I noticed a hint of another reflection. On the wall directly behind and above the sofa the light fashioned upon an inch of a mirror behind another large piece of material.

Piano sounding in my ears, notes seemingly louder with each step, I approached. I pulled at the cloth that then fell to the floor. And before me was a great reflective surface unleashed, revealing the room of activity, twice the volume it was before: in the bottom corner towards the frame – to me his back remained – the pianist had stopped.