Treasures

• Eye to eye with Michelangelo's David
• St. George and the dragon - Trajan's columns in the background
• Restoration under way

Victoria and Albert Museum

Minature moments II

The Three Devils of St Peter

St Peter's Church - Cornhill - City of London

"Restored Wren church from 1680 situated on, reputedly, the oldest church site in the City of London. In the nineteenth century a very observant vicar at this church noticed that plans for building a new structure next door intruded by one foot onto church territory. He raised legal objections and forced the architect to redraw the plans. In gleeful triumph he added three terracotta devils to the building facing Cornhill from the South." - Wikipedia

Gay go up and gay go down
To Ring the Bells of London Town
"Oranges and Lemons" say the Bells of St. Clements
"Bullseyes and Targets" say the Bells of St. Margaret's
"Brickbats and Tiles" say the Bells of St. Giles
"Halfpence and Farthings" say the Bells of St. Martin's
"Pancakes and Fritters" say the Bells of St. Peter's
"Two Sticks and an Apple" say the Bells of Whitechapel
"Maids in white aprons" say the Bells at St. Katherine's
"Pokers and Tongs" say the Bells of St. John's
"Kettles and Pans" say the Bells of St. Anne's
"Old Father Baldpate" say the slow Bells of Aldgate
"You owe me Ten Shillings" say the Bells of St. Helen's
"When will you Pay me?" say the Bells of Old Bailey
"When I grow Rich" say the Bells of Shoreditch
"Pray when will that be?" say the Bells of Stepney
"I do not know" say the Great Bell of Bow
Gay go up and gay go down
To Ring the Bells of London Town

sleeping off insomnia

Feel comfortable to be called a neurotic. You belong to that splendid, pitiable family which is the salt of the earth. Everything we think of as great has come to us from neurotics . . . We appreciate good music, fine paintings, a thousand exquisite things, without knowing what they cost those who created them in terms of insomnia, tears, fitful laughter, nettle rash, asthma, epilepsy, and worse still, a fear of dying, which you perhaps have experienced yourself, Madame.

Proust

At the age of 70 I have still glimpsed in dreams the ardour of the jasmines in the hallway and the phantom in the gloomy bedrooms, and always with the same feeling that crippled my childhood: terror of the night. Often I have a foreboding, in my worldwide attacks of insomnia, that I too carry the curse of that mythical house in a happy world where we died every night.

Gabriel García Márquez

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Elizabeth Bishop

And apologies to Groucho Marx...

night

We find ourselves bound, first without, then within, by the nature of our social catagorizaton. And escape is not effected through a bitter railing against this trap; it is as if this striving were the only motion needed to spring the trap upon us. We take our shape, it is true, within and against that cage of reality bequeathed us at our birth; and yet it is precisely though our dependence on this reality that we are endlessly betrayed. Society is held together with the legend, myth, coercion, fear, that without it we will be hurled into that void, within which, like the earth before the Word was spoken, the foundations of society are hidden. From this void - ourselves - it is the function of society to protect us; but it is only this void, our unknown selves, demanding, forever, a new act of creation, which can save us - 'from the evil that is the world'.

James Baldwin - Everybody's Protest Novel

Restoration - Black and Orange

The Americans across the way told the guards again about the dead man on their car. The guards got a stretcher out of their own cozy car, opened the dead man's car and went inside. The dead man's car wasn't crowded at all. There were just six live colonels in there-and one dead one.

The Germans carried the corpse out. The corpse was Wild Bob.

So it goes.

During the night, some of the locomotives began to tootle to one another, and then to move. The locomotive and the last car of each train were marked with a striped banner of orange and black, indicating that the train was not fair game for airplanes that it was carrying prisoners of war.

Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut

• North Dakota 1936
• Banksy
• Detainee - guard - dog - Abu Ghraib
• Sandi Miot - Awakening

Cassiopeia - Prussian Blue / Indigo / Ohio

Preußischblau or Berliner Blau - iron(III) ferrocyanide, ferric ferrocyanide, iron(III) hexacyanoferrate(II), and ferric hexacyanoferrate - discovered by accident by painter Heinrich Diesbach and Johann Konrad Dippel in Berlin in 1704-5

Joseph Cornell. Cassiopeia

Would the departed never nowhere nohow reappear? Ever he would wander, selfcompelled, to the extreme limit of his cometary orbit, beyond the fixed stars and variable suns and telescopic planets, astronomical waifs and strays, to the extreme boundary of space, passing from land to land, among peoples, amid events. Somewhere imperceptibly he would hear and somehow reluctantly, suncompelled, obey the summons of recall. Whence, disappearing from the constellation of the Northern Crown he would somehow reappear reborn above delta in the constellation of Cassiopeia and after incalculable eons of peregrination return an estranged avenger, a wreaker of justice on malefactors, a dark crusader, a sleeper awakened, with financial resources (by supposition) surpassing those of Rothschild or the silver king.

James Joyce. Ulysses.

Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.

When the blazing sun is gone,
When he nothing shines upon,
Then you show your little light,
Twinkle, twinkle, all the night.

Then the Trav'ller in the dark,
Thanks you for your tiny spark,
He could not see which way to go,
If you did not twinkle so.

In the dark blue sky you keep,
And often through my curtains peep,
For you never shut you eye,
Till the sun is in the sky.

'Tis your bright and tiny spark,
Lights the trav'ller in the dark:
Tho' I know not what you are,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star.

Cold fire - Scarlet / New Mexico

Etymology: c.1250, "rich cloth" (often, but not necessarily, bright red in color), from an aphetic form of O.Fr. escarlate (12c., Mod.Fr. écarlate), from M.L. scarlatum "scarlet, cloth of scarlet" (cf. It. scarlatto, Sp. escarlate), from Pers. saqirlat "a kind of rich cloth," variant of siqillat "scarlet cloth, rich cloth," of unknown origin (Arabic siqillat "fine cloth" probably is ult. from Pers.). In reference to color, attested from c.1386. Scarlet lady, etc. (Isa. i:18, Rev. xvii:1-5) is from notion of "red with shame or indignation." Scarlet fever is from 1676.

"...scarlet: a colour obtained instead from the desiccated eggs of various
pregnant shield lice or scale insects of the Coccidae family (genus Coccus) that fed upon various species of Mediterranean oaks. The most important was the Kermococcus vermilio (sometimes referred to incorrectly as Coccus ilicis). These insects, in medieval Europe and the Islamic world, were cultivated in the Iberian peninsula (especiallyPortugal, Andalusia, Valencia), Provence,Languedoc, Morocco, the Maghreb, Tunisia, and Asia Minor. From the Caucasus region – i.e., present-day Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan – and adjacent regions of Iran, scarlet dyestuffs were also extracted from a related insect: Porphyrophora hameli. From the Spanish conquests of the sixteenth century, the New World provided a new and more powerful formof scarlet dyes: Mexican cochineal, which the Spanish called Grana cochinilla and whose modern scientific name is Coccus cacti, or more properly Dactylopius coccus."

From The Anti-Red Shift – to the Dark Side: Changes in the Colour Patterns and Market Values of Flemish Luxury Woollens, 1300 - 1550

Desert - Yellow / Arizona

Antimony yellow, can range from a somewhat muted, or earthy, reddish yellow pigment to a bright light yellow, and is the chemical compound lead(II)-antimonate. Its chemical composition is Pb(SbO₃)₂Pb₃(Sb₃O₄)₂. It is also known as jaune d'antimoine. It is one of the oldest synthetic pigments, dating from around 1620.

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"My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!"

Henry David Thoreau

"To say nothing is out here is incorrect; to say the desert is stingy with everything except space and light, stone and earth is closer to the truth."

William Least Heat Moon

Heavens - Cerulean blue / New Mexico

Etymology: Latin. cæruleus sky-blue, prob. :- cælolos, from cælum - sky, heaven


In the desert,
Turn toward emptiness,
Fleeing the self.

Stand alone,
Ask no one’s help,
And your being will quiet,
Free from the bondage of things.

from The desert has many teachings - Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210 – c. 1285)


Old desert sun washed license plates evoke a melancholia in me. For times past - past lives - for uncluttered space. The faded colours have become quite ethereal. I have a number of such plates from New Mexico and Arizona: collectors shun the faded plates...

I find myself craning to catch a glimpse of plates on cars in old movies - a key to reimagine monochrome as colour. Spreading to the car, the people, the landscape... a burden lifted - light.

Newfoundland II

Signal Hill, St Johns, Newfoundland. Contingency - walk past the Canadian embassy in London - an exhibition of abstract art - a Newfoundland painter - booked my flight the next day. Newfoundlanders secure in who they are, on the rock. But cods stocks dwindle, and...

"Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one's room?

Continent, city, country, society:
the choice is never wide and never free.
And here, or there . . . No. Should we have stayed at home,
wherever that may be?"

from Questions of Travel, Elizabeth Bishop.

Repetition - San Joaquins

Just north of Bakersfield on the Amtrak train to San Francisco.

Flatness. In SF people were perplexed not only to why I spent time in Bakersfield, but why I didn't take the coastal train. The coast is lovely, but the interior was entrancing. There was a lulling monotony; a repetitiveness - of right angle crossings by roads and rails; telegraph poles, fences, barriers; fields, furrows, tracks; bells, doppler effects. Space etched by rail.

"He is telling all of this while he keeps fixed to his map, and
as he speaks, he draws in the ties of his tracks, a couple hundred little hash marks. At first I see them as tallies of wrongs, but when he keeps marking them even after the topic changes, keeps laying down those little sleepers, I think: of course, the most important elements in a trackman’s work is the crosstie—that piece holding the railroad together, the predicate between subject and object, the linking between soil and rail. A trackman’s days go to battling ties; as feet are to a walker, so ties are to a train"

Prairyerth: A Deep Map - William Least Heat Moon

Nostalgia II

Sketch of Childhood + airport + CN railway

airports

DUR NBO LHR YEG LHR YEG LHR YWG YEG AKL YQY CPT PLZ ELS DUR VIR JNB DUR JHB LHR XDT LHR FCO CCS LIM CCS FCO LGW LGW AMS LGW ATH LSW ATH LGW LHR YYT YHZ EWR LGA YYZ LHR JFK LHR JFK EWR LHR LAX LHR

Airports: they've been described as non-places, but that might be an overstatement. However, they are supremely bureaucratic authoritarian spaces - but paradoxically overlaid with anticipation of escape. Corresponds with inside and outside. Will Self marvelled at how something as incomprehensible as flight has been rendered so boring.

Myself, I'm fascinated by the overall geography of the runways; of the signage; of the codes. Flatness - geometric shapes - ethereal blue skies.

air

The wild passion of letting yourself be transported by wind, by burning heat and by cold space... the pleasure of being anonymous, of being quiet for a long time, of existing in no place at all... where the dialogues of others continually slip in... the pleasure of leaving, of being far away, of being missing... the subtle pleasures of erasing the presence of your body, your words and your shadow, of counting for nothing, of hiding yourself, of becoming so light that you fly away...

Michel Serres - Angels: a Modern Myth

We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition, the epoch of the near and the far, of the side by side, of the dispersed. We are at the moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein.

Michel Foucault - Other Spaces’ - Diacritics

Graffiti - Kings Cross

Graffiti around Kings Cross. For large versions click on image.

1. "Always fail" says the rat... banksy
2. Rogue cash point - banksy - Roseberry Avenue
3. Mao Tse Tung - Pentonville Road

Red light

"Red protects itself. No color is as territorial. It stakes a claim, is on the alert against the spectrum."

"Love, like the heart, is red."

Derek Jarman, Chroma

National Theatre, Southbank

Home as Museum

‘Why content ourselves with a mere inventory of our treasures? Let us look at them ourselves, use them and work upon them in manifold ways.’

Novalis

• Systematic collecting: ‘an ostensibly intellectual rationale is followed, and the intention is to collect complete sets which will demonstrate understanding achieved.’
• Fetish collecting: ‘the objects are dominant’; this is an ‘obsessive gathering [of] as many items as possible . . . to create the self.’
• Souvenir collecting: ‘the individual creates a romantic life-history by selecting and arranging personal memorial material to create what . . . might be called an object autobiography, where the objects are at the service of the autobiographer.’

“Both [fetish and souvenir collecting] are part of an attempt to create a satisfactory private universe, and both do this by trying to lift objects away from the web of social relationships, to deny process and to freeze time”

Susan Pearce

‘Systematics is the construction of a collection of objects in order to represent an ideology . . . . Fetishism is the removal of the object from its historical and cultural context and its redefinition in terms of the collector. In souvenir collecting, the object is prized for its power to carry the past into the future.’

John Windsor

Beginnings

"She is the kind of child who feels a protective tenderness towards her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve - keep things together for their value as remembering objects - a way of fastening herself to life."

Don deLillo - White Noise.

Blue and yellow - horizon to horizon - undulating wheat - man on the moon - a place to be lost - to loose oneself - 1969.

Loss of belonging - of physical continuity - both location, and proximity of physical objects. How much do physical objects mean - how much do they make us: proof of our history - our past. Out of body confirmation of our existence. Otherwise, we are only in our mind. No clues on offer. Nothing to contradict. Can the objects lie?

Do I need a catalyst? And others... do they? And love?

On Exactitude in Science

...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Newfoundland

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still...

Self as Collage

Narrative, episodes, blogs, short stories, poems, collage... how to gather a life fractured - to form a whole - what glue to use? To gather the shards, to restore meaning to what has been neglected, and to give meaning to what has been ignored or derided.

The glue of Nin's collages is the "I" who percieves, reflects, interacts with others, dreams, interprets her experience, and finally expresses what she has experienced.

Sharon Spencer on Anais Nin

"I allowed myself to live out a mood and see what it would construct. Once the mood is accepted, the mood makes the selection, the mood will give fragments a unity, the mood will be the catalyser. And so, this book, which should have been a novel or another book of short stories, became something else, a collage"

Anais Nin on Collages

"Our lives are a dense network of perpetually reconstituted connections between impressions, feelings, meaning, words - we create ourselves humpty-dumpty like from frgaments - never simple, always complex, contradictory, like Baudelaires Consequences and leonardo's universe, where he saw actual lines of geometry connecting objects."

Proust

Narrative

Nostalgia

In The Future of Nostalgia, cultural historian Svetlana Boym proposes to differentiate between two kinds of nostalgia: restorative and reflective. Restorative nostalgia evokes national past and future and is focused on the recovery and preservation of what is perceived to be an absolute truth. Reflective nostalgia is focused on the individualized meditation on history and suggests flexibility, an individual narrative, and cherishing shattered fragments of memory. While restorative nostalgia takes itself "dead seriously," reflective nostalgia "can be ironic and humorous. It reveals that longing and critical thinking are not opposed to one another, as affective memories do not absolve one from compassion, judgment or critical reflection."

A Little Nostalgia: The Detective Novels of Alexandra Marinina - Elena Baraban

Restorative nostalgia ... attempts a transhistorical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in ... the longing itself, and delays the homecoming.... Restorative nostalgia does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition. Reflective nostalgia dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contractictions of modernity. Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt. Restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and religious revivals; it knows two main plots - the return to origins and conspiracy. Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores ways of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones: it loves details, not symbols.

The Future of Nostalgia - Svetlana Boym

The etymology "nostalgia": constructed from the Greek words nóstos, meaning "return home", and álgos, meaning “pain”. The word was coined by the Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in the 17th Century to describe the pathological condition of severe homesickness observed in Swiss mercenaries who spent long periods away from their homeland.

It was during the 20th century that it's meaning evolved - a shift in emphasis from the spatial to temporal. A yearning for past ages, and then further into fantasy: a yearning for what never existed. And then, perhaps, even nostalgia for the future.

photographs

• Painting + armoured crab + fan + Sheran
• Stoat + cod backbone + virgin mary + navy torpedo bomber + 19th C pottery shards

Repetition - Music and Mathematics

Insomniac meanderings... I found these during the night

Chopin, Mazurka in F# Minor at The Shape of Song

Maps

"Functional visualizations are more than innovative statistical analyses and computational algorithms. They must make sense to the user and require a visual language system that uses colour, shape, line, hierarchy and composition to communicate clearly and appropriately, much like the alphabetic and character-based languages used worldwide between humans."

Matt Woolman - Digital Information Graphics at Visual complexity

Colour planes

1. The fourth plinth, Trafalgar Square - Thomas Schütte's Model for a Hotel.
2. National Theatre