in significance.

“Outcrop.” 2021

I have lost all sense of perspective.

I am hanging on here by the grace of...?

My skin is all that counts.

I am in significance.

A fearful drop is shrouded in swirling cloud.

I am thankful for this.

My attention is focussed on this micro-universe of slanting holds, loose bulging rock, dank cracks.

I am hyperaware of my fraility, of my insecurity.

My breathing is drowned out by deadening roar.

What monsters hide in those mountain gulleys?

Time seems to have stopped.

Heroic odyssey.

The line dangling down, is my only connection to my climbing companion.

The distance between us and the noise of the mountain-side, has cut off any reassuring communication.

I try calling out.

I hear my cries swallowed up in the mist.

"Hello! Can you hear me?"

Silence.

I am effectively alone.

For what seems like hours, I dust grit off potential points of purchase with my finger tips..

I am stretching out blindly above my head, while adjusting balance on my toes.

I feel the gravity of my position, my body-weight pulling me downwards.

"Idiot!"

"Fucking idiot."

There is nobody here to hear my cursing.

I am my own best and my own worst company.

"Idiot!"

"Fucking idiot."

There is noone here to hear my cursing.

Time seems to be on pause.

"So, what next?"

I overhear myself discussing aloud my plans of action.

"If I were to put my hand there?"

"No, it's unsafe, there's a loose block."

"If that were to come off, that's a bloody big block."

"What if I moved my foot up a bit."

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

Silence!

I abandon myself to instinct.

I have somehow moved to a higher position.

"Yes, that seems better."

I am clinging onto what appears to be a solid hold.

I have a future now.

This is some sort of minor triumph.

I am alive.

My story continues...

Fast-forward...

I am sitting here on a sofa, with a lap-top, a few tabs open on the browser, feeling around for the next move.

It comes from a friend of mine, from back then, at university.

Johnny Dawes was the greatest, bravest, rock-climber of his generation, likely unknown to anyone outside this marginal fraternity.

His first ascent of what he named "The Indian Face", up on Clogwyn Du'r Arddu in North Wales, was, at the time, the hardest, certainly the riskiest route ever attempted.

I was, and now I am again, struck by the intensity of his description of this climb which concentrates on just a few metres of blank rock.

It owes its existence to his improbable, youthful, sense of survival.

"I went for the crux, the motion startling me like a car unexpectedly in gear in a crowded parking lot. I swarm through the roundness of the bulge to a crank on a brittle spike for a cluster of three crystals on the right; each finger crucial and separate like the keys for a piano chord. I change feet three times to rest my lower legs, each time having to jump my foot out to put the other in. The finger-holds are too poor to hang on should the toes catch on each other. All those foot-changing mistakes on easy moves by runners come to mind. There is no resting. I must go and climb for the top. I swarm up towards the sunlight, gasping for air. A brittle hold stays under mistreatment and then I really blow it. Fearful of a smear on now-non-sticky boots I use an edge and move up, a fall fatal, but the automaton stabs back through, wobbling, but giving its all and I grasp a large sidepull and tube upward. The ropes dangle uselessly from my waist. Arthur Birtwhistle on Diagonal, I grasp incuts and the tight movement swerves to a glide as gravity swings skyward."

Johnny Dawes

Fast-forward...

My desire to write this post, the discovery of the title: "in significance" , my recounting of these moments of life captured on pieces of blank rock came to me on reading a post by Keith Hamon entitled Deleuze, Serres, and the Desires of Prepositions.

In the article he charts his emerging exploration of prepositions in blog posts over a period of a year.

He structures his article as a travelog, following the flow of his reflection, as if it is flowing down the Chattooga river.

There is a moment where he talks of river noise:

"there is no position outside the noise, no objective stance away that says the noise is over there apart from me, and I can assess it and judge it from over here apart from over there. If you've ever run a wild river such as the Chattooga, then you understand noise. On the Chattooga, you are always inside the noise, part of the noise. The noise flows through and around you. There is no transcending the noise of the river, nor is the noise transcendent. The noise is always immanent. Actually, transcendent as something beyond and immanent as something inherent mean nothing in the noise. The noise simply is, and you are simply in it, differentiated more or less at different times, but never distanced. Your own noise is included in the noise but not inclusive of it."

Keith Hamon

It was these lines which brought me back with a jolt to a precarious stance on the South Pillar of the Mont Aiguille which I climbed twenty years ago.

I heard again the noise of the wind blowing through the gulleys, ducked again on hearing the terrifying whoosh of dropping boulders.

I was reminded of Johnny Dawes.

We are as one, humbled, in our insignificant significance.

"You fucking idiot."

"Fuck, fuck, fuck."

There we are at a crux again.

"My God, oh my God , why have you forsaken me?"

Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34

Silence.

"I thirst"

John 19:28

[Adapted from In significance, first published in touches of sense… Februrary 1st 2015]

driftwood curiosity.

The window sill was full of junk.

Arranged in some sort of pattern were miscellaneous finds.

The objects were certainly curiosities.

The objects were perhaps memory aids.

The objects were perhaps an artist's exhibition.

There were no legends to explain.

We will have to assemble our own meaning.

The collection certainly attested to a love of nature.

In no apparent order there were:

Collections of shells.

Broken clock mechanisms.

Pebbles from a beach.

An asparagus fern.

A driftwood stallion.

There was nothing of any saleable value.

The objects were beyond value.

Shall we call it a treasure chest of scrap?

Shall we call it an animistic shrine?

Here lies buried, a story-teller's hoard.

For today, I shall keep the plot simple.

I will not weary you with interpretation.

I beg your forgiveness.

I don't suppose you will see interest here.

I don't suppose you will see value here.

How can one be attached to a piece of driftwood?

I am content you see no value.

I see myself standing on a beach.

You have left me quite alone.

Objects are washed up by the ocean.

Something catches my eye.

I bend down to pick it up.

It will spin my yarn a while.

Gulls' cry in the wind.

There is a strong smell of brine.

Waves crash on the shore.

Pebbles drawl.

I am home.

[first published October 26th, 2014, touches of sense…]

arboreal art roots…

Branching out.

As I have branched out into creating visual art, I can’t get around the continuing presence of trees.

Trees, drawn in graphite or ink, painted in watercolour, sometimes absent from an image but always present.

Here, I reflect on the tangled roots to this evident obsession.

Climbing trees

I had watched my brother from afar, clambering up the tree.

However hard I tried, I was simply not big enough to reach...

to reach up far enough, to pull myself up...to be big.

I rather had the impression that I was fated always to look on from below and admire.

Growing up is never fast enough when you are five years old and tree-challenged.

My brother took pity on me, or got bored with tree climbing and gave me a foot up.

That first foot up was all that it took to get me upwardly mobile and free.

Once the hidden hold had been pointed out, there was no stopping me.

The tree became my escape, my playground, my kingdom, my best friend.

Every day, on getting up and finishing breakfast, I would head out and up towards a future adventure.

The tree was an adaptable play partner.

I was a pirate in the rigging, Tarzan, lord of the jungle, a secret agent, a mountaineer...

On Sundays, I would hide and scare the ladies dressed up to the nines for the communion service.

On other days, I would practice walking out as far as I could on the higher branches to see how far they would bend down so that I could jump to the ground and scare my mother.

On one special day, I found that I could climb over a wall into a secret hiding place, protected by dense undergrowth and dangerous nettles and brambles. This would become my headquarters for planning operations.

It may not have spoken much, but I didn't let its mutism prevent me speaking for it as I included it in daily conversation.

I confided to the tree that it was a very special friend.

It was a good listener.

That tree lived on in my memory long after I had grown up and moved on.

Forty years later, I took my kids to see the house where it had been.

I was desperate to show them that tree.

We arrived, it had gone.

They probably wouldn't have understood its importance anyway.

Tangled routes

A series of hashtags tell the stories of my online connections over the past ten years, tangled routes indeed:

#rhizo14, #clmooc,#digiwrimo, #blimage…

If the tree, my childhood friend has long gone, over the years my relationships have grown rhizomatically across the internet. The image featured above, entitled “Tangled roots” (2019), was inspired by a photo taken by Hawaï based artist, speaker, and creativity mentor Amy Burvall who has played an important role in a number of collaborative mixed media projects that I have worked on over the years.

Another friend, connected educator-poet-musician, Kevin Hodgson, commenting my childhood tree story, writes:

“We need those trees to step up and get a wider view of things.

We need our personal vantage points, our refuges from the mass of traffic.

We need time to dream, to tinker, to establish relationships with objects, trees, and people.”

In a sense, both my visual and written art, the time I take during walks in city streets or in the countryside, to pause, to observe and contemplate, to sketch or to take photos, enable me to get a wider view of things.

Art, has always been a refuge and a vantage point, a means to build deep relationships between myself and my environment.

My ever evolving affinity groups of creative friends, like the tree of my childhood, offer me social and emotional support enable me to get away from the mass of traffic online and offline and to explore new unexplored lands.

I am thankful to the tangle of tree and human roots, they nourish and support me.

They keep me grounded.

“It is in the roots, not the branches, that a tree’s greatest strength lies.”

Matshona Dhliwayo

libertà corsica.

I was in Corsica in November 2017 for a conference. I retain very few memories of the conference itself.

Getting away from where I was supposed to be, exploring the Corsican landscape, having long conversations with the local people about their history, their language and their culture made a lasting impression on me. I don’t remember ever visiting a place which was so visually exciting and stirred such strong emotions.

Extraordinary beauty, vibrant autumn colours, warmth of summer one day, biting cold rain and winter atmosphere the next, deep contrasts between darkness and light, signs of violent struggle for freedom tagged on the walls and in the silence of people when I asked the wrong question contrasting with the incredibly generous hospitality of others.

Rather than concentrate on my presentation, I escaped to go for a walk up to the Capitole of Corte.

Every few feet, I was stopped in my tracks.

The sound of the river flowing in the valley bottom.

A cinema billboard announcing a Hollywood blockbuster next to an ancient tree.

The winding path cut into the rocky hillside which led up to the Capitole.

A traffic sign indicating that I was on the road to Calvary.

The rays of sunlight which lit up the path, as I climbed higher, gave the walk a quasi mystical signifcance.

Five years on, I still return to that walk, that time, you can find a few of the many images drawn and painted from that trip in the Further afield collection.

I have many stories that I wanted to tell which remain untold for the moment.

These few lines are just an introduction.

Libertà Corsica!