OS - Ireland, Venice Biennale plus
Sunrise
The Green Man. In Celtic mythology he is a god of spring and summer (and more recently an emblem of modern paganism).
To ladders two step under
The Ashmolean - great to see the oldest museum in England with a new extension that doubles its size (though I did get lost), the fine art is hung in the old galleries, refurbished and beautifully lit.
Amenhotep-Huy's autobiography, on a scroll on his lap, c1360BC
Coutrai Chest dtl, c1325
Alexander's memorial (Rome 4thC BC, "Alexander the sausage seller")
Pitt Rivers - Good to see it hasn't changed!
Baldwin Spencer, copy of sand painting (1902, 18 feet long). Spencer (an Oxford anthropologist) and Frank Gillen an Australian Alice Springs telegraph station manager travelled through Arrernte country with great curiosity and sympathy and tried to get to grips with the central concept of Dreamtime. Yet they were encased in a world view of social Darwinism and a ladder from the primitive to civilised. A decade later Spencer photographed such ground paintings being made and body paint being applied - the basis of all Central Desert art.
The Natural History Museum
"Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as strangled snakes beside that of Heracles, and history records that wherever science and dogmatism have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed, if not annihilated; scotched if not slain." Thomas Huxley
John Ruskin advised and supported the architects of the Natural History Museum, because he admired their use of local self-directed craftsmen, but he felt the experiment of Gothic architecture in iron and glass was a failure.
I began a long poem about the Dodo now lost in piles of papers, begun I believe by this very skeleton. The last recorded sighting on Mauritius was in 1663,and the last known stuffed bird was destroyed in a fire here at Oxford less than a century later, leaving only partial skeletons and drawings. Christopher Logue’s Ode to the Dodo: Poems from 1953–1978, makes no mention of Raphus cucullatus, named Didus ineptus by Linnaeus rather rudely.
Pastoral, Great Mill Pond Mead, almost in the centre of Oxford.
July
Taking Art Seriously? The Venice Biennale
'Gloria' outside the US Pavilion
Joseph Brodsky's grave on San Michele.
‘The social function of a poet is writing, which he does not by society's appointment but by his own volition. His only duty is to his language, that is, to write well. By writing, especially by writing well, in the language of his society, a poet takes a large step towards it. It is society's job to meet him halfway, that is, to open his book and to read it.’ Brodsky
How to be happy - following Rousseau to St Pierre
The view from his window - he only spent two months on this island, but they were the happiest of his life - before he was forced out by the rulers of Berne, after a pastor in a nearby village preached that Rousseau thought women had no souls.
Rousseau confessed ‘never have I thought so much, existed so much, lived so much, been so much myself, if I dare so, than on these [journeys] I made alone and on foot.’[i] He pursued in Michel Serres’ words: “the aleatory and happy destination: ‘la randonnée’, as Jean-Jacques saw it, passes throughout the whole island and calmly allows all the plants and flowers to bear fruit.”[ii] Rousseau is widely seen as proto-Romantic.[iii] Serres claims he wrote in opposition to Descartes’ Discourse on Method (1637), a foundational document of modernism.[iv] Rousseau may have preferred botany to geometry as his science but never claimed to found a new sensibility and defended Enlightenment reason.
Rousseau’s reveries were not solely of a dreamer, but alternated with a botanist’s exacting observations, measurements and recordings of this destiny:
“I set about doing the Flora petrinsularis and describing all the plants of the Island ... in sufficient detail to occupy myself for the rest of my days.... As a result of this fine project, every morning after breakfast ... I would go off, a magnifying glass in hand and my Systema naturae under my arm, to visit a district of the Island, which I had divided into small squares for this purpose, with the intention of covering them one after the other in each season.”
Draft of his Reveries
[i] Confessions, quoted in Ann Hartle, The Modern Self in Rousseau’s Confessions, U of Notre Dame P, 1983, p106
[ii] Michel Serres, Eloge de la philosophie en langue française. Paris: Fayard, 1995, p144,160. Quoted by Pierre Saint-Amand, ‘Contingency and the Enlightenment‘, SubStance 83, http://substance.arts.uwo.ca/83.
[iii] Though his wanderings are through a multicursal maze rather than a unicursal labyrinth, and local, not the macro adventures of Gilgamesh, Odysseus or some Romantic hero.
[iv] Albert Borgmann suggests the other two are Bacon’s New Atlantis (1627) and John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690), Albert Borgmann, Crossing the Postmodern Divide, U of Chicago P, 1992, p22.
Niesen Mountain - poem and images (transhumance in the Alps)
Didn't Cadel do well!
Appeared at the West Cork Literary Festival - a unique and friendly festival thanks to the Director Denyse Woods.
My two readings addressed the topics of ecopoetry and the poet's responsibility, particularly at times of war. I read with Brian Turner, ex Marine Corps Sergeant who served in Iraq. He is a most generous poet, eager to engage with his poems and through these moments of elusive clarity the audience.
Here he is reading 'The Hurt Locker' from his fine first collection, 'Here, Bullet' (2005).
Part of my talk in response to a reading he gave.
A week in Ireland
As well as fellow writers I met wonderful characters and audience members.
Thursday - going backwards
David demonstrating how he felt being struck by lightning in Nepal. He was missing his Nepalese wife, 6 months pregnant and was hoping to join her soon. He has L O V E tattoed across his fingers and had a hard life.
'Lucky' fishing. Toma had spent 2 years at Greenham Common, would have known a friend from the Saltford squat.
Friday
Bantry Bay sunrise
Saturday
Bill in Ma Murphy's front parlour handing out lollies
Saturday
Bird lady of Bantry Bay, feeding them eggs, bourbon biscuits and sandwiches.
Traveller's Garden
Bantry Bay Garden & House
Sheep
Driving in West Cork
Schull (pron. skull) art week
A few minutes from this tourist village is Copper Point, one of 230 odd ghost estates in Ireland, a result of the hyper inflated property boom that has collapsed.
Of 55 houses mostly built, for sale from 450,000 euros, not one is sold - they are a huge problem deteriorating daily and an OH&S hazard.
Sunday to Cork
B throwing a coin, Kilreach Stone Circle
Arundo, a great trad music night at Counihans - surprising highlights were two solos: Johnny 'bongos' on the spoons, and John Byrne on the Uilleann pipes.
Heron, River Lee, moments earlier a seal was hunting just below in the city centre
Monday Kinsale
Kinsale, Charles Fort from James Fort
Reredos from Galwey chapel in St Multose - brilliant!
Tuesday, Cobh
The old cemetery with Lusitania memorials hidden behind a Tiger economy development
Fledgling sparrow
Fota House - being restored
Gold leaf and peeling back the colours of history
Wed
Now selling - many shops, clubs even a pub (named after Rory Gallagher - I had a Taste album) closed down
Crawford Art Gallery
'Whale' 2011, an impressive piece.
I met the artist Dorothy Cross, she was wondering whether to fill the bucket with water.
Figures with 'Raft', Crawford AG
Lewis Glucksman was in change-over mode - bright loo though
Family Party
July 1 Natural Aesthetics in London
If only hands could pluck all the cars off the road.
Serpentine Geese
Peter Zumthor's Serpentine Pavilion.
The blue sky hides the fact that this air is the most polluted in Europe.
Nature survives outside art:
Natural Aesthetics
We head for the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor's Serpentine pavilion open today – a squat black bumper, thin stained surface from a garden centre but with deep, thick walls like a Zen temple or 18th C hermitage. You walk in through short dark blank corridors into this space, a courtyard garden, the first thing you see is sky, like a chairs and small tables line the walls beneath a deep eave. The dark overhang emphasises the sky (like James Turrell) rather than the narrow strip of garden. Zanthor has stated “I hope people relax here.” But the coffee machine breaks down, just as B gets to the front of the queue and the tourists next to us are talking loudly, it is not a garden pergola, not a temple, not a coffee lounge, just a different space to inhabit temporarily. But a connection to nature, hardly. Outside are the crows and squirrels and waterfowl.
We caught a bus to Piccadilly; it took 30 minutes, the traffic is appalling, sirens a frequent interjection - relaxation is over - the air in this city breaking EU regulations, so off to Richard Long’s exhibition ‘Human Nature' at the Haunch of Venison.
Natural aesthetics is complicated by our creativity and the speed at which we are changing the reality of space, time, human relations and our connections to nature. Our notion of aesthetics has been emasculated since Baumgarten, and generally ignores the natural (except in discourse of the sublime). Many theorists suggest a natural aesthetics is impoverished, lacking multiple levels of conceptual analysis, and artistic intentionality (Dickie & Danto). I would argue that the modalities, strengths and urgencies of natural aesthetics easily make up for any deficits. But how to incorporate the natural into the unnatural (fine art) or vice versa?
Long works with stones, mud and words to hook along a walk. I found the show a repetition of what he has done before. A large piece is a similacrum of one in the new Kaldor galleries I saw 2 weeks ago in Sydney.
Fibonacci Walk, Somerset (2009) is a text work recording 'continuous walks on consecutive days' that increased in length according to the Fibonacci number sequence: 1 mile, 1 mile, 2 miles, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89 miles. [London Olympics?]
Richard Long at the Haunch of Venison - I missed any corporeal connection
Boris Anrep at the National Gallery. Is the line between attention and distraction always clear? The landscape show 'Forests, Rocks, Torrents' art from Norway and Switzerland, makes the sublime picturesque and was disappointing.
Man in Piccadilly talking to a bear
Not much had changed in a year at Tate Modern . Who is the revolutionary, Castro or Beuys?
Behind the Tate at Bankside a crowd watched Wimbledon, hoping for a Murray victory
Free street pianos, City of London Festival
This guy was great, improvising arpeggios - Glass combo Jarrett.
Met Will at Apothecaries' Hall, London's oldest Livery Hall.
After Will's whacky chic [characterless] hotel
We took Will to The Black Friar, a wonderful Art Nouveau pub with good beer
We tried all the tap beers
¬
The day ended with a fine concert, Will on didge with the pianist Piers Lane - the highlight for me were the two Elena Kats-Chernin pieces.
The worst part was a long and tedious wait for the tube home - it's not the estrangement of Simmel and Kracaeur, just a wearing tedium of a large noisy city that I have lost patience with.
June
Brighton day trip
Site of my first ever date
West Pier (closed since 75)
Gay capital of the UK
Banksy art.
The future is here
Tarot
The future is corporate
The future is multi-cultural
UNICEF
Chiltern dawn at Latimer
The River Chess
Back at Bricky Pond
Walking into Margot
Korea - photo essai, not quite a flaneur
Heading to the UK to see my family.
Sydney
Reading Martin Johnston's 'To the Innate Island', after an age, wonderful poem - available here.
The poem is ambitious and elusive, the sections retelling myths and history, like Pound, but with the colour of his intimacy with the Greek landscape, culture and people.
I never met Martin, but he moved to Glebe while I was living there, the year (89) I won the Mattara Poetry Prize I think he was runner up, I went around the world for 11 months and 2 weeks on the $$ and he succumbed to familial demons and alcohol. Prizes are a lottery - what might have changed if he had won and I had come second? I wish I could invite him up to the BRWF next year to read this important poem.
Art in Sydney
After seeing the Anne Landa (Video&New Media Art) and the new John Kaldor galleries, disappointingly filled with the usual suspects, though a few important works - not the Richard Long though, I turned to more traditional art:
Art Gallery of NSW, best meditative painting
Door detail, Timor c1900
Baby
Record crowds for Holman Hunt's 'The Light of the World' pictured. This time the long queues were for the Archibald, Wynne & Sulman Prizes. I spent 20 minutes in Artspace at Woollamooloo and apart from the friendly guy on the desk I was the only one there for some quite interesting video works.
Sali Herman, 'Park at the Cross', 1947 (Swiss born lived Australia - died 1993).
A beautiful painting with the sensibility of mid-career de Hooch.
Pelicans, moonlight, Cooks River
Flying into Sydney, this is what it felt like, arterial spray from rush hour clearly visible spilling down every road.
Friday 5pm on the shortest day of the year. The taxi to Marrickville took the same time as flying Coffs to Sydney
Extreme weather - floods north, south and west of us. Coming back late in the rain from friends at Hungry Head, only one other car on the highway! I later heard that the road to Sydney was under water at Nambucca.
Storm at Valla - the highway closed with fallen trees and flooding north
and south.
The wind was so strong it flipped my Canon G11 up onto my nose
Climate is becoming more extreme. In Queeensland, an area the size of Germany and France was flooded in the country's "worst natural disaster". It has cost the economy up to A$30bn and is still being cleaned up. In China, there's a "once-in-a-100-years" drought in southern and central regions. In north America the most deadly and destructive tornado season ever saw 600 "twisters" in April alone, some of the largest wildfires seen in Arizona and the greatest flood in recorded history on the Missouri River and exceptional drought in Texas.
Comfort vs Adventure (GeoQuest 2011, June long weekend)
B fishing the V Wall
I look around from taking this photograph of B fishing, I hadn’t noticed the crowd just behind me. It was the briefing for Mountain Designs GeoQuest.
Mountain Designs GeoQuest 48hr is the ultimate test of your physical and mental limits. There is no question, the race is tough and it is real adventure. Your body will be totally exhausted, your brain will be begging you to stop and you'll have had little or no sleep for 48 hours. Then if you are one of the lucky teams, you will crawl across the finish line. This is certainly not your average weekend!
The weather forecast is diabolical – I recall cross-country runs in the cold and rain at boarding school – I loathed them and am so relieved to be free of such forced discomfort. I feel slightly ashamed, a coward, but GeoQuest is the last thing I would want to do on a long weekend.
Aristotle opens the Metaphysics (350 BCE) with “ALL men by nature desire to know.” In Pt 2 he writes: “The earliest philosophers . . . wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about the greater matters, e.g. about the phenomena of the moon and those of the sun and of the stars, and about the genesis of the universe . . . evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end. And this is confirmed by the facts; for it was when almost all the necessities of life and the things that make for comfort and recreation had been secured, that such knowledge began to be sought.”
I suggest “ALL humans by nature desire to experience life.” It is years since I could head out and kip anywhere – once I took half an hour to pack on an expedition to hitchhike across the globe. I crossed the Channel and realised I had forgotten to pack a towel or toothbrush and had to buy them in Calais. Those sorts of adventures, with no thought of comfort or dangers are in my past. Now comfort is important to me and I get a sense of adventure from observing nature and writing poems
GeoQuest seems too much hard work, though the participants hit the reality of natural environments, of teamwork and comradeship and testing their own embrained bodies. We like to challenge ourselves, some through a career, sport, speed, the arts – I find writing a poem challenge enough.
I am used to comfort; comfort is a luxury. Technology and capitalist organisation has enabled us to lived a materially comfortable existence (Max Weber's 'democratisation of luxuries') with little labour. Yet Australians now work longer hours than any other country in the developed world. This country is no longer the 'she'll be right mate' one I arrived in over 30 years ago. Mind you others have laboured for us for a long time: “Under the capitalist system, in order that you may live in comparative comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation - an evil state of affairs, but you acquiesce in it every time you step into a taxi or eat a plate of strawberries and cream.” George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).
Next day, after rain all night long I log onto the site:
Due to the current flood watch and severe weather warnings issued by the BOM, a part of the GeoFull Course has been changed. This is to avoid teams riding on Water Fall in potentially dangerous conditions as well as avoiding crossing the Bellingen river at Gordonville Crossing where water levels can rise quickly.
Support crews please drive safely up to Dorrigo. One crew reports a white non event vehicle smashed - no occupants.
Crazy rain. Heading to cp11 for the half #
Al is on struggle street but ok. Other 3 demolished chicken wings. Wet but warm
RT: What a horrific night @ #GeoQuest 48hr adventure race. Rain like I've never seen b4, leeches, knee-deep mud. An unfortunate DNF Team 8
Leaves
from Mary White's home - she takes delight in all aspects of the natural world, from the past (her The Greening of Gondwana , 1986 was rebadged in the USA as The Flowering of Gondwana: The 400 Million Year Story of Australia's Plants) to the present, from rocks to fauna to leaves:
ITCHING
I’m scratching my bites from world environment day, one has become infected - that means more antibiotics and being on my little toe, a pronounced limp. There are people living here who have never been bitten by a snake or leech or tick, their gardens are too tidy and they avoid the forests and dunes that surround them.
Most of would have rushed to purchase a book that claimed to cleanse one's home of: "adders, badgers, birds, catterpillers, earwigs, fish, flies, foxes, frogs, gnats, Mice, otters, Pismires [ants], Pole-cats, Rabbits, Rats, Snakes, Scorpions, snails, spiders, Toads, Wasps, Weasels, ... Moles, Worms ... Buggs, Lice, & Fleas &c" (1756).
Let others tell the Paradox,
How Eels now bellow in the Ox;
How Horses at their Tails do kick,
Turn'd as they hang to Leeches quick;
How Boats can over Bridges sail;
And Fishes do the Stables scale.
How Salmons trespassing are found;
And Pikes are taken in the Pound.
But I, retiring from the Flood,
Take Sanctuary in the Wood . . .
Andrew Marvell, 'Upon Appleton House' (1650-52)
We live next to a wood and walk it every day, but our house is our sanctuary. (Two stanzas later Marvel writes of the magic power of nature: benedicta viriditas, or blessed greenness - the Fifth Element):
When first the Eye this Forrest sees
It seems indeed as Wood not Trees:
As if their Neighbourhood so old
To one great Trunk them all did mold.
There the huge Bulk takes place, as ment
To thrust up a Fifth Element.
Itching for knowing who/where we are
Socrates in the start of the Phaedro stresses rational argument is a tool to discover truth, but requires disciplining bodily emotions and desires (because bodily urges distract the mind and intense emotion confuses it. But, “Bodies cannot be transcendental; they are existential". I exist embodied in a foreign country – we all are – the world we live in is one mediated by technics, distortions of space/time, kinship bonds breaking and revolutionary pleasures. This new world and the old are equally rich, diverse, dangerous, generous and confusing.
Schiller suggested that nature may be rediscovered in the foreign country of art (Im fernen Auslande der Kunst in ‘On Naieve and Sentimental Poetry’). This position is likely to lead to the aesthetic being cut off from everyday active engagement with our environment involving “the entire living creature” (John Dewey). A fine art’s aesthetics of nature is helpful for our appreciation of what we are distanced from, but helpful mainly in leading us BACK to a natural aesthetics: the grandeur of dawn, the dazzling moment this morning as a Splendid Wren puffed out his iridescent sea-sky chest and mated quickly.
The ever changing bush! at the moment the Pink Bloodwoods are flowering, the woods smell sweet and the canopy is buzzing with honeyeaters, Yellow-faced, White-cheeked, Lewins, Eastern Spinebills and for the first time here we saw a White-naped Honeyeater. (I watched a pair of White-plumed build a nest opposite my study in Marrickville - a perfect view, five feet away and head height, then a Red Wattlebird destroyed it and I never saw them again).
In under 12 months we have seen 96 bird species in the small reserve we back onto. "The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible . . ." Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.
World Environment Day
A wise hero must realise Ongietan sceal gleaw hæle
how terrible it will be, hu gæstlic bið,
when all the wealth of this world þonne ealre þisse worulde wela
lies waste, weste stondeð,
as now in various places swa nu missenlice
throughout this middle-earth geond þisne middangeard . . .
The Wanderer
We celebrated by sharing ourselves with the native fauna
(tick and leech bites)
A Peregrine perches in the tree on the far end of Valla cove - trust me.
Bricolage
I am a believer in bricolage and luck. I was talking to someone at a party last night who believed in a modern God, a pervasive presence, but why I asked? Life is a miracle I can’t explain, I acknowledge that, but let’s appreciate the cosmos and all that sails in her and save it – we are destroying the world. Evolution is a wonderful way of understanding fundamental bricolage processes in how we have come to be here – without telling us the whole story. But positing anything beyond nature serves no purpose and only distracts us from our task to hand – maximising our potential and that of the environment around us. How much time has been wasted in prayer, guilt wasted on the human and blood spilt through religious hatred. Certainty is the enemy – from Calvin to Stalin – if we all believed in bricolage and luck and John Keat’s negative capability, then the world would be a safer place. We can’t know be certain because everything. Why? Because:
We are not even aware of 99% of what’s happening in our brains and bodies let alone the rest of the world.
The brain is a "cobbled-together mess. . . quirky, inefficient and bizarre ... a weird agglomeration of ad hoc solutions that have accumulated throughout millions of years of evolutionary history," David Linden, The Accidental Mind, Harvard University Press, 2011.
We interpret the world – we are notorious witnesses, perception is fallible.
We are creatures of habit- we don’t think for ourselves, on the other hand we need to be trained to perceive and think.
"The correct answer to skepticism . . . does not consist in denying the conclusion of skepticism but in reconceiving its truth. It is true that we do not know the existence of the world with certainty; our relation to its existence is deeper—one in which it is accepted, that is to say, received. My favourite way of putting this is to say that existence is to be acknowledged." Stanley Cavell
Red-necked Wallabies at Mary White's Falls Retreat
B at Will Barton's birthday bash - we hadn't seen him for a year. It was an experience hearing his new didge from just feet away - an orchestral sound from a length of wood! We'll catch up again at the City of London Festival later in the month.
Bronwyn Rodden Big Sky Gallery
Church St, Bellingen, 21 May to 17 June 2011
first solo show on the mid-north coast
‘Big Blue Meets Big Red’
This painting was inspired by the death and the aftermath of the death of a large blue groper known to snorkelers at Clovelly in Sydney as ‘Big Blue’. Gropers are protected fish and he had become so tame that people used to stroke him, but someone who came from another world speared him in public. The painting represents not only his death, but the distress it caused to everyone, no doubt including his killer who was stunned by people’s reaction to his ‘fishing’.
Lost Fish SeriesThese are collaborations with nature, water paintings and mixed media incorporating clay, sand and cuttlefish cartilage, their materiality enhances images of fish that are fast disappearing from our rivers, estuaries and seas.
Her site
Putting a price on Nature
We will be visiting the UK later this month, and I was just reading about their National Ecosystem Assessment (NEA) released yesterday. As a boy both my prep and public schools were beside forests and we all loved the woods. We caught sigt of large red stags, weasels and stoats, and caught grass snakes, slow-worms, voles - once I caught a common lizard. England now has the smallest percentage of forest cover anywhere in Europe - and I looked out and saw this:
(click on photo to enlarge)
Does it matter, apart from an aesthetic point of view? Of course - but how to get that across - it comes down to economics, and in the last ten years efforts have been to put a value on nature and the eco-services it provides (soil microbes, cleaning pollution, water quality, pollination, etc.)
NEA put a £1.5bn price on inland wetlands for producing clean water. Such valuations are important for the political and planning processes, but lose the point that we are totally dependent on nature and that nature is of value in itself. I have been arguing that a natural aesthetics is vital for people to reengage with natural environments and come to appreciate & love them, and so want to protect them.
The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study
is a UN initiative to draw attention to the global economic benefits of biodiversity and highlight the growing costs of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation. It put the damage done to the natural world by human activity in the year 2008 at between $2tn and $4.5tn.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MEA)
assessed the consequences of ecosystem change for human well-being from 2001 to 2005. The focus was on assessment on ecosystem services and their direct connection to human well-being and development needs with a scientific basis for action to conserve and use the world’s ecosystems sustainably.
Unsurprisingly it found that over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, and that the degradation of ecosystem services could grow significantly worse during the first half of this century
"Between 1960 and 2000, the demand for ecosystem services grew significantly as world population doubled to 6 billion people and the global economy increased more than sixfold. To meet this demand, food production increased by roughly two-and-ahalf times, water use doubled, wood harvests for pulp and paper production tripled, installed hydropower capacity doubled, and timber production increased by more than half. The growing demand for these ecosystem services was met both by consuming an increasing fraction of the available supply (for example, diverting more water for irrigation or capturing more fish from the sea) and by raising the production of some services, such as crops and livestock. The latter has been accomplished through the use of new technologies (such as new crop varieties, fertilization, and irrigation) as well as through increasing the area managed for the services in the case of crop and livestock production and aquaculture. " 'Ecosystems and Human Well-being' Synthesis - A Report of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, p5
Those who claim the expanding human population is not a problem are wrong. (See earlier comments in Archives, April 2011)
Rainbow - the first day of winterThe house has 360 degree views and in the last few days of stormy weather the windows have showing rainbows at various compass bearings.
Thinking of Dover Beach on Valla Beach
A poet on his honeymoon, returned to the coast at Dover in June 1852 and wrote:
". . . . the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling
. . . . And naked shingles of the world."
which can’t provide “joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. . .”
The poet wrestled with his loss of faith. Mathew Arnold drafted ‘Dover Beach’ on his notes for ‘Empedocles on Etna’ (withdrawn the year after publication for its black heart, its lack of faith) His belief almost extinguished by both Lyell's revolution of geological time (that so influenced Darwin) and the new sciences and technologies of the typewriter, telephone and electric telegraph, sublime and fast, but not tender enough. Arnold published ‘Dover Beach’, sixteen years after he drafted this fine example of early English free verse.
On Valla Beach, the breakers energise the ground, enabling this particular beach ecology. But each pebble has a unique 'thisness', each gull beauty.
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles,
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,
An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,
Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world,
Deictic, fiducial stones.
Hugh MacDiarmid extract from 'On a Raised Beach'
A painter on his honeymoon at Osmington near Weymouth in 1816 was inspired and began to paint the natural elements en plein air with the free hand and that impressed Delecroix and the later Impressionists so much. See 'Weymouth Bay' at the V&A
Constable didn’t bother with travel, nature is always present in the sky in water in the trees. "I am come to a determination to make no idle visits this summer, nor to give up my time to common-place people. I shall return to Bergholt, where I shall make some laborious studies from nature — and I shall endeavour to get a pure and unaffected manner of representing the scenes that may employ me." 1802.
He was a champion of naturalism, both through close observation and also reading scientific texts on meteorology, geology etc.. His cloud studies (many in the V&A) have details of their circumstance scribbled on the back.
After the storm, a dramatic sky edging the lower slope of Nunguu Mirral
Found poem
(just came across this poem derived from a spellchecker ten years ago) -
Anzac Nazi
Heidegger headgear
Coleridge clerihew
Andromeda undimmed
Republicans replicants.