The poetry of the body

Gaston Bachelard's 'The Poetry of Space' was at one time an essential text to read. It gave artists a rationale that they could use to value the poetic (i.e. non scientific) way that they shaped lived experiences and his text demonstrated how emotional responses to spaces like attics, cellars or even drawers, could be communicated through a more poetic understanding.  

What I'm looking for is a companion volume, 'The Poetry of the Body'. Something that like a dérive, eventually finds purpose in wondering about. My unsettled mind, as it flitters around and alights on stuff and then dips into things, never quite settles. I cant seem to drill down and deeply focus on one thing or another, each of my posts skips around an idea, but never quite settles down and I'm looking for some sort of confirmation that this is ok, this is normal.

I was watching a butterfly in the garden yesterday. It seemed to be randomly drifting around, following the shifting air currents as a light breeze passed through the hedge. Then it settled on an old stuffed textile. The cloth was now a pale yellow, a ghost of its former self, but it  offered a moment of warmth to the butterfly, that then spread out its brown spotted wings as a gift to the world. As it bathed in the sun, the surface it had happened upon became something else, a spot for sunbathing. It was a sunbathing spot that hosted a sunbathing moment, like all the billions of moments that butterflies of this sort had had in their pasts and futures. A moment that I now thought was what that old thrown out stuffed cloth had been made for. It was already degrading, it had the grime of nature already woven into its texture, touches of green were now growing through its tight matrix of fibres and this moment, was perhaps the moment of its transformation, woven back into the matrix it had emerged from. 

The speckled wood

 A moment of inconsequence, but it felt more real to me than the many systems of thinking and categories of connections that I had been wrestling with over the last few years. 

I sitt in a plastic red chair, writing about something I felt yesterday. As I lean forward to write, I'm aware my shirt lifts away from my lower back and I feel the cold air that this lets move across my skin. The chair exerts pressure to my upper thighs and I can rock slightly from one side to the other to make myself more aware of this. I cough occasionally, I am getting over a nasty viral infection that I have had to struggle against over the last two weeks. I wonder how many more I will succumb to in the future, before one takes a hold that I cant shift. I have an itch that I cant really get at as it sits between my shoulder blades, but I don't mind, it helps make me aware of that part of my body and it guides me to an ache that sits across the top of my shoulders. My attention, like that of the butterfly's, flits around and then I forget these body sensations because something else takes my attention. The flow of awareness, the impact of constantly occurring qualia on my perceptual screen, is like a mist that I walk through and as things appear to solidify themselves as they emerge out of this mist, I tend to mostly let them fade back again, unless it feels as if they hold some sort of importance. 

For a brief moment this morning I saw something come into focus as I was looking at the work of Flora Joan, who is an acupuncturist and artist. She is part of 'The Nature of the Points' a group based in Amsterdam who have been thinking and acting within a territory that straddles visualisation and healing.

Tongue and diagnostics: Flora Joan

Tongue reflexology

The tongue can be used as a diagnostic tool and it can be used to assess the flow of Qi (energy) in the body. I was interested in Flora Joan's illustration because she was bringing together elements from both inside and outside traditional Chinese medicine, in particular her own focus on a return to nature. Looking at the range of activities that take place under the umbrella of 'The Nature of the Points', also helped me develop my own thoughts on how useful my work on the visualisation of interoception was and I could see a clear link between the work they do and what I'm attempting. 

Visualisations of subjective models of the body's interior

I have cardiac arrhythmia and certain medical and music scholars have speculated that Beethoven may also have had the same condition. In his musical scores he sometime uses asymmetrical rhythmical patterns and changes in tempo, that could possibly mirror the effects of an irregular heartbeat. This aspect of his work has also been linked to a correlation between the known times when it is argued he would have experienced stress or a very high emotional connection with what he was engaging with. It is impossible to prove this of course, but it is another of those possibilities or what ifs, that help me frame up what I'm thinking about in relation to emotion and its communication. 

An invisible hand about to close on the chest

Sometimes I dream about my inner body being squeezed and then realise its my heart trying to tell me something. Out of dreams, sometimes emerge images that sit between the conscious and the unconscious mind, they can be an alternative poetry of the body. 

I think of Beethoven is a giant of poetry, particularly in the way his music's expressive power and ability to evoke emotions, goes right down to my body's core. I 'feel' his emotional intensity, as a type of 'sound poetry', something that I intuitively feel ought to be possible as 'visual poetry' as well. 

The externalisation of an idea of a headache

I have attempted to visualise inner sensations in a variety of ways and after running several workshops with people looking at how others can visualise interoceptual experiences, am now very aware of the necessary time it takes for people to confront the difficulties that face them when attempting to learn a new or developing language. Often you need to show a cliché in order to open a pathway towards an alternative.

Headache

Sometimes I have to rely on existing conventions and deal with clichés, as in the image of a headache I came up with above. This was an image arrived at by consensus but which I now feel could go on the side of a packet of Anadin. Which in itself might be a good thing, but I have never thought of my work as graphic design for pharmaceutical companies. 

An image of sinusitis intuitively feels to me that it is much more interesting.

Headache: Sinusitis

This is a more personalised image, one made as a consequence of a conversation, so it is an actual 'portrait' of two people's interoceptual experience, rather than a generic visual idea. Perhaps this is where the value of the work lies and that by tapping into individual experiences and trying to make them visible; am I finally making some sort of embodied visual poetry?

See also:

Drawing the internal body

Drawing and healing

Drawing and urban acupuncture 

Sensuous aggregates 

Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is the verbal or written representation of a visual representation. It is often used as a way to stage an encounter between mediums, a sort of test bed whereby you can gage either the effectiveness of one or the other in terms of its communicative ability, or to judge the poetry of the experience. Therefore in terms of writing, ekphrasis is often thought of as a poetic form, but it doesn't have to be and there was much, I think I remember, written about the difference in approach to ekphasis between Greek and Roman writers. The Greeks insisting that recited poetry was the pure form and that prose was a more debased form of writing. True ekphrasis therefore being a verbal representation of a visual representation.

The use of ekphrasis as a rhetorical device is usually traced back to Homer's description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. Homer uses a long description of the shield and its making as a sort of interlude in the poem, a space in a fast paced narrative, whereby the everyday scenes that make up the decoration of the shield, give us a vision of the ordinary lives of non-heroic Greeks. (Ordinary in those days still including lots of gore and fighting) This interlude gives us the necessary mental space to contemplate the coming horror of superhuman action and emotions. Achilles has heard that Patrocolus his old friend from boyhood is dead, not just that but he died pretending to be Achilles, as he thought by doing this he could galvanise the troops to follow him in a Greek victory; as Achilles had at the time refused to fight. The armour Achilles had lent him now stripped from the body by Hector, and because of this Achilles now falls into an intense rage striding out in front of the battlefield with flames burning from his head, terrifying the Trojans as he screams both for vengeance and the stupidity of his own actions.

Perhaps time to set up that encounter between mediums. Achilles' mother the sea goddess Thetis, goes to the God Hephaestus and pleads for him to make new armour to replace that taken from the body of Patrocolus by Hector. Hephaestus agrees to make the armour and as he does Homer develops a vivid description of the shield as it emerges from his workshop forging. This is the passage in full:

First fashioned he a shield, great and sturdy, adorning it cunningly in every part, and round about it set a bright rim, threefold and glittering, and therefrom made fast a silver baldric. Five were the layers of the shield itself; and on it he wrought many curious devices with cunning skill. Therein he wrought the earth, therein the heavens therein the sea, and the unwearied sun, and the moon at the full, and therein all the constellations wherewith heaven is crowned—the Pleiades, and the Hyades and the mighty Orion, and the Bear, that men call also the Wain, that circleth ever in her place, and watcheth Orion, and alone hath no part in the baths of Ocean. Therein fashioned he also two cities of mortal men exceeding fair. In the one there were marriages and feastings, and by the light of the blazing torches they were leading the brides from their bowers through the city, and loud rose the bridal song. And young men were whirling in the dance, and in their midst flutes and lyres sounded continually; and there the women stood each before her door and marvelled. But the folk were gathered in the place of assembly; for there a strife had arisen, and two men were striving about the blood-price of a man slain; the one avowed that he had paid all, declaring his cause to the people, but the other refused to accept aught; and each was fain to win the issue on the word of a daysman. Moreover, the folk were cheering both, shewing favour to this side and to that. And heralds held back the folk, and the elders were sitting upon polished stones in the sacred circle, holding in their hands the staves of the loud-voiced heralds. Therewith then would they spring up and give judgment, each in turn. And in the midst lay two talents of gold, to be given to him whoso among them should utter the most righteous judgment. But around the other city lay in leaguer two hosts of warriors gleaming in armour. And twofold plans found favour with them, either to lay waste the town or to divide in portions twain all the substance that the lovely city contained within. Howbeit the besieged would nowise hearken thereto, but were arming to meet the foe in an ambush. The wall were their dear wives and little children guarding,  as they stood thereon, and therewithal the men that were holden of old age; but the rest were faring forth, led of Ares and Pallas Athene, both fashioned in gold, and of gold was the raiment wherewith they were clad. Goodly were they and tall in their harness, as beseemeth gods, clear to view amid the rest, and the folk at their feet were smaller. But when they were come to the place where it seemed good unto them to set their ambush, in a river-bed where was a watering-place for all herds alike, there they sate them down, clothed about with flaming bronze. Thereafter were two scouts set by them apart from the host, waiting till they should have sight of the sheep and sleek cattle. And these came presently, and two herdsmen followed with them playing upon pipes; and of the guile wist they not at all. But the liers-in-wait, when they saw these coming on, rushed forth against them and speedily cut off the herds of cattle and fair flocks of white-fleeced sheep, and slew the herdsmen withal. But the besiegers, as they sat before the places of gathering and heard much tumult among the kine, mounted forthwith behind their high-stepping horses, and set out thitherward, and speedily came upon them. Then set they their battle in array and fought beside the river banks, and were ever smiting one another with bronze-tipped spears. And amid them Strife and Tumult joined in the fray, and deadly Fate, grasping one man alive, fresh-wounded, another without a wound, and another she dragged dead through the mellay by the feet; and the raiment that she had about her shoulders was red with the blood of men. Even as living mortals joined they in the fray and fought; and they were haling away each the bodies of the others' slain. Therein he set also soft fallow-land, rich tilth and wide, that was three times ploughed; and ploughers full many therein were wheeling their yokes and driving them this way and that. And whensoever after turning they came to the headland of the field, then would a man come forth to each and give into his hands a cup of honey-sweet wine; and the ploughmen would turn them in the furrows, eager to reach the headland of the deep tilth. And the field grew black behind and seemed verily as it had been ploughed, for all that it was of gold; herein was the great marvel of the work. Therein he set also a king's demesne-land, wherein labourers were reaping, bearing sharp sickles in their hands. Some handfuls were falling in rows to the ground along the swathe, while others the binders of sheaves were binding with twisted ropes of straw. Three binders stood hard by them, while behind them boys would gather the handfuls, and bearing them in their arms would busily give them to the binders; and among them the king, staff in hand, was standing in silence at the swathe, joying in his heart. And heralds apart beneath an oak were making ready a feast, and were dressing a great ox they had slain for sacrifice; and the women sprinkled the flesh with white barley in abundance, for the workers' mid-day meal. Therein he set also a vineyard heavily laden with clusters, a vineyard fair and wrought of gold; black were the grapes, and the vines were set up throughout on silver poles. And around it he drave a trench of cyanus, and about that a fence of tin; and one single path led thereto, whereby the vintagers went and came, whensoever they gathered the vintage. And maidens and youths in childish glee were bearing the honey-sweet fruit in wicker baskets. And in their midst a boy made pleasant music with a clear-toned lyre, and thereto sang sweetly the Linos-song with his delicate voice; and his fellows beating the earth in unison therewith followed on with bounding feet mid dance and shoutings. And therein he wrought a herd of straight-horned kine: the kine were fashioned of gold and tin, and with lowing hasted they forth from byre to pasture beside the sounding river, beside the waving reed. And golden were the herdsmen that walked beside the kine, four in number, and nine dogs swift of foot followed after them. But two dread lions amid the foremost kine were holding a loud-lowing bull, and he, bellowing mightily, was haled of them, while after him pursued the dogs and young men. The lions twain had rent the hide of the great bull, and were devouring the inward parts and the black blood, while the herdsmen vainly sought to fright them, tarring on the swift hounds. Howbeit these shrank from fastening on the lions, but stood hard by and barked and sprang aside. Therein also the famed god of the two strong arms wrought a pasture in a fair dell, a great pasture of white-fleeced sheep, and folds, and roofed huts, and pens. Therein furthermore the famed god of the two strong arms cunningly wrought a dancing-floor like unto that which in wide Cnosus Daedalus fashioned of old for fair-tressed Ariadne. There were youths dancing and maidens of the price of many cattle, holding their hands upon the wrists one of the other. Of these the maidens were clad in fine linen, while the youths wore well-woven tunics faintly glistening with oil; and the maidens had fair chaplets, and the youths had daggers of gold hanging from silver baldrics. Now would they run round with cunning feet exceeding lightly, as when a potter sitteth by his wheel that is fitted between his hands and maketh trial of it whether it will run; and now again would they run in rows toward each other. And a great company stood around the lovely dance, taking joy therein; and two tumblers whirled up and down through the midst of them as leaders in the dance. Therein he set also the great might of the river Oceanus, around the uttermost rim of the strongly-wrought shield. 

The Iliad Book 18, lines 478–608

Ekphrasis allows Homer two layers of communication, the first and most important via the scenes as they are laid out around the shield, which are set out rather like the script for a graphic novel and secondly those references to the metalwork that has been worked on in the forge of Hephaestus, whereby Homer points to the selective use of tin, gold, silver etc. thus materially reenforcing the narrative. 

I have thought myself that the structure of the shield might have been based on one of the forms of memory recall devices that were used before the development of writing as an everyday recording device. Memory palaces or theatres as they have been called, all of which are basically structures you can mentally walk through and as you did you could retrieve parts of a long complicated narrative that you needed to remember. (All described in detail in Frances Yates: The Art of Memory). 

One way of visually organising the shield

The text feels quite long, but it was originally meant to be spoken, or recited, a particular 'poetic' voice would have intoned this epic poem and as it is such a long piece, I suspect specialists would have developed all sorts of 'tricks of the trade' to ensure they both remembered what they had to declaim and that they had the necessary voice control to ensure a proper emphasis was placed on the different emotional encounters we are taken into.

The translation of this passage into a visual object is another fascinating aspect of the ekphrasis encounter.

Alexander Pope
Diagram for Achilles’ Shield 

The poet Alexander Pope decided to rewrite the Iliad for an 18th century audience and as part of his research he decided to make a diagram of the shield, one not unlike the diagram already used. What is interesting here is that a visual methodology, the diagram, is being used by a wordsmith, the poet in order to come to a better understanding of another poet's words.

The Victorians were fascinated by Classical Greek culture and as they prided themselves that their own culture had great craftsmen too, copies of what was an imaginary object were commissioned.

Rundell, Bridge and Rundell, the London-based royal goldsmiths and jewellers, used 24 drawings and 5 models drawn up and made by John Flaxman over a period of approximately seven years, to create a copy of the shield. He received a first payment of 100 guineas 'for the beautiful design of the shield of Achilles' and a further payment of £200 for the designs on 4 January 1817 and a payment of £525 for the models on 20 January 1818. (Approximately £80,000 in today's money) The final model probably made in wax or clay, was then cast in plaster, and the finer details carved into it. Three bronze casts were made, followed by five cast in silver, one of which was bought by George IV in early 1821 and which remains in the Royal Collection.

Rundell, Bridge and Rundell: The Shield of Achilles

John Flaxman: War: Design for the shield of Achilles

1832 illustration: Unknown artist

Angelo Monticelli (1778 – 1837)

As well as Flaxman's designs and Rundell, Bridge and Rundell's recreation, several artists were commissioned to make illustrations based on Homer's text. What is fascinating is that eventually the shield settles down into a visual idea, one fashioned by drawing, rather than making, which is interesting, especially that I haven't seen any references to recreations trying to make for example; "a vineyard fair and wrought of gold; black were the grapes, and the vines were set up throughout on silver poles"; a series of visual effects that were made, I presume, in Homer's imagination, by welding and / or embedding different materials together.

So what was made initially "out of a mouthful of air", as the poet Yates would put it, was eventually written down in Greek, translated into English via Latin and French versions and this one particular imaginary object, was then reverse engineered via its visualisation through drawing, to be eventually reconstructed as an actual metal shield.

As to the encounter between mediums, and being able to gage the effectiveness of one or the other in terms of communicative ability, I think the issue is that the idea was first and foremost poetic, and the natural medium for the description was a verbal one. As we read the text, we get a glimpse of what it would have been like to hear it recited, and when we see the reconstruction, we begin to realise no matter how well the words are used as a pattern from which to create an actual artefact, the complexity of Homer's original thinking is over simplified and what we are left with is a shallow version of a God's design, which could never be copied by mere mortals, because it was an idea and never a reality. 

See also:

Drawing with words

Drawing as writing

Drawing as translation

Translation: Drawing between languages

William Blake at the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge

Casper David Friedrich: Sea at sunrise

William Blake’s Universe at the Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge is a wonderful exhibition, so good that I had to spend two days in Cambridge, so that I could go back and look twice. The quality and range of the images is extraordinary and it is not just Blake's work that you need to see. For instance there are images by Casper David Friedrich, that reminded me that it is possible to create landscapes that glow with mystic spirituality, such as 'Sea at sunrise', images that need to be seen in the flesh if you really want to get an idea of their intensity. The issue about 'Sea at sunrise' being that the image is stripped down to almost nothing, except the play of light as it vibrates through the air and dances on water. Light of course in Friedrich's case, being a metaphor for the constant presence of God, but for myself a reminder that the Sun is the shaper of all life on Earth, and that life originated in the sun energy charged chemical soup that we call the sea.

I was also fascinated by the diagrammatic work of Jakob Böhme. Some of the plates illustrating his ideas were printed onto layers, so that flaps could be lifted and you could see underneath. 

The Third Table

As soon as I began researching Böhme, I found a theosophical hermetic illustration of the fiery soul. The soul is, according to Böhme, in 'its natural condition' when burning. When the heart is represented upside down, it is immersed in the fire of anger. However, through the sacrament of baptism, the soul receives the fire of love and anger is transformed into love. I was very interested in this, as I'm working on how to visualise emotions, and it seems to me that they can migrate, and as they do, I begin to see affinities between them, anger being very close to love, the one often being triggered by feelings instigated by the other. His diagrams reminded me that we haven't really moved on that much further since then, an article from the Dark Energy Institute about how the Quantum of the Void compares to the Quantum of the Physical Universe, when diagrammed, would I suspect look very like one of Böhme's ideas. 

The fiery soul 

As well as being introduced to some things I hadn't come across before, perhaps it was the 'intensity' of people's visions that I was most impressed with in this exhibition, all of the works and artists represented, managed to communicate a total commitment to some sort of psychic command of visual language. Blake is of course the most well known of the artists in England and his influence on Samuel Palmer, who is also represented in this exhibition, was clear to see, but it is the chance to see a collection of Blake's images, exhibited in sequences that has the most powerful effect. I was soon wondering, because of the sequential nature of his art, how he would have responded to the comic book tradition, would he have been a sort of mystic Robert Crumb?

Robert Crumb: Genesis

Thoughts of this type still emerge from my brain, as it was shaped like so many children of the 1950s by having to go to Sunday School for most of our formative years. Therefore the Bible, whether or not we eventually decided to be atheists, would loom large in our creative imaginations. No matter how hard I try to intellectually move beyond notions such as 'good' and 'evil', an all seeing God and a Saviour who died for us all, my neurological wiring from those experiences, is still in place. 

William Blake: America

I had not seen all of Blake's work in the flesh and in particular had not seen a collection of prints from his 'America' plates before. After looking at them and thinking about how intense the images were and how much could be achieved within such a small surface area, I was fired up to get back to making some prints of my own, this time to perhaps use the new Risographic machine that has just been installed in the university. Good exhibitions always excite me to make more work of my own, they remind me of how wonderful art can be and of how it doesn't seem to go out of date. What Blake was trying to communicate, seemed to me to be as powerful as anything done today and it hit home, right to the heart; but not only Blake, other artists from the same era who had also been selected for this exhibition such as Philipp Otto Runge, all of whom were trying to find visual metaphors for a difficult time of revolution and changing social order. 

Philipp Otto Runge

Philipp Otto Runge

I thought Blake stood up very well in comparison to his European counterparts, in particular I thought his visual language was more expressive, especially in the way he pushed the human body into dramatic shapes and positions designed to heighten the body's expressive potential. The exhibition also includes some of Blake's classic images, as well as others I was not so familiar with, such as his satirical portrait of the Pope.

William Blake: Albion’s Angel Rose from Europe: A Prophecy

Blake: The Dance of Albion

The exhibition is open until the 19th of May 2024, so if at all interested do find time to get down and see it before it closes. 

See also:

Crosshatching as energy carrier

Diagrams from Dante

The Quantum of the Void compared to the Quantum of the Physical Universe

Fuseli and the modern woman 

Poetry and drawing (W. S. Graham)

Roger Hilton

The Ilkley Literature Festival is on at the moment and I went with an old friend of mine to the exhibition at the Manor House over the weekend, 'W.S. Graham, Poet among the Painters'

The exhibition collects together poems and letters by the poet W.S. Graham and puts them alongside images produced by selected St Ives School artists that he was friends with, such as Bryan Wynter, Roger Hilton and Peter Lanyon. I first came across W. S. Graham’s writings through Patrick Oliver, an artist who had been an apprentice to Lanyon in the late 1950s and who himself often wove poetry into and through both his conversation and his paintings.  Patrick taught alongside myself and my friend Terry and so in many ways visiting the exhibition brought back memories and in particular a re-visiting of approaches to drawing that sometimes get forgotten or simply lost as concepts change and our ways of making and thinking about drawings alter due to societal shifts. 

W. S. Graham’s poems are set alongside paintings by the artists he was responding to as well as four images by Alfred Wallis, a seaman/artist that was to become a seminal figure not just in relationship to the development of modern art in St. Ives, but in how artist/teachers like Patrick Oliver could articulate the relationship between lived experience and image making. 

W. S. Graham held a long standing correspondence and friendship with the art collector Ronnie Duncan and it is Duncan who has provided the majority of both artwork and copies of W. S. Graham’s correspondence for this exhibition. 

A few weeks ago I posted a response to a drawing conference I had been to in Loughborough. The final event I had been to was Patrick Brandon’s: ‘Delayed graphification: obscurity and emergence in drawing’. The workshop was an introduction to the idea of using poetry as a way into thinking about space and surface in painting and Brandon read out a few lines from W. S Graham as an introduction to his workshop. He had though filtered W. S Graham through a Derridian lens and therefore had a post-structuralist take on how poetry could be fed into a painterly sensibility. However, Derrida when talking of poetry has a wonderful line himself, ‘the ‘catachrestic hedgehog, its arrows held at the ready’, an image that for myself is about the poem as a rolled up hedgehog, it’s potential, animal like, and ready to spike anyone that dares to try and uncurl it, especially if you try and correct 'mistakes'. This image of a curled up compaction of meanings, is one that I will myself take into this interrelationship between poetry and visual image-making. Sometimes this can be as much as anything about just plain awkwardness, and this is where the hedgehog image comes into its own. Roger Hilton was I gather a difficult and curmudgeonly man, who had drunk himself into an early death. In his final years he took to his bed but continued to work, painting gouaches almost to the end. There is a note on the wall of the exhibition next to Hilton’s work, it states; “When Roger Hilton took to his bed in the last years of his life, he lay on his left side. But Hilton was left handed and as a result, his much-admired gouaches were done with the ‘wrong’ (i.e. his right) hand”. How awkward can you get? But in this very difficulty, in his whiskey fog, he was able to pull out a series of images that hold steady in the mind well after seeing them. 

These images were all behind glass so forgive their lack of sharpness and occasional white spot, but hopefully you can still get a sense of their childlike warmth and openness. The birds in these images are awkward buggers, they are flightless soothsayers born of a need to escape the fug of bed, a way out, directed at I suspect Hilton himself. For W. S Graham, Hilton was a ‘terrible’ friend, a friend loved dearly though and in the object memory of a watch, Graham is able to find solace and a sort of companionship, both object and human being left behind after Hilton’s death. This is W. S. Graham's poetic reflection on the fact that he had been left Hilton's watch as a memento of his friend.

Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch

Which I was given because 

I loved him and we had

Terrible times together

O tarnished ticking time 

Piece with your bent hand, 

You must be used to being 

Looked at suddenly 

In the middle of the night

When he switched the light on
Beside his bed. I hope
You told him the best time
When he lifted you up
To meet the Hilton gaze. 

I lift you up from the mantle

Piece here in my house

Wearing your verdigris.

At least I kept you wound

And put my ear to you

To hear Botallack tick.

You realize your master
Has relinquished you
And gone to lie under
The ground at St. Just

Tell me the time. The time

Is Botallack o’clock

This is the dead of night.

He switches the light on

To find a cigarette

And pours himself a Teachers.

He picks me up and holds me

Near his lonely face

To see my hands. He thinks

He is not being watched. 

The images of his dream

Are still about his face

As he spits and tries not

To remember where he was. 

I am only a watch

And pray time hastes away

I think I am running down

Watch it is time I wound

You up again. I am

Very much not your dear

Last master but we had

Terrible times together. 

So how does poetry sit alongside plastic image making? If you look at the work of Alfred Wallis he fuses vision with experience, with a poetics of association. And it is this fusion that I well remember Patrick Oliver trying to make students understand when we were undertaking ‘morning drawing’. (See blog posts related to the pedagogy of art and design) 

                                  

                                                             Alfred Wallis

If you look at the image by Wallis above, you may well think that the small house squeezed between two others is the result of observation, it being set behind and away from the other two. However I well remember Patrick Oliver telling us a story he had picked up from his time in St Ives about Wallis’s own observations on the size of the house. Apparently the man that lived there had a small soul. He was mean spirited and had shown himself to be no friend of the sailing community. Size in this case being a recognition of spiritual worth. This coupled with a way of making images that relies on memory and a finding of shape/space by feeling for the way that forms fit or lock together as they are made, creates a way of image making that transcends a need for fixed perspective because it moves seamlessly between vision, memory, and an image hierarchy based on relative importance, whether this be spiritual, emotional or simply clarity or vividness of the remembered experience. These things are nested, or rolled together, like the hedgehog, and if you attempt to unravel them they lose their prickly warmth and end up as cold facts. 

Hilton had assimilated Wallis’s lesson and just as Wallis was no longer a sailor when he was making his images of ships and St. Ives, Hilton was no longer going any where except his bedroom. Hilton was even though bed ridden, able to tap into the raw world of image discovery, perhaps all the more raw because he was using his ‘wrong’ hand, perhaps all the more spiky and edgy because he was dying and he knew it and was yet still able to sense something of his life through that whiskey daze. 

Another death that W. S Graham had to respond to was that of Lanyon himself, killed in a gliding accident, at a moment in his career when he was beginning to fuse together his earlier lyrical abstractions with a tougher, gliding inspired vision of landscape and its perception as an unfolding dizzy conjunction of earth and air. The poetry of ‘space’ that Lanyon occupied is revisited by Graham as he folds the Cornish landscape into the language of Wallis and the making of boats and pounding of waves and history and flying. Another curled hedgehog that steadies us as we metaphorically hold hands with those past artists that help us to see again and even in their passing remind us of how in our own present, we owe it to them to continue the search for the curled hedgehog of image making. 

Peter Lanyon: Gliding painting

This is W. S. Graham's poetic tribute to Lanyon who died in a gliding accident in 1964

The Thermal Stair

I called today, Peter, and you were away.

I look out over Botallack and over Ding

Dong and Levant and over the jasper sea.

Find me a thermal to speak and soar to you from

Over Lanyon Quoit and the circling stones standing

High on the moor over Gurnard’s Head where some

Time three foxglove summers ago, you came.

The days are shortening over Little Park Owles.

The poet or painter steers his life to maim

Himself somehow for the job. His job is Love

Imagined into words or paint to make

An object that will stand and will not move.

Peter, I called and you were away, speaking

Only through what you made and at your best.

Look , there above Botallack, the buzzard riding

The salt updraught slides off the broken air

And out of sight to quarter a new place.

The Celtic sea, the Methodist sea is there.

You said once in the Engine

House below Morvah

That words make their world

In the same way as the painter’s

Mark surprises him

Into seeing new.

Sit here on the sparstone

In this ruin where

Once the early beam

Engine pounded and broke

The air with industry.

Now the chuck of daws

And the listening sea.

‘Shall we go down’ you said

‘Before the light goes

And stand under the old

Tinworkings around

Morvah and St Just?

You said ‘Here is the sea

Made by Alfred Wallis

Or any poet or painter’s

Eye it encountered.

Or is it better made

By all those vesselled men

Sometime it maintained?

We all make it again.’

Give me your hand, Peter,

To steady me on the word.

Seventy-two by sixty,

Italy hangs on the wall.

A woman stands with a drink

In some polite place

And looks at SARACINESCO

And turns to mention space.

That one if she could

Would ride Artistically

The thermals you once rode.

Peter, the phallic boys

Begin to wink their lights.

Godrevy and the Wolf

Are calling Opening Time.

We’ll take the quickest way

The tin singers made.

Climb here where the hand

Will not grasp on air.

And that dark-suited man

Has set the dominoes out

On the Queen’s table.

Peter , we’ll sit and drink

And go in the sea’s roar

To Labrador with Wallis

Or rise on Lanyon’s stair.

Uneasy, lovable man, give me your painting

Hand to steady me taking the word-road home.

Lanyon, why is it you’re earlier away?

Remember me wherever you listen from.

Lanyon, ding dong ding dong from carn to carn.

It seems tonight all Closing bells are tolling

Across the Duchy shire wherever I turn.

The letters that W. S Graham wrote to Ronnie Duncan have a quality of their own that sits between the visual and verbal. So I will leave you with a few images of pages of Graham's letters. 

A film about Ronnie Duncan and his art collection