Drift

drift |drift|verb [ intrans. ]1 be carried slowly by a current of air or water : the cabin cruiser started to drift downstream | figurative excited voices drifted down the hall.

adrift |əˈdrift|adjective [ predic. ] & adverb(of a boat or its passengers) floating without being either moored or steered

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Certain themes seem to be recurring both at home base and out here in the blogosphere. Walk. Run. Leap. No don't. Wait. Oh-oh. Splotch. Slowly now. . . r e a c h. No, sorry, I meant to say crouch. Ouch. And so on and so on. Bumpity, bump, bump. . . bump, bump. As Marylinn wrote in her recent post, wake me up when it's not stupid any more? 

Meantime, while things are as they are, we do as we must to keep ourselves on course. I am finding work really helpful at the moment. My focus is on getting an installation together - its various components need to be conjured up and completed within the coming ten days or so (instal date, Sunday 28 November; official opening, Tuesday 30th). I think I might have mentioned this idea here before. . . basically, my task is to produce +/- a thousand paper boats (made in three different sizes to create subtle spatial tensions) and a silent film showing a similar flotilla adrift under the sea ice in Antarctica.

The film part of this installation will be circular in structure; by that, I mean it will loop, and therefore announce no obvious beginning or end. There will be no familiar points of reference, nothing explicit in terms of 'statements of context' or intent. There will be no narration and no music; nothing but the play of light and dark and an ocean of static (on the wall) and floating (in the film) boats to draw you in and hold you there. You will be able to float underwater for hours or days if you feel like it, and you will not have to hold your breath while you're there; neither will you need to come up for air. And, guess what? You won't be expected to wear swimming togs or a wet suit. . . and - you have my word on this - your skin will not resemble a wrinkly old prune when you emerge.

The paper I'm using to make the boats is 300gsm cotton; sheets left over from the printing, in 2007, of my poetry collection. Piles and piles of proofs would ordinarily have been tossed aside and renegaded to the rubbish tip but thankfully I was there at the time the book went to press so was able to rescue (literally, hundreds) of beautiful, large sheets of creamy, acid-free paper for future projects.

In a way, these small boats are messengers, each one carrying a fragment of our common story on its surfaces - a lithographic drawing, a few lines of poetry.

Making paper boats is a wonderfully steadying exercise. I highly recommend it. It has a similar effect (on the mind, at least) as yoga does. There's something about the repetition and focus and the accompanying head-clearing rhythm that does it, I think. It feels a lot more like meditation than obsessive industry or - heaven forbid - indulgence (although I can see how it could easily take on the appearance of either or both, given how many hours - no, days - I'm spending at this.) My intention? To say something about community - how we're a kind of constellation composed of many parts - and at the same time to create a space that loosely references T. S. Eliot's line 'at the still point of the turning world is the dance'. And then I want to invite people in to partake and participate for an extended moment. Does this count as a 'reason'? And is it reason enough? I'm not sure. All I know is that I feel compelled to make this piece.

Measure, rule, cut, stack; mark hull joints, puncture axes with compass point, cut to midpoint using scissors; score, crease, fold, glue, peg x 653 (so far). . . As a process, it's kind of numbing, kind of nice - or, ecin of dnik, gnibmun fo dnik. (Siht si tahw deneppah ta eht dne fo eht yad, detpmorp yb Alemap dna Epolenep aiv liame dna Koobecaf. Ti dah em gnihgual flesym yllis. Uoy dluohs yrt ti, yllaer uoy dluohs. Eht erom uoy od ti, hte reisae ti steg. Dna eht reinnuf.

Sdrawkcab gnitirw smees ot tif htiw s'yadot ddo erehpsomta, t'nod uoy eegra?

Os, owt sgniht ot yrt. . . (1) evititeper gnikam-taob dna (2) gnitirw sdrawkcab. 

?!? 

   

; )

147 boats packed together make a mandala, a paper buoy, a kina (sea urchin). . . 

*

PS. You can find out more about this group exhibition at

A Museum of Obsessions 

Tuesday Poem - Candle Hat

This Tuesday, a poem I wish I'd written. . .

CANDLE HAT

In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrandt looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
from painting The Blinding of Sampson.

But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror
and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio
addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew
we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head
which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,
a device that allowed him to work into the night.

You can only wonder what it would be like
to be wearing such a chandelier on your head
as if you were a walking dining room or concert hall.

But once you see this hat there is no need to read
any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

To understand Goya you only have to imagine him
lighting the candles one by one, then placing
the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,
the laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house
with all the shadows flying across the walls.

Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door
one dark night in the hill country of Spain.
"Come in, " he would say, "I was just painting myself,"
as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,
illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

Billy Collins

*

For more Tuesday Poems, visit the TP hub

It depends how you look at it

Inside the stone the world is round.  A woman wears jeans and a clean white T-shirt.  There’s a canvas hammock in the garden, strung between the magnolia and a flaming red maple.  Her family’s washing hangs on the line, snapping its way towards freshness. A taste of summer.

 

Inside the stone the world is beige.  Flat. Bland. Pale.  The sun’s light is tepid, the sea runs a pale wet tongue across the beach leaving behind a faint tea stain.  The sand is a crushed malt biscuit.

Inside the stone the world is an apricot.  Wind loosens the ripe scent of sex and soft fruit, of wet and round and orange.  Men and women peel off their clothes, step out of their shoes.  They stride past work on cool, bare feet.

  

Inside the stone the world is a puzzle, a thousand pieces strewn across a landscape. A man is gathering them up, constructing a scene from the inside out.  They remain out of focus until he picks them up, transforming at once from flat and grey, to monumental, three-dimensional structures; his dream of a different life keeps him captive.

 

Inside the stone puddles are pewter ovals, sleeping.

 

Inside the stone is a black world, a place with neither windows nor doors. The woman searches for a trapdoor, any means by which she might escape the darkness.  But there are only concrete walls and wooden floorboards that threaten to split.  She can smell the sticky stench of bitumen, the singe of a hot, high fire.

 

Inside the stone is a soft wax world.  Children know the silent slide of honey.  They walk with candles; lights tilted to flatter the forest, they highlight moss and lichen, outline fallen pine needles with a subtle edge of gold. 

 

Inside the stone the world is populated by flocks of primordial birds.  They burrow their way out of the dark soil in our gardens and look us straight in the eye.  Their skin is damp and pink as a Desiree potato.  They carry the dirt of the world on their backs, feed on mass nouns and ripe plums.

 

Inside the stone the world is a bulletin board. Sharp corners stab and cut. People and events are paper cut-outs, underlined, trimmed, pinned to its surface with cold stainless steel pins.  Disturb the layers to see what lies behind or beneath and everything will turn to dust. Take heed. The printers’ pigments will leave telltale stains on your fingers.

 

Inside the stone is a trapped storm.

 

Inside the stone a spill of full-cream milk spreads across a linoleum kitchen floor, splashes down the back doorstep and out into the garden.  It flows down the slope, past the exuberant yellow peonies and flowering cherries, gathering speed and doubling in volume as it travels. By the time it has crossed the neighbourhood boundaries, it is a wide white river; the children and untethered lambs of the suburbs run along its banks sploshing, stretching and bending, drinking their fill.

 

Inside the stone a miniature narcissus threatens to pull up its roots.  It shakes its head, catapults its scent across the sprawling grey of the city.  Perfume drizzles down street lamps, drips onto sidewalks, sticks to the dusty flanks of buildings.  Industry blushes and for a moment steps out of the shadows.

 

There is a universe inside a stone.

CB 2007