30 November 2007

TAKING TIME

"Every river, as we know, must have banks on both sides, so where, seen in those terms, where are the banks of time? What would be this river’s qualities, qualities perhaps corresponding to those of water, which is fluid, rather heavy, and translucent? In what way do objects immersed in time differ from those left untouched by it? Why do we show the hours of light and darkness in the same circle? Why does time stand eternally still and motionless in one place, and rush headlong by in another? Could we not claim, said Austerlitz, that time itself has been nonconcurrent over the centuries and the millennia? It is not so long ago, after all, that it began spreading out over everything. And is not human life in many parts of the earth governed to this day less by time than by the weather, and thus by an unquantifiable dimension which disregards linear regularity, does not progress constantly forward but moves in eddies, is marked by episodes of congestion and irruption, recurs in ever-changing form, and evolves in no one knows what direction?"
W G Sebald, Austerlitz

Image below, long exposure pinhole photograph of the Pacific Ocean, Kaikoura, place of  ancient memories ... while the light seeps in through the pinhole, forming the image, the waves become blurred, such that the sea appears to become sand ... taking a photograph of time itself.

Soundtrack: Joy Division, Atmosphere
More Dark Dances here
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29 November 2007

ON WRITING

"That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eyes on the complex patterns they created.  It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread."
W G Sebald, The Rings of Saturn

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26 November 2007

MELANCHOLIC ACHE

There's a wonderful small moment in Werner Herzog's 1984 film Where the Green Ants Dream (a surreal scenario in the Australian outback, the closing passages of which are absolutely otherworldly) ... I cannot recall the character's name ... but the lament is: "Melancholy ... Melancholy?  Or is it toothache?"  This dialogue fragment drifts through my mind as I sit here writing my tome, realising I have again adopted the gestus melancholicus, the melancholy demeanour or regard.  Head in hands, and 'worry brows' furrowed,  beginning to enumerate Hamlet's catalogue of melancholic traits ... the 'customary suits of solemn black,' 'the fruitful river of the eye,' and the 'dejected haviour of the visage.'  A kind of dislocation ensues, and writing seems the ideal locus, the modus operandi, free to wander in the topos of pathos ... to yearn through words, for worlds, for times, for places, for people ... there within the tears of things.  Our lady of perpetual sorrow.  Lingering.  Longing.

Kaikoura, November 2007
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25 November 2007

NEVERMORE

In "The Philosophy of Composition" Edgar Allan Poe wrote that his main concern in writing The Raven was to create a 'melancholic tone' ... saying, "I asked myself, of all melancholy topics what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?  Death was the obvious reply."


B(l)eached Bones, Kaikoura, November 2007
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19 November 2007

SEEKING ASYLUM

A sunny Sunday.  An uncanny land.  Australia’s proximity, geographically, culturally, at times morphs into vast gulfs of difference, and at others is undeniably universal.  It's early, heading to an old asylum.  In my head that old song from The Fun Boy Three… the lunatics have taken over the asylum … but got there to find out it is actually the artists who are now in residence.  The place under lock and key for the weekend, a circumnavigation is required, and the ha-ha landscape is then inside out.  The sheeps-eye view, rather than the topographical sleight of hand which would seemingly seamlessly blend the asylum with the surrounding landscape. 



Wandering about the desolate grounds, various weird birds supply a suitably bedevilled soundtrack. Trees exhibit a range of mental disorders.  Dark fugues of Van Gogh cypresses.   


Outside the sandstone fortress of the original asylum are the abandoned institutional dwellings of the wider mental hospital site.  Everywhere there are poignant traces of a simple existence.  And vacancy.  Clothesline, bicycle, chair, stair. 


There’s a presence in such a place, following me in my head.  My bi-polar brother.  Once oscillating widely, and wildly, between the bleakest of black dogs, and a searing, scorching black sun, he now drifts in a soft mist, muffled, far away.  Would.  Could. Should such a place provide a haven, a sanctuary, the truest sense of asylum.  Sunny days, golden daze. 


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13 November 2007

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

All will be ssssilent on Passages for a bit.  Off to Sydney.

Macrocarpa Chiaroscuro, more from the pinhole ... November 2007

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12 November 2007

THE DARK GAZE




Two Heads (pinhole image), November 2007

Tenebrism, an extreme form of chiaroscuro, sees light fall upon objects, lifting them from the velvet shadows beyond.  Caravaggio was the master tenebrist, where images appear to gather light to themselves while hovering over the blackest, deepest abysses.  The play of light and dark is criss-crossed by the gaze, here two heads, encountered in a barn, stare nonchalantly into the middle ground.  Behind them the anarchic agricultural equipment melts into deep space ...


 
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10 November 2007

DARK MOMENTS


Johann Heinrich Wilhlem Tischbein (c.1805) La Grande Ombre (The Long Shadow), from the (delicious) catalogue Melancolie: genie et folie en Occident (2005, Reunion des Musees Nationaux / Gallimard) 


Another 'dark chamber,' here the sole source of light is not the pinhole but the fire, stretching the shadow, having it circumnavigate the room.  Introspective space, inhabited by an intensely melancholic figure.  He is casebook melancholy  ... exhibiting the so-called Melancholic Regard:  “The eyes are motionless, and directed either towards the earth or to some distant point, and the look is askance, uneasy and suspicious.”  (Jean-Etienne-Dominque Esquirol (1845) Mental Maladies: A Treatise on Insanity).  Looking closely, he also has Melancholy Eyebrows, what the Chinese call Chou mei … worry brows.  The pose is the iconic melancholic head-in-hands, diagnosed in regard to Van Gogh’s Dr Gachet,as  the “classical depressive pose.” (Jeffrey K Aronson and Manoj Ramachandran (2006) The diagnosis of art: melancholy and the Portrait of Dr Gachet. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine,  99: 373-374).
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08 November 2007

CAMERA OBSCURA


The man at the photo shop beckoned me to one side, so as not to embarrass me.  It's about your photographs, he began in a stage whisper ... Judging by the glances from others in the shop, their imaginations were working overtime, a few eyebrows raised.  He continued, in a somewhat condescending tone, the guys at the lab say they're, er, out of focus. So I explained ... they're pinhole photographs.  He seemed somewhat taken with that, and proceeded to tell me how to make a pinhole camera from a beer can ...
 
Canterbury: Night and Day, with apologies to Colin McCahon
 (About his Takaka: Night and Day, McCahon wrote, "it states my interest in landscape as a symbol of place and also of the human condition. It is not so much a portrait of a place as such but is a memory of a time and an experience of a particular place.")


Writing on Volkmar Herre's pinhole photographs of Ian Hamilton Finlay's Fleur de L'air, John Dixon Hunt alludes to the elusive quality of camera obscura ('dark chamber') imagery, the way that, "Simultaneously, and beyond the ineluctable quiddity or 'thingness' of the rocks, trees and earth, the extraordinary light translates everything into praeternatural scenery."

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04 November 2007

LIGHTING OUT FOR THE TERRITORY ...

Michael Gordon and Bill Morrison's Light is Calling is haunting, arresting, mmmesmerising. The IMDb describes how  "A scene from The Bells (1926) is optically reprinted and edited to Michael Gordon's 7 minute composition. A meditation on the fleeting nature of life and love, as seen through the roiling emulsion of a film."  Amongst the images a group on horses sets out, over and over again, the sense of a journey into the beyond, with the turbulent chiaroscuro at play all around them.  There's something about that crackling of light and dark, the light pouring in ... like Heidegger's lichtung, or 'lighting,' the way that he conceptualised the idea of a 'clearing' in the forest, where the light comes in.  But also of 'lighting out,' climbing on, heading off ....  (Huckleberry Finn via Iain Sinclair via Martin Edmond).

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The pulsing images of Light is Calling recall the decalcomania techniques of the Surrealists.  Like Max Ernst's decalcomaniacal The Eye of Silence (1943/44)...



Many thanks to Dylan Trigg for pointing me to Bill Morrison.

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