Hannah Nicklin

On Love.

I haven’t really talked about comics much here, before – though I have music, games, dance and, obviously, theatre – but as comics are more and more a part of my life these days (film and TV; meh), it was pretty inevitable that one would drive my fingers to the keyboard at some point.

Ready yourself for some minor spoilers (nowt more than you’d get from the blurb on the back, and no major later ones, I hope).

I just finished reading a comic called ‘Aaron and Ahmed‘. It was recommended to me by my mate Andy whose judgement in comics (except for the men in tights kind) I trust implicitly. But, unusually, I struggled with this one. Andy said it had him in tears, and so I fully expected to be in pieces afterwards, but instead I just felt kind of… silent.

I think I want to talk about a flaw in the work, though I’m not sure. Like I said, I really struggled to read the comic; I just didn’t move past the first few pages.

The writer offers you a once-broken man; an army psychiatrist saved by the love of a good woman, only then to lose her in the attack on the Twin Towers; seeks out employment in Guantanamao Bay. That’s the opening premise, Aaron before we meet Ahmed. We watch him walk into the Guantanamo.

And that’s when I leave. Because my disbelief refused to be suspended the moment we traipse the halls and dusty grounds of that detention camp. Detention. Those little neat words like hospital corners. Place of torture; that’s what we see in Aaron and Ahmed. Aaron sleepwalking around rooms where different horrific tortures are inflicted on detainees. Victims? They’re certainly portrayed like that. Right then I’m lost to the main character, right then I can’t possibly walk by his side.

What stopped me at that first page I saw a man being tortured was like the feeling of a seeing punch to the stomach of someone I love further away than I could reach them. I wouldn’t walk by it, not even as narrative companion.

This story doesn’t fit in my head. My mind said. But it fits in my world, it’s one of the pieces; it fits together with the piece I am a part of. These acts or ones like them are committed by a culture I buy into. My government is implicit in tortures like these.

Here is what interests me about the work; it’s close, recent stuff, this. How could I possibly be asked to suspend myself? It doesn’t have the historical/generational distance of Maus or Ethel and Ernest, the ‘not-here-but-somewhere-like-here’ of something like Habibi, or the personal ‘true story’ nature of works like Fun Home or Persepolis. I felt rudely present throughout the whole. And maybe that’s right; that I feel my body – my mind – present. That I see how they might or might not be implicit in a story; this story. That I see both me, and story, and the places they both vanish, because that’s where things sometimes get dangerous. Like the kinds of stories, the memes which the story goes on to talk about (still, I felt, pretty heavy-handedly). The stories we (cultures, societies, religions) tell ourselves about the world. The stories which always have to rearrange the world to fit into our heads. Sometimes these stories should bear unfolding. Sometimes we should trace the creases.

It is the first few pages which cause me to trace the creases. I didn’t really rate the stuff in the middle, but then at the end, the main character’s final conclusions ring true; there, Aaron finds me again. It’s an idea (meme) often repeated, by many people. Here’s one from 403 years ago:

Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Yeah, horrifically well known Shakespeare, I know. It’s been running through my mind, that, recently, though. No one is ever lost to the night sky; it is only ever obscured from view.

Sometimes love burns with disappointment, or regret, or too much weight, or it is obscured, lost. Sometimes you might fly on it, it might suddenly be in the face of a stranger, or stoop with you to pick someone up when they least expect. I couldn’t walk with Aaron past those people being tortured. And when I realised what this meant to me, several hours after finishing the comic, my eyes were wet.

If you want to buy the book, at all, I recommend getting it from the lovely guys at Page45, you can reserve stuff via Twitter and everything.

#Dust – Tell me about an object.

Can you tell me about an object you own that is tied to a particular memory? In one tweet or two, using the hashtag ‘#dust’, or write it in a couple of sentences below; about the amount of writing you could fit on a post-it. You can send me pictures if you want, but tell me about an object that is significant to you and, shortly, why it is significant. You can leave your comment anonymously below by using ‘anon’ as a name and ‘anon@anon.com’ or another fake email address in the comments form.

I am making something with Nikki Pugh called ‘Dust’. It is a response to a manifesto that claims we will make things with you, not for you. This is one of the ways it’s with. You can read about where the project is at right now over here. If you can offer me a story, it will be made into a Dust Mote. Things that people will find and keep. The stories will also feed into and inform the longer-form narrative fragments in the work. Head over here for full context.

And because this is a two way thing, here’s a couple I will submit:

Object 1: A porcelain badge, square with rounded corners, the transfer of a rabbit with a balloon on the front.

This object broke. It was the last thing in my daily life that came from the boy whose hair smelled like raku firings. It fell off my bag in St. Pancras about 3 years ago and shattered. I still have the largest fragment.

Object 2: A small plush rat.

[no picture]

Bought because it looked lonely. Bought just before something went completely, bafflingly wrong. Now hidden.

…

I need some less emo objects, huh?

The Woods

I’m cross-posting this to my blog, a week after it originally appeared on The Good Review

Image shared via CC license on Flickr by gato-gato-gato

There’s something endlessly fascinating in not knowing the rules. Trad-theatre’s ability to signify meaning is all tied up in knowing the language of it. If at the beginning of a play a person is buried, under the rules of traditional storytelling you are most likely to think ‘that person is dead’. When, however, in The Woods by the Jane Packman Company, the audience are invited to lay leaves over a person lying still on the woody earth, you (or I, at least) experience the moment of covering, not the immediate meaning.  You explore, rather than consume, the storytelling, here.

This piece is a piece about grief, and at the same time about winter, and wondering if you’ll ever see spring again. It took place in a gallery space in MAC, Birmingham, almost all the floor covered in woodchips, leaves, and shrouded in tall green rectangular sheets that felt easily like trees. The space lit by large low burning bulbs, cradled in twigs, you find yourself both in a bedroom of the urban flat of a young couple, and deep in chilly woodland permeated by the scent and crunch of leaves; scored by the murmurs of rooks in the distance. It reminded me of those dream moments in Michel Gondry’s films – where a toy patchwork horse is suddenly big enough to ride, or when a couple wake up in a bed in the middle of the beach where they first met. And indeed, The Woods had the same complex language of a dream.

The storytelling here has to move differently around its audience; immersion foregrounds the body of the audience, it is not the vanishing act done by placing the body in darkness (a la trad theatre). This was very gentle immersion, though, with a mix of direct address that didn’t require verbal responses, and careful invitations to feel the wholeness of the experience (touch the bark beneath your feet, partake in a warming, spicy punch on entering the space).  The Woods’ physical language addresses the body, and in doing so, our bodily mortality; while the setting reminds us that whilst we die, the world continues, the leaves fall, mulch, and feed the coming spring.

The sense of watching the piece from spring was perhaps important to how the piece felt; the abject despair of grief, seen framed from a land where the snowdrops are starting to flower. This distance doubled with that of childhood – a story about the games a little girl played to make sense of the world moves into the ‘bets’ made by a grieving partner:

‘I’ll give up a limb, a leg, an arm, 5 years of my life, 15, if I could just see her again, for a moment’.

There was a strong feeling of folklore and fairy-tale – from the opening song to the often thick, and slightly obtuse language. Movements were repeated, footsteps shadowed. This was a Story. The woods are one of those liminal spaces in literature, where characters meet, fall in love, lose themselves. We once lived among them, from them, and had to tell stories to warn each other of the dangers there.

When my grandmother died we spread her ashes at the feet of 5 large beech trees we planted in memory of her second husband. There is much of death in the woods, but each year I visit that place and see the beech trees grow. You come out of The Woods feeling like I do when I leave their side; sad, but somehow, taller.

The Woods ran at MAC, Birmingham from Friday 18^th until Sunday 27^th of Feb. Next time I’ll try and actually get to see something a little more usefully earlier in the run.

Dreams &tc

I read Freakangels the other day. It put me in mind of this:

“Each epoch dreams the one to follow.” – Michelet, “Avenir! Avenir!”

Freakangels also puts me in mind of my small obsession with flooding (and rain). Growing up in Lincolnshire will do that to you. So much of the land there was ‘reclaimed’ from the sea. Wrong way round, that. As if the land belonged to us before the water. Anyway, projected sea level rises linked to global warming put vast swathes of my home county back underwater. And flooding threads itself through an awful lot of my plays and soundwalks.

I’m a good swimmer. I’ve never been afraid of water. I am afraid of losing the things that tie me down though. The skies of Lincolnshire are as big as they are because of the lay of the land. Because how far away the horizons, because of how far you can run and feel like you’re not moving. I return home when I need to unwind my mind.

I have really vivid dreams. If you follow me on Twitter you might sometimes see me talk about them. The ones I remember most I’m always running. Packing for a great ordeal, leaving with a warm jumper, clean socks, running shoes, basic supplies. And running. Sometimes I fight. Sometimes I save the day. But I’m always running.

“the arcades and intérieurs, the exhibition halls and panoramas*. They are residues of a dream world. [...] Every epoch, in fact, not only dreams the one to follow but, in dreaming, precipitates its awakening. It bears its end within itself” (p13 of the Arcades Project by Walter Benjamin)

Just a thought.

*think shopping centres and billboards, museums and parks