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.

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?

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.

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

I am so tired at the moment. I am so tired of being angry, of feeling each stupid, ill-thought-out, privileged and destructive decision of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition hit me like a punch to the stomach. Have you ever been punched in the stomach? I haven’t, I spoke to someone who has though, and I think it’s an adequate metaphor.

I went to see Tim Crouch’s The Author, today. I had tried to avoid reading details about it, all that I knew was that it was an interactive-ish play with two lines of audience facing one another, and that it was about writing, and accountability. I also knew people had walked out, fainted, thrown things in reaction to it.

And I was apprehensive. I was apprehensive about doing it wrong, it wasn’t clear how much of it was a script, and how much of it wanted audience input. I knew that it asked for some, but had also read one of the performers bemoaning ‘wrong’ interruptions.

I was also angry. And tired. Which I normally am these days. And I knew that if someone stood up and tried to imply that I did not hold myself accountable to the world, to all that people do to other people, that I did anything other than spend every second I am not (and also some that I am) trying to earn a living or make art; protesting, writing, coding and shouting about the wrong in the world, I would react with violence. Like the image of the Millbank protester kicking the window. I would speak out of turn, and shatter their words.

“I looked at the performers on the stage and I saw that they had imagined me, badly”*

I sat down. The door closed. And as @danrebellato said, it was cleverer than that. It asked you to lean towards it, but it didn’t exploit.

It described some shocking things. But not with the aim To Shock, rather with the aim To Show. Shocking if you have never forced yourself to look, certainly. But it also talked about what looking means.

Here’s something about me: I have never, and will never purposefully watch a youtube video or recording of someone dying. I won’t even watch people breaking bones, or hitting a hard bail whilst skateboarding. Might not sound unusual to some of you, but for most people my age it I am an anomaly. It’s not that I don’t admit the horror or the pain, but rather that I won’t abuse someone’s embodied life by cheapening their death or injury with disembodied mimesis.

This person is not a symbol of the Iran riots, this woman is called Neda, and she is dying, bleeding to death, struggling to breathe, suffocating. She’s not 500,000 google hits.

I struggled with the wikileaks release of the Iraq shooting video for a similar reason. Should I face this video, as something I, as a member of my society, am complicit in? Am I actually just shielding myself from facing the reality of my place in the system – both complicit but (more of a hurt to me) essentially powerless? After all, in a democracy we all have units of power, but we lend them, one by one, up through the system, where they are traded, some handed to lawmakers, others to decision makers, perhaps redistributed to the armed forces… But if I do watch this film of people dying, what am I facing? Their deaths? The people killing them? My accountability? Or some pixels representing those things, never exhausted?

People are wrong if they have described this play as ‘interactive’. It isn’t, you can’t affect the outcomes. But that’s not to say that’s a bad thing. This play was about something that is sometimes the result of interaction, but here was found elsewhere; through embodiment. The Author illuminated the bodies which in a conventional play are erased by darkness, or by becoming a part of a mass. The Author addressed you. Called people by their names, and when it did use darkness, you and the performers were all in the same light-less-ness.

The actors used their acting voices. You were clear about who you had traded your power to, and though they lent it back to you through the occasional question, you were always clear, I thought, about where you stood.

I have never nearly died. I have been hurt, though. Had serious injuries. I am scared at the moment – after seeing how easy it was to simply slip and snap the end of my radius off this Summer – I am scared of hurting myself. I see it play in front of me with every pothole I cycle over and patch of wet leaves that I step across. I am scared of injuring myself again, but probably more of the moment of being faced by my own fragility, my own pain, my bodily mortality.

Someone on Twitter described The Author as beautiful. But I wouldn’t say that, I would call it exquisite, in the same way as heartbreak is.

I have had that happen. It remember it felt like I couldn’t breathe. It hurt to fall asleep with my thoughts and it hurt to wake up and remember who I was. My body shook, lost all sense of time and hunger, and I didn’t recognise it. Because really, for the first time, I saw it. I saw my mind – I saw the metaphysical – connect with my body, and affect me in such a way that I stood in a shower and cried and cried and couldn’t leave, because needed the water to wash over me and render me and my tears invisible.

I didn’t applaud after it finished. It didn’t seem right. Not the right way to react to it. Not appropriate. In the same way I wouldn’t applaud at a funeral. Was that wrong? Was that not the right thing to do? Was that right?

*paraphrasing, I couldn’t afford the script.

Image shared on Flickr by somegeekintn via a CC license

I saw two very different pieces this week. Both made me react quite strongly so I thought I’d scribble a few lines about them. (aside: what’s the typing equivalent of scribble? Patter?)

Although really very different pieces, one devised, one scripted, one raucous and difficult, the other anxious and heartfelt, it felt like they were both, in some way about inarticulacy; Ugly the inarticulacy of a potential then, What I Heard About the World about the inarticulacy of being, now. Here are some thoughts:

Ugly

Ugly is a piece touring regionally with Red Ladder Theatre, the script is by Emma Adams and is a really challenging piece which I struggled with. It was only actually by the post-show discussion that it really began to work for me. That’s the first time how I felt about a piece has been changed so dramatically by talking with people involved. <insert something about me being stubborn>

Both the text and the direction was relentless. There were no still characters, no still moments, even moments of (opted) coitus were frenetic and impersonal, the characters seemed to be archetypes left out in the sun too long then fed a combination of amphetamines and ritalin, and the language warped and broke and jarred and choked with swear words. I struggled to hold my attention to it because it rattled on without respite. And I think that now feels like it was the point. It was not structurally sound. It felt like it was too long. And it said big things, at the same time as (with the frequent swears) saying nothing. It was a flawed vehicle about a flawed future. When I got back from Twitter I described it as a mix of Alice in Wonderland and Threads. And as I pile similes and metaphors on you – you hopefully see something, too, of inarticulacy. The experience of the play, not the words or the action, is where the heart of it lay.

But I also think that this play wasn’t really for me – not that I didn’t like it, but that for me, it’s not necessary. It was a piece for younger people, the ones who don’t see beyond now because as yet their life doesn’t require them to, and don’t connect the many news reports to a future. I don’t need convincing climate change is deadly. And I’m not one to be convinced in such a frenetic, physical way. I think it did want for a greater connection to that audience – this came out afterwards – ‘what happened in between’, ‘how did it get to that’ – they needed a glimpse of something they could recognise, to tie them back to their own lives. But it stubbornly refused that. And that’s a point in itself – you won’t recognise anything apart from that these are people. But some of them aren’t even that.

The other Climate Change Play that has stuck with me for a long time is (the lovely) Steve Water’s Contingency Plan. A completely different, very realistic, near-future double bill about flooding somewhere very like my home county and Westminster’s reaction to it. The script was an exquisite piece of almost porcelain sculpture – and as Steve, and like me, cerebral at heart. That was my watershed. But I think for a few people, younger, Ugly might be theirs.

What I Heard About the World

The ink bleeding from an upturned plane, sunk in a salted fish tank. A love song for a massacre. A little girl with magical powers. The sound of…

These are images swimming in my mind after seeing What I Heard About the World last night.

This piece, devised by Sheffield’s Third Angel with the Portuguese Mala Voadora was a much gentler, stiller, but also more anxious experience. It felt more about the weight of storytelling, the weight of being the storyteller. It took me about 15 minutes to settle into and I think I’ve put my finger on that being down to each of the 3 people in the piece’s approaches. Alex felt like himself, telling stories – Chris, with his mode of um’s and er’s felt more writerly, but at the same time as someone performing someone telling stories, and then Jorge felt much more like ‘just’ a performer. As though each of them took on a different stage in the telling of the stories they’d been given.

The piece was nicely woven together, I appreciated the music (and hint towards storytelling of old) and the linking sections of action and fast rambled accounts of the real-life journeys to reach the places talked about. My opening unease about not really knowing whose piece it was – which character it belonged to – relaxed, as it felt like mostly that actually it belonged to none of them, all of them, both.

In a very different way to Ugly there was again something there about inarticulacy – this time the inarticulacy of being in the world and the decisions – conscious or unthought – which we make in order to fit it in our heads.

The end section really brought this into focus, and reminded me of a passage I just read from a book on Heidegger;

“What art can do is bear witness not to the sublime, but to the aporia [undecidability] of art and to its pain. It does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it. ‘After Auschwitz’ it is necessary, according to Eli Weisel, to add yet another verse to the story of the forgetting of the recollection beside the fire in the forest. I cannot light the fire, I do not know the prayer, I can no longer find the spot in the forest, I cannot even tell the story any longer. All I know how to do is to say that I no longer know to tell this story. And this should be enough. This has to be enough.” – Lyotard, here

Particularly for the (character of?) Chris Thorpe, the piece felt like it was hinting towards a kind of liberal inarticulacy. A want for parity in world that offers none, a need to not take stories as wide-brushstroke constructions, when as soon as they’re told, that’s what they become. And a resistance to narrative causality, because you know that the bad stories end with an ending that can’t be undone. At the last, he can’t take the accountability, and reads instead from a worn piece of paper – to me that said ‘this one isn’t my responsibility’.

Although perhaps it was just ‘I haven’t had time to memorise this yet, so we aged the paper to make it look intentional’.

[see what I did there?]

A brilliant and hectic week has just passed, highlights of which include the Playful Festival on Friday – where I learnt about the wonders of Minecraft, that games ≠ points, and about games people’s frustrations at badges and the ‘gamification’ of brands/sites, as well as getting a teensy bit grumpy at game designers’ propensity to play with and challenge all rules apart from those pertaining to gender-; a performance of Brian Duffy’s Modified Toy Orchestra after a spectacular Artists’ Brunch Sunday at the Edge in Birmingham; and a top meeting with the Nightwalk York music people - Lantern Music - ahead of our trip to reccy the area around the Minster at the beginning of October.

Saturday evening, as you may have seen, I had the immense pleasure to take part in Stoke Newington Airport‘s Live Art Speed Dating. An absolutely brilliant event, incredibly welcoming and supportive, and having spent 3 or so years in the West Midlands I can say an incredibly valuable effort by Fierce to get Live Art out into the heart of the Black Country. Having primarily hid behind pen and paper for the past 5 years, performing again was a bit strange, but mostly good. The piece I decided to do in the end was a very simple one, and probably still a bit writerly, but the base ideas of which are something which I think I’d like to work up further. All of the other artists’ work looked and sounded brilliant brilliant, and my main regret of the night was not getting a chance to see any of them!

‘Home’.

My ‘date’ happened down the back of the stage, in a dingy and dark little corner. It was lit by a lamp and a green emergency light, was called ‘Home’, and consisted of an audio track of me speaking for 3:30 about the fact that the growing consensus on sea level rise puts my county mostly underwater in 50-100 years, and what it feels like to understand that you might never be able to return to the landscape that to you, is home. This was listened to over headphones, whilst I spoke about 2 seconds behind the recording with the idea of disorienting the listner. The iPad I was playing it on (longest battery life available to me, 3 hours action, left it at 96%[!]) had a picture of the tree I centered the speech around on it. The final thing I did was to give them 30 seconds to write down the ten things they’d take with them if being evacuated, they could then leave that with me, or take it with them. The text was pretty short so I’ve included it at the end of the post if you’re interested. 

Things people would pack if evacuated with only one bag:

5 people would take a phone

3 people would pack their passports

3 people would take their grandmother’s cutlery

1 person said they’d take their grandad’s potato peeler

7 people would take photographs

8 people would pack socks

3 people took abstract things like ‘love’, ‘life’, or ‘heat’.

3 people packed other people

One of those people was James Brown

2 people packed some form of diary, one person a notebook

1 person would take all of their Vinyl

1 person would pack onions

1 person would take two gold jackets

Also, women tended to be more practical, taking things they could use, men more nostalgic, taking things they owned and prized (though obviously there were exceptions to this on both sides).

Afterthoughts.

The piece went down somewhere between middling to very well. One person left tearfully, several people visibly affected, a couple interested, and few unmoved. I think developing the piece would involve looking at becoming more disorientating, or perhaps playing with erasure of the audio as well as the place I was talking about, maybe I lose myself, and begin to forget what I was saying. Maybe different sensory disruptions. Maybe asking them to read out the words for me. I’m not sure how much the iPad was a bit of a distraction on the table as it’s not exactly a ubiquitous piece of kit yet, so a longer headphone cable would mean I could have the player on my lap and eliminate out of context distractions. I think a longer piece would look more at the idea of ‘home’, how our landscape makes us, and what we associate with it. I’m also coming to these more interactive forms from quite a writerly background so I need to learn to free up a little bit too. Though I think I’m glad I started with something simple.

(If you want to see where you live under different sea level rise conditions, check out this map. Remember to take into consideration storm surges if you’re coastal/London, and infrastructure; your house may not be underwater, but if much of your surrounds are, it’s unlikely sewage systems/water/ electricity/gas supplies will be maintained.)

The text.

There’s a tree near where I grew up. In the highest place for miles. This tree is tall, taller, I think, because in my mind it merges with the memory of standing at the foot of it as a child. This tree is tall though, and it sprawls towards the sky like a reaching arm. And on it are these little slats of wood, nailed, to form steps and handholds, so you can climb up, sit in the crook of its branches and look out across to where the ground meets the sky.

I used to imagine sitting there and watch the season change, as though recorded in time-lapse. Watch the fields ploughed, and planted, watch the shoots spring, grow green, and as the sun, rain and clouds flash across the ground, grow golden, weighed down, as the hedgerows thicken.

Two summers ago I stood on that hill, and I saw something different. You couldn’t see the roads, the divisions between crops, or hedgerows. It was like when it snows, but darker, muddy grey. One colour.

About a third of my home county is below sea level.

I was two years old when we moved there, and one of my earliest memories is watching my mum spread across a huge map in the dining room, shading in all of the ‘safe’ places. We made sure we lived up high.

I have these dreams, about disaster. There’s lots of different kinds, zombie uprising, food riots, flooding, wizards. The dream always begins with me packing, though. Good trainers for running. A coat. A screw driver, hat, gloves, a jumper, and socks. I always pack socks.

When – as is looking increasingly likely – an ice shelf collapses sea levels will rise 3m in about 50 years. And as extreme weather events become more frequent we’ll have more regular and bigger storm surges. The storm surge in Lincolnshire in 1953 was about 6m. So that would make 9. A total additional sea level of 9 metres.

But those numbers don’t really mean anything to me, I can’t picture them. What I do see is the view from that tree; static, grey, unchanging. Flood defences broken too often to repair economically. And the place, abandoned.

It’s so strange to think that within my lifetime there’s a good chance I might never be able to return to the landscape that to me, is home.

And it is. And there’s nowhere else like it. It’s made of big skies and hot summer’s days and blackberry stained fingers and racing after the horizon.

In 1953 30,000 people were evacuated in one night.

They could take a bag. About 10 things.

What would you pack? What would you take with you? You’ve got 30 seconds.

]]> http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/09/home/feed/ 3 http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/08/just-imagine/ http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/08/just-imagine/#comments Sun, 15 Aug 2010 23:06:33 +0000 Hannah Nicklin http://www.hannahnicklin.com/2010/08/imagine-2/ Imagine if the land and housing in Norfolk, Suffolk, Lincolnshire, Essex, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Herefordshire, Cumbria, and Durham was entirely wiped out by flooding.*

That’s what Pakistan is dealing with, 1/5th of it, “ravaged by floods“

“The water was up to my neck, then my nose, I only survived because our men took me by the arm and lifted me up,” she told me. “We walked for two hours like this. Ever since the running away my belly has hurt all over. I don’t know if the baby inside me is alive or dead.” Saeed Bibi from the Punjab

DONATE HERE

Meanwhile the hottest weather on record in Russia has wiped out ONE THIRD of their grain crops.

They’ve had to impose a ban on grain exports, which will raise prices across the world, hitting the poorest, hardest.

That previously linked article comes with a handy explanation on how both are caused by a shift in the jet stream, the instability of which has been linked to climate change:

“The World Meteorological Organization says this “unprecedented sequence of extreme weather events … matches IPCC projections of more frequent and more intense extreme weather events due to global warming.”  NASA says July 2010 is “What Global Warming Looks Like.” ” (source)

Even the DAILY FREAKING MAIL has changed it’s stance to ‘global warming is happening, and it is our fault‘

Donate to Pakistan relief efforts, because you should. Donate, because you can. Donate, because this will soon be us. Donate because Western lifestyles have contributed directly to this. For whatever reason, whatever you believe, please, reach out, £5, whatever you can. Donate.

And all this comes as the so-called ‘green’ Coalition government are side-stepping their promises on climate change action, including an incredibly damaging broken promise RE power provision, and the mooted selling off of our conservation land and country side. Not only will reneging on green policies like this mean being hit severely by EU penalties, if the coalition government carries on like this a greater cost will soon be at their feet. The sooner and better we act, the lower the human and monetary cost the world is hit with. The later and more half heartedly they act, the greater the risk that  it’s not long before we won’t have to do any imagining.

*that’s one fifth of England, mind, I don’t know how many counties there are in the UK. Also, it’s 1/5 of counties, not of land, I did try to pick coastal ones, as we’re more likely to be affected by storm surges and sea level rises. They’re also mostly low-lying. But I will freely admit this may not be exactly 1/5 of land or population. I hope you accept it as a quick way of making a point, if not, feel free to do the maths and I’ll happily amend it.

[images off the BBC, via the linked articles, I always try to use CC images, hopefully these will be seen as 'fair use' as quoting the referenced articles, however I will take them down if wished]

Is gravity responsible for falling in love?

The first time I realised I was in love I fainted.
I was up a ladder. In a warehouse I was working in at the time.
I’d like to hold the effects of gravity responsible for the concussion.

The second time I realised I was in love I wasn’t sure.
The falling was replaced by an easy, settling feeling.
And it fell apart in the same, slow way.
Though here, the word ‘fall’ is inaccurate.

The third time I began to be in love I resisted.
It made the descent even harder.
It dragged me down, out of myself into someone I didn’t recognise.
Well I still looked like me, but you get what I mean.

66% of my sample of love was like loss of control, or breath, or the feeling you get when a lift speeds upwards, and you feel like it forgot the bits of you that aren’t your body.

66% of my sample made my heart soar, my stomach drop, but really our internal organs don’t care what madnesses our hormones are inducing because they have a job to do, and in fact a ‘thank you’ wouldn’t go amiss for keeping you alive, you and your ungrateful endocrinal system.

Science explains the forces that act on us, and we heat it up and warp and twist it’s simple, meaningful language to mean the things we don’t understand, in the hope that by penning them in, we’ll be closer.

Is Gravity responsible for falling in love?
If it is I’d like it to be corporeal, I would bring it close, rest my hand gently on its bare upper arm, and whisper into its ear.
But I wouldn’t let you hear what I said, it would be like the end of Lost in Translation.

Which means if you have no romance in you, you could probably google for it.

This is a bit of creative writing I did in response to the question ‘Is Gravity Responsible for Falling in Love’ from here. I don’t really put creative stuff up on here anymore, mainly because the little pieces seem to suit Posterous more, but I think I’ll try and keep a bit more for the ‘proper’ blog. So here we are.

This evening I took part in a sound walk-come-performance called ‘As if it Were the Last Time’. It was devised by Duncan Speakman and was put on by subtlemob. It took place on a small number of streets near Covent Garden. It was a (performance? Experience? Neither of these words do -) for two people. We were provided with a map, an mp3, and told to set it going at 6pm on the dot. My critical vocabulary is already struggling with this piece, because it really was very individual. That was the point. For each and every person who took part, the performance (for want of a more accurate word) was theirs. Entirely. And not, in staged theatre, as each audience member receiving the piece from a different perspective. This was each participant doing. The movements, the characters the gestures, the reflection in the shop windows and puddles, and the touch of someone’s hand on a shoulder, were all completely yours. Of your making.

Conventional suspension of disbelief – the time and credence that you pay into conventional, staged performance, pales into comparison to the weight of belief that you pour into this kind of experience. I’m not going to argue that staged theatre is irrelevant, the video game didn’t kill the cinema, theatre is powerful but I do think that this is a form that is incredibly powerful in new ways. A piece of staged theatre is a rip in the space-time continuum, it is a hundred different hours, paid into one, it is a hundred held breaths, a hundred moments of people turning one seen thing, into another. ‘As if it Were the Last Time’ was one whole moment, it was the heat of one breath, it was noticing how the ripples of rain in a puddle shake the light of shop fronts in time to a piece of music. It was stories, yours, of others, and your reflection in the window. It was one voice, lost, and your own, quiet.

You were inhabiting a new world instead of conspiring with another.

The narrative was fractured, the one solid piece of information you were given at the beginning was that the piece was in memory of another, but instead of talking about the person lost, it asked you to find yourself there as if it were your last half hour. It was the story of a person seeing the world as they’d never see it again, you heard thoughts that occurred to them as they saw the same things you did, the memories prompted. The narrative built like a collage, like a barrage of images and sounds and ideas that didn’t fit, and then you realised they were building a whole person. It hurt. And it was wonderful. You felt like you were falling off a building. Or maybe ‘you’ didn’t, maybe only I did.

This was a piece truly (to borrow a phrase from the phenomenologists) about the thickness of experience. It went all the way around the back. It also talked about ‘drifting’ – asked you to find places that were safe, it led you away from your partner, and then back again – and was the closest to the dérive and détournement of the situationists out of anything I’ve taken part in so far (See The Cracks Between the Worlds for more)

There were moments when it faltered, when things weren’t fitting, they didn’t fall into place, but you were seeking, willing them to get back on track, because this was you – your belief at risk. This wasn’t and actor fluffing their lines, it was you, as an avatar of the narrative.

“[an avatar is] amachine that is attached to the psychology of its user. From within that machine the driver can peek out, squinting through alien eyes, and find a new world. And, oddly, the driver can also look into himself, as if gazing into his navel, and find a new landscape inside as well” p.8, I, Avatar

This was a very hard post to write. It might be because I’ve been travelling to and from London for two days. It might be because at the moment I’m horrendously busy and trying to engage my brain on a number of different levels, with a number of different things. Or it might just be that this piece of… experience, was more a part of me than my critical eye finds itself able to analyse.

Those thirty minutes were the most vivid, most high contrast of my week. It was true augmented reality, and I want to take my friends and loved ones back there with me. It hurts that I can’t. But that’s kind of what being is, isn’t it?