Not Drowning But Waving

Composing Poems

2011-10-11T22:26:00.001+01:00

'Midway on our life's journey, I found myself in dark woods, the right road lost.' Dante.

A thorny thicket, and no mistake. We all do it differently, just like fucking: it is the same thing, but multiplied by every individual quirk, kink and vice. How do I do it? I don't know. It comes out. Spurts. The writing gets done behind the scenes, the poem comes out, like the slow turd of a birth, alive, two arms, two legs, all the fingers and toes, and with a little luck, even a head. Then it gets difficult.

The child we bear ourselves is never quite the one we thought we wanted. Just as a real child is an individual, so is a poem. It isn't quite what we expected, nor intended. It has its own fragile life. But that is not good enough for us. Instead of leaving it like a flower or fungi glinting in the morning dew, we take the hammer and hacksaw to it, perform the operation, the trepanation, the lobotomy, all in a futile but necessary attempt to make it speak what we wanted to say, to fulfil its obligations, to justify the life we've given it.

Often the operation is a complete success, yet the patient died. But rare the angel that is born perfect.

A Personal Philosophy of Pinhole Photography

2010-01-24T23:36:00.006Z

The pinhole is remorseless, a fixed view, focused equally on near and far, denying salience to the subject, or putting the subject in its lack-of-place with Nietzschean enthusiasm.

However, this decentralising of the subject is not its true virtue. What pinhole photography does best is to show us Time and Insignificance in the visual context.

People fall apart, despite their hardest effort. A tree shows us its constant vibration. Grass becomes water.

Pinhole photography is the supreme visual medium of flux; of the chaotic god's-eye-view of the world (all our gods have been chaotic over the last hundred years and more).

It is an unparalleled act of reduction, and perhaps an honest and much needed viewpoint. Man is made little in space, time, and importance.

To that end, I feel personally that the best pinhole photographs are the ones where the people in them aren't. Or if they leave traces, it's like a ripple on water, or smoke in the breeze.

Ballardsville*

2009-09-13T17:22:00.002+01:00

"You know that you won't get rubbish moving in next door." Sarah McLellan.

"Paxton has made it a firm principle that his creation should not be a place of fences and private domains." Jonathon Margolis.

"The problem with second homes is that your neighbours hate you." Andrew Lamb.

"We had a glimpse of this jolly, sporty world, albeit in the saddest circumstances possible [...]" Jonathon Margolis.

"Whether you call it ghettoisation or neighbourhood, to be able to find yourself among like-minded people with the same values, who are interested in the same things, whose children you want your children to play with, is something very valuable." Kevin McCloud.

All quotes lifted from this article.

*"Ballardian," defined by the Collins English Dictionary as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J. G. Ballard’s novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.”

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