21/06/2010 - Summer Solstice Itinerary

Sunrise: 4:43 am

Sunset: 9:21pm

Sunrise: Beat the boundaries of Parson's Wood and (maybe) actually see the sun! Forecast is for sunny intervals. Once we have visited the wood we will return to Johnny's for breakfast and Solomon's Seal tea (said to provide poets and painters with inspiration, as well as being the key to underground treasure chambers).

Mid morning: Start a new, collaborative project journal and make paper boats for later on in the day. Then take some new ribbons down to the Wish Tree and leave spirit cakes at the well.

Lunchtime: Picnic in the woods, followed by paddling and the creation of a Dancing Tree, reading aloud (A Midsummer Night's Dream, Moominsummer Madness and Milton's masque Comus), and a nap (because large swathes of iambic pentameter are known to be highly soporific).

Sunset: Illuminate the woodland path with tealights and burn paper boats on the hammer pond. Close the evening with a reading of Keat's Ode to a Nightingale.

From Another Notebook

On the Taking of Notes:

An image becomes treasure, passed from mind to mind. We four are collectors of images.

One of us find bark, one finds leaves encased in ice. I write, 'encased in eyes'. Someone finds ice in water. Someone else notices the fog coming fast through the valley.

Item: dock stem rising from snow. Black-red shadow puppet, explosively notched and zing-rippling. Leaves hanging small, spriteish, black leaf soulish, vaguely hellish, hot and vibrant.

Item: meadow grass. Disconsolate, lonely and drooping.

Item: thistle.

Item: spine.

Snow like white linen.

We take nothing sappy, only what the year has already discarded. As we look at our images, turn them over, warm them, they are revivified, born to us. We exchange our time for their lives, our lives for theirs.

The snow turns from blue to white to blue again, as the sun rises and sets. We give our day to the snow and in return it gives itself to us.

Mummers' Play

From The First Quarter Notebook

photograph by Sian Thomas, © 2009

Notes on Woodland:

- Wood as a boundary, a between place on the edge of the village.

- Woodland as a narrative landscape. The stories it holds, hides and reveals.

- Landscape that feels wild, secret, hidden - but in fact is post-industrial. Marked and shaped and scarred by human activity, industrial and agrarian.

- Paths made by people, animals and water. Paths as a line of text or musical notation. What do they reveal to us? Footprints and tracks = words, phrases.

- What is the language of this landscape? How can we act as its interpreters?

- How am I 'confirmed' by this place and my habit of walking in it? How do I mark and transform it, and how does it change me?

- Hansel & Gretel, Babes in the Wood. Go to the woods/forest to lose ourselves and in the process find ourselves.

- Intimacy. Patrimony. Knowing a place like my own hand; creases, valleys, gullies, in landscape mimicking the folds and creases of my palm. Intricacy and intimacy.

Notes on Winter:

- Winter landscape, sculpted, laid bare, readable or legible. Superficially fixed (still) yet constantly changing, moving.

- Wheel; cycle of seasons; lowest point in the wheel's turning.

- Fire; sunlight; the impossible return.

- Winter solstice = day of reversal if not transformation. Yule. Saturnalia. Janus (gates, doorways, beginnings and endings. January). First day of winter is also last day of the year's descent into darkness. Birth = death. Darkest day.

Layers:

This is true of all ancient places - cities as well as this woodland - that they exist in layers. One era, century, epoch is laid over another, sometimes as crudely as the false ceilings that in old Sussex farmhouses once concealed smoke-blackened beams. Usually, though, the layers are opaque, subtle, translucent and delicate as tissue paper.

In public places, in the countryside, this interlayering, is perhaps more evident. In a private house more care is taken to ensure the discomforting chinks don't show. No one relaxing in their sitting room wants past or future epochs bleeding through. And no one really wants to brush against a ghost on their way up the stairs to bed. Though it is precisely on the staircase and in hallways and corridors that domestic spirits cluster.

As John Berger reminds us, these interstices exist. Our world is not the only world. Rather we live in a shifting palimpsest of lives lived, and so of experiences, change and mutability. At boundaries and border places we are able, if keen enough, to sense this gentle colliding of orders. On thresholds; doorways; leaning out of windows; crossing an ancient square; entering a narrow passageway or walking an ancient path or road. We stumble. We fall through time into something, somewhere else.

The Gathering of Artists

My first Image from our day recording the Winter Solstice.
A group of Artists, heads buried deep into their books.
The silence was stunning.

Documenting the Wood

Item 1: Hazel Leaf

Item 2: Sweet Chestnut Leaf

From my notebook:

30.12.2009
Thoughts - had not held - walking today without a notebook.
1) Parson's Wood as a museum; the curator of the wood; observing, documenting, preserving, interpreting.

2) Wood/winter song. I am the bell's clapper. A proclaimer. Or the wood. Vast, silent, unfathomable. Clay. My footsteps merely tickling the paths, hardly registering. In winter the wood is turned in upon itself.

Benjamin at the Rose & Crown

Benjamin's Paris address book

A merry meeting last night in the Rose & Crown - one of our local pubs. This was first time all four of the quarters have reconvened since the Solstice, so it was an opportunity to share words, pictures and photographs, and to make plans. There was an impromptu reading session from our various journals, which sparked discussion about the power and energy of the collective mind. Several intriguingly overlapping ideas, themes and even words emerged.

At one point late in the evening I tried to paraphrase a quote from Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project - kindly sent to me recently by a fascinating new friend, Terri Mullholland. It was a feeble attempt at verbal recall and so I've decided maybe the safest place to keep the quote is here. Though I should probably also write it into my journal. Benjamin's words raise the hairs on the back of my neck which means, for reasons I have not yet entirely discovered, they are important:

‘The interior is not just the universe but also the étui of the private individual. To dwell means to leave traces. In the interior, these are accentuated. Coverlets and antimacassars, cases and containers are devised in abundance; in these, the traces of the most ordinary objects of use are imprinted. In just the same way, the traces of the inhabitant are imprinted in the interior...’

[Walter Benjamin, Exposé of 1935, in Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 9.]

Written in Snow

We lay our images, our words on the almost-cloth of snow and compare them: this frozen stem; this pattern that once led to flowers, to seeds; this eruption of something other than whiteness. We break them from branches, pick them up from the floor, pass them between us. We say, 'The trees are like lightning.' Our voices are loud against the snow. The sounds move quickly, on huffish breath, carrying meaning.

'Like lightning, that's good.'

'Yes, that's good. I'll have that.'

We collect them in our pockets and take them home to pile in the kitchen beside the cooker and ashtray. On each stem and sound, the ice is already melting.

Footprints on snow

photograph by Sian Thomas, © 2009

"To love with all one's soul and leave the rest to fate, was the simple rule she heeded. 'Vot zapomni' -- now remember -- she would say in conspiratorial tones as she drew my attention to this or that loved thing in Vyra -- a lark ascending the curds and whey sky of a dull spring day, heat lightning taking pictures of a distant line of trees in the night, the palette of maple leaves on brown sand, a small bird's cuneate footprints on the new snow. As if feeling that in a few years the tangible part of her world would perish, she cultivated an extraordinary consciousness of the various time marks distributed throughout our country place. She cherished her own past with the same retrospective fervour that I do now her image and my past. Thus, in a way, I inherited an exquisite simulacrum -- the beauty of intangible property, unreal estate..."

-- from 'Speak, Memory' by Vladimir Nabokov

21/12/09 - Winter Solstice Itinerary

Sunrise: 8.00am
Sunset: 3.54pm

Sunrise. Walk the boundaries of Parson's Wood and the old road. Be present. Listen to the stories being told by this ancient landscape. Rather than an effort to invoke the place, allow the place to evoke us.

Late morning. Walk across the iron bridge and out along the valley that lies between Little Trodgers and Pennybridge. Visit the site of a spring-fed well and the old College swimming pool.

After lunch, make water wheel.

Sunset. Back through the wood and out to the old furnace pond. Set our cardboard water wheel alight and float it through the tunnel. Fire marks the shortest day of the year - our hope that the sun will return. The wheel is a symbol of the turning of the year. Reversal. Rebirth.

Night of the solstice. Dinner and a private performance of the Sussex Mummers' play. In which St George slays the Turk - who is miraculously returned to life. Good cheer and carols.