The thought experiment continues.
'A line made by walking ' by Richard Long in 1967 recorded a man made temporary line as a line or path that goes nowhere. He wanted to make an artwork that was outside of a gallery space and the traditional notions of sculpture. The snaking line of detritus above was made by nature and man had no hand in it and because of that its sculptural form has an even greater purity. I have written and rewritten a poem - trying to distill this piece of nature's artwork.
Storm wood pushed up
Following the shore
An imprinted memory of flow
Sea apples and sticks
Swept in curves
Stranded line of beach bone
Detritus not of human hand
Plastic washed far out to sea
Cleansed the cormorant is watched by the fishes impassive eye.
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I watched a You Tube clip of ants constructing a nest on the forest floor. The journeys they make are either to find materials for construction or to find food for the colony. After thinking about their single minded activity I wondered if ants lived fulfilling and happy lives - unlike us who are slaves to status, appearance, mortgages, loans etc. We are conflicted - we know that we are destroying the planet through our consuming but we are unable to stop. *1 Ants just ant. I thought perhaps I should start a new religion which cuts out our thinking and makes our lives simple.
The religious text and commandments would be as follows :
Follow the queen of the six legs
Join the segmented community
See mindless purpose through compound eye
Active antennae twitch at the busy movement
Going nowhere but existing nonetheless in chemical messages
CLEAR THE FOREST FLOOR
FIND FOOD
NEST FOR THE NEW GENERATION !
Adherents of the new religion would wear ant masks with restricted vision - only allowing a view of the next task.
How happy we would be.
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Whilst out walking I kept thinking of these journeys we make - what is the purpose ? Connection to the landscape ? Therapy for the soul ? Walking in nature does seem to have a restorative effect. We walked to the top of Carn Ingli from there you look down as though in an aeroplane and the landscape looks map like. I did a sketch of mountain bikers making an ant like trail along one of the paths.
I often walk with fellow blogger, photographer and garden maker Charles Hawes, he sends me postcards from the walks he does abroad - I love receiving them - records of a journey into which I try and place myself imagining I was there in that landscape.
I have continued to work on the fresco adding words related to this journey of thought. I suddenly thought that the ant looks like a fossil - the circle around it like the circles painted around fossilised insect like sea creatures called trilobites collected for my A Level in Geology many years ago.
Fossilised records of the past - imprints like postcards of an ancient journey.
As I am writing this - the news shows thousands of migrants from Honduras and Guatemala crossing the border into Mexico, thwarted at the border gates they build rafts and float across the river to avoid the border controls. Another type of journey - disturbing and distressing.
*1 Today ( 24/10/18) I remembered the following piece of work by Simon Starling 2006 - a wooden steamboat crossing a lake fuelled by its own timbers. It sinks. I remember laughing when watching the slide show at Tate St Ives. A beautiful and melancholic thing- a metaphor for our lives. We are all in the same boat burning up its resources as we go nowhere in particular. We are ants, so perhaps it would be best to recognise that and take a bit more care of one another and the boat ?
Paul
 |
| Footprints, the direction of travel dictated by the estuary and the sand dunes. Detritus from the storm following the flow of the tide. An imprint, a memory of flow. It reminded me of a line of wood ants in a forest carrying twigs to make their enormous nests |
Storm wood pushed up
Following the shore
An imprinted memory of flow
Sea apples and sticks
Swept in curves
Stranded line of beach bone
Detritus not of human hand
Plastic washed far out to sea
Cleansed the cormorant is watched by the fishes impassive eye.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I watched a You Tube clip of ants constructing a nest on the forest floor. The journeys they make are either to find materials for construction or to find food for the colony. After thinking about their single minded activity I wondered if ants lived fulfilling and happy lives - unlike us who are slaves to status, appearance, mortgages, loans etc. We are conflicted - we know that we are destroying the planet through our consuming but we are unable to stop. *1 Ants just ant. I thought perhaps I should start a new religion which cuts out our thinking and makes our lives simple.
The religious text and commandments would be as follows :
Follow the queen of the six legs
Join the segmented community
See mindless purpose through compound eye
Active antennae twitch at the busy movement
Going nowhere but existing nonetheless in chemical messages
CLEAR THE FOREST FLOOR
FIND FOOD
NEST FOR THE NEW GENERATION !
Adherents of the new religion would wear ant masks with restricted vision - only allowing a view of the next task.
How happy we would be.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Whilst out walking I kept thinking of these journeys we make - what is the purpose ? Connection to the landscape ? Therapy for the soul ? Walking in nature does seem to have a restorative effect. We walked to the top of Carn Ingli from there you look down as though in an aeroplane and the landscape looks map like. I did a sketch of mountain bikers making an ant like trail along one of the paths.
I often walk with fellow blogger, photographer and garden maker Charles Hawes, he sends me postcards from the walks he does abroad - I love receiving them - records of a journey into which I try and place myself imagining I was there in that landscape.
I have continued to work on the fresco adding words related to this journey of thought. I suddenly thought that the ant looks like a fossil - the circle around it like the circles painted around fossilised insect like sea creatures called trilobites collected for my A Level in Geology many years ago.
Fossilised records of the past - imprints like postcards of an ancient journey.
As I am writing this - the news shows thousands of migrants from Honduras and Guatemala crossing the border into Mexico, thwarted at the border gates they build rafts and float across the river to avoid the border controls. Another type of journey - disturbing and distressing.
*1 Today ( 24/10/18) I remembered the following piece of work by Simon Starling 2006 - a wooden steamboat crossing a lake fuelled by its own timbers. It sinks. I remember laughing when watching the slide show at Tate St Ives. A beautiful and melancholic thing- a metaphor for our lives. We are all in the same boat burning up its resources as we go nowhere in particular. We are ants, so perhaps it would be best to recognise that and take a bit more care of one another and the boat ?
Paul
I think the boat will survive us. It's a self mending boat. Ants may not be the ultimate species'
ReplyDeleteYes!It will outlive us and reclaim 'our' territories.It will be depleted of many species but it's been there before.'Nature' is a powerful thing.
DeleteI wish I had their focus! Amazing little things really. So determined to fulfill the task.
ReplyDeleteThank you Sara yes same here - if I had focused a bit more today I would have remembered to read out the poem during my presentation !
Delete