34 Unseen

Back in an earlier post, 3-Circles, I mention Hilma Af Klint. About how her sisterhood at the close of the 19c became mesmerised by invisible things hinted at in new scientific discovery. Magic persists

In recent years with a small group I have toured around a local haunted Loretto House with my EMP detector (electro-magnetic pulse) playing the part of artist-ghosthunter. I went along with it, imagining the other two were slightly bemused at my enthusiastic immersion in the project. That’s OK though. Often it’s better to take things slowly to see what might try to escape your approach. Stupid like a painter 

Subsonics are unheard things below 20hz in wavelength. To us anyway. Dog whistles are high at the other end of the spectrum. http://www.porty.net/weltanschauungskrieg/

My grandfather became a Catholic in later life. Converts get it intensely. He started going to Lourdes every year on pilgrimage. I have large box of old View-Master slides I inherited, which were a 1950s precursor to the 360 headsets we have today. The old black and white stereo images have 3D magic held within them. In the image below you may just be able to make out the wall of abandoned crutches, post miracle.

I recently discovered a story about an entombed water cistern in Edinburgh that held an animal diorama in secret for 300 years… https://porty.net/blindwells/levels.html

Moonwalk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNSgmm9FX2s

Try with a headset - Munlochy Cloutie Well 360 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ky1Q2RCAS_A

35 Bing

This is the name of a search engine I’m using, but also Scots for a slag heap, a mound of (sometimes hot) waste, dug out of the ground during mining. There are many near Edinburgh. I fashioned a story that included one… The Quiet Hill https://youtu.be/aXxu5Qttr2s The bing was closed to the public when I went to film. It had caught fire again 40 years later! Old bings never die. There’s a joke there somewhere.

They are often an unusual shape. Probably because they are man-made, and cast a particular shadow on the landscape. I have a beautiful book about them Terrils : Naoya Hatakeyama

The Five Sisters are nice https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmABCUyR2Iw

…with gradients useful for performance poets https://youtu.be/Y9TrPYEqxas

My grandfather lived in darkest Fife, Cardenden, and was a miner all of his life. The village arrived with coal mining and disappeared with it also. It took about 150 years. It is an incredibly interesting history, pretty much ending with the fight between the miners and Margaret Thatcher. A hated figure in these communities. Joe Corrie - the miner playwright - was from here https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/joe-corrie/ Fun fact The woods adjacent to Cardenden are known as Cardenden Den.

One of the UKs great social historians, Tony Parker (amazing books), wrote Red Hill, the story of Horden, a mining town devastated by pit closures in the mid-1980s. I was inspired to go on holiday there to find out more. I may have been the only tourist they had seen for a while. Horden is also famous for (another reason I went) the closing scene in Mike Hodges 1971 film Get Carter with Michael Caine. He said he wanted to film on the ruined beach because it had a close vision of hell. It has been beautified since with European money. Bit of a shame.

One of the great landmarks (well two actually) near me was Cockenzie Power Station. Demolished in 2015 and sadly missed, it was a last coal-fired power station from this once great mining nation. I have a bag of white stones collected from the rubble after the chimneys came down, and am still considering a suitable epitaph. I have to admit though, wind turbines look better.

36 UNC2

The return.

In 2016 I made a film called The Unconformity Project

In the world of Geology, there is tell of a famous event that took place one day in 1788. The story is recounted in ‘Transactions - Volume 5’ from The Royal Society of Edinburgh and is about three men in a boat, bobbing up and down in the sea, just off Siccar Point on the South-East coast of Scotland. One of the men in the boat was James Hutton, and he was out to prove to his two friends that the world wasn't created in 4000 BC as the Church told them, but was in fact billions of years old (4½ billion actually). His interpretations of rock enabled an understanding of some of the magic stuff, through his beliefs about Deep Time… about mountains, stars and galaxies... and evolution... 15 years before Charles Darwin was born.

We have just revisited Siccar Point for a week in a caravan, taking with us some new ersatz unconformities, lit with ultraviolet and the arctic wind.

37 Unreturn

A story I particularly like is when the hero doesn’t in fact return. The opposite of circular. Our minds just go on and on, and it’s exciting. I’m not sure if this automatically converts them to antihero status. That’s OK, heroes are never as lovely as antiheroes. Plagued with insecurity.

A favourite example is The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. There is also a pretty good film version of the novel from 1990 from Bernardo Bertolucci, with John Malkovich heading off into the North African desert at the end. For me it triggers the same romantic sensations as Peter O’Toole had in Lawrence of Arabia. Luxuriating in myth and landscape. 

Kurt Schwitters didn’t entertain insecurity or orthodoxy. Right on! Collage is a kind of non-linear unreturning.

Not Schwitters

One day Schwitters decided he wanted to meet George Grösz. George Grösz was decidedly surly; the hatred in his pictures often overflowed into his private life. But Schwitters was not one to be put off. He wanted to meet Grösz, so Mehring took him up to Grösz's flat. Schwitters rang the bell and Grösz opened the door.

"Good morning, Herr Grösz. My name is Schwitters."

"I am not Grösz," answered the other and slammed the door. There was nothing to be done. Half way down the stairs, Schwitters stopped suddenly and said, "Just a moment."

Up the stairs he went, and once more rang Grösz's bell. Grösz, enraged by this continual jangling, opened the door, but before he could say a word, Schwitters said, "I am not Schwitters, either" And went downstairs again.  They never met again. Hans Richter

I am not Schwitters -- not he

who wheezes at the tops of hills

Not Sturm und dung-wiping Schwitters

the delicate ego smeared on canvas

Not Kürtchen -- Mama's blond-eyed boy

Not Anna Bloom's snivelling lover

Not Schwitters

Not Pfc. Schwitters, Army corps

pppppppffffffffffff

cacacacacacacaca cucu -- No

Not he

I'm not dada

Not anti-dada either

Not anti-Schwitters but definitely

not Schwitters

Not Huelsenbeck's nor Spengemann's Schwitters

Not Schwitters the ad man -- buy bye bye!

Not this quaint old easel-leaner

peddling landscapes to the tourists

Not Kurt the pharmacist's chessmate

Not that file they keep down in Oslo

No -- I'm not Schwitters

I'm Merz

I'm a gleam of sun over mountain peaks

reflected off the glacier

I'm a foehn wind howling down the fjord