Last night (Friday, 20th June), performed 'Recent Falls' a 12-minute lecture, followed by a five-minute performance, before an audience of, perhaps, forty people at 'Volume' the quarterly night run by Sometimes... and friends. Also on the bill was Rachel Nelson & A Middle Sex, Joanna Brown, and Claire Blundell Jones.
'
Recent Falls' was a continuation of the work I am making concerning a stranger, my father, before he was my father.
Extracts from '
Recent Falls':
Article 4
In the picture he’s about 23, five years my junior. He has jumped from a cliff into the sea, and I tend to suppose that the picture documents the precise moment when a jump turns into a fall. Little is known, since little is remembered. From the picture we cannot know that this was in France, somewhere near St. Tropez, that the year is 1958 or that the photographer was named either Wilf, or Joe (probably Joe). And we cannot know how steep the drop would be, nor can we know he survived it.
He is not yet my father. He has not yet married my mother. (This is even earlier – if we still abide by earlies and lates), he has not yet married a first time and has not yet begotten an eldest son or an only daughter.
Not yet my father, and in this respect, a stranger to me.
I remember asking: Who is the man in the photograph?
Article 5Sometime in late infancy or early childhood he asked his Father: “what time is it”? He had already learnt something of time, but did not yet know how to tell it.
At length the Father replied –
“Sometimes, I’d like to write a book,
A book all about time
About how it doesn’t exist,
How the past and the future
Are one continuous present.
I think that all people – those living
Those who have lived
And those who are still to live – are alive now.
I should like to take that subject to pieces
Like a soldier dismantling his rifle” (Yevgeny Vinukurov, Cited in John Berger's 'and our faces, my heart, brief as photos', 1984, p21).
“Time is a timeless concept and has led mankind badly astray, especially as we record age, which we do from the time of birth, and yet (...) it is not elapsed time that really concerns us, but time remaining – and that is something we cannot know. A youth of fifteen who will die tomorrow is older by far than an elder of seventy-three who has ten years remaining to him. So we should not concern ourselves with time, except as we must arrange meetings or journeys by public convenience”.
And then he looked at his watch, and gave his son the time" (adapted from Garrison Keillor, Wobegone Boy, 1996, p253).
Article 9 (Coda):
Before he jumped the man turned to his friend and said: “There is not one atom in this body that has not been forged in the furnace of the sun. Here I stand – I cannot do differently. God help me. Amen!”
On the way down, he was heard to yell: "So far, so good, so far, so good, so far, so good…” the litany stopping short on its thirteenth repeat, with the announcement of a loud splashing sound, which itself stopped abruptly, with the announcement of a deep silence that seemed to be matched only by the stillness of the air.
top-to-bottom:
Just before the lights went down
Projection of Yves Klein, "Saut Dans le Vide"
Me in my father's vintage swimwear,just before I jumped
(Note: these are not the actual trunks in the 1958 photo,
by all accounts they perished in 1962).
* * *
Further to this - some lovely surprises. Joanna Brown and I have been writing back and forth to each other - sporadically - since we met at the Goat Island Symposium at the end of February, beginning of March. She incorporated one of my texts into her show and, if truth be told, my Rules and Regs show, '
First Classic of the Season' and '
Recent Falls', were both responses to an work I had not yet seen, her '
We Will Mend on the Highways'.
In response to this experience of not-knowing Jo or her work generally, or her show specifically, I wrote a text, which she adapted slightly:
"1. Photograph
I learnt the name of the show, and found one photograph, in which I observe the following details: your hand pressed flat to floor; elbow pointing upwards; head up (eyes looking slightly to the left), and I notice the reflection of your hand in the floor.
It is 10.09 on the 27th March, and for me, for now, the performance is a short distance, enfolded, between the fingertips and the nape of the neck. If I look again at the photograph I cannot be sure what movement led into this stillness, or what movement led out of it.
When I tried this stillness for myself I held it a while, long enough to notice how I was moving, trembling under my own weight, tense at the top of my spine. When I got up I felt sure that the performance began and ended in the humming feeling that joined up my wrist and the top of my spine. I held this position for 23 minutes. 23 to think this thought through.
Look at me I'm dancing".
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