Category Archives: Source Material
Posts linking to realted, useful and informative source material including work of practicing artists, theorists and commentators, research of anecdotal evidence, magazine or news items.
Happy New Year
My daily walk in the morning is now overlapping the darkness before sunrise. I walk as the rookery wakes and masses in the nearby Oak tree. We now rise and depart together as the night’s darkness departs. I always say hello.
As the light of summer departs a new year is upon us. Samhain is the end of the year in the Celtic calendar. As dusk is the end of the Celtic day. The Celts started their day and their year in darkness. The proper order, for we all start in darkness, as do all seeds. A moment for time travel. Looking to the future. Remembering the past. Ones we have lost. Time is upon us.
So too am I remembering the past. I have been going back over my photography archive, all the way back to 2005 when I got my first digital camera. It holds 13000 photos. This surprised even me. I edited this down to my 400 best and put them up on my portfolio site. Click the image below to go to my portfolio and see the images. I chose a picture of geese because they are honking overhead now as they return for the winter. Time turns. It is circular.
I also bring you Van the man singing Celtic New Year, on Jools. There is a very grainy clip of this on Yootyoob but this one is best. He starts at about 3m 55 sec. He so captures for me, that sense of darkness and light, longing for absent friends, some passed over to eternal darkness, and light, the looking forward to meeting friends again even if it is when we pass over into darkness. Like “Bette Davis said, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” We begin and end in darkness. Peace at last. I head this post with an image of the coming green of spring. See you on the other side.
October
1874 – 1963
O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
To-morrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
To-morrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow,
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know;
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away;
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.
Geological Time
An introduction to the vastness of geological time. I live by the Solway, between England and Scotland, once either side of the Iapetus Ocean.
My calculation gives humans appearing at 39.998 seconds.
That is the last 0.012 seconds.
At some point soon I will publish timeline calculators you can apply to a walk to measure human life against geological time. It makes geological vs human timescales physically perceptible.
Be Happy
Nuff said…
Don’t give in to gloom.
Greed
Trent wrote this about the greed he saw in his fans.
They loved him so much they would, he feared, devour him if they had their way with him.
Kind of a climate change anthem.
A bit harsh on the pink pigs, they are noble and not greedy, but you get the point.
Nothings Changed
I was taken by this strapline in a news report on climate change…
“We have no choice but to take direct action to put our bodies on the line because petitions, sign-waving, and chanting—we tried that for the past 50 years and it hasn’t worked, and we’re out of time,” said one arrested activist.
From Climate Campaigners Decry ‘Absolutely Horrendous’ Brutality Against Protesters at Fed Summit
A book called, ‘Limits to Growth’ was required reading for my degree in Human Ecology starting in 1979. It was published just over 50 years ago.
Limits to Growth was the first widely publicised model for climate change. It has kind of been forgotten because critics rightly pointed out it’s proposed timescale for catastrophe was missed. However it was clear that this was an estimate of a thing very difficult to predict. Change, it said, would be non-linear, ie it would get worse faster over time but the rate was nearly impossible to calculate with their early modelling. It proposed a ‘Business as Usual’ sceanario as the worst case scenario. Evidence from 2023 suggests this is the best description of what is happening now.
The Limits to Growth+50 – Club of Rome
And nothing much has changed.
Part of what I want to do with my work is to use story writing as a form of personal research to explore the worst case sceanario from a factual and imaginal point of view. I started this as a series of performance peices meant to be a serialised story. In the setting planned this did not work but I continued writing. This was entirely fictive, but was informed by objective evidence. I reconnected to my degree which was a science degree, to see what had changed since the early 80’s. Sadly, not much had changed. That’s why the strapline captured me.
In fictive writing the story kind of tells itself. It has a life of it’s own and a hand in what is written. In the writing of the story. I went to a place several times where the medium term outcome was total nuclear war. Putin was dropping hints about this regards Ukraine at the time. So I took a break. I let it incubate. I wanted a more optimistic prospect. What was clear from my research was that we are taking part in an experiment, and we cannot say how it will end. This is an adventure of uncertain outcome. But this gave me hope. I wondered if a non-linear narrative might work. Could there be a number of different outcomes? This was really much more accurate.
Then my two main Mac’s died or started to expire. I stuggled to write on what other tech I had to hand. I have now replaced them and my writing can continue.
What is emerging is a story which explores as a starting point, a reality ‘as if’ the earth wants rid of us. It has a classic protagonist and antagonist. The outcome of their struggles, again in a classical form, are new forms neither of them anticipated. In writing I hope to find what these forms are. Some will be imaginal, fictional, and some more factual, except, as Club of Rome, Limits to Growth show us, we cannot accurately say what form this will takes. Except it won’t be pretty. At the end of the 4 year bachelor of science degree, on reflection, the consensus was that the shit was definately going to hit the fan. But we were young and thought we could outwit this outcome. Now I am not so sure.
By the beginning of October I want to have the story out as a series of podcasts. My intention is to use this work with art as research to suggest some ways of being that retain optimism in the face of what I do think is inevitable. Maybe accepting the inevitability of the shit hitting the fan will be the catalyst for change. My beleif is that we cannot change the whole world. The world is full of people who start their prognosis with “We all have to….”. This is not realistic. I want to get to “In order to not be laid low by this I am going to have to…” I want to see if the story can suggest some fictive ideas about how to be not be rendered depressed and useless by anxiety as individuals. To ask “What if it is inevitable. What can I do to survive?” I think this is what more people will find is unavoidable for them.
I hope to put together a kind of magazine, a collection of related posts, centred on the theme ‘End Times’. This will be put online and I hope to do a paper fanzine kind of thing with QR codes to online content. So I will be posting stuff that I hope to curate or collate into a coherent form by mid October.
Moving Space 