No scene to be set

The greatest art installation I’ve ever seen was Matthew Barney’s Redoubt show at the Haywood Gallery in 2021.

It featured a 134 minute film on a loop which follows a sharp-shooter in pursuit of wolves through wintery Idaho Mountains. The hunter is accompanied by two dancers moving in dialogue to her actions. Barney appears in the film as an artist, he tracks and observes the hunter whilst making a series of copper etchings. In the gallery these etchings and other large tree / cannon sculptures were placed across a series of rooms.

I remember the snow copper slow stalking ritualistic branched acid-etched lonely essentialism sensations the work evoked in me more strongly than any other piece I’ve experienced.

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I read a lot of biographies of poets, writers, artists, academics and magicians.

I have a gnawing sense that no one ever taught me how to do life. I switched schools at a formative moment – from a tiny, cosy village school where they read us The Hobbit, practiced maypole dancing and filled the classroom with corn dollies at harvest time … to a sudden, loud town primary full of spitting, football and anger, with classmates known to each other for years. 

From the age of seven everything has always felt like I’m behind, like I missed a lesson. Biographies for me are an attempt to gather up intel on what to do. 

Well, that’s one story. Vaguely pained, dripping with psychology and recognisable – if not in the specific details – in the common feeling of existential bafflement.  

Most likely I read biographies because I’m nosy. And decades ago I was just terrible at making new friends. Why do you think all I do is write?

Whatever. I like tales about creative people. I divide the lives up into two types. Let’s say major and minor. Major biographies I’ll read straight through. Hey, did you know that the poet Laura Riding thought she was the physical embodiment of the end of time? (She wasn’t.) And that Victor Neuburg was rumoured to have been turned into a camel by magician Aleister Crowley. (He got better.)

Minor biographies though, I won’t take linearly. I pick them up every-so-often and open them randomly. I’ll read a few pages, then close the book. 

Let’s do that *right now* with a book currently on the go. It’s a biography of Francis Yates. Yates was a 20th century scholar who wrote academically about esotericism. Her Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age is brilliant and I’d like to know more about her. But I wouldn’t like it *enough* to plough through her childhood. Who cares about anyone else’s childhood? 

Opening at any point we read … ‘There is no journal for 1937. Writing in January 1938, Yates noted the last day of an Italian course (4 January) and two teaching offers from girls’ schools (10 January), which she evidently refused. Encouraged by Edgar Wind, Yates remained preoccupied with Giordano Bruno “Working at Bruno in Paris”; “Writing. Bruno & the Inquisition”; “B.M. [British Museum] Medieval earth movements.”’

Lives really are fractals.

We learn from a blindly-picked passage that Francis Yates was a sporadic diary keeper – her existence seemed to swing between energetic highs and periods of depressive silence. That she taught. Studied. Was particularly interested in Giordano Bruno. 

A randomly chosen slice giving us an image not far off the wider picture of her total time. 

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‘Treating technology like it’s the divine in disguise’ is a line I’ve written for a new magazine and event series launching September. I rarely do taglines but I really like this tagline because I *really* like the conceptual thrust of this publication.

It has been started by the remarkable Visual Editions founder Anna Gerber. I also have an article in the first issue about the mysterious origins of the names of technology projects. Sign up for news here or follow on Instagram here.

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Paul McCarthy's ‘WS’, 2013

In 2005 the art critic Jerry Saltz coined the term ‘Clusterfuck Aesthetics’ in an article in the Village Voice. Even if you haven’t heard this term for the particularly kind of narrativeless art installation he is talking about, I bet you have a sense of what it means.

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The 2022 Nobel Prize for Physics went to three scientists who proved the universe was non-local. Here’s a primer. In a nutshell, it means that the stuff around you right now only has definite properties when it is being observed.

And that if two previously entangled particles are either side of the universe and one is observed, thereby giving it a set of properties, then the other will instantly conform to these properties. Which means a faster-than-light communication of information.

Here’s a complicated illustration that looks like it relates to what I’ve just said, yet tells me (and probably you) nothing.

Of course, excitingly, the supposed faster-than-light travel of information demonstrated in non-locality could also be reframed as the universe-wide space between the two particles is immaterial. That physical dimensions are an illusion. That space – and probably time – don’t really exist.

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Shakespeare didn’t invent the phrase ‘in a nutshell’, but did have Hamlet use it beautifully, prefiguring quantum non-locality by a few hundred years.

‘O God, I could be bounded in a nut shell and count myself a king of infinite space.’

You’ll note that line is in prose, rather than Shakespeare’s regular blank verse. Over 30% of lines in Hamlet are prose, which is the highest percentage of any of the tragedies. Possibly because Hamlet has more comic scenes than the others. Shakespeare and contemporaries tended to keep blank verse for the *meaningful* statements and prose for the throwaway.

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I’m putting out a call here for an organisation to invite me to create them an ad campaign or brand tone written in blank verse. I’ve been trying to persuade a few of my clients for a couple of years but no one’s biting. I’m *convinced* it would work. Not just for the novelty factor, but the beauty, elegance, import such a structure demands.

Blank verse. Any amount of unrhymed lines, each usually with ten syllables, most often following an iambic pattern. Oh, you know … down-up / down-up / down-up / down-up / down-up.

(Though, as with any poetry, such ‘rules’ can be crushed like skulls.)

Couple of examples here from a 16th century poet / playwright called Benjamin Fisher that I’ve made up.

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When I set out to try and become a writer 273 weeks ago, I knew that someday I was going to die. And just before I died two things would happen – number one, I would regret my entire life and number two, I would want to live my life over again.

No, hang on, that’s Requiem for a Dream author Hubert Selby Jr.

No, when *I* set out to become a writer I knew that I would never be published and so it was on me to figure out new ways to reach audiences. Which leads us to Happenings. Occurrences with a capital Huh.

One night-only events about language and consciousness. You might have read about or even come to the D&AD Yellow Pencil winning Twenty-five Sculptures in Five Dimensions or the Jonathan Rowson introduced Game Six.

I haven’t done one for a while because, well … I ran out of money and they are expensive, but I’ve saved up and we’re back on duckies.

July 24th, The Idyllegy – An Unravelling. Free tickets here. Only 100 people can come.

You know the most common thing people say after these things? They say ‘is it happening again? I’d like to bring friends.’

Of course, it never is happening again. Nothing interesting does. Someone should tell Hubert Selby Jr.

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Debussy in conversation with his tutor …

’Two associated dreams: that’s the ideal. No country, no date. No scene to be set. I dream short poems, mobile scenes.'

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My most recent book, Very Special Knowledge, a long poem about angels and UFOs and nostalgia and an invented 16th century playwright and creeping through a deserted scientific base has been well-received. One of my favourite responses is below. More reactions here.

(Despite every article about AI mentioning the fantastical possibility of the robots *writing poetry* … it doesn’t seemed to have dawned on the inventors that hardly anyone actually reads poetry. LOL, they’re going to lose so much money.)

There are four copies of Very Special Knowledge left. £20. You can buy one here.

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Something else to own.

I was commissioned to write a piece for Sir Simon Russell Beale to perform at St Martin-in-the-Fields. He read this last Friday at a Classic FM evening dedicated to him. Now fifty prints of the work have been created on lovely Colorplan Tabriz Blue stock with text in white. Signed. Sadly by me, not Simon Russell Beale.

Designed by Stop, Look and Listen Studio. There are about five left. £25 each. All money goes to support the incredible work St Martin's does with marginalised communities, music and causes. Email if you'd like one.

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‘Until the missing story of ourselves is told, nothing besides told can suffice us: we shall go on quietly craving it’ said Laura Riding, her of the eternal being, and I think she’s right about the craving, but wrong about the implication that there *is* a story of ourselves to be discovered.

This urge to give our existence a narrative. This urge to make sense. To hold situations and events apart as if time and space were anything but an illusion. To look at the clusterfuck, the objects in a gallery, the sudden spriting of technology and veil it with a story, a timeline, a sense filter.

Reality is poetry, not story. It has no linear truth, only what appears collapsed in front of us in the moment.

Anyway, hire me for projects and buy my books so I can lose more money on Happenings.

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