Sojourn in
Harm.
I
could be black I could be white
They put a hot wire to my
head
'cause of the thing I did and said
And made these feelings
go away
Model citizen in every way’ – Public Image Ltd.
What to
do.
The
affiliation fiasco of belonging or not to Europe is like a punch and
Judy sideshow on the approach to a gladiatorial arena. I guess okay
for those selling hot dogs and watermelon, but… Meanwhile, every
day the horror of what man does to man and the planet multiplies,
escalating horror to a new level. When my five year old stepson saw
images of the ocean drowning in plastic, he said, “What, no way,
its not me, I haven’t done this, what are they thinking of…” He
understands the gravity of what he sees and feels collective guilt.
He knows nothing yet of suicide bombers or children starving to death
in Yeman. What to do?
So I tend
the land, get the composts going, sort out the waste, minimize the
water use, grow as much bio food as possible, shop in the local
markets that are plastic free, recycle, re-use and mend. My footprint
is small, and if I were Mr Average the businesses that employ people
and produce commodities and stuff on a
non-stop-continual-growth-sell-model, would cease to exist, including
the popular ‘green washing’ eco-show. Would the collapse of the
economy, mass unemployment and the probable disintegration of retail
outlets be a truly bad thing, considering the return of donkey fields
and allotments? But I use the car and take flights, my trousers are
made in China and every time I turn the radio on I slump helpless
into some horror acted out on the world stage, and like a five year
old, say it is not of my making. But it is. My small footprint is no
solace in the face of this harm.
So I
return to the land and the crops, and try to forget the problems of
the day. I amuse myself with the thought that there is a strong
possibility that a warlord does not grow spinach. I remember saying
once that Owain Glyn Dwr, the Welsh fugitive hero, fighting for land,
had no time for growing parsnips. And even Popeye had spinach from a
can. But whilst surrounded by nature and all things organic in the
biosphere, nature has its deal. Each inch of soil is a battleground.
Everything is programmed to take advantage, to seek a foothold and
survive; from a sapling seeking light and excreting toxins to deter
predators, to a snake with a toad in its mouth or the bacteria in
your belly. I notice blackfly in the spinach. I observe an ant colony
that has moved in and is busy on the leaves. I think that perhaps
this is a good thing and they are feeding on the blackfly. But no,
this army is no normal predator like the ladybird, who is also
present. What is actually happening is that the aphids excrete a
waste called honeydew that has a very high sugar content. The ants
rub their antennae on the aphid’s bodies to encourage them to
release this elixir, which is actually their waste material.
Apparently some aphids can only ‘go to the toilet’ by having an
ant rub itself on their bodies.
Margins of the Marrows; JR's Veg patch.
Surrounded
by the clever trickery in nature, which is almost ‘corporate’ in
its symbiosis, I can be amused and amazed. But every time an act of
terrorism occurs, usually of a religious nature, it is not remotely
symbiotic and it is not the voice of the earth that is directing. It
is another voice. Such violence against people and the planet leaves
me at a loss. So I pause a lot and, more and more, to think about
that voice… From feelings of angst and borrowed time and horror at
disintegration, to man just getting on with it ‘as
if‘ things will just get better like ‘soup
of the day’, accepting lies and fictions for a peaceful life, and
then on to the engaged artist addressing harm in a poetic sense. So I
sit on one of the many pondering stations on the food terraces
surrounded by my green ‘stuff’, not only racked by hypocrisy but
also by a powerful sense of vitality and awe. I look at the rocks,
placed to form the tall terraces, some the size of a small car, as if
in a dream. The communal relationship between the land and trees and
the soul of man is omnipresent, is inspirational. It is like hanging
with giants.
I ponder
on my recurring anathemas of belief systems, creed and belonging. I
rewind two thousand years to take in the devastating accountability
of this ‘creature’, this voice, called belief.
Belief.
And this
is the burnout that the Gnostics, or rather the
telestai predicted a long time ago. Their
indigenous European culture, rejected the incoming salvationist
beliefs. They were perplexed, but tried to engage with these alien
concepts that were polluting their psyche: an ‘off planet’
landlord, being God, bringing redeemer ideology wrapped in a
victim-perpetrator cult complete with effigies of suffering for sins
and narcissistic prophets with tricky cards up their sleeves making
miracles…and of course, latterly, crusades and genocide and
corporations making a stack of cash. This is not metaphor but murder
in the backyard. This was not their tolerant, nature inspired voice
and experience of the world. What on earth allowed all that righteous
rage in? The Gnostics called this new Judeo-Christian religion a
disease. That is a tolerant appraisal from the wisest that Europe has
known. So facing the garlic and potatoes I call it a story to
literally die for and its interpretations total bullshit that allow
radicalization to end the world. Everyone who follows the Abrahamic
religions, even the passive colluders with welcoming, gummy smiles,
serving Sunday tea and cake, are guilty of all the horror and
violence enacted, now and throughout its history, in the name of the
story.
Direct,
nature oriented experience needs no interpretation or self-diagnosis
or weird subjective twists. It is self-controlled. There are two tiny
words that capture the essence of our Earth…it is. It is not ‘as
if’. The reality is now an ailing planet, as the armed newcomers,
centuries ago tore it up, regarded themselves in ‘glory’,
persecuted the Mystery schools and those of a nature-inspired mind
and made more stuff. The will to violence through creeds of suffering
and redemption leads to ever more destruction of the planet, ecocide
and, commodification: stuff. Hey ho! Isn’t it about time we
recognized the harm and had a serious word with the perpetrators…?
The problem is that we are all involved in various degrees. I talk to
myself a lot. Do I really need my milk-frother and a nutmeg dispenser
for a perfect designer cortado? What to do?
Europa
barbarically wiped out its highly intelligent, native culture of
tolerance and harmony with the biosphere. This was a genocide against
deep thinkers and what is now known as ‘deep ecology’. On a
universal scale it pales even the Jewish holocaust. It continues
today. The extermination of the Europa Cathari and their ‘book of
love’ was also genocide against deep thinkers. It continues today.
We are in
a state of chaos between political, religious and racial tension.
Bluntly we are in the hands of the haters and believers. They seem to
be in control: ‘put a hot-wire in your head’
limiting the range of thought, keeping people almost blissful in
shallow waters. The bottom line confirms to me that none of this
nonsense and hate that confronts us on the world-stage can happen if
the planet is loved. It isn’t I am afraid…it is hated! The hate
is due to the effects of false promise that is a belief in something
or other, and uncontrollable greed. But wait, this is not strictly
true, and this is the rub: it isn’t hate for the planet as such,
but devotion to a cause. The causes make the planet invisible so that
it’s health is ignored and side stepped for loyalty to a belief
system, to a creed and to the need to belong and have. This affair, I
am afraid, is all too human. And this is the state of hypnosis. This
is the abyss AE is talking about in his dreaming, and I think is part
of the ‘democratic process’ we are used to.
‘Mistrust it. Its
messengers are prophets of the darkness. As we sink deeper into the
Iron Age we are met by the mighty devils of state and empire lurking
in the abyss, claiming the soul for their own, moulding it to their
image… We need a power in ourselves that can confront these mighty
powers’. AE
The belief
business is not just a religious tag or a political party or an
ethnic intolerance, it is also a corporate mentality and financial
strategy that kills and harms for profit. It is also Mr and Mrs
Average blindly going about their daily routine. Belief in something
is bought cheap every day without awareness. Media headlines, special
offers, sport, self-reflective therapies and designer coffee all work
to annul the stupor. It is big business. We are all culpable. What to
do?
Back to
the sideshow: I live in Catalunya, the self-declared new European
state, but not quite, already in Europe as the wealthiest province of
Spain. I am in Europe and I am European, so the question is not how
to vote (as if) but how to act otherwise. Being pushed to qualify a
stance, I would like to contemplate advocating non-action in the
socio political order. This guy said it a long time ago,
‘a man cannot
solve social problems, but he can forsake them’. Lao Tzu
In Homage
to Catalunya, George Orwell wrote a
cautionary tale that for me draws on the deep insanity of the
schizoid human condition. Mr and Mrs Republic versus a military
dictatorship. Socialists versus the fascista. Man verses man. Breath
versus breath. All very well; but, when institutionalized, the group
mindset fails in its thinking; it favours duty and doctrines, and
then obedience to hell, as the order from above goes out to harm and
destroy.
Is the
worst that could happen any bad thing? Surely, both time and death
equalize.
Orwell was
‘dug in’ too deep. He was morally and ethically obliged to fight
on the side of the socialists, the communists and anarchists against
the fascista regime of Franco, ‘the bad guys’. His ideological
romance was about the working class and ‘the good guys’; his
notion of ‘liberty’ and truth only concluded in fighting a war
amongst the institutional political factions of the ‘good guys’,
an insider battle of who’s who in the political arena of left,
right or wrong.
This will
always be a battle lost and the fascists will always be better tooled
up. If you oppose a regime you are merely the opposite side of the
coin. Oppositions need oppositions, they need you, and a revolution
means exactly that, to revolve around this ‘devil ruled hell’,
constantly with heads full of conflict and war. This is not the life
of the ant and the aphid or the tree aggressively seeking more light
or the maggots in a carcass. This is the terrain of Armageddon as
depicted in Revelation and it dominates our culture today. The planet
can do nothing but seem to suffer. This world paranoia keeps people
in a ‘futile’ bubble trying to save themselves from the enemy or
protect from this or from that, or to make a few more pennies,
getting and spending and supporting the party giving the most.
Politics, like religion fails to negotiate with man’s inner being
and it ties with nature; it is a busy, dreary, man-made construct,
directing and entertaining the world with no vision of the ‘divine’.
To be free one must be free of rigid polarization. Fighting wars for
whatever cause is not a supple business…it is Auschwitz and Gulag
and misery. It is not Earth first. Remember? We need a united Europe.
But more importantly, we do not need the ocean warming up.
Each man is in the
spectre’s power
Until the arrival of
that hour
When his humanity
awakes
And casts his
spectre into the lake… Blake.
My own
‘Homage to Catalunya’, regardless of its political or economic
climate – is to be rooted in the Catalan earth, because this is
where I live, and where my creativity runs free of any political or
ideological agendas. Beyond the growing ‘independencia’
graffiti, my imagination is my home, and is always a safe haven for
ambiguity and metaphor. It is always on the go. As an outsider artist
I am totally aware of the spectre and delusion, the almost
hallucinatory grip that politics and religion have on man. It is a
shadow. This shadow of economics and politics fulfills its role in
suppressing nature in man. The shadow is man-made. All are capable of
visionary pleasure with every breath of wind or birdcall or raindrop,
because nature has no economy or politics to keep its species under
control. To live fully and harmoniously at one with nature, nurturing
and protecting humanity outside of any institutional system, is the
only form of democracy there is, and the planet wins. Nationalism is
always a threat.
I spin the
globe and randomly pinpoint a place on the planet. The nearest city
is Jakarta, in Indonesia. I Google for info and find the sprawling
township and its poor farming folk forced to seek work in its
spiraling economy, sinking slowly into the sea under fashionable and
arty high-rise concrete and ‘stuff’ impossible for me to
comprehend. An example of what could never be sustainable and surely
the ocean is waiting… A silly game, but the random point surely has
a high probability of empires lurking in the abyss?
After the
kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light
to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point
of the turning world… T S Elliot
Two
migrants asking for money engaged me in my local café the other day.
Upon a meeting of tongues, they sat down, and bought me a coffee and
lunch from the ‘slummy’ they had made that day! It was brought to
our attention that we are all migrants, that is, floating on a
mythical migrantship
in potentially losing the planet to idiots… Easy for me to say
having a home, but the question depends on how you negotiate and
rationalise the concept of home. For me, as declared in Colonist’s
Out, a home is conjoured through the need of
creativity and imagination, manifesting a virtual space of
connectedness. Being ‘dug in’ to a negative, literal mindset gave
them the impression they needed more than I did.
As regards
Europe, the folk that make the politics habituate and create gain in
a world of fear, war, plague, famine and pollution. Such visions of
doom dominate the world today. It is fuel. We are used to it. It is a
script born from long ago when the wise shuddered in dis ‘belief’.
It is the group mindset. The collective imagination is fuelled by
terrorism, and manifestations of mass-hysteria. This is not, nor ever
was, a democratic tale. As regards a vote, what the hell do people
know about Europe? Most only want more stuff. This is about choosing
how to act.
The Europe
‘vote’ is a foregone conclusion. It is not ‘real’. It is a
game, a spectre, with a curse of agendas that conceal more important
issues. I think it important to give thought and imagination to more
life affirming possibilities and thereby to bypass the insidious
takeover, the ownership of our psyche as commercial property
belonging to the state or a prophet or a television series. That the
earth is alive and intelligent is surely contrary to the apocalyptic
pathology of the last few thousand years of weird religious creeds.
It is an infestation massaged by the State.
Ghost
bird.
It was
because I was motionless that the bird landed so close in the fig
tree beside me. Like the white flash of a shooting star, I glimpsed
its entry blur upon landing. I remained motionless, but my eyes were
upon it. It looked at me, as if focused on something odd or out of
place. My brain scrolls down for the measure of its bird knowhow –
silver-white-grey, pale tawny crown, size of a plumpy robin, insect
eating bill – my eyes recorded something odd and out of place.
Birds of a feather? I had never seen anything like it. Perhaps the
bird was thinking the same. It was too early for juveniles and
visitors and with dark eyes not an albino or leukemic. It lingered
and we looked at each other and in five seconds it was off, a silver
dart vibration beating through the budding chestnuts. My books
offered no clues as to species. It was a mystery bird that became the
phantom creature, and from thereon it became a geomantic symbol of
the feathered messenger in myth, legend and folklore. But I am also
aware that the phantom could be me. Five seconds was enough for the
white creature but hardly enough for me.
Restoration.
I return
to my Europe and to the external stonewall that I am restoring at the
old mas where I live. Some of the stone lower down is of poor
quality, some kind of gneiss that is very friable. This is the first
stone you find close to the surface of the land. The old lanes gouge
through this soft material and some builders dig from the edges and
sieve to 6mm to make coarse sand. These easy pickings do not make a
stable structure but are mostly used for terracing and as an interior
fill between better stone. It may suggest a previous structure or
perhaps just poor building practice when money or labour was short.
Red
conglomerate sandstone, of various qualities predominates, and again
is found close to the surface of the land forming the slabby cliffs
in the valley. Tall, leaning slabs of this rock stand aloof from the
holm oaks and look like hooded pilgrims’ eager to journey to the
many chapels that furnish the land. When eroded, pink quartz pebbles
protrude from the stone like gems. This reminds me of climbing at
Montserrat, where every move made using a pinched pebble is balanced
by a hollow sloper where a pebble used to be. This rock is identical
to my own slab found from nearby Bryn Celli Ddu, a Neolithic burial
mound on Anglesey. Slithers of this stone are curiously placed,
slanting to curve across the wall in what appears to be an arch from
a previous vaulted building. Some of this stone disintegrates to the
touch, liberating its hold on the pebbles, scattered like marbles in
the fissures. The stone more deeply buried in the wall has become
like red mud. I love this ‘visceral’ business. It is a reminder
of time; you can almost read its secrets, in your face and on your
fingers, demanding attention. It affirms how little of your life you
own… ways of maintaining it, or patching it… and how indeed it
falters and fades.
The lime
mortar is friable, dusting to the touch, migrating into my lungs with
each raking of its tenuous grip. I expose chunks of solid lime,
placed deep inside the ‘rat runs’ where the edible dormouse is
heard on an evening scampering with apparent glee after taking a few
hazelnuts. It’s a sleepless night when she decides to play marbles
in the roof space. We once heard the chilling, croaky cry of what
sounded like a baby coming from deep behind a kitchen unit.
Apparently this is its incredibly human sounding snore. In a dreamy
tangent, Alice and the White Rabbit come to mind…
In a Mad
Hatter sketch, he fails to remember what the dormouse said of the
stolen tarts, and the dormouse denies nothing being fast asleep. In
the lyrics of the Jefferson Airplane song, the dormouse vehemently
says, “Feed your head, feed your head.” With creativity, tarts or
drugs or what remains undecided? Funny, I don’t associate the
dormouse with sleep. I count hazelnuts.
In my
builder’s head, fed by the groggy dusts of history, I begin to
understand that this building, or part of it is much older than
previously thought. Three hundred years was a good initial guess, but
sections of this wall are medieval if not prior. The pottery found
on-site may prove it. I also understand that these stones were a
precious commodity and were reused as structures fell into disrepair
or were replaced by other structures as needs dictated. I face many
cultural and social accretions by analyzing and restoring this old
wall, not only the external make-up with its odd array of different
rock, but the inside business holding it together. I am just the
latest human being in a long line of humanity holding on to the land
for shelter and use.
There are
larger, faced volcanic limestone blocks as quoins, the masonry blocks
at the corners of the wall, and the same stone is used to step up
from the supposed dome, a little like steps. This beautiful
creamy-white sedentary rock is pocked with a myriad of holes and
honeycombed vents adorned with fossilized leaves, which I think is
the holm oak. The locals call this stone ‘tosk’. It is very light
and easy to face into any shape. Some sections have worn better than
others. Poor quality tosk can disintegrate into little more than soft
cheese. Granite, in speckled grey, yellow, pink and a collage of all
three colours is spread across the wall like strong statements. A
stratered ferrous black and quartz rock appear like sparkling, glam
make-up, and totals the collection of stone types used. This stone
may have come from the many old gold mines in the area. In between
some stones have been placed broken roof pantiles to chock or balance
the stone. These are called snecks and are an old technique to avoid
using too great a thickness of lime mortar, which would crack. Where
the soft rock has latterly disintegrated, the broken tiles have been
packed into the gaps as a fix and rendered over. This is not the
handiwork of a mason however; it looks shoddy and has a limited life
span because of different strengths and densities; is always a sign
of trouble. Stone should always replace stone and should be well
raked out for a key. This kind of working is not sustainable as the
rigid concrete shuffles as the building moves. Primitive, makeshift
and ‘needs must’ are the solutions used as occupiers struggle to
‘make good’ in times of poverty and need. C’est la vie doesn’t
work for me.
A ‘mas’
is like a small hamlet under one roof. Community living is a working
practice, with its own home-produced economy, pre-commodity
existence. This makes me aware that the old mas is a living,
breathing entity, a home, a factory, a farm holding a wealth of human
and animal-kind, a one-roof extended family, the life and death of
community soul. Part of its furniture is a sleepy dormouse that must
have snored here for over five hundred years. I have to stop my work
for a while as I hear the alarm call of a nuthatch, nesting in a hole
higher up the wall.
Bernabast.
I cannot
know what an alarmed nuthatch or a snoring dormouse would mean to
Sebastian Bernabast who lived here in the métier, the workers’,
bakers’, caretakers’ domain, that is now my studio. I cannot know
his relationship with the stone and wood that sheltered him or the
land that fed him. I cannot know his ecstasy or fatigue at the end of
a laborious day or his response to desire and sensation. I cannot
know his moments of quietude or rest or revolt. I cannot know the
hidden ‘god’ visiting in his sleep. I cannot know more than what
history, fact or fiction, wrote of him and his times. I cannot know
for sure…
Around
1840 a famous group of bandits lived and roamed in these hills. They
were the Trabucaires, originating from the Spanish Carlista soldiers
who became brigands and formed allegiances with their French cousins.
Their name refers to the metal-shot rifle that they used. This was a
safe house for the Trabucaires and their symbol is etched in the tosk
stone that surrounds a tiny window. This window was used to signal
with a lantern when the coast was clear of soldiers, police or
douanes. The Trabucaires were notorious for kidnapping people of
wealth and holding them to ransom for gold. They dealt violently with
their human trade and held command in this remote, fecund terrain on
the frontier between Spain and France.
I have my
Peruvian bowl with fertility beads, a large clay penis and a Buddha
in the ancient bread oven that ‘Tia’ must have baked his spelt
loafs in, spat in and got dressed by. I paint where he slept, snored
and fucked, probably on straw. Linseed oil and turpentine have
replaced the wood smoke that must have billowed through the room,
judging by the blackened oak roof beams. A digital synthesized Eno
has replaced the pastis-analogue breath of song and squeaky brass.
The heartbeat of a fugitive’s life lies just under the surface of
things. I feel like a hologram in a time machine jukebox.
The
smugglers footpaths that snake from the house were the highways of
commerce and subterfuge, at one with the blood and adrenaline
coursing through veins. The remains of the day are scattered around
the remote habitations in various stages of dereliction now claimed
by vegetation and fed by the rot and rust and rag within the dense
woodland. Everything not needed was thrown out, which was at least
bio-degradable, but if plastic had been invented I imagine it would
have buried the houses. One particular mas called El Palla, took two
years to find and is less than half a kilometer from the house on the
Spanish side. Although now physically lost, older locals remember it
with mischievous glee as a place to dance and make merry. They
remember the music and the brave, fiery-eyed smugglers evading
capture. It was never regarded as being in a remote location, but
part of the interconnectedness of a working community. This den of
iniquity, this seedy bar by all accounts, provided the human animal
with the lascivious platform of the day. It is now a burial chamber
under beams, planks and tiles holding memory of dancing shoes, joy
and freedom. This was a woodland central club keeping rhythm with the
green world and the heartbeat of the soil, released from its
agricultural past.
Hideaways,
caves, lookout points and nooks and crannies of the landscape are
joined to the soul of a man’s existence as the rutting and breeding
locations are to the life of the wild deer. The energy of the
predator as a participant of nature is ancient and part of the land
telling its story. As the Golden Eagle scopes for life to be taken,
so, as in a notion of freedom, the bandits robbed and killed. The
green world is red and just so. There is sanctity here. But of
course, there is also criminality here. As the notion of freedom from
the restraints and the slavedom of society have been romanticised, so
the robber fulfills the balancing role inspiring those who feel
suppressed as human animals. For those who were losing the land, the
Trabucaires were seen as holding it. As man’s instinct is
sanitized by permanent work for the devil’s purse in the townships
nearby, and an easier life, the symbolic, macho creature that is the
fugitive hero plays out a colourful life as a sell-by date
caricature. I associate with the anti establishment ethos but cannot
reconcile to the taking of life for cash as opposed to for food.
As tenants
in the property where they lived, the fugitive heroes tend not to fix
a chimney or a fallen down wall or to grow parsnips. They tend to be
on the run or looking to move to a better ‘crib’ with better food
and comforts. Of course, there must have been a wider communal
collusion among the poor tenant farmers; they must have benefited
from the activity like the mutual support of cottage
industry…tickling the farmer’s bellies
with a little gold in exchange for silence, shelter and food…
But times
change, sell by dates arrive and not everyone can be bought. They
were shopped and stood trial in Perpignan. A wealthy man had been
kidnapped and later found dead with an ear cut off.
Later on,
during the second world war, local conscripts for the French army
were perplexed as they hadn’t realized they lived in France and
didn’t speak French.
Orwell’s
communist and anarchist Republicans, torn, tired and starving, arrive
in Vichy France via the smugglers paths through no-man’s land,
destined for the pre-Nazi camps of hell…
And so,
beyond plastic, beyond hate, cruelty and stupidity… I find a stag’s
antler after days of barking and roaring heard nearby. Our nine month
old puppy dies of a snake bite. A tethered goat is engorged and eaten
by a wild boar. The box moth devastates all the box trees.
Soon, the
cosmic hologram jukebox will be on a different shuffle.
Perhaps we
are fighting nature in addressing what we construe as harm and
horror. Is it relevant? As the medieval anchorite Julian of Norwich
wrote in Revelations of Divine Love, ‘sin is behovely’… the
harm, the horror is the way ‘it is’… and all too human. Perhaps
all the harm I feel is actually self-controlled and what I witness is
little more than potato blight?
And
continuing the wise dame’s thinking – looking upon a dusty
hazelnut in the wall… this little thing… it is all that is made…
shall not be forgotten… it is loved.
John
Redhead, Los Manes, Coustouges. June 2019
