e-detox

I've been racking my brain for some T. S. Eliot that talks about electronic detoxing, but strangely enough, he wasn't quite prescient enough for that. Oh but what am I saying? Of course he was...what else was he describing but the ghostly glow of the Mac screen (displaying Facebook) when he wrote

'only a flickr (haha)

over the strained, time-ridden faces

distracted from distraction by distraction

filled with fancies

and empty of meaning

tumid apathy with no concentration

men and bits of paper whirled by the cold wind

that blows before and after time'

Burnt Norton, III, Four Quartets

I did my first e-detox in early November last year, which happened to coincide (I later discovered) with an Observer article about how social networking, emailing and texting was 'fracturing our attention spans', reducing human contact and tyrannising our lives. Bit extreme maybe, especially as the article concludes:

‘Yoram Kalman sounds a cautionary note against using technology as a scapegoat. "Usually, if you look behind the technology, you find culture, social behaviour and you find people," says Kalman. "Technology is neutral, it depends what you use it for.”

So perhaps, in the end, most of us want to be tyrannised.’

I accept this is probably true of myself, but I was glad I’d made the conscious choice not to allow it to happen always.

The irony of blogging about electronic-detoxing is not lost on me (thanks Lewis!) but there's more to it this time, something that needs explaining before I go all quiet: this time I'm e-detoxing for little bird....

A lot of the last piece was about distance: distance in time – between who were and who we are now and distance in space – between us and home and the people we care about. My mum on the phone was sharing stories in real time, but from a place (Aberystwyth) it would take 3 hours 40 minutes to reach on the train from where I was dancing (Coventry). The stories and memories were from her youth, her University education, my childhood and our shared history. We were united across distance and time or a matrix of the two.

Much of the time, technology helps us transcend distance with such speed we tend to get seduced into thinking it somehow compensates for the absence of the people themselves. The speed at which we communicate makes a big difference, not least to our expectations of ‘gratification’ from contact with others. How is this affected when we communicate with more physical materials – by post – letters and parcels and objects that make a journey of their own – with their own untold story – to reach us? Something that takes more physical effort, forethought and care than pressing the send button. And what does it say, energetically, about where they travel from to converge again in one place? How does this map more tangibly than e-phemera (emails, texts) the web of interconnections of our geographical mobility, our social networks?

I will be asking 14 friends who I most often or only communicate with electronically – wordsmiths and dancers – to ‘participate’ in an exchange of materials through the post that will be brought together in the next performance of little bird, listening, weaving more stories into this developing narrative.

Summer Solstice

From East Coker I | Four Quartets

In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls

Across the open field, leaving the deep lane

Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,

Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,

And the deep lane insists on the direction

Into the village, in the electric heat

Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light

Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.

The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.

Wait for the early owl.

In that open field

If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,

On a summer midnight, you can hear the music

Of the weak pipe and the little drum

And see them dancing around the bonfire

The association of man and woman

In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie -

A dignified and commodiois sacrament.

Two and two necessarye coniunction,

Holding eche other by the hand or the arm

Whiche betokenth concorde. Round and round the fire

Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,

Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter

Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,

Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth

Mirth of those long since under earth

Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,

Keeping the rhythm in their dancing

As in their living in the living seasons

The time of the seasons and constellations

The time of milking and the time of harvest

The time of the coupling of man and woman

And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.

Eating and drinking. Dung and death.

Dawn points and another day

Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind

Wrinkles and slides. I am here

Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning.

so said the little bird, listening in the tree

Realise that I forgot to mention, shock horror, that on the evening of the performance, weary from my 3 hour 40 minute Eliot marathon, I walked like a bag lady to a little park in the middle of Coventry, and sat on a bench under a tree to eat my supper (M&S superwholefood salad which had leaked all over my bag, if you want the bare facts) and a little bird listening in the tree very kindly shat all over my props bag.

I think that says it all really.

art, dance, life, taking yourself too seriously.... no chance

Huge thanks to Vicki Smith for the amazing photos

mission accomplished

We shall never cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time through the unknown remembered gate when the last of earth left to discover is that which was the beginning at the source of the longest river the voice of the hidden waterfall the children in the apple tree not known because not looked for but heard half heard between two waves of sea quick now here now always a condition of complete simplicity (costing not less than everything) and all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well when the tongues of flame are infolded in the crowned knot of fire and the fire and the rose are one.

And now I need to go on T. S. Eliot de-programming therapy....

little bird listening by Jess Allen - Tues 1st June, 3-6.40pm

little bird, listening is a durational work exploring distance (in space and time) through endurance (of body and memory). It uses the rich and complex text of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets spoken continuously from memory whilst moving and performing tasks with objects. The words form a continuous sound score that is spoken in relay between the performer (live) and her mother (over mobile phone from Aberystwyth), for the length of the train journey that would reunite them (3 hours 40 minutes in Coventry).

Within this overarching structure, the work attempts to address how and where memory resides in the body-mind; how pre-occupation of the cortex with the conscious act of remembering text allows movement to arise from sub/unconscious; and how text – whether imagery or pattern – can become truly embodied through a regular practice of speaking-dancing.

The Quartets are perhaps the most famous twentieth century poems to deal with the nature of time but are also contained in the one slim volume that I mistakenly picked up age 6 and precociously read out loud to my mother; the book in which she once wrote my lessons in grammar and punctuation and the notes for her own mother’s epitaph. Now these words form the basis for this exchange, exploring, through text about time, the distance between who we are now and who we were then, and how we transcend or distort it through the un/reliable lens of technology and memory.

So I find words I never thought to speak/In streets I never thought I should revisit/When I left my body on a distant shore

T. S Eliot | Little Gidding | Part II

the hedges white again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness...

Little Gidding | Part I

Between the live and the dead nettle...

Little Gidding | Part III

Harvesting nettles for tea, 2010 vintage, Caplor Farm May 22

Pigs Can fly or In the Rigging and the Aerial Part II

Taking some time off from Eliot to fly with pigs and Blue Eyed Soul Dance Company in a barn near Worcester...

remaking the aerial piece TAKE; a dance in the park made last year on an outdoor rig...

for a theatre space... first perfomance VSA Arts Festival 9th June Washington DC! Then back on the rig for the Unity Festival, Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff 28th June.

At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial...

is a voice descanting...

The Dry Salvages | Part III

you whose bodies will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea

or whatever event, this is your real destination

The Dry Salvages Part III


Mrs A has another story for me and, thanks to the miraculous self-indulgence that is blogging, you...

As this piece is about d i s t a n c e (see what I did there?) part of the process has been exploring the distance between both who we (Mrs A and I) were back in the day,

and who we are now...

but also the literal distance between us, populated (through postal exchange) with objects that link us in place and time: a mobile phone, a fan steamer, a taffeta dress...each with a story of their own.

I wanted to widen this postal exchange too, to include (some of the) four elements that each of the Quartets respresent. For water (and specifically the sea), and to turn Mrs A. into an ever more bewildered co-collaborator in conceptual art, I requested some Cardigan Bay seawater to be collected from fair Aberystwyth beach.

Once we had established the practicalities (not Mrs A's strong point: 'but won't a bottle smash in the post?' me:'not a plastic one' Mrs A: 'where will I get a plastic bottle?' me: 'buy some mineral water and drink it?' So you see the texting really is a miracle) she was away...

But in true Mrs A style, this story is already legend, as recounted by mobile phone and later by Post-It note

me: so did you really go down to the beach?
Mrs A: well, yes and I even had my wellies with me, but I thought, honestly, I'm 72 I can't go all the way down to the sea. (You don't realise how decrepit I really am now) [yes Mrs A really does use brackets in speech] so I saw this outdoorsy hippy-ish woman in walking boots getting out of a van and I went over and explained that you were making this piece about us and the distance between us and that you wanted me to send you some sea water and she was very direct and looked very capable said 'yeah, I can relate to that' and then she took the tupperware box (I thought it would be easier than a bottle) [ooh a stroke of genius - Mrs A going into overdrive with her technical thinking] and ran down over the sand and kicked off her shoes and strode into the sea and then came back over the beach with it. I said 'oh dear, i hope you have a towel. Do you have a towel?' but she said it was OK'

So, thank you, Margaret of the Sea Water, wherever and whoever you may be. Thank you for so readily getting your feet wet in the Aberystwyth sea.

------------

Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business has to do with fish, and
Those concerned with every lawful traffic
And those who conduct them.


The Dry Salvages Part IV

If you came this way in may time...

you would find the hedges white again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness

Little Gidding Part II | on the home strait now!

I'm no longer surprised by the strange synchronicity of the echo between lines I am currently learning in these poems and events in life (though I have some vague memory from Richard Dawkins along the lines of 'there's no such thing as coincidence/coincidences happen all the time/they're only significant when we choose to notice them'. Hm, spoil sport).

Had a good talk on the phone about the poems and difficult pronunciations with Mrs A on the train between Birmingham and Bromsgrove, with some technical issues:

me: are you there still? we might get cut off, I seem to be in a tunnel
LONG SILENCE, emerge from tunnel which was only a bridge
me [perplexed, check phone, call still seems to be open]: look, are you there?
Mrs A: YES. But there was a long silence...
me: BECAUSE I WAS WAITING FOR YOU TO SPEAK

gah

later:

me: why do you keep cutting me off when I call you back?
Mrs A: well, If you call me back and my phone is aleady open I don't know what to do
me: so you shut it?
Mrs A: Yes, but what should I do?
me [exasperated]: PRESS THE GREEN BUTTON. I can't believe you don't know how to answer your phone.
Mrs A [disgruntled]: Look, it's a miracle I've got this far
me [laughing]: Sorry, yes, I never thought to see the day you'd send a text message
Mrs A: Yes well it did take me forever [pause then, scandalised] Did you know S [similarly non-technical friend] has only just found the punctuation button on her phone?...

And we're back to punctuation AGAIN.

I begin to wonder if we've ever had a conversation which is NOT about language...

"She must learn to OBEY her mother"

(So said the little bird, listening in the tree)

Love is most nearly itself/When here and now cease to matter...

Mrs A has reminded me that the last section of East Coker is part of the 'edited highlights' speech she has arranged to be read at her own funeral. This is touching and comic by turns. We laugh at my suggestion that I will now be able to read the whole of the Quartets and perform contemporary dance simultaneously. A marathon of live art for the mourners.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older

The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated

Of dead and living. Not the intense moment

Isolated, with no before or after

But a lifetime burning in every moment

And not the lifetime of one man only

But of old stones that cannot be deciphered

[Old stones? With weird synchronicity I was learning this section when dancing at Pentre Ifan for Cathy with Resondance]

There is a time for the evening under starlight

A time for the evening under lamplight

(The evening with the photograph album).

Love is most nearly itself

When here and now cease to matter.

Old men ought to be explorers

Here or there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

----------------------

Journey back from Bristol today:

St. Wertburghs to Fownhope in about an hour and three and a bit Quartets...

Burnt Norton M5 junctions 15 to 13 (a bit of speeding)

East Coker Junction 13 to 11A (ish)

The Dry Salvages A40 to Highnam and beyond

Little Gidding tailed off before Newent...

April is the cruellest month...

...when you have to spend it learning the entirety of the Four Quartets, word perfectly. OK, so it's a self-imposed challenge, and nobody will know but I will, and so will Mrs A (mother), so it matters.

I was hoping that I'd use this page to mark off, section by section, the arduous-but-oddly-masochistically-pleasurable process of committing these endless words to my head, but I reassure myself that like most healthy people I've been rather too preoccupied with living and breathing and learning to actually blog (I am so over the split inifinitive thing now; besides, 'to blog' seems to be far too modern an infinitive to be sticklery about) and probably no-one with a functioning self-indulgenceometer is reading this anyway.

Anyway, I'm already three quartets down now, three quarters through - finished The Dry Salvages this morning and strolled on into Little Gidding - but no-one to share my triumph except the walls and windows of my caravan, the car, the M5 (with the window down), the studio, the hedges of my running routes, Merlin's ears, all bristling and singing with Eliot's words. Some of them I didn't even know (Mrs A would be appalled) and had to look up...

inoperancy, appetency, eructation (Burnt Norton)

hebetude, grimpen, Almanach de Gotha (WTF?), l'entre deux guerres (never did French) (East Coker)

seine, groaner (The Dry Salvages)

sempiternal (Little Gidding)

It makes me feel like Eddie Izzard's reluctant-cat-in-training: 'Hm. Interesting words...'

Great: widening my vocabulary with words that make me even less comprehensible and make one [ironic] sound like even more of a 1940s academic.

I feel like I'm having an intense relationship with a long dead poet [even] more verbose than me...

I feel like my rhythms are being dictated by these lines constantly looping in my head ('the fever sings in mental wires')... they seep in through cracks in my conscious thought and fill my mind like groundwater ('And the groundswell, that is and was from the beginning/clangs/the bell')

I feel like I'm drowning in someone else's words ('those who were in ships and/Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips'), but they're so wonderful, so true, so universal, they're saying as articulately and succinctly as words can, what our flesh already knows.

Time past and time future

Allow but a little consciousness.

To be conscious is not to be in time

But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,

The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,

The moment in the draughty church at smokefall

Be remembered; involved with past and future

Only through time time is conquered.

time present and time past

Once upon a time there was a little girl & a liberal intellectual mother & a house full of books...

Looking for a book to read one day, the little girl (age 6; maybe just a little bit precocious) stumbled upon a little paperback so slim, she thought it must be a story for children. Her mother said it wasn't, but when she opened it up, the words looked easy enough, in short little lines & so she started reading out loud to her surprised, laughing mother:

"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally [this word was a bit hard] present

All time is unredeemable... [and she might have stopped here because she definitely hadn't seen that word before]..."

-----------------------------

This work was originally conceived as a reflection on our perception of time. Reading and listening to the work of the Eagleman laboratory, I was drawn to the notion that our perception of time is determined by the density at which we lay down memory

"When you’re a child, everything is new, so you’re laying down very dense memories about everything that’s going on. By the time you’re older you’ve seen it all before; your brain doesn’t have to write as much stuff down. So when you get to the end of a childhood summer and you look back it seems like it took forever. But when you’re an adult and you look back, you just haven’t written down that same density of memories, so it seems like it flew by. You can make your life seem longer by doing things that are novel each day."

Inevitably, thinking about time, I found myself returning to Eliot's Four Quartets (maybe because I imprinted it on my memory at such a tender age) and got no further. First published together in 1944, they are some of the most famous and well-regarded twentieth century poems to deal with the nature of time. But they hold an equal (and related) significance for my small family as a unifying thread that has (until now) surreptitiously linked our lives with colourful stories. In particular, our one slim copy of these poems is rich with such traces: the scribbled marginalia of my mother’s literary analysis; her biro-ed (and comically posh) lessons in the use of punctuation (for me, age 7) on the frontispiece; the notes she later wrote on page 45 for her own mother’s epitaph. This was also that the volume that I'd picked up age 6, deceived by its slimness. All this on the faded armchair where I was so often read to, or slipping down the side of, lulled to sleep by my mother’s sonorous voice on another endless telephone call. One volume, three generations of women, one cat (called Eliot), a telephone and a lot of talking out loud….

All this weaves together the time and distance that now lies between me and my mother (who doesn't travel beyond her self-imposed forcefield at a 10 mile radius of Aberystwyth) and my hometown, geographically, and between who we are now and who we were then, temporally.

So that's it, my starting point: one huge and hugely famous set of four long poems, in two battered copies (one here, one in Aber), a mother and a daughter (one in Aber, one here), a mobile phone and three scores: (1) IWILLLEARNALLTHEWORDS (2) i will move and speak at the same time (3) when i can't speak any more, i will listen to my mother (for the first time, ever).

Like the little bird, listening in the tree.

my grammar and punctuation lessons (age 7)

mum's literary marginalia

my mother's notes for my grandmother's epitaph (in Welsh)