A Confluence of Mud

To stand at the mouth of the river with your back to the city and look down where the water trickles through the mud, to see it naively attempt to weave a passage through, jittery, hyper, waiting for the estuary tide to return, waiting for its chance to tumble out, as fresh turns salt and makes its way out to sea; is to stand at a confluence, a metaphor of the city. 

Atop the confluence lies The Deep; sharp, shining, angular. A hit of modernity atop the wood struts of yore, pointing away from the river, away from this muddy lapse in the waters meandering journey, out to sea, out to Europe. This oracle, this seer into the horizon, belies that which sharps into focus upstream. A landscape of mud and antiquity punctuated with the odd half start into the now. A city seemingly stuck at the end of its own river, stalled, waiting for the next tide. And this is where the reed of its culture can be found, in mudflats that shift silent and slow, undisturbed by the draught of momentum, untroubled by the bellies of barges now so rarely displaced here. The hulls now barely bother the Hull.  

But what mud! 

Wound down from Wolds over centuries, oozed from the Ouse, dragged down from Doggerland; this mud was farmed prehistoric, its paths cut by of hides cut from animals and wrapped around feet. Paths long washed from memory and surface by salt and waters weight, eroded by sediment, by the slow march of time in that most shallow of seas. Mud brought tidal from Europe and beyond. A port indeed, a mulch of ideas and culture brought through mud, through the mixing of land and sea and all the bounty that bestows. 

A tidal barrier. Because the river is no match for an estuary backed by the sea. The water in the Hull is captive (oh what a wonderful simile) until invited out to play by the waves that skip over the mud as though it’s nothing but a nuisance. This wonderful marriage of the salt and the fresh builds a bridge, navigates the unnavigable, once brought barges in and out of the city, bound for Beverley, for the markets of the Wolds. These muds of the Holderness rivers, though unable to bear crop, still fed residents for miles through trade and goodwill, brought new blood and sturdied old, changed language and custom, but no more. 

(I’s proposed, every so often, that the barrier should be semi permanently dropped, opened just every once in a while to flush the silt out of the river. This would, the argument goes, create a veneer of still glass to prop up that idea of riversideness so commercially viable right now, an idea of sunshine and eateries that wouldn’t look out of place exactly everywhere else with a river, or at least exactly everywhere else that doesn’t have such an unreasonable river, a river that refuses to do what rivers are meant to do for 18 hours a day. I like the mud though, I like its unreasonableness, its inconsistency and its disregard for what’s expected of it, it is, without doubt, an exact mirror of the city it runs through.) 

To walk upstream is to walk backwords through time, to push against the glacial drift that carved out these meandering waterways over aeons. So it is no surprise, as backs are turned on that first flush of modernity and footsteps found through this stuck in the mud river, that the first thing you come to is the Museum Quarter. 

To Be Continued…

Tertiary

I don’t remember my paternal Grandfather, not really. He died when I was seven, so I hadn’t the maturity to form fully rounded memories, just dreams, feelings. Playing draughts with him on a Saturday afternoon, his garden, his orange Datsun standing idle in his garage, whisps, I guess, ghostly apparitions of a childhood half remembered, as all childhoods are. If you asked me what he looked like, without the benefit of the photographs that remain of him, I could not tell you.

It is through photography that our memories, our emotions, become tertiary. Become to belong in a third space, between experience and loss, a memory clung onto but not really recalled. The third stage of grief, of a life slipping helplessly away from us, is bargaining. What better a compromise than an image, a permanent memorial fixed on paper? A trueness of appearance to be carried in the absence of soul.

In much the same way we bargain through social media. We are told repeatedly of the toxicity of social media toward young people, we are told to reassure them that it is not real, that these people are not out there Living Their Best Life,  that it is all a construct designed to sell. Yet we succumb to the pantomime, the places we must have visited, the culturally proscribed experiences that equal a successful existence, no matter its toxic effect on masculinity, on femininity, on community. It is through social media we get the chance to become a spectacle in our own right, to present ourselves as nearing the social construct of perfection, however shallow that may be.

Through channelling anxieties and digging into our fears of inadequacy, social media offers us an image exchange. By buying in we can create an image of ourselves for the world to remember. As our lives drift inexorably toward the void, to being forgotten, as our days of seeming banality slip away it offers us a chance to be celebrity, to paint ourselves as winners, even though as winners we are only conforming to the perceived norms, which is rarely what winners do. Through celebrating our proscribed ‘individualities’ it stamps out nonconformity quicker than Mussolini’s mobs.  It is, in all intents and purposes, the ultimate advertisement for the status quo, for the hegemony. We excoriate our minds to move numbers in accounts we will never see, let that sink in. To sell a cultural system that works for less and less people every year. To stay in serfdom.

Aspiration, the byword of our political era, of our advertising age, distracts the masses from revolutionary thought. The bright lights, the bread and circuses, the £500 trainers; someone once told me that Churchill once said: “keep them out of the libraries and in the pubs”, I don’t know if that’s true, but they don’t want us in the pubs anymore. They want us at home, in front of Love Island. They want us to be wanting to be the contestants on a show that pits people against each other for the shallowest, most narcissistic reasons to win the vacant prize of celebrity. Sound familiar?

If photography can be considered a sort of Turin Shroud of moments past, then social media must be the shroud of directly lived experience, the shroud of community, the ultimate expression of Thatcherism’s drive to replace society with the individual. A transaction of life for perception. It seems ironic that the camera, a tool used so much in its history to challenge the structures that entrap us, now reinforces those same structures under the guise of a free formed community, the destruction of which is the ultimate goal of the neo liberal ideology.

On conception Facebook was heralded as some sort of anarchist society, as if it challenged those very structures that sought to control us, by freeing up communication and allowing us to be individuals, to express our individuality regardless of societal norms. It presented itself to us as a free-thinking network outside of consumerism. As it is, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat et all; they seek only to monetise the image you strive so hard to perfect for them for free, and then sell it back to you repeatedly, until we all become like the photographs of my Grandfather. Tertiary, unknown. A compromise.  

On Shadows

I’ve just finished reading In Praise of Shadows by Jun’ichiro Tanizaki a glorious little book.

It’s a book written at a time when Japan was succumbing to western influence at speed, from the simple toilet to shop signage, from interior design to the appearance of gold, the novelist discusses that main difference that sets (or at least set – this is the 1930’s) the two cultures apart – namely our relationship with light.

Western culture, from the Ancient Greeks through Christianity all the way down to Capitalist consumer culture has always been founded on the bright, or at least on the absence of shadow. Divinity, it teaches us, is found through the light, the casting away of the darkness, the dispelling of shadows. Eastern culture, founded in balance between the two, teaches us that divinity comes through wisdom, wisdom comes through harmony, from the wave through the circle, the place where Ying meets Yang, In effect, from the shadows.

The liminal, those places where things converge, those we peer into nervously, are where our stories are born. It is the riverbank, the forest edge, the harbour that holds those ships once in peril. The gaslight, the torchlight, the flaming embers that cast silhouette to screen or ceiling give way to imagination, desire, loss and heroism. Sometimes that which is barely seen completes rather than obscures the stories within us. We are pointed the way through gnarled paths, well-worn yet alien, to wisdom through experience; not shown straight up a staircase, pearled and gleaming, glossed into abstraction with squinting light toward an inconquerable happiness. We cannot bleach half of life away and, looking back at it all, why would you want to?

For what is poetry without shadow? A few dull couplets, emotionless, soulless, bereft of feeling, of life. What is Photography BUT shadow? The halide does not just stand straight or lie down, it wavers, invites us to peer into the edges, to engage, the shadows bring intimacy, connection. A safe place to find solace between the extremities of existence. Where pain meets salvation, where the twilight of failure meets the sunrise of redemption, a spring is kindled.

Our duality defines and completes us. Neither Minotaur’s stumbling blindly through pitch black labyrinths, nor the Soma induced middle classes ignoring the ugly realities of the brightly lit Brave New World, we walk that wavy line. Our meaning is discovered on the borders between horror and joy, between the comfortable and the sublime. Near a lamp, next to a roaring fire, with a book of white pages marked with dark hieroglyphs, we find stories.

Far shores

All feels fractured, a rift in bone waiting for the cast of time to graft marrow into marrow, heal that which is broken, sear sinews back together as welds heated to permanence in a furnace of hope. As we stand in this void between storms, an eye gaping, waiting to be filled by the aye of permission, the nod of heads to move forward once more. Headlands half visible, a journey through water awaits when the tide resumes its flow. When wave turns to glass. Clocks will resume and the crushing monotony of day falling into endless day abates, turns back.

The mists will roll over us. A clear horizon, a calm sea, an easy paddle over as smogs recede and the air becomes breathable once more. And all will be forward. A bearing in view, a shore so sure as to be unmistakable ground. An ending, an ascent, a life after patience, a certainty after horror, as ghouls fall back, there will only be the scars to wash away in the waters of each other.

Mantle

All journeys find their feet under the mantle, and the hearth of the homestead gives rest to weary soles at wanderings end, life’s travels punctuated by the cool of summer stones or a warm winter glow rested under time and memories. Shadows of grief mere play acts of memory upon walls, flickered by flames of hope and fraternity. The faces of those lost gaze from the heat of ashes, a warm embrace from days distant, a home.

Plots and reflections, recovery and restoration, the hearth heals, it’s crackling kindness a warm generosity, it’s presence a visual soup. A homecoming for those gone without whose hands blister in cold, a weight that cannot be rubbed away drifts in vectors of heat, to return only in memory. A reassuring hiss and crack, an jump of comfort in the wilderness of warm distractions.

Tales spun on the loom of smoke from threads of half remembered misadventures, the comfort of stories in safety brings walls where there were none, a fortress of friendship, the conviviality of clan. From Kraken that rise from ocean depths to mazes of Minotaurs, the wonders of a sunrise steeped in allegory and exaggerations stir souls as stories are shared. Getting us through; fears, hopes, all that we share by the simple virtue of being human, whether relative or from strange shores, all that we live in microcosm, in myth.

Let these days show that warmth and shelter alone kept no one sane. Songs by the fire, a convive, the poetry of company, of the rhythms of voices sharing stories of survival and hope, revive spirits sagged by staid survival. A meal shared is a sustenance multiplied, as tales tree tall fil the bellies of our minds, as souls touch through tragic myth. We share our laments and our laughter, as to not would be sacrilegious to the gods of our songs. Culture binds; its web covers us all in a comfort of one another. Human voices, in turn so loud and so frail, build us into each other, breed humility and harmony, give rise to reason.

Wintersun

Sudden stabs, a decade of night punctuated by the fleet trick of summer in idle pools, a brief reminder, a breath exhaled to the winds from the sea. Westerly gales give to light from the east. All darknesses break, all light will lengthen. Time. Just aching time. Pensive. Aloof.

Defences drowned, as drifts glacier cold run the ramparts, an infantry lies beaten, submerged. Brave knights remiss to enter a courtyard entombed by the dark sea of a year grown to death, given to the burden of its old age, for even time is mortal. Deux sive natura. And God will find fuel from a feast of His own flesh. And nature will find its way. And knights will charge into day.

A carnivorous season, the bleak feeds on the bleak, lays a warm bed of its skin and hair. A flame of catharsis for Springs’ Phoenix to dismount, griefs burden burned, lifted by ash. The whys of yesterday transformed in the becauses of now, sent as smoke to the canopies.  Dead memories murmurate from the carrion which sustained them, leave nests of hope for clumsy hatchlings. A new year sends wings, doves will rest here soon; the Icaruses of yesterday at ground.

The days will stretch their span, scatter dusks as starlings stealing seed driven to flight by the gunshot boom of springs return. All memory all portent. A weak light grows, sends steel to the senses, drops a drawbridge over the moat of season, builds a castle of hope.

Yesterdays’ litter, so cumbersome and sore, lies trampled by drifts and buried by thought; a rot ground to mulch new roots, the land revives, gifts the promise of return. The barrows will green once more, that much is unassailable, the reassurance of resurrection, a prayer call from the east. Stepping stones bridge out slow toward the dawn.

In solitude we find hope. As a chill shakes teeth, as aching winds sting and skin dead cells from face with flaying cold. As stubble hardens, as battles are fought between grip and slip, as frost firms on the paths, a steel furnace flames. A wintersun still burns.

Remnants

If, on a Wednesday afternoon around 1999/2000 you’d have gone into the Virgin Megastore in Hull’s Princess Quay, you’d probably have seen me and my mate Dame. Rituals being what they are, personal agreements between people that take on an almost sacred meaning, this was our Sunday morning in church, which had, as rituals must, it’s own unwritten rules.

First and foremost (in fact the only rule so it had to come first) was the Unspoken Rule Of Purchase. This was a simple rule, but one that led to amazing discoveries. The rule was thus: we would both buy two cds each, one cd was one you wanted, you’d heard some tracks off it (usually played by Mark and Lard on a weekday afternoon), you’d check out a few more at the listening post (remember them?) and buy it. CD two though, that was the challenge, in a nutshell each of us had to pick an album based on the albums artwork alone, which, if nothing else, killed a few hours.

CDs, they were more than just product, the booklets in them, thought out and collaborated over, were objects d’art in their own right, and it’s these little pieces of document, with their snippets into life, banality and beauty that first drew me into photography as a means of telling stories.

It’s been a year since I picked up my camera with intent again, after a seven year lay off, and it’s taken that full twelve months, through experiment, playing with ideas, relearning things I’d forgotten and wandering off down dead end philosophies, to bring me back full circle to where I find meaning in it all. The middle distance, the unspoken moments of truths unexpressed, when time stops and you find yourself with no dialogue except that without words but with yourself.

I miss the quiet of those old CD inlays, the connection between yourself as viewer and a truth so everyday, presented small, discrete and personal, usually next to some lyrics about some girl who went off you.

Photography is a quiet solitude. It is loss, and hope. It is the simple truths of the ugliness and rapture of life, the literature of refraction. Moments unbloomed and remnants of the afterthoughts of a life you never knew existed. The chemical magic of memory marked on paper, the faded lights of time.

Pillars

Stories are important. They’re how we process the trials of life’s trails. Myths forearm and forewarn us, give succour and sense to the ambivalence of the uncaring void, teach us through wisdoms handed down, pains passed on. The allegory of the fable, that all myths must manifest in our lives until we learn their lessons, that they are handed down as tools from craftsmen to apprentice sons, makes their metaphors all the more frustrating and rewarding. There’s Troubles In Adolescence. Sage advice, but it doesn’t hit home, doesn’t flex those memory muscles into shape as a Red Riding does, as dangers that become witches, as Grimm tales of blood.

Society rests on it’s myths, it’s structures are reinforced by them, as a temple roof on pillars of words. When those pillars are rocked a fear filters down when the echelons tremor. But are those tales really ours? Those shadows on cave walls, two dimensional silhouettes given flesh through language, become cage bars forged and laid around us by those in power. Smoothed out, the life sandpapered out of them, they replace our hand me downs, our shabby make do’s, our shared truths. A furious Samson reclaimed his strength through the act of kicking down those pillars, it’s worth remembering that in these times.

Disney never taught me anything that hasn’t been better, realer, more eloquently expressed by the cracked and choked up voice of some old drunk at a bar.  A real Bukowski born in my language. The same lessons, handed to you in your own accent, from a voice that quivers and laughs at the dumb horrific pathos of it all, with the acceptance of regret, punch drunk by the silver linings, those are the lessons you forget and then remember when it’s a little too late. Those are the teachings that get you through the desperate times.

When a culture prises it’s stories back from the corporate state, when it finds voice to force a retelling, brings back the truth of its myths, its wisdom of the shared, that’s when freedom breaks out, it’s structural anarchy, the grass roots rise, take it back for themselves. Cultural change can only steep up, it wont trickle down from those who maintain their power from altars they wish to remain unaltered, and that change starts with the stories, with the folk tales of now.

Commons

Mutual aid is how we got here, not the survival of the fittest doctrine that has been ruling us for the last 40 years, but that doctrine has slowly being picking that aid apart. To give of yourself is to leave a void, one that regenerates and replenishes through receipts of the gifts of others. This is how we were meant to live, with strength in unity. It’s a far cry from extraction, from the act of taking without giving back, from leaving a gulf in someones soul.

Across the new world, the world our forefathers took and killed for and eventually brokered deals with the very people they’d broken to lay claim to, indigenous rights, centuries old on the bartered for, have become a vital and unifying cause in the fight against our planets destruction. That this land was offered to these tribes, a tool in the capture of greater gains for conquestors, for them to continue a way of life harmonious, a mutual aid with the Earth, has become the centre cause of battles fought and won . Won against major players whose only ambition is to extract a profit from the one thing that gives us life and return nothing but smoke and slag. Gamorrah incarnate, those lessons not learned.

The Magna Carta, so famed and fawned over as a piece of equality granting legislation, gave rights to lords and landowners. The Charter of the Forest gave Freemen the right to find food, shelter and fuel in the woodlands. Those rights were stripped away some 754 years later, in 1971, by the Conservatives. It’s these rights we need to fight to reclaim, alongside the Right To Roam, or soon we’ll lose the right to breathe clean, free air.

Nature can and did provide all we need, it’s why they wrested out of our hands in this country. We have no indigenous tribes with historic bad deals to fall back on, no ones rights to uphold in a court of law, no one to lead a way forward with the past. We don;t have those unrepealed old treaties, we’re going to have to find a way to make new treaties with ourselves. Our best hope now being our common bonds, our ties to what was once our common lands, our heritage and our future survival bonded into one. Community is a raft in these tumultuous seas we find ourselves floating on. We have to organise, to uncontain ourselves, there are other ways to live, why are we choosing this one?

Hegemony, the idea that an elite can build a society where every cultural institution, even every daily task can somehow build into a structure that constantly reinforces and reinstates belief in it’s overriding ideology, is no longer a paragraph in old old Anarchist manifesto. We’re living and breathing it every day. The simple acquisition of bread, that most mundane and vital performance becomes paean to the god of extraction, a trip to the temple of oil. You can barely go to the woods these days and if you do? There won’t be teddy bears having picnics, there’ll be plastic cordons, and signs telling you not to partake in that which once belonged to us all. Until they fenced it, and charged you to get in. A levy, a toll, an extraction.

Did we ask for this? Did we request that our relationship with the natural world would become a transaction? A parasitic one way exchange where once it was mycellic? Symbiotic? No, it was sold to us, sold, not given, in exchange for what we once possessed and what was taken by force.

The commons have become the spaces between us, us commoners. As the media rains it’s rules down on us, the per perceived perspectives of what constitutes aceptable behaviour, it’s through these commons, through exchanges within them, that we can mount our challenges. Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, these movements with one foot echoing from the Paris Communes, these much maligned, disparate diasporas united by a common cause from all walks of life, are the most exciting thing to have happened in decades. Gone now is the image of the Crusty circling a fire poi on some picket line. These are shop workers, teachers, nurses, to use the the popular parlance of our times, key workers. All united by a shared bond of compassion for the earth and those who live on her, all prepared to risk ridicule and step outside the parameters of our cultural norms for what they believe in, for each other, and for us.

Grass roots are what will save us now, restructuring from the bottom up, commuinity led. Those vested interests won’t effect change from the top, they’ve got too much to lose, but we’ve got too much to gain to not start it from the floor. A habitable earth, a shot at good mental health for everyone, these aren’t unreasonable demand, and nature holds it all for us.

When we half stagger from this strange sand we find ourselves mired in, when it’s safe to resume society and we break back into the dawn, lets start with that conversation about what kind of society we want, what kind of planet we want. We can find ways to reconnect with each other and our lands, for they are our lands, we just took our eyes off them, distracted by plastic and flashing lights, and they were made off with, and now we have to fight to get them back. Sign petitions, form councils, refuse to let any more of our public spaces be sold off only to be rented back to us by the hour. If land is resource and resource is power, why do we want to give it to those who will use it to extract profit from us?

Intimacy

It’s in the gaps. The voids between the markers that signpost the way, that’s where the stuff happens, everything else is just direction. When the imagination moulds the lights and wanders into those etched grooves, when the maps find a clearing, an empty space, the magic takes hold.

The relationship, that intimate connection between your mind and a piece of artwork, that which exists in this space, is the only true value of a art. If you can gaze for hours, lost as in a lovers face, at a bunch of masking tape balled up, stuck to a wall, if all you see is beauty in that banality, then that masking tape is worth more than money aver could be. Beauty being in the beholders eye, no one should be educated on this. And if you don’t see beauty? Walk away, look at something else.

There’s nothing so democratic as a pair of eyes, and art, culture, whatever you want to call it, it’s only there to serve, to bring comfort to the soul as we career blindly toward death and confusion. If the lighthouse doesn’t shine to you, you don’t follow it’s lights. If comfort doesn’t come calling for the clifftops, take some time amongst the trees.

Intimacy is a human need, and solace in it’s loss is the lights exploding in the gap between night and day, the soul pricking stab of your truths clarity reflected.