A Room with a View

 

My cousin Steve Robinson recently used one of my pinhole photographs on a video to accompany his song ‘Room with a View’ (a follow up to his ‘Unnecessary War’ song video, which also featured my pinholes). As part of our ongoing collaboration I wanted to write something in response (I'm also painting a response, that'll take longer to create than this blog post but I'll hopefully have something to show in a few weeks). I’ll start with a few words about the photo, which was taken in 2007 with a wooden box camera. It cost me 15 pounds from a shop specializing in children's games and toys. Here's a photo of it as it was nearing the end of it's life. 

There was a hole (fashioned with a pin from Mum’s sewing box) for an aperture, no lens or viewfinder, and another small square of wood fastened with a screw for a shutter, which I manually slid to one side to begin the exposure, and slid back to finish it. Inside the wooden box was a square of photographic paper, which was replaced using a darkroom changing bag after every exposure. 

This camera, alas, is no more. It fell off the top of the Sigiriya mountain palace in Sri Lanka in 2014 and disappeared into the jungle. It offered me a very productive 13 years though, which wasn't bad at all for something held together for much of it's life with electrical tape and an elastic band!

The photo was created at Tenterden train station, in Kent, southern England. There was a 1940’s revival day going on. Lots of fine old cars and people milling about in war-era clothes. I stood on the platform for a while watching a couple of steam trains come and go and people waiting to board or alight, getting the feel of the overall flow of the place. When the lady appeared with her back to me as a train approached, I prepared to make a long exposure image. Long enough to capture something that was just beyond the reach of a straight edged, modern, western mindset, but not so long that the image would be too blurry, overexposed, or otherwise unreachable. I imagined coaxing an image forth that might act as a kind of bridge between how I felt and how I imagine the English mainstream feels, a photo that might offer them a path to my way of thinking. I opened the shutter, felt the strength of the daylight on my forehead, and closed the shutter again about 3 seconds later. I never use a light meter, always work by feel. Sometimes I’m completely out of touch with the earth and get all the exposures that day wrong. But it never seems a waste. For now and again I believe I achieve a flow, and a result, I'm happy with, as is the case with this image.

I’m the sort of artist who likes to use many tools but never wants them to get in the way of the flow of energy from the source to the finished product. Often I fail in that but occasionally magic happens. Some artists talk of collaboration with the unknown, of meeting it halfway, such as in the wonderful poem by Gary Snyder titled ‘How Poetry Comes To Me’.

“It comes blundering over the

Boulders at night, it stays

Frightened outside the

Range of my campfire

I go to meet it at the

Edge of the light”.

I have an inkling, also, that maybe it’s not so much we venture out and collaborate with the world, but that the world offers us a thread and then we must do our best not to spoil the essence of it as we take it from thread to finished artwork. The main difference in these perspectives is that in my idea the earth is the originator of the thought, and the process, not us. We just join it wherever we're aware enough to notice it's existence. Now, in my late 50’s, I’m still working out how to do that. It seems if I try to put my most obvious fingerprints all over whatever I'm working on, that often destroys the essence of what I'm aiming for. 

Perhaps the process of creation takes priority over the finished work for me. I have always felt that this may be the case, hence I’ve tried to ensure that the making of art is the most important part, rather than the exhibiting or performance of it. And hence why I've often been drawn to the spirit of collaboration, such as the one Steve and I have going on now. Because making art with another human is, in my experience, mostly more rewarding than making it on my own.

So, that’s how the pinhole image came to be. And now I’m going to talk about past and present, about nostalgia, and I feel like a little boy trying to reach the biscuit tin on the top shelf, balancing on a chair, fingertips wafting in air, custard creams just out of range. So please go easy on me, I'm out of my depth but feel compelled to explore! How to talk about nostalgia, the past, and it’s interest for me…this is probably just a little too far for my current level of understanding, as are many of the topics I touch on in my writing and speech these days, hence a fair few mental blocks come my way, but I’ll give it a go.

Looking at my photos, or listening to many of Steve’s songs, including ‘Room with a View', you can be forgiven for thinking that we’re two old chaps sitting at a pavement café, trading teary eyed tales, operating largely in the past. But, if this is indeed your thought, I invite you to revisit your idea of time.

I know it’s tricky. Kind of like saying, hey, Einstein struggled with this one, but maybe we can just get it straight in a couple of minutes, over a nice cup of tea?

In some people’s worlds' the past is a very large place, and the present a very small place. For me though, and perhaps it’s true also of Steve, my idea of the present has been enlarged so much that it contains almost all of the past.

It’s an idea that maybe you have to buy into for it to make sense. Very much like the non-linear idea of time that so many indigenous people have. Belief in it begins like an act of faith, and then that faith becomes something more solid and suddenly you have a firm foothold from which to understand further.

For instance, I might say that Mum and Dad, and all those who went before, and all the places and experiences they told me of, are not really dead and gone like our modern world considers them to be. It doesn’t matter that they’re not physically there in the bodies I recognize. I often bake a cake for my parents and set it down in front of a candle. With it I put my Dad’s pint glass, and Mum’s cocktail glass, both filled with beer made in the town where Dad did his National Service, and then I silently speak to them. They don’t answer in words that I understand in my ears or mind, I don’t expect them to. But they do answer in feelings. I don’t believe it’s just my imagination, or simply wishful thinking. Millions of people living closer to the true human spirit - indigenous people of many lands - think a similar way.

The philosopher David Abram has this thought experiment that helps to see this unusual perspective of time. Imagine there are 3 inflated balloons, connected by little pipes with valves. The balloons represent the past, present, and future. Let the air out of the past and future so it all flows into the present. Soon the past and future will be very small. One day they might cease to exist at all.

David Abram also believes that the written word is powerful magic. We must be careful not to be tricked by it, both when we read it, and when we write it. I'm trying to bear that in mind right now. So many in the west use words to deceive others and themselves. I try to avoid that. 

Steve’s song reminds me of a journey I took when I was 19. I felt so lost at that age, out of place, disconnected. I wanted to reconnect with…something more real. So I drove north, towards places where we had once gone on family holidays, and where my parents had gone before I was born and subsequently told us loving stories about. North Wales. Southport. Blackpool. Dinner on the 3rd night of travel was a bag of chips, sat in my car on the seafront. The Blackpool lights were on, it was raining and cold. I rolled the front seat back, pulled a sleeping bag over me, and woke to a brighter dawn. A few families were giving the kids donkey rides on the sands. I visited the tower, the view from the top was fine but it didn’t reach the past. Down below, in the ballroom, old couples were dancing slowly, smiling softly. There it was. That’s how it was.

Folks who looked like they'd spent half their lives worrying if they had enough to last until the end, and working 12 hour shifts for fear that they hadn't, realizing as they whirled that they had enough. In a way they probably always had. It's the realization of it that was missing. 

I realize I'm straying into Stoic territory now. Like Boethius in his cell making the best of things, perhaps. Maybe even misinterpreting Stoicism with such thoughts. Ok, I'll attempt to rein myself in. 

Now, all this talk of ballrooms and the past might be giving you visions of 'The Shining', where Jack walks into the ballroom and the past is ghostly and evil yet very much alive because he's an insane alcoholic. It's not like that with me. That book and movie are an example of creative people taking up a pure thread and instead of guiding it somewhere it needs to go they put their fingerprints and fear over it just so they can earn a few quid, and mess it all up in the process. Much of our mainstream culture is like that. The artist didn't have a light enough, honest enough, brave enough, touch. They hadn't realized, perhaps, that they'd enough already, and that they didn't need to betray inspiration in order to survive. Such betrayal might be good for the bank balance, perhaps, but it's bad for his soul, and for society. (One of the reason's I like Steve's work is that it seems like he's trying to honor the thread of inspiration rather than trying to please, to cash in, or become famous.)

I’m trying to be like how those folk in the Blackpool ballroom appeared to me. I have enough, that's for certain. My girlfriend and I, we move slowly and smile softly. We're not rich by western standards but we have enough, and that's enough.

When I walk by Lake Ontario I notice a certain smell and it’s very distinct and powerful yet still, another scent is there too. It's of the River Medway at the place I was born, where salty sea water flowing in from English Channel meets freshwater flowing down from the High Weald in West Sussex. The scents mingle to create something wider than their individual selves. 

My modern self butts in at this point and says, ok, so this expanded perspective is fine and all the love and good feeling that has ever come your way is still here. Good for you. But what about the bad stuff that came along in the past? Well, somehow, increasingly, I forget that. Maybe I try to either let it go or make good use of it creatively so it becomes something I value. As for some of the present, the wider world madness, that can get depressing, for sure. How to deal with this, I'm not sure yet. It's not very logical, is it? Harm reduction maybe, and perhaps not at all spiritual like I'm trying to make out. I imagine that anybody good with words can tear my theories apart. 

But then again, people good with words are currently trying to convince us all that murdering civilians in the Global South is fine (or at least a legal problem as opposed to a moral issue), that destroying the environment is needed to maintain our lifestyles, and that infinite growth is possible in a finite world. And so on. So maybe the point where true understanding begins is one big jump beyond the point where human words and explanations end. Where human centric magic ends, the real stuff begins. 

And as artists we can just create signposts, rather than destinations. To go further you've got to have faith, and the curiosity and energy to do so.

Have you read much of Antonin Artaud, and his friend, the poet Jacques Prevel? They had very individual views on art and language. Prevel believed in writing poetry as if nothing had ever been written before. Obey no rules, ignore rhyme, syntax, metric forms, even the rhythm of speech. Express no learned references. I fail dismally at the last, obviously, merely by mentioning Prevel. Yet I do look at them as much as David Abram, as I write this.  

Steve and I share a grandfather, Arthur. Mum told me that Arthur would have a single whiskey every afternoon whilst sat in his chair, looking out at the sky. It was one of his core pleasures. One afternoon he passed away quietly in his chair and was found with the whiskey glass by his side, still with an untouched single measure in it. Maybe he got to a point where even a little drink wasn’t required. All he was, was enough. 

After all this waffling, maybe nostalgia is just nostalgia, and that, taken in the right spirit, is not so bad. Nor a crime (yet). Nostalgia for a time when you could still get proper chips. When custard creams and french fancies, and going on a peaceful holiday to Blackpool, and being given 10p to go up the corner shop for a bag of sweets, were as good as it got (and were enough!!!). When words like 'antisemitism' actually meant something, and protestors calling for a sustainable life weren't being jailed en masse. 

Well, I’ve lots more to say on this. It’s like a huge ball of string between us and I’ve only tugged on one strand and begun to unravel it. And you have to have your input, too. But this piece of writing is already too long. Next time, perhaps. Maybe I'll be able to talk clearer then! This collaboration with Steve is helping me see a little further. In the meantime, here's Steve's wonderful song.