Author: startind

Herstmonceux Castle

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herstmonceaux

© Denise Startin

Herst Henge or Wood Henge exists in the Gardens of Herstmonceux Castle. The trees are carved with encoded rune messages. This is the symbol for WYN = Joy and Happiness, the transforming of life for the better. There were 7 symbols in total. The overall interpretation was given thus: “Herst Henge incorporates all the meanings of the runes and translates them into the context of the site. Herst Henge is a place of rest and relaxation, when someone enters into the ring, they will feel that they are experiencing a new beginning in their life, a sense of revitalization will prevail. Herst Henge is a circle of protection and anyone spending  time within the circle will feel empowered and able to depart on a new and challenging time in their life with increased physical and mental energy.”

It certainly was a beautiful place but I think after an exceptionally stressful year I would have needed to just stay in the circle ad infinitum. Hopefully if you meditate on this image a sense of revitalization will prevail for you, if it does let me know.! “Herstmonceux is renowned for its magnificent moated castle, set in beautiful parkland and superb Elizabethan gardens. Built originally as a country home in the mid- 15th – century, Herstmonceux Castle embodies the history of Medieval England and the romance of Renaissance Europe.” Herstmonceux Castle is in Hailsham, East Sussex. [This is not a one horse town, this is a one gnat town but very handy for Eastbourne and Hastings where they do the most excellent fish and chips!]

Rune text quoted from signage in Herstmonceaux castle gardens. Text quoted from http://www.herstmonceux-castle.com/index.php

Friedrich Nietzsche

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“The assumption of a single subject is perhaps unneccesary: perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? A kind of ‘aristocracy of cells’ in which dominion resides? To be sure, an aristocracy of equals, used to ruling jointly and understanding how to command? My hypothesis: The subject as multiplicity. ” (Nietzsche 1968: 270)

For a short but informative passage about Nietzsche and the musical rythms (Also pursued in different ways by Phillip Lacoue-Labarthe and Julia Kristeva) in his texts click here

Text reproduced from Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies, Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Indiana University Press, 1994: p.122

Image reproduced from http://philossophy.wordpress.com/2010/04/10/modernity/

Word Flesh

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Pre/face © Denise Startin

“FLASH – an instant of time or a timeless dream; atoms swollen beyond measure, atoms of a bond, a vision, a shiver, a still shapeless embryo, unnameable. Photo’s of what is not yet visible and which language necessarily surveys, from a very high altitude elusively. Words always too remote, too abstract to capture the subterranean swarm of seconds, insinuating themselves into unimaginable places.

Writing them down tests an argument, as does love. What is love for a woman, the same thing as writing. Laugh. Impossible. Flash of the unnamable, woven of abstractions to be torn apart. Let a body finally venture out of its shelter, expose itself in meaning beneath a veil of words. WORD FLESH.  From one to the other, eternally, fragmented visions, metaphors of the invisible.”

Stabat mater, Julia Kristeva quoted in The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Harvard University Press, 1986 p.99/100

The Flesh of Words > Derma[uto]graphic drifts

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Dermographisme [aka dermographism, dermatographismm or “skin writing] – Démence précoce catatonique, from Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, Paris, 1904.

“Language is understood by Merleau-Ponty according to the self enfolding of the flesh. Language is not dependent on any voice but is what gives voice to the world itself. He writes that “language is everything since it is the voice of no-one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves and the forests.” Language, in short, is the result of or is made possible by the dehiscence or folding back of the flesh of the world. [Invagination?]. In this sense language too is ‘another flesh’, another ‘wild being.’ Continue reading →

Not all those who wander are lost

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Walter Benjamin, Pariser Passagen

In the Field Guide To Getting Lost Rebecca Solnit quotes a question from the pre-socratic philosopher Meno. “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” p.4 […] and goes on to write “To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin’s terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. And one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implication that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrendering, a psychic state achievable through geography.” p.6

The current exhibition at the British Library 25th September celebrates this psychic state through the relationship of writing in Britain. Exhibits include extracts from diaries, notebooks, letters, artworks and sound recordings from a wealth of poets and writers including William Blake, Ted Hughes, George Eliot, James Joyce, J G Ballard, John Lennon, Harold Pinter and more. Writing speaks of walking and wandering [wondering], of finding and losing, of coming and going, of boundaries and horizons, pilgrimages and wild places. Writing and landscape mark each other reciprocally producing dream landscapes, barren landscapes, hostile landscapes, loving landscapes and sacred spaces where the human being who is most of the time caught up in human doing, can take time out and dwell [in the Heideggerian sense of the term] in being. To experience its chthonic heartbeat and return itself to its natural rhythms through walking and what is writing if not a walk on the wild side?

The title of this quote is reproduced from the exhibition and is from J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring.

Quotes reproduced from Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Canongate Books 2011. Image reproduced from http://www.hatjecantz.de/controller.php?cmd=detail&titzif=00002894&lang=en