Visual Fragments

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

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

French Horn with Mouse

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“Can you ever forgive me for posting this delightfully corny image?” I had almost forgotten how I got here and then realised it had been produced by a search for images of Rebecca Horn. Hence a combination of surrealist chance and google images produced French Horn with Mouse [or Mouse with French Horn].

John Cale of the Velvet Underground is playing in the background [Fragments of a Rainy Season] and I am reading about writing, techné and female sexuality and this image provided a little light-hearted relief. Could it be that somewhere deep in Dissertation Land there is a mouse playing a french horn?.

Image reproduced from http://rakstagemom.wordpress.com/tag/the-nutcracker/ [there is very little here about the genesis of this image.]

Deleuze

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First Drafts_DS 2012

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.”
Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Text reproduced from POSTCOLONIAL ‘TEXTUAL SPACE’: TOWARDS AN APPROACH
 by Alexander Moore . For the full article click here.

 

Landing Sites > Arakawa and Gins

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Shausaku Arakawa_Out of distance / Out of texture
[Distance of point blank B]

 “Were nothing being apportioned out, no world could form. What is being apportioned out no-one is able to say. That which is being apportioned out is in the process of landing. To be apportioned out involves being cognizant of sites. To be cognizant of a site amounts to having greeted it in some manner or to having in some way landed on it. There is that which gets apportioned out as the world. There is an apportioning out that can register and an apportioning out that happens more indeterminately. A systematic approximating of how things are apportioned out should be possible.

The body is sited. As that which initiates pointing, selecting, electing, determining and considering, it may be said to originate (read co–originate) all sites. Organism-person-environment consists of sites and would-be sites. An organism-person, a sited body, lives as one site that is composed of many sites.”

For more information about the work of the artist Arakawa and Madeline Gins, artist, architect, poet and their architectural poetics in The Mechanism of Meaning please click here

Text reproduced from Architectural Body, Chapter 2 Landing Sites, MadelineGins and Shausaku Arakawa, The University of Alabama Press, USA 2002:pp.5

Image reproduced from http://nga.gov.au/international/Catalogue/Detail.cfm?IRN=74725&ViewID=2&GalID=ALL