Last night I had a v curious test at the hospital where they inject dye into your vein (blood) and fire you into a tunnel simultaneously. What follows is a surge of heat from the top of your head to the other end — a zippo lighter effect!
Technology and tests are often passive. Put your arms out, take a picture, squash body part into square and don’t move. This one was active! There was something sporty in the instruction we’re injecting the dye now spurt, spurt, spurt and then slide, whirr tunnel and SURGE — did a small arrow just pass through me?
Hospitals are a crossroads where in the morphine mid song you meet your fellow humans on a parallel platform covered in the same standard issue hot blanket. The man beside me at the tunnel intersection had lost the use of his hands after waking one night to sudden onset numbness below his shoulders. Another man had temporarily lost the use of his hands because he was rolling drunk, abusive and post a pub brawl the RCMP had to handcuff him to the bed so his injuries could be treated.
Today thanks to the great medical care and their various infusions I am significantly improved.
“La moitié de l’année, les heures de liberté sont dans la nuit. Mais tous les matins, c’est la hantise du retard.
Départ à la nuit noire. Course jusqu’à la station. Trajet aveugle et chaotique au sein d’une foule serrée et moite. Plongée dans le métro tiède. Interminable couloir de correspondance. Portillon automatique. Entassement dans les wagons surchargés. Second trajet en autobus. Le travail est une délivrance. Le soir, on remet ça : deux heures, trois heures, quatre heures de trajet chaque jour.
Cette eau grise ne remue que les matins et les soirs. Le gros de la troupe au front du travail, l’arrière tient. Le pays à ses heures de marée basse.”
Extrait (voix sur) de L’amour existe par Maurice Pialat.
Vomiting trains..
“The train wound in curves along the narrow pass; he could see the front carriages and the labouring engine vomiting great masses of brown, black and greenish smoke, that floated away.” The Magic Mountain Thomas Mann.
Made in Japan
Recently I had been gah-brooding on trains. Then I was on a train with a sick child and the broodle gah-moodled into a head in the toilet result.
Well I am back on them again! As long as I keep my child off them, all will be well for the broodling.
My recurring thoughts about trains centre on visual artist (and my partner) Jeremy Isao Speier’s new series of kinetic sculptural works Made in Japan. I was at his studio at different times over recent months after quite a long gap and met the new work in different instalments. Some pieces in the series feature photographs of trains, which for some reason take me imaginatively into the industrial decline of the mid west of America. I don’t know why that is, since the series references a Japanese economic time. The sculptures also send me to one of Zola’s openings which I must look up (The Beast Within?) and Mann’s The Magic Mountain. Entry points.
Today when watching Pialat’s L’amour existe I was struck by how the trains in it divide the piece almost like the turning of a page, the speed at one point of the window passing is deliberately falsified to give an impression of it passing. It has to have been tampered with because it is soo uneven and because I sat on that very train but a few days ago and I know precisely how it moved!
This evening again I was looking at the series at the studio. They feature a rectangular encasement around the photographs, made of perspex, and then I had it! The old trains that ran on the Clapham Junction line used to have individual carriages and in order to see was there any space you had to look in through the closed door. When you looked if a person was in there you’d always the sense of spying and might continue to hunt an empty carriage.
The pieces remind me so much of train carriages, in the way you look into the sculptures so carefully to realize and collaborate with their components and like being an active reader, these pieces offer an active viewing experience and that is why for this viewer they have me travelling so far.
All of the objects are, in actual fact, culled on and around Main Street in Vancouver. (The local being the way to the general as John McGahern would say or in this case out to the general.) And as they are motorized they move. The starting point were the motors, I believe, which were all Made in Japan.
Beans II
I have gone and replanted beans. This is a very daft thing to do, but I feel a call to battle with these slugs who have danced all over my beanog dream.
Unfortunately I have planted beans in a haphazard have-at-you- manner and will never be able to locate them until they show themselves, when no doubt the slugs to shall raise their pokey swords in the mushy night.
Yesterday a man, Glaswegian, asked me the never ceasing what do you think of it here? question. The question was followed by a cock-eyed intense look and expectant pause. I had the feeling a pendulum was waiting to launch depending on the vowels I chose with which to fill said pause. It was morning, I needed a painkiller for my killing-me-ribs and wanted to get up the stairs swiftly. I thus filled it with the words that would achieve that and off I hopped.
Truthfully I should have answered on any given day at any given hour I think about 156 different things about here. Many of them are contradictory and include the chastisement geography is in the mind.
During the recent two week sojourn away from here, I also thought 156 different things an hour about there. Many of the things I had stacked up about there, in order to improve my disposition to being here were swiftly dismissed or rearranged. Damn it. People there would ask me of here. They’d ask me in that “Canada’s lovely so it is” amen tone. Lucky you. They wanted to be told life is much better here than it currently might be there. I had to paint strip away at imagined Canadian utopia on the North side and South side of Dublin, in Mayo and even on the bus in between.
In total that gives me 312 things thought an hour about 2 different places. Of which about 6 and a half make actual sense.
Within the here and the there, it is people more than geography that affect me. This morning I had coffee with a gang who raise me up here. Last week it was a gang there. Sin e. I appear to be blessed in the here and the there. And now I am off to eat dinner with my marvellous males who have to put up with me when I am here and there and dithery in the in between.
And then there’s the advantage of ageing….
Just treated myself to Monsieur Pialat’s L’amour existe (1960) sans sous titres.
Jetlag has been gnawing at me, but have been restored intermittently when able to keep eyes open by Declan Kiberd’s Ulysses and Us. A timely read. Had been hunting for it. Grabbed it at Eason’s in Dublin. Loved that it was 3for2 stickered. This gesture being entirely appropriate to its central thesis. Have some thoughts on his citing of common culture.
I’ve great faith in readers.
For some reason those two shots of the Spire look like they are taken underwater. Like I said earlier it was blue, blue, blue the day with the silver rising against it. Love that piece it adds so much to O’Connell Street and gives a much needed hoof to the elevated males further down the row by the bridge.
