Three exhibitions of things not quite

I have been working on ideas for some exhibitions focusing around the idea of collecting things that are not quite present. The first exhibition started life under the title “Spaces” and was intended to be a collection of scenes captured at the moment when the important subject had just moved away. Rooms photographed just after the person in whom the photographer was interested had left. Branches just after the bird that a photographer had been stalking has flown out of frame. Moments just after the important moment, which are then redefined to become important themselves. These are the moments immediately after most people have looked away. These are the points where the period of noticing has just ended, and a different period is just beginning. With practice, we can extend our period of noticing and learn to capture these moments. Otherwise they may as well never have existed. We can learn to be not only in the moment, but in the moment after. We can learn to keep noticing.

As that idea evolved it became clear that what I was trying to capture were not just spaces, but moments, and so the working title for that first exhibition became “The moment after”. It was important that these were not images simply of things left behind. I did not want the detritus after the flood, or the circle on the grass after the circus. I was not looking for after-effects, or signs, or evidence. I was looking specifically for absence, rather than for any indication of former presence. Without an accompanying caption or story it would not be apparent what had just been missed, but once the absence was known, the moment after would acquire some significance.

As the idea of “The moment after” moved forward I found myself struggling to capture the notion that these were moments other than, but close to, the important moment. There was always the trap, the danger, of capturing the moment itself, or some shadow of it, rather than the blankness of the moment after. The moments I wanted were obviously not “the President making a speech”; they were not even “the room where the President had made the speech”. Also I didn’t want simply to capture a relic such as “the podium at which the President had stood”. What I wanted was specifically a moment when the president was not there; the speech was no longer being made; nobody was paying attention. These were moments that had escaped and may almost as well never have occurred. They were moments that did not matter other than in that they were adjacent to moments which had. And that idea of adjacency drew my back to my geographical roots, setting me on the path to a new idea: the idea of locations adjacent to, but absolutely other than, important or well-known locations. Here would be an image not of the room where a famous event had occurred, but a room in a building across the street. A room in the unremarkable apartment upstairs from the famous apartment where the event had occurred. These were peripheral locations. Locations to which everybody had their backs turned at the important moment. These locations were simply nearby, which gave me the title for the exhibition: “Nearby”.

“The moment after” and “Nearby” drew attention to moments and places that were close to, but other than, the moments and places that everybody noticed. In trying to identify items for inclusion in those collections I found myself discounting and discarding objects that were neither moments nor locations but nevertheless fell into that same category of “nearly but not quite the thing to which everybody would pay attention”. Hence the origin of my third exhibition: an exhibition of objects that were nearly, but not quite. I would include, for example, a sheet of parchment from the workshop of Leonardo Da Vinci. But it would be a blank sheet that he had never used. Had he done so, it could have been as famous as any work of art, and perhaps the sheet that was above it in the pile in the studio is now behind bullet-proof glass in the Louvre. But this sheet is one on which Da Vinci never drew. And here is a roll of unexposed film found amongst the effects of a famous photographer: had he lived longer, this would have been the roll he used next. Here is a type writer that Hemingway did not use, but would have done if things had been different that year. Here is the car that James Dean did not drive. Here is a piece of fabric from one of the flags that they did not raise that day on Iwo Jima. The title of this third exhibition: “Almost”.

Nowadays, everyone is a curator. I shall curate these moments, places and objects that are not quite. But they may be hard to find. They may be difficult to notice.

If you exceed the word limit…

If the dissertation handbook says “write no more than 11,000 words and provide a word count” and you put “word count 11,673″ on your submission, you should not only fail your dissertation but fail your entire degree, and all your work should be publicly burned. That is, of course, my personal opinion and not that of my employer.

Entropy – whatever that really means

As is true for most people, I suspect, whether they realise it or not, my understanding of most things is pretty hazy. Most technical terms seem to be in one way or another controversial or uncertain. People use the same term in different ways, for different things. And even when you find a term with which you are comfortable, or a concept in which you are confident, that confidence is shaken when somebody declares, with even greater confidence than your own, that most people (probably, you infer, including yourself) have a completely misjudged understanding of what is, they claim, a much more complex idea than most people realise. Entropy is one of those terms. In the old days when I used occasionally to look up its meaning or have conversations about it with colleagues, students or friends (as one did in those days), it was rare indeed for the conversation to pass or for the source to be consulted without there being some reference to the fact that most people got the wrong end of the stick when trying to talk about entropy. Such terms then take on a permanent shimmer of incertitude. Rather like the word “incertitude” one uses the notion of entropy with a deep and unshakable feeling that you may well be using it incorrectly. It is with that feeling, therefore, that I tell myself today how much my blogs, tweets, web pages, facebook groups, Virtual Learning Environment sections and other online presences are tending towards… I hesitate to say it… entropy. After a certain point, unless there was a clear design underpinning the original conception, the management of an expanding web empire becomes a battle to retrieve lost structure or instil some form of order into an increasingly disordered mass. Perhaps if left to its own devices the mass would mutate into some naturally ordered form, like a crystal emerging from a liquid. In my case I see no sign of that. And so I am getting out the shears and having another prune, another hack, and lopping off more or less random extensions of the crumbling, rotting empire. I am turning loose to the barbarians, releasing to the sea, leaving behind in the desert, and allowing to dissolve into the ether a whole wing, a whole battalion, a whole region of the empire. Letting the jungle burst back up through the concrete. Letting the termites do their thing. If ever you knew that there was such a thing as physicalgeography.org.uk that knowledge is redundant now. It’s gone. It’s toast. It’s history. Or, at least it will be soon. Dead domain walking…  For a few minutes my world will feel just a little more simple and a little less disordered.

Ten Commandments for Geographers (1-5)

Alain de Botton recently published a list of “ten commandments for atheists”, and I thought it might be fun to try and think what the ten commandments for Geographers might be! It might also make a good teaching exercise, getting students to come up with their own versions of such a list. Here’s a first attempt from me:

Ten Commandments for Geographers

1. Thou shalt be curious about the world around you.

2. Thou shalt make detailed, accurate and thoughtful observations of the world.

3. Thou shalt communicate effectively the observations that you make and the implications thereof.

4. Thou shalt strive always to see the big picture as well as the fine detail.

5. Thou shalt explore.

Phew… that’s enough for now. I’ll try to think of 5 more for a for a follow-up post. Suggestions please! You could always give these first five to your students and let them come up with the rest.

Haiku, again

Starting another round of trying to get students to try writing Haiku as a way of honing their observation and reporting skills, I looked back here to see whether I had said anything about this exercise previously. The entries are quite well hidden, so I thought I’d re-post some of the text here so it would be together in one place… in case any of the students seek it out!

“One of the hearts of Geography is the search for a sense of place: the quest to identify, capture, record and represent the essence of a location. Japanese haiku poetry does much the same thing. Sometimes at the scale of a bug under a leaf, sometimes at the scale of a view to the distant horizon, Haiku try to capture in a succinct and tightly formalised way the essence of what a geographer would call a landscape.”

“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about using haiku in teaching. Haiku are great for encouraging concise and precise writing, and they are also good for training students to look carefully and notice things. I spoke to the 3rd-yrs on Friday about how the best way to make yourself really look closely at something was to give yourself the task of representing it or recreating it in some way. For example, by making a model, doing a drawing… or writing a poem. Look really hard and write what you see. The first attempt will be trivial, so look deeper… repeat until you are seeing things you never noticed before. I really like the idea of Geographical Haiku. Yes, of course all genuine Haiku are geographical in that they refer to an aspect of the natural environment, but I’d really like to develop haiku that refer to a specific location and could be geotagged on google earth. I could set students an exercise to write about their home area, or a place they visited, and plot the poems up onto a big map. May be such a thing already exists in google earth… may be one of my excellent students will read this, seek it out and let me know. Meanwhile I put a few up on twitter now and again.”

The far flung islands

I tell my students that Geography is all around them, even in the small everyday places that we take for granted. “The truths,” I say “are not out there, they are in here with us; quietly behind that upturned box or in between our tea time and our evening walk.”

Some of the time I believe what I say. I believe that we can find Geography even in the small places. But sometimes I think: no, that’s just not right.  Geography is in the mountains and the oceans, in the desert and the sky. Geography is in the hearts of explorers and in our stories of far-flung islands. Geography is the giant constellation in which we are the tiny points of light.

But just as when our fathers taught us that there are three ways to melt ice, although we know now that they were wrong, when our time comes to teach our sons and daughters we teach them the same three ways.

We tell them what we must. There is no point in teaching them our truths. They have to learn their own.

With glaciers, and a steel guitar, from Hawaii

This week I have been putting together material for a book chapter about glaciers in literature, film and music. I was looking for an example to start the chapter to show how glaciers are often used as metaphors in art. I went with this one.

Ned Selfe is a musician who grew up in the deep south of the USA and is now based in Hawaii. His main instrument is the Steel Guitar. In 1995, when he produced his first album, he chose the title “Glaciers Come, Glaciers Go”. It didn’t seem an obvious choice of title for a rock-jazz new age album by a Hawaii-Southerner with tracks called Castaway, Wavelength and Ocean Avenue, so I wrote to ask him why. He explained that he wanted an image that would allude to the transitory nature of human consciousness: we all tend to inflate our current problem or obsession into a giant megalith that seems forever unchanging and all consuming, when in fact it will soon melt and fade into the next thing that will occupy our thoughts.

Selfe told me that the idea of using the glacier for that metaphor came from  his reading of M. Scott Peck’s book “The Road Less Travelled”. Writing about how we choose a map for our life, Peck wrote: “… the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them.  The world itself is constantly changing.  Glaciers come, glaciers go.  Cultures come, cultures go.  …the vantage point from which we view the world is constantly and quite rapidly changing… we must continually revise our maps.”

You can say a lot using glaciers as a metaphor. Even if you say it from Hawaii with a steel guitar.

In 2000 the film maker Ruth Meyer made a short dance film “Breath Crystal” in memory of her grandparents who died in Auschwitz. It was a choreographic interpretation of the Paul Celan poem “Weggebeist” from Celan’s volume of poetry Atemkristall (Breathcrystal) written in commemoration of the victims of the holocaust. The film’s message about our fragility and yet our ability to overcome is delivered through a dancer’s journey across the ice of the Turtmann Glacier, Switzerland, and the glass objects that he encounters while Celan’s voice intones the lines of the poem over the soundtrack.

People have used glaciers to say a lot of different things in a lot of different ways.

 

Sense-of-Place Geographical Haiku

One of the hearts of Geography is the search for a sense of place: the quest to identify, capture, record and represent the essence of a location. Japanese haiku poetry does much the same thing. Sometimes at the scale of a bug under a leaf, sometimes at the scale of a view to the distant horizon, Haiku try to capture in a succinct and tightly formalised way the essence of what a geographer would call a landscape.

Lost knowledge

You have to love science, much as you have to love a slightly naughty, slightly incompetent little child when it claims to have worked something out about the world for the first time ever.  The study of the history of science may seem a dull and distant cousin to the cutting edge of modern research, but history has many virtues, one of which is to help prevent us having to reinvent forgotten wheels. Researching the history of glaciology for my new book “Glacier”  I have encountered many cases where discoveries have been made, written up… and then forgotten, only for the same questions to be asked again a generation later.

In 2001 the Proceedings of the Geologists’ Association included a paper that the authors described as “the first comprehensive description and interpretation of Pleistocene glacigenic deposits exposed in a cliff section at Thurstaston on the Wirral Peninsula, NW England.” It was a splendid paper, and did indeed provide the most comprehensive description and analysis of that site to date. It even referred to previously published literature about the glaciation of the UK from as early as 1860 to set the historical context for the work. However, it didn’t refer to one particular publication from that era: a fairly obscure note published in “The Glacialists’ Magazine” in 1895 under the heading “Notes on the glacial deposits on the Cheshire shore of the Dee Estuary” by Arthur R. Dwerryhouse, which was itself a detailed description and analysis of those same sediments. The 1895 paper seems to have fallen into the great pit of forgotten knowledge.

The 2001 paper set out to address the ongoing debate about whether the sediments were deposited by a land-based glacier or laid down under water, and whether the different sediments in the sequence represented different events or different processes operating within the context of a single event.  Dwerryhouse in 1895 had used much the same evidence as the 2001 team, including clast lithological analysis, striations on individual boulders and on boulder pavements, and deformation structures and clast fabrics in the sediments to settle the same argument for a previous generation. He concluded that the sediments were glacial, with the “boulder clay” deposited directly by an ice sheet while the sand and gravel were deposited by streams flowing at the base of that ice sheet. The list below compares extracts from the 2001 publication with extracts from the note published a hundred years earlier:

2001: The sedimentary succession at Thurstaston is best explained by the advance and subsequent recession of a single terrestrially based ice sheet during the Late Devensian. Both the diamictons are interpreted as basal, deformation tills with the interbeds of the sand, gravel and mud lithofacies as indicators of subglacial meltwater flow and ponding.

1895: The boulder clays I attribute, then, to the direct action of an ice sheet, and the gravels and sands to subglacial drainage.

 

2001 There is no evidence at Thurstaston to suggest a glaciomarine origin for the Late Devensian deglaciation sediments on this margin of the Irish Sea basin.

1895: I cannot see any evidence in the deposits on this shore in favour of the view that the beds were deposited in deep water.

 

2001: The diamicton lithofacies can be divided into an upper, clast-poor sandy diamicton and multiple units of a lower, clast-rich sandy diamicton.

1895: …two distinct layers of boulder-clay are shown in the cliffs. The lower bed… is sandy and of a bright red colour. The upper bed is… extremely varied in composition, in some places being very gravelly.

 

2001: (There is a) lack of clearly defined changes in clast lithology through the various lithofacies… Particularly distinctive rocks include the Borrowdale Volcanic Group tuffs, the Ennerdale granophyre and Eskdale granite. …

1895: Both beds contain shell fragments and their boulder contents appear to be similar. The latter consists of Eskdale granite, Buttermere granophyres, Scotch granites, Lake District volcanic rocks…

In a way it is reassuring to know that science can repeat its results in an independent re-study of the same question after a gap of a hundred years. Somehow it is comforting, also, to know that the till at Thurstaston hasn’t changed in that time. And it is astonishing to see how Victorian scientists over a century ago could reach the same conclusions as scientists in the 21st century, and then have their work lost and forgotten. It makes you wonder what else has been lost, and what will happen, over the course of time, to the things we are finding out today.

Different ways of writing books

As I get into the “actually writing” stage of my current book project (Glacier, for Reaktion Books) I find myself writing quite differently from how I’ve written previous books.

Previously, I’ve had ideas, developed a plan, and then written stuff down – looking up any facts and figures that I needed as I went along. It seemed to work OK, and it was pretty easy. Perhaps because this new book ranges into areas where my prior knowledge was less complete than my knowledge for the previous books, I set about this one in what I imagined to be the way that real authors work: I started by doing some research! With the “How to write your dissertation” book, for example, research had not really been required. Everything that went into the book was already in my mind before I started the project. All that was required was for me to think of a neat way to say much the same things that I had been saying to students for years. Similarly with the old “Glaciers” book: I pretty much knew what I needed to say, and just had to check details as I wrote.  This one has been different. For a couple of years now I have been collecting, with terrific help from my wife, all manner of bits and pieces of information that are quite new to me, and I have discovered all sorts of things that I previously knew nothing about! I’ve been helped by people such as musicians, art curators and historians with whom I don’t normally have much to do and I have accumulated a mass of material that now needs to be sorted, arranged and turned into the content of this book. So far, I have worked through the accumulated notes and documents for a couple of the chapters trying to put them into an appropriate “narrative”, and I have to say it is quite difficult! It’s a bit like being a student again – setting out to write something on a topic about which you are still learning. Perhaps this is a bad thing. Perhaps a real author should have already discovered everything about the topic, internalised all that knowledge and turned it into understanding, and be ready at the point of writing to present the fully polished pearls. Well, I’m still polishing the pearls as I arrange them into a sensible order.

The difference between the two approaches is a bit like the difference between trying to make something out of a collection of pearls (which I seem to be attempting this time) and trying to make a pearl out of some stuff in my head (which is what my previous approach felt like). I have a feeling that for me this new approach is going to involve an extra step in the end: when I’ve made a string of polished pearls I suspect I may decide that I didn’t want a necklace after all and may have to condense and refashion it into… well, I don’t know. And that’s where my new approach is just like my old one: part of the fun of writing is not knowing quite what you are going to turn out to have said!