Reáchtáil an lámh ar Tonn
Reáchtáil an lámh ar Tonn
the language of flowers
there can be so stillness .
and when then does the stone turn to water?
walk on and on.
through and through.
the cow laughs at the waters edge.
How does the grass sing?
The crow narrates the ocean.
What time is it?
The rock laughs.
Herald the owls.
night potion, a parrot and a tea cup.
smashed vases and broken flowers.
he loves me. he loves me not
the forget me not dies.
There is no language which can be spoken to describe this feeling.
“when the sea cries who will listen” asks the seagull to the rock.
a fish listens in, bemused by the concern.
” I listen” he jauntily replies; ” I will always listen”
The seagull looks on at the sea as it howls and spits out trees.
The rocks wait for time to pass.
Time does pass.
The fish waits at the shore for the seagull.
The seagull does not appear.
A tree emerges beaten by the sea.
” Tell me a story” asks the fish, bold and impatient.
The tree sighs, a long sustained breath, looks longingly at the fish and in silence, crashes itself to the rock.
The fish looks on, a little jealous at their close union.
The rocks offer no comfort to the beaten tree, only a surface on which to rest until the sea comes dashing back to claim its prize.
the pulse that rose
and fell in its abyss,
the cracking of the blue cold,
the gradual wearing away of the star,
the soft unfolding of the wave
squandering snow with its foam,
the quiet power out there, sure
as a stone shrine in the depths,
replaced my world in which were growing
stubborn sorrow, gathering oblivion,
and my life changed suddenly:
as I became part of its pure movement.
( Neurda )
The sea watches me.
It does not speak
It will not speak.
Casting trees.
Holding trees.
The treasure of seaweed.
Falling, always falling, the gaze beyond.
” The world is nowhere, my love, if not within” ( Rilke)
They stand at the foot of the mountains.
And there she embraces him, weeping.
He climbs alone, on the mountains of primal grief.
And not once do his footsteps sound from his silent fate.
But if the endlessly dead woke a symbol in us,
see, they would point perhaps to the catkins,
hanging from bare hazels, or
they would intend the rain, falling on dark soil in Spring-time. –
And we, who think of ascending
joy, would feel the emotion,
that almost dismays us,
when a joyful thing falls. ( Rilke)
The seagull has watched the whole thing, the lady is wet now, sodden and cold and the tree floats on the waves. Maybe she cries a little. The sea gull cannot tell as the rain comes now. The lady or girl, or human retreats back into the caves and tries to become a fish so that she can join the tree.
the waves have been listening.
The rocks have been listening.
the waves depart, leaving a calm sea now.
The seagull shudders at such commotion.
The rocks wait, sometimes they contain to bare witness to so much sadness they weep as the sea, sometimes they bare witness to so much beauty they grow flowers.
The rocks will always wait.
( muid féin ag titim chun píosaí / Tá mé ach aoi ar an sail seo. is an ongoing conversation with the landscape of Devon. All images and film copyright to Beatrice Jarvis and may not be reproduced without permission.)
why do the hundred rivers rush towards the sea?
I am but a guest to this world.
When life begins we are tender and weak.
When life ends we are stiff and rigid.
All things, including the grass and the trees are soft and pliable in life.
dry and brittle in death.
A strong wind does not blow all morning.
a cloudburst does not last all day.
I am but a guest in this world
while others rush about and get things done
I accept what is offered
Oh, my mind is like a fool,
aloof to the clamour of life around me
Everyone seems so bright and alive
with the sharp distinctions of day
I appear dark and dull
I am drifting like an ocean
floating like high winds
Everyone is so rooted in this world
yet I have no place to rest my head.
Perhaps this is difference.
Quiet the restlessness of the mind.
Sharpen a blade too much and its edge will soon be lost.
Can you remain steadfast as the motherbird who sits in her nest?
Wait.
Wait for the passing wind.
One step, two step, three step four.
You promised me one step more.
( cas pian I leigheas / Tá mé ach aoi ar an sail seo. is an ongoing conversation with the landscape of Devon. All images and film copyright to Beatrice Jarvis and may not be reproduced without permission.)
– Tred softly as you tred on my dreams.
but what does the horse chew?
– Memory.
A longing to wander tears my heart,
– Every path leads homeward.
That is home.
| Hold everything dear |
How does the wind listen, and the rain lament.
A quietness that holds memory as a fallen tree.
Another tree looks on, regarding the encounter.
” dont play with dead things’ a thrush chirps.
The tree which lays now next to the earth smiles;
‘When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured’ ( Hesse)
Red red earth and broken sky
The rock and bones.
Steady in the quest for a moment of silence.
The wind howled, not a lament, but an exhaustion.
The sun asked; ‘why do you hurt so?’
The wind paused and sighed. ‘ Though I may journey from place to place, as force, as obstruction, as change, carrying seeds, birds and gulls, changing seas and forms, in my core all I wish for is to settle and to travel no more and to simply stop here and be here and that to be all ‘
The sun hid a moment and looked to the cloud for some words to counsel the winds, but by the time the sun had returned the wind had departed leaving no trace other than scattered ferns.
“Perhaps we need not ask”
The tree and the leaves sighed to one another as the day began to hide.
“She will learn”
The tree said very slowly
” Turn pain into medicine”
The leaves sighed for they had left a long before the tree had finished his sentence, but the roots quaked and the earth turned, holding close the words.
” Who is she calling too?’
The moss has settled now to watch the scene.
The fern became agitated.
‘ Why should you always ask. These lands leave each to their own quest.’
A horse bounds on.
A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one’s suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death. ( Hesse)
( cas pian I leigheas is an ongoing conversation with the landscape of Devon. All images and film copyright to Beatrice Jarvis and may not be reproduced without permission.)
cosa succede quando si dimentica la riflessione.
La memoria è un’amante crudele.
La sua pelle è morbida, ma le sue parole mordere e duro.
Quanto ho tempo di ricordare il mio riflesso. ha preso prigioniero e detiene la chiave.
Lei mi tiene così vicino e poi mi butta in un lago di ghiaccio freddo dove mi siedo.
Assente.
Sguazzare.
Quanto ho tempo di ricordare il mio riflesso. ha preso prigioniero e detiene la chiave.
Terrò la tua mano.
la tua mano scivola
e io cadere.
partito.
Io contare fino a dieci
e dimenticare tutto
e ricordare solo
uno tendrill gara.
Queste immagini ora si sentono stranieri.
il passato è un paese straniero.
il passato è un amante assente.
il passato è il sapore amaro della perdita.
il passato è un relitto che userò la colla a mettere insieme solo per distruggere ancora e ancora.
il passato è un paese straniero.
si prega di avvicinarsi chiese.
voglio guardarti.
(Per cancellare e dimenticare)
Si prega di venire più vicino in modo che io possa ricordare dove è sei.
Ma lei corse.
corse finora che le scarpe rotto. il suo cuore si spezzò.
non ci può essere ritorno.
non ci può essere ritorno.
– –
there can be no return.
( she clicked her gold heels)
fragment
n
1. a piece broken off or detached: fragments of rock.
2. an incomplete piece; portion: fragments of a novel.
3. a scrap; morsel; bit
vb
4. to break or cause to break into fragments
[C15: from Latin fragmentum, from frangere to break]
Sometimes memory is a game
selective enchantment.
Lost in sea of boiled asphalt.
Chasing dreams I wish I had written down.
Promises I wish I had written down.
Other peoples footsteps.
I have to draw in my own shadow.
Realities I passed in brief duet
Now feel more like home than worn out shoes.
The egg timer will not stop
as I will not sleep to turn it over,
so you can dream and I will let time give us a room.
Let us take time and sit with it.
To sail a sea that has not been crossed yet.
“Lets run to Hollywood. and count pigeons.
Or we could sit.
And you could tell me a story.”
The lady has lost her teeth again.
So she just smiles and nods at me.
“Seems like lately that things are changin”
He won’t finish his sentences and keeps eating kippers
“But Beatrice, one day you have to sit still”
The egg timer is blue.
The sky blue.
My socks blue.
At least there is some synergy.
“What becomes of broken hearted?”
A new jar of kippers and its day break again.
The lady puts on her boxing gloves and the parrot grins.
Where we were, where we are. These things have no meaning now.
To find an exhaustion.
We dance again in silence.
Blood. Sweat. Tears.
” Thats all you need” she said handing me a map on a napkin to a bakery.
Bread.
” Your in Hollywood now”
i wish I could remember what it smelt like.
Spaces of faded grandeur, that perhaps never existed.
Chasing my own tale ( tail)
The book is soaked in water.
I can read my words.
Can we forget feelings in the same way?
To submerge my head in water?
I want to be a fish
To live under the under sea.
to stay hidden in seaweed all day.
to count the sea birds which fly overhead.
And say nothing.
To know nothing of this world and its absurdity.
” Perhaps you would help me cross the road? ”
” Perhaps you would help me cross the road? ”
because sometimes we forget:
to breathe in itself is quite a miracle.
This complicated series of cells and passages we call the body.
it hold us.
sometimes when it is quiet i like to dance fiercely.
and get so exhausted i fall over.
and then i get up again.
and i start again.
I have gone back to ballet and minimalism for a brief affair.
Discipline. Rigour. restraint. abundance.
Such classicism confuses me at points.
Learning another’s language.
“There is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.”
Yet how do we learn it?
How do we repeat it?
How can we teach it?
“The body is a great intelligence, a multiplicity with one sense, a war and a peace, a herd and a herdsman.”
Yet how hard it is to gather, form, calibrate, when speaking another language.
sometimes i give up
and listen to the rise of fall and breath.
then i go back what makes sense.
and i leave the studio and walk and run.
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”
“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.”
Other peoples voices. Other peoples vocabularies.
What then is left to say?
” landscape is a way of seeing that has its own history ”
I suppose sometimes to be only in the body
when there are moments when nothing quite seems to make sense.
landscape and power.
landscape is an exhausted. ( form)
landscape is ( not ) an exhausted medium
no longer a mode of artistic expression. perhaps fallen.
routine. testing. practice. exhaustion.
can we see landscape not a form of art but as a medium?
a medium of exchange
between human and natural
The other and the self.
Landscape as a social hieroglyph
Landscape as perhaps our own commonality
yet I have no idea what you feel when the soil is between your fingers.
we are surrounded by things we have not made.
landscape as ideology
landscape as method of power
landscape as escape from humanity
i want to count the grass stalks and not say one word.
stressing the disjuncture between spectacle and their subjects
one cannot own ‘ place ‘
The affect is not yet clear.
System. abstraction/ order.
DIS ORDER
and then.
Chaos
perhaps i run
to run away
perhaps i dance
to dance away
perhaps one should count each blade of grass
I like to talk to sheep.
I like to watch clouds.
I like not knowing where i will end up
but to keep going
i like exhausting myself.
even in dreams there has to be a quietness, the hearing nature is still alert.
“the waking have one world in common, sleepers have each a private world of his own.”
i like to hide behind trees
when no one will ever come
and imagine its hide and seek.
this could be a conversation.
but we have sealed our mouths.
leave only footsteps.
.. to perhaps nothing at all.
because sometimes i fall over and forget to count the grass stalks.