Stone Talks , livre ebook

Triarchy Press - Alyson Hallett

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60 pages

English

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Description

Stone Talks brings together poems and four talks/essays by noted poet Alyson Hallett on the subject of stones, rocks, somatics and our relationship with our environment.

Sujets

Installation art

Informations

Publié par	Triarchy Press
Date de parution	01 septembre 2019
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781911193562
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Published in this first edition in 2019 by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, England
info@triarchypress.net
www.triarchypress.net
Copyright © Alyson Hallett, 2019
The right of Alyson Hallett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. All rights reserved
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Print ISBN: 978-1-911193-55-5
ePub ISBN: 978-1-911193-56-2
Printed by TJ International Ltd., Padstow, Cornwall
Contents
On Kinship
Stone Talks
Introduction
Chapter 1 - Pebble No Bigger Than My Thumbnail
Chapter 2 - In The Beginning Was The Boulder
Chapter 3 - The Body As A Site Of Intelligence: The Body As A Site of Ignorance
Chapter 4 - A Field, A Stone, A Grief
Chapter 5 - Entering The Vastness
Conclusion
Bibliography
Notes from the Deleted Pile
Acknowledgements
Haunted Landscapes
Bibliography
The Stone Monologues
About the Author
About the Publisher
On Kinship
Embodied Reading
While packing for a recent trip to New York, I was disappointed to realise I didn’t have room to take the book I was besotted with. Travelling with cabin baggage only, I was limited to taking books necessary for work and the one I was besotted with didn’t come into this category. I moaned about this to a friend and she suggested that, without the text, I had a chance to take the book with me in a different way.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“You can embody the ideas in it”, she said, “you can live and breathe them, start to understand them with the whole of your body instead of just your head.”
The book in question was Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway. It contains the potent and highly relevant idea that in these times of environmental destruction we need to think about kinship and how we make relationships of kin with all things, including what she refers to as ‘critters’. This not only makes sense to me, but it appeals to the child in me who sees no difficulty in talking to worms and butterflies and trees. I have my mother to thank for this. As a child I saw her greet blackbirds and sheep, cows and butterflies as warmly as any other friend or relative.
As the Boeing 737 rose into the sky, I settled into watching a documentary about Alexander McQueen closely followed by ‘The Children Act’, based on Ian McEwan’s novel of the same name. I’d feasted on gnocchi with spinach and spicy tomato sauce, downed a couple of drinks and was now feeling sleepy.
As soon as I closed my eyes, my friend was there again, nudging me, reminding me that without my beloved book I had agreed to embody the ideas in it instead.
What did that mean? Embody the ideas in a book? Osip Mandelstam, in Journey to Armenia , mentions the physiology of reading. “It is a rich, inexhaustible, and, it would seem, forbidden theme.” Instead of entering into this forbidden theme, he changes direction after this sentence. Which left me wondering how we go about bringing what we have read into our lives, translating the words that have stimulated our imaginations into our bodies and the way we live. So that a book is not just something we read and then cast away, but something we absorb, digest and allow to viscerally affect us.
In To Kill a Mockingbird , there is the suggestion that reading can teach us to walk in other people’s shoes. Empathy, or sympathy, is the route that the imagination takes when it engages with lives that are different to its own. In my case, however, I was wanting to dive into kinship – and for a while it seemed as if there was no way on earth I was going to be doing that in an aeroplane.
Something began to creep into me. I wasn’t on earth. I was in a metal pod that was hurtling through the sky at around six hundred miles an hour. What made this possible? Fuel. And where did fuel come from? The decomposed bodies of plankton, plants and animals whose liquidation created that beautiful, black viscous gold we call oil. The only reason I was able to hurtle through the sky was because of the countless critters who had lived and died and then been subjected to a process of transformation for more than one hundred and fifty million years.
I closed my eyes. Took a deep breath. Sent myself down, down into the ground, all the way down to where the miniscule plants and creatures had long since ceased to be identifiable as individual entities. I imagined myself into their lives before they died. Microscopic, transparent, drifting. Dinosaurs were walking on the land and human beings were not even a twinkle in a lizard’s eye. I went into the world of the critters, their planet, their ocean where life was possible and where death was possible too. When we died, our bodies fell to the sea bed. Body upon body piled up. So many bodies it was a mass grave of epic proportions.
Next, mud and sand fell on top of us. One layer led to another layer, each successive layer heavier than the last. Layer upon layer pressing down on us. Then more layers on top of that. Until there were so many layers that I lost track of the one I started with. Heat and pressure increased. The layers so heavy we broke down and began to merge, to transform.
This was a curious thing to do. Transporting myself into the creatures whose lives and deaths created the fuel that was catapulting me through the atmosphere. As my body travelled inside a metal tube, I travelled inside my body and into the imagined bodies of tiny creatures. These creatures were and are my kin. Without them, flight is not possible. Without them, I would not be flying from London to New York.
It seems absurd to countenance that plankton which lived one hundred and fifty million years ago are now responsible for my metaphoric wings. Not forgetting the processes of extracting oil, refinement, the developments of design and engineering, I burrowed into an intimacy that would have passed me by if I’d been able to bring Haraway’s book with me because I would have kept on reading without pausing to bring the ideas out of the book and into the body of my imagination.
Perhaps this is why Mandelstam called the physiology of reading a forbidden theme. It isn’t easy to do. I’m not even sure it’s pleasurable. It has changed my perception of the world though. I have had to carve out a space inside myself to take in a bigger reality than I had previously understood. Instead of oil being an idea, a black thing that’s drilled out of the earth, I now had a feeling for the critters the oil was made from. To imagine something is to bring it not only into our minds but into our bodies. The critters were inside me now. I had felt my way into their lives and, as a result, they had come into mine.
The mystical dictum as above so below took on a different resonance. I was starting to see that I was only in the sky because of what had been hidden under the ground. I thanked the critters. I made room for them in my heart, for the sand and mud and rocks that had participated in their transformation. I was discovering that kinship, if it was going to extend beyond an idea in a book, required time and imaginative energy, and from this an awareness that stitched me to the ancient lives of critters as surely as two sides of material are stitched together in a seam. Inseparable then, and along with that an immense gratitude.
I opened my eyes. The lights in the cabin were dimmed. I wasn’t sleepy any more. I scrolled through the menu and started to watch another film.
Embodied Walking
Entering a country where major institutions were on lock down because its President wanted money to build a wall between the USA and Mexico also required skills I had rarely used before. An example of this was on the day when I decided to visit the National Museum of the American Indian, which is situated at the southernmost point of Manhattan where boats leave to cross over to Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty.
I arrived around eleven o’clock, looking forward to a museum that I hadn’t visited before. I bounded up the steps but half way up there was a freestanding notice:
All Smithsonian museums and the National Zoo are closed today due to the government shutdown.
It felt like walking into a glass wall – I could see the museum in front of me but I wasn’t able to go into it. What I saw and what I was being told didn’t match and this meant it was hard to believe. I experienced something similar to this when a bicycle that I’d had for years was stolen. I’d locked it with a D lock to a bike rack near the Odeon in Bristol city centre and gone off to do some shopping. When I came back, the bicycle wasn’t there but for ten minutes at least I couldn’t believe that it wasn’t there. I looked around and checked that it wasn’t nearby. Then I stared at the empty bike rack and tried to take in what I was seeing. It seemed impossible that it had gone, that its substance was no longer where I had left it. Someone I knew passed by and asked if I was all right. I told them what had happened and they ushered me into a café and bought me a coffee.
Still in a state of disbelief that a national museum could be closed due to a government shutdown, I noticed an open door at the bottom to the right of the steps – skipped down and went in. Three museum guards were skulking around a table. They were surprised to see me, but I was glad to see them as I thought they might be able to let me in.
“Is the museum really closed?” I said.
The guard nearest me nodded. “Yes mam.”
I asked them how they felt about this and about having to work without being paid.
“We’re not at liberty to comment Mam.”
I sidled out and wondered what to do. The Holocaust Museum was nearby and so I set off along