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I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert. W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995 Water hollows stone, wind scatters water, stone stops the wind. Water, wind, stone. Wind carves stone, stone’s a cup of water, water escapes and is wind. Stone, wind, water. Wind sings in its whirling, water murmurs going by, unmoving stone keeps still. Wind, water, stone. Each is another and no other: crossing and vanishing through their empty names: water, stone, wind. Octavio Paz, "Wind, Water, Stone”, The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987. A brown musically moving beauty, the earth’s fullness Slides towards the sea. An escape Of earth-serpent, with all its hoards, casting the land, like an old skin, Pulling its body from under the eye. Ted Hughes, Fairy Flood (River), 1983 We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter towards its doom. Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943 Wanderer in the black wind; quietly the dry reeds whisper In the stillness of the moor. In the gray sky A flock of wild birds follows; Slanting over gloomy waters. Georg Trakl, At the Moor, 1887-1914 ‘In some mysterious way woods have never seemed to me to be static things. In physical terms, I move through them; yet in metaphysical ones, they seem to move through me.’ John Fowles, The Tree, 1979 The sensation that John Fowles so precisely anatomises is the feeling we have when we contemplate Guy Dickinson’s photographs. As records of the physical world and as pure sensory experience, their intricate visual fields circulate through us. Thicket is an Old English word, distinguishing areas of dense growth from thin woodland, where the trees grow more sparsely. With power and poetry, Dickinson’s images manifest the way these ‘thick’ territories are also thin places, where the veil between the earthly world and everything that is other feels most porous. Conventional polarities of form and space, light and shadow break down. Void acquires mass and the deepest darkness has a lambent quality. We start to lose ourselves and in this dissolution experience a thrum of profound recognition. For hundreds - thousands - of years, we were people of the trees. Our earliest forebears inhabited landscapes dominated by vast forests of oak, ash, beech, elm, Scots pine, yew and chestnut. We lived, hunted and foraged in these woods and with its timber constructed shelters, kept warm, cooked, smelted and fashioned countless implements. Little wonder that trees saturate the stories we told ourselves to explain our origins and order our world view. The first holy places in Neolithic times were artificial wooden groves of felled tree trunks whose coverings, Fowles observes ‘must have seemed to their makers less roofs than artificial leaf canopies’. Stonehenge he describes as a ‘petrified copse’. According to the belief system of the ancient Celtic druids, trees are the guardians of the land, doorways to the spirit world and the individual ancestors of human beings. When the druids cleared an area for a settlement, a single tree was always left standing in the centre and designated the tree of life. How much more compelling to think that man’s genesis tracks back not to the ordered paradise of a garden, but to the tangled fertility of a thicket - to one of Dickinson’s infinitely rich arboreal crucibles. Alison Morris “Don't be amazed if you see my eyes always wandering. In fact, this is my way of reading, and it is only in this way that reading proves fruitful to me. If a book truly interests me, I cannot follow it for more than a few lines before my mind, having seized on a thought that the text suggests to it, or a feeling, or a question, or an image, goes off on a tangent and springs from thought to thought, from image to image, in an itinerary of reasonings and fantasies that I feel the need to pursue to the end, moving away from the book until I have lost sight of it. The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.” Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, 1979 “Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.” Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759 It forgot its wild roots Its earth-song Ted Hughes, The Remains of Elmet, 1979 Photographic composites of ephemeral works Iron Filler / Graphite / Fabriano 4 Cartridge Paper / Wind (wsw) ...Grinding the skin off earth Earth bleeds her raw true darkness A land naked now as a wound That sun swabs and dabs... Ted Hughes, Remains of Elmet, 1979  "How far that little candle throws his beams! " William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice, 1596 "mutation of weathers and seasons, a windfall composing the floor it rots into." Seamus Heaney, North, 1975 my silence is like glass blown by an apprentice flawed and cracked but now I have learned to form silence and next time I will do it right perfectly Webb Chiles, Artist of words and wind, 1975   “The quality it had now, in fresh untempered sunlight, was neither faerie nor austere; the changing shadows of dusk and midnight had vanished with the darkness and the rain, and walls and roof and towers were bathed in the radiance that comes only in the first hours of the day, soft, new-washed, the delicate aftermath of dawn. The people who slept within must surely bear some imprint of this radiance in themselves, must turn instinctively to the light seeping through the shutters, while the ghostly dreams and sorrows of the night slipped away, finding sanctuary in the unwakened forest trees the sun had not yet touched.” Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat, 1957 ...In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. - Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 On Exactitude in Science, Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley. 1946 "So it is with time, that lightens what is dark, that darkens what is light." Samuel Beckett, Watt, 1953 “Distance has the same effect on the mind as on the eye.” Samuel Johnson, The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, 1759 "In the dark belly of the valley A coming and going music Cutting the bedrock deeper To earth-nerve, a scalpel of music" Ted Hughes, River, 1983 "The Atlantic has bitten into the island's neck like a stoat, and will in time consume it all. Aran is a dying moment." Tim Robinson, Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage, 1986 |