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Tag Archives: memory

The Sea, submergence & losing the Edges

20 Sunday Aug 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Ageless, Bantham Beach, Belonging, Burgh Island, Dreams, Ice Cream, Kite Surfers, memory, reality, South Devon, The Sea, Timeless, youth

BanthamBeach.jpg

The silver leather-back sea washes up to meet me.

I knew she was close;

The breezing air about my ears had told me so

As I climbed the sand hump-back

To see her,

And stumbled to her foaming hem.

 

The cawing and whooping of my children

as they rush to meet her, and skip at her edges:

Firecracker Girl and Loping-Limb Boy.

 

He turns away from her

to throw his hoodie

Up into the air,

Randomly; repeatedly;

Watching the wind take it

To then gazelle forwards and upwards

To catch it or not;

Then fall to the floor

And beetle-scrabble

In the sand around and about him.

And plant his face into it

And stop still

And motionless, for a moment.

 

A study in the physical fluid

Of rushing air.

And the incomprehensible sensation

Of being 13.

 

The light from her glinting skin:

The silver foil of her, un-scrunched

And smoothed flat before me

Turns my head back to her.

The light rises up

To wrap around my face

Pull at my cheeks

And draw a smile

From deep beneath

the place where I normally dwell.

 

I can’t quite define

What she does to me;

But she can do it blindly,

even when out of sight of me.

 

My lungs and heart fold into each other,

like twisting dough in a Baker’s hands.

 

I am distracted by Loping-Limb boy

And his sand churning

Till she reminds me she’s there.

 

She laps at me.

Her eyes sparkle everywhere.

Sharp spikes of light fire in every direction.

The sun does her bidding and sinks to her edges

As I wade into her shallows.

 

A whoop and a screech;

and Firecracker Girl erupts into my sight line

legs pumping, arms flailing;

splinters of salt-water glass

smashing up around firework eyes wide open;

sun silhouetted and all fierce trajectory

into the silver leather-backed water.

 

The sheer velocity of being 10 and alive

Launching into the spray,

The day one endless

Expanse of salt-stained forever.

 

I fall forwards and low

Into her shallow rolls

As she rises to meet me.

 

Then all is grey blue swirl

Arm reaches over arm

Body twisting and turning

And salt-sting eyes.

Then up,

Puffing and whooping,

To stand on the Bantham sandbank

And open my arms to everything.

 

Year after year drips off my skin

In rivulets running,

Falling away:

54, 47, 32, 25, 18, 9, 5, 2…

And suddenly they’re gone;

Sucked into her froth.

 

And I’m ageless and timeless

And fizzing with it all.

 

Fuck, I love this place;

Where time and age break their fetters

And skip off

Like children

To play elsewhere;

For a moment at least.

 

One deep breath.

And I turn away from her,

Until next time:

 

Ice cream calls.

 

 

Bantham Beach. 18th, August 2017.

Movie houses, memories & the illumination of negative city spaces.

15 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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Absence, Art School, buildings, Culture, Fleshy Data, London Underground, Look Up, Marble Arch, memory, No.73 Bus, Observation, Overground, redevelopment, urban regeneratio, urban Sprawl, youth

Screen Shot 2017-06-15 at 10.14.50.png

There’s something quite remarkable about street level living.

And when I say street level living, I don’t mean the standard fare we trot out when we talk street life – about street food, pavement culture, busked music, tagging, midnight city walks, clubbing and vibrant multiculturalism. The stirred, slash cut, jagged, muscular, rippling, colourful, odorous, fusty, littered – the fierce and the free.

Nor do I refer to its profoundly saddening counter-culture cousin of the bleak stained streets, the shadows of humanity; the homeless and the abused propped in its doorways. The runaways, drop outs, drug addicts, alcoholics, despondent, broken, fragile – the lonely and the lost

When I say street living I’m talking about the act of living in a city at street level – the relentless act of passing through the urban space – connected to its ordinary everyday – neither floating above it nor tunnelling beneath it.

I am talking about pavement and tarmac bashing – traversing a city using feet and buses, as opposed to dropping into the dusty air-blown human vat of the Underground, its elevated un-tunnelled cousin the Overground, or any of the arterial rail lines coming in and out of the city for that matter, shifting people like emotional clusters of fleshy data from one side to the other.

Trammelling the streets is a goldmine of experience because the rewards are plenty – gifts, revelations, illuminations and surprises at every turn.

If only we remember to look up and look around more often, ‘there’s gold in them thar hills’. 

One surfaced in my journey on Monday morning.

And it smacked of an art school exercise long forgotten and suddenly remembered.

As the 73 bus scarped the edges of Marble Arch the most striking thing was not what had appeared – like the arrival of the inverted horse’s head or the jelly bean people sculptures.

Beautiful and enriching though their appearance was, this morning’s revelation was inspired by quite the opposite – by what had in fact disappeared.

The old Odeon, perched on the edge of Marble Arch and Edgware Road for as long as I can remember, was gone. In its place a large space revealing the buildings behind it and to the side of it. A 90 degree, dog-legged breather amongst the claustrophobic clutter of city buildings.

The building that was, was not only enshrined in my material view of the city I traverse – its geo-located bulk a firm, fixed point in my universe.  It was also located on both my emotional and temporal maps of the city.

The Odeon Marble Arch played high stakes in my youthful rummaging around London – the western edge of the West End. The corn-franked, pop-furtered fust of its dark interior home to many happy and boisterous outings. Heady times indeed.

So, to me, its absence was truly remarkable. An experience that was both a mournful missing and an urban eye bath in one. Truly bitter-sweet.

And it struck me that our enjoyment and the relentless revelations of the cities we inhabit are as much driven by the things time takes away – and the negative spaces that their departure leaves behind – as they are by the staggering multiplicity of new developments,  redevelopments, re-generations and resurgences of neighbourhoods, communities, boroughs, villages, estates, high streets and thoroughfares.

And it was the relationship between what is, what was and what might be that intrigued me. The tension between them.

So to the art project.

When doing basic foundation art, in still life and spatial studies, one of the first things you are taught is not only to draw the things you see in front of you in your still life – the positive – but also to render the spaces between those objects – the negatives. You are given the task of turning the negative space into a ‘thing’. To make the unseen seen. And to explore the relationship between the negative and positive. To make them both an equal part of the structural symmetry. And understand the role of both in creating Tension in the composition of things.

Simply put, this is about looking through, looking beyond – about truly ‘seeing’ – beyond the obvious

So its worth remembering that our seeing is only complete when we’ve engaged our ability to see what isn’t in the cities we live in, as well as what is.

And that we are as invigorated by the absence or removal of things as we are by the presence or addition.

The value of this level of seeing and awareness?

Hopefully it raises questions in us: questions of What if…? What was….? When did I…? Why there…? We question the way we and the spaces we exist in connect, how we attach to each other – materially, spiritually, emotionally.

Looking in this way, seeing the dynamic multi-dimensional relationship and nature of how things co-exist, not just as physical things but across time and cultures and generations reasserts our connection to the world and each other.

This kind of seeing brings the quanta level vibration of life writ large in our world. Each disappearance and appearance a vibration in the world.

Watched through the lens of time lapse – through a fluid eye – the cities would start to resemble a graphic equaliser of our existence and the utility and function of the buildings within it.

And I sense it would be beautiful.

So, to see or not to see. That is the question. And in the No. 73, for me that morning, lay an answer.

‘ got to love a bus.

ABBA, Anamnesis & social memory in the 21st Century.

14 Friday Mar 2014

Posted by Thin Air Factory in Uncategorized

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70s & 80s Music, ABBA. Social memory, Anamnesis, Bowie, Christian Theology, Dancing Queen, Dylan, Ga Ga, Gamification, i-pad, Incarnation, IPv6, Madge, mamma mia, memory, multi-generational, peta-flops, Reinvention, social networks, Socrates, Swiss Army Knife, The Day Before You Came. Ibiza, Tour Of Duty

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By my reckoning ABBA and the philosophical Socratic theory of anamnesis will finally meet somewhere along IPv6, just at the crossroads where peta-flops of ’70s and ’80s pop tune mash-ups collide with the PDF of the Ga Ga/Madonna/Bowie Manual of Reinvention.

Given that there’ll be 6 billion online personas (giving the current 2Bn + users a very conservative 3 online personas each to play with) using the crossroads at the same time, its going to get messy out there.

Now ABBA, fine, got that bit – and the Lady meets Madge meets Thin White Duke stylie for reinvention and the death of discarded personas, yup. Got that but Anemwhat?!

Anamnesis. A simple philosophical Socratic theory – and a pretty powerful one. Which is why it was quickly air-lifted into Christian Theology as a fabulous way to frame an infinite eternal re-incarnate soul running through all of humanity over time, with Christian teaching merely being a way of ‘recovering’ pre-existing yet dormant spiritual knowledge within us to accompany the soul we are born with. Nice.

Wikipedia cites the following descriptor: Socrates…   …suggests that the soul is immortal, and repeatedly incarnated; knowledge is actually in the soul from eternity, but each time the soul is incarnated its knowledge is forgotten in the trauma of birth.What one perceives to be learning, then, is actually the recovery of what one has forgotten.

So what on earth have ABBA got to do with it?

I reference ABBA in this piece because, for me,  they represent one of those entities that have transcended standard memory and entered a longer, denser living framework of collective or social memory – one with multiple and complex networks of interrelated life times.

They have also reached far enough into the future from their heyday to touch the hem of the skirt of the Infinite Digital Now and all that it brings. And I have a feeling that, through their burgeoning role in the global fabric of social memory and the furious sharing psst! pass it on culture of the social networks, ABBA are hurtling  towards a state of anamnesis.

OK, in the realm of philosophical profundity ABBA’s Waterloo doesn’t quite set the same bar as perhaps Dylan’s ‘Times They are a Changing‘ but that does not exclude them from becoming something that a classical philosophical text might describe.

How they do this is another question entirely. Maybe they’re just so wrong they’re right. Perhaps the unique fusion of chirpy and deceptively engineered pop music and the flip-flop nature of their lyrical content: from the charming euro-nonsense lyrics of Waterloo to songs like The Day Before You Came, sung with the long shadow of Leonard Cohen and Der blaue Engel hovering over it, seems to have allowed ABBA, like all music of increasingly mythical status to become one of the more powerful threads stitching together the fabric of our social memory.

ABBA, like Mozart, Piaf, Elvis, Bowie and Ga Ga, have come to be both perceived and used as a sort of socio-cultural swiss army knife. They are a lever, a key, a signpost, a mapping point, a cork-screw and an emotional cattle prod in the ever-expanding and lengthening fabric of social memory. Music like ABBA’s fixes points of social memory into a particular context, thus creating a door through which we can access them.

But just a great song doesn’t cut it. That’s just a memory – a time machine to what was. To become part of social memory – the stored, dormant library of evolution strategies that we draw upon when life’s challenges open out, shut down, twist, stutter, or fail around us – the music must be potent enough, rich enough and loaded enough to be capable of regeneration – of itself creating a living, constantly-reincarnating relentlessly-reinventing self to qualify.

Whatever it is, and whether you like it or not, ABBA have done an amazing job of creeping under the skin and into the psyche of multiple moments, moods and generations. ABBA. The moves. The powder-blue eye shadow. The melancholy. The show. The Movie. Meryl Streep!. Madonna!! The spiritual and social halo of ABBA is immense. And the ley-lines of its cultural, social and generational impacts fall across every shape and form of social group and individual typology.

For me, being a divorce child of the 1970s in southern England, living the bleak video musical backdrop of The Winner Takes It All; and with most summers spent partly on the White Island amongst Scandinavians of all hues (long before the football hooligans and pill head fraternity turned up) I can attest to ABBA being a great example of the social big bang theory – from its very particular era specific explosive beginnings to hurtle outwards in an exponentially increasing mass of social knowledge, reincarnated and recovered across many lifetimes.

The second I hear those words. “I don’t want to talk…  …cos’ it makes me feel sad…”  I am hurled into a cement lorry of memory and feeling. That’s already more than just a memory. It is a living recollection that occurs with feeling and context – a trojan horse of social memory: an echo of its first incarnation. On hearing it I am immediately primed to mitigate all manner of degrees of emotional distress

But also, if I am on a dance floor and hear Madonna’s Hung Up, it’s the ABBA sample and the latent recovered feeling carried in the Trojan horse of it that lifts my heart, not Madge’s new self conscious re-fabrication of it. But the complexity of emotion that the music evokes is layered by the moment in which it is now being recreated and in which I am enjoying it. It is reincarnated.

But in the same way, the surprising joy I get when I watch Mamma Mia with my 6 year old daughter is transcendent. In this way it is incarnated again with additional and highly complex additions of light and shade for me.

This to me is a good demonstration of how music moves from being an anthem for a time past to being a source of energy, revitalisation, reassurance and guidance, transforming itself as it evolves into a burgeoning strand of social memory.

It is at this evolutionary level that music moves from being a linear recollection of a bunch of chords and stuff you liked – a piece of sentimental data as someone once chose to describe emotion –  to being a living evolving strand that entrenches itself in cultures communities and tribes across multiple generations, drawn on as a social tool and in doing so, becoming reborn again and again.

My daughter will internalize the Mamma Mia experience, along with my own recollections about ABBA, music, the 1970s and my parents as part of that recollection, and it will create emotional triggers and feelings that will continue to exist, carried within her  – only to be reborn every time she hears the opening chords and voices of Dancing Queen.

The enriching memory and the spiritual and emotional information and knowing carried within it is evolving, becoming more dense and complex, developing a mythology of its own as opposed to simply reflecting that of the people who carry it.

It is in that way that something as trite as “I don’t want to talk…” or the first 4 chords of Dancing Queen, a shard of popular culture from 30 something years ago, begin to transcend normal memory, and become living social memory: a source of emotional intelligence and evolutionary experience that the same tribes cultures descendants can draw on to keep reweaving resilient communities, navigate turbulence and upheaval and ultimately manage change. This is much the same journey as that of pieces of philosophy, spirituality, faith and religion, continuously regenerated retold and proselytised across tribes, regions, cultures and generations to expand to cover the world.

To demonstrate the process in action, and of how the ripples of impact and emotional knowledge grow both more complex, and abstracted the further they get from their original source we might set an experiment:

If we were to play the opening chords of ABBAs Dancing Queen to a massed variant audience – a mixture of 8 years olds, 18 years olds, 30 year olds, 50 year olds and 70 year olds, both in villages and cities in different regions and parts of the world – and then, subsequently record the emotions raised, feelings felt, wisdoms recovered, the light and dark of their deeper emotional reflections; to reveal the texture and richness of social memory being stirred and potentially drawn on – I think we would be staggered at the scale, breadth and depth of social memory: the ‘recovery’ of deep rooted emotional ‘knowledge’.

More importantly, I believe the rarified theory of Anamnesis will help us to explain and navigate some of the more complex philosophical dimensions of social memory as they develop in the new landscape of the hybrid virtual and actual 21st century lives we live.

And we’re going to need all the help we can get in the moral maze of the multi-device ‘me’.

My point is this: in the modern world we are expected to live many more ‘lives’ than our forebears. In our post-modern world we re constantly reborn: professionally, personally, materially. It is seen as part of thriving.

I might also venture that consumerism, locked as it is in a relentless round of reinvention of the self through a continuous stream of new identities purchased – cars clothes homes holidays – is creating a truncated state of anamnesis – an expanding universe of reoccurring rebirth across ever decreasing periods of time.

But that is not where the tension will occur.

The tension will come from the fact that underneath all of this new multiple selves we still carry with us a far more one-dimensional primal, living memory. One bound by a much longer thread of continued existence; that gets passed down socially through nurture and the cultural context we find ourselves in, from generation to generation.

But the concept of generations is being rewritten by the modern world. Generations used to be a simple descriptor to identify the progeny of humanity in such as way as to mark them out by the fact that they exist within the same age frames in the same time frames. To be 16 in 1968 for example sets out a generational viewpoint and compass from which to define and explore many different dimensions of self. Generations were a linear thread that dropped down through history tying the past to the future.

But our new world of tech induced multi-persona living is exploding the concepts of generation sideways, upwards, outwards. There are now multiple generations of individuals, communities cultures and mindsets housed in each generation

Ancestors and descendents and the linear relationship between them and the threads of social memory they carry with them have been shattered into a glittering constellation of existence virtual, real or otherwise.

They do not just stand behind and in front of us any more. Our own multiple myths and histories scatter all about us in varying forms of existence – some live, some dead, some decaying dismissed or forgotten.

In a socially charged world of the multi-persona person: whose face-book profile might accent their personal ‘myth’ or story one way or tell of one very siloed professional individual Linked In one in another: their Sim city or Tour Of Duty persona another again – add in a few Farmville coins, on line shopper profiles and PIN numbers, multiple email tags and a twitter account and you’re up to 7 personas as it is. Each one ‘born’ and nurtured and raised to fulfil its immediate social need in the context of the device or channel it exists within.

So I would venture that social memory as it used to be, framed either by classical concepts like anamnesis or more recent frameworks like nationalism, versus how we have begun to frame and explore the dimensions of social memory in the last 10 years makes for a very different creature.

The next time Dancing Queen comes on – and a herd of 50 something’s, 8 year olds, 23 year olds and the ironic 41’ers charge the wedding dance floor, the old model of social memory is at work in the new world – a linear pass the parcel of collective and compounding memories, feelings, in the context of multiple pieces of data embracing occasion, company, personal fulfillment and development, fluid time and fixed geographies.

The same one that amortises their elder’s wisdoms in a box, repeats parental aphosrisms and behavioural tics. Where the work ethics and behaviours of 3 hundred years ago have been passed from Tofflers First Wave to the Second to the beginning of the third with everyone using the mistakes of the past to try and reset the opportunities of the future in an evolutionary line.

But now, where ABBA, the classic concepts like anamnesis and our 21st century multi-dimensional and multi-existence models of social memory meet, playing out across our twittering Id Ego i – pads, there’s something altogether new and far more complex happening.

Social memory is fracturing at light speed into a hydra of persona channels – the social memory as embraced in the virtual world will evolve in a different manner to its real world cousins. The social memory of gamers will have both gamer specific dimensions as well as real world ones. The time machine of music and the ever referable digital filing systems of the cloud will create a fractured concept of temporal existence.

This is no different to what was before – just multiplied. Young men who went to war developed a parallel social memory to those of the families at home. Exclusive of of but not inextricable to the everyday lives they returned to. One they could reach in and out of as they needed to. The same stands for us. But we tend to be reaching into our parallel social memory not of trenches, gas, camaraderie, distress and man’s inhumanity to man – but that of hot dog and champagne restaurant reviews and download recommendations from last year and an blog archive!

And Philosophy, truncated by the new concepts of existence, the socially networked virtual landscape and the multiple life-strands technology offers us outside the old linear temporally locked life span, is being jugged, butter patted, creamed and squeezed through the piping gun to spell out something new: but what?

Money Money Money? SOS? Take A Chance? Dum Dum Diddle? 0r Bang-A-Boomerang?

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