Another month has flown by and I swear that after February time somehow learns to speed up… the days are noticeably longer and I look in wonderment at the trees which are beginning to branch-tip swell with budding leaves ready for the explosion of new foliage that is the miraculous renewal of life –and a good indicator that I’ve been here longer than I realize, for it strikes me as somehow significant that I was here first when the leaves began to turn colour –or simply fall –off their million perches… which inspired me into a flurry –perhaps a paroxysm of poetry –would be the correct phraseology… Now that collection of poetry has been edited and printed in limited edition as Peargirl V –the poetry edition- and I am already working on Peargirl VI –the online edition which is more reflective of my delving into the many myths, folklore and fairy tales of Wales.
So catching up –memories of Budapest still linger and sing in my memory recall data banks, but a new tumult of experience has come piling in the last month along with realizations that a) I’ve been here long enough to start to feel more settled in, to get to know people and to feel comfortable enough that I worry if it will be difficult to reconnect with my old routines on Bowen. Likely reconnection will be transformative and a development of new routines and associations on top of the old bedrock of my islander identity. b) For a workaholic occasional hermit, I have the capacity to make new friends and to be social –even if I’m still not keen on drunkenness out of moderation or sitting still in Pubs for too long) I’m proud to be a bit of an academic, a geek, an organizer and planner as well as a creative type d) I want to follow more of my dreams, and now is the time…. I want to learn to, or attempt to learn, to play a musical instrument even though the idea and the associated bad noise, steep learning curve, and my own complete ignorance, scares the bleep out of me.
In the last month the muse of writing seems to have taken over from the muse of painting –the two seem to swing back and forth on an internal pendulum for me. Although the muse of textile arts and embroidery seems uninterested in the painting/writing swap-over and she just hangs around and insists that I drag a bit of needlework around with me wherever I go… after an eight-hour Welsh-smocking embroidery marathon while watching the extended BBC version of Mansfield park on a day when I was fighting off a cold (or the vapours?) I wondered, in an Austonian fashion if I was indeed now an ‘accomplished young lady’ or if I was really just wasting my time! Still, the square of embroidery I did may or may not outlast me, so it’s difficult to determine, just yet, the full measure of waste and folly in my life versus my accomplishments and usefulness as a human being on this blue-green orb.
Speaking of orb-awareness… I attended a local food awareness event at the Morlan on April 5th and then went walking in the slate hills of Tal y Bont, approx 800 meters above sea level, with the waters grey and gem-like in the distance… despite being on a guided tour we still got lost… but in the best sort of ways, for in getting one path mixed up with another, we just was different things, and I was more interested in seeing some tall trees and altitude up in the old lead-mining hills, that to look at a few lakes. I got to see some of the forestry practices, what iron water looks like seeping through slate, fenced off mining shafts, more of the rumpled Cambrian mountains, farmers piling boulders at the edge of a field in an almost-pagan style… sheep sheep and then beyond the sheep into some of the more of the rugged and isolated/desolated areas of the more lonesome-beauty of stubborn old Wales.
Welsh Colours…
What colour are my true love eyes?
It’s very easy to see
Whether brown or green or even blue
There is an ease in old Welsh poetry
Whether of sea, gorse, slate or sky
There is no concern to my memory
As long as she’s wick
There’s only one word for me:
For my true love’s eyes are glas,
glas will do the trick
My true love’s eyes are glas
As long as she is wick!
Welsh eyes and Welsh words tell us there is more than one difference in how we see things. I was told there was not Welsh colour for brown, except a recent word, and no colour for green either, until modern times, for there used to be one word, for the living colours, which ranged from grey to green to blue. From the colours of the sea, to the sheen of water on slate, the greys of the sea to the greens of the land including the gorse, bracken and even the greys and blues of the sky.
Glas
Glas
Ynyslas (inn-IS-lass)
Blue hill/island of sand
Mutations in Welsh language frequently occur to the first consonant.
“Modern Welsh is tending toward the 11-color Western scheme, restricting glas to blue and using gwyrdd for green and llwyd for grey. Similarly, in Gaelic, glas can mean various shades of green and grey (like the sea), while liath is grey proper (like a horse), and the term for blue proper is gorm (like the sky or Cairngorm mountains).”
Wikipedia consulted April 6th 2008
Many stories have been told by the long, flat sandy shores of Ynyslas, where the blue island is a tuft of grass at the top of the sand dunes, and those tough, knotted and knitted grass roots are the only thing preventing the edge of Wales from unravelling in the ceaseless, tuneless wind, the tides rise and lower in a swift foam-trimmed slate grey rush… across the flat sands.
Aberdovy, is across the way, sitting idyllic and quaint in slate and paint. Nestled beside the river Dovy. It is so close to Ynyslas, which is no longer really a place to live, but an idea of what once was, a parking lot and set of sandy dunes to traverse to get to the long beach that stretches over the miles back to Borth which is South of the river mouth. To the North is Aberdovy, so close at low tide and yet ever so far since the trains took the ferry away and the tracks go around and up the river before crossing. Once upon a time, if you missed the last boat and were ‘benighted’ in the old fashioned sense of being caught out at night, with the tide coming in –there was a hut on stilts in which to take shelter until the next day.
I went with a jovial local historian as a guide to find the fabled petrified/drowned trees of Ynyslas Nature Reserve and I discovered that the trees are not actually petrified; they’re just old and salt-preserved centuries old stumps that are as often covered by the rising tides as they are by layers of sand. (which ties into the Welsh myths of the Low Hundreds and the town that drowned when the man who was supposed to be looking after the gates of the sea dyke was drunk and asleep…(part of the Taliesen legends) and which may or may not be the location of Cantref Gwaelod (can-TREv goo-why-LOD) the drowned town off the coast between Aberystwyth and Both where an old stone path stretching out into the sea appears at low tide and scientists still argue if it is man-made or natural, and the locals say that they can hear the bells of the drowned church ringing warning when a storm is coming in –in anycase the ancient tree stumps do seem to indicate that the sea has risen, or that the land has sunk… the stumps looked as though they had been chewed down by a twelve foot high beaver! –which I suppose is the mark an old stone or bronze-age axe makes ( reminding me of the Welsh monster known as the Afanc which an American writer interpreted as a twelve-foot high beaver in her retelling of the Welsh tales.
There seems to be a tradition of ‘those from away’ to come to Wales, to fall in love with its myths and then to re-tell them with varying degrees of regard for the original story… I’m not being critical, this is a process repeated around the world to fables and myths. Some of the alterations do not suit me, and others do; but overall I’d rather see the material re-used than left discarded on the scrap-heap. Besides, I find my own writerly muse sniffing around the old Welsh Tales, going, hmmmm, there are some tasty morsels here!)
Rambling around on a miles-long beach where time and space are folded in the perception into a dream-like perspective where a mile or two seems like it is within reach… I learned about the scepticism towards ley lines, but the firm believe in dowsing and the basic theories of how to dowse using a common aluminium coat hanger (cut the hook off, cut in half, bend into 2 L’s, one slightly larger than the other, hold upright in your fisted hands, antennae pointed out, and walk… when the antennae move towards each other, pointing to each other, or crossing, then water lies underneath.)
Back to the colours and how we separate them… vision, perception and culture are quite fascinating. What is the difference between blue and green? It’s a boundary line I think most would place differently. When does grey turn into grey-ish blue, and how to I convey what I see? And what of the Welsh bumble bee, which sees in an entirely different spectrum, or the Welsh dogs that don’t see in pure black and white, but just lack the ‘full Western colour spectrum.’ I wonder if in the future we will evolve our colour spectrums into divisions akin to the palettes offered to us in computer palettes. Oh –you’re still on the archaic 11 part rainbow –
And I always think I won’t have much to write each month!
Other highlights of the month:
–getting two pieces into the Imaging the Bible in Art Exhibition (an art show for secular and non-secular artists) and being photographed by the local media. (why do those media dogs love teeth so? It’s not a picture unless you show your pearly whites.)
-Walking up into the hills by myself a few times to see the sheep and to fall more in love with hedgerows.
-meeting energetic photographer Grace Lau after her lecture and discussing the narrative impulse in imagery and community art projects.
-meeting Daniel Meadows after a talk he gave on his ’73 project driving the 1948 omnibus around England taking photos of people in what was dubbed ‘The Great Ordinary Show’ and then 20 years later going back, meeting them and photographing them again and developing a community story –narratives that he produced in a show for BBC radio. Daniel Meadows’ presentation was probably one of the most self-effacing, personal-yet-informative, engaging, well-paced and organized presentations I’ve ever sat through. Who wouldn’t love a man who sewed a huge old battery-run cassette recorder into the back of an old long coat, stitching the microphone into his sleeve so that he could do sound recordings while taking photos!
Afterward the official talk he gave freely of his time and spoke ‘off the cuff’ of his passion of photography –and his knowledge of the ‘There’s no such thing as Society’ exhibition which showcases the work of over two dozen photographers. I especially appreciated hearing what he had to say about Homer Sykes’ work (a photographer who documented British and Welsh rituals including the morris dancers). Daniel Meadows has classic long artists’ hands gesticulating in a dance of enthusiasm, his blue eyes twinkling and his genuine earnestness and interest still shining through him, even in his silver years, as much as it had during his hey-day long-haired hippy days when he followed around in the footsteps of Benjamin Stone. Daniel Meadows is a part of the ‘iconic digital storytelling movement’ and idea I quite fancy.
-going to Henllan Mill too visit David and Aubin’s friends: David Millward and Jenny Nimmo. Jenny is a successful children’s author and David is an artist and teacher –between the two of them they run a summer artschool/B&B in the old mill and the cottage and barns around the lovely old mill…. Despite being complete strangers they welcomed myself and Phillipa, an MA art student who is in the process of designing and building her own Creative Retreat B& B in Wales… we had a few cups of tea, went for a tour, saw chickens sunning themselves under the willow besode the happy stream running beside the old mill. It was lovely. The hour and a half trip there and back was in perfect glorious golden spring sunshine (the first time I’ve been on a jaunt in the sunlight on the roads of Wales) and it was a great day to see the land and take some photos. Phillipa, being an artist herself, was sympathetic enough to stop when I HAD to take some photos of a particularly dilapidated barn!
The visit to the Mill inspired a new fairytale and the stop in ‘Mach’ at the fabric shop to buy canvas and embroidery floss will keep me busy in the studio for the remainder of my time here.
-Last night (april 20th) I went with eight improv-contact-dancers (one of whom I know from Welsh dance who invited me) to the barns of EquiLibre and found a bit of Cirque du soleil Welsh-style. A lady named Jane is a horse trainer and does annual horse-theatre performances. Her last event was a theatre show and masquerade banquet for 160 deep in the heartland of Wales! http://www.equilibre.co.uk/intro.htm
Through local connections I was lucky enough to get invited along to an artist to horse introduction night. She gave us a tour, introduced us to her horses, talked about horse language and then we got to interact with some of the horses after she put them through some paces. The rapture of seeing a Spanish stallion with some war-horse/parade training, meeting a young gelding named Trigger, and then an aging white Lipizaner, a beauty of an animal who felt comfy enough to roll upside down outside of the barn, at twilight. -Quite the spectacle- It was surprisingly easy to forget about the red and orange paint and stage-prop mirrors around the show ring as the horses were the most beautiful, and clearly well cared for, and magnificent gems of the farm!
I’ll admit when I first heard of the scheme I was highly dubious… but after meeting Jane I became confident and impressed that she’ll accomplish what she sets out to do. After looking her up online today the impression of awe and notion that it would be my privilege to participate in a project of hers has deepened.
But last night I arrived back in Aber late, to the familiar lights and confusing one-way tangle of streets with my hands smelling of horse -despite the soap and water -feeling quite happy. I may have the opportunity to dance with horses.
What an idea!
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1 comment:
hi sarah
great journal - you're a very good writer and have got some lovely pictures too!
:)
V
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