Notes
Topic: Writing
In the gathering tobacco-coloured morning a song thrush pours forth its morning hymn and allows me to lose myself listening nearby for five minutes.
Each tree is winter-garbed, baubled with negative space, wrapped in tinsel air. The dog eats from a cow pat, two peregrines ride the wind.
A painting and a poem for a friend
I like to pretend I accept the ambivalence of landscape but really I expect some subjectivity from it. I want its blessing, its confirmations, it’s healing powers. I want the right configuration of hedges, trees just so.
A choir sings in a field, faces pointed up into the encircling darke night. Each voice is like a dove issuing forth into the star-holed firmament.
Barn Wood is full of wood anemones, a patchy blanket of expectant white faces pointed towards any break in the forest canopy.
On the shore that first day were ocean-pocked plastic buoys, steel oil drums, nylon rope, hemp rope. A toilet seat.
Dust doesn’t settle here but thickens the air like cornflour.
The small car park at the start of the Ridgeway is half full of camper vans. No one is stirring at 6:45am and there are no other walkers when I bounce the car over the uneven surface of the car park, grab my camera and start up the ancient track.
Nighttime starlights of boats constellate, strung festively along the invisible horizon.
A wisteria-wrapped memory of kites over a chalk field.
Space between words
Photos from two days walking the Ridgeway
We can fill landscapes with meaning, transforming land into landscape by our attention – by looking, working in them, undertaking creative acts.
The distance between now and the memory and all the strange sadness of that distance. Measure it in paintings.