"The Maybe's Are Essential"

Also in Utah: "Sun Tunnels" by Nancy Holt.

 

 I haven't posted a "vlogbrothers" video on here yet, and this seems as nice a one as any for the unititated. Brothers John and Hank Green are pioneers in the act of turning youtube into a bona fide educational aid with love. They've also managed to keep up a weekly tradition of sending each other macroscopic little musings like the one below. Here, John touches on a couple of subjects close to this blog: not just the monolith in Utah that was discovered on Tuesday then went missing on Sunday, but its place in the greater tradition of Enormous Object Arrangement. This primary artistic impulse, which I described as "looking cool", and to which I attributed the building of Stone Henge, John identifies as "the mysterium tremendum", meaning it's the mystery that thrills. That sense of mystery doesn't have to come from not knowing who the artist is though, it can come from... Well I don't know where it comes from. That's the mystery. Maybe whatever animal part of our brain first felt hope is just triggered when we recognise the work of something other than weather, even if we made the thing ourselves. But I don't know. That's why I'm irked when people talk about Science versus Religion in terms of "what people need", without ever mentioning Art. As Neil deGrasse Tyson put it: the wider humanity's circle of knowlege, the larger its circumference of ignorance. Atheists aren't going to run out of mysteries.

 

Or Maybe They Just Wanted To Frame The Dawn

 Browsing is something I've subconsciously abstained from in the Plague Year, but yesterday I found myself scanning the racks and shelves of the British Heart Foundation with an enthusiasm I hadn't felt since getting Netflix. Maybe the shortening days were making me feel festive or maybe I was just hoarding for the winter, but I found Anvil (full title: Anvil! The Story of Anvil) on DVD for 33.3recurring pence, and Joel Morris had recommended the documentary to me earlier in the week so I took it home and watched it with much crying which I hadn't expected but really this is a post about Stone Henge: 

  Lips and Robb, who've gone their whole life without a Plan B, visit the site after a particularly high stakes argument on the sixth day of recording their make or break comeback album, and it's only now that I realise this sequence was probably a nod to Spinal Tap, because all I was thinking as I watched was how unmysterious Stone Henge suddenly appeared in the context of their story, and how almost everyone alive has probably had experience of erecting something similar as an infant. 

  I don't know if it's a discovery each of us makes or if, unlikely as it sounds, we're all just copying an original, but when given building blocks, at some point we take one and stand it on its end, and then we stand a second block next to it, but that's still not a building, and then... and then we realise we can put a third on its side along the top! 

  And now we see that it is finished. And what we've made serves no purpose, it is just - although our infant minds don't recognise the baggage of this evaluation yet - cool. 

  I'm one of those who grew up distrusting the idea of cool, but the instinct to raise two freestanding objects and then place a third on its side along the top is an instinct I understand, and it's because it would be cool. And to do it on the scale of Stone Henge, with the collective energy such a project would require, would be incredibly cool. Which is maybe all the motive people needed to break their backs doing it. 

 It seems to be all the motive Anvil needed.

Dad Games

Speaking of board games, here's Dad.

He took an early retirement in the South of France and has started inventing things. Here's his solar-powered pool heater.

It's a hose painted black. It works. Here's his combined bread-board/bread-bin.

Properly handy. Now here, he assures me, is a straight-backed lilo chair fashioned from pool noodles:

It's quite had to get right. Recently he's started trying to invent board games too. Trying and succeeding. This is "Kaleidoscope":

It's hard to play, but easy to learn, and quite reminiscent of Scrabble only with colours. (Mum and Dad play Scrabble every evening.) He plans to take Kaleidoscope to the Essen "Spiel" convention in October. Here's the second game he's working on: "Stone Henge" which we played appropriately at sunset.

The Folk's porch gets great sunsets. I loved Stone Henge. Then, sometimes he just sculpts.

I don't know.

SETTLEMENTS (time excellently spent)

To my right (your left) is Ms Meikle. We met arbitrarily (pictured) at a Superthriller gig, when I was in the mood to be met. That was last year. Her veterinary training has come on quite a bit since then, and now they let her inside cows.

She's been staying in a caravan in Dorset, training on a farm, birthing calves, visiting the abattoirs, waiting for the cows to die, inspecting meat, considering the waste of such finely evolved teeth in the head of an animal that once bled to death has only about a fifty per cent chance of ever being eaten, going for runs and getting shat on a lot. And as mentioned in the previous post I invited myself over. We're both mumblers, but she seemed fine with it over the phone I checked.

My God I learnt so much. The amount of roadkill on the 12 mile stretch from Salisbury to Sixpenny Handley alone was an education. She looked like a millionaire when she picked me up from the station in her bauble-coloured Clio, and it was a red sky at night. And the caravan was family-sized and quiet and stuttered with valances but with everything, like Japan, in its right place. And she'd never heard Miles Davis so I flipped open my powerbook and I put that right and then, as requested (since she'd played me Hot Chip) cradling Bulgarian red and amaretto and orange we moved onto Arvo Part, King Oliver and O Superman. "You have a lot of stuff that's good for... if you don't want to think about anything, but you don't want to think about nothing either," I made out, and nodded. And she told me about the local walks and the abattoir and the time it takes to die from a bullet wound and the great times she had at Matt and Fred's in Manchester just sitting by the music and smoking roll-ups - Ah! - Laurie Anderson pronounced "Smoking? Or Non Smoking" and neither of us are "smokers", but it hits home. And tipsy enough not to mumble, we basked. Like Michael Caine and Clive Owen in the film "Children Of Men" if you've seen that. Exactly like that.

And so it went on for two days: dropped off by Salisbury Cathedral while Ms Meikle went to work... Magna Carter, Second Hand Books, checking out Scope for board games and finding a bag of South American Lying Dice, free tea in the town hall while I sat at a bank of laptops being market-researched... yes, a dip had been reached, I wasn't feeling very much like Ferris Bueller. But: Then: a call from Mia Sara Meikle to say she'd been given the afternoon off. So: Back into the Clio and off to the settlements. Stone Henge, wangling free entrance by impersonating Egon Ronay (both of us! in a big coat! No! Fences are fine. Neither of us have an issue with fences), and then the Roman Villa, four-hundred years in the making, sixteen-hundred years hiding in a hill, mosaics, pins, bones, sun and unburied treasure. And time.

And another day. And a big walk. And an idea for something fomenting. Farms and flies around a horse's eyes, which is normal apparently, and a light drizzle so I don't get burnt. And pizza and packing and a lift to the station. And forty-eight hours in which I haven't been rotten to anyone. I am a passenger. I naturally passenge. Thankyou for that, Ms Meikle.

No, I didn't want to come back. Every single paper on the midnight train to Waterloo (I know it's not called that) carried as their main story an event gleaned from a television trailer for a show about the Queen which was unresearched, unimportant and, unlike the weather or the Magna Carter, never even happened in the first place. Where's the facts? Where's the stuff? What did I learn in London today? What corner in what track did I turn to be delighted?

Actually, when I left work at six today, I found, lying in the middle of Joiner Street, pretty dusty and passed on either side by the six o'clock rush, a bra.

I just haven't found a name for it yet.