rag-pickings – Page 4 – Murdo Eason

At Crombie Point

Ink etched blue silence. Cold harbour spires, sketched over cubist sails. Thorn pinned birds still tethered. Wings opening, sensing the sky

…

The ruined pier at Crombie Point. (January, 2017).

Jules Verne travelled to Scotland for the first time in 1859. He arrived at Crombie Point on 30th August, following a three-day exploration of Edinburgh.

Verne along with his traveling companion and old school friend, Aristide Hignard, had boarded the steamship The Prince of Wales at Granton Harbour earlier in the morning. The ship sailed up the Firth of Forth passing Aberdour, Queensferry, Rosyth, Blackness Castle and Charlestown with Verne recounting tales of historical events associated with the coastal landmarks. Approaching Crombie Point, the weather turned violently against them with high winds and waves proving too strong for the steamship to moor at the pier. Verne and Hignard managed to transfer into a smaller sail boat to reach the landing stage safely but very wet. They were met by the Reverend William Smith, from Oakley, who ushered them into the nearby Black Anchor Tavern to dry out and take a whisky.

What was once the Black Anchor Tavern, Crombie Point. Now a private house. (January, 2017).

…

Beyond the door-less door. An invitation to enter. What lies beyond the threshold, the scattering of leaves and crouched shadows?

On the ancient whispering walls, the faces start to appear. Language of the stones, silent tongues ….

And on this short stretch of coastal path, the receding tide and dying light coats Torry Bay in an emulsion of gun-metal grey. A vista of colour bleached beauty with a tangible undertow of concealed violence bleeding over the mudflats.

In the middle of Torry Bay you will see witches rock. This rock was used to tie-up and restrain anyone suspected of witchcraft. Here the witches were judged and simultaneously sentenced as the tide rose. If they drowned, they were absolved of being a witch, but if they survived they were deemed to be to be a witch and burned at the stake.

(adapted from heritage interpretation boards located on Torry Bay)

More on the dark history of this short stretch of Fife coastline emerged from the Tales for Travellers Project which we recently participated in:

On Torry Bay the sky appears to expand to a grey cloak as we experience a brief rain shower. It’s a suitable backdrop for Kate Walker to tell us of the dark history of witch hunting along this coast in the seventeenth century. Zealous, self-appointed witch-finders, usually being local clergymen searching for those who had ‘danced with the devil’. They used an armoury of pseudo-scientific techniques to prey on poor, elderly, and vulnerable women, with their use of witch pricking and searching for the devil’s mark. The familiar power structures embedded in organised religion and misogyny. Kate recounted the tragic story of local woman Lilias Adie, buried face down in the mud on the beach, between the high tide and low tide marks as it was outside consecrated ground. Buried neither on land or at sea, huge stone slabs were placed on top of her; a folk remedy for revenants who were suspected of returning from the grave to torment the living.

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Now playing: Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes – ‘Trio and Sine Waves (With Wind, Snow, And Birds)’ from Memory and Weather.

Reference:

Ian Thompson, Jules Verne’s Scotland: In Fact and Fiction, (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2011).

Quiescent structures of the (in)visible

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Hi-rise tower blocks at Seaton Place, Falkirk, built 1965 – 1969.

Home of the estate factor of Callendar House, a listed building with stable court, stable blocks, dovecot and implement shed. Now derelict and on the buildings at risk register.

Just to the north of the hi-rise towers lies the route of the Antonine Wall which stretched across the Central Belt of Scotland between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Clyde. Construction of the wall began in 142 AD, taking around twelve years to complete.

Now playing: Harold Budd – The Oak of the Golden Dreams.

Lost coordinates

Time adrift

Land, sea and sky under caul of ice fog

Lost coordinates.

Trace of an island? spectral ship?

Ah – foreshore shaman at the prow.

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Now playing: Kevin Drumm – Middle of Nothing (Part 1)

Settle / / Disperse

Settle

Settled /

/ /

/ Disperse

Dispersed

≈

ice blue hue of early morning / / settled setting of frozen music / / arrowhead stave aimed at the stars / / rhythms inked on starless starlight [ crack crack – cacophony crescendo ] winged chorus sounded in flight / /

settle / / settled / / disperse / / dispersed

still / / stilled / / stillness

At Capernaum Pier, Limekilns. Early morning 21st January 2017.

Now playing: David Cross & Robert Fripp – Starless Starlight

Spectral Dreams of the City Stones

A dream in masonry and living rock

Robert Louis Stevenson

the habit of dreaming and the ability to dream are primordial

Fernando Pessoa

adrift

casting a line

to pull down

the stars

at the threshold

of hearing, sounds

of the city, stored

in the stones

thought bubble

of the white dove

fractured figments

of translation – PA?

dazzle me

with dreams

of a kinder

kind of blue

even electrons

get lost

in the forest

(scratch) —–>

this way

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From a walk through the New Town of Edinburgh on 14th January 2017.

(Edinburgh’s) buildings are dominated by locally quarried sandstone so that the stone-built heritage literally grows out of the bedrock foundations of the city. (McMillan and Hyslop, The City of Edinburgh: Landscape and Stone, 2008).

Now playing: Morton Feldman – Triadic Memories (Steffen Schleiermacher).

A short history of …

A short history of breathing

≈

A short history of writing

(scratch wall)

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A short history of building

…

stone

brick

mortar (concrete)

iron

glass

plastic

…

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Now playing: Claire M Singer – Solas

Slow Time – Assorted Ragpickings and Footfalls

Conflux of cobbles

Walking against

Autumn’s wake

Deep Time

Shore Line

F r e s c o

a scattering of jewels

criss-cross streams

of early morning light

drifting

at the edges

meaning, slipping

away

from the words

...

Godot Tree

Waiting

For leaves

To fall

Autumn morning / City pastoral

(King’s Stables Road, Edinburgh. Horse and cattle markets were held weekly in this road from 1477 until 1911)

Underfoot

the spaces in between

One cracked cobble

“Several whales have come in upon this coast

Anno 1652, one, eighty feet in length”

Moby Dick (Supplied by a Sub-Sub-Librarian) – on the Fife coast.

No still life:

Foraging wasps, drunk

on autumnal colour

Always good to head for a higher perspective. On the way, counsel from the elephant wood shaman.

Towards the brow of the hill:

a wind blown tree;

an apparition,

forming in the sky

Always the tracks

of footfall

beyond the now

of time

Frost already underfoot/ A smothering of darkness/ Celestial lights & the eerie glow of the petrochemical plant/ A heron stalks the shadows

Now Playing: Robin Hayward – Stop Time (favourite piece of music of the year).

Time of the Vanishing ( )

That time of day in December when the last flicker of light gives way to shadow and smothering darkness

The sea a dark mirror, pulling down the sky

Time of the Vanishing ( )

Time of retreat

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From the shore at Limekilns, 3rd December 2016, around 16.50.

Now playing: Loren Connors – Blues: The Dark Paintings of Mark Rothko

Psychogeography Extreme – Phil Smith (+ one small fracture)

We were disappointed not to be able to attend the recent Fourth World Congress of Psychogeography, which by all accounts was a great success.

The opening address by Phil Smith (aka Crab Man, aka Mythogeography), is a fascinating and thought-provoking missive on the state of psychogeography and the walking arts today. You can read, download and share it here:

Psychogeography Extreme

Also check out Phil’s Mythogeography website – ‘an ambulatory goldmine’ and his books published by Triarchy Press.

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One of the points Phil makes is the need to rethink the drift on a smaller scale. In the gaps, in the smallest fractures, in small disruptions to personal routines; the late running of a train that allows you a few minutes to explore the hinterland around a station.

A recent personal example was the unexpected distress visit to a garage when a section of exhaust pipe fell off the car. Whilst the new part was being sourced and fitted, a short walk around the immediate environs:

Crack-

ed slab scree

c o b b l e s

c o b b l e d

in p O O l

-ing light

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Now playing: The Soft Machine – s/t (with a nod to Boyle Family).

Fragments of Istria: an Assemblage

We could eat this sky.

Stretch up, scoop out

handfuls; smear our faces

and taste the fanfare

of sunset.

Out of red earth

lines of olive trees, vines

and quarried stone.

Centuries of building,

dwelling, tending

the land, goats

and cattle.

Another cyprus tree – rooted

in tangled narratives

of departure

vivid light

and shadow play.

No neatly packaged hay bales in the uncanny rural. Creatures of twilight, sit hunched in the corner of smallholdings, backs turned. In fading light, walking past these halo-skewered field dwellers: was that a lengthening shadow? a sigh? a suggestion of movement?

They would appear in the adjoining field at around 7.00pm each evening. A symphony of bells heralding their arrival. We never did see where they came from. They would feast in the field for around half an hour, a clanking cacophony of movement. Occasionally, one would come over to eye us up, usually the smallest with the highest pitched bell. Curious young eyes stared us out. Yet, these eyes tapped into something much older. Some fundamental rhythm of the land. Jaws rotating in perpetual motion and then, as they do, leaping into the air as if the earth had administered an electric shock to their hooves. A display of exuberance and delight in contrast to the slow, deliberate movements of the herd elders. They kept their heads down, chewing, chewing, chewing. After a cycle of time, which we were not party to, the deepest, most sonorous bell started to sound out a rhythm. The largest goat of the herd was calling time and starting to amble away. Gradually, the other goats began to follow, bells around their necks congealing into a moving mass of sound. A few short explosive trills as the stragglers ran to catch them up. We watched as the herd turned a corner and listened as the bells faded into the distance.

A visit to the small hilltop town of Motovun and very surprised to meet this straw giant and his dancing acolytes. Staring us out with his silent gaze, he must have been over twenty feet tall, At his feet, some folk ritual or dance taking place, arms thrown open to embrace the sun. Something of the Wicker Man about it all.

As far as I could find out, his name is Veli Jože, a giant who lived (lives?) in a local truffle-rich forest. Local stories suggest that he has been known to enter the town and physically shake the church tower to sound the bell.

To reach Motovun, it is a steep walk up the hillside to reach the town perched on top. Whilst not religious, was touched by the care and beauty displayed in the construction of this minimal roadside shrine.

Motovun sits is on a hill in the Mirna valley and evidence of human settlement dates back to prehistoric times when it would have been surrounded by water. The river Mirna is Istria’s longest river and legend has it that Jason and the Argonauts fled down the estuary after having captured the Golden Fleece.

Another hill-top town, this time with a twist. Dvigrad is a relatively well-preserved mediaeval ghost town in the Draga valley. The population was initially decimated by the Black Death in the 16th century and finally abandoned completely in the early 1700s. As the town was unoccupied, it was spared from the destructive ravages of war which were a constant feature on the Istrian peninsula. Today, the town gates still exist, and it is possible to walk around the town walls. The defence tower still rises to cut the blue sky and interior room structures of the 200 odds houses are clearly visible.

VII

Aura of the town walls: return of the gaze:

To perceive the aura of an object, we look at, means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return … when this expectation is met … there is an experience of the aura to the fullest extent.

Walter Benjamin

VIII

Amongst the networks of rural paths and tracks.

Always the walls:

Stacked

Held

Holding

Entropic Futures.

An alien structure in the rural landscape:

the new, never having ever been.

We were staying on the Istrian peninsula in what could best be described as an agricultural hamlet, mostly comprised of smallholdings and cottage style dwellings. These were all constructed in a similar style with what looked like local quarried stone. A network of paths and tracks connected up to other nearby hamlets which were also of a similar architectural style. When we stumbled across the half completed building above, it looked as alien to its surroundings as finding a mountain bothy in the middle of Las Vegas.

The scale of the building was completely out of proportion to anything else locally. The pick and mix collision of architectural styles created a bizarre postmodern mash-up with a tear shaped swimming pool or fish pond, bizarre minaret style columns half-built on the roof and Italian style interiors. What was clear, was that the building was the new that had never been. We wandered around the half completed rooms, bare wires hanging out of walls, yet opulent installed marble bathrooms. Work had clearly stopped some time ago with the extensive grounds already starting to be reclaimed by nature. It was as if we had walked into the film set of a Ballard adaptation, where the crew had disappeared.

Of course we had to construct some sort of narrative as to what had happened here. Ms A came up with the one that we settled on. The remote location, stilted opulence and rather garish tastes indicated that this could have been a low-key hideaway for some gangster or Mafiosi. Work on the property was well underway when they were either rubbed out, banged up, or cleaned out of money, leaving this rural fun palace to slowly begin to merge back into the Croatian countryside. The new that had never been.

Walking a line

an iridescent alchemist

pulls the sun

across the sky

XII

That night, an absence of city light and gravity. We fell from earth, lost our breath, immersed in that plunge pool of dark sky. We learned to gather stars, eat planets for sustenance, grab comet tails to move. The dawn light made us heavy again. We fell back.

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Now playing: Maja S. K. Ratkje – Crepuscular Hour