18.05.00 : protective movement

Thursday 18th May

Finding the last few emails very exciting in their interrogation of what for is the means by which we establish a sense of place. And the desire, need, indifference, conflict, thrill etc. with which we do that. Someone once told me that my work seemed to revel in an aesthetics of 'getting lost'. I liked that, but also came to realise that 'getting lost' was only enjoyable when it afforded the opportunity of finding somewhere you didn't already know. Coming to 'know it' involved another kind of losing yourself, that was more social, more about the communication of the exploration. Once the thing is 'known' what is there to communicate?
For me the movement of that kind of 'placing' is very much between the slats of the dotted lines of Shane's/Shelly Jackson's hyperspace/text. It isn't a commute. In much the same way that Jane was explaining. As a 'commute' is not really a 'movement' in that sense, as it's not about going somewhere else, rather it's about having two somewheres to be.
What I enjoy is wandering, travelling and emmigrating. But I am always challenged to think that that is only something I 'enjoy' because I have a kind of gravitational pull back to a site of great stability in terms of the house and place/family where I grew up. Last night however, I went to bed with that weird feeling of forboding, that someone was going to break into the house. And I remembered how as a child, sleeping in a house that had nothing around it but fields, you could hear the house's body creak and tick and rumble. And you could hear the wind and animals etc. outside. And I used to be so scared in that house sometimes. Still don't like being there on my own. And yet it is in another respect, the most secure place I know. It's very much 'uncanny', 'unhomely' homely. A doubleness of 'home'.
And it occurs to me now, that movement, the kind I was talking about above - either conceptually or actually - is also a kind of protection. There is no 'sanctum' to invade when you are moving. Less times at which your vulnerability is a fixed location, a target point. So while the conditioning of my life sets up home and security as synonomous with stability and the 'known' quality of that, I think this 'home in motion' that Jane wonders about is possible within the emotional and psychological architectures of fluctuation and exploration.

Also found it interesting the different spatial orientations of these last few emails 'explorating places'. Shane endlessly moving through the lateral stiching of the quilt and the text. Pat seeming to be drawn upwards, to spaces of immaterial lightness, levitations beyond ceilings, roofs and the verticle stagings of architecture. And Sue, under a tree, into her own body - little known to her - into earth and soil and ground. And through that.

Yesterday I came accross a couple of guys knocking down a house near my office. They had a big mechanical digger and were pulling it apart carefully, salvaging the wooden palettes of the floors and walls for one guys 'swimming pool' - so he said. It was an extradinary site. That this building could be torn apart, so simply. Like pages torn out of a notebook, they peeled off walls, roof, floors. One of the guys told me that they were taking their time because they wanted to save some of the wood etc. but that with the machinery they had, they could go raze that building, and ones much more solid than it, in half an hour. I know this from when I was living in Belfast and seeing the devastation left in place of buildings after they'd been bombed. We all know that these places are only ever temporary shelters. But something about the deft and careful way with which these two guys dismembered this house was shocking to me. But also kind of beautiful.

B