The Royal Sussex County Hospital accident and emergency department, Cotton’s Dolphins, Triage and rather large ideas:
The emergency room is to my own tacit inclinations a place of great intrigue, a place in which the myriad brands of suffering, violences and impositions are frozen in some kind of bureaucratic homeostasis. Within this particular department I have frequented enough times to have a favourite seat, in the hallways by a 10ft mural of dolphins circling each other - by someone called Alison Cotton dated to the year 2000. Cotton’s picture contains a particular length and momentum to form a sort of narrative strip, from nose to fin, to dappling light. I think of a passage by John Berger, he writes of Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece “The altarpiece, no less than a Greek tragedy or a nineteenth-century novel, was originally planned to encompass the totality of a life and an explanation of the world.” A complex labyrinth of marks and colours impressing onto the individual the grace and constitution required to sustain a life of plague, or death or any other myriad brand of suffering. Berger’s essay appears early in his chronological opus ‘Portraits’, the piece propositions the Isenheim altarpiece as an object not of observation but of consultation. An answer to suffering and misery, an actual answer in the key of depiction. We are encouraged forward into the notion that this picture, this object possesses the requisite imagery to do something as sophisticated as cure the body. It’s a big idea indeed.
Why do we have paintings in hospitals? I don’t imagine someone being wheeled out from heart bypass surgery is suddenly filled with warmth when they encounter a disproportioned portrait painted by a local sixth former. Nor do I imagine having a limb flailing of your body can be assuaged into peace by a pastoral pond painting courtesy of the impressionistic Sunday painting. And yet, I witness in this hallway a procession of wheelchairs, beds and in one instance a stretcher pass this dolphin mural; carriers of people that very often don’t come back the same way on two feet, and some that do quite nonchalantly. What’s the big idea? “the world unravelled from reason” Annie Dillard writes in her essay ‘Seeing’ concerning a group of people born blind - undergoing cataract surgeries, who’s new and apparent sight could not be remedied against their brains unutilised image processing. Intentionality perhaps, that things can be made from other things. Moulded if you will. Reason unravelled.
Me and these dolphins do a sort of calculus, someone just came in bleeding from the elbow in a peach Calvin Klein track suit that resembles the tone of their skin. Fuck, I glare disappointedly at the middle dolphin, he’s going to get seen before me. What to make of the rest of room, one old gentleman beside me has adopted such a vigorous stillness that he seems both on the cusp of death and at the same time eternal, so he is an unknown quantity and perceivably contented to wait. A rock-climber in some shoes with holes for each toe, wrist and a couple of fingers look all wonky, no blood and steady breathing, brave but unfortunately not enough to skip me in the queue, they call this a stable condition. Unstable conditions are as such: a young woman actively drinking a bottle of wine in the emergency room with punctures in her forearm from sloppy needle placement, frantically screaming and imminently attended too, a couple cradling each other both with grains of glass still attached to their wounds, glinting in the pale yellow of the hospital light strips, and a bloated and searing red man waddling in circles completely bereft of cognisance with a cardboard bowl of his own sick. So I fit in under them and above the others and by this logic, me and my dolphin wait for a consultation.
A well spoken, quilted man asks a nurse, how much longer? The nurses who are all have tattoos of tree roots and butterfly’s congregate to inform him that there are two doctors currently in this hospital area and thirty patients. The same for ambulances I can attest, my shoulder popped out of its socket in bed one morning and the ambulance service administrator informed me that prospects of ameliorative care could be half a dozen hours at best; so It’s a towel as a bite, a mango flavoured e-cigarette as a gas and air mask and popped it back in myself whilst squealing a noise I didn’t know I could make before this version of pain. “This NHS is on its knees” Starmer reiterates on BBC 4 radio.
St Peter's Church, Preston Village:
A little chapel, a place in which I invite the Holy Spirit, I’ve not been one for liturgy but we can do some business - Jesus or whoever, if you’ve got some holy ordinance I have some space for belief, a deal can be struck perhaps? a little health and a little time, for a little worship. Otherwise, I might be forced to invoke the the new ways; medicine that is fun to pronounce, Brazilian breathing methods and good old exercise, all feel fruitless. The new way that seems of most reputable credibility is art. That maybe a picture or some kind of sensuous experience can help console the operative self?
350 elapsed miles in a saloon motor vehicle, a waining august and a waining precipitous sense of nationhood, the ideas kind of tersely strewn into them:
Glued to the driving seat for the best part of 9 hours, A27 to Exeter, the A30 for hundreds of miles through Devon and into Cornwall. The vigour of humans in engine machine frames - found in motorway service stations, on benches outside the McDonalds or the Burger King, in paper bags and cigarettes and liminally maned spaces sustaining the forward. There is also an older and receding sense of the country in the smaller off-road towns and villages. As the radio bleets with Sir Keir Starmer’s priministerial ban on outdoor smoking, a gauzy haze swims through the spired churches, crenelations and stone community centres of an old dignified nationhood. Of a way of being that is entirely proportionate to the appetite of ones self and ones neighbours. Highstreets with endless bunting splaying into a grey breeze, electronic exchanges and games workshops, subways and bus stops asking for a wait of 45 minutes. Places where fantasy seems the biggest idea there is, Places where we see the ‘death metal’ t-shirt and the video game hoodie is all crusted in dandruff. That it is enough to be a we, a we as in us, in a place that just is - not becoming or modernising or urbanising but enduring and thriving without construction vehicles and cafes. This is a monolithic idea from the minds of men now calcium phosphate under gravel and dirt, an idea that we live in so veraciously, that we cling to as if summoned from the core of our being - An English way, a western way, a local way, the done thing and just the way things are around here. Simultaneously caught in the radiant lustre of war memorials full of rifled soldiers and red flowers, resentful of our political establishment and those that make too much noise and believe things rather differently and dress bit odd or talk a bit funny, or support a penant tricolour of the sports team you dislike. I mean by this, as I drive through Arundel and Tidworth and Ilminster and Cheriton Bishop and Lyme Regis and Truro and Gwennap and St. Ives - I wonder how in a little island, united by this grand post war idea of collaboration and shared history, do we end up at such vehement conjunctions of disagreement and distaste for one another. “Causing pain to others is part of being in this machine” Shiela Heti writes in the ‘Alphabetical Diaries’ and "Either life is always and in all circumstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account; it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other." a British journalist writes whilst helping the Sisters of Charity after the Tsunami in Calcutta as written in Annie Dillard’s essay ‘The Tsunami’
Tewlwolow Kernow in Cornish:
“just as fish live and swim in water: we live and move through light” John Berger writes in ‘Cataract’ an illustrated recounting his 2010 eye surgery at Quinze-Vingts eye hospital in Paris. “my desire is to bring astronomical events and objects down into your personal lived in space” Artist James Turrell during the opening of a LA Country Museum of Art accompaniment video to the in-construction Roden Crater Installation. “The skyspace is at the top of the park, it’s kind of like the main big art thing here” - Reticently, the employee at the ticket booth to Tremenheere sculpture garden. She can’t find our tickets, they have a new system, we show her the email with our tickets again. I cant be bothered she exhales in good spirits, lifting two pamphlets from beside her desk, go on in.
‘Twilight Cornwall’ carved into a plaque of slate at the space entrance. Another of Turrell’s Meticulously constructed, bunkered rooms and walkways with carved annular, disc shaped apertures, usually with an agora like bench seating cresting the below room. The big idea in the artists imagination is the cultivation of “geological time” defined as time outside of the construction of mankind, opposingly propositioning “astronomical time and things above”. A lasting hallway to the installation is cast in complete shadow - only the greenery of the gardens behind and the pure sheer calcium light of the viewing room ahead are available to the ocular sense. Egg shaped porthole, giggling visitors in nylon from the mountain warehouse, children playing chime around the circlet above ground, culling September stray wind, curiously a lot of bugs all over the walls and the seats, like a lot, buzzing, crawling like little black pocks in the cataract. “Other colours flare or recede or penetrate but blacks look as though they have been deposited” Berger writes as his eyes begin to recover. There really is a lot of bugs here, an unusual amount I note. Visitors leave and time is privileged to be alone in this beautiful amalgamation of a vessel porthole and a wellness retreat spa lobby.
White is the empty colour. No, it is the weightless colour, because it’s restless for light. This is a trench for light I think, a place where light preserves itself and swells into a truer less intentional state. I am reminded once more of Grünewald’s altarpiece. About articulations, about geometries that through some act of human ingenuity can ameliorate suffering. I am waiting for it to hit, like a come up, like the euphoric highs of ecstasy or benzodiazepine. That epiphany, big bang moment. Rotating through the room, trying different seating and different postures and different breathing, nothing’s coming. Even as the clouds become thinner and recede entirely, elucidating a sky so alarmingly blue even the smallest collisions or refractions cause it to collapse into low resolution concentric rings of complacent blue. Pretty in here, pretty and peaceful, but just like these failed communions in coastal chapels, the big idea cant find a way to my plug socket. I suppose a strangely vivid and analogous proposition of failure. Pseudonyms for grace, all these rooms we frequent - for what we wish to extract, perhaps intentionally so, they wish to give us just enough to try again, to find a new lay line through into the big idea.
A consideration emerges as the mechanism on my wristwatch encroaches the parks closing. I wonder, if even visible, what this installation looks like at around 2AM in the morning. A single diaphanous line of stars pinching the endless darkness of the night into knots and crests of visibility. This room deadly black, clumsily trying to find your footing and see your own arms and orienting yourself around whichever dregs of moonlight bloom the circlet. My previous consideration becomes quite guilty, to see this room undisguised by light. Could this be a remedy to the nothing I feel in this daylight chasm? One word feels pertinent, trespass. That artistic practice from iconoclastic abstraction to monolithic land art is a trespass on religious laws. To suggest even symbolically the mechanisms of worship can be rotated away from godhood. Tresspass. To suggest there’s something else to it, some astrological apparatus, some spiritual notion shared amongst mortal people, something of nature perhaps - of the secular spirit. Turell’s work is said to be heavily influenced by his experience as a Quaker (hands up, booming voices) In a juvenile, puerile way, I think amongst the hollow sentiments of twilight of Cornwall, that perhaps sneaking in here with a tin can or some kids in Los Angeles engineering a clandestine plan to sneak inside Roden Crater’s unfinished construction site and get biblically high is an aperture of considerably enriched enlightenment. “Because there is no god to ask forgiveness from if we trespass religious laws, we must ask for forgiveness from each other for trespassing or failing to honour human laws.” Heti writes. Probably about cheating on someone.
Suffering our glee ways through the great, viscerally uncomfortable privilege of consciousness:
During the most recent consultation with my medical practitioner I’m asked, relative to the current state of my condition how I am dealing with ‘a new normal’. I detest this I concede, that this seems a defeatist proposition that surely we are just a few small and manageable alterations away from my old and completely preferable normal. Surely that can’t be how it works. You wake up one day and for no discernible catalytic reason the vital components and interactions that govern your daily life just evaporate and that this implacable and undefinable pain is just a new process of things, that one day everything changes and it hurts all the time, perpetually. Not how the body works, they say. It can do things of its own volition, can vacillate your conscious intentions and create for itself a little nebula of insolvable, critical problems. With this misery I am drawn outside and circumnavigate my way, not to the allocated exit, but the one by the emergency room, the one with the dolphin mural.
The big idea hits like new gravity. That little clumsily quipped glint for an eye, that protruding horn of a nose, how breathy the water feels and the treatment of stoney skin speak so directly into something I know to be the biggest idea there is, being seen for the unconsolable and ununderstandable creatures that we are. Suffering our glee ways through the great, viscerally uncomfortable privilege of consciousness. Doing some emergency room calculus on each other, driving across countries to see rooms with holes in the roof, talking to dolphins and reading illustrated poetry about a man getting his eye surgery done - supermarket lives in throbs and cusps of unadulterated free time like Booker Little’s ‘man of words’ and like absurdity and vehicles and alloy and medicine and being okay, being quite frankly an usual amount of specks in this chamber of light. Lithe tap on the sheet plastic, clumsily bolted atop the mural “thanks for the big idea” a chute of time, a morsel of bone.