“We come too late to say anything which has not been said already,” lamented La Bruyère at the end of the 17th century. The fact that he came too late even to say this (Terence having pipped him to the post back in the 2nd century BC) merely proved his point – a point which Macedonio Fernández took one step backwards when he sketched out a prequel to Genesis. God is just about to create everything. Suddenly a voice in the wilderness pipes up, interrupting the eternal silence of infinite space that so terrified Pascal: “Everything has been written, everything has been said, everything has been done.” Rolling His eyes, the Almighty retorts (doing his best Morrissey impression) that he has heard this one before – many a time. He then presses ahead with the creation of the heavens and the earth and all the creepy-crawlies that creepeth and crawleth upon it. In the beginning was the word – and, word is, before that too.

In his most influential book, The Anxiety of Influence (1973), Harold Bloom argued that the greatest Romantic poets misread their illustrious predecessors “so as to clear imaginative space for themselves”. …

(I like the Morrissey/Smiths reference, though it gives away Andrew’s own contemporary past! see below *)

This is a variation on my argument about actuality and the contemporary past – that we overemphasize the flow of time in our notions of history, forgetting that the past lingers, mutates, haunts, and constitutes our very being. This is the archaeological, the vitality of ruin, the impulse to arrest entropy, the shock of the old, when nothing happens twice, because it has already happened before (was this one of those wonderful aphorisms from Theodor Adorno?).

See my recent comments on the new translation of Laurent Olivier’s wonderful Sombre Abîme du Temps [Link], and my own forthcoming book The Archaeological Imagination [Link].

The past is all around us.

The implications apply also to any authoring or design -

Innovation and creativity are mostly about recycling, remixing, reworking.

Dryburgh Abbey, by Scott’s tomb.

*
Cemetery Gates – Morrissey – lyrics from The Smiths – The Queen is Dead (1986)

A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetery gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine

So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people all those lives
Where are they now?
With the loves and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived and then they died
Seems so unfair
And I want to cry

You say: “ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn”
And you claim these words as your own
But I’ve read well, and I’ve heard them said
A hundred times, maybe less, maybe more

If you must write prose and poems
The words you use should be your own
Don’t plagiarise or take “on loans”
There’s always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs
When you fall …

I have been photographing these old apple trees for over ten years now. Relics of an outdated rural economy.

Location – Mountain View Road, Boonville, Anderson Valley, northern California. The valley is now increasingly dominated by vineyards.

Welcome to the post-digital world, an exhilarating return to civility – via Facebook and Lady Gaga.

The point – our contemporary world is a mixed reality – witness the growing importance (again) of “live events”, even as we are more connected digitally:

A week in California and a finger in the recessionary wind has shown me where the smart money is moving. It is from online towards “live experience”.

The example of the music business is already well-known. Earnings from recordings have been plummeting for a decade, while from live they are rising ever faster. Warner Brothers release albums free online to publicise forthcoming concerts. In Britain HMV is closing 40 shops while tickets for a Rihanna concert can cost £330, and for Coldplay £180. A seat for Madonna is more expensive than her entire recorded output. A top American performer would reckon to earn between 80% and 90% of revenue from live performance. In the US alone, touring revenue that grossed $1bn in 1995 rose to $4.6bn last year. The big money, goes the catchphrase, “is now at the gate”. Nor is this just a youth phenomenon. On the American music circuit, 96% of singers were reportedly over 40 and almost half were over 60.

The potency of experience extends far beyond the realm of music. The upsurge in live comedy began in the mid-90s with tours by Robert Newman and David Baddiel, but now has Michael McIntyre and others appearing weekly, with back-up teams that would staff a circus. Performers such as Stephen Fry have taken to reading their books in public, Dickens-style, and simulcasting to hundreds of local cinemas. Close to a million people worldwide watch the Met Opera live in cinemas.

The most carefully researched audience activity, American politics, has swung from advertising and staged events to the archaic political form of active debate. The Republican primary campaign has seen 23 debates, winning unprecedented television audiences of 5-6 million …

The issue is the convergence of authenticity and mediation in what Joe Pine calls the experience economy. People matter in the world of (industrial) design and cultural production in a way that we haven’t seen for a long while. As I was recently commenting [link], the values at the heart of this human-centered design ultimately come down to relationships between people, their artifacts, and, crucially, both in the context of what Jenkins calls “civility”. (Recall the etymology – this is the world of the civis, the citizen – what I am calling res publica.)

Jenkins only comments on the significance of authenticity, of presence, of liveness. He doesn’t delve into the workings. A forthcoming book edited with Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye does just this kind of exploration with some performance artists and academics.

Presence, trace, record, media, document, archive … it is one of the culminations of our five year long “presence project”:

[Link] – Amazon

Laurent offers profound elaboration of the fundamental insight that the past is all around us, before us, in material traces,

that presence is filled with the past,

that the future is not constructed with innovation per se, but is an ongoing project of working on what is left of the past, and on what will become the past

(those iterative acts at the heart of design thinking).

Bamburgh Hall, Northumberland UK, a village that was once the capital heart of Celtic Christianity, setting for Walter Besant’s historical novel of 1884 Dorothy Forster, set in the Jacobin uprising of 1715

This is something of an antithesis to historiography, that the writing of history establishes events, sequence, date, agency, causation. Instead Laurent celebrates Walter Benjamin’s attack on such historicism with his messianic time of the now – Jetztzeit, and takes up Henri Bergson’s metaphysics of duration.

There are four key components to this argument.

1) The temporality of archaeology, our most intimate human experience of the past, is not date and event, but what I term actuality – conjuncture, the articulation of past and present, rooted in the way the past can endure, albeit changed. Actulaity is the Greek kairos – a moment of re-connection, re-collection, when something prompts a link between past and present (hence Laurent sees this as memory practice).

2) There is in this articulation a melancholic paradox – the past’s material decay is the condition of its persistence. The past is gone, and, though we may wish to revisit, we can do so only on the basis of remains that must have changed. Forever now beyond experience, we can only know the past because it has changed, has become trace and vestige, and is thus with us now.

The present must decay. Immortality is not an option. Transiency is our condition of being, of the existence of the past in the present. Ruin and decay mean that the past can be a potential subject of experience and knowledge. Things can endure, through their material resistance to decay and ruin, and because we can care and protect, attend to old things.

3) This is a geneaological perspective, focused on chains of connection reaching back into time immemorial. Its main features are not plot and event (the drama of historicism), but everyday matters, the quotidian, material textures of life. Most of the past in the present is trivial and superficial.

I think of the fictions of Georges Perec and Alain Robbe-Grillet, indeed those too of Walter Scott, and how they foreground texture and indeterminacy. Consider how photography is a superb witness of precisely the superficial and everyday, mostly irrelevant noise against which we may wish to see event and drama in the gap between the moment of picture taking and viewing – the actuality of the photograph, the temporal gulf bridged by its materiality.

4) The past needs work, the present contains latent pasts ready to be re-activitaed, re-collected, re-articulated, re-presented in creative work – the craft of archaeology. In this geneaological perspective there are necessary breaks with the past, because memory depends upon forgetting. Memory does not hold onto the currency of the ongoing present, but is conjuncture – when something prompts a connection to be made with what had until then been forgotten, latent or dormant. The past returns in such creative acts, such hauntings that may appear quite uncanny, precisley because of the breaks in the flow of time.

See my book Experiencing the Past (1992) [Link]
The Archaeological Imagination (2012) [Link]
Archive 3.0 [Link]
Archaeography.com [Link]
Archaeographer.com [Link]
Ruin Memories [Link]

Daguerreotype, c 1850

Richard (Hingley) – discussing things Roman

Coordinated effort to document the driving experience – historic cars – and the community who cherish automotive heritage.

Raising the profile of automotive studies, taking seriously this vital iconic part of the contemporary past.

As Mark Gessler – HVA (Historic Vehicle Association) and FIVA (Fédeartion Internationale des Véhicules Anciens) – puts it – from hobby to history

Preparing the Eddie Hall Bentley – car instrumented to record performance variables

Murray Smith at the wheel – wired up to track his actions and responses

The Bentley on the track

Instrumenting the 1960 Porsche-Abarth 356B Carrera GTL and the 1967 Porsche 910/6

Talking with John Morton in the pits – driving the Porsche-Abarth

(photos by Chris Lowman)

PhotoGraphy from ShiKai Tseng on Vimeo.

(An artifact is placed inside a pinhole camera that records a 360 degree panorama onto its surface.)

Further focus on medium as mode of engagement, as much as signal and communication; the camera as architecture, here theater and prop.

In conversation with Bianca (Carpeneti).

My early morning runs are troubling me deeply …

these encounters with a sublime picturesque [Link] [Link] [Link]

Photo – dawn on Holy Island. Watercolor – J.M.W. Turner (exhibited 1829) (the castle in the background)

Turner’s figures in the landscape (they are on the shore by Cuthbert’s island) indicate more going on than the conjunction of wind, sky and sea.

My concern – something of an ascetic moment, a methodist moment -
guilty pleasures
in landscapes and ruins that attest not to the realities of history, but to what the wealthy and powerful have done to turn labor on the land (and sea) into aesthetic allure.

The politics of land and ownership turned into a pleasant vista.

As I mentioned the other day [Link], Lindisfarne castle is a sixteenth century military fort by a nineteenth century industrial facility turned into a wealthy man’s holiday home (Edward Hudson, proprietor of magazine “Country Life”, commissioned Edwin Lutyens to oversee the tasteful conversion); Gertrude Jekyll added a walled garden.

How can we deny the taste, and this form of the landscape?

Lindisfarne – stairs and kitchen by Edwin Lutyens

The site in the 1900s, when Hudson bought the castle, was still dominated by an industrial facility – what was left of a substantial lime kiln works that had produced agricultural fertilizer. Over by the small harbor (the Ouse) were fish processing plants (mainly for gutting herring – and there are still some remains of the great fishing boats upturned on the shore – [Link]).

And, in a remarkable design gesture, Lutyens took the bricks used as ballast in the boats brought to carry the lime and used them, herringbone, for the new floors of the castle:

Here is how Thomas Girtin, contemporary of Turner, dealt with this conjunction of picturesque history and industry:

My concern

how do we deal with this now?

More thoughts to follow … [Link]

Though overly restored in the nineteenth century, the church of St Cuthbert at Norham on the Tweed still has some of the sumptuousness that originates in its original foundation by the bishops of Durham (Durham Cathedral houses the bones and grave of Cuthbert, and Norhamshire was not part of the border county of Northumberland, but of the County Palatine of Durham). The south arcade and chancel of c1170 remain.

It was on this exact spot in May 1290 that Edward Longshanks, King of England, declared he was come in the character of supreme and direct lord (Arthur’s heir), to maintain the tranquility of Scotland in its disputes over the succession, and to mete impartial justice to the numerous claimants of its crown.

There followed three centuries of border conflict.

Dad and Mom, Don’t Worry About Us, We Are All Well is a large-scale installation called Waste Not. It comprises over 10,000 items ranging from pots and basins to blankets, bottle caps, toothpaste tubes, and stuffed animals collected by the artist’s mother over the course of more than five decades.

Haunting, everyday textures

In todays Guardian – an evocative “Country Diary” set in Borth, near Aberystwyth, west Wales, where we used to live. Another petrified forest on the coast and taking us back to the days of the Welsh epic sagas.

Photo courtesy of Stuart Herbert

After the long winter, with its numbing cold and sustained snowfall, few things raise the spirits as much as walking under a deep blue sky with the afternoon sun warming your back. Add to this a long stretch of empty beach and the scope for improvement becomes vanishingly small. My visit to Borth was timed to coincide with a spring tide, whose dramatic range exposes at low water much that is usually covered by a confusion of surf. Winter storms scour the beach dramatically, and a visit in early spring often yields previously hidden elements – including new areas of the ancient sunken forest for which the beach is well-known.

The especially low tide revealed a part of the forest I hadn’t seen before. A dozen feet or so below the peak high-water mark, stumps of trees and jumbled arrays of prostrate trunks stood out from the scalloped ripples of the beach. Beyond them I could see tangled shallow root systems set in a glossy, eroded matrix of clay and woody peat. Some newly exposed trees had surprisingly well-preserved bark still in place, and several were immediately recognisable as birch. Dated at around 5,000 years old, these trees appear to have lost a battle with rising sea levels after the last ice age. Welsh legend carries intriguing tales of the lost land of Cantre’r Gwaelod (the Lowland Hundred), a fruitful tract beyond the present shoreline whose sea defences were inundated through either poor maintenance or drunken error.

Could this be a folk memory carried by word of mouth for thousands of years, or is it a later tale devised to account for the same evidence of change visible today? Opinions appear divided, but as I watched the incoming tide gently moving the individual sand grains of the beach it was clear that change is the natural state of the coastline – whether we like it or not.

David Petts has posted an x-ray made by Jenny Jones of one of the artifacts found this summer – [Link]

It didn’t look like much when it was found. It turns out to be a stylus – for writing on wax tablets.

Evidence for literacy in the last days of empire. A personal item, likely as not. To convey the mark of the writer. Another of those silent witnesses in our contemporary archaeological sensibility, attuned to traces and vestiges, memory fragments asking for reconstitution.

I find this kind of thing so evocative.

It is my latest presentation of the argument for a living past, a transitive past, tied now to a call for attention to matters of common and pressing human concern. In Stanford Strategy Studio we have been modeling foresight thinking and planning rooted in the Humanities – a long term historical (and necessarily archaeological) perspective. Key components of this have come through my recent posts on human-centered design [Link].

Here is an extract:

… Great voids in the antiquity of humankind came in the eighteenth century with the challenges to senses of history based upon religious teaching, biblical chronologies and Graeco-Roman historiography. Archaeology has worked so successfully over two centuries to populate the past with sites and artifacts in a global time-space systematics of timelines and distribution maps rooted in universally applicable systems of classification and categorization. While this inventory of archaeological remains has become the foundation and instrument of the management of the past in ministries of culture and planning departments the world over, it has nevertheless, indeed necessarily come with a growing awareness of threats both to the remains of the past and to the possibility of creating any kind of meaningful knowledge of what happened in history, if access to sources is overly restricted, if contextual information is lost or never acquired.

Here we experience a new kind of threat or risk to the past itself as well as to the potentiality and richness of pasts in the future, based upon new modern dynamics of presence (of the remains of the past) and absence (of past lives themselves as well as future memories and histories). The past is conspicuously not a datum, but subject to contemporary interests and concerns, infused now with the interests of knowledge and also with erosive threatening interests. Just as the natural environment is now seen as a thoroughly socialized and institutionalized habitat, a hybrid that includes threats, culpability, and responsibility on the part of humanity to care and curate, so too the past is a matter of concern, a matter of foresight, another risk environment affecting whole populations’ needs and desires for history, heritage, memory. The paradox or contradiction is that the control that knowledge affords, for example, in managing the impact of development or of the trade in illicit antiquities on the possibility of a past in the future, comes at the cost of a senseof security. It is not just that the past is threatened; senses of personal and community identity are threatened. …

Folk singers at the Durham Miners’ Gala UK 2010 – celebrating industrial and regional heritage [Link]

Mike Pearson and his new production of Aeschylus Persians (National Theatre of Wales) gets a superb review in the Guardian today [Link]

This is site-specific theatre with a vengeance. High up in the Brecon Beacons, in a mock-up village used by the military as a training-base, National Theatre Wales is recreating the oldest extant play in western drama: Aeschylus’s The Persians. The combination of the story and the setting ,with the sun slowly disappearing over the hills, is overwhelming.
The Persians

The play itself is extraordinary. Produced in 472BC, only eight years after the Persians had been routed at Salamis, it is the only Greek tragedy to be drawn from recent history rather than from legend. Obviously Aeschylus was celebrating Athenian victory. But what is astonishing is his sympathy for the vanquished. Atossa, mother of the defeated Xerxes, views the wreckage of her country with mounting horror. The ghost of Darius, her husband, rises from the grave to announce that grief is man’s lot and must be borne. Even “war-lusting” Xerxes himself, guilty of impetuously taking his country to war, is finally seen as an abject object of pity.

What is impressive about Mike Pearson’s production, however, is the totality of the experience. We assemble in a square in this deserted military village where the four-strong male chorus is rejoicing in war and announcing “no one can withstand this tsunami of the Persians in full rage.” We then march up a hill to sit in front of a four-storey house with the front cut away; and there we see, both in live action and on video, the tragedy enacted. There’s a wonderful moment when Atossa arrives in a white car to a blaze of trumpets. But, once she is in the house, a hand-held camera moves in close to watch the distintegration of her hopes as the news from Salamis arrives. And, with typical Pearson invention, that news is conveyed direct by video satellite.

Pearson puts the piece in contemporary clothes but makes no attempt to relate it directly to Iraq or Afghanistan. Instead he and the translator, Kaite O’Reilly, focus on how war destroys the very fabric of people’s identity. At the beginning, the chorus praise Xerxes as “fierce as a dragon scaled in gold”; by the end, they are threatening to beat him to death with a hammer. Even Darius, ritually raised from the dead, starts out in Paul Rhys’s performance as a gently melancholy ghost, only to turn into a wrathful figure who talks of Xerxes as “a mortal playing God to gods”.

Sian Thomas, left, also puts in a tremendous performance as the queen, a woman of fiery splendour reduced to ululating agony as the disasters mount and she cries “this is the peak of my misery”. And the four strong chorus, in its turn, descends from arrogant state apparatchiks to figures writhing in torment.

This superb production, with atmospheric music by John Hardy, literally takes one on a journey. And, as one went back down the hill after, strange lamentations emerged from the deserted houses. Shivering slightly, one moved on, still hearing the aftermath of war in one’s ears.

Michael Billington

Charles Spencer in The Telegraph [Link]

This is extraordinary, one of the most imaginative, powerful and haunting theatrical events of the year … This rarely performed masterpiece, which taps so powerfully into our present concerns about the West’s adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be an event however it was staged.

But the director of this National Theatre of Wales production, Mike Pearson, has achieved an extraordinary coup by staging it in the military village of Cilieni, from which civilians are usually barred. Built during the Cold War, and perched high in the Brecon Beacons, it has a church, houses, a village square. From a distance it looks idyllic. But the breezeblock buildings have never been homes, and there are burnt out tanks in the deserted streets. This deeply creepy place is used to teach troops how to fight in built-up areas, which gives Cilieni its alternative, acronymic name of FIBUA.

Another Guardian review from Charlotte Higgins – [Link]

Kate Bassett in The Independent – [Link]

Video from the Guardian – music by John Hardy – [Link] -

The annual celebration of a great industry and labor movement, once a living force, now a memory, nostalgically inspiring at best, after Thatcher’s neo-liberal ideology and political spite closed all the coal mines in the UK and devastated the pit villages.

More photos – [Link]

Around Lordenshaws, across from the market town of Rothbury, are many carved rock surfaces, typically associated with farming communities from the fourth to and millennia BCE, maybe earlier and maybe later.

Birky Hill

I met Stan Beckensall, school teacher in Rothbury, rock art enthusiast, some thirty years ago – his lifetime’s recording of Northumberland’s rock art is available online – [Link] See also the superb work of the Northumberland and Durham Rock Art Pilot (NADRAP) Project (managed by Northumberland and Durham County Councils and funded by English Heritage). Their website and database (English Rock Art – ERA) build on and incorporate the Newcastle University Beckensall Archive.

INORA, the International Newsletter on Rock Art is available online – [Link]

Coquetdale – a remarkable valley to the north of Hadrian’s Wall. A fascinating archaeological landscape.

Lordenshaws – prehistoric rock carvings and hill fort.

Shillmoor – from when the borders settled down in the eighteenth century.

Harbottle – feudal border stronghold, motte and bailey; the Drake Stone, center skyline – a druidic “Draak” stone? [Link]

Woodhouses Bastle – fortified homestead from the days of the raiding Moss Troopers (Holystone Grange in the background)

Magical – Whitton Dean, in the middle ground, is noted for its fairy community, Simonside Hills, to the left, for its mischievous elves.

See also the entry on Chew Green.

And the romance of the railway.

Just found a wonderful site called “Forgotten relics” – it has a page on a favorite village of mine (the castle straight out of Scott’s “Marmion”) on a branch line in the Scottish borders – Norham Station.

See also on Thomas the Tank, Ealing comedies and technicolor – [Link]

Link – Presence – the conference

Next comes a book from Routledge – “Archaeologies of Presence” – due out in 2010

Here are Pearson/Brookes in a performance Friday 27 March 2009:

memory, family, being there/here …

Link – Theatre/Archaeology

Northumberland UK

drag – pan | shift – zoom in | control- zoom out

Beneath the hill fort; around from the rock carvings.

(Please be patient with a long load time – I think it is worth it)