body blog: Use

While loading an image, in the time it takes for that thing to manifest there is a play of pixels; a dance across the blanket emptiness of the computer screen where first this collection and then that collection gather and superimpose one at a time at the given intervals required. And yes to begin with before the system is totally up and running there is that sense of spaciousness in the in-between of these gatherings. As if a certain freedom of expression could be found in the left-undone totality that never was. We are all too ready to read forward or backwards- to a time of given completion or a forecast of event-closure once the system's overload starts bit by bit to constitute its missing parts. And it's not only in this obviously temporal landscape of a decomposing and recomposing code tablet that the assembly/dis-assembly is taking place before our eyes. There at the British Museum standing an arm's length away from a painted vase shattered and rebuilt, the varnishing and ink-work all but a dream. But we are prompted into this idea of completion by the helpful sign beneath the glass cabinet; "A Goddess wearing a split skirt holding a bird in either hand" Oh so now we know. That is it of course.There it was before our eyes and now it is pointed out to us, well yes of course it is this. We stand a little further back. We squint and the vase could be nothing other than what is described.

Back at home I am listening to an ancient Bob Dylan CD- still working off a sound medium that can be physically scratched and re-rendered; distorted on the surface of a round translucent disc that in this way can then affect the reception and/or perception of a sound. But I am lucky it is playing at all. And that is a hit and miss thing since the 10 year old C.D player is losing its laser grasp on these inserted discs and randomly it seems, draws a blank; a mute disc where the song plays in my mind not on the physical apparatus that usually corresponds and slips so identically into this memory trace every time it catches in so that the two are inseparable So it is playing- and I think really playing in the room "Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowland". But it is slipping and regurgitating itself in any which way sometimes cutting out and then doubling up in speed only to halt and fixate on a distant segment somehow plucked out of the blue. I cannot actually recount any words beyond this remembered phrase or is it simply the Title Name that plays over and over in my mind whether it is physically apparent at that moment in terms of the track sequence or not. But yet all the other placements of this song all there with their own sound qualities are there as relatively heavy or light insertions held apart so that like the well spaced-out crowd in a large stadium who are strangely quiet and restful simply dropping into place in a crescendo wave of applause when it is their turn to be heard in this panoramic display and then disappearing from view. So there is this semblance of a whole even though at any one time only a single notation or rhythmic emphasis is actually occurring at any one moment. It's as if my own body is tilting and beckoning in and out of these dips ad crevices; the deep timorous accents of the voice and the shrill harmonica interspersing yet never becoming one. It's in this splayed out dissonance that some kind of aggravated mood that is swinging toward a closure that is never totally fulfilled sets up this mood of familiar yearning which is the song before the words mean or refer to anything. What do they refer to? They refer to themselves at that moment- the sound-intervals that float up and sink back down like bubbles that then pop on the surface.

Back in the British Museum I am standing before a stone tablet- one of many- the surface of which rises and falls like the water-worn stone that it in fact is. I feel these creases and undulations like I would feel a questioning on my brow even when the question was gone or no longer relevant and only the crevices of its affect remained. Or the small rivulets of valleys and mountains on the palm of my hand which if magnified would perhaps create a near-perfect match to these indentations that I stand before. That is all they are; indentations; a series of foregrounds and backgrounds; of reliefs and shadows where the affect of the harsh overhead cool lighting accentuates the soft warm folds of the rock as if it were shaping in the time it took to look at it and simply melting away at other moments of inattention. I want so much to touch this surface but this is prohibited either by invisible laser-beams that ring out at a given interval of human body warmth or by the smooth panels of glass that separate me and the other observers from the object so that what is most significant is our own brief and passing reflections off from this glass behind which are the melting lumps of stone. But look carefully with a trained sense of observation and what is more read the notes inscribed in black typeset underneath each stone and one will gather the correct information about each scene. Look here a man caught in battle thrown midway between his galloping horse and the arms of his savior or here, a tiger in the moment of a kill with jaws wide apart and the rump of an antelope between his teeth or the soft supple body of a woman leaning towards her companion who perhaps in a later stone tablet is destined to become her lover. These stories are told in the script below but they in themselves are fragments; part-erased into the locked in details that become islands outside of any connective narrative. Sometimes they offer up strange semantic inconsistencies to our modern eye; a dislocated hand near a crotch, the hoof of an animal somehow stuck on the lower thigh of a man. But beyond and before these readings they are simply the hills and valleys of this relief. These are what are humming here on this day below the cool lights inviting us to pause or move away and amid the clutter of broken limbs and smashed in faces that are not the apparent replica of the signs that call them "Woman" "Horse" "Man" and "Chariot" but are something in and of themselves, it is the soft vacancy of almost total effacement where the stone is rendered back into itself as nothing other than stone, that calls us the most insistently And we know so clearly in that feeling of calmness that it was always only ever this. So that we linger here jamming the procession of visitors on this Thursday morning in March of the year 20013. And yet this collectivity of people seems strangely fitting; to come together on that day all by itself.

Up in a secluded top-floor segment of the Museum there is an almost -so it says- perfectly preserved collection of Egyptian stone reliefs dating from BC 5,000 or thereabouts that loop around a landing in a full circle with the staircase allowing visitors to emerge and disappear from the center floor without disturbing this ringed circuit. A man in a blue uniform is walking rapidly around this runway. He never breaks his step but moves onward manically as if his heart were on a lead that simply swung him around and around. When I interrupt him on one of his turns and ask him why? he says it is good exercise and keeps him busy in the two-hour stint he must do up there on the landing before being relieved by another museum assistant. I say it must be a funny job to do; somehow being there but not being there to the visitors who come and go all day long in the museum. And he says yes, they are taught to somehow keep in the background and to become almost invisible; to give priority to the objects and the broken reliefs in the cabinets and on the walls around them. He says its O.K working there part-time but working full-time -as some of his colleagues do- would drive him crazy. Just then he is replaced by a female museum assistant. She takes up her place in the corner of the room where there is a seat that the man had not used the whole time I had been up there and which in fact I had not noticed at all before she sat down.

British Museum Reliefs and Statues