tokens of love

Have been a little obsessed with love tokens for a long while. The image above is one of a whole load of my own love tokens that I made back in about 2004. My parents had decided to sell the house that I had spent almost my entire life, and I was staggered at the sense of loss I experienced at the prospect of leaving it. I felt I couldn't just withdraw without some sort of significant act, something that demonstrated its importance to me and my formation (my parents built it themselves, on the hills surrounding Bath and overlooking the town). 

So I sanded down (by hand) one side of a 2 pence coin for every year that I had lived there (26 years). It took ages and felt incredibly doting. But that's what these gestures are all about. I couldn't find words to express all the emotion tied up with that place, so I left them blank. Just too personal I suppose - I couldn't bear to belittle or make hackneyed these feelings. It became more about the feel of their smooth facets, as if I'd been carrying them around with me for years in my pocket. And although they still look a little rough in the picture above, they weren't (and they were a real bitch to get entirely scratch-free with just sand-paper, water and elbow-grease alone!). Queen Elizabeth's face remained, impervious and impenetrable on the other side, the name a casual reference to me. Before I left, I hid all the coins in significant places around that house for the next inhabitants to discover. And they did - some of them anyway. But a few I think you'd have to tear the place down to get to actually.

Have a look at The Golden Smith's blog and his great post on love tokens: lots of interesting stuff referencing a sort of truth-to-materials ethos. His post reminded me of the above and made me think about convicts love tokens, exchanged between families and loved ones as they set sail from our shores for new lives elsewhere, particularly in relation to all the 'ah-hoy' things I've been thinking about lately.

all real lizzies?

From a student of mine at University of Plymouth,  Mella McKeown. It's so unusual to find old stuff with your own name on it - so thank you!

the formal qualities of a drench

 

some valentine

in a word

All images © Charles Barten & magic-lantern.eu

More from the Magic Lantern Slide Collection of Charles Barten.
With thanks for allowing me to reproduce his images here.

with microfilm strapped to their ankles

All images © Charles Barten & magic-lantern.eu

A nice fact: during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) carrier pigeons were crucial for communication outside Paris, which was under siege. Pigeons were carried out of the city by balloon, with both official and private 'dispatches'. Correspondence was mainly in the form of microfilms, allowing for up to 21 letters to be documented on film and carried in a tube by a single pigeon. The microfilms, once they had arrived at their destination, were projected, read and copied by teams of clerks, using magic lanterns. The letters were transcribed onto special forms and often annotated with 'pigeon' before being sent on to the addressee.

If time and money were no issue, I'd send out a flock of pigeons with hand-drawn magic-lantern messages right this minute. The Magic Lantern Slide Collection of Charles Barten in the meantime offers some beautiful inspiration, both in terms of material referencing birds, flight and other skirr-related activities but also for text-based and hand-drawn magic-lantern slides (see tomorrow's post). A big thank you to Charles Barten for allowing me to reproduce just a few of his slides here.

airmail

scaredy-cats & fear-rabbits

'Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.'

Robert Browning, Bishop Blougram's Apology, 1855.

words that never get used… but which ought to be

Cassell's English Dictionary

whistle what you would normally entrust to words

Not a blackbird, more like a swallow or perhaps a sand-martin.

[First off, go to Birdsong DAB radio channel, running 24 hours a day (click on the player at the bottom of the entry to listen to the live broadcast) to set the tone for the following post. The bird recordings were originally used as a test transmission on Classic FM prior to its launch and listeners currently enjoy the soundtrack again since the radio station Oneword ceased to broadcast on the 11th of January 2008 and the recording was used again as a substitute. Listeners are warned that the bird song could cease to be broadcast without warning at any time.]

. . . . .

'After a while the whistle is repeated - by the same blackbird or by its mate - but always as if this were the first time it had occurred to him to whistle; if this is a dilaogue, each remark is uttered after long reflection. But is it a dialogue, or does each blackbird whistle for itself and not for the other? And, in whichever case, are these questions and answers (to the whistler or to the mate) or are they confirmations of something that is always the same thing (the bird's own presence, his belonging to this species, this sex, this territory)? Perhaps the value of this single word lies in its being repeated by another whistling beak, in it not being forgotten during the interval of silence.

Or else the whole dialogue consists of one saying to the other "I am here," and the lengths of the pauses adds to the phrase the sense of a "still," as if to say: "I am still here, it is still I." And what if it is in the pause and not in the whistle that the meaning of the message is contained? If it were in the silence that the blackbirds speak to each other? (In this case the whistle would be a punctuation mark, a formula like "over and out.") A silence, apparently the same as another silence, could express a hundred different notions; a whistle could too, for that matter; to speak to one another by remaining silent, or by whistling, is always possible; the problem is understanding one another. Or perhaps no one can understand anyone: each blackbird believes that he has put into his whistle a meaning fundamental for him, but only he understands it; the other gives him a reply that has no connection with what he said; it is a dialogue between the deaf, a conversation without head or tail.'

Mr Palomar (Palomar's Vacation: Palomar in the Garden: The Blackbird's Whistle), Italo Calvino.

aims & objectives

One of Many, St Bride's, London

I seem to have been talking about recording ideas and thoughts a lot lately. And even doing it. Definitely getting back up to speed with documenting the tiniest meditation these last few months.



And here's someone else who carries notebooks with her all the time: Jo Peel.

Jo also designed a rather lovely poster for Julia Kent, who came to play her cello down in Cornwall this week. Have a listen on the link. It's beautiful stuff.

Studies in Indirect Communication vol. VIII: Response

Image: John Stanbury, Advice to Sink in Slowly

Studies in Indirect Communication vol. VII: Response

Image: Kalle Sten.

Back on the radar.

Studies in Indirect Communication vol. VI: A Lifetime is Not Just a Succession of Breaths

Studies in Indirect Communication vol. V

Painting in a small convent in Mexico City, where the nuns had all made vows of silence. [There were also mummies in open caskets in the cellars. Didn't think I'd be disturbed by the sight - but really was.]

Studies in Indirect Communication vol. IV

Ways to not talk and yet say everything
or
Ways to talk and yet say nothing

Studies in Indirect Communication vol. III

Source: The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, Maurice Rickards, 2000

The deeds on my house state that as it is classed as a residence, it is illegal to run a business from within my own four walls. In the past, people got round this problem of letting the 'right' people know that they were working from home by discretely placing small 'adverts' within their windows. Small and decorative enough to be difficult to read unless you were in close proximity, they were also explicit in their communication once you made the commitment and ventured nearer…

Studies in Indirect Communication vol. II

Motion picture & method of producing the same, C.F. Pidgin, September 1917, Patent: 1,240,774

Notes on feathers, message flimsies & papillons

Feather letter, 1811. Source: The Encyclopedia of Ephemera, Maurice Rickards, 2000.

i. Volante; volantissime! [Fly; as fast as you can!]

ii. Per postas, cito, cito et fidelis. [By post, swiftly, swiftly, and faithfully.]

iii. Birds as emissaries: imperial despatches in ancient China were carried by homing pigeons.

iv. The feather = speed

v. A feather flight in your seal:
- Symbolic of urgency, and used to indicate army mobilization orders in China in the first century AD.
- Express post in Scandinavia from the 1780's.
- Birds printed on the inside of contemporary envelopes still indicate speed, efficiency and lightness.

vi. Tiny written scrolls attached to besiegers' arrows and fired to agents within the city walls of Potidaea, 5th century BC.

vii. Siege of Metz, 1870, defenders of the city flew messages out of the city via balloon. The notes, written on flimsy sheets of coloured paper were named papillons - butterflies, or just called flimsies.

viii. Pigeongram / airgraph / aerogramme / catapult mail / rocket mail

ix. Dead letters: 'Stamp found eaten off by snails', Looe, Cornwall 1946. 'Destruction by tomtits', Exeter, 1957.