Thursday 1 October 2009

CIVILITY AND ALTITUDE – OCT 2009

22nd Oct 2009

Hi Steve,

Really enjoyed today. wasn't bored - always interested in anyone's climbing and whatever the level.

Here are some fast thoughts too:

Fear

I was interested is seeing where and what you feared. - what element of the siuation was the seed of the fear - the insecurity of the foot placements. technically this is often the case - footwork a takes time to atune too - but fear looks for any nook or crany to slip into and fester - so if it wasn't the feet (but it usually is - because they are slightly less predictable in terms of slippage and friction that hands - less feeling) it would have been something else (is the knot right? is the rope strong enough? is the rope over a sharp edge? did the karabina close right?....)

It's painful to hear somebody recount witnessing a shocking scary climbing injury. These moments taste. The impact of the ground is something you never forget if you've experience it to any level where it injures. This is something you can sense in a situation where you imagine it can happen. But it's difficlu to be objective when these thoughts / tastes feeling come into you mind. I don't want to suggst that climbing is about denial (it won't happen it didn't happen) but in some ways you have to face it down and come to terms with it - or put it in it's place. is this inhumane?

So it was interesting to witness how long it would take you to become familiar with the situation - and steps which might encourage or facilitate that. You climbed the black jugs a few times - on top rope then leading it. The knowledge of the situation grew and fears went - also interested to hear about the practical distraction of clipping. Oftent he experience is the other way that the clippiung adds extra fear becasue it takes time and when you stressed never seems to go right...

Twisty - devious - deviant

The hips thing leads into thinking about how you feel the situation - rather than confronting the wall / rock you move alongside it - you align with the rock - side with the rock if you like. make friends with it - not always possible especially when fear looms....

Personality important in climbing - you can also se it in certain climbers repertoire of routes.]

Counter culture climber...

Respresentations of climbing / climbers. Pepsi max (adrenlin - pseudo adventure / club climber (boy scouts). I guess I feel these both dismiss the key concerens / values in feel climbing has (for me). Social and anti social, introspection, routine, risk, adventure, relationships, culture, history, aethetics, respectfulness.

The route as a text which can be read by climbing - but always having the potential of being unreadable if you fall of it.

Altitude related shift in civility

I liked the conversation of the cattle as they moved up from the valley into the alp they became less domesticated and more wild. - It's a brilliant poetic. and the herders too – ALTITUDE CHANGES CIVILITY – OR CHANGES THE CRAFT OF CIVILITY.

Functional aesthetics - meaning

I've written quite a bit before about the conscious, unconcious and self conscious movements. In performance art i've always had trouble accepting the effected gesture - I tend to dismiss it as pretentious twaddle. But climbing gave me a form of movement which performed fantastic aethetics without it being self conscious. Meaning is there -there's no "reason" to climb other than love of life. The movements often need to graceful but they are formed by the negotiation of a problem. In this sense they are like other movements - walking, runnning sitting - they are directly subject to the enactment of that moment of being. But I guess you could argue that dancing like down the disco, club or gig (that which doesn't claim "meaning" - ) also has this - it's more movement for life - than movement for meaning.

That's not to say that isn't meaning.....

Does climbing close down thinking? does it reorder cognitive priorities to those of just what's in front of you? is it an escape? - is it self indulgent?. is it a form of denial? does it remove life's complexities?

Wider view

Does being on top give you a better view? Actually my experience generally of climbing is that it's a narrow visual perspective - close up - peripheral sometimes but close up and granular. I guess there's that shift from close and far perspectives - as you get onto the top (in that clasic sense of climbing things with lofty tops...) but generally nose to the rock face. close up and pornographic!

Can complex, socio-political, world view, life, art, culture exist and be present in the climbing moment / movement? It certainly does in the wider span of what climbing involves - and of course climbing history is littered with fascist climbers and socialist climbers. Could they climb together and not have a problem with their activity? Does the activity ever exist as just thE activity?

I'd love to understand more of your compositional approaches - the idea of phrasing.

I'll re-investigate some moves and try to describe them (like the climb poems I've done) - maybe as drawings?? the poems kind of reduce it to just the movement described in shorthand. i wonder if there's a way of expanding (rather than reducing) it somehow?

I'm not sure why this is relevant but:

recently (since Leo was born) I've noticed that when doing something with leo or anna (changing nappies, nursing screaming infant, making baby bottles) I get flashbacks of periods, places and moments I've experienced before. It's quite interesting - a simple banal activity - probably coupled with a level of sleep deprivation and circumstantial stress - triggers a flashback. It's probably very obvious to anaylse and read (time and place when things were freer) but it’s fascinating non-the less. Climbing doesn’t do this to my experience - but I feel there's a button / door / trigger somewhere to unleash the life in the movement moment. or i feel there's a poetic possibility in exploring this. maybe that's the crunch the movement moment doesn't allow such mind wandering and so it is the whole world - but that’s pretty narcissistic isn't it?

thats not a good place to end but i will,

hope you enjoyed DV8

best wishes,

dan

SENSING. FEELING. DOING – OCT 2009

AFTER CLIMBING

22nd Oct 2009

Hi Dan,

thanks for today. For me it was fantastic... hope it wasn't too boring for you... Here below are some immediate musings.

Next meeting 17th November according to my diary. I'm going to try to find time to explore on the wee wall in derry... maybe find a dancing friend who wants to play too.

I'd like to spend some time in the dance studio with you... invite you a bit into my conceptual/practical/creative world... maybe that could turn out to be relevant... see how you deal-with / move-with some ideas...

All the best

Steve

…. Musings…. Post re-introduction to climbing up a wall 22nd October 2009

FEAR

On the way down from derry I remembered that woman I saw fall….

I heard her voice murmuring, whining, pleading….. “het doet mir pijn”… it hurts…. That was after, probably two minutes after, the dull thud of her hitting the floor from 15/16 metres… enough of the shock had worn off… she was half-sitting, and half lying on crushed and crumpled legs and pelvis…. Then the blood started to spread across the floor….

… the car filled with a stress-sweat-fear and sorrow smell…

I thought I’d have a problem getting off the ground…

Like when I went to the wall in Moldova the first climb up was ok. Up and down … don’t think… just go…

Second time at three metres a burst… immediate, sudden, all over me… adrenaline… unfocussed mind… run away, run away, where is the “way out”… couldn’t control it at all… the feeling that if I wasn’t on the rope I would just let go and fall… because staying up there, holding on, balancing, working felt just too much… not too much in my muscles, too much for my soul, too much to stay there aware, remembering, imagining…

ATTENTION

Clipping on to the bolts was a relief. Having to pay attention to this balanced my attention to holding on to balancing to staying poised and efficient. My attention to these things was better when I had this other task… a practical attention… Like the details got clearer when my attention had to reach out to different things… like the way that peripheral vision becomes clearer when you focus the eye and the point of focus becomes clearer when you are aware of the peripheral visiion.

TURNING THE HIPS

This twist to get the pelvis in close to the wall has a sophistication potentially a sophistry, it is the beginning of Pantalones untrustworthyness, but also the potential for adaptability. It is a catholic pose not a protestant one (hah hah). Flat against the rock, walking up it this is “honest”, straightforward, vertical in its attention. A spiral is always horizontal. The flat version seems more like “pulling up” the twist is more like finding an indirect pathway which remains primarily horizontal but secretly weaves its way upwards… there is something fine about this form… This form looked very natural on Dan. The guys on the overhang were all shoulders and deltoids, trapezius, the gorilla approach, hanging and pulling, swinging… not so much walking. These states relate to levels 4 and 5 in the system of vertical space… they have such different chemistry’s, personalities, endocrine components… The breathing is different the eyes, the skin…

A ROUTE

A route with a name. Reification. A score for someone to play. A selection from all of the possibilities. The climb doesn’t exist except when it is being done… even then it is transitory, like a dance, not like a text or a sculpture, the name is text, it continues to exist, the climb disappears at the moment it appears… But the naming creates the possibility of history, of collecting a canon, of evaluating changing tastes and attitudes… Maybe on a crag with many “routes” what is offered are many ways to approach looking at the landscape of the crag… the impossibility of percieving everything leads to a desire to percieve something as a way towards the complete thing. But paradoxically as soon as something is named it also becomes a total thing which is impossible to contain in a direct fashion and so there is a desire to find a partial version of it through which to approach the whole…. And so on ad-infinitum…

… is there a poetics of route names… or many poetics… how do the names relate to the forms of the routes, the experience of climbing them… the conotations or the “facts”.

FUNCTION AND MEANING

I realise I don’t watch the other climbers in a very technical way. I watch their states and the way the states change. The state includes the mood, feeling, communication, intent, hopes, fears, intellectual engagement, tonus, functional tonus immediately relevant to the “move” but the tonus left over from before or anticipating the future or simply carried in from daily life, habits. Each “move” or “phrase” has its own character. A taste. Not just a form but a musicality. . . a meaning, a resonance. The composition of the climb is the movement through these changing resonances… skill assists this… but somehow functional language can’t describe the climb. The task is senseless as a functional task…. I don’t have a “reason” to go up… so what “sense” does it make? I am drawn back to climb because the action takes me to visit states of body/mind/mood/resonance which are unavailable without external challenge but which are not arbitrary. The rock…. Or wall has a form the “sense” of which demands to be discovered/created. The sense is also in the time composition…. That is the frustration with not finishing a climb or climbing without a sense of rhythm or time or phrasing. It is like the “sense” of the object has not been respected.

PHRASING, VERTICAL SPACE, HORIZONTAL SPACE

I have a well developed theoretical and practical approach to these. I’d like to introduce them in the studio to Dan. I’m not sure what and how they relate to the processes of climbing but there is something there.

SENSING. FEELING. DOING

Compositional/interpretative minds. How do these apply to the climbing process.

What was that phrase Dan used as he got out of the bus on the ormeau road?