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?
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