southwark park

Jun 29
3 min read

Updated: Jul 20

place

southwark park offered their stretch of padlocked wild woods. visiting the site I was met by a family of foxes . there was no digger access, so the serious physical aspect of the spade work has become part of the identity of the making, replacing the gesture of painting.

woodblock 1561
copperplate 1582
ordnance survey 1960

the ground

iron compounds and ferrous minerals react with the tannins in the oak. peaty decomposing matter make fulvic acids that wick the canvas. telluric fields at play.

ceremony ( the planting )

the force that through the green fuse drives the flower

drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

is my destroyer.

and i am dumb to tell the crooked rose

my youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

the force that drives the water through the rocks

drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams

turns mine to wax.

and i am dumb to mouth unto my veins

how at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

the hand that whirls the water in the pool

stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind

hauls my shroud sail.

and i am dumb to tell the hanging man

how of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

the lips of time leech to the fountain head;

love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood

shall calm her sores.

and i am dumb to tell a weather's wind

how time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

and i am dumb to tell the lover's tomb

how at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

(thomas)

“I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth. I believe this affinity of the human spirit for the earth and its beauties is deeply and logically rooted. As human beings, we are part of the whole stream of life. We have been human beings for perhaps a million years. But life itself — passes on something of itself to other life - that mysterious entity that moves and is aware of itself and its surroundings, and so is distinguished from rocks or senseless clay — [from which] life arose many hundreds of millions of years ago. Since then it has developed, struggled, adapted itself to its surroundings, evolved an infinite number of forms. But its living protoplasm is built of the same elements as air, water, and rock. To these the mysterious spark of life was added. Our origins are of the earth. And so there is in us a deeply seated response to the natural universe, which is part of our humanity."

(carson)

ceremony ( the exhumation)

infinitive

we make too much history.

with or without us

there will be the silence

and the rocks and the far shining.

but what we need to be

is, oh, the small talk of swallows

in the evening over

dull water under willows.

to be we need to know the river

holds the salmon and the ocean

holds the whales as lightly

as the body holds the soul

in the present tense, in the present tense.

(le guin)

the marrow

there was a word inside a stone.

I tried to pry it clear,

mallet and chisel, pick and gad,

until the stone was dropping blood,

but still I could not hear

the word the stone had said.

I threw it down beside the road

among a thousand stones

and as I turned away it cried

the word aloud within my ear

and the marrow of my bones

heard, and replied.

(le guin)

Most writers of biology texts imply that an organism exists apart from its environment, and that the environment is mostly a static, nonliving backdrop. Organic beings and environment, however, interweave. Soil, for example, is not unalive. It is a mixture of broken rock, pollen, fungal filaments, ciliate cysts, bacterial spores, nematodes, and other microscopic animals and their parts. "Nature," Aristotle observed, "proceeds little by little from things lifeless, to animal life, in such a way that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation. Independence is a political, not a scientific, term.

Since life's origin, all living beings, directly or circuitously, have been connected, as their bodies and populations have grown. Interactions occur as organisms connect via water and air. Darwin, in his Origin of Species, likened the complexity of these interactions to "an entangled bank"- too complex for us humans even to begin to sort out.

(margulis and sagan)