A text submitted for Gnommero: Exactitude, the third in a series of six art journals produced in response to Italo Calvino's 'Six Memos for the Next Millennium', (edited by Sarah Tripp and Eona McCallum).
The publication will be launched during the 2HB exhibition at Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow.
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Leaving Edinburgh Station half past three in the afternoon: relative to goodbye set in motion. Inanimate and close to: Bruntsfield Links, the weekend when sky became storm.
“As you pull out of Waverly Jeffery Street is your right. I will be stood waving, throwing your goodbye in to the air. Wave back to me and look for a bright red zipper jacket.” I laid flat on the ground near my house. The surrounding grass coloured my periphery vision with a soft blanket of varied green, my boots at the base of my sight the sheen of acorns fresh from their autumnal aprons: my outstretched arms had the affect of red wings that touched the blurred movement of passers by. I looked straightforward up in to the sky, framed by tree leaves and towered stairs appearing more in focus yet beyond the reach of my fingers toes and tongue.
“Jeffery Street is on the right, relative to the train as it heads due east and south along the track. If your seat is backwards facing I will be on your left not your right. Get this particularity incorrect, you will not see me”. Beyond the framing of trees and towers waved another realm of relativity painted blue. I was stuck to the ground, much like everyone else, looking down in to the atmosphere as it moved at a similar speed to me and not too displaced from the effort of the earth under my back.
“You missed me and your wave. And you were wearing a red zipper jacket not me. Are you not too hot on the carriage heading down in to stormy weather leaving the blue skies of Midlothian behind? Have you checked the weather report for the rest of the day?” After stroking the grass around me, tapping my boots together and protruding my taste in to the air, I reach a moment of stillness. Not dissimilar to the moment they describe as facing downwards in to the sky below you. Everything backwards you have a sense of being glued to the ground, the waves of your inner ear fluid becoming tidal as the blood in your veins levels off relative to horizontality. My eyes blinked and the world shifted at a right angle before me.
I am heading backwards in to the south again. Soon I will hit England with the North Sea to my right and the route towards Cumbria on my left. As the breadth of the country matures pasts its bottleneck the coast will slowly disappear as the train heads inland. The clouds, according to the weather report, will close in on the train to a point where relativity excludes itself from the collected location of coach E. Clouds began to float in to my line of sight; I thought of weather reports and a conversation I had the week before, during a train journey, about stillness and not being still: “if the earth stopped moving the atmosphere would maintain its viscosity across the surface of land and sea. High winds would rip us from the ground at speeds beyond macro-recognition and the skies would blur between you and the next solid object. Death would smash at your limbs in a matter of milliseconds.” No fingers no toes and no more tongue.
As we on the train are wrapped in the momentary (or continuous) happenings of the atmosphere out with the carriage, we travel like a river into the unknown through histories and past landmarks. Inside the carriage I can throw my hand up to the ticket officer with little more affect than brushing the passenger to my right lightly with my elbow. However, if I used my other hand with enough force as to smash the window on my left, my arm would be thrown out to a trajectory other than the rest of my body, and ripped from its socket crashing to a bloody demise. Suspending this quick act – that is stretching the description to more than a few milliseconds - would be similar to submersion in water after emptying your lungs of air: sinking to the bottom as the liquid streams across your body, your breath would remain expelled irrelative to any further inhalation of life force. As you open your mouth or nasal passage your anus does the opposite and tightens in panic, your lungs are flooded with liquid affect and the abyss takes you.
One stream of access to an idea is relative to the other. Appearing together and reflecting one another - like a train travelling at a similar speed to its italic counterpart - the two adjacent texts are below merged in to a non-viscous fiction:
Superfluid: One moving but still
the other still but moving
“You are facing downward in to the sky below. Body glued to the ground you begin to lose your thoughts. All that ordinarily sits at the back of your mind flushes to the fore. The waves of your inner ear fluid become tidal as the blood in your veins levels off relative to horizontality. Ideas undulate in the brooding storm above; your body is caught in the crossfire. The window to your left is fluid and becomes you. As the liquid enters your lungs your body will leave the ground and conform to a suspended atmosphere, which you enter at a speed beyond that of the train and its backward motion. Adjusting to this floating world you catch your goodbye, collect your wave and re-surface from the storm.”
One blink and the world shifted by ninety degrees – as easy as opening one eye in place of closing the other. Everything looked different but the same. I have your speed now, you borrow mine for a second or two and we work out what displacement stands between us. Your window seat catches up with mine and we enjoy an expanded durational lapse where visual contact is exposed and slowed. Your face flickers gently with recognition. Mine makes the same involuntary contortion as usual. For a brief calculation we stare in to one another’s eyes with exacting measure.