Robinson My Time in Space

1. Auflage 2001
ISBN: 978-1-84351-287-5
Verlag: The Lilliput Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 232 Seiten

In an essay from 1996 collecton Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara and Other Essays, Tim Robinson noted that 'we are spatial entities, which is even more basic than being physical entities, subject to the law of gravity'. In this dazzling new series of essays Robinson examines aspects of his own 'time in space', moving from his childhood in Yorkshire, to a deadly moment on a Malayan airstrip, a pilgrimage to the midnight sun, adventures in the art-worlds of Istanbul, Vienna and London, and finally to the spaces of the West of Ireland which he has interpreted with incomparable attention and fidelity over the past three decades. The essays explore problems in mathematics and mapping, the human implications of the arc of a missile the feelings of a sceptic upon approaching divine ground in the company of a mystic, and other encounters of the empirical with the numinous: Robinson has an uncanny capacity to write convincingly about both. The sequence ends with an angry outburst against the continuing destruction of the Irish countryside and a moving hymn to the delights of his own house and garden at the edge of the sea in Connemara. My Time in Space is the latest instalment in a literary corpus of singular integrity and endless fascination.

TIM ROBINSON was born in England in 1935. Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage(1985), won the Irish Book Award Literature Medal and a Rooney Prize Special Award for Literature in 1987. Stones of Aran: Labyrinth(1995) both volumes are available as Penguin paperbacks, and Labyrinth as a Lilliput hardback. Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara was published in 1996. A collection of stories and speculative essays, Tales and Imaginings, was published by Lilliput in 2002.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Robinson, Tim

Leseproben

BIRDLIFE

(AND A PREFACE)

It’s the wise thrush that knows its own song …

While my mother-to-be was lying in wait for me, a thrush sang unceasingly outside her hospital window, day after day. She told me this when I was grown up and her mind was rambling back through the past, and I have interiorized it as a seminal event, the second, to be precise, of my life. Such parental tales of one’s own beginnings, which one can no longer distinguish from memories, acquire the tremendum of legend, of revealed religion. The totem animal’s song enters the bloodstream via the umbilical cord; later the blood will answer to a call from outside. When I was about eleven, as near as I can guess, my mother told me that since I could fly I should go and live with the birds. I remember standing at the back door, full of the pathos of leaving home, looking at sparrows in a hawthorn tree.

That was a dream, but the idea that I could fly had seeped into my waking life. I used to practise levitation, lying face down and concentrating with such hypnotic intensity that I persuaded myself I was floating an inch or two off the floor. My memories of having drifted like a toy balloon around the ceiling of my bedroom, and of having glided down the long sloping field below the school, were convincingly vivid, but a ballast of scepticism kept me from telling anyone of them. Rapturous cloud-explorations, snipelike towerings, angelic freefalls, reoccurred for many years thereafter and are among my most treasured unrealities.

‘Hushaby baby in the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle does rock’ was not among the mantras of my childhood, but hearing it now reminds me of early fantasies of being born in a bird’s nest high among branches swaying in the wind. Perhaps that balancing, flexing, world promised a strange security. My father, who knew about such things from his own treeclimbing, bird’s-nesting, boyhood, often told me, as a marvel, how the woodpigeon’s eggs lie safely on a mere half-dozen crossed twigs. As for the moment of terror ‘when the bough breaks’, I had already survived it, for once when I was no bigger than a monkey a branch snapped off under my weight, and I fell rather slowly to earth astride its thick, air-resisting, foliage. I was good in trees, showing off to all who would pause to admire how I could hang by my knees, and daily practising Tarzan-swings from branch to branch of a long-suffering tree known as the Coronation Oak in a little park near home. A few years ago, when I visited the deserted villages of the Anasasi Indians built into hollows of a cliff hundreds of feet above the canyon floor of the Mesa Verde, I found myself envying the children who had looked down like hawks’ nestlings at the maplike geography of their future hunting grounds. But I am not a cliff-climber; the cliff-edge is the controlling emblem of my life, as I hope to explain deeper into this book, and I do not transgress it.

Once, after I had waited many hours for a lift by a road that was evidently little travelled, in Norway, an eagle appeared high overhead. Two crows from a nearby wood set out to pester it into quitting their patch of sky. Was it really in their territory according to bird-law? As they laboured upwards for minute after minute, shrinking to ragged dots almost lost against the pale glare, I began to have a sense of how far up the eagle was. It was only with great effort that the crows reached its level, whereupon it flapped one huge wing at them as if shaking dust off a carpet, and sailed out of range of harassment. Height, then, can only be won with expense of energy; the vertical dimension is not as easily penetrable as the horizontal ones; flight-space is stratified by increasing difficulty; up-draughts, thermals, are winds that help one up invisible hills.

Questions of how the spaces of experience, human and non-human, relate to real space, whether they can always be expressed as colorations, tensions, deformations or indexings of it, and whether real space itself is a perpetual creativity beyond comprehension in terms of the conceptual spaces of geometry, have always intrigued me, and I am far from answers to such problems. I suspect that the impossibility of my dream-flights does not lie in their effortlessness but in some geometrical incoherence in the space they traverse; dreams can benefit from the logic of contradictory foundations, in that anything can obtain in them, if only because their contradictions are not attended to. (The dream contains only what is attended to by the dreamer.) But when their spaces are inscribed in real space, they can fall to earth.

I painted a number of works called ‘Falling Bird’ once. This was in Vienna in the mid-sixties; that lugubrious Cold-War city seems in fact to have called forth macabre and surreal expressions of several themes that happily have also surfaced in less phobic periods of my life. Some of these birds looked as if they had been falling so long they were reduced to desiccated anatomies. What had stopped them in mid-flight was not to be known from the paintings; it might have been a burst of radiation from the Armageddon we half expected daily at that time. Contorted, rigid, they fell through layers of grey vapour, or hung like black silhouettes against it as if seen by one in free fall alongside them. Insensible or indifferent to all other influences, they were abandoned to gravity. That supreme space-shaper, the commanding force orthogonal to all the tentative, laterally spreading, webs of my mapwork, is immanent in much of what I have drawn or written.

A bird’s flight-world is perfused by its song-world, a structure of intensely significant directions, distances, locations and regions, perceived through the influx of sounds made by its congeners and to a lesser extent by other species: warning cries tracking the prowl of a cat, nestlings’ unappeasable demands, sexual advertisements, rivalrous bravado. We eavesdrop on this world, which intensifies both space and time for us: the echoing sea-cliff is redoubled by a peregrine falcon’s gaunt clamour; a slothful summer afternoon is lulled into still deeper inertia by a woodpigeon’s repetitious lucubrations. Stepping out of a cottage on the Aran Islands very early one spring day I found the slopes of rock and raggletaggle bushes around it being partitioned between half a dozen voluble cock blackbirds. Territoriality, the staking of exclusive claims, is the driving force behind much birdsong. What sounds like mere recreation is indeed re-creation: the reinvention or reimposition for another day of a political geography that had lapsed overnight. In fact a number of treaties were being drawn up as robins and wrens and other small birds added their distinctive signatures to that morning’s crisp parchment. A superimposition of transparent maps, the brouhaha of languages in a cosmopolitan restaurant, the interweaving of games played by different age-groups of children in a school yard, are all inadequate images of the endless interpretability of space.

The various possible relationships between bird territories also remind me of those diagrams in textbooks of logic, in which, for instance, two overlapping circles or similarly simple shapes, standing for two sets of elements, divide the page into various parts representing those elements that are members of both sets, of neither, of one but not the other, and so on. These Venn diagrams (so called after their inventor) are also useful in the formal logic devised by Boole in the last century: the interior of a shape represents a proposition and its exterior the contradictory of that proposition; the overlap of two shapes represents the conjunction of two propositions. Such a structure of abstract argumentation is termed a calculus, from the Latin for a stone as used in reckoning. Just as propositions can be about propositions, so sets can have sets as their members – but these logical systems founder in self-contradiction if sets are permitted to be members of themselves or if propositions are allowed to refer to themselves, as Bertrand Russell proved. The successive catastrophes provoked in logic by Russell, Gödel and Turing suggest that thought is not a matter of piling up stones, for that gives no play for paradox. Some such train of associations, together with my abiding fascination with theories that lie just beyond my comprehension and like birdsong seem always about to crystallize into sense, motivated a deranged harangue I wrote a few years before that dawn chorus in Aran; it purports to be a lecture delivered by a man in a tree to an audience also perched in trees, in the University of the Woods:

Is thought a calculus? A calculus a stone? Thrown at a bird, let fall to sound a well, used in a wall against a wind? Admit the wind! To fence a field? Consider the territorially of knowledge: the don defines a field (the territoriality of birds, we’ll say), assumes a stance (his axiom: each bird sings only ‘I am here!’), deploys his arms (poor scarecrow, the birds are flown already), and lets his field define himself. ‘I am my place!’ he sings, and produces proofs: ‘The song’s assurance dwindles with distance from the perch; each bird and its neighbour meet in equivocation and make their mutual boundary the locus of equal unconviction. Thus the land is parcelled out by blackbirds, thus by...