Art is How We Decorate Space and Music is How We Decorate Time
In reading about Glen Hansard after his shocking death a few days ago in a motorcycle accident outside of Dublin, I came across this quote by Basquiat and I’ve been listening to several of his songs and watching videos of him singing with such love and soul on instagram. He was only 56 and had been performing and writing songs ever since he was a kid, dropping out of school at 13 to busk on the streets with his uncle. In several of his interviews he thanks the teacher who told him to follow his passion for music and learn the guitar and not watch tv if he dropped out of school but really practice and get out on the streets and make music. https://glenhansard.com/videos/
He won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for "Falling Slowly" at the 80th Academy Awards in 2008. This song was featured in the film "Once," which he starred in alongside Markéta Irglová. The outpouring of grief and also the tributes to his generosity and ability to move people whenever he performed and his life of collaboration affected me as I was staying in Falmouth and made me think of how solo travel can heighten one’s emotional landscape; while exploring a new outer landscape, the inner landscape is also being explored and changed. I have found that this period of travel has heightened my sense of all our human commonality and vulnerability in the face of wildfires, droughts, flooding, etc. etc. and made me even more aware of the mystery we live in every day on this planet floating in the vastness of space. It was therefore a bit jarring to go from being on my own with my own thoughts with a sense of not being a defined person and sort of floating and observing to the new fast tempo of being with my family yesterday, defined by them, but also a relief to feel surrounded by people I love and who love me.
Our airbnb in Polzeath is the most incredible house - full of art books, beautiful minimalist yet warm furnishings with an incredibly diverse and fun array of mugs and electic collections of bowls and plates, all mismatched and colorful. There are artsy graphic posters and a serene concrete patio next to a joyful array of tall purple agapanthus flowers in both purple and white and…a trampoline built into the ground which I’ve never seen before! It rained the first night and all the snails emerged which led to a bit of awareness with the family about the beauty and vulnerability of snails. There were at least two snail casualties in the process but my nephew got on board with moving the snails out of the walkway when it rained later in the day. A few days later he discovered some very tiny baby snails about 1/10 the size of my pinkie fingernail and we all remarked on the coupling of a few snails and were curious about snail sex which happens very slowly and seemingly mindfully!
My sister discovered that the owner of this house was a location scout for Poldark and presumably many other films/tv series. I like to imagine Aidan Turner hanging out here at the long table in the kitchen…
In the afternoon after lunch we all disappeared to either nap or read. I’m reading The Wild Places by Robert MacFarlane and love this quote:
“For these writers (early mystics and monks) attention was a form of devotion and noticing continuous with worship. The art they left behind is among the earliest testimonies to a human love for the wild. Ideas, like waves, have fetches. They arrive with us having traveled vast distances, and their past are often invisible or barely imaginable.” Noticing the snails on this trip does feel like worship and a form of devotion.
We spent a couple hours of the morning going to Port Isaac (where Doc Martin was filmed) a few miles up the road from Polzeath. “A few miles up the road” in Cornwall means harrowing car journeys around hedge-hugging roads that look as if they could only fit one car, and often includes the dance of one car backing up or sometimes inching past another car in a very intimate slow almost snail-like maneuver. Once we arrived in Port Isaac, there was a bit of kerfluffle over finding a parking space because even in this remote edge of the continent the tourists flock to see the set of Doc Martin which is, surprisingly, an actual town! Sadly the tourism has driven most of the actual full-time town dwellers out, with many renting their cottages to people like us. The irony of a sweet tv series about small-town village life actually negating whatever that was before the show. Still, there was much to love - I discovered a church turned into a cafe/art gallery which still has a working pipe organ. In the afternoon we all went to the beach to meet up with other cousins and play around in the surf and the sand.
The rest of the week was full of family walks, group dinners, and several fun rounds of Ransom Note, where everyone had to abandon clear sentences for creative abstraction and the vocal delivery was almost as important as the words strung together. It was wonderful getting to know some of my British 2nd cousins and to meet the most adorable youngest members of the family, Hector and Harry, who had the same surrogate and were each given identical clothes to wear at the same time as well as two of the same books to read at the restaurant so they weren’t jealous. They were incredibly calm, engaged and self-possessed for two year olds. Their concentration on my singing the numbers of their toes going forwards and backwards was quite amazing and they were both excited by all the trucks around the beach and the construction happening nearby.
One day when Becca, Jim and Livy drove north to a folk festival in Sidemouth, Mom and I, Lottie and Michael took an epic four hour bus adventure to Boscastle to lunch and tea with an hour layover in the purgatory of Delabole where we waited outside a garage in the hot sun about an hour for our connecting bus. It was fun riding on the top of the double decker and also a bit terrifying as the bus negotiated tight roads, steep downhill switchbacks and low hanging tree branches which made loud thwumps on the top of the bus. Once we arrived we thoroughly enjoyed the lunch along the river, watching kids feeding the many ducks below. We meandered around the shops and I thought about how nice it is not to feel I need to have more things. I’ve come away from this trip with basically several art books and cards to send and put in my studio of art. This time I didn’t find any clothes to buy, other than a black tshirt near the beach in Polzeath.
On our last day in Polzeath, Lottie and Michael had left and my Mom, Becca, Jim, Livy and I climbed along the sheer drop off path to Pentyre Head which was going ok until near the end and when my positional vertigo hit me and I felt as if I couldn’t walk upright anymore without feeling like I was going to fall to the left down the steep slope into the ocean. I saw a couple children and dogs on the path, too and then started to be very worried about my Mom who actually has a form of vertigo on a daily basis and was there with trekking poles along the sheer drop, seemingly unfazed. I have this sense of vertigo very rarely now since I had experienced it back when I was in my early 20s and in my 30s hiking above tree line on a steep slope (in Mt. Lassen and in the Dolomites). Had I known I know that the path was so steep and with such a sheer drop off I never would have gone, but happily my brother-in-law held my hand behind me since the path was so narrow and that grounded me to get to the top where we could all sit far away from the edge. Mom and I opted to take the inland route back to Polzeath and quickly found a couple doing the same thing, though heading to the National Trust carpark, and we talked the whole way and then I treated them to drinks at the cafe at the carpark since they offered to drive us back to the airbnb. They were so friendly and conversation flowed so easily. Again, a moment where the kindness of strangers comes to the fore.
N.B. The whole trip in Cornwall I was worried about the drought and the dried foliage, low water levels in streams, and parched landscape. I only hope that all this beauty I experienced can be nourished by rain soon and that there are no fires that spread to all these places where it would be very hard to escape on the roads and fight any fires that might move quickly. There were at least 100 fires burning in England while I was there and the horrors of all the creatures and plants dying by fire now across the planet is like that slow-moving ember on a piece of newspaper that is in a campfire that is slow to light, always moving in the back of my awareness in this age of climate disruption.