Thursday, September 29, 2005

North


If you're in the northern hemisphere, you should make an effort to take a look at the sky at night at the moment: the big winter constellations are wheeling into view. This morning (about 5:45 in the English midlands) Orion was absolutely spectacular in the south-eastern sky, flanked by the pale ghost of the Milky Way. It's a real privilege to live somewhere without light pollution. There was a big red star/planet almost overhead...I don't know what it was. If I get the chance, I'll train the binoculars on it.

On these clear, crisp mornings, in the dark, the stars are icy and white. The trees are silhouetted against the deep blue pre-dawn sky. You can almost imagine that the universe is whispering to you as you tilt your head back and try to take in the massive view: the sound of the cool breeze stroking its way across your straining ears, and the sense of some deep message that's just inaudible, but which you know is important and profound.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Friday, September 09, 2005

transmissions interrupted


I'm off on holiday for a couple of weeks. North Wales. Harlech. It's lovely there.

So I'll just be sending some pics from my camera.

See you in a bit.

A x

Wednesday, September 07, 2005

W I P - 4


She prefers thinking about the past, or focusing on the external abstractions of water and light in perpetually shifting patterns. It stops her thinking about the other things, the things that seep in whenever her mind is stilled, when the external stimuli stop coming, or when she lets her internal focus shift away from the colourful, concrete past. Work. That's the thing that comes relentlessly to mind.

Work. Which she doesn’t even enjoy. Which she hates, actually, and which even so seems to monopolise all her waking hours and all of her energy. She always gets up extra early, and skips breakfast mostly, and is in the office before anyone else, but it doesn’t make any difference: however many hours she puts in, however many lunches she misses, however late she leaves – whatever she does, there’s always too much work to do, and no sense that it will ever end or ever get better. So she feels weak, and defeated, and destroyed, and she comes home with her mind spinning and her emotions roiling and boiling in her stomach and chest, and her breathing uneven and her thinking twisted and acid. And she can’t sleep because of the irresolvable circular problems she keeps rehearsing in her mind, and even her dreams are suffused with echoes of workplace tensions, frustrations and confrontations.

Sometimes she can barely remember the drive home. One day last week, when things at work were so ridiculously chaotic, and so many people were obstructive or stupid or inept, she’d almost gone head on into a truck as she drove home when, furious and aggressive, she committed herself to a blind bend at inappropriate speed. Instead of sobering her, it had just made her more angry, sweeping her into a swirling vortex of self-disgust and self-criticism: You’re too weak and stupid to cope with work. And you’re too cowardly to do anything about it – too scared and useless to quit and risk doing something else. So why don’t you put up or shut up? Because you’re weak. Fraudulent. Stupid. Useless. Fucking useless.

The car headlights on the opposite bank flicker and fade back up as the driver starts the engine, and exhaust gas farts into the glow of the taillights. Then the headlights withdraw from the embankment, swing sideways across water, bollards, tree trunks and brickwork, and sweep off towards the city centre.

The night settles back down into the deeper canal side darkness. She puts the mug down on the hard gloss paint of the window sill, twitches her dressing gown closed, and heads back to bed, where she hopes she can sleep and not dream about work.

Tuesday, September 06, 2005

Wrk n Prgress


She seems to remember that she wasn’t allowed to have candy floss before Josh was born: that wasn’t fair. Walking along the promenade in the sun, with the pavement all dusty and bright and hot and full of bits of mica that shone, smooth, she’d see all the other kids with their parents, all seeming to converge on the glass-sided stalls at the start of the pier, where the sweet smell of spinning sugar was sticky and tantalising in the air. And toffee apples: how she longed for one of those bright red glistening things on a thick, square stick. But however politely she asked, however persistently she whined or grizzled, however good she was – whatever she did – nothing worked; it was always ‘later’, or ‘you’ll spoil your dinner’, or ‘no, you’ll get in a mess’, or ‘it’ll attract the wasps’. And they’d drift along the seafront towards the quieter, deader end, where the ‘crazy’ golf courses petered out and gave way to car parks and pathetic gift shops that had glossy seashells, hideous cups and saucers, and wasps in pride of place in the window display.

She remembers one magical evening, though, an evening when some of her deviant, ungrateful desires for fast food were satisfied. Mum and dad were walking hand in hand for once: she remembers that clearly, it was so rare. And their shoulders were touching – they were leaning into each other as they walked along in the dusk – she could see them becoming a single silhouette joined at the shoulder as she trailed along behind them.

It must have been late in the season, because she remembers the evening air starting to chill her legs where they were bare, between her long white socks and the hem of her yellow linen skirt. She’s sure – almost sure – that she remembers smelling the colour of the burger buns toasting in the Wimpy Bar…she has a sense of the pale bread browning under an orange grill, and the colour and smell entwined as they spilled out of the doorway, out into the cool air. She can feel the crumbly cut surfaces of the bun crisping into ridges and scratchy nodes of toasted dough. There was a cliff-face looming over the road, darker than the sky, and the lights of the shops and the pier ahead. And then they were inside, amidst the bulky, shiny seating, the smell of caramelising onions, and the tacky feel of tabletop grease and smeared ketchup against her elbows. She barely dared ask for what she wanted, so she chose the cheapest things she could see, sure that this was too good to be true, and that, if she overstepped some vague behavioural mark, all hope of actually getting her meal would be dashed away. So she gambled low: the standard hamburger, orange squash, a share of her parents’ French fries. She’s never enjoyed a meal as much since.

Monday, September 05, 2005

Work in progress


The lounge floor is covered in polished wooden boards, but she knows that there are a few rough edges in the space between the big rug and the window, so she moves tentatively, her toes curled in a protective arch, like a caterpillar inching its way across a hazardous surface. (She supposes that all surfaces are hazardous for caterpillars, but she lets the simile stand in her head.) Although she can only see shadows and the pale, half-imagined ghosts of her insteps, she looks down as she shuffles towards the window. She can hear the dry skin of her feet sliding across the slick, varnished wood and, behind her, the steady chonk, chonk, chonk of the kitchen clock’s oversized second hand. The fridge hums and judders. The sounds you barely notice in the daylight, expanding to fill the night’s silence.

The car is still parked on the opposite bank, the headlights white on the water. Her flat’s window frames’ edges are cream-coloured in a sheen of reflected light, and there’s a broad wavering band of light on the ceiling. As she moves into the blur of light near the window, she steps sideways into the shadow of the window frame, feeling the winter cold that’s pressing against the flat glass. There’s a wind blowing down there, and the combination of waves and headlights is like a film show: the way the patterns ripple and change, dissolving and reforming nets of light endlessly, swallowing dark patches, always in motion, so fast and complex and unfixable that you can only capture – momentarily – little pieces of stasis in the constant flux of light and dark. It’s the same when there’s rain falling on the canal: she could watch it for hours, the shifting patterns of disturbance and stability: scattered splashes, ripples, and the wind-blown planes of water and spray. Mesmeric. Watching it, she drifts out of the concrete world of conscious perception, absorbing different rhythms and patterns; none of them capturable or repeatable. But the waiting, the watching, the sense that it might suddenly make sense, and be fixed in her mind – that’s what keeps her watching. And sighing.

Multimedia message


Multimedia message
Originally uploaded by andycorsham.

Sunday, September 04, 2005

Something I was working on today - part of a work in progress


She’d forgotten that there was such a time as 3 am – at least, other than as a time for getting out of bed, going to the toilet, and then hurrying back to the heavy confines of the still-warm duvet. Especially now, when you were about as far away from summer as it was possible to get.

But something’s disturbed her tonight: a bad dream. The type of dream that leaves you confused and shaken when you awake from it, not quite sure if the terror and the threat of violence was actually real, but knowing for certain that your sleeping body thought it was real; the irresistible and urgent promptings of flight or fight, the residual deep breathing, the echoes of panic and funk. Before the dream dissolves into lost memory, she registers a few vivid images: mercenaries in the desert, firelight, and a man’s head being gradually destroyed – vaporised – by the sustained close-quarter machine gun fire of a vicious rival.

She makes a cup of tea in the kitchen, hyper-aware of the kettle’s roaring heating element in the dark hours silence and stillness. The light switch’s click makes a big sound in the dead of night, and seems to echo through the building’s infrastructure.

As she turns off the kitchen light and starts back towards the bedroom with her fingers curled around the smooth, hot curves of the mug, her feet’s cool soles on the colder tiles, a car on the other side of the canal switches on its headlights.

Looking down at the car lights’ reflections shivering on the dark water, she thinks of childhood holidays: harbours at night, with long looping chains of coloured lights shimmering on the wavelets – red, yellow, green and blue on the water; the smell of fried onions and deep-fat-fried fish and chips; the gusty sound of laughter from the quayside pub’s yellow-lit interior; her parents hissing at each other as they all walked back to their hotel together. She remembers the sound of their anger in the dark air three feet above her head, and the feel of the breeze lifting her fringe off her delicate forehead. Mum and dad were holding one of her hands each, stiffly.