First Day at Cove Park – Chatter

"There is the silence before one just as difficult to disturb significantly as before.What one has learned is inadequate against the new silence presented."

('The Nightfisherman – Selected Letters of W.S.Graham (Carcanet, 1999).

Yesterday I arrived in Argyll for a two week residency, and I've spent today slowly settling in, starting coming to terms with the fact that "no outcomes" are expected. Pretty rare, that. Basically, you get paid to shack up with your own funny head for a few weeks and work if you feel like it. You're allowed to just sleep if you like. Now, it sounded very enlightened, but it turns out that 'no outcomes and nothing expected' isn't just as easy to accept as all that. If I don't work, what am I? So I've been a bit unsettled today: new place, working out where to start, how I'll begin to try and 'disturb the language'. Missing the cat.

Last night I walked down to the beach. Muddy shingle; hermit crabs; lots of spoot shells, but no sign of siphons. It would be good to forage here. The different light you get on water when there are mountains. Bewildering lack of wind and occasionally, an inexplicable urgent backwash on the shore, which gave me the willies as I considered it might be caused by submarines passing underwater to Coulport. Don't think I'll be swimming after all. But I gathered some dry seaweed and some of the everpresent plastic fishing fibre you find at the tideline, and today I've made rope out of them. The fibre is salmon pink, and nicely luminous within the red and coppery weed. I might get around to making a basket out of it. It's good to make rope out of seaweed: your hands slick with agar as if you were assisting a birth; or as if you were actually extruding the vegetable hawser from your own spinnarets, as a spider extrudes web.

Some reading today. Gerald Manley Hopkins, but I didn't have the patience for the God-bit, although I enjoyed his mania and the drubbing his verbs give you 'does so rinse and wring/The ear [...]' And I admire the way he couples those bleached abstracts with imagery that's weird enough to be compulsive. Can't imagine getting away with the opening line 'Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –' myself, and yet I love this, that follows 'When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush[...]'

Otherwise, I've snacked compulsively (the visibility of the little kitchen from the writing desk may be a problem) and napped (the visibility of the bed from the writing desk may be a problem.) But napping, I propped the notebook and pen on my knees and shut my eyes, and everytime I became aware of a bit of 'chatter' rising up through my subconscious, I wrenched my eyes open and wrote it down.

"No, I'm a member of staff! No, I'm not slow –"

"Phone your baby. I'm gonna di–"

"Keep crisscrossing for mixed stones and make sure they're all of one colour."

"So you're both Mrs B.S.?" (Checking my eyelids, friendly-like. )

"Bob, it'll only take you one minute" (American)

"Have you heard about the three Danes? There's one sitting where I'm sitting..."

Although it's tempting to try and use this stuff for divination, my fascination with it is that it's so aligned with my preoccupations in poetry just now. Obviously, it's the reverse of intention, it's a way of forgetting the self, and there's a spookiness about it. Where does it come from, after all? Who's doing the voices?

Then I passed out for real. 'Nap' seems an incongrously cute word for something you start up from with your heart pounding, trembling all over.

This evening there's going to be a kind of happy hour to meet the other residents...

Sunday's littoral...

Danish migraine tablets...Nivea Classic Care Shine Shampoo: 'reveals fascinating shine in all its facets – silk protein and orchid extracts'...right...'for normal and unproblematic hair'...fishbox from MFV Miraculous, Clogherhead...vegetable crate from Prince de Bretagne: 'Défendons le goût de frais'...an eider on her nest, so a quick retreat...

and Monday's literal....

'The eyelids are formed as small cutaneous folds which about the middle of the third month come together and unite in front of the cornea...'

Gray's Anatomy 'The Organ of Sight'

Credo The Day

Something is wrong in the way that I'm writing

what I'm writing about or why.

I asked the poems to be Aztec descriptions of things

in the familiar world and that is all they obediently are.

They have the rhythm of things that are like other things

buckled and braced with similes, turreted clauses.

When you say, it is like, it is like, it is like, you make emphatic

equations: inward-looking things. The true poetry

can't be far off – like parallel universes, you're nearly there –

but not until you shrug off this vector.

Places still available for creative writing workshops in Shetland

More info here.

Patella – The Dominant Species

Time for an update on the limpet situation. I picked up my latest batch this week and feel like I'm getting somewhere: their form is much blousier, and I'm finally getting the porcelain thin enough for light to shine through. Incredibly exciting, because for me, its translucency is the most mesmerising thing about porcelain. I'm intending to try firing some of these with in a matt, translucent glaze, but in the meantime, I settled the colony in on my windowsill, and peered over the laptop at them as I worked to see how they would behave. As soon as the sun hit the windowsill, they began to glow with a lovely submerged golden light, making me think this species is one of those furnished with photophores: light-emitting cells. Speculate that these may attract prey to within the reach of the hunting limpet.

My feeling about these limpets has been that they should seem subtly animated in some way, but I wasn't quite sure how this would happen. I've had ideas about an installation where they move up and down the walls of a gallery space 'with the tide'; and I noticed that the ones with a single feeding pore gave the impression of having a vestigial face. When I tilted a couple towards each other, they seemed to be communicating or negotiating.

Instead of a single large feeding pore, some have a ring of small holes around the shell (females?) Through these emerge fans of retractable 'hairs' with which they sweep the current in search of their very small beer.

Welk-ebb

Yesterday I went from the literal to the lovelier littoral, bending, picking, swilling about in the warming shallows. A pair of loons (I think) barked on the water and the eiders and skylarks lightened my mood after the morning's work on the novel, which was grisly and effortful. I gave up after a while to open Bull of the Woods – The Gordon Gibson Story. Gibson grew up making a tough living from lumber and later shipping on the West Coast of B.C. in the 20s and 30s. He can hardly get through a page without a reference to his interest in 'the ladies'. He's continually hopping in and out of windows and letting himself into hotel rooms: 'I crept along the hall and picked a door that seemed about right [...] crawling on my hands and knees over to the bed, I felt about the covers to make my presence known to the young lady.'

The winkles on the rocky bottom here were caked in a Battenberg-pink coral or sponge and I saw more of those animals that are like transparent potatoes. Does anybody know what they are? Broken shells of smislins and spoots, but no sign of siphons. Yearning for a new language for the draining meadows coming firm underfoot, the distended hill, the time of butterwort (penny-girse) and royal blue milkwort; tirricks, geese and shalder. That yearning is the place from which poems have so often started for me but I'm still pretty self-conscious. In the meantime I sorted out some things that have been troubling me about the novel, in my head, at least, which doesn't mean all that much. Guddling in the chiffons of algal bloom: "you're asking too much of the narrative to try and set the action in a space of three winter months; it might not work to relegate so much history to the back-story."

I'm working on too many different things at once, again, I think. In the last two days I've worked at novel, welk-ebb, poetry; then there's been mentoring, plans for woven baskets made from bruck materials, sequinned (I think) with with plastics reclaimed from the sea and hole-punched. I might make Greenlandic/Danish sequins from that shipping ticket, too, or opercula of (poor old) winkles. I'm looking forward to picking up a batch of the bisque-fired porcelain limpets today too. I feel like a prism, splitting the light. But what else can you do with so much light?

O help, I'm making poems