CosmiKnot

Speech for the Blakefest Cinematic Glad Day Celebrations  Bognor Regis Picture Dome 28th November 2021 Video here When I was asked four years ago to curate Blakefest I was over awed by the great innovating poet’s creative legacy. Soon, however, I began to realise that his song of creative emergence resonated with my ideas about the possibilities for an experience of meaning inside the event. Is, for instance, the event the same as Plato’s Khora; movement as the womb of everything? Thankyou for organising the event Rachel (Searle). What is a song if not an event? And so for Blake the imagination was not a bolt on to or escape from the mechanistic material reality but the core of the cosmos itself. Blake shows us an opening onto a realm where feeling and creative emergence a literally within all matter and we become aware of our indigenousness to nature. This, explains why we need to embody the extra sensory experience via ritual to feel meaning as a part of the expressivity of the u...

  God is in his cubbyhole  a place usually concealed the slatted chubb-lock doors are today flung wide open   like God’s man spread as he sits performing one-person show a couple stand before him for all eternity I too am invited to partake in a round   this much I gather from the array  of score cards, balls and anti-bac spray with cast-off selection of diecast putters  leaning invitingly against catering table   putting green shimmers with holy portent eighteen solar systems waiting each undulating around dead suns sucking down soft dimpled moons with   down the drain, death-rattle endings pastel draped couple stand ready moon scythes in hand before God discussing something beyond perception         In this vacuum of Summer I feel my chest fill with boundless hope fed by times spent inside finite models of the cosmos   didn’t ever want to fall off the edge of the putting green but knew I would find it waiting even before...

  A bunch of stuff (a work in useless progress)   All the books the ceramic hooks They’re all a bunch of stuff And decks of cards without these shards Are all a bunch of stuff When down below you sip your tea before the fire side The radiator’s got my back And laptop wires and shelves of books await my eyes’ attack The titles and the memories of memory itself Are stacked like figments of a dream That once described the self The desk its grungy patina A map of my endeavours The saucer’s eyes are on me now The skylight sending weather From vistas far and far beyond my tiny brains snow globe A festive trope for everyone and everyone’s bath robe Pockets full of mystery and nameless empty fluff Because the flames nuzzle your knees It’s all just a bunch of stuff   The boat is in the doldrums upon a glassy sea Expecting the horizon any day now One two three The poetry of Santa Will Satan’s wisdom be Once we have sailed over the line into a fantasy That we have all agreed is good...

A song created for Blakefest 2020 by David Devant and his Spirit Wife. Inspired directly by William Blake's vision of Albion:  Grass - green screen- green screen grass - analogue - virtual - virtual - actual - green green screen - grass - lawn - earth - pixel take everything and make it matter for expression and the virtual weaves with the actual in fiery visions. There’s something magical about grass as a green screen when one considers how William Blake found the virtual in the material. released for Blake's birthday on Corporate records

Rachel Searle of Blakefest suggested that as curator of the festivals's Corona Visions show, I respond to the ruling that Poetry will be optional in the next GCSE syllabus: This sylla-bus is a coach driving through the boundless Amazonian forest via the wilds of Siberia with a well-tended bed of specimens and flowers down each side of the interior. The people on the bus believe this is the limit of knowledge, after all you could spend a life time analysing the bus’s botanical cargo. Poetry has been a lifeline during the lockdown and presumably most people have accessed it via their computers and yet the reason given by Ofqual is that respondents to their consultations have “highlighted the difficulties for students in trying to get to grips with complex literary texts remotely”. What they mean is that there is difficulty translating the individual responses to observable measurements. You see there is a limit to what observable measurements can tell us otherwise why not just have ...

Reading about  Hito Steyerl   I found the desire to reclaim the experience of art exciting but I began to recollect a discussion I had attended about theory communiste, which advocates the creation of instantaneous revolution rather than the production of preparatory propaganda for a revolution of the future. The power of the institution is upheld by direct protest art like the songs of the proles. This is what Orwell revealed when Winston and Julia betray Love in 1984. It's what one might call fucking self-neutering art. Art belongs to a realm beyond and outside of the institution accessed from the gaps in the fabric of its all enveloping mesh. Art understands the language of the soul or perhaps it is that but only by virtue of appearing in the gaps in the living society. The problem is that much time and effort is spent reacting against the patriarchal institution and yet much of this this effort by attempting to adopt a cynical or aggressive stance, rejects the soul in equa...

Human beans were put on this earth To learn to find the ending of a roll of selotape To hear the sound of goats’ bells as they make good their escape To learn to spot their luggage on a moving carousel To learn to read expressions and eye brow tics as well To walk around full circle Til youre back where you began To rescue eggs for turtles With an exiled Syrian man To bemoan the lack of signage on railway platform walls To fall in love with a cleric who wont return your calls To instigate a transfer that’s a record breaking deal To own a long haired hamster That gets caught in its wheel To compile an algorithm of the latest cool Tell children theyre forgiven for the stunts they pull at school To grow tomatoes in a green house Because you like the smell Of bloody marys in the morning And the theme to William tell To learn to conquer evil in the driving rain And free a tangled seagull Then ho...

The Dog and Bacon The green to whence I ran away (Rang home from the vanished red call box) Landing there again with A&R again today I saw the circular path that I had taken Just as I was crossing the road to the shop Looked up and there I saw The freshly painted sign Depicting in lush strokes the dog and bacon Butcher gaily wielding cleaver Dog with ham joint in its maw Me striding towards the coop To buy more butchers streaky bacon Boys remain on the green All long grass and butter cups Looking after Betty chocolate lab pup Borrowed from friends for the weekend And now she’s ours to pretend The moment never sours never ends The circular path that I have taken Back outside the dark and beacon Co-Op was once a Vivo next to an offi Now they’ve knocked it through Text alert - Don’t forget coffee It was here aged six I asked Lesley With long straight dark brown hair To marry me – wait for me She was a shop girl but now I’m ...

"Sentimentality is when it doesn't come off – when it does, you get a true expression of life's sorrows." Was Fournier’s response to an accusation of said soppiness from his friend, the critic, Jacques Rivière. When I was painting the footballers from my childhood I was aware of the danger of leaving myself open to perceptions of sentimentality and in many respects this is what drove me on. Not out of sheer contrariness (although that always plays a part) but because I have made a pact with myself to follow hunches in my work. My hunch here is that this deep ache of longing is a real part of being human and not something to be drilled out of one’s system. The way to capture this is not to revel in it but to coax it out into view somehow. In the central room of my exhibition - Trope - there is a triptych I embarked upon about the time I bought the book le Grand Meaulnes. The title of the book has been awkward to translate and the English version is called The Lost...

Yesterday I passed the Mall Gallery outside which was a large poster for a Peter Blake exhibition. The poster was a life size version of his self-portrait in denim. A classic. The exhibition shuts at four I was informed – oh what’s the time? Ten to four. Ten minutes would have been too long to look at the exhibition, which was essentially a collection of ink jet posters of Peter Blake's collage work. I could look at them online. Peter Blake is a lovely man or at least that is the impression I have formed of him from a couple of brief meetings and Beatles documentaries. Here comes the “but”. But before I go on perhaps I need to get over myself after all perhaps he himself doesn’t think of this as art. Leave him alone – it’s not his fault that the world is full of poseurs out to make a quick buck from other people’s desire to somehow seem classily creative in a quirky way. Is that enough of a but already? In my hastily scrawled notes written on the top deck of the 176 I was set to de...

I am outside lecture room EBG08 – this translates as East Building ground floor room 08 – I am there for a book launch. The invite says it’s between 3.30 and 5 so I think 4 is probably an okay time to arrive but it seems I have come in mid way through the guest speakers speech. Suddenly I feel like an aberrant student. Still I quickly squirrel myself away in a seat at the edge of the front row and keep a low profile. I don’t make a habit of going to lectures in other departments but something about the blurb on the polite invitation drew me in. It’s all about post humanism and escaping the strictures of Newtonian analysis (although here I am already embellishing their copy). The guest speaker is talking about how innovation comes about not through individuals but through groups of ideas happening at the same time and somehow coalescing over time to make a new system that makes the old system obsolete. He is clearly tickled, as am I, by the metaphor of the fax-machine that once ru...