Black dogs

Winston Churchill is the cultural figure famed for using the term 'black dog' to describe his affliction of clinical depression. Whether or not Churchill invented this phrase or not is a matter of dispute - it would seem unlikely, given that the metaphorical image of a black dog within common parlance, literature and folklore has a long and tangled back-history. Indeed, cultivation of the phrase has also been attributed to Samuel Jonson, Hester Thrale and John Boswell, which indicates that conceptions of depression found description in the visual symbol of the black dog long before Churchill spoke about his illness. Nonetheless, in 1911 Churchill wrote to his wife, Clementine, having visited a doctor who he felt had 'cured' him:

"I think this man might be useful to me - if my black dog returns. He seems quite away from me now - it is such a relief. All the colours come back into the picture."

The notion of colour in relation to depression is curious, since it figures frequently as a way of measuring or describing ones internal state. That the ascription of mood to colour is culturally learned does not prevent it from 'feeling' like a natural or instinctive way of expressing the tone of personal emotion. Grey, black and blue are ready shorthand descriptors for feelings of apathy, sadness, bleakness and hopeless sensations, all of which are common symptoms of depression.

The evolving thesis

Though the focus of my thesis has not changed, what has been clarified over the past six months is the methodological approach that I wish to employ. I am interested in the pursuit of qualitative research methods, as practices that represent an interdisciplinary approach to knowledge. I am keen to produce a thesis that signifies the convergence of a number of ideological stances, that utilizes a wide range of research methods, written styles, and observational angles.

I wish to avoid writing a thesis that assumes the role of outside quantifier: I do not wish to occupy the position of colonial ethnographer, observing the habits and customs and cultural output of the Lake District, from the assumedly elevated position of expert analyst. Instead, a qualitative research model offers a conceptual framework that is gendered and multicultural, and is thus a more appropriate – and I would argue interesting – position from which to weave a written thesis that attempts to reconsider certain ‘truths’ about the landscape of the Lakes.

My earlier desire to take on a mixed-mode thesis came from my wanting to approach my work in a way that interconnected practice with research, in order to locate myself within, rather than without, the project. I am interested by how research might pull at certain hierarchies and traditions, and how it might therefore actively mimic the same themes of my thesis. I like the idea of producing work that interrogates hierarchies as much through its form as through its content. I see qualitative research strategies – weaving together a research project that refuses to privilege one methodological perspective or theory – as an exciting opportunity to borrow from a number of disparate theoretical models and practices.

Though I have dropped the ambition to unite visual illustrative practice with research, the desire to remain on the inside of the project remains steadfast. I shall employ qualitative research practices that locate and situate the researcher in the world, and am keen to utilise interpretive material practices that make this world visible. I should like to draw upon ‘a variety of empirical materials – case study; personal experience; introspection; artifacts; cultural texts and productions; observational, historical, visual and interactions texts’.

It is from this notion of interconnection and range that I came to the concept of bricolage, or assuming the role of the bricoleur. Though it is sometimes disregarded as a methodological approach which is prone to being vague and imprecise, bricoleurs come in many forms, and interpretative bricolage is a methodology that knits well with cultural studies. Qualitative research can thus be described as ‘multimethod’ in its perspective, as it chooses to incorporate a range of different voices, points of view, and political angles; and the researcher is at liberty to draw upon various research tools in her desire to make ‘the world’ of the research questions visible. But I have said little so far about the content of the project, or what I am going to look at, rather than how I am going to go about looking at it. Below, I have sketched out a rough chapter plan which details the cultural texts I wish to look at as overlapping sequence of representations of the Lakes:

1. The Lakes in television: ITV1’s The Lakes; BBC2’s One Man and His Dog; W.G Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape, and Landscapes of England.
In this opening chapter I am to employ the methodological tools of media and television studies to look at how work and employment is presented as an integral part of Lake District ‘life’ – and analyse the kind of narrative structures that are devised to denote the assumed ‘eternal values’ attached to vocational work in the Lakes

2. Ingrid Pollard: ethnicity in the Lakes. Also I want to us Conrad Atkinson as a case study but I’m not sure how yet

3. The difficult third chapter

4. Wainwright: I want to use this chapter to look at how Alfred Wainwright’s illustrated texts formed part of the politicized ‘opening up’ of the Lake District countryside; to examine how access to the land has changed common perceptions of the landscape; and compare his hand-drawn illustrations to other visual depictions of the landscape, such as maps, photographic guides and walking handbook.

5. Railway posters, adverts and packaging in the Lake District: I wish this chapter to focus upon how the Lake District figured in poster art, advertising literature and commercial packaging. This is where I'd like to talk about the picturesque tradition, and how that has informed our understanding of the efficient representation of the landscape.

6. Political rhetoric: Using close textual analysis, I want to focus on how the Lake District has been used within speeches by a number of political figures including Thatcher, Chamberlain, Baldwin, Atlee, Nick Griffin and John Prescott. I'd like this chapter to look at the overlapping rhetorical tropes of these speeches and in an attempt to locate a ‘common parlance’ that exists within political representations of the Lakes.

A defining aspect of qualitative research that makes it quite distinct from quantitative research is the blurring of the boundary line between traditional notions of ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ research, as such researchers see all methods as a complementary web of insight and knowledge. Qualitative approaches encourage writing that draws upon observation and participation, and sees such writing as articulating a liberal and feminist ideological underpinning. I am therefore keen to visit the Lake District and undertake participatory research methods such as interview, case study, visual practice, written observation, anecdote and personal account. I shall re-visit the Lakes and take photographs and produce my own visual practice, but this work is not to be exhibited as part of my PhD assessment.

To conclude, this project will call attention to the value-laden nature of academic enquiry, by focusing on rupture, overlap, intersection and coincidence of Lake District representation, rather than the ‘grand narratives of the aloof observer’ .

What's the point of anything

This post demonstrates the futility of life. You see you might have got doing your ponytail off to a fine art, but when you face the front, you'll still look like a boy called Sean.

Cultural labelling/quantification

A fleeting thought: if your aim is to quantify culture through an outsider-located perspective, the risk* is you will still distort the specifics of the culture under investigation. In the same way that labelling the plant changes the make-up of the plant, quantitative research is similarly transformative. The gaze of the researcher is not negligible. But quantitative approaches continue to be seen as bias-free expertism. It is still top of the academic hierarchy, and it is still believed that in the pursuit of knowledge, such models outperform mixed-mode processes. Ludicrously, proponents of quantitative research still claim they operate from a value-free framework. Within the world of qualitative research work, it is openly acknowledged that individual action and experience intersect with culture. Also, we like description and detail and the people over at Castle Quantity deal in generalizations. Basically hang with us because we're the liberal positivists and they're the boring dullards

*definite likelihood

Shy Misgivings

As the daughter of a history professor and a retired schoolteacher, and the younger sister to an English teacher and a Guardian night-desker, you'd be forgiven for thinking I have been born and raised with a desire to engage in debate and discussion. You'd be forgiven, but even so, you'd be wrong. I detest debate, and am shy of intellectualised conversations. I don't find pleasure in arguing and even if I do 'win' in a discussion - that is to say I happen to undermine the other person's particular argument - I feel awkward, a little embarrassed and even more convinced that such manners of engagement are redundant. I don't think conversation necessitates having a victor.

That is not to say I don't enjoy thinking deeply about a broad variety of topics: I do. The enjoyment I glean from running, cycling, walking, swimming, drawing, painting, riding around on the tube and listening to songs whilst staring out of the window comes largely from the associative white space these pursuits allow you to fill with deep and protracted thought. I find running wonderfully uplifting but the movement itself is monotonous: I am an able long distance runner not because I am exceptionally athletic but because I see 10km as an opportunity to think deeply and extravagantly. Similarly, I like being silent because when you are silent, you can think. My best friends are people who can bear an absolute and lingering absence of dialogue. To be lost in comfortable thought whilst in the company of another is a rare and special occurrence. A favourite memory of an ex-boyfriend involves our lying silently and companionably for a number of hours on a beach in Sucuraj, on Hvar. When I finally turned to speak, he smiled and said "hello" in a manner so curious, so surprised and friendly, I think he'd genuinely forgotten I was lying next to him. Some may see this lack of dialogue as unforgivably tedious but to me, such moments marked a rare and mutual fondness for our own thoughts.

When it comes to spoken discourse, I like to engage with others through a light reading of popular cultural markers. To me, conversation is a little like a giant jigsaw puzzle - where it is your collective job to find appropriate pieces to attach to the peripheries of the discussion. Conversation can move swiftly or dawdle languidly, but either way, the aim remains the same: to quantify the cultural terrain, to feel you have traversed as much of it as possible, without contention, without rupture. Dialogue that seeks to worry problems, to tease at loose threads, to dismantle before ultimately re-assembling component structures is for me, tiring and fretful. Maybe I am too quick to interpret disagreement as animosity, or something, but actually I don't think it is a question of psychology: I feel it is more to do with a visible model of communication and for me, conversation that boils down to sharing references and prizing agreement provides a cleaner and more productive model of discourse than an essentially Aristotelian approach. My family and I communicate by talking about television programmes, adverts, clothes, food and drink and people we know. We tell anecdotes about places we have been to but they are light and seemingly inconsequential: no one moment of conversation holds any great point or attempts to uncover particular 'truths'. Instead, the meaning of our conversation is greater than the sum of its parts: our dialogue is rooted in the past or in the present tense, it is familiar, it is rooted in the realities of our everyday lives, and we do not debate topics for the sake of their debate. There is little attempt to abstract concepts and work through their logic: with the exception of two topics; sport and film. My brothers will speak at length about football and are happy to make intellectual enquiries into the historical and social contexts of the game. Similarly, my Dad - educated at Oxford, a lifelong academic, a Professor for the last ten years - will only impose critical reading onto film, and even this is done sparingly, and only with people he thinks will be interested. Otherwise, Professor Hill mostly talks about the overinflated cost of things, how his laptop is unnecessarily complicated, or how he should like to acquire a new scarf. He does not foist his academic ability onto people. My Dad approaches intellectualism in the same way he approaches his knowledge of French: it is a separate language, removed from the language of the everyday, a particular type of specialist discourse that is reserved for scheduled seminars and papers at conferences. And, before you wince, avoiding particular modes of academic discourse does not signal a patronising 'dumbing down': because that claim would itself announce a hierarchical view of language that neither I - nor my Dad - subscribe to. To engage in pronounced intellectual debate is not, necessarily, a more profound mode of communication than other, more popular, discursive practices.

What fascinates me about this topic is that until the age of 21, I assumed all families used dinnertime to discuss what the lady in the Post Office had said or how the man at the dry cleaners thought he'd lost his ticket. I thought everybody spoke about the bus ride home, or how there was an idiot on the train. It wasn't until I started visiting the homes of friends that I'd made at Oxford that it dawned on me that other families held conversations in the way we'd been holding conversations in academic tutorials. The Father would carve the meat and say something like, "well, personally I think it was about race" and off they'd all go, debating whether Nachhatar Singh Bola's death was racially-motivated murder or not, and everybody would join in, and become very animated, and it would be clear that a great deal of pride was at stake. And so it would go round the table, everybody squabbling and in high spirits, and they would try to undermine each other, and afterwards, when everybody had settled down again, they'd move onto pudding, as if nothing had happened. But in that moment, in the moment at which the conversation was taking place, it clearly did matter. To everybody. Stuff mattered. Everything was important, and potentially cerebrally interesting, and multiperspectival, and no thing could be taken for granted as being good or bad, because there was always somebody close by who would leap on the opposing bandwagon and contest your opinion. I was disappointed by my own family's aversion to feather ruffling. I craved the constant mental agitation I saw in the lives and relationships of others.

Over the four years since being 21, I have had friendships and relationships that prized dynamic disagreement, been on holidays during which people sat about and talked endlessly about 'issues', and found employment in offices where contentious ideas were regarded as a more vigorous means of achieving progress. I have talked with friends about various current affairs, argued about the benefits of politics and religion, and even picked films apart immediately after exiting the cinema. Now, the idea of family members undermining my every possible assertion or conception seems a draining, exhausting notion. Because in the end, debate for the sake of debate is a false construct - it is a way of communicating that achieves similar ends to not debating. Contesting everything is closely related to contesting nothing, because both models seek equilibrium. I find arguing not progressive but tiring, and also largely pointless - I think personal opinion is born out of a very nuanced ideological framework, one that is very specific to the contextual and biological makeup of the individual, and it is therefore quite difficult to change minds. I don't believe that confrontational analysis is the most profitable approach to discourse, but it has such a long history, and sounds so thrilling, and is married to a rhetoric that is so highly prized in film and television scripts that it is regarded as a far more glamorous mode of exchange than more passive models of discursive intercourse. For me, the most valuable treatment of ideas comes when one internalises them: when a concept is silently quizzed, deliberated over, picked and turned and interiorised and poked at during the quiet process of internal reflection. But you couldn't make a high-grossing, dramatically active Hollywood film about a young-buck lawyer who sit quietly at his desk with his headphones in, listening to melancholy songs as he silently ponders the trivialities of the case. It would lack a certain, argumentative jazz. Thinking quietly - giving in to your shy disposition - is like sucking a boiled sweet on a long car journey: it may not look very interesting, but it can sustain and comfort you for a surprisingly long period of time. Striving for peaceful conversation, peaceful thought patterns, and peaceful discourse will not announce your intellectual capabilities to the world: but it may distract your attention from that world for long enough that your own internal repertoire of thoughts and ideas have a little more room to flourish.

Looking Back/Thinking Forward

I'm 25 years old now: which means twenty years have passed since I knew I would be a vet, fifteen years since I was to be a champion showjumper, ten years since I wanted to be the unexpected rising star of English ballet, and a varying number of years since wanting to be a park ranger, mounted policewoman and all of the other (usually animal-related) jobs that I've at some stage dreamed of having. In the very early years of my life, I proclaimed that I would be either a boy, or a clown. As time advances, that claim seems to grow more and more prophetic.

In actuality, none of those vocations have come into being. I am neither a qualified vet, nor do I live in the country with a horse in my back garden as I unflinchingly always forecast. I don't yet own a dog and I don't run a tearoom. Instead, I share a flat with two other 25-year old girls behind the Ritzy cinema in Brixton, London. It's a small, cold, dampish place with single glazing and an unusual layout, but we like it. We have an unkillable mouse and seem fated to shiver in our beds at night. Without our hot water bottles we'd have most likely died long ago. I can't help but wince at the coincidental crossover of my first winter in the flat and a rampant attack of pneumonia. So: it is not luxurious. But it is well-located - just two minutes from the tube station and in close proximity to the ordered beauty of Brockwell Park, and eight minutes away from my brother Tim's house, and ten minutes away from cousin's Simon's house. Brixton is vibrant and noisy, a clash of different cultures and exotic discourses, our road especially prone to middle-of-the-night misdeeds and shady occupants. Last year I inadvertently walked right through the middle of a drug exchange that was happening on our doorstep: well-mannered to the last, I even bid that they 'excuse me please' as I negotiated my bike through the middle of the packages that were changing hands as I passed into our shabby stairwell. To the credit of the seller (although I think the word is dealer), he did apologise and give me a hand with the door.

As my Mum would say, I live a hand-to-mouth existence, earning just enough money to get by comfortably, but not enough money to save or luxuriate in. For the past eighteen months, my life has revolved around a PhD: a research project based in a Fine Art department but which really takes its cues from methodologies related to visual culture. It is also an undertaking which means I have a lot of time to myself, and a lot of freedom in which to live. With such freedom comes the stress of unstructured time, hours and hours of time that could be devoted to the eternal process of research and rediscovery but which very easily get translated into reading novels that definitely do not relate to my thesis, (I'm currently reading Howards End) thinking upon and dissecting Simon Armitage poems, going on dog-trot runs around pleasant parks and watching decidedly unacademic comedy clips on YouTube. It hasn't always been this way: for the first 5 months of my doctorate I lived at the British Library, enduring eight-hour days in Science 3, desperately grabbing around for texts that could be in some way illuminating to a project I had no handle on. After the fifth month, I rebelled, stopped visiting the B.L and instead explored London, listening to songs and replaying Curb Your Enthusiasm and failing to attend to any element of my work. This continued for a guilt-inducing 6 months before admitting I had well and truly lost my way. Such realisation nudged me back towards a happier mid-point between work and unrelated exploration. What I have learned is to treat the doctoral work as a job that must be attended to in order to earn my keep: thanks to a bursary and scholarship from the University, it is the monetary bread and butter of my existence. My thesis pays my electricity bills, and working on it is a responsibility that allows me a few sacred benefits. I do not have to commute. I do not have to sit at a desk in a room with other employees, dodging the minute detail of office politics. I do not have to take my lunch break when I am told to. I don't have to abide by the rules of a manager who I may or may not respect. I am free to go to galleries during the day, I can thankfully ride the tube when it is quiet, and I can go swimming in Hampstead Ponds during cold wintry afternoons. I can examine cultural attractions when others are being productive in their suits and ties, and feel as though my life is untainted by corporate cynicism. All of this I like, and appreciate. My life unfurls at its own leisurely, lo-fi pace: I cycle through a life that is certainly not glamorous, definitely not impressive-sounding, but at least not connected with the world of commercial work and money and high ambition. I experience London through the eyes of an Other and feel sidelined to many of the typified mechanisms that drive the city forward.

It's not a life I expected to live, or one I even knew to exist at all, and I continue to oscillate between feeling contented and feeling wildly lost. I have felt depressed more frequently since starting the PhD than I thought I could feel, but I've also come to know my own mind with an uncompromising sense of intimacy. This means I derive great strength from the academic and intellectual knowledge that I have attained so far. I have had the space and opportunity to read not just widely but also deeply, which makes me feel enriched - I have more tools in my arsenal, and a sharper sense of curiosity. But I wonder whether it's a life built around floating, existing on the peripheries and living by modes of defence rather than attack. Often, my days are spent warding off listlessness and thinking of new ways to approach the unrelenting task of research. I am not dynamic as I would be if people relied on me. I suppose I am on my own; walled in by a thesis that sits on my shoulder and refuses to budge, and a lowly position within the dominant social hierarchy.

I sometimes wonder whether my young self would feel proud or outraged that I've stuck with the doctorate for 18 months without feeling love or passion for the task itself. She'd probably be kind but despairing. She would advise me to go and pursue happier, more productive and more integrated avenues, ones that didn't allow for the constant self-analysis that she would find tedious and wasteful. She would encourage me to travel widely, and have fun, to be around others, to relinquish the ivory tower PhDs seem to demand you build. She would tell me to focus upon the essential task of making myself happy. She was a very good little lass, you see, one who only wanted to laugh a lot and have fun, and feel wanted, and essential; and somewhere, in amongst all the Derrida, and the overanalysis of research models, and the endless days of filling time and attending to self-supplication, I realise I have lost my grasp on her.

Elusive sleep

I have a complicated relationship with sleep - switching suddenly from 'good' periods during which I sleep for ten hours a night to 'bad' and unsettled bouts of early-morning waking. Each period usually lasts for about ten days. I don't know what determines the switch and am yet to identify knowable factors that affect my patterns of sleep. Exercise can either make me fatigued and therefore ready for sleep or it can over-energise me, making it difficult to 'switch off' come bedtime. Reading before switching the light off is similarly unpredictable. The only reliable thing I have found to aid my sleep is a hot water bottle placed on the small of my back (I sleep on my front) as I like to lie and pretend the sun is warming me. Otherwise, whether I sleep through the night seems to be a game of chance, and a frustratingly delicate game of chance at that: if I dare overthink the concept of sleep or how to achieve it, the likelihood of it eluding me seems to thrive.

I know I have slept well when I have dreamed. My dreams, when I am settled and at ease during the night, are paradoxically vivid and consuming, and resolve around heavy or unusual atmospheres that stay with me long into the following day. I often dream of death, that close friends have died, or that a potentially fatal accident is close-by. For me, such dreaming is not tiring: it is the mark that I have slept well since it shows I have stayed asleep for longer than three hours at a time. Much worse, much more tiring, is waking at 3am for many nights in a row. This is my clockwork tic: a pattern that can set in for days, or even weeks. My worst period of insomnia occurred last June, when I experienced 24 consecutive nights of broken sleep, sleeping for no more than 2 hours without waking. By the 24th night I felt depressed and bleary, desperate and unable to imagine I would ever enjoy regular bounties of sleep. On the 25th night, I slept for 14 hours and woke feeling overwhelmingly relieved. I don't know what changed between the 24th and the 25th night.

Broken sleep feels like a punishment for something, and it is difficult not to feel envious of those who sleep calmly and soundly every night. Sleep is restorative and balm-like, without it, life can feel difficult and unrelenting. If I wake during the night, it is likely that I will experience a degree of fatigued hyperactivity. Suddenly my brain wants to investigate every one of life's complexities and ponder the outcome of every variable course of action. I replay conversations I have had, conversations I haven't had, jokes I've made, better jokes I should have made, things I should have told friends, odd jobs that I have neglected to attend to, places I'd like to visit, people I'd like to meet with, books I'd like to re-read, the face of my old piano teacher, the feel of carrying a saddle, feelings of indignation, feelings of sadness, warm memories of nostalgia, a cutting remark I shouldn't have made. My head becomes a confusing bric-a-brac of moments, and it is during this time, in the early hours of the morning, that my mind chooses to sort through it - picking over it and sorting it and generally engaging in an exhausting process of re-examining and reconsideration. It is not soothing but punishing, and the night stretches ahead tiringly. It is during such nights that the world feels like a dark and lonely place.

These periods of insomnia are thankfully usually cushioned by periods of well-received rest. These periods are like holidays and I value them more highly than anything else I could experience. I regard healthy sleep as a comforting tonic - a rare balm that is to be respected and cherished - and when I am sleeping well, I look forward to bedtime hours ahead of its arrival. I sleep on my front, prone and straight, with my hands held close to my face. I enjoy the feeling of breathing against my hand and find the action itself incredibly soothing. At the age of 25 I am reluctant to admit to sucking my thumb - a habit I tell myself I have kicked but which in fact I continue to return to - whenever I feel tired and at ease. I also sleep well when I share my bed with any one of a very select few friends and consider my ability to slumber in their company evidence of the peace of mind and reassurance their silent companionship brings me. I thus always sleep heavily when sharing a room with my Mum. My favourite feeling is to wake in the night and to be tired enough to turn my head and fall back to sleep, even better is the vague and imprecise sensation of yawning before descending once more into dream.

I often think back to a holiday my family and I had when I was 11. We spent a few weeks in the Pyrenees - I think we were on the French side - and being in a high and remote hamlet, there was no running water and a very limited electricity supply to the house. The nights were so dark it was impossible to see anything but matt blackness - your eyes never adjusted to the absence of light, never saw outlines, never saw depth, only the black. Waking in the night to find the toilet was an impossibility. With this darkness came three or four weeks of the deepest sleep I have ever experienced - dreams so vivid I can still recall some of them, and a sleep pattern so stable and predictable I remember that holiday not for the experiences of the day, but the otherworldly ferocity of the sleep. It is a state I would like to feel again - inert, powerless to the darkness, utterly without motion. If that sleep was treacle, then the vague and wobbly sleep I have come to expect is more like gravy - thin, vapid, and lacking in an appropriately reassuring level of density.

The Thought Fox, Ted Hughes

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest: 

Something else is alive 

Beside the clock's loneliness 

And this blank page where my fingers move. 


Through the window I see no star: 

Something more near 

Though deeper within darkness 

Is entering the loneliness: 


Cold, delicately as the dark snow 

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; 

Two eyes serve a movement, that now 

And again now, and now, and now 


Sets neat prints into the snow 

Between trees, and warily a lame 

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow 

Of a body that is bold to come 


Across clearings, an eye, 

A widening deepening greenness, 

Brilliantly, concentratedly, 

Coming about its own business 


Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox 

It enters the dark hole of the head. 

The window is starless still; the clock ticks, 

The page is printed.

In this poem, written in 1957, Ted Hughes writes self-reflexively about the process that occurs during both poetry making and poetry reading. He displays a self-consciousness that refers to the role of imagination in the creating and reading of his poem – where he seeks to break down our perception of what is ‘real’, and what is imagined within written text. Throughout the poem, Hughes alludes to a sense of reality. This is an attempt to make his own poetic persona seem tangible, and he repeatedly references naturalistic and specific detail such as ‘the clock’ and ‘this blank page where my fingers move’. This verifies a present tense, and locates Hughes as a vital, physical presence within the text, whilst crucially acknowledging his own existence. This is juxtaposed by the following lines which seek to declare the essential power of imagination. He slowly turns the shadowy other presence – the ‘something more near’, the ‘something else alive’ - into a fully formed, fully articulated signifier of a fox. We can pinpoint the moment at which the fox appears in Hughes’ imagination – ‘A fox’s nose touches twig, leaf/ Two eyes serve a moment, that now/ And now again, and now, and now/ Sets neat prints into the snow’. It is the repetition of ‘now’ that is key to this stanza, an adverb which reveals Hughes’ attempt to trap the moment of the fox’s mental conception into the physical lines of the text. The subsequent sensory description of the animal – ‘a lame/ Shadow lags by stump and in hollow’, ‘an eye/ A widening deepening greenness’, ‘a sudden sharp hot stink’ works to break down the established boundary between imaginary and physical existence. Hughes is asking us to imagine, really imagine a fox, but goes beyond the mere testing of our mental faculties by also inburing his 2-dimensional signifier with sensory desciptors. By doing so, he draws attention to the process that occurs between poet, poem, and reader and the fact that written symbols can only do so much to describe before reader must meet the text and take over the cultivation of meaning. The poem is a paradox; where Hughes is and isn’t the all-powerful creator of textual content. He hands responsibility over to his reader to participate in the making of the poem, and he acknowledges that the act of reading is not a straightforward negotiation between sender and receiver. Instead, suggests Hughes, the reader anticipates and creates his own interactions – we are guided by Hughes into imagining a fox, but ultimately we must create it, modify it, complete it, for ourselves.

This idea is critical to one element of my doctoral thesis since it articulates the complex gap between physical marks on the page and the process of imagination that occurs in the reader’s mind. The Thought Fox is a poem which attempts to pinpoint the moment at which the recognised shape of letters becomes transformed into a fully functioning mental picture. My thesis, in part seeks to analyse this moment in more detail, by investigating the various ways in which artists, writers, poets and illustrators have used this interplay between text and image to achieve a wide variety of artistic and intellectural results.

What I find so remarkable about Hughes’ poem is his insight that nothing that we perceive as ‘natural’ is free from semiotic baggage. A traditional reading of his poem might surmise that he is a naturalist/existentialist writing metaphorically about an fox, but I argue his wry analysis of the way that his own text is operating bears a close resemblance to semiotic criticism. Hughes seems to suggest that reality is dependent upon a system of signs; that nothing can exist outside of such cultural constructions. We ‘see’ the fox because a system allows us to read and interpret the textual signs (the letters, punctuation and spaces) that Hughes lays out. The play in the poem arises from the tension that exists between spontaneity and forecast – as new readers we are led to feel as though the conjuring up of the fox is somehow unique and fleetingly precious, when in fact the fox is an inevitable by-product of the signs already organised by Hughes. This relationship between signifier and signified is often taken for granted as being natural, which makes Hughes’s attention to the gap between the two all the more extraordinary. This supposition of ‘naturalness’ is one of the most common ideologies that semioticians seek to expose and eradicate. Semiotic analysts such as Jonathan Culler argue that taking this exchange between signifier and signified as being unmediated is like perceiving photography as being ‘a window on the world’. – a claim made by Roland Barthes in 1977 which has been widely contested since. Hughes works in opposition to this notion of naturalness by calling noisy attention to the process of mediation, as if he is unpicking the so-called ‘invisible editing’ we have come to expect from most forms of mass popular culture.

To Walk On Hills/ The City as Landscape

To Walk on Hills

To walk on hills is to employ legs
As porters of the head and heart
Jointly adventuring towards
Perhaps true equanimity.

To walk on hills is to see sights
And hear sounds unfamiliar.
When in wind the pine-tree roars,
When crags with bleatings echo,
When water foams below the fall,
Heart records that journey as memorable indeed;
Head reserves opinion,
Confused by the wind.

A view of three shires and the sea!
Seldom so much at once appears
Of the coloured world, says heart.
Head is glum, says nothing.
Legs become weary, halting
To sprawl in a rock's shelter,
While the sun drowsily blinks
On head at last brought low -
This giddied passenger of legs
That has no word to utter.

Heart does double duty,
As heart, and as head,
With portentous trifling.

A castle on its crag perched
Across the miles between is viewed
With awe as across years.
Now a daisy pleases,
Pleases and astounds, even,
That on a garden lawn could blow
All summer long with no esteem.
And the buzzard's horrid poise,
And the plover's misery,
And the important beetle's
Blue-green-shiny back...

To walk on hills is to employ legs
To march away and lose the day.
Confess, have you known shepherds?
And are they not a witless race
Prone to quaint visions?
Not thus from solitude
(Solitude sobers only)
But from long hilltop striding.

Robert Graves




The photographer is an armed version of the solitary walker reconnoitering, stalking, cruising the urban inferno, the voyeuristic stroller who discovers the city as a landscape of voluptuous extremes. Adept of the joys of watching, connoisseur of empathy, the flâneur finds the world 'picturesque'.

Susan Sontag, 'On Photography', 1977

Ingrid Pollard, 'Postcards Home'

Ingrid Pollard’s photographic work 'Postcards Home', calls attention to generalizations and assumptions made about race and colour within Lake District discourses. She inhabits the gaps and silences and inserts herself into the mis-en-scene of typified Lake District landscapes. By doing so, she substantiates an idea I share: that the Lakes are not a landscape that allows space for a dynamic variety of peoples and human experiences. Rather, she focuses upon the isolation and menace of being the ‘other’ in this culturally and visually constructed part of England. ‘It’s as if the Black experience is only lived within an urban environment. I thought I liked the Lake District where I wandered lonely as a Black face in a sea of white. A visit to the countryside is always accompanied by a feeling of unease, of dread’. The text which accompanies Pollard’s ‘Postcards Home’ is interesting, as it asserts a radical and politically-charged – and yet poetic – vocabulary. Her linguistic deviation highlights the presence of a conventional language of the Lakes – a way of prizing and describing the landscape that is seen to be inclusive, and which orients that landscape as a site of wholesomeness, nurture and inspiration. Much has been made of the Lake District as ‘Real England’ and its capacity to restore health and peace of mind: a place to ‘get away from it all’ and ‘return to nature’. Pollard challenges such notions with a rhetorical style that is steeped in violence and objection – “Death is the bottom line. The owners of these fields, these trees and sheep, they want me off their green and pleasant land. NO TRESPASS, they want me dead. A slow death through eyes that slide away from me...” Pollard’s final sentence in this quotation is telling – she suggests that as a Guyanan immigrant, hers is a face not recognized and affirmed through others’ gaze. With ‘the eyes that slide away from me’ she is reduced and annihilated, not accepted as a legitimate symbol within the order of the ‘true’ Lake District semiotic code. This leads to a sensation of non-existence, affirmed in Pollard’s exploration of ‘feelings I don’t belong. Walks through leafy glades with a baseball bat by my side’. Pollard’s awareness of her own face and colour as a politicized aesthetic symbol means she is able to treat her personal experiences as a microcosm through which to explore much greater relations of power. “I heard black people talk about the [postcard] image. Heritage? Whose heritage?”


Pollard attempts to find answers to this question through the particularities of her chosen medium. She exploits the conventional aesthetic code of the holiday photograph as a stable norm from which to then deviate. By inserting her own black skin into the pastoral mis-en-scene of the Lake District she plays with the initial shock that comes from seeing a Black presence in a 'natural' setting to affirm the existence of conservative conventions and assumption of pastoral heritage. Pollard explores notions of her outsider-status in the photograph below – a piece which registers multiple levels of otherness and alienation. The barbed wire fence acts as a visual signifier of the barrier that exists between her and the landscape beyond – a physical articulation of the ideological gap between her and the ‘Real England’ of the Lake District. Pollard’s look settles out of frame exacerbating the photograph’s unsettled quality. The tone and colour of the project parodies 18th century painting, shown more clearly in the photograph below which gives a conventional ‘view’ or ‘vista’ - one then challenged by Pollard’s lack of belonging to the scene she is parodying. Her work 'Pastoral Interludes' drives at not some ‘essence’ of the Lake District – it does not attempt to argue that popular conceptions of the Lake District are right or wrong – more, Pollard recognizes that they are informed by our reading of and repeated encounters with public artifacts such as postcards, photographs, and advertising literature. Pollard quizzes the stability of these artifacts as bearers of certain ‘truths’.




Photography continues to carry assumptions of truth-making – as Jean Francis Lyotard in his ‘The Postmodern Condition’ observes, “photography retains its place in the hierarchy of devices of realistic representation”. Her photographs toe a fine line between parody and documentary - Pollard’s photographs defy the naturalness of nature and expose the cultural definition that lies behind so much of the purported photographic ‘truth’. Pollard represents the experience of the Lakes through codified objects – she rewrites culture with her subversive take on existing modes of cultural ephemera.

In her words: 'the leisure industry dominates the surface, but there’s all this other stuff underneath, hidden.'

Bricolage

An interesting quotation which helps to illuminate Walter Benjamin's much-lauded 'Arcades' project; itself never finished, but a text frequently used as a vibrant working model upon which to base bricolage-centred methodologies

Perfect Light

There you are, in all your innocence,
Sitting among your daffodils, as in a picture
Posed as for the title: 'Innocence'.
Perfect light in your face lights it up
Like a daffodil. Like any one of those daffodils
It was to be your only April on earth
Among your daffodils. In your arms,
Like a teddy bear, your new son,
Only a few weeks into his innocence.
Mother and infant, as in the Holy portrait.
And beside you, laughing up at you,
Your daughter, barely two. Like a daffodil
You turn your face down to her, saying something.
Your words were lost in the camera.
And the knowledge
Inside the hill on which you are sitting,
A moated fort hill, bigger than your house,
Failed to reach the picture. While your next moment,
Coming towards you like an infantryman
Returning slowly out of no-man's-land,
Bowed under something, never reached you -
Simply melted into the perfect light

Ted Hughes, 'Birthday Letters', p143

Conrad Atkinson, through Edward Said

Edward Said’s seminal 1978 book, Orientalism may seem an illogical text through which to approach the study of our native Lake District, but often it is the most seemingly extraneous texts that can give a subject sharpest illumination. In Orientalism’s introduction, Said asserts that ‘the orient was almost a European invention, and had been, since antiquity, a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, landscapes, and remarkable experiences'. It is not difficult to apply this quotation to cultural conceptions of the English Lakes: not too much of a stretch to see that the Lake District is an invention of its own, albeit an invention that sits close-by, which masks its stark ‘otherness’ (as Said would have it). This post seeks to examine the ‘otherness’ of the Lakes through a prolific Lake District-based artist – Conrad Atkinson.

What makes Said’s text so helpful is his ability to call attention to the powerful objectives that are at play when receiving, or viewing, a place. Said’s desire to unpack the terms of the gaze under which a particular landscape falls is important to the objectives of my own thesis. Moreover, his intellectual allegiance with Italian-philosopher Gramsci’s project – to ‘pick over’ the ‘infinity of traces’ that make up a particular place, or cultural monument, or historical moment – corroborates my own ambition to re-audit the cultural, literary and artistic output of the Lakes in order to reconsider the pre-existing assumptions and preconceptions that otherwise stand to be inherited.



I shall begin with an analysis of the above - one of Conrad Atkinson’s paintings, painted in 1980 and entitled ‘Landscape’. Atkinson is interesting for his desire to reassemble his own history and sense of place, and this is in keeping with one of the major themes of Orientalism. Like Said, Atkinson is acutely interested in sidelined or partisan peoples and their susceptibility to being reshaped or ‘placed’ by a dominant ideological party. Atkinson suggests that ‘taken in it’s entirety, [my exhibition] ‘For Wordsworth, For West Cumbria’ takes an impassioned stand against smug, unquestioning ideas about the English landscape’. Said too argues that it is the unquestioning nature of a gaze that renders it problematical and likely to become imbued with doctrines of superiority. In the case of the Lake District, these doctrines can largely be traced back to the period of Romanticism that occurred during the second half of the 18th century; it was during this time that a small group of poets and writers visited the Lakes and used the ‘rugged’ landscapes as allegory, metaphor and poetic inspiration in their linking of nature to a volatile political scene. This group forged a link between writing, thinking and landscape. Often this politicism is stripped away in a retrospective appreciation of Wordsworth, Colderige, Shelley and their contemporaries, in a reconfiguration which marks the group of artists as more socially inert than was actually the case – theirs are not poems simply of hills and vales but work which, like Atkinson’s, attests to a deeply engaged interest in outcasted members of society and the denial of certain – as Foucault would have it – discursive regimes. It is this activism and propensity towards reshuffling Gramsci’s ‘traces’ that we see in Conrad Atkinson; who is keen to untangle outmoded assumptions from notions of heritage, history, and ‘Real England’

Of his portrait of Wordsworth (shown at the top of this post) Atkinson has said, ‘I basically make the point that Wordsworth was a political animal, along with Shelley, Keats, Byron and Blake who have been presented as dreamers, detached from reality Wordsworth has written that although he was thought of first as an artist, for spent 12 hours a day on politics to every one hour on art. I am recovering history’. Atkinson is keen to shake off the notional cultural baggage that comes with being a Lake District artist – keen to redefine the Lakes as the site of activism and radical thought as opposed to a landscape devoid of its liberal history. I argue that it is through the specifics of Atkinson’s very particular art practice that he is able to do this, since Atkinson’s work exists in the middle of a venn diagram of fine art and illustration. He is exhibited and recognized within a Fine Art context – his work having appeared at Tate Britain, V&A and numerous other Fine Art-led institutions – and yet his desire to reprint and physically reproduce his work destabilizes notions of Atkinson as being an ‘Artist’. It is this desire that I argue aligns him with his literary forebears; since Atkinson has taken up modes of political activism similar to Wordsworth et al with their printed pamphlets. His work too is designed to enter spheres of public consciousness quickly and rapidly engage with current affairs and national events. It is, then, both the content of Atkinson’s work, as well as his proclivity for illustrative processes that marks Atkinson out as a good case study to interrogate notions of ‘otherness’. Within spheres of Fine Art, reproduction is regarded as a process capable only of devaluing original artwork, due to a deeply ingrained correlation between rarity and value – both in a monetary and a creative sense. In illustration practices, reprinting and reproduction figures as one of the strongest tools available for successful communication between artist and recipient, and it is important that ‘mass’ does not become interchangeable with a Fine Art equation to ‘low’. Indeed, Atkinson is ‘keen to use prints as a way of promoting ideas to and communicating with a wider audience’. Again, Atkinson takes up the project of his forebears, by exposing the organisations of power that lie behind a landscape.


The V&A introduce Atkinson’s ‘Landscape’ by noting, ‘his artwork is labeled with words and phrases calling attention to the invisible social and economic problems that pervade this seemingly idyllic setting’. Atkinson’s desire to represent the working class native Lake District populace and to reshape conceptions of their landscape – his labels include phrases such as ‘alienated picturesque’, ‘seasonal employment patterns’ and ‘sale of council houses’ - is thus assisted by his employment of illustration-based methods of practice. His incorporating artifacts of popular culture – such as labels but also postcards, adverts and newspaper articles – enable him to ‘speak’ or make work whose delivery is in keeping with the political aims of his art. And hierarchy of medium is a seemingly long-contentious issue for Atkinson himself, as noted by Sue Hubbard in her biographical article in ‘Artists Talking’: “Everything was changing; the last shackles of post-war constraint were being overthrown; the personal became the political. He became disillusioned by painting, felt there was "too much disparity between his family background and what he was doing". This friction, between Atkinson’s place in the art world and the audience to whom he feels his art belongs posits Atkinson as an interesting ‘other’ – I suggest that illustration is appropriate to Atkinson because it exists as a discursive register that is as sidelined as the realities of his Lake District upbringing. This idea is confirmed by a further moment in Hubbard’s article, in which she notes the use of everyday ephemera in his work, and aligns this with the idea of being ‘mute or silenced’.

Since then Atkinson has built his reputation on an art that dares to act as a catalyst to discussion on social issues from nuclear war to 11 September. Atkinson does not, he insists, favour a particular 'style'. Rather he uses whatever materials he feels best suit his subject, everyday objects such as shoes or newspaper in which he might paint over the text to make a point about being mute or silenced.

We begin to see, from Said’s idea of poring over and re-selecting ‘bits’ of history; from Gramsci’s poetic notion of there existing an ‘infinity of traces’; and from Atkinson’s use of everyday objects, that ephemera could be regarded as a linking mechanism important to my line of enquiry. Moreover, the study of ephemera indicates a particular historical approach or set of ideological concerns that are counter to more traditional forms of historicism. Ephemera, in this context, refers to transitory written or printed matter not intended to be retained or preserved; and can include “leaflets, handbills, tickets, trade cards, programmes and playbills, printed tins and packaging, advertising inserts, posters, newspapers and more”. As Maurice Rickards, founder of The Ephemera Society would have it, ephemera can be regarded as “the minor transient documents of everyday life”. Such stress upon the ‘everyday’ is useful in destabilizing approaches to history and culture that emphasise the dominant ideological forces. It is an approach that seeks to understand culture, and the past, from the bottom up, rather than top down, and sees texts that belong to the popular realm of the public as viable agents of meaning and worth. In terms of my own project, the study of ephemera offers a way of accessing the Lake District in a precarious fashion – an approach that sifts through cultural artifacts and pieces together a representative vision of the Lakes that is more progressive than the ‘frozen countryside with powerful natural and historical appeal – a sacred geography to which the public has no legitimate relation except through an appreciative and increasingly educated visual imagination’. Patrick Wright considers such matters in his ‘On Living in an Old Country’ as he reads the Shell Oil guides as arbiters of homogenized cultural and national values. “For a consideration of public ideas of the nation, then, Shell is significant as an apparatus of cultural reproduction”. This helps articulate the way that reproducible matter can contribute to and comment on national or public discourses, and offers a model of cultural analysis quite distinct from more traditional historical methodologies. It also throws up interesting and worthwhile questions pertaining to the practice of visual illustration. To draw once more upon a notional reading of Gramsci, it could be argued that visual illustration offers a way of opposing or agitating the Lake’s dominant cultural voice : and so even in its basic status as ephemera, visual illustration carries subversive or anti-dominant implications.

Simon Armitage, 'Song'

Song

The bridle-path, the river bank,
and where they crossed I took a length
of hazel bark, and carved a boat
no bigger than a fish, a trout,
and set it down and saw it float,
then sink. And where it sank
an inch of silver flesh declared itself
against the sun. Then it was gone.

And further south, beyond the bridge,
I took a nest of cotton grass
and flint to make a fire. Then I watched
a thread of smoke unhook a pair
of seed propellers from a sycamore
which turned together and became
a dragonfly that drew the smoke
downstream. But the fire would not light.

Then at night, the house at the mouth
of the river. Inside, a fish,
a trout, the ounces of its soft
smoked meat prepared and on a plate.
I sat down there and ate. It is
the way of things, the taking shape
of things, beginning with their names;
secrets told in acts of sunlight,
promises kept by gifts of rain.


This poem, taken from 'Kid' (first published 1992) defies easy categorisation as a Simon Armitage poem. Its concentration upon and preoccupation with natural imagery is counter to the voice typically associated with Armitage - gone are the deliberately outmoded popular references and comic nouns - and the narrator takes a more reflective, and less imposing role within the three stanzas. Its most Armitage-esque quality is the emphasis upon childhood pursuits and childishness as a mechanism for interpreting the world around us; but even this is a toned-down version of the dry effervescence readers have come to expect.

It's a melancholy verse that is bridged by references to failure and absence. The carved wooden boat sinks, the fire will not light, the trout, 'an inch of silver flesh' that previously 'declared itself/ against the sun' becomes dead and consumed. Armitage's three stanzas present not only the cyclical realities of the natural world but more, a disharmonious push/pull between man and nature. The poem's narrator does not embody the role of Romantic poet, at one with his environment and open to receive the glories of elusive inspiration - instead, he encounters an inability to recreate the wonders he perceives in nature evidenced by a division between he and all that he observes. His hazel bark boat sinks where the trout can swim; his cotton grass and flint fire will not ignite, and his smoky failure merely draws the readers attention towards the sycamore seeds' successful beauty in flight. That the seeds 'turn together' and 'become a dragonfly' demonstrate the transformative power of the natural world to integrate and evolve, dwarfing the significance of the poet and making 'the house at the mouth of the river' feel small and rigid. The house is too small, the victory of the smoked fish is unprized and uncomfortable, because both things are bereft of larger, more divine importance; inconsequential compared to the overarching and unified natural schema surrounding them.

This disrupts the conventional relationship between poet and nature, where poet is held as the esteemed conduit through which inspiration is channelled. In 'Song', Armitage does not so much celebrate man's kinship with nature, as demonstrate an ability to temper and withhold nature, to overcome it, to shut it out with bricks and glass, to kill it, and trap it, to eat it. The closing stanza is unsatisfying and cloying, one in which the previous delicate descriptions of fleeting natural moments are replaced with examples of sturdier, more domestic language: 'I sat down and ate'. The plate off which the fish is eaten is made to seem preposterous - a formal and irrelevant detail - but Armitage deliberate calls our attention to it, placing it at the end of the line, then making it reverberate through the subsequent 'ate' and 'shape'. Dominance over nature is thereby made to feel petty and ugly, far removed from the elegant and mysterious evolutionary order of things: 'secrets told in acts of sunlight,/promises kept by acts of rain'. It's in this final clause that Armitage finally confers his trademark sense of childhood kinship with experiences of the everyday: he nudges his reader towards wanting to step outside, makes them feel trapped by the walls around them, encourages them to see gravity and significance and 'true' knowledge not in the limited achievements of man, but in the mystifying and unrivalled energies of nature.