Last week we had a meeting at the playground with some people from architecture department. Carolyne was worried about some wool on a tree trunk - it was growing into the bark a so I sliced it off with my universal buzzy saw, the tree has all sorts of cords growing into its bark. Trees have a hard time at the playground. I've done quite a lot of pruning to create a better view over the past few weeks. I do it guiltily and always in small bits at a time hoping nobody will realize my brutality. It is the manipulation of nature to fit my evil plans of dominating the world of things the shaping it to an image from my minds eye. I at least released the tree from its decorative bondage.
I have just got back from the allotments with Tim after a dull start the sun has come out. It is Monday the day I promise myself I will write a blog post so I have a record of where I am. It is a snapshot, Tim talked a lot about feeling slightly removed from reality, a standing slightly outside of himself. I told him about Alfred North Whitehead and the origins of his speculative-realism where Christ is reborn and Angels dance on the heads of pins. He ordered Pizza from the most unlikely Italian restaurant anywhere outside Italy. He asked me when I was starting the work on the platform and I mumbled a bit and tried to explain that I was interested in finding out how to embed loose parts play into the playground and that was what I was starting so my work was more holistic. I also said that one of the things I was thinking about was how it may be important to not make loose parts play and building separate from everything else, or to establish them as ideals to work towards - that it was part of the whole thing. I tried to extend this into the way that the playground builds community out of the loose parts of things- things that include people. I want to make Tim part of a Socratic dialogue where I bring the reader along with me to a point of understanding, they follow with Tim a line of thought, their own thought along with a slightly re-imagined Tim that offers some sort of enlightenment.
We were going to feed the Chickens which always seems like a euphemism but although it usually involves a lot of talking we do feed the chickens. As they scuttle around the allotment I wonder how the giblets actually work to power them along. When I came up with the idea of the chicken without giblets as my own interpretation of the body without organs I didn't really think about a live chicken with feathers and a face. Confronted by six today I wondered what the giblets actually did. I'm not naive enough to think of them stuffed inside the body cavity in a polythene bag but my chicken biology is also not good enough to imagine them doing work inside a clucking scratching hen. I wonder if there is any mileage in the chicken without giblets or CWG taken seriously or as a joke the concept doesn't really add very much. Things that are alive and things that are dead are very different though and if we are truly to embrace an ontology that flattens the living with the none living we need to come to terms with the car crash of a carcass verses pecking hopping feathery chicken.
After a weekend in Glasgow I started the day off reading Pat Thompsons book on writing and PhD's. I think it was good to read her talk about writing up negatively and to position writing at the heart of scholarship. She says writing blogs and field notes is writing and the main thing to remember is it is the place where we work out ideas. I do that in my blog and my field notes and my more esoteric meanderings. It was good to know that even though I am not doing all the writing I will surely need to do I am writing. I am producing text and actively working through ideas. I have never really agreed with the separation that the idea of writing up holds and its good to know that it doesn't have to work like that.
At the playground and in the work in Rotherham I am part of trying to make something happen and part of trying to research something happening and I do not declare either as a specific territory or treat them as such. The thing I'm trying to make happen is not a dead chicken with or without giblets its a live clucking and pecky thing scratching up set potatoes on a day when the weather doesn't know what to do with itself, a Rhode Island Red digging up a Charlotte to be precise .
I am now going to write some field notes from last week because I'm sure something happened that will be constituted or at least thought through in writing. I have Tim to thank for this discipline, this is practical rather than Socratic and real not speculated Tim.
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