Winter is coming.

 In the time it has taken me to get back to writing this blog the winter storm outside my window has subsided and the sun is breaking through the cloud. Gods golden fingers are stroking the freshly mowed grass in our garden. I have cut it for the last time this year and run the mower out of petrol so it does not lose its volatility over the winter months.  Septembers warmth seems to have lasted an eternity and I am still wearing my shorts, though more from habit than good sense.

It is 12 days since my last post and it has really been a time of recovery. I have done a few things including a planning session at the playground about animating the loose parts area. I have days booked in the diary, events unfolding. I started to make a film  with the young people to try and promote what the playground does.  This was nice and easy and felt fresh but it can't form part of my research. It has to sit outside, but it is a good reminder of what we are missing.  It is clear to me that I can't use film as data and work ethically within research. The intention of my art/research is opaque, there is no real way to predict where it may end up so there is no ethical way to ask for informed consent.  I find this decision quite liberating and as ever within academic work it gives you something to write about. Making a film and actually working directly with young people on my PhD project feels like it may be impossible.  I can live with this and the films and conversations can fizz at the corner of everything - Like a glass of bubbling Berocca to save you from the hangover that it is difficult to wake up from.

Winter is a time for writing.  We are moved in now, feeling more at home and each morning when I wake up I am not driven to do a thousand jobs on the new house.  To walk down the steps of the old house, to fill the Volvo and to walk up the step of the new house.  It felt like 3 months of groundhog days, I kept other things ticking over but lost proper concentration. 

Today is Monday morning and its nearly October.  I have planned a final two weeks in  at the playground finishing with a Halloween light event and then I will be in my writing up period.  I keep thinking about how far I have come and the journey of a PhD. I have moved into another stage of life in some ways, the old ways of working had to end as the game of getting funded work was starting to tire me out.  I loved the freelance life, I loved its unpredictability but it was always a little stressful and lacked the throughline of thought and practice that I was consistently craving and regularly inventing.   

I have a chapter to write about mending the Arial runway at the playground - it is a chapter to capture the spectacular and the mundane and it will be problematic but it is a chapter I'm hoping will act like the kick-starter on a motorbike. I will kick it off and leave it on the stand to tick over so it warms up before shooting off on it and going to the woods.  It is a Honda 90 and not a big powerful thing but it is reliable and economic transport that gets you where you need to go.  And this is the thing. Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance would not be the same if we replace the Harley Davison with a Honda 90.  Although the book does focus on the Zen of motorbike repair there is always something exciting about the bike itself.  My contribution to new knowledge will be about maintaining and riding the Honda 90, a step into the mundane and practical everyday of keeping something ticking over. A moped, an adventure-playground, a life.

Marking Time

 

I hit my thumb with a hammer.  I am not sure when I did this but it was probably while mending the arial runway at the playground a week ago.  I was up a ladder and, as it turned out, just starting to get Covid symptoms. I had high adrenaline levels due to fear and had to do some difficult hammering, at angles, while holding on with one hand.  I am pleased it isn't totally black, though from experience I know it will take a long time to grow out.  I once dropped a padlock on my toe while wearing sandals, the black mark crept forward at an infinitely tiny  incremental pace like an ultra slow motion penny fall machine at the seaside.  Black fingernails are a reminder of hitting the wrong thing with a hammer, dead blood under the nail.  As well as my multiple digit injuries I am recovering from my first Covid infection. Ten days in isolation and all that goes along with a strange illness that has had its major teeth pulled yet still has a good go at gumming you to death. 

It is an important week as I have had my last PhD payment. The job of work has now detached itself from the funding. Not that the funding made me get on with it any more than not getting funded but now it seems like a point has been crossed. Getting the funding is no longer the point, getting the Phd is the point so perhaps the point will change.

My phone sent me a word today

IMMANENT 

It means 

1. Existing or operating within, inherent.

2. (of God permanently pervading and sustaining the universe)

I thought I had heard this word a lot and thought I knew what it meant but I was confusing it with imminent - something that was about to happen.  This doesn't really matter as I think you could probably work with both definitions and in context I must of read Immanent nearly properly - God is about to happen and it is within this future orientation that his true power resides. However it is another thing that makes me feel slightly thick and out of my depth.

I found a very old literature review methodology piece of writing I had done yesterday, it actually seemed rather good when I read it.  It came from a time when I was trying to write more PhD like so it wasn't actually that good but it did look a bit like a piece of PhD writing.   I was tempted to pick it back up and work into it. Somehow though it read like it came from a different pre-Covid world, it read like an echo that had been bouncing around in Plato's cave for a couple of millennia. 

My PhD is Immanent, it is permanently pervading, it is existing and operating within - it is gestating.  It's not Imminent or about to happen, I think this is a good thing.

Two things to notes

Sarah Trueman suggested I submit the platform as part of my PhD - the thing not an image.  This is clever and I like it.

Research creation potentially develops a way to work with philosophical ideas and animate it through arts practice without taking on the full weight of its context.  It liberates a concept from its plain of consistency.  I might look to using the Phd to activate Glissant's idea of opacity  - the opacity of practice - I think that would be a good thing to achieve in writing,

Pete and Glenda

 I was up on a ladder trying to mend the Zip wire yesterday.  Patrick asked me how my PhD was going and I said that it wasn't really. It is and it isn't, I started back doing field notes and observing what was happening in the loose parts area and did 3 sessions with extensive notes.   This was just before I went away to Dorset and the bank holiday.  I have started to make a film at the playground, Sarah asked me if I could use it for my PhD and I explained that there was no way I could make something like that that could fit into the ethics of the University.  After lots of engagements with ethical process I have become more sympathetic to the process and why we need it.  Research can and does do harm, research harvests data from people without their informed consent and this in turn can shape peoples lives through policy and perception.

The simple answer to the question of ethics is don't make any films within research as the two forms are not compatible.  It is possible to work with stills that capture something without showing children faces, for the images to work with text to act as memory triggers. I think film is slightly different as it unfolds in time and carries its own rhetoric.  I know that the still image has its complex rhetoric but these can often be mitigated within the writing process. To film a playground and think about play and have all children absent is pointless and has its own message. Yes it is possible and there are nice examples of films where objects are juxtaposed with dialogue but these films are made with this in mind they are often reflective and soft and insightful and full of memory.  They can't capture the affective buzz of the playground, this is the essence that I would strive to hold within the frame of a film.  I will make a film for the playground and her funders and I may even write about it as an artifact that sits on the boundary between what is and isn't research that perhaps marks an edge.  Too many of these edges seems to be set through process and protocol rather than an emerging and felt relationship to practice and place which is what we always put at the center of residency as method.

Perhaps the next process to to sift through all the things I can write about that actually are about an affective relationship to place that are not compromised by research protocols and then I can begin a journey of hope that I will call the long revolution.