HIDEYHOLE AND INNERSANCTUM

2247 Ouest
Lavelanet
Serie Bleu 1:25000.

Through the forest from Montségur.
Grid reference D4.
Louyre
I’m there.

Maps are useful
They tell you where you are and help with plotting the journey.
Where are you?
Are you sitting comfortably?
Then let us begin.
There was a time when meanings were fixed
When beliefs would stick
Nowadays round some parts

(not these, the Pyrenees),

they are open for interpretation.

The rain batters down and I gather wood for the fire and worry that the electricity might stop and thus this my sentencing.

Mediated unmediated
Me as cipher to the stream of think.
I watch
As it makes its way from this mountain location to sea level
And off into the eversoBigbeyond.

The bundle of approximations and inconsistencies that sits down for breakfast is later reborn as the work intended.
Or is it?

Place your bets.
Placeless place or coordinated zone?
See I remember he said,
He said:
I’m going to take you to a place that you have not been before.
I remember his words most distinctly, most clearly, most enjoyably.
There was a time, way back when,
People didn’t have the knowing.
It was either one thing or the other.
Not the in between,
Not the un scene.

Beckett’s place.
Notathome:
Vladimir and Estragon.
A country road.
A tree and evening.
The wait and the wait and the wait.
Moves in their yesteryears.
Metaphor for metaphysical.
Headspace.
Indoors outdoors and in your neighbours garden.

It’s in the unlikeliest of places that you’re likely to find things.

Bus Station Train Station or Airport Lounge?
Perfect the picture
This image now abounds.
Alfred Merhan
Refuge e or con?
Twelve years in the waiting,
Never alone?
Tooth brush and newspaper his companion
All else is gone.
Neither heimlich nor home.
Berczeller tells him
I’ve found a place for you in Paris.
And then again
It looks so much like Tarkovsky it’s unbelievable.
But Mehran is happy in transit, never-always alone.
His zone.

Stalker’s zone. 
Post apocalyptic placeless zone
The Stalker, now he’s never at home.
He’s roaming
Into a
Bleak unknowable future
Wish granter and wanderer.
The site, not non-site but site
Approached with trepidation and fear.
The poet the artist and the candle stick maker.
And Everyone else that might have been there.
The trick and the treater.
Tattered and torn, rags his nuts and bolts.
He leads them their merrydance.
They’re waiting to be told.

Let things conceived come true.

A make believe thing.
Same as it ever was.

Ridley Walker.
Talker, walker, assimilator and regurgitator.
Court jester, meanderer, hitherer and ditherer.
Intothefuture conveyor and reporter of things no longer.
Where was that place?
Inbetween place, inbetween states.
The State of Elgaland Vargaland.

On and on and on until we come to KonungRikena Elgland-Vargaland
The Kingdoms of Elgaland Vargaland.
Physically the largest nation on Earth.
Incorporating all boundaries between other nations as well as the Home Island and Digital Territories.
Every time you travel somewhere, you visit Elgaland Vargaland.
Where is it, what’s in it and how do you get there?
(Is it Alun Rowlands World War Two Sea Fort? Is it Sealand?)
Is it www.haven.com ?

All right hold on tight here we go again.

Beuys
He’s there
With his Dead Hare
Showman and Sureman
Explaining pictures
Explaining the meaning of things.
A way with the fairies to somewhere not been
He sets about invoking a transportation
From his place therein to thereout.
Then there’s that bloke that lived under the floorboards of a gullery
Someone would enter
They’re walking on top of me
He’s wanking underneath them.
Seedbed
it was
Vito Accionci
Hidden in his Hole or
John Bristow in Nick Gordon Smith’s
Hole
That place between
States.
Flux
or
Lived-in-habited

Out there-here, in the back of beyond, (and the shadow of the Gorges de la Frau), from babbling brook versus the whirr of the computer, to the tap of the finger and the happy-ever-after.

Property and propriety, we’ve lost the key.
Dada as the great grandfather to the misbehaviour and saviour of anti-settledown.
Neither one thing nor the other.

Sets Subsets : tn38 0he is me
Backthere
Apparently.
Birthplace as home place.
Home wins and away games count double.
The codification the decodifaction
Of this my meaning.
Configuration reconfiguration.
Fundamental existence in the worldfusion of human and natural order.
Us as significant centres of immediate experiences.
Consequently
Order prevails.

It’s the knowing where things are
Where to put them and everything in its place.
Once this stateofplace has been experienced then the vagabondic begins.
Metaphysical wanderlust and of no fixed abode.
The long and winding road.
Peripatetic en route ists
Itinerant place to placeist.
The getting there and not the arriving,
How much longer? How much further? And are we there yet?
The irritation of not knowing versus the wonders and delights of not knowing.
The unfamiliar now familiar in this age of fun.
Make culture to consume culture.
Did you see her?

Carving this out in the wilderness with woodworm my companion and anti-homemaker.

Vicinity
And Whereabouts.
Stelarc’s place.
Aloof from and raised far above the ordinary.
Sublime.
In one glorious moment on a bright Copenhagen morning he transports us to the void between.
The heaven’s above you and the earth’s below him.
Place of suspended disbelief.
A place we have not been before and what’s more he will go again and again and again.
A Suspension.
Suspension as suspended disbelief.
The spurious artistic intention serving as manifestation of body-conquers-all- contemplation.
There he is, flesh pierced
Meat hooks gleaming
Crane dangling and him swinging
30 meters up.
Displaced and travelling.
Home is where the head is.
Home is for some: couldn’t-care-less.
Has to be
Romany.
Pikeyjopeddler and Diddykoy.
No Fixed position entailed and
To be born is to be born in a place and that place becomes a home of sorts
Mobile home or home alone, home is where the placenta is
Was.

Italy, Sicily, France and Spain all round Elgaaland and back again.

Nationhood or Brother and of which is home?
That sense of where, to whom and what we belong.
Honing in or escaped
Under the perimeter fence and out the other side.
Always an invisible barrier.
It extends along the line of frontiers: A no man’s land to die for, to leave the trench, get up early and play football with the enemy on Christmas day for.
Was it worth fighting for?
Sure.
Are you sure?
Occupation
Retaliation and
Un bridled reiteration of rights.
The Resistance
And violation upon violation.
Homeland – Motherland - Fatherland
According to the declaration
Nationality is the preservation of our lives as human beings, where belonging is a foregone conclusion of freedom at any price.
Which is nice

Ius soli

(nationality based on place of birth)

Ius sanguinis

(nationality based on place of blood)
Unless you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time or of the wrong type or the wrong caste in which case you might be asked to pay the price.
Homewardbound and homecoming?
Home.
Take off and Land.
Time-space compression.
On
And
On
And
On.

Space melts like sand running through the fingers.
Perec and his Species of Spaces.
My list of non-places;
Lifts
Staircases
Cupboards
Motorways
Shopping Centres
Casinos
Aeroplanes 
And
Escalators

 

Up here hidden in my trees untouched and untouchable from the outside world.
The fire exudes a warm glow and I have doubts.

Stylistic affectation can be compared to pulling faces.

Artuhr Schopenhauer

Suffering for the world.

 

Video conferencing instant messaging online banking blogging and televisual vegging.
Virtual conversing streaming mass media communicating understanding and misunderstanding.
Stand ins
For?
Truth?

Walk talk and pay as you go.
Bounced around up there
To us below.
Phenomena of space and time are inseparable
Near - far
Located - Dislocated
Steadyreal - Everchangingvirtualspace
As
is the examination of place and ‘lessness
or
Artyfact - Blather
Stuck - Notallthere
Subjection - Agency

Take me off in ignorance at half time or keep me on as paradox until the end of the game.

One of the worst enemies of placefishing, especially in the days before radio, was fog; obfuscator and deceiver.
Place grounds are zones where warm (new) and cold (old) currents meet, mist is commonplace. It can be thick, so thick that the bow is obscured by midship.
Skating on thin ice.
Plaice and chips?
Thus
The displaced peoples of Plaicelessness are enigmatic. They live christknowswhere and not only is the origin of their language unknown, but the origins of the people themselves remains a mystery. Dictators Communists Fascists and even some New Ageists have all tried to either subdue or assimilate them. All have failed. In the late 20th century, at a time when their embryonic dialectic was about to be whispered, (having been outlawed by some Stuckist Gulleries), they secretly dispersed it through the use of technology. Today anyone might speak it given half an inkling. Not only are the Plaicelessnessae good at blather, but they are also a cyberfaring people noted for their success in limited dissemination. 
My plaice or yours?

Here I am again.
Some where from which to make these forays.
Back to my continuing inventory of effort :

Marina Abramovic and her
The House with the Ocean View
Brings you indoors to then throw you out
There
With her
Upthere
Performer spectator divide
Not hidden but open wide
Rooted reminder of those places we travel to
To hide.

We’re crossing waters to get to the other side, don’t ask me why the Ocean’s so wide.

 

Matthew Barney
Blimey
Where’s he taking me?
Sergei Paradjanov mentor and founder member of this Poeticsymbolic reality?
Place is the place dwelled within,
Placelessnes is the place dwelt upon.
Place is home
Safe and sound
Non-place is no longer terra firma but on dodgy ground.
This Filthy Earth – as a mucking around
Sometimes familiar neither here nor there
the exact ‘spot ’ has gone to ground.
Spot-lessness.
Displacement through migration or exile has meant that ‘homeland’ is no longer given as
Found
Stable.

Hewn from the wilderness and settled upon.

Heidegger

I think.

Tomorrow we’re going somewhere else are you coming?

Janek Schaefer’s voice activated tape recorder
Collects the sounds of the city,
As it is makes its way through the London postal system.
Pillar to post.
Messenger, harbinger, interloper and survivor
Witness to the place of nonplace.  
The things you hear nowadays.
Belkell, Oilyn, Crizzle and Bruke: A constantly updated catalogue to the portals of beyond.
www.entrances2hell.com
Imagination creates these places.

Here I am, here I am; journey-man-typer-confabulator
Sat here, now drizzle outside.
Me the mister middle-aged lifer
Limited knowledge.

Piet Moget the painter?
And whirlwind performer
again and again,
Up against the Mediterranean weather,
year after year.
Canvas strapped to the side of a van,
Brush in hand
And
intent on attaining
The depiction of the nothing as represented by the merging of the region that is land, sea and sky.
A Trinity (of sorts) achieved through his, as yet, elusive epiphany.
Don’t ask me why the river’s not wide but he’s crossing it to get to the other side.
Collapsed foundational certainties in association with place.
Where are they?
What is it?
This psyche and its’ geography.
Inner space outside location.

Exterior
Day
The Elephant and Castle
Robbie Coltrane drums along to the shipping forecast.
Down below
Stuart Brisley drags his sodden body onwards in remembrance of things Marx and times endured.
What a place!
A Ghost Dance of a place.
Ken McMullen; Creator and facilitator.
Lighterman and Ferryman.

You just need to find the right boat going in the right direction.
Mark Twain

Latitudes, attitudes and longitudes.
Fastnet fishing zone.

Back again, tap tapping on this thing as proof of my whereabouts.

Commonal garden fantasy:
Alone in a zone neither here nor there,
Travel the world from your own armchair.
Reality tv for you and me.
Tv tv and no longer the stable sexuality.
Out there.
Far out.
Posited place of the non-settled.
Not in your own hometown,
Not on your nelly
But
On the telly.
No Familiars to beat the path.
Nothing similar.
Uniquely, unlike nothing on earth.

Has this become a discontinous and fragmented temporal gadabout idea retrieval? Cerebral flotsam and jet sum?

Spit on my eyes someone and wake me up.

Close the eyes and indulge therein, a blindness.
This is new territory?
It’s Blue.
Radio Tele communication Blue.
Audio Visionary far sighted Blue.
Dying, with a dense veil of Yves Klein prevailing Derek Jarman all pervading invading.
Transports you to that place that you have not been before.
Precious and all consuming spot s.
Growing.
Somewhere, but not there.
Wherever.
His nook and cranny.
Then
Disintegration.
Reposition
and
Stopping

Place.

Edgelands of Contemporary Phenomenon.
Mixed messages.
Write it Big.
Write it Jennifer Holzer.

II

Or show it like Herzog in
Land Of Silence and Darkness.
Land Of Deaf Blind.
Where do they go?
Where do they live?
Solitude as home.
Locked into the castle of the however many senses.
Touching Tasting Smelling their only means of knowing
And as for the telling
Amazed they’re not forever yelling,
But through the tap tap tapping, beating and stroking of hands eventually they come to the communicating and understanding?
This place their place.
Sense of Place.

 

House of Leaves
Vortex and void

Not

To avoid
at all cost
else
Lost
Therein
Maze like
Of no fixed coordinates and permanently on the move.
With words Mark.L.Danielwski plots a precarious foray deep into an Indoorabyss.
His place is a state of mind
it reflects the psychology of anyone that enters it – you can become yourself when you’re there - Beware!
Collapsing
Expanding
Tilting
And Closing.
Disharmonious reflection of the consciousness therein.

The rain has stopped.The hunters are out with the dogs.

Arrive at a clearing and ease yourself down into the well of peacefulness.
It’s all welling up.
Placelessness as anti iconic
Not a dense chunk of experiential information or stuff but
Mellifluous and flowing
Free-thinking.
Fickle?
And
Out there
One minute
Gone the next
Signifier to nothing but the desire to keep looking
Channel hopping
Wife swapping
Dissolution
Devolution and
Supposed cultural erosion?
Mennonites, Hudderites or Bauman acolytes?
The tenuousness of this place at which we’re at, shapelessness, pointlessness, directionless.

And me sat here, still, at the table of my immediate experience.

Felt not grasped, touched not held.
Post modern late modern latest modern post mortem Morton Feldman minimal hip modern hyper modern hyped modern.
Deservedly modern with all its mod cons.
Self accredited acumen as sole remaining passport to netherparts.

Hold on tight here we go again.

We approach it and then it disappears in the chaotic journey that is an attempt at understanding.
Beuys man
This time talking to his coyote whilst all around him New York sets about doing its very own version of American Beauty.
Energy Plan for the Western Man, Old time German Expressionist or Original New Man?
Where is he at?
Where’s he from?

Dispense with the logical structure of drama and making sense.
Hardware = Yoke
Software = Velcro
Reason = Home
Unconscious impulse = Nothome.

Floating piece of space and outoftheway place
Steep hills and Nowherevilles.
Men resembling their times more than their fathers.
Is this as pure as it gets?
Dan Graham’s present continuous past (s) in front of me
The Art Gallery
An 8 second tape delay
To play
with
and his infinite degrees of time continuums within time continuums
reminding me of the possibility
of a quest
for the void manifest.

Reading back waiting for the kettle to heat and I’m all a fluster alone with just my cryptic scattergun spewout missive.

So not really landscape at all, but more of Manley Hopkins' Inscape.
Consciousness as it might look if it were dimensioned and therefore words
And
Celluloidic space is a contemplative space not just a representative space.
Not just peaking troughing car chasing place.
More Bergmanesque, existential experimental homestead.
Can you believe it?

A knock at the door; the hunter has lost four dogs, I tell him I heard them in the night barking at the north star.
Which is ever so far
Away.
He leaves, no smile on his face
And

Beckett is back.
Expanse of scorched grass rising centre to low mound.
Maximum of simplicity and symmetry.
Not often found.
The extinction of a body and a mind.
There there never mind.
Oh Happy Days, oh joyful days.
Evanesces.
Gone.
Bermuda Triangle gone.

(This place can take you prisoner – never let you go, never let you out.)

Engelbert sings: Place release me let me go because I don’t love you anymore.
Ian Curtis sings: This is the place come inside.
Back to the headland 
Danger!
Keep away from the cliff’s edge.
Lands End.
Hear-me-now attending to what I half know.
Yi-Fu Tuan is the man when it comes to the man with a plan.

 

IV

From too ‘G’ (heavy place) to zero ‘G’ (light-as-a-feather-floaty-place).
Between there and a hard rock.
Place is underpinned by the psyche and its’ geographies.
Smidgeons and the traces we leave behind.
(The nature of a space depends on who you are.)
Thus to the politics of placelessness and the real solution to An Occupation.
Now there’s a proper conversation.
Factions enclaves and hierarchies.
I don’t like that because I like that, I don’t read that because I like reading that, I kowtow to this instead of that, thus the gulags became and the interloper was born.

It’s often in the most unlikeliest of places that you are likely to find things.

Paradox of place as self-ish and social.
Place is what went on in the place in the first place.
The moment of definition is the moment of loss.
Definition is an approximation less we forget
So
We live in the lives we live in and these lives transpire within their own particular space,
Neither one thing nor the other, yet both at once.
Ripe for a deciphering.
Dial 999 and tell the police: As far as the mobile phone is concerned every place is exactly the same as every other place. Telecommunication may have wanted to disrupt the meanings and values of contemporary culture but these are no longer grounded in the foundational certainties associated with ‘modernist’ living. There has been too much ‘seepage’ and there is no longer a ‘given’ or ‘self-evident’ context. Electro magnetism travels quickly.
And
Fluids travel easily.

I don’t know what’s going on. Alone in this workshop, disparity the glue. This is the room from which it comes. Cold damp mountain hideyhole.

And all along Music plays host to the aspirants of placelessness.
Jem Finer’s
Longplayer
Soundtrack to a future
from present and past
his message to others
And inscribed to last.
Penetrating the barricades of the eversoBigbeyond.
Or
Early early morning
Shanghai,
The pavement painters painting their prayers in water
To welcome the new day begun
There one minute
Then devoured by the sun.
The day is blessed and the backofbeyond touched:
Connection and reveal makes tangible the contact with the other side.

As luck would have it the front door was open and the dogs are drying out in the cellar.
They rest
From all their splendorous mucking about in the river.
The roof is not leaking and a new day is yawning.

Placetime - specific.
Elsewherelateron - non specific.
If it’s not one thing it’s another.
Never the closure.
Never
The End

 

For clarification on any of the aforementioned please visit: www.entrances2hell.co.uk.

 

 

INDEX

Marina Abramovic

The House with the Ocean View

Vito Acconci
Seedbed

Zygmunt Bauman
Liquid Modernity

 

Samuel Beckett

Waiting for Godot
Happy Days

Joseph Beuys

How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare
Coyote, I love America and America Loves Me?

 

Paul Berczeller and Glen Luchford
Here to Where

Mark.L.Danielwski
House of Leaves

Jem Finer
Longplayer

Nick Gordon-Smith

Hole

Dan Graham
Present continuous pasts

Werner Herzog

Land Of Silence and Darkness.

Tony Hill

A sense of place

Russel Hoban

Ridley Walker

Derek Jarman
Blue

Andrew Kötting
This Filthy Earth

Ken McMullen
Ghost Dance

Alun Rowlands

Sealand

 

Janek Schaefer

Voice Activated Tape Recorder

Stelarc
Copenhagen Suspension

Andrei Tarkovsky
Stalker

and

Matthew Barney
Stuart Brisley
John Bristow
Robbie Coltrane
Ian Curtis
Entrances2hell
Jennifer Holzer
Engelbert Humperdinck
Yves Klein
Manley Hopkins
Alfred Merhan
Piet Moget
Sergei Paradjanov
Georges Perec
Arthur Schopenhauer
Mark Twain
Yi-Fu Tuan
Elgaarland Vargaaland