Each Others' Islands
So here is IslandInsel: Each Others' Islands, hello and welcome to everyone!! You find a description of the project in the About Page (the paragraph below me).The other posts are as follows:
1. about the project, the twinning idea. (Click here)
2. drawings of British and German islands together (Click here)
3. an excerpt of my first text about the project (Click here)
4. poetry about islands (Click here)
5.plunging into history: murky waters (Click here)
6. this one 😃
(all photos, drawing and writing mine - with much more in the pipeline).
contributions are welcome and will be collected, once we have fundraised for this project as part of a bigger thing, then will be more interactive! The 'we' is me with Simon Bradley, we work together as artcouple.co.uk. And this is my other blog: colourcirclesite.wordpress.com
islandinsel
Thursday 30 May 2019
Murky Waters
Water carries memory, murky waters carry history: names echo sad sea. And unexpected stories too.
Here comes the story of Borkum: the name of an island in Germany, war camp in the channel islands, and also that of a ship during the war... there were the traces and the routes of colonialism too, which went through the sea.
Poems/Poesie Sea/See
Viewing
Points
When you’re on an
island
Or even once you
reach a coast
You can see what it
really is you’re living on
You see a side of
the earth here
It’s
the perspective of the land from the edge
So go to a
coastline, have a look at sea-level
Look at the land
from the edge
See at this level,
look out for this dimension
Sea-points, viewing
points, edges
Cutting edges that
cut out the shadows of the moment
The surfaces of
unconsciousness, in favour of
Direct, immediate
exposure: sea-level to deep sea
Then there’s
another possibility, a way of finding
What’s below:
ground level to cave
Go there to seek
your unconscious, you’re closer here
In this inside-oasis
Here you might find
That, overall,
points of view
Are really points of
you
And your hand, your
palm, mirrors and echoes the landscape
With each line a
river.
©
Ursula Troche, 4.17
Seaside
Insight
Seaweed
grew tall
In
the light of the evening sun
Gaining
in height
As
part of the ontology of the sea
And
its attendant
Symphony
of the land
Music
and knowledge
Have
made the landscape into what it is
Giving
voice to the dream of the earth
Sending
messages up to the feet of the seaweed
Growing
into meaning-making
At
the edge of the land
Land-listening
occurs
Landscape
longing, I move to the end of land-ness
Taking
this as a vantage point for our connectedness
With
the sea, the seaweed, the world and the sun signs
Of
growth, for the light is the midwife of all bloom
And
water is another: essential element of energy
Nurturing,
night and day, enacting freshness
Sea-listening
occurs just as much
With
my insight from the seaside side by side
With
the land, looming large, and where invisible
Continuing
under the sea, land everywhere
Seen
and unseen, with our without sea.
© Ursula
Troche, 4.17
Seal
Silence
The sound of the
seals
Articulate the
silence
So silence has
attained a wide scope
Of meaning,
interpretation and fascination
This side of the
northern, sea, this seaside
Echoes the sound of
seals, magnifying the magic
Of life in tune with
the sounds of silence
©
Ursula Troche, 4.17
Waves
Open
ended, open minded
You
recommended the sky
As
a space to concentrate on
A
place to look up to
Unsuprisingly,
wholeheartedly
I’d
never expected to do just this,
And
for long periods of time,
But
there was a lot going on there
Clouds
and birds and sun and moon
And
even my hand, when I hold it up
I
wave with it, addressing the sky
And
perhaps I even
Make
waves with it
Sky-waves,
like airwaves
Transmission
waves, waves like brushstrokes
On
the beach, painting the land as it washes it
A
special form of ephemeral water colour painting
And
so we have reached the water
Waves
operate in two dimensions, two elements
Agents
of motion, wave-levels:
Air-level
plus water-level equals wave-level
Movement
guaranteed
Its
equations, reflections and reverberations too!
Sky,
like the sea
Blue
at last!
©
Ursula Troche, 4.17
Water
Forms
Water forms, not
water falls: water-rivers even sometimes. Sometimes water even rises
evenly, sometimes it rises suddenly, and sometimes it rises like
this:
I divided the
patches of grass and the patches of trees into water and land whilst
sitting in a train in Poland. It’s the longevity of the view of
exclusively grass and tree patches.
I’ve been
imagining more and more spaces of water in my life: I’ve been
thinking about the times I keep still for a life modelling pose as
water – posing the process of swimming from one water’s edge to
another, and the times around the pose as land-time, normal time,
solid space. It’s exacerbated by the keeping of silence and
nakedness whilst posing, the resumption of talking and of being
dressed when not posing. When a pose finishes, I stop being dipped
and submerged into my inner life on this intensive, intriguing and
immense level.
©
Ursula Troche, 12.16
The beginning
The beginning of Each Others’ Islands
We
tend not to know each other’s islands. They tend not to appear
along the outlines of the maps of the countries we live in. Many
islands are simply too small to be seen from a distance. At a
distance, then, they become hidden islands, coming into existence
only when taking a magnifier, or when a map is big enough to
accommodate the details, the nitty-gritty, little nuances of the
coastline.
The
scales of our maps determine the schemes in our heads, and so we
assume coastlines to be solid, not realizing how much is going on
around a coastline, the rugged edges, and the shapes they make,
sometimes with islands, and sometimes with lakes and lagoons around
the line, that coastline. Then there are those countries, where the
coastline in itself is an island. The UK is of course on of them, but
it doesn’t disappear off the maps that we are familiar with. It’s
big enough to count as mainland, with lots of little islands around
itself. However, most Caribbean islands, for example, don’t stand
out on maps, being rendered invisible by map scales. There are whole
nations in the sea that seem to be invisible! Whole countries that
appear only when you look closely! What is a nation in a state beyond
visibility, a metaphor for marginalisation? What does it feel like to
live somewhere which is invisible? To look at a globe and come from a
country that appears as nothing but ocean! If we would only use
larger maps, so we could only see all the dots of land in the water!
Shapes,
Forms
Even
with the larger scale maps we use for the European continent, In
Europe, lots of islands still go map-missing. Last year, I discovered
Caldey Island, off Tenby, Wales, little islands in the Medway river
mouth in Kent, and Tabarca, off Alicante in Spain! I first caught
sight of the amazing outlines and shapes within the Medway Mouth
whilst on a plane. Here where you have a view from the air, you have
an overview, and so you can see shapes and arrangement of land and
water, which you do not see from a land-perspective. Also on a plane,
I saw Tabarca. I was flying to Alicante, and saw this island just
before landing. Thinking it is too small and too close to the coast
to be Mallorca, I kept wondering what it is I saw. It was Tabarca:
off the shore near Alicante, just like Caldey island is off the shore
opposite Tenby. For Tabarca island it was the aerial plane-view that
made me discover the island, for Caldey Island it was its lighthouse.
The blinking light at night I noticed got me enquire where it comes
from, until I saw the next day that there is an island behind the
coast! So here it was: another island that goes missing off the maps
too frequently, not because it is not on the map but because the maps
we use are too large-scale, and thus the details go missing!
One
could go into yet more detail and find that both Caldey Island an
Tabarca are more or less like twin islands: Caldey more and Tabarca
less. This is so because Caldey Island has an edge of itself which
is, at regular intervals, another island called St Margaret’s
Island. In other words: at low tide there are two islands in the sea,
and at high tide there is only one island. So island definitions are
changeable, and island count depends on the tide. Outlines, hence,
rise and fall, and are sometimes more out of line and sometimes more
in line. The details depend on what is happening at each moment of
looking. Pinning islands down to a particular arrangement, then,
goes, ultimately, against the law of the tides. On the other hand
though, if a coastline moves without coming back at the next tide,
and does so again and again, then there are other factors at work,
and the melting of the icecaps, for example, could have found a
worrying echo here. So we have to try not to disrupt or pollute
nature, in order to keep the (tidal) rhythms and outlines going!
Some
islands have funny names, such as Rough Island, in the Solway Firth,
and some islands appear to have no name, such an island I cannot
mention, except to say that it’s an island that cannot be named!
Some islands are just about islands, or rather islet-islands, such as
four little ones further outside of Tabarca by Alicante. They are a
little group of mini-islands with a group-name (los Farallones), so
they have made it into the books and records, being solid enough to
be known and seen! Some islands are just rocks or sandbanks, skerries
or reefs, or too small to be any of those. Yet other islands are
completely submerged under the sea – but these are not islands we
are looking at, because we can’t look at them! They don’t count
when it comes to island-counting; only land that you can see counts,
land above sea-level. So it’s a sea-level too! This level is the
limit. And literally, it’s a littoral matter!
Even
on sea-and surface level, as we have seen, the shapes that we expect
are in reality much more intricate. If you come closer, you get to
know more, such as the spaces of land inside what you assume to be
just water. Then there are the more stable water-and-land
alternations: some coastlines are full to the brim with them in wavy
to zigzaggy patterns and all sorts of amazing shapes and islands
appearing everywhere around the coast like a dance along the side of
the sea. It’s even arbitrary whether to speak about a coastline,
because there is not always much of a line there at all, if we think
of a line as more or less straight out/line. If we do not, we are
closer to reality, for so many of those lines are wavy. It can even
be confusing to figure out what is coast and what is island! That is
to say, which details of the wavy shapes you can see on a detailed
map form part of the coastline, and which of these forms are islands
- and then, as a third option, which of them might be peninsulas!
Peninsulas are then yet another kind of intermediate shape to look
out for! Land and water alternations! There’s another option, and
that is the shape of a lake. Some water areas that you see near the
coast might not belong to the seaside directly but are lakes instead,
showing no connection to the sea but being ‘framed’ by land all
around. Lakes and lagoons: I was amazed to find lots of lagoons along
the Mediterranean coast of France, so that when you’re on the train
along the coastline, you don’t just see water on one side, but on
both sides, with the train in the middle rather than on one side! In
France, and elsewhere too, e.g.: Poland, Spain, lagoons just off the
coastline occur next to a straight line, in other cases, there are no
straight lines anywhere.
The
whole picture can be so intricate, interesting and confusing, that
you might get the impression that the coast, or the islands, are
dancing! Or the coast is dancing with its islands and vice versa!
Scotland and Norway are obvious coasts full of dancing islands.
There’s a presumption of islands there, though some of these, too,
go map-missing. Other coastlines keep their islands much more hidden
to maps altogether. Such as the German coastline which looks rather
straight on most maps, and only reveals islands upon closer
inspection. The islands of the Netherlands are still more visible,
and by the time, that group of islands reaches Germany, they look to
have moved so close to the coast, as if non-existent. But once you
get there, more similarities, apart from land-and-water and
water-and-land, will arise to you, similarities and transitions –
or similarities as evidence that transitions have occurred. Or
transition as transmission!
We
could spin dialogues around the sea, make a sea-ing and a see-ing
forecast around the shipping forecast. We could name our own inner
islands, and our sunken lands. We could name our oceans and our
drowned elements. We could find that whilst no man and no woman is an
island, we are all islands together. We could do all this and more,
there is a lot more to be seen and to be said! We may be like
privileged refugees, if having the choice to go on an island, and
having the choice to return too. By being conscious of our choice, we
might help the project of humankind-ness too, to get to know each
other, through each other’s islands. Edges and coastlines as
meeting points, and more importantly the land-outposts beyond the
edges! The edge at the centre, the space between us!
Some Island-Twins / Insel Zwillinge
So here are some ideas of island-twinnings.
Island Twins: these names thrown together might seem odd because we are not used to them, but these are our names - there's often some unexpected similarity in the name, even more than the shape.
Each Others' Islands: Introduction
Islandinsel is a double word with the same meaning...! it's an island, and then it's an island again!
That is, it's the same in English and German. 'Island' is an island in English, and 'Insel' is an island in German. So this blog is about islands in Britain and in Germany. It all started in Papay, a little island in Orkney, which is an amazing archipelago off the north coast of Scotland - that's when this project was born, and it grew from there. It was in Papay, where I was reminded most strongly of my 'childhood islands', which are the islands of the North Sea coast of Germany, which I spent holidays in as a child. And then, further north, in Papay (the long name for the island is Papa Westray) the coaat looked like when I was young! I looked into more ad more similarities, and I found more and more as well! There were similar names of other islands, and there were similar locations elsewhere. Such as the Uists in Scotland, which was like Juist in Friesland. Friesland and Scotland in terms being regions with more islands then other regions in the same countries. Then there's landmarks that have echo-landmarks in each other's islands, such as The Old Man of Hoy is echoed by Long Anna in Heligoland. So I thought we need an exchange here: can we talk about each others islands?
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