Tag: Industry

Blake and the Pandemic

Finding Blake creator and filmmaker James Murray-White reflects on the troubled times we find ourselves in under lockdown with Covid-19, and on what’s ahead for the Finding Blake film — and, with joy, to some extras we’re looking forward to sharing.

Well, what strange times!

We know that Blake didn’t live through a pandemic, although he understood the coming of industry as the harbinger of the spiritual crisis in the West that started then and has brought us to this point today. This time of corona — a virus passed from animal to human, likely to have transferred across in the so-called ‘wet meat’ markets of Wuhan in China — is happening because the process of industrialisation, now fully developed into the capitalist economy, has expanded so rapidly in these years since Blake’s death in 1827.

Pestilence, by William Blake (circa 1795-1800) http://museums.bristol.gov.uk

So-called ‘economic growth’ has spread like wildfire across the globe and literally eats into territory that was and should be the exclusive dominion of ‘the others’: the beautiful wildlife we share this planet with — the bat, the pangolin, the wild boar, the butterfly, the snow leopard, and of course the tiger — hunted in China for the medicinal values of its organs, or to be shipped around the world to be ‘preserved’ and gawped at in zoos.

Look on the rising sun: there God does live 
And gives his light, and gives his heat away. 
And flowers and trees and beasts and men receive
Comfort in morning joy in the noonday.

— from The Little Black Boy, by William Blake

And, in a far more minor way, coronavirus has now prevented us from getting our Finding Blake film into the world, and its bigger message of being part of the beautiful, strange and varied canon of creative responses to Blake’s life and legacy that have emerged since his death. I’m really proud of this piece of work being part of the legacy of responses to these values: the ‘golden thread’ of ethics and belief, and questioning and care that Blake (and many others) tapped into. Values that are so much needed in this beautiful and tragic world today, at this time of climate crisis, planetary warming, social injustice. There is now a growing recognition of human anthropocentrism — which sees us as being the ‘dominant’ species at the top of the tree, but cutting off the roots below — of which this tragic pandemic, which will have devastating consequences for our interconnected tribal species, is probably just one part. Blake knew, and communicated through his images and words, the true ecological and spiritually connected web of life.

More joyous things to come

So, we held a preview screening at the Kindersley Workshop. This was for Lida (the creator of the new ledger stone for Blake’s burial site at Bunhill Fields in London), and friends and funders, and it was a joyous, small event, with much discursive response in the Carpenters Arms afterwards. I’ve taken all that feedback away and am making some minor structural tweaks and tech/sound adjustments right now. And I’ve started the process of arranging screenings UK-wide — but this process was on lockdown anyway as Finding Blake is being considered for the UK’s flagship documentary festival for June (hint: in a northern city famous for steel) and, naturally, the film couldn’t be publicly screened until then if it gets in.

William Blake’s ledger stone at Bunhill Field, 2018. By GrindtXX – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bunhill_Blake_2018.jpg

We’re looking forward to screening publicly post-corona, though we’ve been invited to screen at another UK documentary festival in November! Don’t know the details just yet, or any restrictions but hope to soon (hint: in a bijou seaside town, where Pears used to play and allegedly Morrissey has a house). I’ve been reaching out to all the people who appear in the film to thank them and share news with them, and some screening opportunities are emerging there too. 

Given that we are all on lockdown, I’m hoping that we can get Finding Blake online in some pay-per-view capacity sooner rather than later. All details on that will be announced here, as will all the extra Blakean offerings: I have been making the extra scenes, outtakes and scrumptious other pieces that I couldn’t squeeze into the film into a package alongside the main feature. We hope to drip-feed some as extra teasers for the film here.

And we’ll start that off — although we can’t give an exact date yet — with an exclusive film of poet Sasha Dugdale reading her Forward Prize-winning long-form poem Joy. From the mouth of Catherine Blake, Joy is an absolutely exquisite piece of work and Sasha, currently poet in residence at St John’s College Cambridge, gave a morning over a year ago now to come into a beautiful old Victorian house being renovated beside the river in Cambridge, and be filmed reading her piece. Sadly, I couldn’t use this within Finding Blake — a case of bad planning on my part, juggling so many pieces of the Blakean puzzle together at the same time — so the footage is being crafted into one beautiful unique film of its own by a master editor in Canada. Again, that piece will be exclusive to this Finding Blake project, so we’ll announce it and release it here.

Finding Blake invited poet Sasha Dugdale to read her poem 'Joy' for us.
Sasha Dugdale, filming a performance of ‘Joy’ for Finding Blake
Photograph: James Murray-White © 2019 sky-larking.co.uk

The walls are wordless. There is a clock ticking.
I have woken up from a dream of abundant colour
and joy
I see his face and he is a shepherd and a piper and
a god
I see him bent by the gate, setting the fire, and he
is a fallen demon
I see him listening to the wind and sorrowing
I see wrath and misery, fire and desolation
A thousand fires in ancient London
And then the grass comes silent silent with the
hardest colour of all
The mirth colour the corn colour the summer
night colour
A thousand thousand summer nights pass
And children weave their daisy chains and place
them on the heads of fallen idols
He wept he wept more tears than there were days
And never changed the door lest, he said, we drive
an angel from it
And every morning he dipped his brush in wrath
and mildness
And out of him tumbled the biggest things of all
All of them righter than the rightest calculation
And truer than any compass
Yet where they were right and true none could say
And how they were right and true none could guess
But I knew I knew
He was an eye, and the eye wept and frowned and
smiled
The eye watched
The eye watered
The world was a mote in that eye

— from Joy, by Sasha Dugdale

Finding a time to reset

Until then, we hope you’re finding creativity and inner strength and resilience during this strange tough time. There will be difficult days ahead, and it feels like we as a species-community need to tackle this crisis in so many ways: medical, scientific research, social isolation, political and in a very humane, spiritual, soul-searching way. Most of all, with compassion and care and with genuine grief and a fully authentic response to the joys and the tragedies of life. It’s time to reset.

I’m in Oxford, where Finding Blake has much of its roots: where I saw the fabulously inspiring ‘Apprentice & Master’ Blake exhibition at the Ashmolean in 2014, and to where I returned (and they so generously flung open their doors to us) to film David Whyte; and then later to film Carol Leader give her talk on using Blake in her psychotherapeutic practice. So it’s a treat to be self-isolating within this other ‘hallowed’ city, so similar and yet so unlike my home city, the ‘other place’, Cambridge. I’ve offered the Ashmolean Museum a ‘thank you’ screening, so hopefully sometime later this year Blake will be back within those walls again.

I’m looking very closely at both the tiny things — the grains of wheat to feed the birds (isn’t there such rich birdsong now there are so few cars and so little sounds of industry?), planting vegetable and sunflower seeds a-plenty, and also remembering to look up, to look at the trees that frame so much space, and the light that bleeds into our retina and allows us to see. Let’s use the inspiration of Blake within these strange times…

Notes

Joy, by Sasha Dugdale, is published by Carcanet Press (2017).

You can view our trailer for the Finding Blake film in this recent post from James. 

 

 

Going Beneath the Grains of Sand

As an accompaniment to our recent video teaser of William Blake's new stone finally in place at his grave in Bunhill Fields, we bring the story 'full circle' with this post and video from James Murray-White on his visit to the birthplace of that stone monument: Portland Head in Dorset. Here, beneath the 'grains of sand', is a place resonant with Blakean names: the Jordans Mine of Albion Stone.

One of the real highlights of my process of starting in on a project is the research time I always undertake, and then the physical journeys I get involved in to explore and create and find stories within the story. It is all about uncovering and hearing stories: following my nose and my gut into the underworld, or the meta-narrative, of the bigger story.

This has been true of many of my projects: a year spent while in my final year at Hull University on the trail of Eric Gill (which leads nicely back into this Blake Project); my undergraduate dissertation of the Dekalog films of Krzysztof Kieślowski; my five years living with and experiencing the life of the Bedouin tribes of the Negev Desert; my two films and research for a bigger project on the life and work of poet John Clare in North Cambridgeshire (my homeplace) and Epping Forest; and now, this wonderfully rich and curious journey into the life, work, and legacy of William Blake.

To Albion Stone

This has now literally taken me down into the bowels of the earth, under the “grains of sand”, down to the seam layer of Portland stone thousands of feet underground, to see the place where the new stone marking Blake’s burial place was cut from, in preparation for the careful work of Lida Kindersley to cut the letters.

Going in
Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018

Hallam Kindersley — Lida’s son — and I set off on an eight hour round trip to Portland Head, to visit the mine where Portland stone is hewn from. Last year I made contact with Albion Stone in preparation, to think about the process of stone being cut, right through to it being carved and created, through to the setting ceremony on August 12th.

For various reasons, I wasn’t able to go before Christmas, and the piece of stone that is being used had already been cut and was sitting in a stoneyard in Cambridge, from where Lida chose it (see the short film showing this, under February in our The Story Continues timeline). So I’m being open that here I’m ‘cheating’ the natural timeline and filming after the event — although forget you’ve read this when it comes to the film, as I’ll play around with the sequence of events and ‘pretend’ that we’re going to choose the piece of stone direct from the quarry…

Down in Jordans Mine

We met Mark Godden, Mine Manager, in Albion Stone’s HQ on Portland Head, and after a quick cup of tea and introductions to our project and to the work of the company, we set off the mile or two to the mine. I knew we were in interesting company when Mark straightaway referred to the Blakean “grains of sand”, and shared that he’s loved Blake’s work for many a year.

Jordans Mine is under-whelming from the outside: a curving white track, a couple of shipping containers at the top, and just two large holes framed by steel — and that’s it. Not sure what I expected, but this was it, and in we went.

It’s bizarre walking into a mine — I thought we were driving in, or even going in by some lift contraption, but no, Mark parked up and in we went. There was an instant differentness to the air and the atmosphere: a chalky clarity and a subterranean ambience, maybe. During some of the time there, around the mining, there was a sulphurous smell, like a bilious release, but it didn’t linger. I smelt it again at Lida’s workshop, as she cut the thicker letters of the name — and we both recoiled at the sudden stink: all those tiny critters released, after so much time encased and crushed down as sedimentary rock.

Mark led us deep in: it’s a very spacious place, as still as you would expect, interrupted every 10-15 minutes or so by the lights and then the sound of a hulking great vehicle taking stone out, or coming back in to collect more. I hope in the footage I’ve captured the slightly sinister sense of these coming towards you and roaring past, like beasts in a dark night. They illuminate and charge past, then the dark enfolds around again, and we walk on.

The cutting blade
Photograph; James Murray-White © 2018

My preoccupation was (and always is!) getting decent footage and sound, and this space threw up lots of challenges, and alongside that, I was watching my reaction to the space, feeling for creeping claustrophobia or indeed panic! Thankfully this didn’t rise up and force me to flee. Mark steered us gently between seams, between active work going on, measuring and assessing, and a close-up look of the huge saws and bits of kit used to cut and extract the stone. This mine quarries stone, not mines it or explodes it out: it’s a complicated process of cutting, then a metal bag is forced inside the cut; this contains water, which slowly expands and then the stone cracks off, and is hoiked out by machinery. The pressure is intense as this metal bag expands, and the sense that a huge boulder would be freed — I looked up at the structural roof supports, and wondered…

The way out
Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018

And so, here is our film of that strange and intriguing day spent underground, in search of Blake’s stone.

Mine Visit V2 from James Murray-White on Vimeo.

 

Notes

You can find out more about Albion Stone at their website and you can download an article by Mark Godden on the history, quarrying and geology of Portland stone:

Coming Full Circle – ‘a Liquid Ledger Stone’

Finding Blake's creator and film maker James Murray-White has been following the careful and painstaking process of creating the new gravestone for William Blake's final resting place. Here he reports on the moment as the final letter is cut and stone nears completion under the hands of Lida Kindersley.

With a final tap tap of the chisel, and then a salutary finger wipe of the remaining dust that the letter cut had created, the last letter – an ’s’ – and William Blake’s new ledger stone was completed.

Lida has been working on this for six months, and has been involved in the planning for the stone for at least ten years since the Blake Society decided to commission it, after the discovery of Blake’s actual resting place within the Bunhill Fields cemetery. I’ve been filming Lida work on this, visiting every week to see progress and film the next line or word. I have enormous respect for her integrity and craft that glides from the chisel or pencil into every piece of work she designs and creates. It ’s been a tremendous pleasure to record her work, and chat very deeply at times – sometimes jokingly, sometimes philosophically and metaphorically too.

Cutting in progress Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018

At one with the stone

On this last session of cutting, she talked of really becoming one with the stone, and the stone coming into her, and we joked of a CGI graphic that could animate this: the letter cutter becomes stone, and the process completes. Making tender memorials is being face-to-face with the human experience of death – of lives that have lived, loved, and left, and our wish to memorialise them and leave something to honour them. Whether it is Blake, here known as ‘Poet — Artist — Prophet’, or my mum (on a smaller square of Portland Stone, to be completed next: ‘Potter’) or the many timeless and ethereal quotes on stone that are around the workshop and out in the world, memorialising and placing within the landscape makes up much of the work of the Kindersley Workshop. I feel we are blessed by this dedication to the letter, the word, and to humanity.

The phrase above that I’ve used, a “liquid” stone is adapted from an exclamation by one visitor to the workshop on seeing the stone: that the letters seemed both strong – ‘set in stone’ – and very fluid and liquid-like. Indeed they do, as the attached photos show. In this current intense light, changing as it does about 6.00pm from the full intense heat of these summer days and, as the stone has been in a corner of the workshop and with light from windows on two sides, the letters do appear to dance and their intensity ebbs and flows and eddies around the stone: particularly the name – big and bold – and the quote too, its shape and form as intense as the intricate meaning of the words themselves, falling back into a ball of string, anchoring you into Blake’s vision of a ‘holy’ Jerusalem and its gate.

Liquid light Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018

There have been long bouts of silence too, just the tapping of the chisel, and the sounds of the workshop – often other tapping sounds as other stones are cut – and I’ve got absorbed in the camera: the light, the sound, the recording, and thinking how I might edit the material and show the entire flow of the work. Lida has been absorbed in her work, learned at the stone face over many years and trained by her Master husband David, and with stone dust as well as the intense grip of the chisel turning her hand slowly white; and I’ve been absorbed in mine, recording, witnessing, hearing, watching, being with the presence of this mighty piece of shaped stone, and reflecting internally and with Lida about Blake and his value in this turbulent world. We’ve talked a lot, and I’ve come away many times and discussed with an array of people those three words highlighted above. And two or three times over the course of the cutting process I’ve gone away and stood face to face with a Blake painting – in the Fitzwilliam, in the Tate, and at the Petworth House temporary exhibition – and returned with the glory and detail of his angels and people and beings, and breathed in Blake by this glorious stone.

The end of a process

And now it’s completed – or nearly completed, as there still is the washing process, possible staining, and any gilding or painting within the letters, and the visit of the Blake Society to see the stone with all the letters completed. The organising committee came down for a morning a few months ago, to see the stone in its early stage, with the letters drawn before cutting began, and it will be a treat to see their faces erupt in smiles and delight when they see it now.

I’ve been reflecting deeply on this, the end of a process, a long slow sometimes laborious one: Lida often had to transfer to another project or to work with one of the other cutters or an apprentice; or I’ve not been able to go into the workshop for a few days, and have really missed the attention to detail and the friendship and companionship.

The hands of a master of the craft
Photograph: James Murray-White © 2018

Soon it will be out in the world, ready to attract visitors to it, who will pause and reflect a minute, and shine light onto the visionary world of poet — artist — prophet: William Blake 1757 – 1827:

“I give you the end of a golden string,
only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”

Notes

Further information about the unveiling event to be held on August 12th in Bunhill Fields will be revealed on the Blake Society website in due course — and Finding Blake will there to film the event and pay our respects.