Salt Trails 2010

Welcome back after a long break from the Salt Trails blog to a new season of walks and conversations.

Linked to the exhibition 'Abrasion' at King of Hearts, Norwich we are offering two walking conversations at Happisburgh North Norfolk on 19th and 20th June.

Why is conversation so different when you are on a walk with someone?
What changes when you talk about a place that you are actually experiencing with all of your senses?
What happens if you broaden your idea of conversation to include the conversation with the landscape as well as conversation about the landscape?
Come and find out.

For more information and the booking form click here
Please let others know, we are really looking forward to this season of walks and conversations.

Tall Timothy said:

Salt House

A bee-wolf eats wasps
Honeysuckle grows bold
The sea is breathing sand

A paper world is plundered
Woodbine twines to heaven
Sand is breathing water

A mansion is destroyed
A river of flowers is trumpeted
Wave and stone are one

Conversely

Salt irritates, heals, preserves, and centuries ago was a currency of reward.

We marked our trails of crystallised perceptions; some of them preserved, some rolled into the surf or lifted away in the wind; being our reward, or perhaps our irritation.

While Hamish Fulton and Richard Long made an artistic practice of walking solo, we found our work as a little group, feeling the place through our stride-rhythms, jazz-improvising stitch-lines and figures of speech to hold together the seams between sand and waves, land and sky, nevermore and always.

Imagining risen seas - a future whirlpool, made by spiral walking. Dave Pritchard, 12 July.

the paths people take

This reminds me that things also have their own paths - if, for example you join razor shells, end to end, the line begins to curve, and I have been thinking about reeds, the paths they would travel if you joined them end to end...

Like razor shells, they seem at first glance to be straight, but they are not. We might think that we walk in fairly straight lines, but we don't.....

Drawing threads together

Play can be serious fun, at different times walks were funny and challenging.

The people, land, shoreline and sea have been filled with stories and I find myself weaving a Salt Trails cloth.
Drawing together walkers, places, flotsam and jetsam, images and threads of conversations.

There are long strands, a warp, of the route we took.
There are the shorter, weft like threads, which make the crossings and relationships found on walks.
There are even more fragile ones, almost invisible, which may be the silences or clouds passing over.
Potential for a treble, or even quadruple layered cloth comes to mind, where there are some threads that appear occasionally. They are the stitching cloth, holding layers together, not always in an obvious pattern.
The crossings like those of Indra's net, reflecting all the new ways of hearing, seeing and perceiving. They are reminders of walks taken and people known, or conversations and journeys that will be taken in future.

Portland Cement

On the July 12th walk we spent a little while discussing the Rocket House and the possibility that a piece of masonry was made with Portland cement rather than the older lime mortar. I think the Rocket House was built in the 1850’s, but perhaps someone can clarify the date.

So a bit of history: Portland cement was patented by Joseph Aspdin between 1825 and 1828 and was widely manufactured by 1852. Portland cement possessed much greater strength than lime mortar and so became widely used. So much so that Sir Joseph Bazalgette specified that the London sewers, constructed between 1859 – 1866, should be built using it. Incidentally Portland cement has nothing to do with Portland, apart from an aspiration that it should be as strong as Portland stone.

If the Rocket House were built in the 1850’s then it is possible that it used Portland cement.

I have been on three of the walks now and really enjoyed them all. If I find time I'll add something about that, rather than this techy stuff.

Indra's Net

Francis Harold Cook describes the metaphor of Indra's net from the perspective of the Huayan school in the book Hua-Yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra:

'Far away in the heavenly abode of the great god Indra, there is a wonderful net which has been hung by some cunning artificer in such a manner that it stretches out infintely in all directions. In accordance with the extravagant tastes of deities, the artificer has hung a single glittering jewel in each "eye" of the net, and since the net itself is infinite in dimension, the jewels are infinite in number. There hang the jewels, glittering like stars in the first magnitude, a wonderful sight to behold. If we now arbitrarily select one of these jewels for inspection and look closely at it, we will discover that in its polished surface there are reflected all the other jewels in the net, infinite in number. Not only that, but each of the jewels reflected in this one jewel is also reflecting all the other jewels, so that there is an infinite reflecting process occurring.'