Alphabe Thursday X is for Exercise.
Running or walking on a treadmill at the gym has become the normal way to get exercise and preferred by many to using the streets and country lanes.
However, as a form of exercise this is not new. In 1818 the treadmill was invented by William Cubitt of Ipswich and erected in the House of Correction at Brixton, London. It had a large wheel with steps where several prisoners trod for set periods. Although it was used to power grain mills and other machinery it was not used for production but as a way to break down an ‘obstinate spirit’
Medical officers in various prisons using the mill noted that the general health of the prisoners was not harmed, in fact it seemed there was a marked improvement. Vagrancy, or wandering without apparent resources or purpose was and sometimes still a crime and doing time then on a treadmill was the perfect punishment.
Repetitive labour has been punitive since the gods of Greek myth sentenced Sisyphus, the robber and murderer to the fate of pushing a boulder up a hill, as he reached the top so it it rolled back down to the bottom where he had to begin again.
We don’t know whether Sisyphus was the first tread-miller, but he was not the last and it is easy to recognise the ancient attitude to repetitive bodily exertion without any practical results.
Throughout history and still in some places in the world, where food is scarce and physical exercise normal, the ‘doing’ of exercise is futile ; it is only when the the two are reversed does exercise make sense.
Wednesday’s wood engraver …
I am always on the the look out for wood engraving by women or celebrating women and was surprised to find this in this month’s New Internationalist attributed to ‘Todd’ who I assume is James G. Todd (1937)
It serves to celebrate a new law passed by President Dilma Rousseff that will see higher penalties and increased jail sentences in place for violent crimes against women. The ‘femicide law’ will target any crimes involving discrimination and domestic violence labelling femicide as a specific phenomenon. In Brazil 15 women are killed daily so this measure is welcomed.
I know nothing of James G Todd just that this tiny work is so sensitive and appropriate …
Information from New Internationalist May 2015
Weekly photo challenge … motion
I am not a photographer and admire those who can take pictures of those in motion and we will see plenty of those this week. My images are like most people’s, I think, a snapshot a frozen moment a stillness and then look more closely we can remember the motion, the energy and story and then the picture come alive and why a family album is always such a delight several years later ...
these for instance … without human distraction in the stillness there is motion … from the my daughter’s home on favela in Brazil a couple of years back and to where we return in few weeks.
Monday …
A couple of nice things … first after weeks of agonising over the content of my portfolio for an application to be a member of a local art guild it has been decided and my little walnut tree has a leaf. So for the moment all is well with the world.
For several months I have been working hard on producing all sorts of works in a hope that at least one would be a good example of my artistry. I want to be recognised as an artist and able to exhibit in local shows. So the pile of potential grew and with my self doubt.
However, this weekend after much deliberation and some help six pieces have been selected to be mounted and framed and I am happy.
Strangely and almost more important the little walnut sapling that didn’t show much promise at the end of last year has rallied and has new growth … such joy!
Silent Sunday
Saturday … and the postman …
This week I have been unwell with random symptoms such as headache, temperature, lethargy, muscle pain, swollen glands etc, after a day or two in bed I went to the doctors. He said I had a virus,with no serious effects and to take pain killers and return to bed. It has been a horrible few days, I have longed to get back to normal, at work to draw and paint the self-pity has worked overtime!
Last night I was able to watch a DVD for and hour or so … a favourite and bound to cheer or at least remind me of real struggle !
Il Postino … a perfect film.
this poem also puts it all right …
Ode to clothes
Every morning you wait,
clothes, over the chair,
for my vanity,
my love,
my hope, my body
to fill you,
I have scarcely
left sleep,
I say goodbye to the water
and enter your sleeves, my legs look for
the hollow of your legs,
and thus embraced
by your unwearying infidelity
I go out to tread the fodder,
I move into poetry,
I look through windows,
at things,
men, women,
actions and struggles
keep making me what I am,
opposing me,
employing my hands,
opening my eyes,
puting taste in my moth,
and thus,
clothes,
I make you what you are,
pushing out your elbows,
bursting at the seams,
and so your live swells
the image of my life,
You billow
and resound in the wind.
as though you were my soul,
at the bad moments
you cling
to my bones
empty, at night
the dark, sleep,
people with their phantoms
your wings and mine.
I ask
whether one day
a bullet
from the enemy
will stain you with my blood
and then
you will die with me
or perhaps
it will not be so dramatic
but simple,
and you will sicken gradually,
clothes,
with me, with my body
and together we will enter
the earth.
At the thought of this
every day I greet you
with reverence, and then
you embrace and I forget you
because we are one
and will go on facing the wind together, at night
the street or the struggle, one body,
maybe, maybe, one day motionless.
Pablo Neruda 1954.
Friday … cordels on the shelf
Not in the library today …. but from my bookshelves some little gems that are cheering at the moment …
Alphabe Thursday … W is for Virginia Woolf
I have looked forward to writing this particular walking experience; is is the reason why I began the alphabet of walking.
Virginia Woolf, daughter of the great alpinist Leslie Stephen revealed to a friend that she didn’t take to mountains and climbing; why should she, she adds ‘Wasn’t I brought up with alpenstocks in my nursery, and a raised map of the Alps, showing every peak my father climbed? Of course, London and the marshes are the places I like the best’.
Her London, had more than doubled in size since Dickens had walked the streets. Woolf wrote of the confining oppression of ones identity, of the way the objects in one’s home ‘enforce the memories of our own experience’. So when she set out to buy a pencil in the city one winter’s evening, she did so it seems without fear and her account became one of the great essays on urban walking.
‘As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friend’s know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one’s room’. She went on to say ‘ Into each of these lives one could penetrate a little way, far enough to give one the illusion that one is not tethered to one single mind, but can put on briefly for a few minutes the bodies and mind of others. One could become a washerwoman, a publican, a street singer’. She walked down the same Oxford Street as Thomas de Quincey, now the shop windows are full of luxury items with which she filled an imaginary house and life only tobe removed again as she returned to her walk and the reason for her activity that evening.
Wednesday’s Wood engraver
I am a printmaker working mainly with lino and wood and I struggle with making my work tonal. My work is usually black and white, any shape or colour that appears is always a happy accident. Each time I start a new piece, I practice making marks this way and that in a hope the answer will come … I wait! I recently engraved a cockerel in wood engraving lesson and not matter how I tried the subtle little marks just didn’t do it. I will at some point go back and look at it again but I am afraid the action will be drastic.
While browsing again through the Poetica da Resistencia aspectos da Gravura Brasileira I found this lovely example of a cockerel by Aldemir Martins (1922-206) … isn’t it lovely? Cannot wait to see more of his work!
Weekly photo challenge … Early
I am an early bird; each morning except Sunday I rise at 5 am. I began this ‘habit’ in 1995 when studying for my degree for the Open University. I was working full time and had a daughter still at home so I would do my study before the family awoke and I needed to get on my bike to do a 20 mile round trip to work. I did graduate and no longer have to do such a long journey to work, but somehow this early rising bit has remained. Now, I do yoga, meditate, drink tea and put the final touches to my daily blog post.
At this time of year, I can, just before 7 am venture out into my little back yard. It is a blessed haven where I can sit with the final draft of my first pot of white tea; almost now lost its first rich flavour but still refreshing and warm. My walled garden isn’t not yet graced by the sun, but I, draped in a blanket, sit and wonder about the day ahead , rejoice at the new growth and absorb the peace even as the birds begin to wake noisily in the nearby sycamores.
Coat Hanger Doll's House 