Republic of Thorns (2001)
3°W Gallery, The Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere
Multimedia installation by Russell Mills, Ian Walton and Paul Farley: a Wordsworth Trust commission presented with the support of Northern Arts: Year of The Artist, The Monument Trust and South Lakeland District Council
Earth-clad books, broken glass, broken mirrors, three convex surveillance mirrors, amber window film, ceiling motor, stone, ceramic bowl, wallpaper, vinyl wall texts, Primum Mobile: This That There (random radio), video film (14 minutes 15 seconds) set to ceaselessly loop, monitor, asynchronous six CD players and two CD Walkman players surround sound system
Film by Russell Mills and Ian Walton; edited by Russell Mills and Michael Webster
Electrical installation by Keith Coates
Glass and mirrors supplied by Westmorland Glass, Kendal
Surveillance mirrors courtesy of Signs & Labels Ltd. Stockport
For the Wordsworth Trust:
Director: Dr. Robert Woof
Administration and production coordination: David Cooper
Construction: Jeff Cowton and Alan Houghton
Volunteers: Philip Northcott, Stephen Hebron and Sally Woodhead
Soundwork recorded, mixed and produced by Russell Mills and Mike Fearon at Shed Studios, Ambleside
Mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering
Republic of Thorns
Wordsworth’s phrase, “A perfect Republic of Shepherds and Agriculturalists” described the landscape he knew as boy and man. The place was a place of equality and dignity for the people who lived and worked among the hills. Wordsworth had gone fishing with them as a boy; he knew their ways with sheep on the fells, he wrote one of his finest poems on human dignity about an old shepherd, Michael. The phrase can perhaps be applied to the thorns, metaphoric and actual, that underlie the exploration of experience that artists and poet have brought to this exhibition. Nature, and specifically the thorn, is that enduring force that is the context of our own mortality: hardy, known when we were young; still known in maturity; obstinate, mysterious; as prevalent in the cities as in the country; an image for us all. We are all aware of the Republic of Thorns.
The Thorn
It was not in Grasmere that Wordsworth wrote one of the most famous of his experimental poems, The Thorn, but in the Quantocks, near Alfoxden, Somerset, in March 1798: indeed, on the 19th of that month Dorothy wrote in her Journal: “William wrote some lines describing a stunted thorn;” a month later, on 20 April she noted the actual tree that we suppose prompted Wordsworth to begin the poem: “Came home the Crookham way, by the thorn, and the little muddy pond.” When Wordsworth published the poem, he added a note: “The poem of The Thorn, as the reader will soon discover, is not supposed to be spoken in the author’s own person; the character of the loquacious narrator will sufficiently show itself in the course of the story.” Wordsworth’s poem, in short, is not written from his own standpoint: it is a kind of dramatic monologue written in a lyrical style with an eloquent and rapid-flowing stanza invented by Wordsworth himself. The Thorn has little of that egotistical sublime that Keats noted twenty years later in 1818 as Wordsworth’s predominant characteristic.
The poem has its origin not only in the actual thorn tree seen on the Quantocks, but also in a fragmentary ballad which we find copied onto loose sheets of paper stuck into his notebook. The fragment is a story of infanticide, but we could easily believe that the story had its origins in the story of Mary Hamilton, a lady in the Scottish court, who became pregnant, and feared, too much, the consequences of discovery. The version that Wordsworth knew, and wrote down before 1800, was the fragmentary one found in Herd’s Ancient and Modern Scottish Songs (Edinburgh, 1776):
And there she’s lean’d her back to a thorn
Oh! and alas – a day oh, and alas a day.
And there she has her baby born
Ten thousand times good night, and be’ wi’ thee.
She has houked a grave ayont the sun
Oh! and alas – a day oh, and alas a day.
And there she has buried the sweet babe in.
Ten thousand times good night, and be’ wi’ thee.
And she has gane back to her Father’s ha’
Oh! and alas – a day oh, and alas a day.
She’s counted the leelest maid o’ them a’.
Ten thousand times good night, and be’ wi’ thee.
O look not sae sweet, my bonny babe,
Oh! and alas – a day oh, and alas a day.
Gin ye smyle sae ye’ll smyle me dead;
Ten thousand times good night, and be’ wi’ thee.
There is one other line that Wordsworth surely remembered, Edgar’s comment in King Lear, when he too, disguised as Poor Tom, like the thorn itself, like Lear and like Martha Ray in Wordsworth’s poem, has to face the elements as a poor naked wretch, the bare forked animal, of Lear’s appalled imagination: “Through the sharp hawthorn blows the cold wind.” The cold wind “cuts like a scythe” through Wordsworth’s poem and the thorn survives almost by changing its nature, “like a stone / With lichens it is overgrown”. Lear scarcely survives the exposure; he becomes mad; Poor Tom manages by stealth and seeming madness, and Martha Ray discards almost all her nature as a woman; she becomes like the thorn, an object on a mountain; one that expresses only grief.
Yet, she endures, as does the thorn. And she has endured. She is almost celebrated by the great universe itself for the long endurance of her grief:
And she is known to every star,
And every wind that blows;
And there beside the Thorn she sits
When the blue daylight’s in the skies,
And when the whirlwind’s on the hill,
Or frosty air is keen and still,
And to herself she cries,
‘Oh misery! oh misery!
Oh woe is me! oh misery!’
The poem deals with a woman who might have killed a child, but who, beyond her suffering, might also be the subject of gossip and calumny by neighbours; the folk in the poem finally judge her innocent; even as the stars of the blue sky and the wind have their sympathy with her. The thorn tree of Wordsworth’s poem just has being; it could be symbolic of Martha herself; certainly, it is maternal, and may be a failed mother; it makes one think that Wordsworth, who lost his mother when he was eight, is dealing with his own problem of a mother and a child separated by death. There is almost a touch of the ghastly aged crone in the poem: this is emphasised in the manuscript:
A thorn there is which like a stone
With jagged lichens is o’ergrown,
A thorn that wants the thorny points
A toothless thorn with knotted joints;
Not higher than a two years child
It stands upon that spot so wild . . .
Wordsworth’s skilful modern narrative is to insist that we don’t know what really happened, and that we can only have partial knowledge of all serious things.
Paul Farley’s poem, Thorns, works wittily, suggestively, more autobiographically; at the same time, it is totally fictional; one doesn’t have to know whether it is true or not, it just seems like a major experience; it is lived; it has voices that confront the writer. Thorns are a metaphor for what it might be to be human and having even less grasp about the solidity of one’s own character (the character that Wordsworth fictionalises into being in his story). Nothing could be more pointed than Paul’s Thorns in that poem’s allusions to our experience of image and metaphor, of language as a tease, which brings us into thought as well as teasing us out of it.
Paul Farley can take you to the edge of discovery by denying that he has anything but an experience to build upon; nothing is given, all has to be found.
When one turns to artists Russell Mills and Ian Walton, one is reminded of early work, trace elements perhaps, when they refer in explicit terms to their interest in Wordsworthian conceptions, “accepting the Wordsworthian imperative that nature underwrites the evolution of culture, the works seek to transform, by direct action and by ricochet, recovering the wonder of what has become familiar, finding a new significance in chaos and giving meaning to the incoherent.” It is Russell Mills’ words here that point one to parallels with Paul Farley’s discomfort in having to commit himself to any avowed affirmative point of view; and yet nothing is more celebrated than the process of probing and energising the search. At the end of Wordsworth’s The Thorn, the narrator is baffled: he is like a detective who cannot find a solution to the mystery; he is only aware that the world is a mystery and that there is a story of a woman who might have killed her child, a thorn tree that might be emblematic of the pathos and tragedy of the individual alone; the tree’s courageous survival in all the elements of the weather seems to have meaning, the more because of its courageous stance even in its toothless age; a living emblem is suggested. The thorn tree in both Wordsworth and Farley is paradoxically contrasting; one tree has thorns that prick, the other tree has thorns that do not, but the probing of the tree’s nature is the interest. It is a kind of mapping which takes us outside our time-oppressed world.
In the end, Ian Walton and Russell Mills have an image of a stone turning in its bowl – like W.B. Yeats’ image of a stone turning in its gyre; the turning is marking the bowl; all art is a mark made through the turning of time; and the shattered glass and the shattered mirrors are like leaves from the ephemeral moment, still marvellously casting shadows of light. We ponder on the books that lead upwards, and lead nowhere; they also are subject to time and decay; they are articulate as images, as are the layers of wallpaper, each layer casting a shape from its own time on to our consciousness. In the end the whole produces a work of art, which might be a series of words, or a series of shapes; it comes out of and goes beyond that past of layers of paper trying to cover a wall with a surface excitement. Here, the distressed wallpaper shows time producing images in a random way, and we praise the ingenuity that sees the present encapsulating so many layers of past. And the yellowness? And the music? And the mirrors? What futility? And what aspiration? The answers are ours and it is our delight to try to reach for an answer – an answer that will probably be another question.
Dr Robert Woof, Director, The Wordsworth Trust, 2005.
(from the original installation catalogue)