by Martin P Eccles
By mid-March 2020 the approach of lockdown was heralded. I had cut short a visit in Galway in advance of the uncertainties of Eire’s impending lockdown – a friend’s re-scheduled flight, a rebooked ferry and an ‘against the clock’ drive to Dublin all contributed to a sense of uneasy inevitability. The UK was just behind Eire and, back in Newcastle and with lockdown arriving, I was thinking about how to respond – I decided that for as long as lockdown lasted, I would walk.
Parameters for daily exercise were never formally stated but as my walks evolved, they settled into a duration of around 60 minutes, walked at different times of the day, from before dawn through to dusk. I recorded each walk in three ways. Firstly in a sound recording. Secondly as a trace on a map and thirdly in poetry. The poetry responded to both the walk and the politics of the situation. Using the poetic form of the mesostic – championed by John Cage – I wrote a daily poem of two directions; lines of horizontal text described my walk and a vertical phrase intersected these lines and commented on the politics.
The trace of the walks incrementally marked on a map, slowly drew out an imaginary island; an island of containment – Contención Island (contención is containment in Esperanto – an international name for an international virus).
It was an irregular shape – indented and fissured – progress on the ground was shaped by the places I walked – cul-de-sacs, main road traffic or the local Metro rail lines stopped routes joining, while alleyways and cemeteries offered novel routes through. Contención fulfilled many of the tropes of islands – paradise or remote prison, a place of safety or a place of anxiety (Beer, 1989) – the outline marked the shore of a lockdown world; beyond was the uncharted. At the beginning of May, I thought that this island work was complete – but it turned out that I wasn’t finished with my island, not by a long chalk.
Though the northeast had been under increased restrictions for much of the autumn, the second national lockdown came in November and was widely trailed as being for 28 days – so I wanted to continue a pattern of responding; dealing with it on my artistic terms rather than being a passive recipient … having created Contención Island I now set out to walk its edge, to walk the shoreline of the island and, in so doing, to also mark off the days of the second lockdown. With a compass in the middle of the island, I measured 28 equal angles and, where each cut the island rim produced 28 stretches of coastline – each of different lengths. Each day I walked to the shore and walked a stretch of coast, one a day, clockwise; the order in which I walked the sections was determined by chance – a circumnavigation across time (sound recording and poetry were the main methods of record)
But, most unfortunately, it was only going to be a matter of time before we were back into lockdown again. The third English lockdown ushered in a further chapter of the development of Contención Island … I am populating the island with sound (and will continue to do so as long as this lockdown continues). This time I have divided the island into eight, based on points of the compass and centred on the point from which all walks have started. I divided each of these eight segments into an inner and an outer zone (aiming for two zones of roughly equal area) producing a total of 16 zones. I returned to a process that I had used in previous works – determining locations by chance (shaped by the methods John Cage used for ’49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs’). On previous occasions I had generated quite specific locations, but on this occasion, I was going to generate zones and then choose the specific site within the zone on the day, my choice shaped by considerations such as the potential for sonic variety; the weather (particularly sub-zero temperatures combined with snow); and repeated visits. Each day I walk the island to that day’s zone, and record the island – in sound, poetry and a visual image.
With restrictions of movement set to ease on March 29th this will be the longest of the three lockdowns (by some distance) and I have about a week to go; let us hope that is the end.
The three pieces of work can be accessed at https://martinpeccles.com/other-sound-works/contencion-island/
Beer, G. (1989) ‘Discourses of the Island’, in Amrine, F. and Cohen, R.S. (eds.) Literature and science as modes of expression. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 1-27.