walking slowly downhill
As I considered potential responses to my experience of walking along the Murray
River I contemplated a number of interpretative possibilities and literary and visual
mediums that might convey my sense of the journey.
But in the end I decided to simply find one word that might encompass the range of
my experiences each day during the walk, so that after sixteen days of walking I
would have sixteen words, each corresponding in some way to that day’s
experience*. The question for me was then, once gathered, how might these words
best communicate my experience to others?
I have always believed that the sounds humans made before our non-verbal
communication evolved to words and phrases constituted the first pre-literary
language.
We still use this non-verbal language to convey our most urgent experiences and by
contrast when the words and phrases of our evolving constructed communication are
used to describe such deep and pure life-responses they only succeed in restricting
them to faint, mumbling echoes of an otherwise urgently primal language.
Twenty years ago I devised a method by which I could translate the consonants,
vowels and punctuation marks that are the building blocks of language into a series
of keyboard sounds.
Since then I have translated poems and novels into this non-verbal mode and I have
performed these translations nationally and internationally as the most significant
components of each of their corresponding larger projects.
I have consequently formed the sixteen words chosen each day after my walk into a
random sequence poem titled ‘sixteen words’ and then I have translated this
collection into keyboard sounds, believing they might convey a more accurate, more
authentic expression of my experiences that any other form of communication.
Through my sixteen-day walk I also collected a number of gorgeous nothings** in a
Dilly Bag, graciously woven for me by Murray Darling weaver Tina Doolan
(Paakantji).
These found objects will be re-located in a new, if temporary home, inside the
soundbox of the grand piano in ADFA; they will mediate the sounds made by the
keyboard as this translation of ‘sixteen words’ is being performed, adding in this
way each object’s particular voice to that of the walker in the articulation of this new
language. In 1984 in the preface of his ‘Six Memos for the Next Millennium’ Italo
Calvino said:
‘Think what it would be like to have a work conceived outside the self, a work that will
let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into
selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird
perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone,
to cement, to plastic…Was this not perhaps what Ovid was aiming at when he wrote
about the continuity of forms? And what Lucretius was aiming at when he identified
himself with that nature common to each and every thing?’
In this spirit I join with bird, stone and plastic and offer you walking slowly downhill.
domenico de clario
*september 13 snowy; september 14 stars; september 15 stream; september 16 above; september 17
below; september 18 feet; september 19 flows; september 25 transparent; september 26 water;
september 27 suddenly; september 28 fallible; september 29 infallible; september 30 visible;
october 1 invisible; october 2 present; october 3 absent.
**This is the term nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson used to describe both random
insights and objects that unexpectedly lead to a defining illumination and an unexpected creative output.
sixteen words: snowy stars stream above / below feet flows transparent water / suddenly
fallible infallible / visible invisible present absent