Islington Tribune - by ROISIN GADELRAB
Published: 1 August 2008
Autism group calls for ‘stay of execution’
Sculptors evicted from garden ‘haven’ as land is sold for housing development project
AN AUTISTIC sculpture group is pleading for a stay of execution before they are evicted from the garden they have made their haven.
The self-help group must leave Memory Garden in Legard Road, Highbury, in September, because landlord NCH (National Children’s Homes) is selling the land and neighbouring buildings to create 300 homes.
Although the group doesn’t oppose the redevelopment, members want to keep using the land until work starts, which could be years away.
Group co-ordinator Ruth Solomon said: “We don’t want to appear ungrateful to NCH and we’re no threat to their planning application.
“We only want to continue to use it until building work begins.
“It’s taken eight years to get where we are. We don’t want to be tidied away. We can’t just put everything in a bag and lay it on a table somewhere else.”
But NCH head of communications Greg Vines said the group “wanted to leave in September”, adding: “They’ve been part of our consultation and we need to keep to our timescale because we need to keep to costs.
“We’ve been trying to get hold of the co-ordinator for some time and have had no response.”
Although he wouldn’t say if NCH would consider letting the group stay longer, he said Ms Solomon should get in touch. But Ms Solomon said she had been frequently in contact with NCH and that the group only agreed to a in September after they were asked to leave much earlier, in December last year.
Ms Solomon found the land seven years ago and asked NCH if she could make use of it.
Since then, the group has cleared the garden, grown plants, berries and vegetables, and use it as a place to relax, create pieces of artwork and do daily duties like making the tea. The group now runs a youth club for autistic children.
One regular visitor has his own routine, where he retraces his steps around the garden every day as he puts out bird seed in very particular spots.
Others have carefully laid pieces of wood in a circular pattern in the middle of the ground, each one mapping out their memories. All this is soon to be lost.
Ms Solomon said the garden “challenges institutional care models” by allowing the visitors to work out their own ways of learning and acting.
She added: “Autistic people are at the centre of this project. They are the ones making the tea, arranging the plants, building the sculptures. In this situation they are the home-makers. So it is about ongoing small acts of hospitality.
“To be part of the community autistic people need active roles of participation. They need to experiment with their own value systems in a real place where their day-to-day decision making has a tangible, on-going effect.”
Adrian Whyatt, chairman of the Greater London Action on Disability, who uses the garden, said: “I come here to chill out. I didn’t want to have to conduct a campaign to save this because it destructs our peace.
“It’s been very stressful having to fight to keep it.”
David Shamash, who has been using the garden for five years, added: “Many people are attached to this place and will be sad to see it go.”
Saturday, 21 August 2010
Attendance Records
Youth and Mentoring Autistic Club
(Pilot Scheme)
Spring: 5.3.06-9.6.06
Sundays at two weekly intervals.
Ten Sessions.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
1. Samuelle Hawkins x x x x x 0 x x x x
2. John Macleod x x x 0 0 x x 0 x x
3. Gabrielle Meth x x 0 x x 0 x x x 0
4. Edward Morriss x x x x x x 0 x x x
5. Francheska Winfun x x x x x x x x x x
6. Amnol Johar x x x x 0 x x x 0 x
7. Jake Hardy x x x x x x x x x x
8. Amy Strover 0 0 x x x x x x x x
9. Sidney Ley x x x x x x 0 x x 0
10. Daniel Shafiani x x x x 0 x x x 0 x
11. Leslie Salif Camara x x 0 x x x x 0 x x
12. Kayahan x x x x x x x x x x
13. Charles Yager x x x 0 0 0 x x x x
There were four workers at the beginning of the Club.
During the course of the Club, Lyndsey Noble has been promoted from the status of a Volunteer “Mentor”, to a worker.
Most of the children have high needs. That is the reason for the high proportion of play-workers to children.
* We hope to increase the number of children to 16 in Spring 2007. We will also be advertising for more Volunteers.
7.10.2006
(Pilot Scheme)
Spring: 5.3.06-9.6.06
Sundays at two weekly intervals.
Ten Sessions.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
1. Samuelle Hawkins x x x x x 0 x x x x
2. John Macleod x x x 0 0 x x 0 x x
3. Gabrielle Meth x x 0 x x 0 x x x 0
4. Edward Morriss x x x x x x 0 x x x
5. Francheska Winfun x x x x x x x x x x
6. Amnol Johar x x x x 0 x x x 0 x
7. Jake Hardy x x x x x x x x x x
8. Amy Strover 0 0 x x x x x x x x
9. Sidney Ley x x x x x x 0 x x 0
10. Daniel Shafiani x x x x 0 x x x 0 x
11. Leslie Salif Camara x x 0 x x x x 0 x x
12. Kayahan x x x x x x x x x x
13. Charles Yager x x x 0 0 0 x x x x
There were four workers at the beginning of the Club.
During the course of the Club, Lyndsey Noble has been promoted from the status of a Volunteer “Mentor”, to a worker.
Most of the children have high needs. That is the reason for the high proportion of play-workers to children.
* We hope to increase the number of children to 16 in Spring 2007. We will also be advertising for more Volunteers.
7.10.2006
We Exist
We have been asked to leave the garden.
What is happening at the garden mirrors the general blindness that exists in relation to autistic people nationwide, as the NAS* has clearly marked out in their campaign, “I exist”
1. Who we are: We are a self-help group of autistic and dyslexic people who manage a garden environment; gardening, cooking and making sculptures and art-works together; sharing time by doing things.
2. How long have we existed for? We have existed for seven years, since 2001. This was the year when we found this piece of abandoned land to the side of NCH National Children’s Head Office in Highbury and begun to work on it.
3. What do we run there? We run an informal club for adults every Tuesday morning and a club for children with high needs every other Sunday morning.
4. Is the club open for non-autistic people? Yes. In the beginning we maintained a quiet space solely for autistic people. People on the spectrum could come to the garden on their own and make a sculpture/do gardening or could attend the club. This is how we first built up links between people. We made “transitional” sculptures which could be changed and added to by different people who may not meet in person but who would leave marks for one another through the sculptures. Later as we grew in confidence, we opened the club to local people and to members of the Peter Bedford ex-psychiatric unit next door. Informal support networks began to grow.
5. Why have you been asked to leave the garden? NCH have decided to move their main office from this site and are working with the council to gain planning permission for a housing development.
6. Have you been included in this consultation process? No. We found out by chance. In the brief we are not mentioned and on the map we are unmarked although we are within the grounds of the proposed site.
7. What is the date you are meant to leave? Our contract runs out on 30th September 2008
8. What will happen then? At present we have nowhere else to go. We do not know if the council is actually aware that We Exist.
What is happening at the garden mirrors the general blindness that exists in relation to autistic people nationwide, as the NAS* has clearly marked out in their campaign, “I exist”
1. Who we are: We are a self-help group of autistic and dyslexic people who manage a garden environment; gardening, cooking and making sculptures and art-works together; sharing time by doing things.
2. How long have we existed for? We have existed for seven years, since 2001. This was the year when we found this piece of abandoned land to the side of NCH National Children’s Head Office in Highbury and begun to work on it.
3. What do we run there? We run an informal club for adults every Tuesday morning and a club for children with high needs every other Sunday morning.
4. Is the club open for non-autistic people? Yes. In the beginning we maintained a quiet space solely for autistic people. People on the spectrum could come to the garden on their own and make a sculpture/do gardening or could attend the club. This is how we first built up links between people. We made “transitional” sculptures which could be changed and added to by different people who may not meet in person but who would leave marks for one another through the sculptures. Later as we grew in confidence, we opened the club to local people and to members of the Peter Bedford ex-psychiatric unit next door. Informal support networks began to grow.
5. Why have you been asked to leave the garden? NCH have decided to move their main office from this site and are working with the council to gain planning permission for a housing development.
6. Have you been included in this consultation process? No. We found out by chance. In the brief we are not mentioned and on the map we are unmarked although we are within the grounds of the proposed site.
7. What is the date you are meant to leave? Our contract runs out on 30th September 2008
8. What will happen then? At present we have nowhere else to go. We do not know if the council is actually aware that We Exist.
WE ARE WALKING THROUGH
We are walking through the line. Where rough-cut grass meets the manicured surface. We are crossing over it like a tumbling forward, because the surface is so smooth and regular on the cut grass and our feet are not used to it.
We are walking from “Memory Gardens” across the field and into the landscaped surface that leads to the big house, where NCH Head Offices are located.
From the garden that we have occupied for seven years, the sun bounces off the reflective surfaces of spottless windows from this main building and at certain moments of the day depending on where we are, we need to shield our eyes from the glare.
This is the first time in seven years that I have taken this five minute stroll with other members of this Autistic project. This is because I want to show Margaret, Molly and Eloina where to pick up the keys from the Head Office in order that they too can access our now permanently locked garden as a place to be, quietly on their own, as in fact was the original purpose of the garden, before the locks went on. It`s strange then that we can stroll through this backway from the garden to the office where no lock could be workeable, yet must pick up a key in order to be officially allowed in- like gaining access to a country with a passport.
At first we didn`t know why the locks had so suddenly come on and why we were being edged into a position of “strangeness” in relation to this space so that our eventual eviction seemed even to us eminant rather than negotiable despite the staged consultations in the early days in the big building, sitting at desks, behind those reflective windows that are just too far away to see out of and into the garden. The garden which has only now just been acknowledged by NCH as a real place because our removal is suddenly and uniquely for them, part of their work-day task. So it figures that we are a sum that needs to be properly calculated, a piece of work. Maybe a logistic nightmare. We and the garden have become one. Never have we aquired an identity so totally and so quickly. We have become “Memory Gardens”.
But this is not our nightmare. The garden we occupy is about the day-to-day things that are necessary to do on a regular and on-going basis.Which are necessary to do in any place. In shops down a highstreet, in homes or small-run businesses. In the hairdressers opposite where I get my hair cut. In building works- the knocking down of the nearby Arsenal stadium- turning it into flats and building the stadium elsewhere. In the NCH head office. That opens at 8.30 in the morning everyday and closes at 5.pm. Opening the gate, putting out the sign, making the tea, putting toilet paper in the loo.- soap and water to hand. Sweeping and washing down surfaces. Putting out chairs. Then the activites, the sessions: moving bricks and pieces of wood around into shapes, enclaves, pathways and bridges. It`s mundane stuff that needs doing and we do it. Others do it. Moving things on in stages.
We light fires. We may cook peanuts on the fire, prune plants or rake up leaves. Pick beans or light candles. This all depends on the weather. We are always somewhere between a cloudburst and a fine day. It also depends on who is there, on moods, on what comes to hand and in which particular direction we turn to on that day.
Today we are stepping over the line and Margaret who has taken many pictures up until now, of close-up moments of natural interest; patterns of leaves, branches, painted tiles, coloured cloth hanging from trees, now puts away the camera when we are on the other side of the line. We have been listening to birds; the call of nature or a “bloody racket”. But some kind of silence falls on us now.
We are lookng up at the large building and we are dishevelled. Intruders at odds with something that rebukes us. We are bounced back on ourselves and because of this there is all at once an atmosphe- like a slow renderning or an infinitely subtle dawn where the gradients are so finely sewn together that it is not possible to capture one moment as discreet along a natural transition to another. Time is going backwards or forwards or perhaps not moving at all. We are not shifting it on in stages like we usually do.. The ground is shifting of its own accord, making of this slow dawn appear a superimposition in the late afternon. Taking a photo would be making things less real, not more real, like screaming very loudly in order to get the attention of an ant. Is an ant really small or is it just far away and impossible to get close to however far and however fast you may walk. Perhaps we are on the edge of the horizon to one another, NCH and “Memory Gardens”.
Yet all at once there is a recognition amongst us, of the enormity of what this situation holds.There is a sense of an occasion.
This crossing of a line from where we have been day after day, year after year to the moment of aprehending the building, the lawn, the flower-beds, the peopleless space where conferences come and go as events in which intelligent, caring people come and take notes and leave again now with a further training and meals on top of that. My sister even went for a course here and did not even come over to the garden afterwards, not realising it was the same place at all. It is not the same place at all. It is just part of the same land.
We are walking from the one to the other. And the foxes we see, the cats, birds, maybe even the worms that pop up when we dig, have walked, flown crawled and munched their way through from one location to another. Across a border which they never once knew was there. Or whether it was there or not, this did not matter to them.They did not have the understanding of a border. Just as the kids who hop over the wall at the front exit and into the shed, breaking the flimsy padlock that NCH puts on our shed door as if snapping candy, do not recognise such borders. Are they home –makers or home-breakers?. They never once disturb the sculptures- just using the shed to smoke a joint, eat sweets, drink fizzy drinks, collapse into piles of laughter, scratch names and slang words on to the wooden panels of the shed before somehow getting back over the wall and staggering home.
So to return to where we were. The line between cut-grass and un-cut grass. Where “Memory Gardens” leads into the Head Offices of National Children`s Home, a national British charity with projects throughout the British Isles, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Put simply NCH would like us to leave because they fear bad publicity. They fear this bad publicity because they have discovered “Trace elements” of Legionaires disease in the water supply of the adjoining Familly Support Unit which mysteriously closed down, almost overnight, back in July and is the real reason why we are now in consultation with NCH over how and when we too will leave. Of course during the consulatation process we have put forward many ideas for how we might stay: using alternative access routes via another adjoining Mental Health project whom we have links with, working with NCH to create an Autistic Day centre in the empty Family Centre. All were turned down and we never knew why- we had not been told about the Legionaires but unstead were asked casually if we used the water much. “No” we said, proud of our compost loo put in because it`s better for Autistic kids to use a loo on site then off-site-. Our non-reliance on the creature comforts of electricity and water in this “Outdoor Living” club saved us for the time being but clearly embarassed NCH who just wanted rid of all possible liability- that if we got ill or died from dodgy water that they would pay.
Yes, they could have just evicted us but how do you tell an Autistic Project to go nicely when the proffessional diagnosis for this condition points to rigidity and possible trauma on the interuption of such routine? After all they are a National Charity dealing with vulnerable people. We were thus, by default in a “priveledged” position of seeing and knowing too much just by being there and doing the mundane everyday domestic things that we have always done. Eloina pointed out, “we have grown into a giant mushroom” with many spores throughout the nearby vicinity- in local mental Health Projects, Autistic organisations, parents who rely on the coffee breaks our clubs allow, adults who cross London with care-workers to drink tea, make fires and balance bricks, nearby allotments and people on the edge, with a need to light fires, community colleges and ecological organisations. NCH can not do what they would so like to do- just pluck us out. The mushroom is never just in one place at one time. Even when gone it is there. Even when there, it is just water held in a shape and then re-constituted elsewhere. Yet what is startling is how unedible we appear to be to them even though it is people just like us who they are dealing with day in and day out in their many projects across the land. Stand-in actors play the part of autistic adults or teenage mothers on the covers of their magazines- this is because they cannot use the true “face” of the people concerned- again for liability reasons. Faced then as they are now with our group, literally in their back garden, is a considerable mishap in the scheme of things- people high up are saying “It should never have been allowed to happen” “How have they managed to move on to the land and to be there for seven years?”. “It`s impossible”. It`s a media disaster in waiting. People are losing their jobs over it.
We arrived one day to do abit of Gardening after I`d accidentally wandered on to the disused plot and suggested to the owners-NCH- that we`d clear it up abit every Friday afternoon and maybe grow some tomotoes. Letters kept arriving through the post-box of the Head Office which I would send, always addressed to different chief executives as the turnover of staff erased one portion of time from the next. There were regular up-dates; “Now we have panted some herbs, now cleared the ground and laid down turf. We have put up a shed. Now we have a constitution. We`ve bought a lawn-mower and some tools and have insurance cover for their use. We are setting up a youth club to run seperately from the adult club” and so on.. It must have made boring reading to people who are juggling large sums of money, following government policies, implementing practical regime change in counties and in Health care and Service Providers which it is under their jurisdiction to overhaul, roll out and embed at a local and national level. There are meetings, figures of speach, presentations and awards. Some people fall by the wayside, others are promoted. So the wheel turns. Somehow we do not figure or only in a rushed off email when someone at a Conferance happens to wander down through the gardens inbetween speaches perhaps with a cup of coffee in hand. Crosses the line in reverse of the walk that we are now taking from the garden to the head office, and peers bleary-eyed through branches, at wire and bead mobiles hanging in the trees, bricks stacked so that they are not exactly a path, not exactly a standing object, paintings-almost primitive- on the white-washed wall- and a slow frown chances across their forehead. Something does not resolve- like a missed frame that makes a T.V programme suddenly invade the gastric juices of one`s stomach and one nearly loses balance, before, in a blink the picture re-congeals and one is sitting on the sofa where one always was, not lost within a moving frame, back at the conference. Nothing in any case registered for long enough for anything to be done about it. A queezy feeling that could have been put down to the wine over lunch was not enough reason to get us off the land.
Traces of Legionaires disease in the Water supply was on a different scale. It was more than a case of flatulance.
The Legionaires issue was only let slip when I met with a Land-surveyor from NCH and he was for one time not affectively “gagged” because another woman, higher up in the order of things, had at the last minute absented herself from the meeting. He was the first to say “If I were you I wouldn`t use the water, not even for watering plants because...”
The fear of bad publicity had prevented them giving this piece of quite important advice.
Crossing the line- seeing the reflecting surface up close that had bounced back our every move rather than risk us peering through the window. Things fell into place.
We knew why we had been there all along: waiting for that moment when the reflectivity no longer works for an instant. NCH, a National Charity, rather than protecting vulnerable people, would choose not to tell in order to secure a clean image. Even if it came to death from a disease which is only treatable when it is known. Better not to tell, so long as the documentation is in place and there is therefore no liability.
At that moment we walked right through the image and we saw into what is refleced out. Our responsiveness and our responsibility as adult human beings came together in the moment.
As we faced the building we felt pity for some of the employees inside.
Our specific situation looked out into other capacities and became a tool for awareness.
We are walking from “Memory Gardens” across the field and into the landscaped surface that leads to the big house, where NCH Head Offices are located.
From the garden that we have occupied for seven years, the sun bounces off the reflective surfaces of spottless windows from this main building and at certain moments of the day depending on where we are, we need to shield our eyes from the glare.
This is the first time in seven years that I have taken this five minute stroll with other members of this Autistic project. This is because I want to show Margaret, Molly and Eloina where to pick up the keys from the Head Office in order that they too can access our now permanently locked garden as a place to be, quietly on their own, as in fact was the original purpose of the garden, before the locks went on. It`s strange then that we can stroll through this backway from the garden to the office where no lock could be workeable, yet must pick up a key in order to be officially allowed in- like gaining access to a country with a passport.
At first we didn`t know why the locks had so suddenly come on and why we were being edged into a position of “strangeness” in relation to this space so that our eventual eviction seemed even to us eminant rather than negotiable despite the staged consultations in the early days in the big building, sitting at desks, behind those reflective windows that are just too far away to see out of and into the garden. The garden which has only now just been acknowledged by NCH as a real place because our removal is suddenly and uniquely for them, part of their work-day task. So it figures that we are a sum that needs to be properly calculated, a piece of work. Maybe a logistic nightmare. We and the garden have become one. Never have we aquired an identity so totally and so quickly. We have become “Memory Gardens”.
But this is not our nightmare. The garden we occupy is about the day-to-day things that are necessary to do on a regular and on-going basis.Which are necessary to do in any place. In shops down a highstreet, in homes or small-run businesses. In the hairdressers opposite where I get my hair cut. In building works- the knocking down of the nearby Arsenal stadium- turning it into flats and building the stadium elsewhere. In the NCH head office. That opens at 8.30 in the morning everyday and closes at 5.pm. Opening the gate, putting out the sign, making the tea, putting toilet paper in the loo.- soap and water to hand. Sweeping and washing down surfaces. Putting out chairs. Then the activites, the sessions: moving bricks and pieces of wood around into shapes, enclaves, pathways and bridges. It`s mundane stuff that needs doing and we do it. Others do it. Moving things on in stages.
We light fires. We may cook peanuts on the fire, prune plants or rake up leaves. Pick beans or light candles. This all depends on the weather. We are always somewhere between a cloudburst and a fine day. It also depends on who is there, on moods, on what comes to hand and in which particular direction we turn to on that day.
Today we are stepping over the line and Margaret who has taken many pictures up until now, of close-up moments of natural interest; patterns of leaves, branches, painted tiles, coloured cloth hanging from trees, now puts away the camera when we are on the other side of the line. We have been listening to birds; the call of nature or a “bloody racket”. But some kind of silence falls on us now.
We are lookng up at the large building and we are dishevelled. Intruders at odds with something that rebukes us. We are bounced back on ourselves and because of this there is all at once an atmosphe- like a slow renderning or an infinitely subtle dawn where the gradients are so finely sewn together that it is not possible to capture one moment as discreet along a natural transition to another. Time is going backwards or forwards or perhaps not moving at all. We are not shifting it on in stages like we usually do.. The ground is shifting of its own accord, making of this slow dawn appear a superimposition in the late afternon. Taking a photo would be making things less real, not more real, like screaming very loudly in order to get the attention of an ant. Is an ant really small or is it just far away and impossible to get close to however far and however fast you may walk. Perhaps we are on the edge of the horizon to one another, NCH and “Memory Gardens”.
Yet all at once there is a recognition amongst us, of the enormity of what this situation holds.There is a sense of an occasion.
This crossing of a line from where we have been day after day, year after year to the moment of aprehending the building, the lawn, the flower-beds, the peopleless space where conferences come and go as events in which intelligent, caring people come and take notes and leave again now with a further training and meals on top of that. My sister even went for a course here and did not even come over to the garden afterwards, not realising it was the same place at all. It is not the same place at all. It is just part of the same land.
We are walking from the one to the other. And the foxes we see, the cats, birds, maybe even the worms that pop up when we dig, have walked, flown crawled and munched their way through from one location to another. Across a border which they never once knew was there. Or whether it was there or not, this did not matter to them.They did not have the understanding of a border. Just as the kids who hop over the wall at the front exit and into the shed, breaking the flimsy padlock that NCH puts on our shed door as if snapping candy, do not recognise such borders. Are they home –makers or home-breakers?. They never once disturb the sculptures- just using the shed to smoke a joint, eat sweets, drink fizzy drinks, collapse into piles of laughter, scratch names and slang words on to the wooden panels of the shed before somehow getting back over the wall and staggering home.
So to return to where we were. The line between cut-grass and un-cut grass. Where “Memory Gardens” leads into the Head Offices of National Children`s Home, a national British charity with projects throughout the British Isles, England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland.
Put simply NCH would like us to leave because they fear bad publicity. They fear this bad publicity because they have discovered “Trace elements” of Legionaires disease in the water supply of the adjoining Familly Support Unit which mysteriously closed down, almost overnight, back in July and is the real reason why we are now in consultation with NCH over how and when we too will leave. Of course during the consulatation process we have put forward many ideas for how we might stay: using alternative access routes via another adjoining Mental Health project whom we have links with, working with NCH to create an Autistic Day centre in the empty Family Centre. All were turned down and we never knew why- we had not been told about the Legionaires but unstead were asked casually if we used the water much. “No” we said, proud of our compost loo put in because it`s better for Autistic kids to use a loo on site then off-site-. Our non-reliance on the creature comforts of electricity and water in this “Outdoor Living” club saved us for the time being but clearly embarassed NCH who just wanted rid of all possible liability- that if we got ill or died from dodgy water that they would pay.
Yes, they could have just evicted us but how do you tell an Autistic Project to go nicely when the proffessional diagnosis for this condition points to rigidity and possible trauma on the interuption of such routine? After all they are a National Charity dealing with vulnerable people. We were thus, by default in a “priveledged” position of seeing and knowing too much just by being there and doing the mundane everyday domestic things that we have always done. Eloina pointed out, “we have grown into a giant mushroom” with many spores throughout the nearby vicinity- in local mental Health Projects, Autistic organisations, parents who rely on the coffee breaks our clubs allow, adults who cross London with care-workers to drink tea, make fires and balance bricks, nearby allotments and people on the edge, with a need to light fires, community colleges and ecological organisations. NCH can not do what they would so like to do- just pluck us out. The mushroom is never just in one place at one time. Even when gone it is there. Even when there, it is just water held in a shape and then re-constituted elsewhere. Yet what is startling is how unedible we appear to be to them even though it is people just like us who they are dealing with day in and day out in their many projects across the land. Stand-in actors play the part of autistic adults or teenage mothers on the covers of their magazines- this is because they cannot use the true “face” of the people concerned- again for liability reasons. Faced then as they are now with our group, literally in their back garden, is a considerable mishap in the scheme of things- people high up are saying “It should never have been allowed to happen” “How have they managed to move on to the land and to be there for seven years?”. “It`s impossible”. It`s a media disaster in waiting. People are losing their jobs over it.
We arrived one day to do abit of Gardening after I`d accidentally wandered on to the disused plot and suggested to the owners-NCH- that we`d clear it up abit every Friday afternoon and maybe grow some tomotoes. Letters kept arriving through the post-box of the Head Office which I would send, always addressed to different chief executives as the turnover of staff erased one portion of time from the next. There were regular up-dates; “Now we have panted some herbs, now cleared the ground and laid down turf. We have put up a shed. Now we have a constitution. We`ve bought a lawn-mower and some tools and have insurance cover for their use. We are setting up a youth club to run seperately from the adult club” and so on.. It must have made boring reading to people who are juggling large sums of money, following government policies, implementing practical regime change in counties and in Health care and Service Providers which it is under their jurisdiction to overhaul, roll out and embed at a local and national level. There are meetings, figures of speach, presentations and awards. Some people fall by the wayside, others are promoted. So the wheel turns. Somehow we do not figure or only in a rushed off email when someone at a Conferance happens to wander down through the gardens inbetween speaches perhaps with a cup of coffee in hand. Crosses the line in reverse of the walk that we are now taking from the garden to the head office, and peers bleary-eyed through branches, at wire and bead mobiles hanging in the trees, bricks stacked so that they are not exactly a path, not exactly a standing object, paintings-almost primitive- on the white-washed wall- and a slow frown chances across their forehead. Something does not resolve- like a missed frame that makes a T.V programme suddenly invade the gastric juices of one`s stomach and one nearly loses balance, before, in a blink the picture re-congeals and one is sitting on the sofa where one always was, not lost within a moving frame, back at the conference. Nothing in any case registered for long enough for anything to be done about it. A queezy feeling that could have been put down to the wine over lunch was not enough reason to get us off the land.
Traces of Legionaires disease in the Water supply was on a different scale. It was more than a case of flatulance.
The Legionaires issue was only let slip when I met with a Land-surveyor from NCH and he was for one time not affectively “gagged” because another woman, higher up in the order of things, had at the last minute absented herself from the meeting. He was the first to say “If I were you I wouldn`t use the water, not even for watering plants because...”
The fear of bad publicity had prevented them giving this piece of quite important advice.
Crossing the line- seeing the reflecting surface up close that had bounced back our every move rather than risk us peering through the window. Things fell into place.
We knew why we had been there all along: waiting for that moment when the reflectivity no longer works for an instant. NCH, a National Charity, rather than protecting vulnerable people, would choose not to tell in order to secure a clean image. Even if it came to death from a disease which is only treatable when it is known. Better not to tell, so long as the documentation is in place and there is therefore no liability.
At that moment we walked right through the image and we saw into what is refleced out. Our responsiveness and our responsibility as adult human beings came together in the moment.
As we faced the building we felt pity for some of the employees inside.
Our specific situation looked out into other capacities and became a tool for awareness.
Funding Application Stage One.
To : The Tudor Trust
On behalf of: “Memory Gardens” Sculpture Club.
24.9.06
1. We are interested in networks.The same people who are isolated in a framework not of their own making, are viable with ideas and directions that matter, when the context for shared value is there. This context is everyone`s right.
We are experimenting with shape, rhythm and form in this outdoor space, making comparisons with what is muteable in nature and what is muteable in ourselves.
Making marks in the garden, seeing them change over time and indeed making changes and adaptations ourselves is at the heart of what we do.
The way we achieve networks is to let them happen. We are not rigid about who the project is intended for but we are clear about a certain emphasis to a way of working. We believe in movement, active engagement with things and elements;
Fire, water, earth, plants. We believe that the visual mapping of “Place”, through moving through it and making patterns of value as “Memory traces” that other people see and respond to creates links within people and between people and underpins a common value which is at a deeper level than language but can also support language. A value system that binds people together.
The difference we want to make is to enable people to experience and feel what is important to them and to others by being part of a network which is constantly renewed by their own involvement.
2. We are the right people to do this work because we are doing it. The project was begun out of a need five years ago. That need involved embedding creative and social activities into an outdoor continuous space where there could be a sense of belonging and a deep connection with tangible things. The first people to set the project up were artists and musicians isolated with autism, dyslexia and mental health problems.
In this sense the project has a pioneering “Survival” ethos to it which resonates to new members whose experience has rarely been of joint involvement but more of being a “Patient” or at best, “client”.
3. An interesting thing is happening in the garden and particularly as the diversity of needs and backgrounds has developed. People are learning to accomodate one another. The group sculptures and paintings that we do, create a Meter that atunes people to one another as they alternately witness and act, to balance an art-piece through combined input. This opens channels between people. These channels remain open and people become involved. Verbal people learn that nonverbal people think and express clear ideas and vision. Non-verbal people learn to communicate their needs through selected and trusted advocates who perhaps for the first time are needed.
The balance in the garden is constantly shifting and re-tuning, creating breakthroughs in unexpected ways. This can create moments which are volatile and dramatic but also caring and tender. The space does not go away and so all situations are important in the memory of the garden.
We know there is a need for such a project because it engages people.
It creates clear yet multi-layered roles for people who normally would be kept apart and not meet. We show that their meeting is beneficial. That people can help each other. That where people are invited to act they will. We believe that “Self-Help” groups have an important role to play both in creating networks and relationships and in long-term research into the nature of isolation and fragmentation and how practically and creatively this might be addressed.
We think that a familiar context with an on-going community of people based around “events” which are in essence positive can shift people from a position of dependency to that of Care of others. That this Care of others is a role which is necessary in order for people to feel they have a place in the world and indeed important if they are to have the strength to truly address their own core needs.
We know there is a need for such a project because people keep coming back.
It is a place that they invest hope in.This hope carries outwards to other activities. People begin to address other difficult areas of their lives in practical and intuitive ways. They are clearer about what they like and what is uncomfortable for them. And they feel that they have the right to express their needs and preferences and expect to be listened to.
4. We would use funding by you to assure our continuation.
To do that we need to:
a) Employ a part-time co-ordinator and an accountant.
b) Develop a dis-used store-room into an indoor space that over-looks the garden as a Meeting Place and Activites centre. ( When it rains, we are limited to a shed which is too small when there are lots of us).
c) Employ Mentors to enable high need members at certain stages of their involvement to attend the garden outside of the clubs when it is quiet and to have meaningful contact.
d) Develop a long-term committment to research and to publishing our findings on a web-site. This would include a clear to follow self-help guide of how to set up a project along our broad outlines but which would be unique to each location and the resources at hand.
Finally, we would use our link with you as a channel of on-going communication and support in areas such as organization and networking that our members sometimes find extremely difficult. We would use the link as a gage in validating and interpreting our ideas and vision and would hope to draw on your experience and the suggestions you make in order to create tangible and achievevable goals which can be communicated to others not familiar with our project but whose support is valuble to us.
Ruth Solomon
Founder/Chair
Memory Gardens Sculpture Club
22.9.06
On behalf of: “Memory Gardens” Sculpture Club.
24.9.06
1. We are interested in networks.The same people who are isolated in a framework not of their own making, are viable with ideas and directions that matter, when the context for shared value is there. This context is everyone`s right.
We are experimenting with shape, rhythm and form in this outdoor space, making comparisons with what is muteable in nature and what is muteable in ourselves.
Making marks in the garden, seeing them change over time and indeed making changes and adaptations ourselves is at the heart of what we do.
The way we achieve networks is to let them happen. We are not rigid about who the project is intended for but we are clear about a certain emphasis to a way of working. We believe in movement, active engagement with things and elements;
Fire, water, earth, plants. We believe that the visual mapping of “Place”, through moving through it and making patterns of value as “Memory traces” that other people see and respond to creates links within people and between people and underpins a common value which is at a deeper level than language but can also support language. A value system that binds people together.
The difference we want to make is to enable people to experience and feel what is important to them and to others by being part of a network which is constantly renewed by their own involvement.
2. We are the right people to do this work because we are doing it. The project was begun out of a need five years ago. That need involved embedding creative and social activities into an outdoor continuous space where there could be a sense of belonging and a deep connection with tangible things. The first people to set the project up were artists and musicians isolated with autism, dyslexia and mental health problems.
In this sense the project has a pioneering “Survival” ethos to it which resonates to new members whose experience has rarely been of joint involvement but more of being a “Patient” or at best, “client”.
3. An interesting thing is happening in the garden and particularly as the diversity of needs and backgrounds has developed. People are learning to accomodate one another. The group sculptures and paintings that we do, create a Meter that atunes people to one another as they alternately witness and act, to balance an art-piece through combined input. This opens channels between people. These channels remain open and people become involved. Verbal people learn that nonverbal people think and express clear ideas and vision. Non-verbal people learn to communicate their needs through selected and trusted advocates who perhaps for the first time are needed.
The balance in the garden is constantly shifting and re-tuning, creating breakthroughs in unexpected ways. This can create moments which are volatile and dramatic but also caring and tender. The space does not go away and so all situations are important in the memory of the garden.
We know there is a need for such a project because it engages people.
It creates clear yet multi-layered roles for people who normally would be kept apart and not meet. We show that their meeting is beneficial. That people can help each other. That where people are invited to act they will. We believe that “Self-Help” groups have an important role to play both in creating networks and relationships and in long-term research into the nature of isolation and fragmentation and how practically and creatively this might be addressed.
We think that a familiar context with an on-going community of people based around “events” which are in essence positive can shift people from a position of dependency to that of Care of others. That this Care of others is a role which is necessary in order for people to feel they have a place in the world and indeed important if they are to have the strength to truly address their own core needs.
We know there is a need for such a project because people keep coming back.
It is a place that they invest hope in.This hope carries outwards to other activities. People begin to address other difficult areas of their lives in practical and intuitive ways. They are clearer about what they like and what is uncomfortable for them. And they feel that they have the right to express their needs and preferences and expect to be listened to.
4. We would use funding by you to assure our continuation.
To do that we need to:
a) Employ a part-time co-ordinator and an accountant.
b) Develop a dis-used store-room into an indoor space that over-looks the garden as a Meeting Place and Activites centre. ( When it rains, we are limited to a shed which is too small when there are lots of us).
c) Employ Mentors to enable high need members at certain stages of their involvement to attend the garden outside of the clubs when it is quiet and to have meaningful contact.
d) Develop a long-term committment to research and to publishing our findings on a web-site. This would include a clear to follow self-help guide of how to set up a project along our broad outlines but which would be unique to each location and the resources at hand.
Finally, we would use our link with you as a channel of on-going communication and support in areas such as organization and networking that our members sometimes find extremely difficult. We would use the link as a gage in validating and interpreting our ideas and vision and would hope to draw on your experience and the suggestions you make in order to create tangible and achievevable goals which can be communicated to others not familiar with our project but whose support is valuble to us.
Ruth Solomon
Founder/Chair
Memory Gardens Sculpture Club
22.9.06
Thinking about the garden
THINKING ABOUT THE GARDEN
2007
Five years ago I found a piece of neglected land.
The Garden from the beginning was a place of engagement where physical input brought about results.
This sustained engagement was necessary in order to transform the space and gradually involved more and more people who added their own unique out-look to this whole.
To this day the space is “held” and brought about by all those involved with it. There is an attention to detail and sense of dometsic “care” in holding this space together. Noticing the “rightness” of this order and adjusting it as one would furniture in a living room is about recognising the part we all play in what it is. It comes to represent our relationship to one another.
In the garden the minor adjustments change from season to season and from each unique combination of human interaction at any one time. It may involve planting, weeding, making fires, feeding birds, initiating or responding to new sculptures or designs at various locations, watering plants or simply walking around the garden and taking in the details as part of a whole.
The garden is an extension of our own movement. When we walk through it or dwell in a chosen area, we unfold it.
Whilst Researching for this project I came across examples where places were used as maps that stored information that was released only through making connections by moving through that space . There were “Palaces of the Mind” in the Medieval era and Japanese contemplation gardens connected with Shinto nature religions. Now these spaces have become embedded within computer systems as “virtual” landscapes. All these systems are useful for Autistic people in particular because information depends on physical engagement and there is a slow release which means images do not overwhelm. They are unstead made tangible through direct experience and contact.
The garden then can create a kind of feedback loop where memory can be stored and brought back up by initiating the movement that originally gave rise to it. When the garden is shared by many, these memories build and interlink with others.
This was the original intention behind the garden.
2007
Five years ago I found a piece of neglected land.
The Garden from the beginning was a place of engagement where physical input brought about results.
This sustained engagement was necessary in order to transform the space and gradually involved more and more people who added their own unique out-look to this whole.
To this day the space is “held” and brought about by all those involved with it. There is an attention to detail and sense of dometsic “care” in holding this space together. Noticing the “rightness” of this order and adjusting it as one would furniture in a living room is about recognising the part we all play in what it is. It comes to represent our relationship to one another.
In the garden the minor adjustments change from season to season and from each unique combination of human interaction at any one time. It may involve planting, weeding, making fires, feeding birds, initiating or responding to new sculptures or designs at various locations, watering plants or simply walking around the garden and taking in the details as part of a whole.
The garden is an extension of our own movement. When we walk through it or dwell in a chosen area, we unfold it.
Whilst Researching for this project I came across examples where places were used as maps that stored information that was released only through making connections by moving through that space . There were “Palaces of the Mind” in the Medieval era and Japanese contemplation gardens connected with Shinto nature religions. Now these spaces have become embedded within computer systems as “virtual” landscapes. All these systems are useful for Autistic people in particular because information depends on physical engagement and there is a slow release which means images do not overwhelm. They are unstead made tangible through direct experience and contact.
The garden then can create a kind of feedback loop where memory can be stored and brought back up by initiating the movement that originally gave rise to it. When the garden is shared by many, these memories build and interlink with others.
This was the original intention behind the garden.
FIRE
FIRE
We’re standing round the fire. It has been raining so we sent the kids home. The parents all turned up together after I’d rung one of them on their mobile saying it was raining heavily and all the kids were wet. One man who was visiting the garden had an umbrella but didn’t much like the one kid standing in front of him and falling back on him so as not to get rained on from the drips of the umbrella. He tried walking him over to the Gazebo saying, “I’m going over here. Are you coming too?” Then he walked together with the boy who now stuck to his side, linking arms, and then tried to unravel himself from the boy and deposit him under the gazebo which he then walked quickly away from. The boy just followed him out again. The parents had been in a café together. They collected their kids and the dripping garments here and there lying around the garden and one by one went.
It was a miracle that the fire was still burning in all that wetness, but we’d lit it before the rain had really come down and now it was established, though smoking a good deal from the wood closest to the surface which was wet and getting wetter.
The area around the fire is mud with ingrained footprints of various sizes. The man with the umbrella has also gone by now, some time after he’d been bitten by another boy because he didn’t know about keeping a particular distance from this boy and had overstepped a mark without even realising he was doing it. Though he’d been bitten through a heavy tweed trench coat, somewhere on his shoulder, I think later more than when it actually happened it was beginning to affect him. I think he felt marked.
A man who recently started as a volunteer- who was quiet with his hood up, buried into his own body that day in august- the day of the street festival that we all attended, but since then, since coming to the garden, has talked and moved a great deal and now begins again, whilst walking up and down, collecting more wood, to speak. There is time to listen. It is early and wet and we are all gathered around the fire. I don’t remember the exact words that this man used so tied in with the gestures were they as if he were sewing them together with his own body motions. But I will try to describe the images and scenes that he conjured up in his brief account, spurred on by the fire, the warmth within, that we leaned into, towered over, the mud and spitting rain all around that we drew our backs up against.
He was one figure caught into the movement of a swelling crowd outside the gates of Buckingham palace. He’d been going down there every day and when not directly outside the gates was walking with the throngs around St James park, drifting along the side-lines of the river, with the birds, pigeons and over weight squirrels that every one was feeding. People were crying, holding hands tightly until the blood was squeezed from the fingers and palms, gathering, kneeling in groups, whispering to one another. Fresh flowers at the gates of the palace were piling on top of older ones, cards with countless different personal messages, scrawled signatures, bodies giving way to gravity, collapsible but with a lightness. Tom was entrapped in the folds of such enchantment. There was the magic of a feeling written on the surface of things that he had never experienced before in his writerly academically grounded parental home even though his journalist father had been exiled by the Croatian government for his left wing writing. Yet such matters had never been discussed in terms of how it impacted on the body, on the nervous system, on ones ability to stand or fall, cry and remember. All in all for Tom it had been a bit of a blank because without that impact on the body, on the organs, on the digestion, in that push and pull of an intertwined mobility- of a heaving crowd that locked one in to something, released one out, only to come back the next morning for more- a crowd that possessed you and that you possessed, no memory could catch on- nothing anymore could burn which in his household had become a kind of melancholic letting go- a normalised stretching of the rationalised arguments like dry parchment over a body that had led to this or that being known even whilst going about ones daily life as if nothing much had happened.
Tom grasped the mood that summer of 1996 around the time of his 21st birthday. The summer of the catastrophic car-crash in the tunnel of a Paris ring-road in which the princess, the princess Diana died. It affected Tom like nothing before. He caught on to the mood and felt like he had never felt before.
One day, in the mass of this shared heaving spasm Tom was spotted by his uncle and his uncle took a look at Tom’s pale yet flushed face, his stinking clothes, the euphoric sparkle of eyes drifting well above the body and said, “you don’t look quite right” What is the matter with you?” Soon that phrase took hold and everyone was asking, “What is the matter with Tom?” It got so that even Tom was asking that and in that question, the crowds’ momentum at Buckingham palace halted. Its ability to take him with it halted, and the expression of that very question was re packaged into a curt diagnosis that related to Tom alone, not the crowd, the vehicle of his then expression.
Without that mobile reactive crowd of which Tom was a part he felt washed up, half-dead, unable to express himself. He still remembers the doctor who diagnosed him, a balding man who would not look directly at him but only at his mother, his father or other family members who attended the sessions. If Tom made a gesture it seemed like that gesture was sectioned off, marked around, and examined like something to hold in ones hand. If Tom moved forward in a gesture, using that gesture as a point of convergence as with the palms of the hands pressed tightly between strangers in St James Park, his psychiatrist moved away, his image becoming progressively more and more blurred around the edges. Tom was pronounced psychotic. Then in the conversations that followed- meandering chats and discussions between the doctor and his mother about his childhood or with other family members- out of these “little conversations” he was given the label of autism.
For around six months he was taken to a place where he lived and stayed- ate and slept. It was a frightening place in which were housed other people with strange and explosive behaviours. Tom became caught up in avoiding upsetting what could not be monitored. He began not talking. Some of these people looked strange to him. There was something not symmetrical about their features or their eyes. He looked in the mirror and noticed that his own head was large, that his jaw was very pronounced or so it appeared to him right then, more pronounced than the jaws of his family members. He began to see himself as different; as the result of some terrible mistake for the first time in his life.
We begin talking about the session at the garden. How it had nearly been a catastrophe but somehow hadn’t been. No one had fallen, slipped or been injured. However it did touch on a kind of madness or intensity with the fire in the middle of the ground, left over from the Guy Fawkes night and lit again on request in which everyone was drawn into this central magnet, adults and children, workers and visitors in which some kind of quiet tangible distance between children in entirely different areas and through different practises which at most other sessions mark out their ability to casually touch one another was somehow collapsed into the noise and furore of that centre-stage sucking us into a limited but tangible warmth and organising actions accordingly. It was more then just a spectacle; it was a new pacing device which somehow brought to the scene a heightened rhythm that spun into relief the opposites of hot and cold, rain and fire, in which and through which all dramas, all cataclysmic episodes could possibly emerge and out of which finally came that story about the crash and in its telling our listening stillness.
In the events in the garden of that day we hardly noticed Edward, a boy of 13 who was systematically throwing glass and ceramic bowls, jars and flower-pots against a nearby whitewashed brick wall in the far corner, far from the warmth of the fire, in the driving rain. Consequently that event became as natural as the rain itself; a backdrop to all that was occurring. It was neutralized. We knew it only from the smashed remains of jars and containers found later and pieced back together into the small recollections, sightings and alignments that various people made in relation to Edward’s whereabouts during the course of that session. Never in fact were they known or seen in the event itself.
Nov 23 2009
Ruth Solomon
We’re standing round the fire. It has been raining so we sent the kids home. The parents all turned up together after I’d rung one of them on their mobile saying it was raining heavily and all the kids were wet. One man who was visiting the garden had an umbrella but didn’t much like the one kid standing in front of him and falling back on him so as not to get rained on from the drips of the umbrella. He tried walking him over to the Gazebo saying, “I’m going over here. Are you coming too?” Then he walked together with the boy who now stuck to his side, linking arms, and then tried to unravel himself from the boy and deposit him under the gazebo which he then walked quickly away from. The boy just followed him out again. The parents had been in a café together. They collected their kids and the dripping garments here and there lying around the garden and one by one went.
It was a miracle that the fire was still burning in all that wetness, but we’d lit it before the rain had really come down and now it was established, though smoking a good deal from the wood closest to the surface which was wet and getting wetter.
The area around the fire is mud with ingrained footprints of various sizes. The man with the umbrella has also gone by now, some time after he’d been bitten by another boy because he didn’t know about keeping a particular distance from this boy and had overstepped a mark without even realising he was doing it. Though he’d been bitten through a heavy tweed trench coat, somewhere on his shoulder, I think later more than when it actually happened it was beginning to affect him. I think he felt marked.
A man who recently started as a volunteer- who was quiet with his hood up, buried into his own body that day in august- the day of the street festival that we all attended, but since then, since coming to the garden, has talked and moved a great deal and now begins again, whilst walking up and down, collecting more wood, to speak. There is time to listen. It is early and wet and we are all gathered around the fire. I don’t remember the exact words that this man used so tied in with the gestures were they as if he were sewing them together with his own body motions. But I will try to describe the images and scenes that he conjured up in his brief account, spurred on by the fire, the warmth within, that we leaned into, towered over, the mud and spitting rain all around that we drew our backs up against.
He was one figure caught into the movement of a swelling crowd outside the gates of Buckingham palace. He’d been going down there every day and when not directly outside the gates was walking with the throngs around St James park, drifting along the side-lines of the river, with the birds, pigeons and over weight squirrels that every one was feeding. People were crying, holding hands tightly until the blood was squeezed from the fingers and palms, gathering, kneeling in groups, whispering to one another. Fresh flowers at the gates of the palace were piling on top of older ones, cards with countless different personal messages, scrawled signatures, bodies giving way to gravity, collapsible but with a lightness. Tom was entrapped in the folds of such enchantment. There was the magic of a feeling written on the surface of things that he had never experienced before in his writerly academically grounded parental home even though his journalist father had been exiled by the Croatian government for his left wing writing. Yet such matters had never been discussed in terms of how it impacted on the body, on the nervous system, on ones ability to stand or fall, cry and remember. All in all for Tom it had been a bit of a blank because without that impact on the body, on the organs, on the digestion, in that push and pull of an intertwined mobility- of a heaving crowd that locked one in to something, released one out, only to come back the next morning for more- a crowd that possessed you and that you possessed, no memory could catch on- nothing anymore could burn which in his household had become a kind of melancholic letting go- a normalised stretching of the rationalised arguments like dry parchment over a body that had led to this or that being known even whilst going about ones daily life as if nothing much had happened.
Tom grasped the mood that summer of 1996 around the time of his 21st birthday. The summer of the catastrophic car-crash in the tunnel of a Paris ring-road in which the princess, the princess Diana died. It affected Tom like nothing before. He caught on to the mood and felt like he had never felt before.
One day, in the mass of this shared heaving spasm Tom was spotted by his uncle and his uncle took a look at Tom’s pale yet flushed face, his stinking clothes, the euphoric sparkle of eyes drifting well above the body and said, “you don’t look quite right” What is the matter with you?” Soon that phrase took hold and everyone was asking, “What is the matter with Tom?” It got so that even Tom was asking that and in that question, the crowds’ momentum at Buckingham palace halted. Its ability to take him with it halted, and the expression of that very question was re packaged into a curt diagnosis that related to Tom alone, not the crowd, the vehicle of his then expression.
Without that mobile reactive crowd of which Tom was a part he felt washed up, half-dead, unable to express himself. He still remembers the doctor who diagnosed him, a balding man who would not look directly at him but only at his mother, his father or other family members who attended the sessions. If Tom made a gesture it seemed like that gesture was sectioned off, marked around, and examined like something to hold in ones hand. If Tom moved forward in a gesture, using that gesture as a point of convergence as with the palms of the hands pressed tightly between strangers in St James Park, his psychiatrist moved away, his image becoming progressively more and more blurred around the edges. Tom was pronounced psychotic. Then in the conversations that followed- meandering chats and discussions between the doctor and his mother about his childhood or with other family members- out of these “little conversations” he was given the label of autism.
For around six months he was taken to a place where he lived and stayed- ate and slept. It was a frightening place in which were housed other people with strange and explosive behaviours. Tom became caught up in avoiding upsetting what could not be monitored. He began not talking. Some of these people looked strange to him. There was something not symmetrical about their features or their eyes. He looked in the mirror and noticed that his own head was large, that his jaw was very pronounced or so it appeared to him right then, more pronounced than the jaws of his family members. He began to see himself as different; as the result of some terrible mistake for the first time in his life.
We begin talking about the session at the garden. How it had nearly been a catastrophe but somehow hadn’t been. No one had fallen, slipped or been injured. However it did touch on a kind of madness or intensity with the fire in the middle of the ground, left over from the Guy Fawkes night and lit again on request in which everyone was drawn into this central magnet, adults and children, workers and visitors in which some kind of quiet tangible distance between children in entirely different areas and through different practises which at most other sessions mark out their ability to casually touch one another was somehow collapsed into the noise and furore of that centre-stage sucking us into a limited but tangible warmth and organising actions accordingly. It was more then just a spectacle; it was a new pacing device which somehow brought to the scene a heightened rhythm that spun into relief the opposites of hot and cold, rain and fire, in which and through which all dramas, all cataclysmic episodes could possibly emerge and out of which finally came that story about the crash and in its telling our listening stillness.
In the events in the garden of that day we hardly noticed Edward, a boy of 13 who was systematically throwing glass and ceramic bowls, jars and flower-pots against a nearby whitewashed brick wall in the far corner, far from the warmth of the fire, in the driving rain. Consequently that event became as natural as the rain itself; a backdrop to all that was occurring. It was neutralized. We knew it only from the smashed remains of jars and containers found later and pieced back together into the small recollections, sightings and alignments that various people made in relation to Edward’s whereabouts during the course of that session. Never in fact were they known or seen in the event itself.
Nov 23 2009
Ruth Solomon
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