When my Grandad died, I didn’t know it at the time, but it was mere weeks before my wife and I moved into our home. After all, you couldn’t move around the house with it. There was a cushioned side seat attached to it where you could sit while talking on the phone. A black phone with the rotating dial sat atop, while in each of the drawers there were carefully placed phone contact books – written in beautiful cursive writing on paper. When you opened the wooden front door of my Grandad’s house, and the ochred translucent glass gave way to the light from the street, dead ahead at the end of the hallway was the phone desk. But there is a piece of furniture sitting in our hall that reflects that wonderful statement of Tim Robinson’s where he imagines how Poll na bPéist [wormhole} might have come into being on the coast of Inis Mór – “What I have imagined exists!” I wonder what it would look like if Xavier Bou turned his lens on us – on how we move in the spaces where we move? Or if you turn a loaf of freshly-baked sourdough bread upside down, you will see how the seemingly random and chaotic movements of your hands (and maybe even a dough hook!) can be rendered visible some time later – by the movement of hot air in an enclosed space, kneading that which contains movements from weeks and weeks ago, and movements from mere hours earlier, in invisible yet palpable ways. Yet using his camera, he has found those traces, and shared them with anyone who cares to look. He had been entranced that of all animal movements, those of birds seemed to leave no trace at all. He has captured the flight paths of birds in the spaces where they happen. Lest this sound a trite esoteric, the photography of Xavier Bou, which I first came across about 4 years ago, makes this real yet invisible movement utterly visible. Whether we are conscious of it or not, we have been threading those ways through cubic metres of filled space for others – who have both come here after us and who thread their own ways along with us. Long before we let go of our last breath, we have been threading ways of being. How we talk how we live how we respond to challenge how we respond or react to uncertainty, unbelief, disbelief how we relate to others, how we include those who seem different – and those who seem not. It might be more accurate to say that we make way for others.īut even then, there is unencompassed truth – whether we have children of our own or not, whether we rear, foster, adopt or not – we are all making ways for others in how we live. We don’t make space really – space, and what it contains, is there. And yet there is much truth that it does not encompass. There is a simple yet brutal truth to what he says. Jim Kerr, lead singer with Simple Minds, was asked in this weekend’s Guardian what happens when we die. Even when we think there is no thing occupying it, there is – at least for as long as we draw breath and let it go. Like the fact that the “space” we see around us is not empty. And there are things that I might remember. There are many things I might learn from an experience like this. No “thing” as such between me and the bread rolls – and yet waves and waves washed my eyes in warmth. It was of course the warmed air rushing out of the oven and rising around my head, creating a mini-oasis effect in my own kitchen. Taking the sourdough bread rolls out of the oven, my vision seemed to shift in waves as I gazed at the curved cracked brown wheaten tops.
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