Wordsworth and Basho: Walking Poets

My work is currently on show at the Wordsworth Museum, Grasmere, as part Wordsworth and Basho: Walking Poets, an exhibition inspired by the work of these two poets. Curated by Dr Mike Collier and Janet Ross, a number of contemporary artists and a composer have responded to original manuscripts by Dorthy and William Wordswoth and facsimiles of haiku by Matsuo Basho, which are also on show.

Flotsam and Jetsam (Portmanteau), 2014, by Christopher McHugh. Porcelain, terracotta, soda glass, mixed media. Photograph copyright of Colin Davison, 2014.

A detail of Flotsam and Jetsam (Portmanteau), 2014, by Christopher McHugh. Porcelain, terracotta, soda glass, mixed media. Photograph copyright of Colin Davison, 2014.

 

Background to my work

My installation, Flotsam and Jetsam (Portmanteau), is inspired by a verse from Wordsworth’s The Ruined Cottage and a haiku from The Narrow Road to the Deep North composed by Basho when he visited the ruined castle at Hiraizumi, Iwate Prefecture, in 1689. The piece aims to compare and contrast both poets’ approach to memory and the ephemerality of the human condition. While Basho’s works often revisit remains, former battlefields and other sites of communal memory, Wordsworth was concerned that human endeavour – both monuments and works of literature – were at risk of destruction through catastrophe and would be outlasted by nature. According to Aleida Assman (2011:94), ‘Discontinuity, loss and posteriority are integral to Wordsworth’s view of the human condition. Although Nature is divine and everlasting, culture is under constant threat of decay and irretrievable loss.[…] Humans rely on tradition, and whatever they create, invent, or compose is in danger of being forgotten.’

This preoccupation is aptly demonstrated by the scene in the The Ruined Cottage when the walker meets an old man resting amongst the ruins of what was once a family home. The itinerant tinker imparts the following:

 [...] We die, my friend.

Nor we alone, but that which each man loved

And prized in his peculiar nook of earth

Dies with him, or is changed, and very soon

Even of the good is no memorial left.

(The Ruined Cottage, verses 68-73)

The cottage and the quotidian narratives it once contained have been left to natural processes of decay. A cobweb hanging down to the water’s edge at the spring demonstrates that what once quenched thirst and ‘ministered’ to ‘human comfort’ has not been touched for a long time. The waters seem to mourn for the family and ‘the useless fragment of a wooden bowl’ is an index of this lost domesticity (verses 82-92).

A similar sensibility is evoked when Basho is moved to tears at encountering the overgrown and crumbling ruins of Lord Yasuhira’s house at Hiraizumi. The endeavours of three generations of the Fujiwara clan have ‘passed into oblivion’ to be reclaimed by nature: ‘When a country is defeated, there remain only mountains and rivers, and on a ruined castle in spring only grasses thrive’ (Basho 1966: 118). Basho composes the following haiku:

A thicket of summer grass

Is all that remains

Of the dreams and ambitions

Of ancient warriors

Both poets were also interested in disinterring for posterity the marginalised histories of the everyday folk – the flotsam and jetsam – they met on the road. Wordsworth writes in The Prelude:

 

No little band of yet remembered names

Whom I, in perfect confidence, might hope

To summon back from lonesome banishment,

And make them inmates in the hearts of men

Now living, or to live in times to come.

(The Prelude, 1805, I, 172-176, cited by Assman 2011:89)

Applying the immutable medium of ceramic to investigate and dramatise potentially overlooked narratives and materialise that which otherwise might remain absent or unconstituted is also a theme of much of the collaborative work I have done throughout the course of my doctoral research. While Wordsworth saw writing as a ‘frail shrine’ (The Prelude V, verses 45-49 cited in Assman 2011:195) and culture as fragile and fleeting, my work takes the premise that ceramic objects provide an enduring means of external storage through which contextual information, including text and imagery, can be preserved.

Flotsam and Jetsam (Portmanteau) is a re-working of an ever-growing installation piece consisting of hundreds of mainly slipcast and press-moulded ceramic components. This work began in 2011 as an installation of porcelain casts of Action Man boots as part of the group show, UnfinishedBusiness, at Wallington, a National Trust property in Northumberland. The exhibition coincided with the bicentenary of the birth of artist William Bell Scott (1811-1890) and my work referenced Scott’s painting, Iron and Coal, which depicts the halcyon days of Victorian industrialism. The boots, inscribed with text derived from a workshop with the Sunderland-based Foyle Street Writers, stood as a signifier of the absent presence of heavy industry in north east England, particularly on Wearside. The piece has subsequently been reworked several times, most notably at a solo exhibition at UAPS Gallery, Osaka, during my AHRC international placement in Japan, where I intended it would develop new resonance in the wake of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami of 2011. In The Narrow Road to the North, Basho visits Ishinomaki, a fishing settlement which was badly affected by this disaster, before walking to Hiraizumi, the site of the ruined castle. This site is approximately 40 miles inland of Kesennuma and Rikuzentakata, both coastal towns devastated by the tsunami.

The inclusion of 'Portmanteau' in the title referes to Wordsworth’s portmanteau suitcace which is on display in Dove Cottage as well as alluding to Basho’s The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel. A portmanteau is also a word formed through the combination of two or more other words, resulting in a new meaning. It is hoped that this piece will synthesise something of the essence of both poets, repackaging their words into a new object with contemporary resonances.

References

Assmann, Aleida. 2012. Cultural Memory and Western Civilization:Functions, Media, Archives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Basho, M., 2005. The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches, New Impression edition., Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics (translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa, 1966).