Manafonistas

Another reason to come to the Island – beside visiting The Beatles in Liverpool – is my deepening admiration for Kurt Schwitters. I cannot count how often I introduced his art to my students.

I traveled to Ambleside, where Schwitters lived a couple of years before he died in 1948. Right now I am sitting in Daisy’s Café, where he used to come to look at the little market across the street, peering for people who he could portray to earn some money with. In this time Schwitters was very poor and already sick. But with still his young love ‚Wanatee‘ on his side happy.

In the little Museum Armitt in Ambleside they show some of his oilpaintings, some collages and pieces from the Merzbarn.
 
 
 

 

Where he lived, he hadn’t much space to produce art. He painted on small pieces he cut off from lino or wood. It was a glorious day for him, when Wanatee found a barn for him, outside of Ambleside. Immediately he started with his 3rd MERZBAU. I went there and found myself in a dark room, where a candle was lit. I saw the painted stonestructures, which appeared to me as precious jewels, which reflect the colours of the landscape in the Lake District. I always wanted to visit his MERZBARN and now I was here. Deeply touched.
 
 
 

 
 

 

Afterwards I went back to the library of the Armitt Museum. There I discovered a collage on the wall, dedicated to Kurt. Signed by Russell Mills. I asked in the local bookstore, who is Russell. The bookseller said: „What a man he is!“ and gave me two addresses. RUSSELL MILLS was not in town. I googled and „doors of perception“ were opened. Russell is a great artist, longlife friend to Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel. With David Sylvian he created „Ember Glance“. In his studio in Ambleside he produces covers for musicians and books. He works on mixed media pieces using light and sound.

Schwitters influenced him a large part in his art. “ … Schwitters believed that, following the mindless carnage of the Great War, and the subsequent shattering of the certainties of the old world order, all that remained was fragments, so that was what he could work with. These ideas, along with those culled from close observation of the natural world, have shaped my thinking enormously. These ideas also suggest a worrying parallel between the dangerous folly of those days and the present fragility of the world with the uncertainty of Trump and Brexit looming over us.“
 
 
 

 

There is no wealth but life  John Ruskin
 
Here in this house in Grasmere the ‚three opium brothers‘, as I call them, were pondering: „I took it – and in an hour, oh! Heavens! What a revulsion! What an upheaving  from its lowest depths, of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse of the world within me …

Yeah, you read this book: „Confessions of an opium eater“. Thomas De Quincey(1785-1859). He had a deepening admiration for  Samuel Taylor Coleridge  (1772-1834). To him Coleridge was the greatest man that has ever appeared. But Coleridge thought of himself that he would not be a gifted poet. He thought of William Wordsworth (1770-1850), that he was the one and only one …
 
 
 

 

In this house, it belonged to Wordsworth, a lot of the most beautiful poems and ballads were written (1. from Coleridge, 2. from Wordsworth).
 
 

What is life?

 

Resembles life what once was held of light,

Too ample in itself for human sight?

An absolute self? an element ungrounded?

All, that we see, all colours of all shade by encroach of darkness made?

Is very life by consciousness unbounded?

And all the thoughts, pains, joys of mortal breath

A war-embrace of wrestling life and death?

 
 

POOR SUSAN

 

At the corner of Wood-Street, when daylight appears

There’s a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:

Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard

In the silence of morning the song of the bird.

‚Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees

A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;

Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,

And a river flows on through the Vale of Cheapside.

Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,

Down which she so often has tripp’d with her pail;

And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove’s,

The one only Dwelling on earth that she lived.

She looks, and her Heart is in Heaven: – but they fade,

The mist and the river, the hill and the shade;

The stream will not flow, and the Hill will not rise,

And the colours have all pass’d from her eyes.

 
 

I must admit that I enjoyed the local pub ‚Unicorn‘ very much. I spent there great nights with Sue from St. VINCENT – we have now a reader on that Carribean Island … :)

In the pub they played great live music. I especially liked songs from
 
 

Pete Morton: Another train

Allan Taylor: The Traveller

Chris Miller: Jamming

Bob Dylan: North Country Blues

 
 

Let me finish with a final quote from John Ruskin, whose home I visited also in the Lake District:
 
we did not travel for adventures, nor for company, but to see with our eyes and to measure with our hearts.