I went into the Glen today plugged into a podcast of a sonic walk commissioned during this lockdown by the /centre Cultirel Irlandais.
“6 March – Rachel Ní Chuinn, sound artist – Scotstoun, Glasgow“
I was curious to experience how our walks might interweave and layer into one another. I hear Rachel talking of her surfacing in Glasgow, she speaks of belonging, and the sound of the empty buggy as she returns home after dropping child to nursery, this sound placing her in the material context of her environment, the place where her daughter will grow up with a Glasgow accent. Rachel tries to find words for the movement of an underwater weapon built upstream. She speaks to herself (and her audience ) of the trident missile not swimming or sailing but (lost for more precise words), going, up the Clyde.
I am aware of words for moving as I walk and hear her speak of these things, This layering of perception shapes the environment sometimes in cartoonish ways, and I see the manhole covers, bringing a sense of the submerged, and I remember my thoughts of yesterday – the hollowness under the Glen encapsulating many echoes past, present and unknown.
Plants are bursting forth everywhere, i see my first hogweed and feel somewhat shamed that I haven’t documented this sooner, at first showing, but these things I know grow fast – we’ve had the rains and now we are in March and full steam ahead for cleavers and carrot family members and a spiral of something unkown that will spring forth immanently.
The scent and pencil factory is an ever changing backdrop, today there are new heaps, of laurel and grass clippings, adding to the aroma and form.
I visit T the tree‘s plantations, camouflaged for now against the dead bracken, there’s a sprig of budding birch, another of full leaved holly and the crab apple is sprouting it’s green shoots – each playing catch me if you can in its own fragile terms in the Glen park for all. I wish and strongly will for their survival.
i pass the yeti homes of last year’s old man’s beard, draped over more supple perennial growth, these framed openings always an invitation.
Homeward bound I remember the cutting of the spindle T the tree gave me yesterday as i catch sight of some pussy willows, and having no tools, I am twisting this year’s shoots as a Glen doggy sniffs me out, his walker L seems confused, here I am embarrassed. headphones in ears and pulling at branches , embarrassed until we share stories of grappling with willows and find our tracks. I am glad to see L and especially today as I knew her brother J, a horticulturalist, had close connections with the park, and being a right tree in the right place kind of a man might be the perfect advisor for T the tree in his sentient approach to geurilla planting.