Well, I suppose it’s hardly news any more, but then again, what’s new in a museum?
What I’m trying to say is that I had a very constructive meeting with the Collections Development Panel back in September 2009. It seems like ancient history now. At that meeting all contributions to this blog were thoroughly assessed. And based on this assessment a number of recommendations were made for the next steps. I’m quite excited about some of the initiatives that may come to fruition (and I do mean fruition). I will get round to following through on these initiatives with the museum, and writing about them here.

That’s the good news.

Unfortunately I was slightly thrown just as I was going in to that Collections Development Panel meeting because I found out that all video documentation of my hermitage had been unwittingly destroyed. It was an administrative error. Misplaced enthusiasm and unusual efficiency. But there you have it. Or don’t. A documentary archive erased. For a live artist it’s a big deal to lose all your video documentation. And in a museum, where so much of my negotiation over the past many months had been focussed on saving and cherishing, storing and restoring. The irony was not lost on me.

I was put off my stride a little but then the headlong rush of my life resumed and I was swept away. Many of you will be keen to hear what has happened, or will happen to the objects I presented on this blog. Be patient a little longer and their continuing stories will unfold. There is no simple story of destruction or preservation, but a complex of conversations and activities in which many people are participating.

In the meantime you may be curious as to what became of me. You may even miss me…

Well, to complete this bad news sandwich here is some more good news. You can watch me on a webcam again! Hurray!

During the Manchester Hermit project I wrote a lot about acquisitions, about our deep volitions, and about the nature of ownership. This thinking led me onto a new piece of work which deals even more directly with the process of giving. I would like to invite all of you to come and be involved in the new project. It is called ‘Present’.

I am living for a week with nothing but what you give me. You can find out more at www.ansuman.com/news.html

Is it simple nostalgia or familiarity? Or do I detect a vibration in the space itself, in the floors, the walls, the way the light falls, the shape of the sounds, the rhythm of the stairwell? I feel so comfortable here, though there is hardly anything here but an empty room. The intensity of what I experienced here still reverberates.

I almost don’t dare to, but I can’t help thinking of the Fritzl children. Are they really glad to be rescued? Do they long for the routines of their old home?
Yesterday, in London, I started rehearsals on an upcoming project. A play called ‘Life is a Dream’ which will be on at the Donmar Warehouse. Its central character Segismundo is locked in a tower all his life apart from one day when he wakes in a sumptuous palace. The following day he finds himself back in chains. Suddenly, now, I think he must have been a little relieved to have been locked back up again.
Then there are those sad stories in ‘The Shawshank Redemption’ of the old prisoners who do not know what to do with their freedom.
I wonder if, in my time as a hermit, I have closed myself down or opened myself up. Who can judge?

I feel much freer here than in any of the places I have been in the last few weeks. I have time and space to think and feel. But should I be the only judge? What about my giving away of myself? My promise to serve?
Am I chained to the world? Are you to judge me? Or some higher power? What duty might I escape?
Now there is no camera unblinking at me. My movements feel different. I wonder who I am talking to.

Many of the feelings that have been hanging over me like a fog over the last few weeks have begun to clarify themselves in the last few hours, as I drink a cup of water alone, go to the toilet, lie on a mat, sit in a corner. It is as though these spaces hold the work I have done previously. I can feel my body settling beneath me, into the foundations of thoughts that have accreted over the many previous times I have done exactly the same actions in the same surroundings. Here I am sedimentary.

The spirits of this place conspire with me. Our rhythms align so that this time I can carry on, build on what has gone before. Now I understand the purpose of the past. Although those spirits too have changed themselves, they continue to grow. There are new piles of dust in the old corners, filled no doubt with new families of microscopic creatures I cannot see or hear. There are two daddy-long-legs in the toilet. They bring autumn. The air, unwarmed by my body, feels slightly cooler, though all of Manchester is bathed in the same rain. But all the spirits remember me and have held my place. Like infinitely solicitous servants they invite me to carry on where I left off.

So, suddenly, I realize the deep root of my sadness. I am mourning the loss of my self. I have so many aspirations. They may even be considered noble, but ultimately they are just mine. Things I want for myself, tasks I want to achieve, understandings I strive for, learnings I want to hold. Books, instruments, knowledge, all my work for enlightenment is a collection for my use. I may temper this truth by saying that I want to share what I collect, it is for wider benefit. But ultimately it remains a collection of myself. A heap of me.

What I undertook to do at the end of my forty days was to serve. This is the hardest thing of all. The monastic vow of obedience is terribly unfashionable in a society of self improvement, self realization.

Paradoxically, to fully walk the hermit’s path it is necessary to leave the hermitage.
Marriage and fatherhood teaches me how self-centred I really am. No relationship is perfect because I can never have all that I want, can never be free to do exactly what I please. To devote oneself to the welfare of others means to give up my own aspirations.

My own selfishness consists of dreams glamourized by my own nostalgia. I want to work on my own body, to make it stronger, healthier, more beautiful, I want to capitalise on my own talents and have the world gaze in admiration of what I have achieved.

Anyone who finds themselves in a situation in which they have companionship without ever having to compromise on their personal aspirations and ethical choices is very lucky. They never need to experience the sadness of this particular realization. There are many blissfull couples. Or at least there seem to be. Perhaps people from more conventional backgrounds, or the same unconventional backgrounds, can find close fits with one another. I know I am a misfit however, an immigrant torn between cultures, continents, languages, disciplines. I pity the person who is just as driven by all the same obsessions as me. I’ve never found them.

Since leaving the Tower, as I have tried to test my arty conceit against the real world, I have been overcome by a despondency it has been difficult to grasp. Only now, returning to this place, which feels like home, can I see it. I am mourning the person who must die.

Bereavement is the most difficult enemy, tainting everything, impossible to escape. To give up what is familiar, what I relied on, what I based myself on, to let it all be washed away and to be swept up into the ongoing world is very, very frightening. What if I don’t like it? What if I am never happy again?

I’m not really sure I can do it. I feel such rage and resentment at the obstacles between me and my muse. In this artwork of my life I have vowed to devote myself to that very obstacle. To kill myself trying. This is such a difficult thing to do. And yet I am also laughing at myself, my earnest conflation of art and life. Why not just relax, stop being so up myself?

Anyway, now it is time to stop. I have to clear up this Tower, remove all trace that I have been here, and then attend the meeting of the Museum Collections Development Panel to finally draw a line under this project.

‘Solitude’
by Lord Byron

To sit on rocks, to muse o’er flood and fell,
To slowly trace the forest’s shady scene,
Where things that own not man’s dominion dwell,
And mortal foot hath ne’er or rarely been;
To climb the trackless mountain all unseen,
With the wild flock that never needs a fold;
Alone o’er steeps and foaming falls to lean;
This is not solitude, ’tis but to hold
Converse with Nature’s charms, and view her stores unrolled.

But midst the crowd, the hurry, the shock of men,
To hear, to see, to feel and to possess,
And roam alone, the world’s tired denizen,
With none who bless us, none whom we can bless;
Minions of splendour shrinking from distress!
None that, with kindred consciousness endued,
If we were not, would seem to smile the less
Of all the flattered, followed, sought and sued;
This is to be alone; this, this is solitude!

———

Let me remind you now that my hermitage, in seclusion and at large, is coming to an end and this discussion will soon close. On September 3rd a public meeting will be held at the Manchester Museum. The Collections Development Panel of the Museum will be there, along with the Museum Director and myself. Anyone else who is interested is welcome to attend.

At this meeting all the discussions on this blog will be assessed. I have opened up a space for us to collectively consider the value of museums and also things in the world. Anyone with strong views on how we should treat our common heritage still has a few days to make their ideas known. Remember that a single solitary voice with an idea about a particular object is unlikely to be successful. I would urge you to gather support from others if you are serious about your proposal. You will have to work to inspire others with your vision. You could urge your friends and family to give their support if other interest groups are not forthcoming. Any community will be more convincing than none.

Just as important is to support the proposals of others which you feel are worthy. Otherwise the status quo is likely to continue.

Otherwise, perhaps we can move on to consider the disposal of the rest of the objects.
Although I will be leaving the Tower, there is no need for tearful goodbyes. By the magic of cyberspace I will still be here! This debate should continue until the final face-to-face meeting which is scheduled for 3rd September. I will also be continuing to post my thoughts until then, as a hermit out in the wild.

One decision has been arrived at quite easily. So please let us now focus in more detail on the 40 remaining objects. If you feel strongly about an object you will have to attract the support of at least two other people. And if you agree with someone else’s claim please say so. As Gunter Grass said, ‘The job of a citizen is to keep his mouth open.’

I imagine we will be able to arrive quite easily at a consensus on each object. It is in the absence of an explicit consensus that the Earth is raped, pillaged and slaughtered.
Many of the objects are simply markers for much larger collective thinking that needs to happen. For example, should the museum keep a beehive? Or make more space for sparrows in its grounds? And more importantly, how will you personally follow that thinking through into action?
Many of the objects might reveal themselves through comparison. How exactly is that first skull I showed different from this last one on which my face is arranged? Do we feel the same way about a tooth as a skull? What’s the difference? And why is it so different if it belonged to a human or another animal? Will we one day look back on our treatment of earwig families in the same way as we now look back on our treatment of Aboriginal Tasmanian families? This is an invitation to examine opinions that we may imagine to be beyond question, or which we’ve never bothered to examine.

This is also an invitation to think collaboratively and transparently. If a mutual agreement on any object is not forthcoming and opinion is sufficiently polarized, then there will be a vote, and the matter will be finally discussed in person on 3rd September.

Of course, if no one speaks up or is willing to care for an object then it will disappear or turn into something else. This was happening before I turned up and it will go on afterwards.
Please bear in mind that my purpose from the beginning has been to reveal and explain our personal implication in the value of some of the things kept here.
All memory must be exercised. If we do not remember what we know then we may as well not know it. We then act in ignorance.

If a museum is a collective memory it must be exercised collectively. Every collection has to be occasionally recollected.
I hope that by my provocation I have reminded us of some common knowledge, and perhaps even stirred up some uncommon knowledge.
This effort will be wasted, however, unless it leads to action. Only in making an active choice is something really valued, made sacred. I have dedicated my whole self.
What will you sacrifice?

I was asked to write some short pieces during my time here which would be displayed on the BBC Big Screen here in Manchester. It’s a big outdoor screen in Exchange Square that shows a constantly changing programme for shoppers and passers-by, so that no one has to miss anything. Of course I never got to see it myself. I think my contribution was for the ticker-tape news summary that runs along the bottom of the screen. There was a thirteen word limit but they said they could probably put a couple of messages together to be shown every now and then. So I took it as a nice structural constraint. Here are some thirteen word lines, in couplets, for the BBC news.

I am no more a hermit than these words you read are real.

These marks remind us how to speak. I present the joy of listening.

World news spins on like a wheel. Does it stop at my axle?

In silence I hear the cries of history bearing down, hope flying up.

I am the opposite of the news. I watch what is fading away.

And wait without searching for that which is yet to come into being.

As I delve into the body, it cracks open, cools, disintegrates, dissolves, evaporates.

Puffs of thought are released. One drifts by saying ‘I’m not a metaphor’.

My own feelings are most pressing until on TV I see others feel.

But who’s on? My dog? A bird flying past a cloud? The cloud?

Axes of sense intersect. On my approach the invisible stridulation of crickets stops.

Do they sing of gods, as I might do when I am interrupted?

Sharing this body of an ape with creatures too small to be seen

And this moment with a time too long to remember, I stop fighting.

I’m no roving reporter. There is no Outside Broadcast van. Everything seeps in.

Beside still water, I ride through galaxies and all the stars come round.

My thoughts float on the surface of this body like a glistening slick

From a ship of fools on the Pacific. Whale song ruffles the light.

Here is an example of the voting form. This is not the actual form, just an example.
In order to be entered on this form at least two people will have to support you. You can put yourself forward but you will have to have at least two other people support your claim.
If no one claims me then, like any of the other objects, I will just sink back into the obscurity I came from.

View This Poll

I am a packet of information sucking at my skin clinging to and separating every hoarding. Chords, horns, bells announce desires I did not know I felt. Sirens entice me into their delirium.

I think the ring is you. The call is to say a text is here. I open an envelope while reading an email exhorting me to open my window and wander enchanted through it, always forgetting where I’ve been and where I am in the deafening glory of the promised world.

Each bit in this quicksound is shaped to suck its neighbours in while slipping away on a fluid film. From this terrain the cold emptiness of the sky seems like a liberation. The falcon sees only one thing.

I string a snare of words to catch every charged pulse but love and hate and play feints through the clauses. Word falls through word. And sense swims in the air between us thinking like an animal, its body changing. Our pages drift and trawl over every liquid surface searching for the fugitive lover. But the breath can never be caught.

The stacked towers of my conversations are archived in folders. I can cross-check the blocks of my history like a city. Misunderstandings, corralled and hobbled, cower in sheepish bars. The wilderness is penned. Busily I flag and mark and cipher space while the sky gets bigger and bigger. And a falcon rests on its arms outstretched.

So I’m not a hermit because I’m on the internet?
It’s true I miss the quietness of a more unplugged retreat but here I’ve wanted to ask how alone any of us is, and how together?

There is a screaming arrogance in our assertion that to be away from humans is to be alone. It’s the arrogance that allows us to close our fist around a frog, brush away the earwig’s quiet story, snatch the seat from under the Taino, uproot the sparrow’s home. ‘Only people like me count’, it says. With that kind of attitude it really is a lonely world. And it gets lonelier and lonelier. In the middle of a city, surrounded by a million single-minded trajectories and averted gazes, on the internet where there are no consequences, that’s where you’re alone. But in a forest every creature is part of a millions of years old dance. In a desert even the clouds and the dunes tell you stories. There is a sense of belonging from which human arrogance has held itself aloof.

A great shift happened when humans invented writing. I’ve spoken elsewhere on this blog about tools and agriculture but surely one of the most significant technologies in human evolution must be writing. The moment when an object in the world became represented by something other than itself, by a sign, it began to lose its own particular voice and began to be relegated to a category for a human purpose.

Writing began as a means of asserting ownership, of counting possessions and trading in them. It was an assertion of control over objects. Writing conveyed a magical power. Spoken language already does this to some extent but it is still tied in to a memory which is housed in a body with its particular sound and breath. Speech still has a music which cannot be captured and tamed.
But writing grew far away from this breath. It progressed by leaps and jumps from pictures to rebus to phonetics to a full alphabet to the printing press and now to the computer. In that process of evolution humans have become gradually unmoored from the particular moment of connection. The life of the thing itself has diminished as human power has increased.
Maybe the key difference between an oral and a literate culture is its attitude of dominion over the world.

Here is a bundle of reed pens from a 13th Dynasty Egyptian tomb. They are an example of just one step in the long journey between smeared pigments on cave walls and the push email and cloud storage of my iPhone. Maybe you’re right, I can’t be a proper hermit with a computer. In the interests of the silence that leads to greater communion, perhaps I should do away with these and all the writing that has trapped the world in a net.

But the hermit has always been a function of highly sophisticated urban societies, and hermits have always kept some vestiges of connection with that society, a Bible, an alms round, medicines, at the very least the language of thought. Perhaps for a post-urban, hyper-connected society a laptop is the new Bible and begging bowl and skull. You don’t need to go the Himalayas any more to find a teacher. After all the work of silence is about attitude not altitude.

And indeed where can we go now to find wilderness? Hermits have traditionally sought wilderness as an antidote to the hall of mirrors that is a human city, in which we see nothing but reflections of human concerns. Whether they go to listen to Nature or God, self or the more-than-human, hermits have always had an inkling that there are other voices to be heard if we can get away from the whine of our own obsessions.

Where is that wilderness now? The hermit goes there not to be alone but to find a greater communion. The vision quest, the walkabout is not for solitude but to meet with the people we normally shout down.
Buddha, sitting alone under his fig tree, was visited by apsaras, demons and gods, ultimately by Mara himself. Jesus too hung out with the devil in the desert.
Now all the avatars are on the other side of that screen you are looking at as you sit there. Alone.
Well. At least we’re alone together.

By making a conflagration of my heart

You have done well.

My incense, if it lies unburnt, pours no perfume.

My lamp unlit gives no light.

What you’ve done is good, oh merciless one.

When my mind is mired in unmindfulness

Your touch is a shock, that is your blessing.

Timid and confused in the shadows, my eyes cannot see you.

Strike me with your lightning and make a bonfire of my darkness

Ei korechho bhalo, nithuro hey, nithuro hey, ei korechho bhalo

Emni kore hridoye mor teevro dohon jalo,

nithuro hey, nithuro hey, ei korechho bhalo

Amar e dhoop na purale gondho kichhui nahi dhale

Amar e deep na jalale dayena kichhui alo

Ei korechho bhalo, nithuro hey, nithuro hey, ei korechho bhalo

Jokhon thake ochetone e chitto amar

Aghat she je porosh tobo, shei to puroshkar

Ondhokare mohe laje, chokhe tomaye dekhi naje

Bojre tolo agun kore amar joto kalo

Ei korechho bhalo, nithuro hey, nithuro hey, ei korechho bhalo

- Rabindranath Tagore

The most precious thing in the world cannot be kept in any museum. It cannot be stored anywhere.
What doesn’t remind us of that fact distracts us from it.
Once our most beautiful and valuable things would have been displayed in a cathedral or a temple or a sacred spot in the landscape. The central purpose of this place would have been not to conserve or venerate the object but to support the activity of prayer.
Whether performed in a temple, mosque, church, forest, desert, mountain or river, prayer is the act of relinquishing the small mindedness one can get stuck in. It is the letting go of self-centredness to appreciate the flow of a larger pattern within which one is only a tiny part.

Selfless observation should not be confused with the idea of some sort of God. Over the last few hundred years objectivity and faith have found themselves head-to-head. But this is a futile battle of ideologies. Without the inner experience of selflessness, only the outer dogmas remain. Now Scientism has taken over from Religion to become a new orthodoxy. Its miracles dazzling us on every side. Museums are its cathedrals. But science leaves out an important part of the world.

What if the knowledge that the scientific method uncovers could be not just intellectually understood but consciously, physically experienced? Would we then act wisely, in practice rather than in theory? If we could actually feel all the costs of our actions personally, would it still be possible to dominate, manipulate and inflict pain on the world around us.

Unfortunately science is still incomplete because it holds compassion outside its field of enquiry. Our rationality cannot encompass the experience of anything, least of all pain. It can study it from the outside, experimenting on others, mapping their suffering, inflicting it here, alleviating it there. Science can chart change at every level of the universe from the atomic to the cosmic. Its abstract patterns can be displayed in the glass cases of museums to inspire our awe. But the most important fact can never be kept in any museum. The experience of change is something that can only be felt in oneself, with one’s whole self, heart and mind. Without this conscious, personal experience even the most beautiful museum is an empty shell, an unlit lamp, an unburnt stick of incense.

One could keep someone else’s experience in a museum, as a live exhibit. Just as one could keep a recording of a song. But this would simply be someone else’s performance. Unless it inspires the conscious experience of change in oneself it is simply a spectacle to gawp at, a commodity to consume, a dangerous distraction.

The museum, the temple, the sacred spot, even the lab, can be a place to remind and inspire, but surely the point of that reminder, that inspiration, is to cultivate the practice in oneself, to actually personally pray. When one is practiced enough it is no longer necessary to come to a special place to be reminded. The world becomes a constant reminder. We find ourselves already living in a temple.

There is a natural cycle throughout history whereby, from time to time, moribund trappings are destroyed to make way for a fresh living practice – the fall of Rome, the English Reformation, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, forest fires, asteroid impacts, ice ages, supernovae…

Perhaps we are in a time of great change now, or perhaps it has always felt like that. When you are drifting off, even a gentle touch on the shoulder can seem like a violent shock. But we should be thankful for that violence. The invisible damage we inflict in our sleep is much more terrible. We are asleep at the wheel of a vast armoured machine with our foot on the accelerator. We’ve already razed villages, forests, swamps, and glaciers. Now we’re coming up to a cliff edge.
Something has to go. It’s either the the whole tank with us in it, or the dreams we are so enjoying. Now that we are at last half awake we can choose which is more valuable.

There are many beautiful and inspiring objects in this museum and it would be a shame to lose them, but there is one thing more important than all the others and it cannot be stored anywhere. If a museum could become a place of prayer I would come and live in it.

We are now approaching the culmination of my forty days in this Tower and while I am still a long way from destroying myself completely, that is my ultimate aim.

So, in this spirit of self renunciation, I am now offering myself.

I believe it would be inconsistent of me to consider my person as having a special status in this collection of objects. So I now offer myself to you as the final object.

On August 5th, at the end of the 40 days, anyone who cares to may take me.

I promise to do my best to give myself fully. I undertake to do whatever I am asked by this new curator. They may treat me me exactly as they wish. My fate will be in their hands.

The kind of relationship this person wants to create will be up to them. They may use me purely for their own purposes, or they may choose to consider whatever fears and desires I may still have. The choice will be theirs.

For my part I will offer myself as a gift and attempt to observe the surrender of what I have normally considered to be mine.

Because you may have to make travel arrangements to come and collect me, I am giving you a few days to come forward with your proposals. Once all proposals have been gathered you will have 24 hours, from midnight to midnight (GMT+1) on Wednesday 5th August, to vote for one amongst these proposals. The recipient of this final item is then free to come and collect it at any time thereafter.

In the event that no one comes forward I will continue to work alone towards my own extinction.