On doodles, art, and the ‘ineffable’: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (5)

THE SLEEPING PLACE Susie Campbell/Rose Ferraby from Guillemot Press.

(Pre-orders here https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place)

It is here! My author copies of THE SLEEPING PLACE arrived this week. The book is everything I had envisioned and more. Because I had worked previously with Guillemot Press and artist/archaeologist Rose Ferraby, I was able to draw on my knowledge of what they could bring to the realisation of this project if I were fortunate enough to be published by them again. And I built this into my vision of THE SLEEPING PLACE, dreaming of a book as multi-layered as the archaeological excavations it depicts. In the hope that Guillemot and Rose would come on board, I imagined a book whose design and visual artwork would work in an assemblage with the text itself. I am so excited that this imaginary book is now a real book to share with a wider audience.

Cover of THE SLEEPING PLACE with detail from Rose Ferraby’s artwork plus pieces of chalk picked up from the site.

Early in my discovery that an ancient Saxon burial ground had been excavated beneath the site of my family home, I had the first conversation in what would become a series of formative chats with Rose about art and archeology. We talked about the importance of broadening the archaeological record to include a range of responses to the material traces of the past. These responses might include visual art or a range of other art forms. Poetry of course is one of these forms. I am fascinated by the poetry of archaeology. There is much important work currently being done, including volumes of poetry (Vestiges and Peat) curated by poet archaeologist Melanie Giles with artwork by Rose. Other important books engaging with poetry, archaeology and the landscape are currently being published by Corbel Stone Press, Longbarrow Press and recently, Osmosis Press, as well as other books by Guillemot Press and many other presses producing important work in this field. Rose is of course renowned for her archaeological artwork, including her work on Seahenge for the recent British Museum Stonehenge exhibition (https://www.britishmuseum.org/blog/art-seahenge). It was an enormous privilege to collaborate with her on this project. Her collage work for THE SLEEPING PLACE not only adds another rich layer to the book, image and text working together, but also creates new spaces for the reader’s creative response to the landscape. And, as always, Rose’s work brings an intelligent integrity, compassion and humanity to archaeological enquiry.

Detail from Rose Ferraby’s artwork (inside THE SLEEPING PLACE).

I’ve written in earlier posts about the influence of the book Theatre/Archaeology by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks on the development of my poetic for this book. I want to quote them again in this context. They advocate for a new way of making the archaeological record, including ‘mutual experiments with modes of documentation which can integrate text and image’. They talk about the importance, when coming face to face with the mysteries of the past’s material traces, of creating ‘joint forms of presentation to address that which is, at root, ineffable’ (Theatre/Archaeology, 2001, p 131). For me, addressing the ineffable is able to happen, if anywhere, across the spaces and relationships of THE SLEEPING PLACE’s images, text and design.

But, at a much earlier stage, it was doodling rather than art which helped me shape THE SLEEPING PLACE. Rather than textual, my first exploratory response to engaging with the archaeological archive was with sketches of lively skeletons dancing across geographical maps and site plans. As these cartoon skeletons increasingly started to resemble letters and words, so the ideas for my textual response emerged.

Skeleton doodles combined with grid and map.

Skeleton doodles playing with how to structure text on the page.

And now these little skeleton doodles have a new role in this project, appearing on my hand signed extracts from the text which will accompany the first purchased copies of the book. As I inscribe each page of the published text with these loose-jointed doodles, they emphasise the open-ended nature of this book and the discovery of more and more skeletons just waiting to be made.

Poetry as archaeology and the poetics of archaeology: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (4)

Detail from site plan of Saxon burial ground made by AWG Lowther in the 1920s (this and all images in this post reproduced courtesy of Surrey Archaeological Society)

In previous posts I’ve written about how this project was inspired by the multi-layered complexity of a local Saxon burial site with its Pagan and Christian burials mixed in together and its multiple bodies within each grave. In this post, I write more specifically about engaging with its archaeology. 

The archaeological records of the 1920s excavations of this site are held in my local museum archive. The main site plan was made by archaeologist A W G Lowther. He led the dig in its final stage but his plan incorporates the notes and plans made by an earlier team, using a numbering system based on the order in which burials were excavated. The site plan is crowded with layers of finds and multiple burials, a teeming mass of layered information which demonstrates the choices and decisions made by different archaeologists and the way the understanding of the site and its burials kept shifting and changing. Perhaps inadvertently, Lowther’s map provides a diagrammatic representation of this site as a one in a state of flux and constant revision. 

Site plan of Saxon burial ground made by AWG Lowther

One of the aims of my project was to deconstruct any essentialist notion of this burial ground as a ‘heritage site’ or as linked with a nationalist myth of a supposed Anglo-Saxon ‘Englishness’. The provisionality and revisions of this archaeological record struck me as a useful template for an alternative construction of this place as a dynamic series of changing networks and relationships. Conversations with artist/archaeologist Rose Ferraby were formative in how I shaped the poetics for this project and led to the brilliant artwork Rose has produced (thanks to the support of Guillemot Press) as an intrinsic part of the project. Also formative was the book Theatre/Archaeology by Mike Pearson and Michael Shanks (Routledge, 2001). Pearson and Shanks’ concept of a ‘post-processual’ archaeology suggests that the task for archaeologists is to forge assemblages which, if they are to be authentic and meaningful, must be volatile: ‘the emergence of new meanings depends on the perception of instability, of retaining energies of interruption and disruption’. This was the start of what became the poetry of The Sleeping Place. Archaeological excavations of this burial ground are staged as provisional assemblages of language and visual collage out of whose unstable layers, insistent patterning and ‘misplaced’ anachronisms the reader is invited to re-assemble the past.

But my work on this project also raised bigger questions about the role of art and poetry in relation to archaeology and formulations of ‘the past’, and the importance of including a variety of different kinds of response – statistical, performative, scientific, affective, aesthetic etc – within the overall archaeological record. I hope that as part of the publication of The Sleeping Place there will be the opportunity for further conversation about archaeology, poetry, cultural enclosure and the work of decolonisation.

Satirising ‘Anglo-Saxon attitudes’: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (3) Lewis Carroll, white rabbits, and decolonisation

Visiting the ‘Lewis Carroll’ grave, white rabbits in the background.

It might seem strange to make a connection between Victorian mathematician and nonsense writer Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) and my project to engage with the decolonisation of a ‘heritage site’. The drivers for my project to stage textually the archaeological excavations of a Saxon burial ground were manifold, but one of them was the compulsion to interrogate the discovery that buried in the back garden of my family home in Surrey were, quite literally, the bones of a violent, nationalist myth of a ‘white’ and ‘anglo’-saxon past.

The hillside on which my family home is situated is not only the site of a Saxon burial ground, itself complicated by its use by different local ‘tribes’ as a pagan, and then a Christian graveyard for over 500 years, it is also the location of a Victorian cemetery, a minor tourist site due to its fame as the site of Lewis Carroll’s grave. This grave is the destination for many literary pilgrims and is always decorated with tokens and tributes, including a multiplying number of white rabbits.

Like many graves in this old churchyard, the Carroll grave is now tilted down the steep chalk hill. As the Saxon burial ground spread from the summit of the hill right down to (and possibly beneath) the nineteenth century cemetery, it seemed to my haunted imagination that Saxon skeletons and Victorian bones might be rolling together down the hill, white rabbits and all.

Although Dodgson spent his working life in Oxford, he spent vacations in Guildford where he owned the house in which his sisters lived. He wrote Through the Looking Glass in Guildford, and in 1898, he died and was buried there. This played into my project in a number of ways: ‘whiteness’ is made visible and deconstructed variously in THE SLEEPING PLACE not least through the shrine of plastic white rabbits accumulating against the Carroll grave. Dodgson’s phrase ‘Anglo-Saxon attitudes’ (Through the Looking Glass, 1872) is collaged into my own text. Dodgson was ambivalent about the British colonial expansion lauded by many of his contemporaries and indeed, there are not entirely implausible readings of Alice in Wonderland as an anti-colonialist satire! He coined the phrase ‘Anglo-Saxon attitudes’ apparently to mock an early drawing style but the satirical potential of the phrase has been spotted, taken up and exploited, including by novelist AngusWilson and as the title of a conference examining English cultural self-images. But most important for my project is Dodgson’s interest in language practices and systems, their role in meaning-making and thus in nonsense-making. I approached the writing of this project with a model of practice indebted partly to Gertrude Stein. Stein is of course a later and very different writer to Dodgson, and yet they share areas of linguistic interest. Stein’s experimental writing was often read by her critics as the very ‘nonsense’ embraced by Dodgson. And that crooked headstone of Dodgson/Carroll’s grave, baffling to a sense of the upright, tilts its uncomfortable shadow across the pages of my project.

Page pulled from my sketch-book

‘Three extra heads’: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (2) and the ethical considerations of working with human remains.

Detail from archive photograph, Saxon burial site. Tinted blue to mark my recognition that these are human remains.

In this blogpost, I write about the early stages of the research for THE SLEEPING PLACE project. In my previous post, I mentioned how this project began with the discovery that a Saxon burial ground, excavated in the 1920s, extended beneath the foundations of my family home. In the course of this post, I include some archive photographs taken from the excavation reports. In subsequent posts, I will be discussing in more detail how this project developed into an engagement with the archaeology around this burial site (and will provide the relevant archival references), but as I am using images of human burials in this post I want to acknowledge some ethical considerations right at the start.

How much time has to pass before human remains become simply museum exhibits? Why should it make any difference whether it is hundred or a thousand years? This is one of the questions that emerged through THE SLEEPING PLACE’s explorations and it led to my use of some personal poetic rituals alongside other more procedural and linguistic approaches in the composition of this piece. I will write more about this mixed poetic approach in later blogposts, including my foray into grave robbery as poetic ritual. For now, suffice it to say that I would be uncomfortable to use these photographs of human remains without acknowledging the fact. I have treated these archival images slightly as a gesture, tinting them blue in response to what I find to be their affect.

Almost as I discovered the existence of a Saxon burial ground, England went into its second national COVID ‘lockdown’, and so I was not able to visit the local Museum for many months. However, I was able to access online reports published by the Surrey Archaeological Society. I discovered the earliest part of the burial ground dates back to the sixth century but the site was in use for burials for the next five centuries. Pagan burials mix with Christian graves, alongside burials of peoples from a variety of tribes. Many of the graves were ‘shared’, containing the remains of several different skeletons or parts mixed together, suggesting it may have been, for a time, an execution place or the site of a massacre. Alternatively, bones may have been ritually mixed together to make one ancestral body. 

 My interest was captured by the complexity and multi-layered nature of this site and the way it so dramatically contradicts a nationalist myth of a ‘pure’ and indeed, ‘white’ Anglo-Saxon originary. I knew that I wanted to write about this but how? It was to be a formative conversation with artist-archaeologist Rose Ferraby and my engagement with online extracts from the archival archaeological site maps of the 1920s excavations that opened a way forward. In my next blogpost, I will write about how these key conversations illuminated a more radical and creative approach to staging archaeology in poetry than I had previously envisaged.

In the meantime, here is a link to my reading and discussion of an extract from THE SLEEPING PLACE. I was honoured by an invitation from fellow poet Sian Thomas to be the guest on her Poetry Bath programme on Wild Hart Radio. I had the chance to preview this new project as well as reading from earlier projects TENTER and ENCLOSURES. My reading from the new project is at 32.55 minutes in: Sian Thomas – The Poetry Bath – Susie Campbell – Ep37 – (W88 4-8th Feb 23) What emerged from Sian’s thoughtful questions was a continuity between the earlier projects and THE SLEEPING PLACE in terms of its interest in the anonymous and the marginalised. In TENTER, the poems engage with unnamed refugees and private soldiers as well as the anonymous women who made the Bayeux Tapestry. In the new project, although there are some ‘named’ burials, it is perhaps the unknown occupants of these mixed graves who rise up through this haunted patch of chalky ground.