Laid to rest…a not-so final thank you

Votive chalk laid on Lewis Carroll grave

I have spent some time over the last week expressing my deep gratitude to a number of people who have so generously supported THE SLEEPING PLACE. I want to include on that list all the readers of this blog who have accompanied me through the series of posts on writing THE SLEEPING PLACE. To all you readers, a warm thank you. That series of posts has now been collected together in one place on the Guillemot Press Journal here https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/journal

(I have also added some additional content on ‘linguistic archaeology’ for those of you who have already read all the single posts).

But I realised there was one more thank you to be said – to the bones, chalk, flinty paths, and headstones of the burial grounds (Saxon and later). A gesture of appreciation for all the creative gifts yielded by the stony earth of this place, but also of release. It has possessed my imagination since my discovery of the burial ground in 2020 and so now it is time to relinquish it to make space for new creative hauntings.

I chose Lewis Carroll’s grave as a totemic place for this gesture of gratitude and so I laid a votive piece of chalk, returning to its original site one of the 7 stones taken from a grave to make the poetic ritual described in THE SLEEPING PLACE. Strangely, the Victorian cemetery was not deserted today. There was no-one around but there was an avenue of votive lights leading from the little chapel towards the Carroll grave.

Votive light leading to Lewis Carroll grave

Perhaps these lights were not leading to the Lewis Carroll grave, perhaps they were the marker of a completely different ceremony (Easter related, perhaps?) but I chose to take them as part of my own ritual.

And as THE SLEEPING PLACE reminds us, there is always another bead to be counted and another way of restringing those beads. This is only a temporary farewell to this place as I will be revisiting it in a subsequent project. The high chalk paths of this place also coincide with the so-called Pilgrim’s Way as it crosses through Guildford on its way towards Canterbury.

And something else. Half-hidden in the long grass of the modern Downs nearby (a remnant of centuries-old downland), I come across this:

‘a missing bead’: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (7)

Saxon glass bead (replica), Surrey burial ground, grave 223*

In this final post of my series on the context and processes of writing THE SLEEPING PLACE, I discuss the role of the glass beads which appear throughout the piece and help to string it together.

THE SLEEPING PLACE, as I describe in previous posts, sets out to stage in the text archaeological excavations of a Saxon burial ground situated beneath my family home in Surrey. During the 1920s excavations of the site, a large number of glass beads were dug up alongside bones, pottery, pins and brooches. The strings themselves had rotted and so the beads had rolled apart. These beads were re-strung by museum staff in a creative approach to determining their original order. This resonated with my own project and so I adopted this as an additional textual strategy.

Archive photograph of some of the actual Saxon glass beads found during excavations

This additional textual strategy drew on an interactive performance in which members of the audience were invited to participate in selecting coloured beads and deciding on their order. I used modern Murano glass beads for this performance but as far as possible, I duplicated the colours of the Saxon beads: red, blue, green, silver, black etc. I also made space for the broken and missing beads noted in the archaeological site report. Each bead was linked to a bank of text fragments and so each time the audience reselected a string of beads, this led to a new iteration of the text.

Modern Murano glass beads used for bead-stringing performance

These word-strings are threaded through THE SLEEPING PLACE, forming a cohesive ribbon of repeated words, sounds and rhythm which link together the sections of text organised around burials. And these bead sections of the poem have a further, meta-textual function, figuring and drawing attention to the way words and phrases have been strung and restrung to make the body of the text. They foreground the way my compositional process has sometimes involved treating words as if they were beads– matching them by look and sound rather than semantics, much as the museum staff restrung the beads based on their colours and patterns.  The patterning and rhythms of the way the beads are strung suggests a way of reading the text that takes the emphasis away from the semantic meaning of individual sentences, and directs it towards the changing relationships between words and phrases. As each new archaeological find changed the meaning of previous ‘finds’ for Lowther’s team, so each ‘restringing’ of words creates new possible meanings for the reader to construct.

Part of a Saxon glass bead string (replica)*

Murano glass bead string

But this brings me back to my ethical dilemma around using human grave numbers as part of a procedure of random text generation (see blogpost 4 in this series) and the push-pull between creatively using these material traces to construct a past in the present, and an abiding sense of irretrievable loss: those missing beads. In THE SLEEPING PLACE itself, these tensions remain unresolved and play out across the text, resolving temporarily but then rolling apart, waiting to be restrung.

THE SLEEPING PLACE. Available from Guillemot Press. https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place

Saxon glass bead (replica) dedicated to Rose Ferraby in gratitude for her artwork

*all replica Saxon glass beads made by Tillerman Beads

---

A little piece of grave robbery: writing THE SLEEPING PLACE (6)

Chalk sketch of ‘sleeping’ skeleton

This is the penultimate post in my series of 7 posts about the writing of THE SLEEPING PLACE, my project to stage in text the archaeological excavations of a Saxon burial ground (Now available here https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/poetry/susie-campbell-the-sleeping-place ). The seventh and final post will be next week just before the book’s online launch at 7pm on 13th April 2023 (https://www.guillemotpress.co.uk/events/book-launch-the-sleeping-place-by-susie-campbell-with-guest-reader-alec-finlay)

Seven is a significant number for this book. It operates in a very different way to the numbered burials 1-223 which are used as a procedural ‘hook’ for my use of a textual constraint based on the archaeological site map. 7 is more mysterious. With its accompanying 1 2 3 4 5 & 6, 7 appears in various configurations throughout the book, straddling the gaps between the poem’s sentences much as did my little skeleton doodles in an earlier draft. These more symbolic numbers arrived in the book as a result of a poetic ritual involving a minor grave robbery. This is the topic of today’s post!

‘Burials 15-65’ (detail from text of THE SLEEPING PLACE)

Pen sketch of ‘sleeping’ skeleton used in drafting process, later replaced by numbers

My primary approach to a linguistic staging of a Saxon burial ground involved using various textual constraints and an experimental ‘decentred’ Steinian grammar. However, ethical and affective considerations to do with grief, death and the mysteries of mortality started to assert themselves (possibly due to the time I spent wandering around cemeteries!). As I have written about in blogpost 3 of this series, the hillside beneath which the Saxon burial ground was excavated is also the site of Lewis Carroll’s grave. Dodgson was of course a mathematician and like Stein (who was herself a close friend of mathematician A.N. Whitehead)  found correspondences between mathematics and language as a symbolic and relational system capable of generating meanings beyond the semantic (this is the basis for Carrollian nonsense). As I started to contemplate Dodgson’s interest in mathematics, I found some numerical symbolism and ritual entering the text. Although I am a little sceptical about ritual I am also drawn to its generative power, and so I followed where it led. 

And where it led was to an act of grave desecration. In the book, I describe this incident as follows:

‘May 2021. I perform a ritual at the burial site itself. I find a grave has been opened in the Victorian cemetery in order to repair its monument. The human remains have been temporarily moved but when I look into the grave opening, I see sockets of chalk and knuckles of chalk-flint. Carbon unites bone and chalk in the ground. I steal 7 pieces of chalk from the open grave and form them into the shape of a human body. This creature I lay out on the earth. It resembles a skeleton curled on its side or a foetus. My ritual is galvanised by my grave robbery. The 7 stones now enter my text, virtual subjects hosting my decentred grammar but creating a new question of how to combine the symbolic 7 with the pragmatic 223. The procedures I used to create my initial draft loosen and slide, and something more mysterious starts to animate the text.’ (THE SLEEPING PLACE, ‘Timeline’ notes).

7 pieces of chalk ritual

7 pieces of chalk preserved and later used as votive objects (see blogpost 2 in this series)

This more mysterious and affective approach started to dominate the closing stages of the text’s many drafting cycles. To an extent, this remains mysterious to me but I believe it to be, in some ways, a return of the mortal griefs and terrors initially banished from the text by its procedural response to human burial. I was keen that the skeleton doodles would give way to numbers in the text, not only because of the more open-ended work done by the latter, but also to clarify the visual poetic of the book and to allow Rose Ferraby’s rich, suggestive and profound collage to do its work across the fullest range of concerns (some of them barely surfaced) by the written text.

Detail from Rose Ferraby’s collage, back cover, THE SLEEPING PLACE