…
John Steinbeck begins Travels with Charley – a meditation on instinct – with the line:

‘I must confess to a laxness’

The statement is made in reference to the author’s disinterest in America’s famous National Parks. Equally, however, it can be read as a prescient (and covert) allusion to the state of inertia that lies on the other sides of instinct. The slack that counterbalances the shot.

In the text, Steinbeck recounts his shock at the abrupt change in his dog’s behaviour while driving through Yellowstone National Park. Usually docile, the dog – Charley – becomes aggressive and hostile upon seeing a bear for the first time. This trigger point, an encounter with an unknown enemy, makes the dog lose control.

The piece ends with the dog’s exhaustion following his outburst.
He was dazed. His eyes held a faraway look and he was totally exhausted, emotionally no doubt. Mostly he reminded me of a man coming out of a long, hard drunk – worn out, depleted, collapsed… I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple.
…

The animals in Mansfield’s recent photo tapestries hang suspended mid-flight, hoisted up by harnesses. They too have relinquished control.

Are they being rescued? Or sent to the slaughterhouse?

Hanging limp, they look exhausted. Their energy all but expended. Depleted, collapsed – like Steinbeck’s Charley.

While the canine in the painting commissioned by Mansfield but painted by an unnamed artist in America bears its teeth – ferocious, fierce – as if to attack predator or prey, the other animals in this body of work (the cast animals with their missing limbs and rough edges as well as those in the tapestries) are entangled in the aftermath of instinct. They are immobilized – from what we don’t know. Already spent, they have surrendered to the slack and the stupor.
…

When talking about the incentives that propel us to explore and travel, in National Parks or
otherwise, Steinbeck notes how ‘one goes not so much to see but to tell afterward’.

It is in the process of telling – returning to a moment in time after the fact through images and objects or words – that we again encounter the (il)logic of instinct. To go off writing, I must escape from the broad daylight which takes me by the eyes, which takes my eyes and fills them with broad raw visions. I do not want to seewhat is shown. I want to see what is secret. What is hidden amongst the visible. I want to see the skin of the light. I cannot write without distracting my gaze from capturing. I write by distraction. Distracted. Whenever I go off (writing is first of all a departure, an embarkation, an expedition) I slip away from the diurnal world and diurnal society, with a simple magic trick: I close my eyes, my ears. And presto: the moorings are broken. At that instant I am no longer of this political world. It is no more. Behind my eyelids I am Elsewhere. Elsewhere there reigns the other light. I write the other light. When I close my eyes the passage opens, the dark gorge, I descend. Or rather there is descent: I entrust myself to the primitive space, I do not resist the forces that carry me off. There is no more genre. I become a thing with pricked up ears. Night becomes a verb. I night.

Hélène Cixous Writing blind: conversation with the donkey

To write is to surrender a part of your cognitive faculties. It is to move tentatively – feeling your way through the words as they form. Writing – at least for me – is an intuitive gesture as much as it is a methodical craft. The writer invokes instinct not in response to fear or trauma (well, not always) but by suspending rational thinking and leaving themselves open to whatever may be dredged up from that ‘night’. That which is dredged up – eruptive instants brought forth from the dark gorge – are fragments that must be collated and gathered together. When we write, we are retrieving remnants from this dark place; souvenirs, stories, snapshots.

To retrieve / to retell – this is a photographic impulse.
…

Even when she is not working with photography, the medium haunts Mansfield’s practice.
Each of the objects in this body of work are proto-photographic forms. There are the casts (trace recordings made through the alternation of negative and positive impressions, like an analogue photograph), the portrait and the tapestries (reproductions that translate and transform existing photographic images).

In all this work Mansfield is attempting to distill – to capture – an emotional state. She is photographing a feeling without a camera. These are snapshots from the dark gorge.

Snapshot / slingshot.

One cannot overlook the violence implicit in this metaphoric terrain.

…

Halfway through writing this text, I’d misplaced the document in the confusion of my computer folders. When trying to locate it I stumbled on another file I’d begun on the 2nd January 2017 that was called ‘bedlam’. What it contained was a short text I have no memory of writing (for that was a turgid time):

This morning I picked up the epic three-part poem It by Danish writer Inger Christensen. She writes of:

the standard expressions, torn loose, flutter around, turned to dust, tentatively seek a form, haphazardly find, for instance, formlessness, the place in ceaseless motion between life and death, the place where the unexpressed in the expressionless still finds expression. Loosely. So downright tenderly.

Loose and unfastened. I find that thought painfully frightening. Where is the tenderness – how can you feel secure and swaddled in amongst the unfixity of the world? When those ropes that tether you to who and what you know are severed – what then? Where can you find tenderness? Is it not all uncertainty and convulsive chaos?

I thought about using the word ‘turmoil’ in that sentence. The thesaurus lists
‘bedlam’ as its synonym. That’s certainly a loaded gun.

Another gun. Another shot.
…

Steinbeck described watching his dog devolve into an aggressor as;
‘nerve-wracking, a shocking spectacle, like seeing an old, calm friend go insane.’
Instinct and insanity – sometimes it’s a fine line. Like the line that demarcates the neutral
definition of the word ‘bedlam’, frequently used to denote chaos, and its origin as the
nickname for a famous psychiatric institution.
…
When I re-read what I’d written in January – now in a very different emotional context – I get a lump in my throat.
Like buckshot.
This happens every time I think I’m about to cry. It’s my body’s impulsive reaction to
emotion, something I can’t control. It is instinctual.
But of course – this is where we land.
…

To act with instinct is to act through feeling.
‘I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple.’
On the other side, we delve into the dark gorge to recount and to tell. And then we’re
spent. Exhaustion seeps in. The slingshot becomes slack once more.

And now I, too, must confess to a laxness.

Isobel Parker Philip

Photos: Docqment