Canoeing Time, 1992 — an illustrated poem
A green NFT illustrated poem collaboration : Wily Guys x Anna Malina.
Our combined thoughts on the project, starting with yours truly:
The past is half-dream, half-memory. The earlier I go back the more dream it is — the primary school, the old homes, dead relatives, masked by layers and layers of stress and fear and inexplicable slowness.
I sometimes wonder if I even existed back then, or did I just emerge from a boring origin myth, as if from the shallow end of a leisure centre pool in a Wiltshire town no-one knows.
The origin myth is this: nothing, then something, who cares.
Canoeing Time, 1992, is an origin myth. Something like it happened, but as the years pass, I become less sure. So like cress, I grew it in the dark for a bit, saw the changes and let them be — added to the myth some made up stuff without a care, gave it a frame. A quantum poem perhaps, both right and most certainly not right, concurrently.
Anna Malina sent me a video of Wuppertal in Germany, in 1902. The flying train of Wuppertal, hanging from rakish steel, and the boys from 1902 wheeled their wheels and the peasants went on below. But this footage was 4K, colourised, new, stable.
Anna’s images are the opposite of this — they tear and distort and misrepresent the past via technology, but by ruining the surface they allow disparate memories and false, glorious pasts to emerge, the reality we dream, that obscures.
You’re left with story — story made of somewhat truth — and I struggle to think of something more alluring.
Anna:
I almost drowned in 1992. Or was it 1993?
It was more banal than it sounds. Most of the time I forget that it happened and then wonder why I am afraid of waters.
I was born in March and yellow is a difficult colour to like. Canoes I know only from stories told about P.E. lessons spent at the lake, by others, not by me. The waters laugh, yet are indifferent as well. What do they care if I float or sink?
There’s something off in each memory that is put into words, into images, assembled in the mind, thrown onto paper, on the screen. There’s something off in my reading of words in a language that is not fully mine. You reconstruct a construct. I reconstruct the reconstructed and fill the gaps with misconstructed imaginings, made with fixed moments — scattered, forgotten, yet preserved in a cluttered space.
There is a certain smell to it. Something is corrupt. The words don’t add up, the images don’t align. And so we’re left with touching points, with sparks of meaning and significance, until the stream of consciousness will wash it all away.
The Poem in full:
—
Army Cadets is where the best
and most intense kids is
their base is on the Avon
river, by and by the old dis-
connect bridge where the most
keen, privy, do suicide a load
well at least three times
in the last local century.
Cadets was a hut and cricket pitch,
in wetter condition, much less size,
plus stacked in iron rungs some
yellowing, no: just yellow
canoes. And hanging in those Cadet
sheds the spray bibs and rows
of oars whose hands are so
loathsome-to-neatness opposed by like
thirty degrees at most. It’s funny
because the land is the land, but at
water height you’re really
zero, cold. And hero might
not be what you thought all along.
—
The water weevils like a nub
at the shore, the pressure of
being here at all just forming
muscled emboss on top no waves
or cool stuff like surfable bores
and they all ignore or just tickle
you and your canoe.
Life jacket style suits you
moves your boobs up, boosts you,
orange, blue spray bib all
cockatoo. A couple of mums
drink tea on the bank trying to
remember what that posh boat
event was, up the Thames
that’s what jokes are said
on the bank that day, they laugh,
gaily, what did you say? Yes, oh lord,
that one. Where’s my hat?
The boys give the grips of their shoes mud,
mud and cold, which by the way was not just cold,
you cannot know.
—
The river laughed at the month (March)
the month didn’t back
the mums capri’d many jokes
that the river if only,
could laugh at too.
Oh, and up in town, just after this,
one local (a girl), same school,
donated her liver to science
but gradually.
She had no intensity.
Canoe Proficiency level 2 test
was pretty hard, though a couple of kids
worked an eskimo under the imperceptible
river slope and came up soaked,
lungs not entirely able to cope.
Mums cheered though. Canoes were put
back on rungs, all the time the
water was like: what. And the
unrecovered Chippenham sons,
only sons, last century anyway,
became Avon, day by gradual day.
—
Anna Malina is an artist and animator from Germany — her physical work is available here, and her digital NFT work is available here.
