Niagara in the 90’s; After James Richards, Raking Light 2014, Digital Video with stereo sound.

Safely seated in a small darkened space
In the 1990’s rooms of the Tate
Here to see Inventory’s DaDa reflection on social housing.
London trains and busses have exhausted me.

Onscreen a series of obscure and abstract images
Until Niagara appears.
And now two films are running,
the one on screen
and the one in my memory.

Niagara Falls in December,
the nineties have just begun like a new love affair.
Niagara Falls in deep love
Of crashing foam.

A woman in a yellow trench coat
that her mother bought from a shop that doesn’t exist anymore,
Headscarf and red lipstick.
She waits at the top
for her photo to be taken.
Pose like Marilyn.

But there are no colours
Everything is blank faced, locked up
Frozen solid, danger zone.
The petrified falls and thickly
Iced, icey, walk-ways are
A hazard
Impassable.
Like this fake marriage.

Why does she persist?
Standing on the edge of
the Falls.
High Place Phenomenon in full force
Like falling off the Humber bridge or
down a deep nautilus spiral stairwell
or the Brink of Horseshoe Falls.

Falling would be so easy on this treacherous day
Freefall
Dissolving into the sublime landscape
Evanescing into the tossing waves.
Just for a moment,
just to see what it feels like.

Watching the tide this morning at Seaburn.
The steps go nowhere
Staircase and jetty are swamped by engulfing waters.
so one can only walk so far down
Before The Sea stops me
and makes me stand and stare at the awe and mighty power of the waves
set in bounds.

Sham marriage,
there is only so far she can walk with him
Collins’ Sleeping Fool
Until the sea of misery, dissolution and desperation
Stops her in her tracks.
Brings her to a halt.
Some call it rock bottom.
Full of grit and dirt and hard painfulness.

The steps leading nowhere,
It has something of a ruin about it.
There is a working of the imagination,
filling in of the gaps,
not spelling it out.

Watching the sea smash up the steps
and fizzle down again
only to be laid waste by the next oncoming wave.

What if I were engulfed in the next wave?
What if I am sucked into the swell?
it is a morbid fantasy,
I will not do it.
But I’m interested what it feels like.
Just a bit of dreadful curiosity,
while I watched and prayed by the banister this morning.
This must be a phenomen.

The video rolls on, the spray,
and the deep curve of the lip of the Falls viewed from Goat Island.
I think she is frozen like the Falls themselves.
Immobile with horror,
Of what she has convinced herself into.
If only she could go down
Draw the curtain under the falls behind her
Then she would know
The secret hidden in the cave there
And she would understand
The meaning of the light
The ice
The bitter frozen storm
The leaden sky
The bloodless relationship
The years of neglect and disorder
The loneliness and heart break.
Comprehend it all.

This relationship is in an eternity of free fall
Sartre’s vertigo of possibility, L’Appel du Vide.
Looking in the reflected blade of a knife
Holding a looking glass up to her own
Servitude
Loneliness
Sanctions.

Nearby is a small stone cabin
Blank windows, shabby disagreeableness.
Barred against the storm.

How she wishes to disappear
To melt into the icy drop
Absorbed like a water-colour in the rain
Atomise into cloud.





Images from Wiki Commons. 
 . Niagara Falls, winter. (Figure peering over the ledge.), by Langenheim, Loyd & Co 1858

  .  View from Goat Isand, taken by Daniel Mayer in late February 2006
.   The Niagara book 1893.

Stills from James Richards, Raking Light, 2014.



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