Labyrinths
11 August, 2009
The Great Square has no corners.
The Great Square has no corners.
“Introduction: A lost corner is defined as a point of a survey whose position cannot be determined by the original monument or by acceptable evidence as to where the original monument was. (Brown, et al, 1995)”.
The pegs are brightly coloured, hard plastic primaries and an industrial green in the sunlight. They contrast with the white sheet her fingers hold as she hangs it from the line, her wedding ring glinting gold. Morning town traffic murmurs, with an occasional horn blast, from beyond the trees at the bottom of the sloping lawn. The woman walks slowly back to the house, makes a detour to pick up a child’s bicycle lying in the shade of a lilac tree, wheels it to the open back door and leans it against the outside wall, its shadow for company.
The house interior is cool and bright, and the TV is on in the corner by the large window – a map with arrows and a scrolling banner beneath it, and then footage of a city. Against clear blue sky, palls of black smoke in the middle distance rising and rolling to disappear off the left hand edge of the wide screen. She stands at the open fridge in the shining kitchen contemplating what to make for lunch. She bends and reaches in, just as the phone rings.
“After exhausting all possibilities of recovering a corner location and making the determination that a corner is lost, the surveyor must often determine how to reestablish the corner position in order to monument said position for a client”.
“But I fucking love you!”
“I’ve told you too many times…….. I love you but….”
“But what??”
“But I can’t be doing with this any more. I just can’t………..”
“Jesus Christ. It doesn’t have to be like this”.
An untidy kitchen in an upstairs apartment, an open window with potted herbs on the sill above a sink filled with unwashed plates and pans. They sit at the small table with last nights wine bottle, a camera, some post and bills between them. Posters, photographs and postcards, some tilting, on the walls. Outside the noise of the warm street, cars and voices, and every few minutes the clack-clack, clack-clack of a train slowing momentum, then metal brakes. The white cat looks up and tentatively mews for milk.
“The retracement surveyor’s duty is to identify the original location of a corner – where the original surveyor originally established the corner, not where the original surveyor should have established the corner”.
As he looked at the computer screen, he lowered his head and pinched the bridge of his nose, thumb and forefinger pressed into the corners of his eye sockets. The sense and quality of the dream he had woken from in the morning still present both in his mind, and somewhere within his chest cavity.
He’d been a child again, standing at the bay window of his parent’s bedroom in the house they had lived in at the time. It looked down upon the garden, and over to the right was the driveway. He watched his father’s car, a big, old, two tone estate, going down the drive, laden with his parents and sister, and filled with luggage. So much that there was a roof rack covered in boxes and suitcases all roped down. They didn’t look back up to the house, or back at him, and as he watched, he noticed that the bricks just below the window were starting to fall out, and away, to land in the garden below.
“The retracement surveyor is somewhat “hamstrung” when a corner is determined to be lost in that he no longer has any evidence of where the corner was originally located, except for a legal description or map specifying the location of the lost corner with respect to other corners along the boundary”.
She knew she’d kept it. She almost remembered where, but now, surrounded by boxes, open drawers, scattered tissue paper, clothes and objects that she had not seen for years it was nowhere to be found. The apartment was full of sunlight, making polished surfaces gleam and ornaments and the glass of the many drawings and paintings in the room reflect and cast patches of light and small rainbows on the walls. The windows looked out high over the city.
Earlier that morning she had stopped in the small square on the way up the steep, winding streets from the city centre. Just to park the car, walk over to the stone wall and look out over the buildings and roof tops to the haze beyond. There was a shop, with a small frontage on a sharp corner, so that the building became wider as the streets on either side diverged. The shop sold bric-a-brac – and was not the kind of shop she would enter. It was in one of the narrow front windows that she had seen the small, red shoe, alone on a wooden box top, surrounded by crockery, stringless musical instruments, ageing domestic electrical appliances. She’d stared at it and walked inside, asked to see it, held it in the crowded gloom of the shop. Cracked and faded red leather with a pattern discernable, a wooden sole with studs around it, some missing, attaching it to the upper which had laceless holes and a flapping tongue. It was extraordinary to stand in this dusty darkened space and feel so much time and distance focus on this object in her hands. And she had bought if for five francs.
Returning to the apartment, she had placed the shoe carefully on the table in the hallway, made coffee, and had started her search. Where she thought it was, where she may have thought she’d placed it when they’d moved here over forty years ago, in drawers long unopened, the back of wardrobes and cupboards, climbing precariously on the small step ladder to look on top. But nothing. Nothing except the certainty of the memory of a spring day, hurried departure, carts loaded, horses harnessed, smoke slanting way across the fields and woods, rooms and dogs she’d never see again and two red leather shoes tied by their laces, swinging from a small iron ring on the back of her mothers pony trap.
“Reestablishment Methods: Six methods of reestablishing lost corners for irregular parcels have been identified. These are described in the following paragraphs.
1. Record Angles and Distances – The retracement surveyor may choose to use the record directions (bearings or azimuths) contained within the description or map to compute record
angles. The record angles may then be used with the record distances to reestablish the lost corner positions. This method may be seen as somewhat arbitrary in that it is dependent on the
surveyor’s choice of existent corners to use as a basis for the reestablishment”.
“When you’re driving in a blizzard, right, y’know, whichever direction you’re going in, the snow always comes towards you”.
“Like smoke from a bonfire”.
“Yeah…….. maybe like that…….. but I’ll tell you what, I had a lift from a lorry driver years ago, and he said that he had driven trucks up beyond the Arctic circle up in Finland, and to save going round like a really long way round, like a ziggedy-zaggedy coastline or whatever, in the winter they’d just drive straight across these frozen lakes – just drive onto them and just truck straight across. He said some were so bloody big that at night you’d have to navigate and know where the North Star was to get a bearing and if you got it right you’d see the tiny lights of where you’d want to be come closer and you’d get there. But some guys got lost and never made it, and other guys left it too late in spring and the ice cracked and they just went through and down to the bottom.”
“ You made that up!”
“I fucking didn’t! I know it was ages ago, but he was in one of those old Volvo F88 flat fronted things ‘n it was up near Carlisle going North”.
“Alright! Alright! I believe you!”
“2. Record Angles – This method again requires the surveyor to compute record angles from the record directions. The record angles are then used to compute directions, based upon the
positions of two existent corners, from which the lost corner position is determined by the intersection of two lines”.
Must have been thirty or forty years ago – slam door trains with netting luggage racks, and a bar where you were served cans of McEwans beer, a plastic cup of weak tea or a ham sandwich from a strange little booth with a scarred and patinated fold-down wooden counter. He knew he’d been heading North, but had forgotten why or where to. Some Northern city like York or Newcastle. He’d sat opposite an old woman who talked of Leamington Spa and grandchildren and had fallen asleep. And opposite a woman in her thirties with a pale almond shaped face, pale almond shaped finger nails, pale almond coloured hair and a pale almond colored dress, and he’d wondered about her pale almond coloured underwear beneath as the train passed saw-tooth factory roofs, canals, acres of rosebay willow herb and densities of back gardens. Then, as it approached an oblique bridge, he glimpsed on one of the abutments built of dark engineering brick, that someone had painted in white capitals “NOTHING LASTS – NOTHING IS LOST”.
“3. Record Distances – The retracement surveyor may choose to use record distances to reestablish lost corners from two existent corners by intersecting circles having radii equal to the respective record distances. This “circle-circle” intersection technique is also known as a “distance-distance” intersection”.
Headlights occasionally washed across the walls through thin curtains and then left the room in near darkness. She lay on her back in the strange bed, staring at the blank ceiling and trying to imagine all the bathrooms in the world, knowing that however she imagined a bathroom, somewhere there would have been one exactly like it. Small poky ones with white walls and basic fittings. A bathroom with three sunken basins let into a vast, long onyx slab and a window with a view onto an ocean. A narrow one with crappy, cracked, patterned tiles and tidemarks around the bath. One with polished floorboards and a roll top bath with legs. Large, light and spaciously minimal rooms with stone tile floors. Communal ones on a landing, tiny with just a shower cubicle, a toilet, basin and mirror, still steamy. There’d have been one somewhere with walls painted freehand in wild colours on a blue background. Another with cream painted pitch pine, tongue and groove panelled walls and a sloping ceiling. However she imagined a bathroom, there it would have been. Somewhere in the world.
“4. BLM Manual Sec. 5-43 – The 1973 edition of the Manual of Instructions for the Survey of the Public Lands of the United States (Manual) describes a method used to reestablish angle points of nonriparian meaner lines in section 5-43. This method of reestablishing points along an irregular boundary may be used by the retracement surveyor. The method is a compass rule adjustment whereby the closing error between an existent corner position and the corresponding record corner position is apportioned along the boundary lines in accordance with their record lengths from another existent corner”
To construct a labyrinth, draw a short horizontal line on paper. Bisect it with a vertical line of equal length. You have a cross with right angles. Within each of the four corners of the cross draw a right angle, separated from the arms of the cross at all points, and with it’s own angle nestling into the corners of the cross. Within the corners of these secondary right angles, make a dot. Again not touching any other line, and as distant from the secondary right angles as they are from your original cross. Draw a small radius from the tip of the topmost point of the upright of the original cross and take it to the top of the upright of the secondary right angle to the right. Draw a slightly larger radius from the top of the upright of the secondary right angle in the top left quadrant of the cross and take it to the dot in the top right hand quadrant. Draw a larger radius from the next available point on the left – the dot in the top left quadrant and take it over the top to the tip of the horizontal line of the secondary right angle in the right hand top quadrant. Draw a radius from the tip of the horizontal line of the secondary right angle in the top left quadrant and take it over the top to meet the tip of the right hand arm of the original cross. Continue in sequence from the next available point on the left to the next available point on the right, whether tip of line or dot. By completion you will have made eight concentric radii and be in possession of a labyrinthine pathway with an entrance that is also an exit. A passage towards a goal and refuge, or a prison from which to escape……………
“5. BLM Manual Sec. 5-44 – This method, also contained in the 1973 Manual, is presented as a method for adjusting grant boundaries. The method consists of a rotation and a scale factor. The line connecting the retracement positions of two existent corners is compared with the line connecting the record positions of the same two corners. The difference in direction between the retracement and record connecting lines is used as a rotation angle which is applied to each record course in order to yield the retracement course”.
Somewhere I’ve got a small photograph, black and white, and slightly faded. It’s of a sandstone pillar on a rough stone plinth in a sunlit garden. The garden is where my parents used to live, and was in the grounds of the house where they both died within a few months of each other. The photograph was taken long before they used to live there, but the garden was very much the same when they tended it.
When I knew it, there was a small brass sundial on the top of the sandstone pillar, which was maybe four feet tall on it’s plinth. The dial was dull and tarnished, it’s gnomon was slightly bent, and the plate had once been attached to the top of the stone with mortar, but was now loose so you could cheat and make it tell the right time. For a moment. Repeatedly. If the sun shone.
During my parents ownership of the garden, ivy grew up and obscured the pillar, and the sundial fell off and was lost. After they had died and the house sold, the new owners, who had bought the house because they loved the garden, removed both the sandstone pillar and it’s circular plinth and raked and reseeded the remaining patch, which now seamlessly forms part of the surrounding lawn.
“6. Four Parameter Transformation – Greenfeld (1996) describes the application of a weighted two-dimensional conformal coordinate transformation in the reestablishment of lost corners.
This method provides the “best fit”, in a least squares sense, between record positions and retracement positions. It is an unbiased technique that favors neither direction nor distance.
The surveyor is required to compute four transformation parameters to be used to transform the record position of lost corners into retracement positions. The transformation parameters required are a rotation angle, two translation distances and a scale factor. Only one set of transformation parameters need be computed for the scenario depicted in Figure 1. This technique, virtually unknown among land surveyors, is a powerful tool for
determining the positions of lost corners. There are some scenarios where it represents the only logical method of reestablishing lost corners”.
“No, listen, I’m not saying there’s no such thing as time, I’m just saying……..”
“Look, it took you time to say that!”
“I know! But that’s because my mouth moved, that car went past us, you breathed, my heart pumped, the pistons in the engine went up and bloody down and the tyres rolled”.
“What the fuck are you on about?!”
“I’m just saying that if the whole bloody universe was in a state of total stasis, nothing ever moved or changed, no mote of dust ever shifted a millimeter, no light moved an inch, no planets spun on their axis, no feather ever fell and there was no breeze to blow even one leaf – there’d be no time, because how could you tell? It’s just fucking change, that’s all it is! It’s like we invented a ruler to measure change and called the ruler time – that’s all I’m saying”.
“I always knew you were fucking mad. I need a piss – you gonna stop?”
“Conclusions: There is no one method that stands out as being superior for the scenario presented. The surveyor must rely on his professional judgement to select a lost corner reestablishment method. A different scenario may result in the choice of a different method”.
In the clearing, smoke drifted in the dusk from what had been the site of a large bonfire. Last notes of birdsong punctuated the descending hush. There was no evidence of anyone, nor of anyone having spent much time tending the fire. Not much in the way of trampled grass, not really any way of determining how so much material could have been bought here through the woods. The ash stood maybe two feet tall or more, and covered an area at least three yards across. Its glow still lived and radiated white heat. Around the edges some of the ingredients of the blaze could be recognized. Wood, both logs and construction timber, charred and smouldering, some jointed and nailed at angles, and paper. Masses of paper. Books and documents, very little unconsumed. Myriads of blackened and unreadable pieces littered the clearing all around the fire site, and among the glowing ash pile, blocks of thin, black, warped and layered pages ready to burst into flame if the tip of a long stick were to be made to try and turn them over, destroying their secrets the instant that they were revealed.
The night had fallen, the closing of a shutter, and through the crowded trunks of aspen, holly, oak and rowan, the lowest strata of a fitful sky had turned to dull ochre smeared with darkest grey, and high above there were no stars.
Note: Text has been re-utilised from “A Comparison of Methods for Reestablishing Lost Corners of Irregular Parcels” by Dennis D. Findorff, PLS., Associate Professor, Department of Civil Engineering and Geomatics, Oregon Institute of Technology.
MRE (Mimetolith)
August 10 2009
5 March, 2009
NOW……….
Then
was
now
but
now
now
is
now,
and
now
it’s
then
and
now
now
is
now…..
until
now,
when
that
now
is
then
again.
6 May, 2008
The Way/My Way
The greening of the leaf. It comes late at 1000 feet. No cherry blossom just yet. A day of sun will bring it on. This is the cherry blossom of 2 or 3 years ago.
“First there is a mountain. Then there is no mountain. Then there is.” A poetic precis of enlightenment. A ‘phone conversation today bought up categorisation, Darwin, the Renaissance, maleness and autism. And in a broader sense, how the cognitive/intuitive understanding of primal societies morphed, particularly in Northern Mediterranean/Northern European cultures, into knowledge based upon empiricism, speciality and analysis.
How it is that such fragmentation of ideas and understanding, in science, religion, Art, have been promoted by a male mindset seeking to find knowledge in ever smaller compartments of investigation, which has had the effect of breaking reality into smaller and smaller and an ever greater number of shards with consequences for communication between related specialisations and “the big subjects” alike, with issues of power and control over minute dominions of practice. Are there not parallels between this behaviour and autism? A macrocosm of individual impairment of social communication and tightly defined areas of specialist knowledge.
It’s interesting that it’s in science, and quantum physics in particular, that there is a realisation that all is connected, that a holistic understanding of reality is necessary to comprehending the nature of all that makes up the whole. And just as fascinating that this seems to approach a return full circle to a more intuitive cognition of existence melded with a desire to understand, rather than just to know or believe. There was a mountain, then there was no mountain, and now there is.
There’s something here about masculinity and femininity. And something about the symbols that appear on old, or continental playing cards. The vessel or chalice that became “hearts”, and the sword that became “spades”. Containment compared with slicing and dicing. Holding together rather than breaking apart. Contemplation as opposed to dissection.
4 May, 2008
May the 4th be with you
Today: After the early morning thunderstorm; painting a white door whiter. And a pale wall paler.
3 May, 2008
Astrid Kircherr’s scissors
To be at Art school, play in a band, wear shades a lot, have a foreign girl-friend, to have a studio in a foreign city. The primary desires of many young white males who aspire, and have aspired to, a counter culture that has become mainstream.
To be male in 1961 in England, you were either a kid in shorts, Clarks sandals and sporting short back and sides, a quiffed and dandy ted (it’s still just about possible to see the last vestiges of the original quiff and ducks-arse on men of a certain age in provincial UK towns), a duffel coated and whispy bearded beatnik or a pipe smoking bohemian in corduroys. Or just “old”.
When Astrid Kircherr cut Stuart Sutcliffe’s hair in 1961 (and Lennon reportedly laughed at it), she created a look and style, that combined with Sutcliffe’s life and interests, has lasted almost 50 years. The birth of British cool.
