Crumbs
And maybe on the Severn side,
Hung low on Brendon’s mound…
‘The Malvern Hills‘
In Songs of Three Counties and Other Poems
Not very far from Upton-on-Severn—between it, in fact, and the Malvern Hills—stands the country seat of the Gordons of Bramley; well-timbered, well-cottaged, well-fenced and well-watered …
Radclyffe Hall (1928)The Well of Loneliness
Fieldnotes
13 July 2022
Took a recce around Malvern Wells after the archives, and finally found White Cottage.
Went to a pub on the saddle between Herefordshire and Worcestershire – walked back to catch sunset and moonrise along the ridge. Found the backside of White Cottage.
From the top of Black Hill looked over the valleys in several directions, back and forward, spinning around as if looking over my shoulder all the time.
I speculated about White Cottage, and speculated on the poems. I thought about what you can and cannot see.
Potential for questions about what the domestic is, ‘setting up house’ or perhaps what is possible to reach – how to map places to the view and what the literature might teach us about it.
Something is missing about the theory: so many writing a metaphor about the landscape + discovering White Cottage not from the front, but from what I think I understand about the location and what it would look like from above. Perhaps Heather Love or Loralee MacPike would help. Also Donna Haraway (a view from above).
Potential Peripatetic Prompt:
Account for / resist certainties cameras create …
PROMPT: Point the camera toward where the location ‘might’ be without looking up coordinates. Take up to three pictures somewhere that feels right geographically. Next, thinking with the reference, look at your surroundings and find something that demonstrates the ‘feeling’ that place generates and take up to three photos this way. Third: using a GPS device, point yourself in the direction of the place and try, without changing location, to take that photo. If you can get to the location, take one ‘head on’ photo as if you are cataloguing it as a property reference.
THEORY: Describe a genealogy of ‘speculating’ with a view- think-with Haraway (1988), MacPike (1944) and Love (2011). Share how looking ahead has been instrumentalised for mapping sexuality, start with a poem or a passage from Hall about a particular view of the valley from the Malvern Hills to Upton-upon-Severn. Quote the theory. Record your own voice speculating, anything that comes to mind. Listen back later for what comes up.
Haraway, Donna. ‘Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective’. Feminist Studies: FS 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.
Love, Heather. ‘“Spoiled Identity”: Stephen Gordon’s Loneliness and the Difficulties of Queer History’. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 7, no. 4 (2001): 487–519.
MacPike, Loralee. ‘A Geography of Radclyffe Hall’s Lesbian Country’. Historical Reflections. Reflexions Historiques 20, no. 2 (1994): 217–42.
Its images are not the products of escape and transcendence of limits (the view from above) but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions-of views from somewhere.
(Haraway 1988, 590)
More from Malvern
Field/Notes: Cartographing an an/archive
Field/Notes: negotiating with friends
Before such Knowledge: the fascist squire
Quotes and Places: the Malvern’s in Biography and Theory
A Well of Discrepancies: Hall and Company
Field/Notes: Archival Plot-twists
Field/Notes: The Agency of the Pivot
Field/Notes: Domiciliation Fever (or sweltering shelter)
Church Hall and Other Specters
Field/Notes: Through a Hall Backwards
Be thyself: Self-Fashioning Hall