Compass
Shipping Forecast – Issued: 1030 UTC Wed 14 Aug
Wind: Southwest, backing south or southeast, 3 or 4, increasing 5 or 6 for a time.
Sea State: Slight or moderate.
Weather: Occasional rain, fog patches later.
Visibility: Moderate or good, occasionally very poor later.
Just five days until the first group of Northern Isles expedition artists and scientists gathers in Stromness, Orkney, to board the 113-year old Shetland fifie the Swan. We’ll be arriving from London, Liverpool, Skye, Orkney, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and other places on the road, bringing with us stories of our recent projects and research, and questions relating to flux, change and transformation on these islands and in their waters.
Bridget McKenzie recently drew attention through her blog (http://thelearningplanet.wordpress.com/) to writer Nick Laird’s call for a Slow Language Movement. This movement towards attending, listening and deep reading might help us to pry apart the smooth shell of cultural, economic and political packaging to expose the kernel of unquestioned assumptions about how we live in relation to one another and our world. Slow Language, like Slow Food (and the growing Slow Fish movement), restores the emphasis on communication, exchange, presence, physical gesture, embodied experience and, above all, respect for and full participation in context.
The Shipping Forecast, with its steady iterations, and the strange, dark poetry of its references and repetitions, is an example of Slow Language. Every spare word has a full and palpable meaning to the seafarers who rely on it. Every rock and promontory, every region of turbulent water becomes fully visible, has ‘a local habitation and a name.’ The Shipping Forecast is an aural icon – a rehearsal of our shared maritime culture (and so was played during Danny Boyle’s Olympic Opening Ceremony) – but it is also a navigational device, a valuable and practical tool for all times, and its words have weight and integrity.
Next week we begin a journey into the Fair Isle sea area, spanning 60 degrees latitude between Viking and Faeroes. On board the Swan, we’ll listen with new attention to the slow language of the Shipping Forecast, to one another’s stories and questions, and to the dialogue of wind and wave that has brought about such change in Orkney’s economy and culture. More words and soundings to follow.
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