Eata and Hild
Short extracts from my paper, Do you see what I mean? Image-text relations and schematic space in Eata and Hild. Delivered at the Auto / Bio / Fiction in Practice Symposium, Goldsmiths 06/2024
Eata and Hild was inspired by the last of three texts I published online as Walk Away Demon in 2022. It describes a picture known as The Meeting of Saint Anthony and Saint Paul, attributed to the Master of the Osservanza. It is Italian mid 15th century and resides in the National Gallery of Washington. If you would like to see it, click here.
I wrote that two hermits meet, “and their embrace forms the shape of a triangle. This echoes the shape of the cave mouth within which the second hermit resides. This visual mirroring is the key to the meaning of the picture. The time taken for the first hermit to find the second is eclipsed by it. Their greeting is invested with a permanence and inevitability through the echoing of these two elements, the embrace and the cave”1
The text goes on to equate the hermit who dwells in the cave with my daughter, “who is many things, as well as being autistic and nonverbal” and finds resolution in understanding the picture as an articulation of presentness, and “of the second hermit living within the frame of that embrace, the hopeful promise of it.”
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Here is Eata scrutinising a nonsensible pebble for meaning, and here is Hild playing a stacking game.
In translating one text into the language of another John Berger characterised the task of the translator as, seeing through the words of the original text into the preverbal experience or sense which gave rise to it. He stated, “True translation demands a return to the preverbal.’”2
This sense of drawing out an experience, a feeling, an intuition.
A word being like the ringing of a bell - an impulse seeking articulation.
What articulation?
And the bell-like word, the crux amid a spilling landscape.
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Eata and Hild relocates experience.
The cave as a way of articulating a personal situation has become extremely useful to me.
It has enabled positivity and creativity.
It helps articulate my identity as a father, carer, illustrator and academic.
Eata and Hild offers a space from which new words may stem.
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The motif of the cave remains open to other interpretations.
You now know how I see it.
I want to explain myself to you, but to do this I want to meet on common ground.
I need the motif of the cave to house and hold my experience.
Others can use it for their own ends.
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I like the idea that in executing a line of historical script perfectly, the calligrapher obscures the individual struggle.
The maker is wrapped up in, becomes part of a tradition.
An act of affiliation takes place.
‘I’ becomes ‘we’.
Unspoken continuities stretch through time.
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References
1. This text is reproduced in Eata and Hild. LICKENS-RICHARDS, Barnaby. 2024. Eata and Hild. London: Self-published, p.62. BERGER, John. 2016. Confabulations. London: Penguin, p.4