Bacon Rind

For all you folks that aren't familiar with a bit of cockney rhyming slang, bacon rind means mind (and i didn't learn that through googling "cockney rhyming slang" and then proceeding to be a dick and try and show off poorly...). Anyhow here i am, beginning a Joe Blog for our research project, and my main area of study is on the mind, primarily memory. Also Paul if you're reading this, im only doing bits and bobs on this badboy, most of it will be in my research book. Anyway seems appropriate to start this with a poem whose underlying theme is memory.

Digging by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boat nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly,
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands

By God, the old man could handle a spade.
Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once i carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slag
Of soggy peat, the curts cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow me like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

I'm looking at artists that work with issues of memory, identity and who achieve a sense of nostalgia through their work. It's funny how many images of ground and digging arise when thinking about memory. My final piece is to be buried (although i'm not sure what the piece to be buried is).