Monday, 13 August 2007

Locating Mark

Spanish_square I stand in a town square on the island of La Palma, watching the ancient geometries of spanish sociability. At the cafes, the gathering of familiar groups, the recognitions and half-friendships allowed to form gradually, the family ties extending, hugs and smiles and courtesies and enquiries, the language of touch, the sounds of time spent out-of-private.

Here is the solid framework of spanish custom - tradition in the structure of the day, infilled with informality. Near-ritual contains improvised social relations.

Laughter travels through the air without ever landing. Children pigeon-step to tenuous distance, improvise on an indistinguishable path, they play at play, their unplotted lines are faded after an instant. Oblivion must be getting clogged with traces erased, I thought.

To my left, up a side street, I can see the breath-taking mountain where my brother fell and lay for six days beyond discovery. But we who searched, with our claws in the scree, are not tempted by the illusion that we are somehow separate. So, in the vital square, there is something to be rescued from this incongruity.

One of Mark's talents was to identify the unusual, in others and around us, the foible and the curious, the mannerism and the oddity. It's not that he was exempt from the ordinary or conformity: but he could find the extraordinary in people and things, to reveal and share its value with inclusive delight. He created contexts in which people discovered that they were of interest.

He did fragments and he did panoramas. People were engaged around the insights that were possible by the way he lifted covers or just quietly pointed out. He was a connoisseur of the quirky, and champion of the oblique. Perhaps his social network was unparalleled, I don't know, he never did parallels. He met the world aslant.

About a dozen of us eventually learned how the truth had slipped from the ridge of our defiance. We came down. In this small town under an inviting old volcano, many saluted the massive humanness that was already welling up. Heat-seeking equipment is finally superfluous, the warmth is irrepressible, and ritual has framed it.

Mark took to the edge. His spirit cascades angles and tangents of affection for the oddness of us all. The wonky framework of his humanity is indestructible, built with unsentimental love and compassion, overheard among friends sitting at a table, a joke spilt while playing ball in the rain late in the evening, glimpsed perhaps in a sudden shift of light over those trees there. You'll know it when you see it.

Revised 29 September 2007

Mark Jackson Harris, 1950-2007

Mark_photo_2_3   

13 Aug 2007 11:07:35

1 Comment

To walk in the mountains in solitude is looking for peace & sernity. To end up taken so brutally is a travesty. Try & take a little from the old adage that he was doing something he loved. Scant sentiment for some one who meant so much to so many.
Heart felt sympathy to all your family.

Posted by: Colin Taylor | Saturday, 18 August 2007 at 11:09

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Kevin Harris

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