TRANSCRIPT OF BRIDGIT, SINGLE-CHANNEL VIDEO, 2016

“Wooooh......yeah new stuff on, um, on UIQ. This one’s from Zuli. Out to Lee Gamble.”

So there’s this huge event.

“Out to Emily, out to Florrie. We clashing again mate?”

A group of people focusing very closely on you — like, the tiny details of you and also the macro.

“Running this at breakneck speed I’m sorry. Plus, what is it? Plus 12 urgh. Apologies.”

All of you, every part of you is their concern.

“Sounds good though.”

It’s all women. They’re totally in control of you. There’s three main people in charge, and an outer layer of others, each with their specific roles, and they’re all focusing very intensely on you. You’re at the centre of the whole thing.

“Yeah out to Ollie. This mix, oooh this mix! Golden Teacher up at about the top of the hour. Maybe run it last thing actually. Cos how am I gonna go after that.”

“This one Robotic Handshakes in 4D.”

It’s all about you, every part of you. But you’re not there.

When I was 18 and 19, in 1992 and 93, on the brink of coming out, growing up in the austere agricultural landscape of rural Aberdeenshire, taking acid tabs called Strawberries and ecstasy pills called Snowballs, Julian Cope — as part of his odyssey documenting all the Neolithic standing stones across Britain — was feverishly making repeated trips to the area, working his way throughout 150 circles, most very remote, many of which are almost destroyed. Despite having more stone circles than anywhere else in Britain, Aberdeenshire was the least written about Megalithic region.

He refers to Tap O’ Noth as a “Great Goddess Super Tanker”, Hill of Flinders as a “Triple Goddess” and Dunnideer as “Mother Hill”. These forms, he says, represent “the reliance on the Great Mother constantly shown by Neolithic humanity.” “In Aberdeenshire,” he says, “the cult appears to have become quite out of control. To glimpse this place is a nourishing exercise, for its revelations of Neolithic humanity are all so hearteningly positive.”

“Bang in the middle of the Great Mother’s heart,” he writes. “That’s how it feels to stand in the sacred Aberdeenshire landscape.”

I was oblivious. At the time I was working as a care assistant at Inchmarlo House, a residential care home for the elderly near Banchory. I had come out to a couple of friends but hadn’t yet had any kind of experience with a girl. I didn’t know any lesbians. I wrote to a couple of girls in the ads in the back of Sky magazine, one of them in Glasgow, but didn’t hear much back. It would be over 18 months until it happened, waiting, doing fulltime shiftwork in the old people’s home. I was good at the work, I liked it, but it was a limbo. I had all this closeted libidinal energy but my attentions were focused on all this entropy.

The anaesthetist is small and Australian, a bit owl-like, with big glasses, they might have been red. Now we’re in the small transition room just beside the recovery room — it’s me, her and an anaesthetic nurse. They’re chatting away telling me how they love their jobs, it’s a great department, how many years they’ve worked together. There’s a porthole on the door through to the operating theatre, I can hear people in there but can’t see them, and another nurse comes in and says “do you want some help?” and they say “no all good thanks,” then they say “how often do you get that, would you like a hand — we love this department” — and they’ve got me sat on a trolley hunched over she says so she can get between my vertebrae — she’s behind me, “can you feel that going down your legs” — and the other one is right up next to me, touching my hand right, stroking it — there’s maybe something going into it — and then the anaesthetist leans in — I think she’s still behind me — and she says “what you think about now is what you’re going to dream about. Think about something nice.” There’s not much time, I haven’t thought about it. So I think about a field, I’ve got it in my mind’s eye. But it’s not quite right, I can’t get the right field so I keep changing it. Now this field, now that one, like slides. I never settled on one and that slideshow, searching for the right field, was the last content before nothing.

The weight of different names by which Bridgit was formerly known is because of the vast time scales across which she operated. In her oldest stone age form, Bridgit couldn’t possibly have been her name, because her Neolithic contemporaries all had one-syllable names. Considering Bridgit in this same manner, and reviewing once more all her known names — BRIDE, BRID, BRIG, BRIZO OF DELOS, THE MANX BREESHEY and THE CRETAN BRITOMARTIS — it is most likely that the Neolithic form of her name was simply BREE.

One of the great difficulties facing anyone who attempts to unravel the problems of the ancient world is that of names. The deities of antiquity have a very great number of names. Not only were they known by different names in different places, but they often had at least three different phases: old, middle aged and young, which were all known by different names in one place. KOEUR, MA, BREE, HOEUR, UR, VER. The names of these goddesses — all of one syllable and all of them so similar as to have been unchanged since the stone age — sound like primal outpourings. [1]

November 14th
Bought two t-shirts, a pair of jogging pants and some socks at JD Sports. The checkout girl asked if it’s my son I’m buying for. I said “no it’s me.” She didn’t say much after that.

January 28th
I’m on a shift at the bar where I work as a DJ. I put on a long record and run to the toilet. There’s lots of people milling about in there chatting. One girl sees me in the queue and shouts “THERE’S A BOY IN THE GIRLS’ TOILETS.”

March 23rd
Helen in the bed next to me just asked if that was my daughter that was visiting last night, I said “no actually it’s my girlfriend.” She raised her hands, “don’t have a problem with that, my son’s gay.”

August 24th
Bought a Caledonian MacBrayne cap in the shop on the ferry. The woman said “that looks good on you.” Then I went to the toilet and as I was drying my hands a group of middle aged women started coming through the door. The one at the front hesitated, backed out, then stepped back in again, “I thought I was in the wrong toilet there.”

September 29th
The young guy at the opticians just asked me if that was my daughter I was in with yesterday. Flummoxed, I replied “no she’s a friend.” So now I’m closeted as well as being a cradle-snatcher. I told Isabel. She said that usually her and L get “are you twins?” and once L got “is this your son?” I told Irene. She said V has been variously her mother, aunt or brother.

Margaret, Deborah, Eimear, Helen. Each are points in a moving grid. The Ward 48 grid is like an Agnes Martin with moving parts. Rows of dots, moving in vertical columns. Coming in at 7.30. Waiting. Then down in the lift. Into theatre. Out to recovery. Back up to the ward. Next ones come in. Go down. Go in. Come out. Go up. Every day. The undifferentiated chaos of organs and bodies contained within this infinite time/space rhythm was going on long before I was there. It was going on when I wrote this, and when I edited it, and now while you’re listening to it.

Sandy Stone. Allucquére Rosanne Stone. Allucquére Rosanne Sandy Stone. Names themselves weren’t codified as personal descriptors until the Domesday book. The idea behind taking a name appropriate to one’s current circumstance was that identity isn’t static. The concept of one’s public and private self, separately or together, changes with age and experience (as do the definitions of public and private); and the name or the label or the identity package is an expression of that concept. The child is mother to the adult, but the adult is not merely the child a bit later in time. [2]

I’m on an island reading things Sandy Stone wrote in 1994 about virtual systems theory, technology as prosthesis, and how a disembodied subjectivity messes with whereness. I’m reading this in the back garden that looks out onto another island. On that island is a community of nuns who are undertaking four-year isolation retreats, off-limits to visitors. Sandy Stone is talking about bandwidth and reality. How a hot medium has a wide bandwidth, and a cool medium has a narrow bandwidth. Participating in a narrow bandwidth (for example at that time communicating via a computer, with only text on screen) we engage more deeply in certain ways, more obsessively even. 

A couple of weeks later, at the end of a long day in my studio going round in circles, I don’t know why but I had googled ‘standing stones lesbian separatism’ and by semantic coincidence the first hit that comes up is an interview in Trans Advocate with Sandy Stone that I remembered reading a couple of years ago. She worked as a sound engineer for Jimi Hendrix and Van Morrison, taught herself machine language and built her own computer. She withdrew from mainstream recording and was approached in 1974 by Olivia Records, a separatist collective who identified publicly as radical feminist and privately as lesbian separatist. They were in need of engineering skills. They asserted a vision of lesbian separatism that is relational and evolving.

The 3D animator who made the grid is also a recovery nurse. He works two 12-hour shifts each week, 8 to 8, always based in the recovery room, a transitional space between the operating theatre and the wards. His job is to be there when people regain consciousness after general anaesthetic, managing and assisting their various altered states. One after another they come through and come round, coming in asleep and leaving awake. Usually there’s a sense that no time has passed. Some people wake up then fall back under. Some people become aggressive when they wake up. Some don’t know they’ve been to sleep. “When’s the operation?”, they say, thinking it’s before instead of after. 

[1] The Modern Antiquarian, Julian Cope, 1998

[2] The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Allucquère Roseanne Stone, 1996