Category: PhD

Chapter Severn – The Mouth – Body Bio-Continuum and To You, Sturgeon.

On By seasonalightIn Love Is The River, PhDLeave a comment

 

 

The Mouth of the Wye as it speaks to the Severn Estuary. Photo by me.

 

♒︎     Body Bio-Continuum     ♒︎

There is a nature of beauty pushed away by all but those who live closest to the living world. It is the part of life that is the fear of danger. It is discomfort, pain, death. It is the smell of decay. From a place-time where-when our ancestors’ bodies were on constant alert for predators and harm from cuts and infection, there came the control, the corralling of wild beasts, the taming of the soils. They had evolved a sense of belonging, to sprinkle fruit seed and grains nearby, and to know the plants that eased the suffering of their loved ones. They built set nets and traps along estuaries and coasts. Inland, they killed and cut back, domesticated and pacified; an expunging of as much danger as felt easier. Fences were built. Animals and humans of burden, defeated and enslaved, all were put to work in the mastery over those dangers. Humans still play the master, harnessing machines and chemicals on top, advertised and bought, an immense Earthly naivety for the sake of profit causing untold harm. Human bodies now controlling all bodies; what a body should look and feel like in the magazines and on film; what’s permitted in public or private or not. Robots in selective human likeness are designed from scratch. We carry the legacy of the strangeness of the Neoplatonic Great Chain of Being, where all are cast into hierarchical order with the white man sitting on top surrounded by angels, pulling the strings, sitting on top of bones. And the legacy is affecting; in real ways its own engine of fear.

The truth is that our own human bodies, all shapes or genetic expressions, are symbiotic with millions of bodies. Inside and outside, desperately reliant, imbued in flows of signals and mutual work; the bodies we see and microbial lives we don’t see are the beings that make us who we are and who we are not. Multitudes are what makes each of us sublime and of miraculous worth, but also intricately delicate and unsafe. Like the estuary is never a single body, it’s a huge pulse of multiple, miraculous lives in porous forms, agents of the flow, making absolute sense from the thick silty paste of the idea of chaos.

Riverine silt is lifted from the land—the catch of a vast inland catchment; add to it the ingredients from estuarine cliffs, brown Triassic butter scraped by massive tides caused by hyper-luna-earthly gravity, from a dish made of rock laid down in ancient hot deserts of the equator. Strong turbidity, the colour of chocolate milk—a mix of red and grey particles suspended in the brackish—block most light from penetrating even the top few moments of the water column. How can such a body be ecologically productive? There are forms of life other than sun-reliant phytoplankton. Our own liver-gut axis lays in relative darkness, yet the communication of circulating nutrients and endotoxins between microbiota and liver tissue is critical to our immunity. The benthos-community axis, the communicating organisms that live at the bottom of any body of water, in the shadows or in pitch black, like the diatoms that are the foundations of aquatic ecological immunity – take them away or smother them in poisons and the dying is unstoppable. Tell me that we are autonomous units and I will show you the estuary. Like liver or river, the estuary-marine continuum is no single person, and neither are we. Here is the turmoil that is more in our likeness, the skin, and what metabolises beneath; the tension but also the life-love between everything giving rise to the drama.

The River Continuum is a truth observed, a communal and real chain of equal being. Beginning high above the tree line, it pushes down into ocean currents like a long outstretched foot. It is a theory by Robin Vannote and colleagues published in 1980, cited more than 11,000 times to date. Natural disasters and human interventions aside, it’s a theory that fits permanent flows, at least with no interrupting lakes, a shimmering riverine zonation in three dimensions. It’s not the kind of hierarchy we humans compulsively crave, the pyramid or the obelisk, but one of energy flow and nutrient streams, where resident beings (biota) process organic matter and utilise all opportunities in a fairly predictable manner. Matter feeds some, some feed others, others feed more, a few dart in and out—the predators, the migrators—adding and subtracting from this beautiful equation. And so it pulses into the estuary and on into the sea to merge into all other continuums: Oceans are perhaps the ultimate coalescence that shines this planet blue.

But the Wye does not end or begin at the mouth. All the way from those springs in the Cambrian hills, evaporating and extracted, it is both part and feeder of the swirling nagorasphere. What is carried in its flow by gravity to this dynamic turbidity in the estuary is cycled by the smallest of beings and turned into a festival for all beings: those that live or visit this place, those that shield here to grow from vulnerable to strong; those who are touched by its protective storm-buffering and surge-quelling. The matter of the basin—the huge lasso of the Wye—is swept here by rains and floods and held in suspension on top of the saltwater, pushed around the peninsula and sucked back towards the oceans by the tides, time and time again, mixing all of us under the bridge and back until we, and all our junk, are mud banks, sandbanks and longshore drift. Here in the flow that switches east to west and west to east with the weight and wobble of both the moon and the Earth, the ebb current to seaward and flood current to landward, filling the mouths and the lower reaches of all the rivers that drain here with salt and the anadromous fish at high tides who swim upstream to spawn like king salmon and their parasitic dependents, the ancient sea lampreys, and the catadromous fish at low tides, who swim down the rivers to be unleashed into the great oceans to spawn like the eels, mullet and flatfish flounder.

European sturgeon, redlist critically endangered anadromous species, ghost to our rivers but now, once again, curiously visiting our estuaries. As long as alligators, with a gentle mouth for kissing mud, what a species to see again in the Wye.

To you, Sturgeon,

Stay with us. Live with us.

Bat’Umi, Basel, Fethiye, Toulouse, Reykjavik, Tangier.

Way below the plate glass of the cities, deep in the rivers, your unfamiliar body winds upstream under the night lights. I can just make out your huge dead body in silver nitrates, museum plates of iron and steel greys next to all those proud, fading men.

Your underwater knowing is as old as the triassic cliffs on these Severn Estuary edges, my spectral kin. Like smooth-hounds and thornback rays, flick your strong fossil tail for that exquisite downward force, shimmering from tide to river and back with the burning electrosensitivity of your pitted upturned beak, patterns like beetle bark burrows, and running in floods along those beautiful lateral lines.

Swimming in from the depths of the sea, you stay in Winter to syphon the bottom of the estuary with your soft mouth, tasting for shelled morsels and goby enzymes with your long barbels and electroreceptors. Mine is the quietest of observations; yours is a full more-than-human sensory devotion of self that is the whole river-estuary-marine continuum; an internal blueprint of the movements required to get from where you are now, the bed mud and bristle worms, to the fine river grit at the foothills of the mountains when you are mature enough, to where you’ll gather in oxygenated pools to leave your young. Then, to twist through a meander with a freshwater surge, to swim-out each run into salinity, and bend this way and that way to a shallow coastal sea in falling light. Your young ought to be safe here if they reach the estuary, and they will grow well until they are fit for the pelagic, yet to return to their natal rivers to reproduce. Everything about you is revered by me. There’s a glint in your ancient, metallic orange-bronze eye.

You are a patientist, realised in acute potential—if we humans could remember it’s within us too—primed for imagining the moment of exquisite love in the flow of all life. How patient must you be, waiting for us to clean up our act and destroy those dams. Would you come and stay, then?

Your spirit presence is the result of a swim of magnificence, from the misty Gironde, the Garonne and the red wines of the Dordogne, and the Bay of Biscay, to this moment inside a future Welsh Wye, a time also threatened with Gaian fury, with flash floods, heat waves and drought. The crowd who came before have all gone, shadows blocked by weirs and finished by bullets and huge gill nets. But you came here curious, tested the water for ripeness. You have sent news back: made signs. And now they also know to be here, pulled by the smell of Welsh hills, the magnetism and internal maps of 400 million years. Ah, sister, to match your devotion! To stop our sewage pouring into your mouth. Standing perfectly still, staying present with your strength and intelligence, distraction would be unwelcome; not even to raise an underwater camera. Your hunt is too important.

Your ichthyolite ability to swim elegantly from the ocean through a curtain of silt and into clear green emeralds is for all to know, and fewer ever to notice. See, unlike me, your electro-centrism helps you navigate complexity without injury. How would the expanse of the English Channel shine as you swim under waves and ghost-whale bellies, steel hulls and oil slicks? How you would rise again without giant, slicing propellor blades.

How does electricity reflect off of me?

I am not afraid to tell you, I love you, and all our kin, as I care for this place–a happy place–down on the banks of the River Wye in June. I love the microbiota and the symbiotic relationships that sustain all the lives that exist right now, though the majority I can neither see nor hear. But I want you here too. Fluministic love means more than they think. It’s not a uniquely selfish act, but specific for this place linked in flows to all places, and little to do with my brain’s reward centres—though there is that. My life is an expression of your way in the flow, you as part of larger flows, that are part of the flows of life that distinguish planet Earth from all else yet known. We are together. Flow runs into itself and all matter, even in death. This is the truth continuum.

Sturgeon, you and the things that creep in and out of the water beside us, the things that never enter the water, the things that never climb trees, share everything through drifts in the nagorasphere. It is felt by evoking our patient imagination—you have it, like the salmon and the eels. This is a process too. Being a Fluminist is a process because we are all creatures of process not objects nor even subjects. All are a verb through time and space.

 

Palermo, Arkhangelsk, Prague, Odesa, Galway, Paris, Lisbon.
Chepstow, Ross-on-Wye, Monmouth, Hereford, Hay-on-Wye, Builth Wells.
Stay with us. Live with us.

 

I write about you so that others may choose to protect your interests in this constant dynamism, to remember that flow exists between every life, even in death, true beauty to celebrate and protect. This place is held close, and this ocean, this estuary, this river—and back again—you, the bristle worms, and the benthic deeps, the places where old weirs have imploded and now let you pass, the ranunculus riffles to those crystal clear pools. We declare these waters sacred. We share hope, in our kindship, for a unified love of the exquisite nature of natural moments, everything joined at the hip, undivided, and for the continued liberty of life and the living. It is, in a way, our small act of resistance.

 

Here in the estuary, a KBA (Key Biodiversity Area of international importance), a SAC (Special Area of Conservation), there are five main rivers that open their mouths to salt, with little pills or streams to create a softening in the juncture between land and water. This is a body of land in dissolution, where aquatic beings have adapted to the storm surges or cling to the banks of mud, where some hang in the water column rushing along with the tides at 1.5 metres per second, and some ripple against and with the tides. Some move in and over the shore, some shelter with the carbon sequestering eel grasses, fly high with the South Westerlies, the strong prevailing winds that snag an outgoing tide in sentient antagonism. For you and me, orange-red signs for danger but for many, a brown hatchery, a brown nursery, fat for winter storage; sanctuary deep inside a maelstrom.

Tiny soft pink-white bodies form dark crystalline reefs on the rocky substrate, or on top of years of the devotion of their own ancestors, like cities on top of cities, under the tides and in between. We—the catch of the land—are filtered by millions of these honeycomb worms (Sabellaria alveolata), quartz and mica, forams (shelled algae), shell bits, polystyrene and plastics, cemented by their tiny bodily secretions into large biogenic reefs that provide stability for their feeding and reproducing, and shelter for more beings like Brittle Stars and Beadlet Anemones.

Cobbles to gravels to clean sands, muddy sands and muds, here holds restlessly 7% of Britain’s mudflats and sandflats, a tenth of all that is supposed to be lawfully protected. Ragworms, Catworms, Sludge-worms, Baltic Clams, Laver Spires Shells, Mud Shrimps, Sand Digger Shrimps, Speckled Sea Lice, free-living Bristle Worms, Peppery Furrow Shells. Some suspended, some globs and slivers of benthic biofilm on mud banks; long, pennate bodied algae, seasonal algae diatoms, tube-dwelling diatoms, epipelic diatoms residing at the kiss between water and sediment – all silicon-cyclers on a gradient out to the sea, like living glass.

Black Goby hunt through the Dwarf Eel Grass and Seawrack beds also harbouring Nilsson’s Pipefish—at home with low salinity—sequestering carbon and grazed by wild ducks like the chestnut Widgeon, sociable birds with their noisy whistles and growls. Straggling, motley Great Pipefish, slender Snake Pipefish, Straight-nosed pipefish surge in with the storms. With the heads of seahorses and the bodies of snakes, pipefish males rear their young in marsupial-like pouches to be freed into the tide and out to sea.

Saltmarsh Glassworts, Common Reeds, Sea Barley, rare Bulbous Foxtail dwell and stabilise the ephemeral into thriving, brackish feeding and nesting grounds for waterbirds. Pills—little streams leaking land close into the estuary—and human-dug back-breaking ditches bring life to the hinterland where Water Voles plop, Common Toads croak and Little Egrets, Grass Snakes and Otters hunt. Knots, Oystercatchers, Curlew roost in crevices of rock and mussel scars foraging Barnacles, Limpets, and Winkles as well wading for their worms and clams.

Common Goby, Sand Smelt ~ these beauties stay in the deep heart of the brown to spawn. Bass and Cod are opportunists, they’ll swim in and out of the estuary to find food and seek shelter to grow. Whiting eat Brown Shrimp, shimmering silver Bristling or Sprats eat microscopic Copepods who eat anything they can find, flat Dab eat the rotting dead, along with young Shore Crabs. So many babies wash through here, but they’ll move upstream to safer waters, or back out to sea.

Tundra and Bewick Swans, Shelducks and Northern Pintails, Ringed Plovers, Eurasian Curlews, Dunlins, Redshanks, Turnstones, Lesser Black-Backed Gulls, Grey Herons, Goosanders, resident, passing through, topping up, gracing, dying. An incredible place for wading birds, named by human conservationists as a global Ramsar* site of feathery significance, this is a place only recently given back to the elegant re-introduced Avocets and uncommon Common Cranes (Grus grus), but a place worth life itself to avian kin, where all length beaks find all depths in the mud and the shingle to find what is eternally desired, the wiggling, creeping proteins and lipids and carbohydrates caked into these living shores of abundance; a place of sanctuary for them all, a passing plane, a global meeting point on major air routes from Sub Saharan Africa to the Arctic. This is a place of Earth’s Body Bio-Continuum worthy of great reverence and the highest protection, of Praximund.

And back to the Wye’s Mouth, overseen by Old Man heron and his spindly legs, between the tyre distribution centre and firing range, between two banks of slippery mud. Here hosts the lampreys, salmonids, twaite and allis shad, and the ghosts of the centenarian sturgeon, all ready to rise north on a big swell of brackish water, to heave their lithe fragile bodies against the weight of flowing fresh water, to find sanctuary upstream to breed. As tough as the ocean is, the toughest is yet to come, where the animal must endure a race against gravity, and spates, pathogens, and human scorn, and banks lined with khaki and fish hooks, to get to another sanctuary – the mythological place in their ancient minds nestled in the foothills of old, worn mountains, of transparent water and scattered sunlight, a clear little nest in a shallow shingle bed, some one-hundred miles or more inland.

 

*Ramsar, City of Iran, where the Wetlands Convention of International Importance was signed in 1971.

~~~

Chapter Severn – The Mouth – Suicidal Intertidal – Jumping

On By seasonalightIn Love Is The River, PhDLeave a comment

♒︎     Suicidal Intertidal     ♒︎

Photo by me

 

 

I am standing on the old ferry slipway at Beachley, just around the headland from the mouth of the Wye. Above me is a monumental hulk of steel girder and wire spanning the Severn Estuary from Beachley to Aust. This is the old Severn Suspension Bridge, which also vaults the Wye (technically, another bridge). It was built to replace ye olde car ferry, and it’s just a little bit older than me. Our lives have spanned the deepest wounds ever inflicted upon the sum of all wild lives of the British Isles, and the span of time seeing the largest rise in global temperatures for fifty-five million years. I stand and glare as if I am arguing with myself—the troll under the bridge—carrying all the blame. My daughter, long hair pulled taught into a bunch, is flitting around me with her precision-made camera phone, looking up from her beautiful open face and following the lines all the way across to Aust. We are trying to absorb the scale of it all. We are both taking pictures by volume, not quite sure how to portray the colossus, and pouring out sentences in a mix of insult and awe.

“Monumental!”

“Would you listen to that!”

“It’s so eerie!”

My parents euphemistically called it the Holiday Bridge. Rarely, because my father worked long hours, the route took us to airports; 1970s plastic exotics like Gatwick and Luton, and to the package holidays he sold in their hundreds from his travel shop in Aberdare. Customers came to our plush shop decorated in dark greens and golds; a wave of new Valleys working class, the lull before the social ligament sprains and bone breaks of the coal miners’ strikes. They came wanting guaranteed sun and sangria instead of a chilly fortnight to Barry. I remember as a small child the smell and sheen of the Intasun brochures piled high in stock. I’d hide under my father’s mahogany desk, turning each page, smelling the print ink and mesmerised by the fake blues—hotel swimming pools and empty sandy bays – ah, the seduction of the Mediterranean Costas, themselves now rows of concrete walls, palms, marinas, shadows of their former spectacular flolocas.

Such a drop from those dizzy heights among the suspension wires, or even the strangeness of fixed aeroplane wings, to the murky brown swell of the Severn Estuary, the way that bridges and Capitalism lift us all from the ecological “mire” and the sublime, beauty that demands more knowledge and a micro and macro imagination. Turbidity of estuary water, rather than crystal transparency, is a beauty that is anti-aesthetic, that rushes through the human mind more like a violent storm. We aren’t supposed to be here, sucked down into the maelstrom or getting stuck in the mud. But the animals adapted to its ephemeral fronts down in the brown or around the sand and mud banks are a perfect fit. And so are the animals that use it to pass through from place to place. They know the storms that blow them in, and they know the storms that can carry them away.

Storms are exciting though, especially in places with big skies and big expanses where the changes can be measured from this moment to that, lined up one after another for comparison, and so is the potential of interconnectedness in and around this body of life. People have navigated the estuary for thousands of years, fishing and hunting using nets and boats, thinking that the risks are worth the reward. Think of the complexity of this storm as some kind of constantly moving three-dimensional loom of life and devotion, the shimmering patterns and lightning strikes of a symbiotic flow created in the mind, and where the mind becomes part of the pattern, transient before the next wave of movement leaves its wake.

Kathleen Dean Moore asks powerfully in her essay Field Notes for an Aesthetic of Storms;

“What reed in the human spirit vibrates with the violence of storms?”

“Beauty, as Edmund Burke pointed out, relaxes” [storms aren’t generally relaxing.] But the opposite of “beauty” is not “ugliness”. The opposite of “beauty” is “sublimity,” the blow-to-the-gut awareness of chaotic forces unleashed and uncontrolled, the terror and finally the awe.”

Kathleen asks us why do we crave it, this chaos of something so much bigger than ourselves; this danger, the desire to reach, at least, the boundary of what it is to be human? Aristotle’s “attraction of tragedy” won’t do. This is no tragedy. A living storm like a tumultuous estuary is no less of a tragedy, nor a monster, than the existence of the universe. Or even our own bodies and microbiomes, with our pulses, blood pressure, sweat and heat, and all our unique vulnerabilities hidden beneath the skin. The estuary is a wonder of LIFE, only in a highly dynamic and opaque form. Reserve “tragedy” for the brutal depression of inevitability, an unnecessary death like suicide, or just a plain morbid fascination with dead things and extinction. I do see this from time to time in so-called environmentalism and reject it. How can suffering be attractive? What bridge shall we all jump from now?

I know too well that which brings tangible mortality right up to the nose. The flow of adrenaline does raise up like a water spout; that subconscious, quick-acting fear that is spent by movement. It makes us use our muscles, fight or take cover. Endorphins are released to dull the coming pain; the same endorphins that rush when we eat good food or enjoy good sex. As dangerous as this tempest of an estuary is, we cannot afford to avoid it. Instead, submerge ourselves deeply within it, only with the fullness of our fluministic imaginations. Publicly love it, for all its volatile expanse, revere and protect the symbiotic lives that make it what it is.

Mark Fisher in “The Weird and the Eerie” writes; “The eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one can pose, questions to do with existence and non-existence: Why is there something here when there should be nothing. Why is there nothing here when there should be something?” Our experience under the bridge is eerie because the bridge shouldn’t be here – the sharp juxtaposition of cool, engineered steel lines over a wild and tumultuous body, yet now dwarfed in comparison to some of the s(t)uperstructures of control between States, rail or road, like the Hong Kong-Zhuhai crossing over the Pearl River Delta, China. Despite our being nature, these impositions are ultra-dominion—dominion on Speed—we’ve created our own weather systems, our own storms and forced them on all living organisms, conquests that affirm our own sense of power by their scale but with impacts we can no longer control. We can stand at the edge of them and exclaim (or jump), admiring the transformation of nature into capital, into something man-built that generates more capital, extra processing of resources by a creature like no other on Earth. We are, for the first time in human history, outside of the clade of the evolutionarily “natural,” jamming, jarring, manipulating the whole planet for our own ends only. Fisher answers his own questions: Capital is eerie at every level, “conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity.” Go further. The bridge is a manifestation of Capital promising to raise us out of the mire and danger, to grow the economy and make some people rich, with the promise of a holiday on an aeroplane at least twice a year. It’s created its own mire and danger, where there should be something perfectly sublime ~ a wide, impossible, racing, untouched body. Akin to more industrial and technical advances, it procures novelty in nature-divorcing experiences laid bare for the consumer. The turbulent wash of body that is the estuary is all but eerie. The bridge is that which deafens us from this point underneath, the objective imposition, the purpose of what the Queen said of it at its grand opening “a new economic era for South Wales” and an affirmation of Nationalist Union. Little else matters in the battle for cash.

I’ve since driven The Severn Bridge, or perhaps now Queen Elizabeth II, hundreds of times myself, a few of the billions of journeys—stories—that have proffered atmospheric roasting and ecological laceration. Queens, and ministers, and Pathé News were all there on the day of opening, along with ten thousand Royalists and families of the men who built it, six of whom died in the original construction. The Royal car made the journey from England to Wales, not the other way around; no doubt symbolic, some kind of affirmation of Anglo conquest of the old kingdoms of Wales. Today, we are under it, this Capitalist beauty that Pathé instructed sixties cinema audiences in commanding Received Pronunciation. There is a kind of odd serenity not having to negotiate the traffic, just standing here staring, yet the rhythmic tyres of cars and lorries bumping the joints of the box girders are relentless. I feel sickened by the low-grade thunder of the engines high above, and of being temporarily mesmerised by those constant vibrations that must surely be felt by all the bodies who live in the air and the water body beneath. And that I still own a car—the guilt of a little white paint-chipped Toyota parked over there—the one that carried us here today all the way down a windy Wye Valley, and on to Cardiff and Gracie’s father.

And now there is this second bridge crossing, “The Prince of Wales” because the first one could not cope with the sheer volume— of traffic and noise. Will there be a third crossing to shoulder the EV boom, or perhaps an egregious and ecocidal tidal barrage to snag the enormous potential of tidal energy to feed the addiction, because the consortiums are still poised should any Government wave a wand of consent. Meanwhile, this bridge will be formally preserved, for now, by our Planners—the main Severn Bridge is a Grade One Listed relic to biospheric loss and rising seas pushing at its concrete feet. And when my Toyota dies, so will my driving habit, and the irony is it will be harder though not impossible to get to these places and bear witness.

Who will walk this bridge during the next fifty years, when perhaps thousands of people and animals file across the gentle curve of its 990ms to move north away from the heat, and storms, and wars; when those high wires begin to buckle under the weight of it all, morning, noon, the full moon of the night. How many R.I.Bs in their rescue-orange-reds will patrol this now turbid-less “sea” pushing all tides and mudflats higher and deeper inland, looking for all the survivors left behind from the great emptying, or jumpers Broken Necks Paralysed Shattered Spines Drown Killed? With each wave of Earth Crisis and the rising tide, the myths of the Capitalist ideal and the “jumpers” float away in the strong ebb, pushed in by the flow, and out again, and in, and out until eventually it is carried away into a new era, almost completely unknown to us now, and buried deep in the sea.

A pair of goosanders float on brown soup like tiny bobbing corks just offshore, accepting this anthropogenic monstrosity around them as run of the mill. I stare at an emerging bridge shadow laying flat on the surface of the estuary, even penetrating the silt, and wonder whether fish take solace in its added shade, as they would under a giant tree on a huge riverbank somewhere. Its seemingly indelible marks come and go with the clouds, and then I imagine the road salt dissolved in rain or hail-melt, falling on their little heads like bullets in winter. That sound from beneath the surface, all the way along the underside of the span, blown this way and that by the winds that funnel through and over and under. I try to fathom the scale of that first concrete stanchion and imagine its slow decay by wave and sand action and eventual collapse. It’s about an hour after low tide and the water levels are creeping back up its pocked surface, nearly four stories up, to the high tide mark. I am imagining what life may cling to it, and down below, in the turmoil.

~~~

A few wasplike figures in yellow and black dry suits appear like an apparition, reversing an R.I.B hooked up to a four-wheel drive down the ramp ready for launch. This is the Severn Area Rescue Association based here under the bridge, along with HM Coastguard Chepstow, the hull and their life jackets in signature rescue-orange-red. This is their HQ, based at this key point along the estuary for access to the rivers, like the Wye and its cliffs too, here to help those in distress, human and beyond, to investigate drifting objects and even old World War ordnance found in the mud. They’re also here to retrieve the occasional body of a “jumper” from either of the two Severn bridges, at least the ones where witnesses are able to report. As we walked past, I asked them about seals, even Arctic walruses like the one making his way down from the Arctic, possible Svalbard, via Tenby to Bilbao. A woman with greying hair and kind eyes was pulling on the top of her drysuit and life jacket. She told me they never see any cetaceans, not even grey seals. Today was just a training launch, a test of a new vessel, and we walked back towards the car to get out of their way.

 

♒︎      Jumping      ♒︎

Photo by me

On those most beautiful days, the contrast seems almost impossible to reconcile, like July 18th – the hottest of days, so exquisite a summer’s day when, after the ambulances arrived to relieve me from the responsibility of my mother’s body, I stumbled into the field to lay among the wildflowers and the insects trying and failing to make sense of an unfolding emotional nuclear explosion. Today was a beautiful day, and the nuclear all but decommissioned. But the clouds were now gathering into a storm over Aust and I felt troubled by what we saw next.

We gazed at the white “Wall of Remembrance” where black, slender empty vases awaited cut flowers. Next, there was a sign zip-tied to an upright girder. The black silhouette of a person jumping from some kind of construction through a bright yellow sky.

In red, “Don’t jump into the unknown.”

In crazy writing designed so that it becomes blue sea below, “Broken Neck Paralysed Shattered Spine Drown Killed”

Emergency Call 999 Coastguard, HM Coastguard.

If you were down here in the water just offshore after jumping, here near the memorial wall some fifty metres below the tarmac at low tide, I think it would already be too late. Just like by the time they call in the infantry it’s already too late. Like Capitalism itself.

 

Chapter Severn – The Mouth – The Mythological

On By seasonalightIn Love Is The River, PhDLeave a comment

♒︎     The Mythological    ♒︎

Photo by me

 

Here, by the flow, I know I am one move away from the idea of feeling no pain. But it is a leap into mental nothingness and a physical dissolution into all the bodies of river life, not peace. There is no peace in suicide; an ecological death, perhaps, if only we weren’t dredged out, split open, organs weighed and then cremated.

You see, I know too well that trauma cannot end at that point, when my life becomes void, because it rips through all those you love; the clever puzzle-solving daughters who love you, the impulsive rescuers who put their lives at risk by trying to save yours. I am fortunate, I guess, in that I could never bring myself to do it, now, for this knowing. But it also a place where I could never find solace. My experience of surviving my mother’s gentle shift of her weight from a chair (no sudden leaps required), is what kills my own thoughts of a death submerged in what I would otherwise cherish—river as life in perfect flow. My fiery neurons quieten, dopamine deactivated, thoughts moved squarely to the responsibilities to loved ones in the tracks of my brain, used-up proteins floating away the myths into the oblivion of my very own bloodstream.

 

Chapter Severn – The Mouth – Danger

On By seasonalightIn Love Is The River, PhDLeave a comment

♒︎     Danger     ♒︎

Photo by me.

Don’t be fooled by their seductiveness. Rivers are dangerous bodies of water. Know them less, and they’ll grab your hips and pull you down, and all the way along. They’ll fill your lungs with mud and blood clots, and turn you intertidal.

Awkward, we huddled around in triage waiting for my father’s final admission to Hereford General. It was just three years after my mother’s death and the next cubicle bulged with an inflatable forced-air warmer. Its tin foil deformity, puckered at the seams, hid well the shadow-person deep inside. We were told—in whispers—he’d been hauled from a “jumping” at the Wye. These lunar-pale faces are not uncommon in triage. As gut wrenched as I was by my father’s now life-snuffing growths, this stranger moved me, and to remember my own special symbiosis with suicide.

On a bad day—a really bad day— the Wye is as lethal as any body of water. You don’t even need to jump, just a lazy slip will do it, and immersion into totality.

Swallowed.

I know how those black, liquid-slick bubbles of bio-continuum entice, especially in high summer; colours too colourful, people too happy; everything’s bent above a body’s surface made of thick plated cylinder glass. In the Unit, my mother tried to tell me about it, and then I came to know something of it too; all you love is muffled, warped, yet still comprehended; like pointing a camera at the things we are supposed to adore, but cannot find with no lens attached.

 

Capler

On By seasonalightIn Fluminism, PhD, UncategorizedLeave a comment
The Wye, South Herefordshire. Photo by me.

 

Hey you, who abandoned me at life’s worst moment; who lied to all of us. Who told me of a love, un-encounterable to most. The path that cut steep down through red soils was lined by light. Tiny stars of wood anemone watched over my eager feet as I moved down through the bluebells having their first conversations with the early bees. All seemed so narrow, a weight, but with an unfurling canopy of shock-green saving me from a complete molten, lead sky.

 

But at the base, where woods fall literally into the river, the sky came in with a bright summer blue, and I stopped to take a deep breath. Breaths are gold, each one, even on ventilin. The river moved like a sliding plate of silver down the table, pausing by me, almost stationary, to hear an ornicophony of riverbirds, and the faint shriek of peregrine somewhere high above. Remember, you asked me to write a poem.

 

Everything opened up to me at this place, Capler, and to everything, flowing through my veins and into my lungs and to the lips. This was what I came for. To try to heal.

 

I’m suffering again, not in your arrogance, in your image fixed into the eye of red-bellied black snake (poor snake), but a realisation that a lifetime of my own difficulty here at my desk, might be a neural difference, an unbidden mindset, unseen and unfelt by all who have tried to help me until now. I don’t like the terminology (this is a symptom too), though I sometimes give too much of my attention, and am hardly inattentive to others. But it only takes a hairline fracture to let the light into pitch black.

 

The DNA-flow of great grandmothers, grandmothers who died by their own hand, mothers (me), daughters who swim beautifully but who still feel they are drowning ~ I just thought this is what it meant to be a woman. To be let down by men.

 

Apparently, only a few are weighted by this “attention deficit”. The anxiety that has ripped through all life’s traumas—there have been many, about as many men in our lives—I just thought we were sensitive. Perhaps, that’s just all we are. It’s hard to contemplate another turn of mental anguish ~ I’ve only just come off the pills.

 

So the path swings left as the river widens into the most exquisite vista to the south, the Wye leaning into a high slope of woods, carving the opposite bank where thick Herefordshire farmland sits heavy. There’s a grandmother over there, with her granddaughter, and they are throwing pebbles in the stream. Bredwardine memories stop me still and then empty me.

 

Butterflies filled me up ~ at least six species; little flighty wings got my attention. I sat among them for a moment, down in the undergrowth, smiling with them. How do you tell a butterfly she is beautiful? Then the path sunk into the bedrock cascading in steps to where the salmon try to run old Ballingham, where the proto indo european rip of riparian—that deep climatic tear—is plain for all to see. More butterflies lay prone on the rock, soaking in the heat. I felt lost there, truly lost in that most profound, good sense.

 

When I came to my other senses, where dream-brain switches into task-brain (as I am now told), I followed a bee into a wide holloway, pushing up into the steeps under Capler Hill Fort, and into a vast auditorium that would have blown your mind.

 

Ravens sounded their wings in circles above me (put that sound in my pocket and save it for later). Giant red-tailed bumblebee queens looked like tiny ants as they rustled their buzz under dry, tongued ferns. All the passerines from all over the Earth were here it seemed, super-high among the quarry-top trees. One oak lay crashed down at the bottom of the cliff, fallen from the topsoil that looked so thin at the top. Another big tree that looked small because of the scale dangled precariously, its roots like tentacles feeling the air. All life is so reliant on that thinness.

 

Then, to hear a slow-rising noise, the shallowest anthrophony of cessna above, of brightly coloured canoe-shouters in the channel, and a sit-on-lawnmower droning slowly towards me. Here, at this place! I could hardly contain my anger. I talked to him later when I’d cooled down, about grass clippings and river ecology—they don’t mix—and he talked to me about keeping things tidy for the tourists, and the fly-fishing licenses; saving the kids from being stung by nettles (I laughed out loud); saving Earth from the scourge of balsam. And litter, to be fair. Even a Ford Capri. And I thanked him for that.

 

I walked back alongside his engine, and we stopped to listen to the noisy peregrines eyeing two-day old ducklings swimming the big, scary river, in little flurries.

 

The man told me the quarry I’d found may have been the source of the red sandstone that is now Hereford Cathedral. A hole in a hill the size of nine hundred years. These peregrines live there now, perched on the quarry ledges. Peregrines also hunt their quarry around the Cathedral tower.

 

I think I found a feather of a female the other day near the remains of a dead pigeon. It’s pinned to my notice board for me to admire the inward beauty of her. Like a shock.

 

Then one flew right over me casting avumbra. And that was the healing moment of the day. The silence of avumbra. I came home wanting, by the habit of four years, to tell the image of me in the mirror ~ you. I wanted to tell the other one too, the earliest bud of cherry blossom, but he’s just told me he found someone else, before the flowers have even fallen to the ground.

 

~~~

 

 

PhD Fluminism as Literature. Practise based research ~ One

On By seasonalightIn Fluminism, PhDLeave a comment

Over the next few months, I’ll be doing a series of moments on the Wye; an in situ telling and collection of personal experiences that helped shape my creation of Fluminism as a symbioethic.

One: Eaton Camp, Wye.

Trigger Warning: Contains distressing descriptions of the memories of suicide ideation and behaviour. If you are feeling vulnerable in anyway, please, don’t listen. Seek urgent help. Help is available. If the first help isn’t positive, try and try again until you find the RIGHT help for you. You are unique. The right help IS there.

I am testament.

#Love #Ecology #Flow

Moment One (link to Vimeo)

 

Galunaissance: Snowdrop Time.

On By seasonalightIn Neologisms, PhD, UncategorizedLeave a comment
Snowdrops. Photo by me.

 

Candlemas bells, Galanthus, you still sound just north of the Levant, drifting across the northern shores of the Mediterranean Sea. You came to me via the piety of Benedictines serving the faith in rejection of most else—they brought you from Renaissance Subiaco on foot or on horseback, in canvas bags tucked inside leather satchels— and they poured you out into the sunlight, then buried you in chimes a stone’s throw from their dark nocturns and early morning prayers. They did love their gardens, the monastics, as they loved God. They must have loved you.

The candles that were lit in these cold, stone buildings each February, where congregations gathered to beeswaxed pews from all corners of the shire to pray, now spill into the graveyards in the form I find you today on the Goggin, all the way from the Abbot’s fields of Lazio. Now you are the candles and the incense burnings along the lane, up on the mown verge. You ring far beyond the Church of England walls, and we are glad, pushing up the hill into the coppice. You are the flowing immigrant to enshrine the earliest of Spring, the short days of hibernation breaking into longer spells.

The light and the change-ringing is coming back, in you.

Your little bell-bulbs are set strong in the hedges and woodlands, and even your seed will sprout if the Queen Bumblebees are early. We love this kind of campanology, and the shadows you cast on crushed, rusted bracken, when the early sun rises low to the East, and your heads bow low to the breeze that swings in from the Baltic and then from the Irish sea. The glistening cells of your petals are clean vellum in that light. You are a bright manuscript awaiting attention; the illuminations of that life, the gold leaves at sunset.

Thank you for it all, dear snowdrops of the Galunaissance. Your familiar sound is a salve for me. If you didn’t ring, what terrible sign that’d be. My genes chime deep in the Brythonic, pre-Roman. But Celts too hailed from elsewhere, from the South. You are an Islander bell, just like me, and all incomers, aged and new. We all wash over these lands in the change-ringing. In the time we are here, best to care for it all.

 

Note: There is no certain origin, as yet, for the introduction of snowdrops into great Britain. I am making a calculated guess, is all.

Audio: MP4

 

Audio: M4a (apple)

Trisense ~ an essay in three parts.

On By seasonalightIn Ecophilosophy, Fluminism, Neologisms, PhDLeave a comment

1. Emily
2. Lynn
3. Ginny

 

Emily

1

 

It’s barely possible to imagine the hem of her black or white dress resting close at the knee of a leather boot belonging to a soldier with so many children borne to another woman.

Metallic scents of expensive ink on expensive paper linger not in her room, but in her father’s office downstairs. She writes by hand, of course, in her bedroom, at a small, crafted desk and seated on a chair that is cut and waxed from some of the grandest trees of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The glories of lilac and generations of bees flavour an ordinary lead pencil, maybe a sharp knife too, laid on the desk to carve a point. Her neck is long and pale, black hair wrapped into itself at the nape, and pinned.  The line of her spine drops plumb as she breathes quick and anxious.

In bitter winter, Emily looks down through her window at a horse raising his snow-dusted hooves through drifts, the wheelwright’s toil rolling behind. They travel along the road to a neighbour, delivering to the town’s elite. Her brother’s children, released from next door, laugh in these memory grounds beneath the cold, white blanket surrounding the yellow house. She’s observed robin search for his worm at the edges, pecking at the frozen leaf piles. Her secret lover makes boot prints through her father’s garden to his place of work. He glances up to her window with a wry smile beneath his flamboyant well-groomed moustache.

Spring has raced through this year—the bulbs bursting with colour in the borders—purple crocuses, yellow daffodils with orange hearts, and pink and blue hyacinths—and then abandoned her. How must she feel? The petals have shaped her thoughts into words, but she is anxious that it will all end soon. This keeps her in with her thoughts.

In a summer heatwave, the warmth of wet soil in clay pots, and spiced leaves, drifts into her hair, and Emily throws open the conservatory windows. A bead of sweat runs across her brow when the nights are sultry. And there is fresh-pressed lavender-scented linen on her bed when thunder comes, especially when the leaves redden and fall to the first frosts.

Emily writes each letter one at a time until they make words, and lines like tiny rivers on the back of used envelopes, and orange telegrams—Baltimore orioles—and any scrap paper she can find. There is a slant of light, of truth, yes; that bright New England kind that contrasts even the palest patterned walls and white skirtings.

She writes again in her beautiful garden. Blue jays are gifts, red cardinals shock. The loud warbles of tiny Carolina wrens float along the perennial borders of the Homestead under an orderly, painted, hickory fence. Even the Magnolia tripetala leaves swelling through the winds of the Fall gently vibrate that same, perfectly hand-stitched hem just when their rosy red fruit cones are in their prime.

For now, thanks to Austin, I read they flourish beyond Homestead northward about two hundred miles from their native range and a degree of centigrade.  You are all visionaries.

Emily mouths her own words quietly and sends them silently to a huge appetite denied in public spheres. The repression bubbles up, coded in decorum. Blood flows to her lips and through her fingertips. Skin on skin, under the skin of him, and her, then through the hand; hand through wood and lead; lead on manilla, and into her pocket. She can keep him there constantly, and no-one would ever know. She smiles, politely, at Lavinia.

If Emily had split a lark herself, somehow without harm, and peered into the microscope, she’d find her neighbour Lynn searching for the slanted truth, and source codes, and yellow, deep in a cell and the organelles. This place is where all the energy is, and all that lays in her pocket.

 

 

Lynn

2

 

She’s young on her wedding day—nineteen, like my Mum. She looks happy, swept into the folds of intellectual love. As a child, she has a bright mind free to roam the woods, unhindered. Now, it’s a strong will to study, and to be with him, and to inspire. They have a child together—Dorian. They divorce.

We divorced.

From the liberal arts to a passion for the inquiring, challenging mind, science history, she keeps her hair tied, or short. And she cycles to a humming lab where she dwells on processes, where the black and white microscopes stand in rows. Soon, she is eye-deep in the cell and the organelles through the glass—the glascella—where she splits the minutiae larks, to think and theorize a new understanding. It’s that slant of light falling across all those pale, patterned neo-Darwinists with her rolling-into-words, honey Illinois.

But she takes all her nature in with her; all of it. Worms, termites, termite gut bacteria, birds, slimes, eukarya. And she knocks on the doors of the journals and they turn her away, until one day, the world just gently shifts on its axis. Life, it is proven (until disproved) is to be less anger, after all, and more love; an inter-kingdom of unions and sex and symbiosis, not war.

And Lynn falls in love again. We all do if we’re fortunate. I did. Two more children, all now flourishing, then another divorce—she’s a dedicated first-class scientist and author.

She writes her notes by hand/in type. Spirochetes spin their corkscrews in white cups, and she looks to all those men again and gently laughs. Her time is big moves, from Chicago Chickadees to the Dark-eyed Juncos of Berkeley and back again to the East. And more, to NASA, to Russia, to international councils of men, and time with mics in studios, and interviews with great writers. She’s blazing trails to lecture halls the length of the land.

Finally, Lynn finds her way home to Emily’s town and the grandfather’s college, where she is content as a botanist can be. She has moved next door to those Dickinson memory grounds. And they meet somehow over the hickory fence. Spring has raced through very fast this year—the bulbs bursting too late in the borders—and as Lynn writes through finger tips and plastic keys and memory boards in a summer heatwave, a bead of sweat runs across her brow. This is her place now, her Amherst. It’s friendships, yes Lovelock’s rainbows on Hungry Hill, and the geosciences where they also make art for her, and this is magic for her: an Earth so in sym as to be the sum.

As her children’s children laugh, her love grows for the sauce code in decorum written on manilla and chocolate wrappers just next door; Emily’s yellow. I’m listening to you, Lynn, as you swim forever wild in your Puffer’s Pond.

 

 

Ginny

3

 

I have two lives. One is before Mum’s suicide and the other comes after that. Before, I am steered by the great events of those I love. After, comes a life of trauma and healing. In healing, I emerge, though trauma is never a singularity.

As a child, I have a bright mind free to roam the Herefordshire woods and streams, and listen to larks, unhindered. My hair is long, until the chemo, tied back into a wild bunch. We meet at college, where I design with black ink on whiteboards and read Zevi. He maps gold and reads Lopez. Then, in Welsh borderlands, he gives me tandems, and our dog, and daily walks. And I know these hills like the memory grounds. After walks under rainbows on Hungry Hill, our daughter comes, and life seems the best adventure. We go to that New England light (Chickadee) and wade through Pacific waves under the Aotearoan cloud (Tui). And I still love him for that. Big moves.

But the after comes, and terrible trauma brings anger and control, and it takes a long time in the city between the Taff and the Ely for me to leave. But I do, and I find new, deep love. And so to this intellectual bird love—of  Cardiff Dippers and Albert’s Lyrebirds—I too receive a wry smile—and the hems and leather boots are in symbiosis with visions of a new epoch itself. I have scribbled in pencil on manilla envelopes our word, mirrors. They also know before and after, a lonely place to be.

How dull would life be without you, Emily and Lynn, and I pocket all the slant light and symbiogenesis I can mine in your words, forming my own thoughts and words, pushing all the hickory fences back. I mouth my own words to a huge appetite denied in public spheres. Love is never sentimentalism. Blogs (light of all the seasons) are my instruments—plastic keys— and Twitter, though there is control there and it can make me unhappy. There’s a beautiful book too, thanks to my friend Riechmann, in a language my daughter knows well. And I relish, too, the visceral art with Lyons under Welsh sleet ~ ah, the Elan horses.

You see, I grew up in my mother’s rambling garden with hardly an edge into the wild of the wood and the streams. And I tended a glasshouse, just like Emily, the warmth of wet soil in clay pots, and spiced leaves in my hair. I climbed mountains and even flew them (the Red Kites). But it was Dad who always tasked me to question. We cared for each other in the after, and I held his hand as he breathed his last. I miss him.

And to abandonment and cancer ~ how must I feel? I am still here above red sandstone, standing at the confluences. Deep down here, there are all the five Kingdoms in symbiosis spreading to cover the entire Earth. I can’t tell you, Lynn, what ten thousand miles away means, and what ten thousand miles back feels. Straight down, beneath my feet, all of time. And then to record them, and the loss ~ each mile ~ with my tiny, black mic, pinned to my pale, patterned blouse.

Daughter’s voice has grown strong in justice and language, like the river, and I learn from her. Meanwhile, I wait and write, and walk each day to Kingfishers and Goosanders, with Heron-like patience; at other times none at all, like the gleam of a Peregrine’s strike. I live Rilke’s questions, searching along my own Amethyst Brook or Connecticut—The Edw and the Wye—  imagining all the spirochetes, searching too for the light beneath my own versions of Magnolia tripetala and all their subsoil mycelium lovers and sunshine. Nothing is separate: All is flow, my rivers, yellow, and that gentle shift of the axis.

Lynn, you asked me for new words, a source code, so I give them to you. Emily, I understand you and the blood to the lips. I feel like we are the lichen on my Mum’s grave, the trisense; it takes three in symbiosis—the alga, and two types of fungi  (an ascomycete and a newly identified basidiomycete yeast), but all three must have that colour.

 

End.