Potamichor, and more.

Moment to sense on the river Clun (2023), photo by me.

In honour of the work of Joy Bear and Richard Thomas, who coined the word petrichor in 1964 to describe the aroma earth emits when rain falls*, I offer potamichor.

ποτάμι Potámi ~ greek ~ river.

Ichor ~ The sacred blood of the Greek Gods.

Potamichor ~ a familiar odour of rivers.

Dimethyl sulfide**, along with other elements and biochemicals, offer the familar and pungent sulphurous odour of sea spray, an important moment of the sulphur/sulfur cycle that aids protein, vitamin and hormone building – I’ll call the smell thalassicor (sea/blood of the gods).

And in the same vein, estuaries and saltmarshes create ekvolichor (estuary/blood of the gods); lakes give off limnichor; ponds – limnoulichor: swamps and bog – telmichor.

Potamichor is complex, with varying cocktails of minerals, biochemicals and olifactory matter bound to be unique to the continuums of river-place given geological, meteorological, climatic, symbiological, microbial (including respiration), ecological and anthropological (extrinsic/intrinsic impacts).

With complexity in matter and directionality, and in a constant state of flux, salmonids, lampreys, twait shad and sturgeon know more than we ever could about potamichor. They smell their particular birth-streams miles out to sea, and without the use of material and energy-greedy tools. Perhaps migratory birds use these cues to navigate too, high up in the atmosphere. And more? Imagine.

~~~

  • * Bear, I., Thomas, R. Nature of Argillaceous Odour. Nature 201, 993–995 (1964). https://doi.org/10.1038/201993a0 – geosmins produced by Streptomyces, etc.
  • ** Shemi, A., Alcolombri, U., Schatz, D. et al. Dimethyl sulfide mediates microbial predator–prey interactions between zooplankton and algae in the ocean. Nat Microbiol 6, 1357–1366 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41564-021-00971-3

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

 

 

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.

~~~

Capler

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

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)

 

Alder the Elder.

Alder, Wye, and Ben. Photo by me.

 

I am thinking about Alder fixing nitrogen at the roots next to the flowing, swirling river. They are in symbiosis with all realms of friendly powers to do this.  True.

Fixed, rooted, “they have figured how to live trapped into place,” says one of Richard Powers’ characters in Overstory.*

They are stillness in the ground, and unable to outrun us. They are vulnerable to pestilences, including our terrible machines. They evolved to be hardened, poisonous and giant to all who may assault them, yet they are losing this race brought upon them. True.

Are they really so fixed?

I am listening to Alder, intently.  With their belly in the ground, their body and limbs above, defying gravity, and their thousands of faces — leaves, buds–  turned patiently towards the sky, I am quiet; present. Sixty years staring at the sky, as we spin on our axis, and around the Sun, and around the Milky Way’s tiny, dense, black hole, and away from whatever lays at the centre of the universe, riding on dark matter at ever-increasing speed.

Alder says they don’t know the meaning of stillness. It’s not in their vocabulary, so rooted are they in this cosmic dance. Neither do their symbiotic messengers know such stillness. We are all constantly moving. In Spring, look up towards the Sun and the stars, just like the unfurling leaves.

Alder’s DNA, their being, floats all the way up to high cirrus, and thousands of miles, and years.

I think I’d like to be a part, if they’ll allow it.

~~~~~~

Alder pronouns: they, them, theirs. They are monecious, hermaphroditic, so until I can hear them say their pronouns…

~~~~~~

*Overstory by Richard Powers, Vintage. 2018

 

Audio:


 

Ecolartia (eco-l-art-ia)

Riverbank ~ image by me, entered into the New York International Photo Competition 2012

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Lumilattiss, and guest blog by Tim Sykes.

It’s striking to realise a personal sense of pure elation from the effect of sunlight in its many forms. Even more so, when light and water mix, and with sounds. I find it healing.

In our rivers, shallow oceans, even at the bottom of swimming pools and upon cave roofs, we are familiar with light refracting back and forth through gentle and chaotic laps of surface waves. A lace-like dance of photons hits our retinas, processes in our brains and triggers emotions.

These hypnotic and beautiful patterns of light are officially known as caustic networks. Most of us would assume caustic is a type of chemical capable of burning, and definitely something to avoid. But caustic, in terms of physics, means patterns formed by the intersection of reflected or refracted parallel rays from a curved surface. Keith Beven, Professor Emeritus of Hydrology at Lancaster University, describes beautifully the physics of caustics and water here at On Landscape.

Ecologically, caustic networks are instrumental to wild beings with varying sensing abilities, who photosynthesize, hide and hunt among them each day, and in ways we are only just beginning to understand

Earlier this week, Twitter friend Tim Sykes @RiversAndPeople, asked me to create a more relational word for caustics. I jumped at the chance, and spent a few days thinking about it.

I agree. I think a new common word might be useful in garnering interest in something so characteristically Earth-y (rock/water/sun), ecologically effecting, and mesmerizing in its affect upon us.

On studying the patterns at my local river, The  Wye, I saw dynamic nets, webs, lace and lattice-work. PIE root *(h)uebh- “to weave;” also “to move quickly” source also of Sanskrit ubhnati “he laces together (Etymonline.com), which is probably where old French Latiz originated.

Lumen, latin for source of light, combined with lattice spelled phonetically for ease of pronunciation across different languages ~ lattiss.

Lumilattiss.

I invited Tim to blog, and so here he writes. My gratitude.

~~~~~~

Photo by Tim Sykes © 2020

I enjoyed a sense of fun as I rolled-up my trouser legs and waded into the chalk stream, a winterbourne, watched by seven circling red kites and a herd of curious black bullocks. It’s not unusual for me to dip my feet in this winterbourne for its soothing effects on my racing mind and two things struck me as notable this day: the chill of the flow was toe-numbingly energising; and the crystal-clear water amplified the bright sunshine illuminating my pale feet so they seemed to glow ice-white. The sunrays were reflected and refracted by the water, casting a shimmering, shifting net onto the flinty stream bed and my feet. Lost in the moment I was transfixed by this dancing water-crazed light-lattice of star-like nodes and chaotic wavy light threads.

Afterwards I felt joyful, glee, but I struggled to describe exactly what I had sensed at the time: I think my self was suspended in a trance-like state of fascination. That evening, contemplating this further, a friend enlightened me to the technical name for this familiar phenomenon: a ‘caustic network’. To be awestruck by ethereal light is not unusual, a recent night on a beach watching shooting stars mesmerised by the dancing flames of our campfire was similarly spellbinding in a primitive and sublime way. It struck me that such a wonderful natural fluvial phenomenon deserves a non-technical, more soulful name and I asked Ginny, my twitter-friend what she would call it. As you are reading this blog you already know of Ginny’s passionate gift for forging new language and better ways of thinking to express how we celebrate and conserve the natural world and our relationship in and of it: and hence the word lumilattiss was born…

Tim Sykes is a mature, part-time post graduate research student at the University of Southampton. An ecologist by training, he is exploring our deep relationships with chalk stream winterbournes in their flowing, pooling and drying phases, particularly intrinsic and relational values. He tweets @RiversandPeople, so please do follow!

~~~~~~

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Beavers are Fluminists.

Beavers are Fluminists. By Ginny Battson. First published by Zoomorphic October 9th 2017.

Spring 2005, and I peer through my living room window to check the weather. It’s looking good, the sun is out. My husband has left for a day’s work at UMaine Orono, so I lower my baby girl into her papoose and strap her in. We are through the fly screen door and out onto the road.

The residential lots of leafy Gilbert Street are studded with blue and red flags, remnants of last winter’s political war that saw Republican oilmen G.W. Bush and Dick Cheney take charge of the Whitehouse for a second term. With Ben-dog on a long leash, we follow the battle flags west, casting purple shadows ahead of us. We walk past classic-style weatherboard homes and gas guzzling SUVs slewn across hardstandings until we find the end of the road. Tarmac gives way to paper birch and alder and we greet the softer edge of the great American Eastern Deciduous Forest. It feels like a rite of passage.

In the human realm, I am entering The Orono Land Trust, a public/private non-profit organization, legally banding sections of post-logging and regenerating northern hardwood forest together for the purpose of wildlife protection and local enjoyment. This forest seems fairly tame compared to the great national parks of Maine like the Katahdin Woods or the rugged Mahoosuc Notch of the Appalachian Trail. But even here, surrounded by roads, including the Interstate 95, I have seen fresh black bear scratches oozing sap from bark. It’s not like entering the woods back home in Wales.

Elbows in, we slip-slide down a wet path to the Johnny Mack Brook where olive reflections of a newly unfurled canopy merge with black and silver melt water. Better still, this is the realm of Castor canadensis, the North American beaver, larger than their Eurasian counterpart, maybe up to 60lbs of large, brown rodent. And they dwell intensely here on the easy inclines of the Johnny Mack; signature gnawings, dams, lodges, mud ramps and woody debris in droves. I long for my baby to see a wet nose or a rippling flank in the stream. But they are largely nocturnal, and we’re a little late in the morning.

As First Nationers shaped the North American landscape by brush fire, up to some four hundred million beavers shaped it by water. But these eager river-keepers were almost obliterated in the 19th Century, not least by the huge British Hudson Bay Company. Armies of trappers were sent into the woods and onto the plains, with a blood-lust for warm pelts to make felt hats and hard cash. And in killing the beaver, the outlanders changed the very nature of the land, and wounded the culture of the indigenous peoples, in gun trade and disease. When only one hundred thousand beavers or so remained in Canadian territory, a new European fashion for silk hats ended the profit in beavers. Perhaps, if it were not for Grey Owl (Archie Belaney), and others who followed, ‘Ahmik’ would never have returned to its North American range and beyond. Yet, even today, beaver numbers are a fraction of what they used to be, with so much more habitat swallowed up by human development and agriculture. And still they are hunted and persecuted in some quarters.

I learn from rivers, as do the beavers. I spend time in and around them, observing and sensing. Two and a half thousand years ago, the ancient philosopher Heraclitus also wrote on the profound things he learned from rivers. In an age before science, he looked for guiding principles in nature. What he found in rivers was a permanence in a reality of apparent change. All is flux, a matrix of matter and movement. The river is an analogy for an elemental cosmos, yet materially effervescent. Rivers are also life systems ~ complex and dynamic.

Beavers, the river keepers, have evolved to be more than the sum of themselves. Beavers live in the life-flow, interrupt and send it in multiple directions. Known to ecologists as ‘keystone,’ First Nationers instead call them ‘sacred centres’ of the land. For they are whirling hubs of life-influence and life-confluence, integral to the flow just as mind cannot be separated from body. They are dam and bridge builders, storing water at times of plenty for times of drought. They sequester carbon by trapping it in fluvial muds that eventually become rich soils. They are coppicers; the trees they fell to feed upon and rear their young will regenerate, beaver-cuts catalyzing a diversity of plant and animal life. They are also wildlife protectors ~ during winter, woody debris left trapped behind dams are buried beneath deep snow, and provide shelter for a host of smaller mammals and reptiles during the bitter cold. And then, when the northern hemisphere tips nearer to the Sun, melt water form reservoirs and a rising water table, creating habitat for amphibians and a plethora of bird species, including waterfowl ~ wood duck and heron, migratory waders and passerines. New lentic deeps amongst woody debris provide fish fry safe passage to grow to adulthood. Majestic osprey take the adults. In lotic flows downstream, clouds of black fly larvae lay submerged, attached to substrate with silk, to emerge in spring and breed, then feed the bats that hunt on the wing above the beaver-cuts. The dams may eventually blow-out by flood, and the beavers will find new territory. Upstream, moose rear young on regenerating meadow grasses years after dams are abandoned. This really is rich habitat; the smell of river, wood and beaver is intoxicating.

If beavers could speak human, they may also say;

“Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.” (Heraclitus Homericus B49a)

Heraclitus appeals to both human courage and sensibility ~ step into the rivers, into the cool and wet of rushing water, the flow of being. Just do it, and you shall be rewarded. We are agents of action. On the Johnny Mack, my little family and I look for beavers, as we smell the air and touch the cold waters of the stream. It’s life affirming.

I believe as we too are nature, we must recognize in ourselves a similar power for good, in that we may step into the flow, generating abundance and diversity within our one biosphere. But as with beavers, our impacts must be transient not permanent, of locale and the seasons. If we decide not to step into the flow, to remain without experience, then we deny ourselves the fullness of being. Our senses wake us to the world. Watch the beavers in their pure devotion to task, and you’ll understand.

More, step into the flow with that same devotion, and strengthen all life around us. We have exerted huge and irreversible pressures on this magnificent Earth, scavenging and parasitising by feeding from the produce of such sublime natural processes. We’ve broken ecological webs and warped the very climatic and nutrient cycles that sustain all. Nature responds to disturbance as evolutionary opportunity, but too much of a ‘hit’ and process may take hundreds of thousands of years to counter. The beaver and river exist now, intrinsically valuable, but, in union, a lesson for the human race.

Required is a critical mass of devotion, previously unknown in human history, as there are now more humans than ever before. Leaders still fixated with a ravenous desire for money and status need to be left behind. And part of this newly found devotion will also be to reduce our impacts, decolonizing just a little, for our animal-kin to flourish a little more.

Beavers are sometimes food for other species. Black bears and coyotes prey on adults. The spectacular Great Horned Owl will rear her young in an old great blue heron nest, and a beaver kit may well end up in their devoted beaks. The beavers’ sacrifice, unlike our own Western death, is more obviously complete. This devotion, the love for life and living, is a force without which there’d be no life. It is ancient ~ a form of love so powerful as to energise evolution. I imagine the story lies deep in the earliest records of life, somewhere, tucked away perhaps, in stromatolites, which supplied Earth with no less than oxygen itself. Colossal devotion must have existed in the face of all hostility and, as a metabolizing strength, within and between us now, and of all living beings into the future. As we move into increasingly turbulent times, the union of the beaver and the river is a devotion of incalculable value, a love, I suggest, worthy of the deepest respect.

Perhaps what also set Heraclitus apart from early Western predecessors was his view that the Logos, the principle of order and knowledge, is within us all. We are part of nature and subject to its fluidity. We are a unity of forces in flux. If we recognise our potential, we all morph into type. We can become beaver people, positively distributing and strengthening the flow of life beyond the sum of ourselves. I expect the Panawahpskek peoples of Maine and to the North always knew it. The patterns of life and cosmic order are dynamic, not uniform, the perfection of imperfection generating even more diversity.

So to my own eco-philosophy, that has riparian roots drawing sustenance from a small Maine river. It is one acknowledging both intrinsic value of all living beings, including humans, and their contribution to infinite and dynamic process. Existence and flow cannot be separated. I perceive flow, to and from all dimensions, including ones we are yet to fully comprehend. The complexity is endless, the minutiae beautiful. There are diatoms and microbes by the million in the Johnny Mack. They are a basic foundation of life, part of the long chains of living process across space and time, but we cannot see them with our eyes. Can we ever know everything? It need not matter. So, I introduce the word Fluminism: an interconnected narrative of a dynamic universe; there is flow to and from all dimensions, including ones we are yet to understand. The complexity is endless, the minutiae beautiful.

The next step, being a Fluminist, means ethical consequences of my actions are good, in that they are of parity with a biosphere conducive to the flourishing of intrinsically valuable, existential life. Beavers may disrupt hydrological flow for their basic needs, stalling it as it travels from mountains to ocean. But in doing so, they accelerate the distribution of flow in multiple and complex directions. A closed system opens. Entropy shifts to enthalpy and the consequences can be sensed, measured and celebrated across space-time. We, as agents, are able to protect and perpetuate the flow, coming from that same deep devotion, as in the beavers ~ beavers are Fluminists.

From the niche desires of flourishing individuals, beavers, engaging in what they do best, I see their agency as a distinct form of love ~ innate of themselves, through and to other living beings. From within to without, there is no separation. Love has had a tough time. It’s hounded as weak, ephemeral and sentimental. But truest love is also a doing word, a vital emotional signal to act on what matters most to us all. If one describes Fluminism, beyond an evolutionary, genetic biophilia and see it as an energetic force, not only towards our one biosphere, to non-human life, but towards each other. In consequence, we may see the kind of society forming envisioned by the political theorist, communalist and libertarian anarchist, Murray Bookchin. I will leave the political ecology largely aside for now, but Fluminism, I see as key relevance to shape a society un-reliant on the disconnection of state and citizen we see today. Instead, it grants empowerment of everyone via personal, local and communal responsibility for all life. Environmental ethics must now be fluministic (love/flows) to help unblock those barriers that are so un-beaverlike that they persist in depauperating, not enriching, the biosphere.

Fast forward to January 2017, and the Northeast Climate Science Center (NECSC) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst publish research predicting temperatures across the northeastern United States will increase much faster than the global average. The average annual temperature in both Maine and Vermont rose by 2.5 degrees, roughly double the average warming of the rest of the nation. The Paris Agreement on climate change aims to curb emissions in order to limit global averages increases by 2 degrees Celsius, but in Maine they will be reached about 20 years earlier, comparatively. The current elected President refuses to partake in the accord, so poor is his understanding of our biosphere. And so much for America First. The anti-fluminists have left a legacy of world chaos and a strange, paradoxical darkness looms where gas flares still burn. Trump’s election has been an unfathomable stamp of fatuity.

The further north, the bigger the climatic disparity. As Arctic sea-ice melts, the darker ocean warms by absorbing more sunlight, further melting ice and emitting heat to disrupt and stall the jet stream. This creates longer, more extreme weather events and shifts the geographical pattern of cold and warm air fronts. 2016 – 2017 has seen the highest winter temperatures on record in the Arctic Basin, with the least number of accumulated freezing days. No-one is entirely certain what comes next, especially as the global control of total emissions is still in some doubt. But more extreme weather events are predicted and the oceans are rising and thermally expanding much faster than expected. We are now witnessing rapid change. What was once Arctic tundra is now hosting early woodland succession, and increased humidity and precipitation in the form of snow means soils are warmer than would otherwise be, activating the microbes that break down carbon as it unlocks itself from melting permafrost. Whole biomes are on the move. Where willow saplings take root, the beavers will naturally follow. They are creating biodiverse wetlands in new terrain, whilst tundra species are increasingly marginalised. Observations are now recorded of beavers reaching as far north as the Babbage River on the coastal plains of the Beaufort Sea, Yukon Territory, never seen before in human memory.

Aquatic wetland is a major natural source of methane and nitrous oxide emissions into the atmosphere, and in beaver habitats, microbes will break down the organic matter trapped above their constructions. But in creating wetland and higher water tables, beavers are also preventing soil erosion, storing water during times of drought, and sequestering carbon-rich woody debris buried in boggy meadows by as much as 23% of total soils. Beavers have been busy at work for millennia under a relatively stable climate. It is human industrialisation, development and emissions that have caused the tipping points we see today. Biospheric flows have dampened to an alarming extent. Life on Earth is trying to adapt, of course, though so often blocked again by more soil sealing, more fragmentation of habitats and increased fires and floods.

Maine is deeply cold in winter, steel-frost and snow-bound, some nights temperatures dropping to way below -35 Celsius. But spring is short, maybe two or three weeks before breaking through to the sultry summers of the continental east, and ecological emanation happens in such a short period. Rising temperatures bring spring earlier ~ the further north one travels, the more extreme. And there are now serious phenological mismatches in delicately balanced food chains. So much so, the US National Park Service is now having to redefine management programmes and visitor calendars, such as citizen science counts of migratory raptors, and funding longer seasons in tackling invasive species. Back in 2004, the Republican Bush/Cheney partnership with Oil and Gas strengthened at the White House. Nearly $400 million was spent on lobbying federal government, and millions more were passed in donations to federal candidates and political action committees. The support received, by return, came in droves ~ tax breaks, environmental exemptions and deregulation, international facilitation and direct subsidies. We’ve seen a greater proportion of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere as a consequence. Those oil men are culpable for disrupting the very essence of life on this Earth, dynamic process, the flow. But no-one claims responsibility.

A relatively large proportion of Maine’s species, 37%, are highly vulnerable to climate change, particularly plants, fungi, lichens and mammals. Alpine, high elevation forest, and peatland habitats are most at risk. Thankfully, the vertebrate species pool is dominated by adaptable generalists, and a high percentage of forest cover also offers resilience. But even in Maine, suitable areas for species and habitats moving from the southern New England and Mid-Atlantic states must now be accommodated, whilst planning partnerships formed with the neighbouring Canadian provinces for a similar northward movement.

Despite a laceration of roads and other human pressures, nearly a thousand acres of conservation easement have been connected by the OLT. Such conservation easements, “running with the land” in perpetuity, are a significant form of nature-protection in the US and are mapped at the National Conservation Easement Database. Certain property rights are voluntarily restricted for the purpose of nature conservation and sometimes in exchange for tax breaks. Specific objectives can be agreed by stakeholders and subdivision for human development is prevented. All the while, sustainable agriculture and forestry may continue, but emphasis veers towards shared benefits, for humans and non-humans alike. I was enlightened by the passion and generosity of those involved, the action of those who love life. The connectivity and place for species movement is vital to address the shortcomings of those who would ignore their own life support system and will not take responsibility for their actions. Scientists are mapping migration routes plus working to predict and map climate refugia zones (local anomalies in climate), providing hope for ailing ecosystems and some resilience for species. And universities, institutes and The National Parks Service are offering  land owners access to free advice, despite failed political leadership. There is hope. And there is love. To a great extent, this is evidence of Fluminism in action.

Later on that same spring day, in 2005, my daughter and I are again criss-crossing the OLT footpaths.We’ve seen porcupines very busy at dusk, with attack-tails ready to swipe and launch a fateful of quills should a fisher attack. Ben has suffered himself, more than once, each time ending in a trip to the vet in Veazie. So we’ve left him at home this time. From another little foot-bridge over the brook, serenaded by an ecophony of river, we gaze across the water and there are still no beavers willing to reveal themselves. I look deep into slit-vistas between lichen encrusted white pine and red spruce, glimpsing a luminous white tail of a white-tailed deer under hemlock. Before now, we’ve seen eastern coyotes, apparitional in dapple light. I know there are bobcats, but I never see them, but the chipmunks are a treat and my baby daughter smiles when they chatter angrily as we pass. We navigate north by fallen white pines, and other natural landmarks on the trail now stored in my memory. We’re on our way to Rampe’s Lot, a key part of the OLT.

The Rampe’s live a generous life working in public and private health care, and they are good to us. They love wild things and so contributed to the OLT with a good tract of regenerating forest. It was Nancy who first showed me the special vernal pools, liquid light mirroring the skies amidst the bryophytes, and the flutterings of re-introduced wild turkeys as they disappeared from view. Considering their small size, these wet depressions in the forest floor, left by blocks of melting ice abandoned during the grand retreat of ice-age glaciation, also host a huge array of species. Snow melts and lingers in these depressions for a while, often stained red with springtails. And because they don’t host fish, they are hotbeds for invertebrate life, particularly as breeding sites for amphibians like the blue-spotted salamander and wood frog. Soon the reptiles are drawn in. Then the wild turkeys and racoons will come. And so, up through the trophic cascade until those glorious great horned owls and bobcats come to prowl.

The state of Maine registers the vernal pools as Significant Wildlife Habitat zones, legally protecting them from destruction and development. Yet some landowners may not even realise the conservation significance of them on their land. Thanks to the dedication of academics like A.J. Calhoun and citizens like Nancy Rampe, knowledge sharing via community outreach informs better decision making at local government level. UMaine’s Department of Wildlife Ecology is contributing to the Vernal Pool Mapping and Assessment Program, locating sites and researching the importance of juvenile dispersal and habitat connectivity for successful amphibian adulthood. But with climate changing so rapidly, the vernal pools may well disappear. Increased winds, tree blowdown and the risk of forest fire all stage a real threat. Research by the State University of New York, Syracuse shows beavers may well be providing key wetland refugia for, at least, some of these species. As most wood frogs breed only once in their lifetimes, a prolonged drought resulting in no production from vernal pools may well necessitate recolonization by dispersers from beaver ponds. Spotted salamanders are longer-lived, breeding several times, lowering risk of local extinctions during drought. Further studies may well reveal closer ties but I expect the elders of the Penobscot Nation have an understanding of these patterns.

As we are seeing, it is no longer a question of conserving one species over another, the usual triage of charity towards wild non-human life. We need to protect the interconnectedness of all, and each one of us, with all our varied interests and lines of work, can participate. We need Fluminists, like Nancy and the researchers at Umaine, who love these species and habitats, and understand the dynamism of all the interconnections which constitute life. And we need them to mentor others. The flow is sent in multiple directions, with abundance and biodiversity in tow.

By example, allowing primary and secondary succession, along with the planting of indigenous vegetation, we can encourage life to flourish in individual yet interconnected self-willed patterns. To actively prevent by soil-sealing (e.g., concreting), is the opposite. We can assess empirically the abundance and biodiversity of our own practices, celebrate successes and learn from our mistakes. So many have forgotten the beauty of observing and participating in such local, natural processes. Human contentment and happiness may spring from living an interconnected and more coexistent life. Vitally, the cultivation of land for food will no longer be a threat, but an opportunity to nurture the dynamic flows of non-human life alongside what we do, like the sacred centres ~ the beavers. From shop keeping to health care provision, from clothes production to local planning, everyone can take part, or stand in for those who simply cannot through no fault of their own. Fluminism is egalitarian.

Long-term or permanent breaks in the flow are anti-Fluministic, and the accumulation of many breaks, or stops, becomes detrimental to the existence of life in the form of tipping points. Examples are tragically many, generated largely within the sphere of unsustainable human development, anthropogenic climate change, pesticide use, socio-political and economic doctrines promoting unlimited growth and inequality. However, there may be pauses in flow that remain Fluministic, in that they may appear to prevent flow, such as ‘natural disasters,’ but are only temporary or cyclical (e.g., volcanism), in time and space.

Fluministic love drives action from within to without and, no doubt, there are positive effects and affects that will return to the self. But it is the local communality where real strength is to be found, strengths expended in a multiplicity of ways across cultures, regions, terrestrial and oceanic biomes, in science and the humanities. Some may commune with a collective consciousness in all, a spiritual interconnection ~ Indra’s net in constant flux. And indigenous peoples with local, endemic knowledge and philosophy will bring much to collective understanding. Opportunities exist all over the world, in the critical formation of corridors and pathways that allow for continuous flow of species to survive, adapt and move, and in traditional and transformed practices such as permaculture, satoyama and satoumi. By placing Fluminism at the centre of decision-making, many new ways of sharing our biosphere viably with humans and non-humans may arise.

In the reductionist scientific world, and in an over-emphatic obsession with limiting cognitive bias, love has been rejected all too often as excessively romantic and sentimental. But science itself has evidentially recognised that moral judgments and ethical actions cannot be devoid of emotion. Rationality and emotion are evolutionarily conjoined, and with good purpose. Emotions need to be recognised in order to take action. To deny that the primary emotion of love exists is to deny its huge potential, a love for life, for our young, and their young, for a sense of place and life all around us. Eros lives, and thank goodness for that. Of course, there’s competition. And conflict. There is even death. But such antagonisms are no less parts of the interconnectedness of all, in the flows of the elements, of water, geology, relationships, companionship, lust, reproduction, time, tides, place, trophic cascades, air, dynamism, weather, music, biodiversity, universes, entropy and enthalpy.

There are many more fluministic species, mutualisms and cause-effect processes that offer us knowledge and hope as we aim to exit the Anthropocene epoch into the Symbiocene. The Pacific Salmon Forest is a beautiful example (true beauty shines in those dynamic interconnections). There are human Fluminists, like the Rampe’s, the people behind the Orono Land Trust, The Penobscot Nation, and those at the Department of Wildlife Ecology at UMaine. And community programmes like the Great Eastern Ranges Initiative of New South Wales and the work of the Kenya Land Conservation Trust ~ the contribution and responsibilities volunteered are Fluminism in action, the legalities being just one means to that end.

Back to the Maine woods, and it’s getting late. I’m a little bit edgy because the light is falling. As I hurry back with my baby over the bridge towards Gilbert, we hear the slap of a scaly, flat tail hitting the water ~ splash. I stop and turn us around to follow the sound. My eyes adjust to the watery scene. And there is the beaver, Fluminist, swimming, with a wet, brown head visible for a moment and shiny eyes, before diving beneath the inky reflections of a darkening sky. She’s warning others we are here. Though we’d never harm her, others might. I feel at peace knowing she is here, knowing she has a rich intrinsically valuable life, full of love for this world in the river she understands so intimately. I point her out to my baby who instinctively feels both the joy and excitement. Formative moments, for sure. There is so much yet to learn from Ahmik, Fluminist, and I walk us home full of awe and gratitude.

 

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What might Heraclitus mean by claiming that, ‘We step and we do not step into the same rivers, we are and we are not.’? Discuss as an issue concerning our knowledge and perception of the world.

Introduction

Heraclitus was borne from an early age of human enlightenment, at a time when the study of religion and poetry proved simply not enough to satiate a human hunger for knowledge and understanding of nature and existence. Homer’s epics, the Iliad and Odyssey, though linguistically direct, were not omniscient and, given the few bones or fragments known to us via successive writers, Heraclitus appeared unwilling to dispel spiritual existence altogether. His work may be viewed as a bridge between ancient, divine poetry and modern, philosophical and scientific thought, a radical and valuable place in human development.
Heraclitus was critical of the few great Western thinkers before him. Pythagorus, he suggested, had a highly selective formula for wisdom and maintained a ‘bad craft’ of learning. Understandably, his words have been interpreted by others as misanthropy. But the value of his critiques, the notion of radicalism as catalyst for the change, may be key to the assemblage of our knowledge to date. He himself may well have been a misanthrope, and wished Homer ‘beaten’, but we would be wrong to constrain our assessments of great ideas by inferred personal weakness. We’d have to dismiss much of attained human understanding to date.
Priest says the pre-eminent role of philosophy is to ‘challenge, question and object’, to be prompted ‘out of mistakes, stupidities and complacencies’ and so to encourage creative and constructive ideas. Levy hopes that by encompassing the history of philosophy, or let us say, remembering, perhaps continental and analytic disciplines can unite in a combination of relevance AND depth. Where better to look than the history of Heraclitus’ mysterious river fragments, the linkage between this fragment and his elegant notion of ‘Logos’, as the principle of order and knowledge.

‘…in the midst of all nature’s constant flux and opposites, Heraclitus saw an Entity or one-ness. This “something”, which was the source of everything, he called God or Logos’. ( Jostein Gaarder).

The Milesian school of thinkers, chiefly, Thanes and Anaximenes, had already begun to define all things by uniformity and searched for cosmic laws outside the influence of the gods. Heraclitus is noted as a monist in that fire is the underlying and universal substance of all things. I question this assertion. Heraclitus’ fire is sacred, therefore, divine and not necessarily material, that ‘the unity of things was to be found in their essential structure or arrangement rather than their material’. Herein lies a fathomable heresy: There is no substance.

Heraclitus’ fragments amount to over one hundred separate sentences, probably part of a more finished work entitled, ‘On Nature.’ They have been documented by successive authors, not least in Plato, Cratylus and by Aristotle. The Stoics, with their metaphysical ideas on divine fire like the Pyrrhonists, referenced him also, and we may continue to see Heraclitus’ influence down through the centuries, philosophical threads woven through time and the human cause.

The River Fragment

There seems two major literary references viable as Heraclitus’ original words.
B12. potamoisi toisin autoisin embainousin hetera kai hetera hudata epirrei. On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow. (Cleanthes from Arius Didymus from Eusebius) or The G.W.T. Patrick translation ‘To those entering the same river, other and still other waters flow’.
B49a. potamois tois autois … Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not. (Heraclitus Homericus)
Although I am asked to respond to B49a, scholars such as GWT Patrick and Prof. James E. Mahon are minded that the first translation is more likely to have been derived from an Ionic Greek syntax during the 69th Olympiad. Kirk, Raven and Schofield’s view is that there is uncertainty on authenticity but a translation as follows reveals a more ‘natural and unforced Ionic (language) and having the characteristic rhythm of archaic prose’. They translate,
‘Upon those who step into the same rivers different and different waters flow.’

Unity of Opposites, the Logos and Spirit

Heraclitus, of The City of Ephesus, along with a limited number of free and able contemporaries around five hundred BC, looked for permanence in a reality of apparent change. Unlike others he sought not to absolve constancy nor change but celebrated the tensions between. A Unity of Opposites applies to all things, not least the forces within us; life-death, waking-sleeping, youth-age and the change is changing. If change is in flux then the Logos, the oneness of all things, is fluidity, like a river.
The river is an analogy, but it is also something tangible. The river, Heraclitus supposed, shared characteristics with the Logos, something to which we can all relate through time. Others have compared the river to our human soul. ‘For, wishing to show that the vaporized souls are always of an intellectual nature, he (Heraclitus) compared them to a river, saying, “To those entering the same river, other and still other waters flow.” And souls are exhalations from moisture’.

Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.

Is this Heraclitus’ dictum, law and deduced by logical thinking? I think not. Heraclitus is appealing to the senses in the first instance ‘into the rivers we step’, to draw us in to the coolness and wetness of rushing water, the flow of being. It is a life affirming thing to do. He then appeals to our sensibilities, because we can decide not to step into the flow, to remain without experience of what is most enriching. If we choose not to experience the flow through our senses, then we deny ourselves the fullness of being.
Obliqueness is purposefully constructed for the adventure of philosophical inquiry. We may view the fragment as an open question, presented as a doxa or teacher’s argument. Heraclitus invites us to explore with our our ultimate goal (The Telos), being the uncovering of the Logos. The Ethos is finding our spiritual path to truth and this is a good thing.
Additionally, since nature prefers to hide, as a conscious intent, humans have to be particularly deliberate and ‘awake’ to find and ‘step into’ it. Here stands Heraclitus somewhere along a line of tension between God and Science, a bridge between the Logos as infinite and Earthly as finite.
Perhaps what also sets Heraclitus apart from early Western predecessors is his view that the Logos is within us all. We are part of nature and subject to its fluidity. We are a unity of forces in flux. The pattern of human life and the pattern of cosmic order are the same. And here we may see a connection with the mystics of the East and West. God is within, and so we see a deeply spiritual connection. The Port of Ephesus was also a key trading hub, with ships coming in from the Orient and so likely also to bring novel ideas, from Buddha, Lao Tse, Confucius and earlier, perhaps the Vedanta religion from India.

Literal Relevance

Change or universal ‘flux’ is as pertinent and profound today as it was at any other point in time. During the Anthropocene, this age of man-made climate and rapid biodiversity changes, it would be remiss to neglect Heraclitus. We may well find no finite resolution but insight in that all states of existence pass. In many ways science is still investigating truth in this claim, post Einstein’s Theory of Relativity via metaphysical space time theory and temporal logic. But by consciously analysing the fragments, memory may be transformed by modernity, as Hannah Arendt implies, ‘in order to’ progress.
The river analogy demonstrates both the sameness of what we universally recognise as a geographical feature, the different states of the river and one’s relationship to them at any singular point in time or space. The argument holds that a wholeness described can also be made up of several different entities and connections. In the case of rivers, we can perceive and understand through scientific investigation, that they consist of water molecules, energy, light, geology and life all in a state of aerobic and anaerobic process across the fourth dimension, time.
A river, therefore, is a pattern, subject to change, with dynamic phenomena that can be studied in some detail, for instance, by the science of hydromorphology.
But we also allocate Proper Nouns, in order to make a specific river distinguishable from another. To name is to find commonality for reference, culturally or otherwise. It can also unify a collective, as in a watershed, and ultimately enrich meaning and communal responsibility in our lives.
The River Wye in the Welsh Borders used to be known as the Vaga. Some say this derives from the Latin, ‘wonderer’ or the Anglo Saxon, Weag (and Gwy in Welsh), and the river surely has wondered across the land and also in human consciousness. It has been altered by evolving ecologies, particularly by the current dominant ecological stressor, Man. Some parts of its course have been modified for irrigation. Farming methods, riparian tree clearance, pollution, invasive introductions and fishing all continue to play a part. Never-the-less, to humans it remains the ‘Wye’. For all other life, we do not know.
The Cayster River, the Küçük Menderes, “Little Meander”, or the Kaystros, rises from Mount Ida, flowing westward through Homeric Trojan battle fields and into the Aegean at Pamucak beach near Selçuk, Turkey. It once flowed into the Port of Ephesus, which is now silted up. The coastal zone has advanced and the ruins of Ephesus now lie miles inland.
Heraclitus must have known The Cayster very well, which is perhaps why the river fragment exists at all. The river was also key in Homer’s stories of the Trojan War, as backdrop to infamous battles scenes. But one imagines, the two men related to this river rather differently.
At whichever point I visit along the length of the Wye, I often lose perception of my own sense of time. This is a very good thing for me, and may have been so for Heraclitus. There are healing processes at work. Worries and fears dissipate into the strong vortex of life, water and rock that is the ‘river’. It compels and sustains. But an ancient river has worth of its own exceeding all of our combined human needs. It is, from source to sea, in a seemingly perpetual cycle, responding to climate by expanding and contracting, like breath. Its course wanders over, under and through time, melting towards the sea. Geology, morphology, ecology, war, plunder, possession; it has endured the changes. And the river will respond accordingly to our meddling with the atmosphere and climate, building on flood plains and decimating structural woodland, by flood and by erosion. It is in the river’s nature, The Logos, the nature of energy, to want to spread out.
Long into the future, perhaps the winds may change direction, continents will divide again, the Wye’s entire length may disappear, consumed by new geological action and climates. There may be traces of its ancient form and life in the rock, and these may, in turn, erode to dust and silt the rivers a billion years from now. A cycle within cycles.
‘A river revealed in a flash of lightning is as thick and quivering as gelatin. And yet, measured against a millennium, a mountain melts down the sides of the valley and pours into the sea’. (Kathleen Dean Moore)
One person’s lifespan is a blink of an eye to the river. All things relative, of course: My own perceptions of time may be faster than the veteran oak or the pearl mussel, slower than the needle fly or sand martin. And we experience the river as uniquely as we are species. Fast or slow. Yet it is our meeting point. Ebb or flow, whirlpool or riffle, all the senses engaged, memories will be in the making. The Wye is different, yet the same.

Problems

There are difficulties, of course, firstly that language must be used carefully in finely distinguishing one moment from another, aspects of the river and the ones who steps into it, through time. Socrates is said to have been critical of Heraclitus’ vagueness but one might also judge any obscurity as intentional and provocative. Heraclitus’s opaque use of language may have been be symbolic of his frustration with the Artemisian faithful, as if he wanted to provoke discussion outside of the norm of political discussion and challenge religious dogma. Laertus tells us Heraclitus was scathing in his criticism of those who remained ‘asleep’, for the blind faithful can be easily mislead. To have faith is to trust blindly, and Heraclitus wished not to be blind. But his language was not monumental and unmoveable but open to interpretation, ephemeral and fluid. Like a river.
Secondly, The Logos, the word, the One True God, is referred to as a Proper Noun, something which Heraclitus claims to understand and know well, as opposed to all others. This can be viewed as elitism, as Geldard says Popper implies in his book, The Open Society and its Enemies. Elitism is not a virtuous thing unless you are minded that hierarchies and closed systems are good and that all things are not equal. Perhaps the only constant is change itself, so God is change, and this may be Heraclitus’ most heretic claim. Heresy? Geldard calls it aversive thought, through which ‘we might learn via provocation and not instruction’ as Ralph Waldo Emerson also suggests.

Fire and the river; a cycle of rebirth

To Heraclitus, sacred fire was eternal. It is not hard to imagine the significance of fire for people of the Eastern Mediterranean, so near to the South Aegean Volcanic Arc. Around a thousand years earlier, the Minoan settlement at Akrotiri was destroyed by the catastrophic phreato-magmatic eruption of Mount Thera, now known as the island of Santorini. Heraclitus will have most likely read Titanomachy in Hesiod’s Theogony, which was inspired by traditional oral storytelling of the event passed down through generations.
We know that a fire can sequentially ignite and snuff out, which does not occur at the same time unless, perhaps, in parallel universes. But if Heraclitus’s ‘fire’ is energy, or better still, entropy, which he could not have perceived scientifically at the time, then we are seeing something extraordinarily consistent with recent theories of the cosmos. That the energy of the Logos, the constant change, is the arrow of time. Couple this with the idea that the universe itself is in a symmetrical cycle of expansion and contraction, like a hand opening and closing, we can see here a constant state of flux but one that renews again and again in a way that a river is constantly refreshed by evaporation and condensation causing rain in the hills, which drains to the sea and so on.
The Big Bang theory becomes something other than the beginning, but a part of an enormous rhythm of energy amongst matter, where the universe expands and contracts repeatedly like love and hate or the ‘Brahma opening his third eye’ each time all things begin again.
The sequence of days, the cycle of months, the rhythm of seasons, form years. Time flows constantly like a river, like life and death, change and recurrence. As the River Cayster silted at its mouth, eventually rendering the City of Ephesus a distant memory, the river is ever dying and reborn, it preserves the form of ‘river’, one specific to its history, current existence and its future. Without joy, there is sorrow so where there is joy there follows there shall be sorrow.

Strife

The unity of opposites provide the tensions needed in nature for existence. One could take it further still and say that all things exist in a unity of opposites, in that all can either exist or not. Life, for example, flows from the tension between existence and non-existence, the fight for survival; conflicts, large or small, which all encounter and hopefully mediate in order to find peace and to flourish.
Are opposites always to be in conflict? Often there is an assumption that we have to make choices between opposites. Capitalism OR Equality, Rural OR urban. Nature OR agriculture. Perhaps it is not always A OR B as our adversarial political system would so frequently have us believe. A and B are often ill-defined intentionally, to reinforce prejudice and encourage division amongst the populous for the sake of political gain. As an example, we may be forced to choose, say, between energy and black-outs, when it is energy and climate which are actually at odds but intrinsically connected.
I would disagree that these ‘connections’ exist in a permanent state of conflict. However we may find ‘JUSTICE’ somewhere along the line of tension. This could be interpreted as compromise, of course, but maybe in doing so, perhaps, we can see the merit of what Heraclitus was proposing. The identity of a ‘river’ remains in tact, but its structure is in a constant state of alteration. ‘The identity of the river is one of form and physical continuity, but not of material identity or preservation of the same content’ Flux, like a flickering flame, is the nature of time, and time is a multiplier of all things. Yet all things may unify again perhaps via a subatomic strata of existence. But also the river is external to us and universal energy is something in which we step in and out. River, energy, flow may be seen as a symbolic construction. It is here that we may see Heraclitus demonstrating language as a microcosm of the cosmos and we’d do well to pay more attention to it.

Depth

‘Listen to the Logos and not to me’ says Heraclitus and you should expect the unexpected. The Logos informs us, or not, via our own newly discovered alertness. Heidegger says this is what is called thinking “from the start tuned in a negative key” or otherwise known as an apophatic paradox. All that is put to us may be questioned. Nothing is, therefore, taken for granted and so we may become dedicated to the ‘road to truth’ .
Catherine Osborne proposes that Heraclitus may have presented fire as one stage of a sequence, the Bang of the Big Bang, to which all things return and begin again. But if we set his words in the context (Ephesus around 500 BC), Osborne’s assertion of Heraclitus’ vision of fire is a radical discontinuity of matter, like death and rebirth. He may not, therefore, be the monist he is purported to be.
‘His system bears some resemblance to Empedocles’s thesis of eternal recurrence, and what Nietzsche found so familiar in Heraclitus was not a material cosmology but the tension of opposites that defined the world as a kind of warfare.’
The process of organic adaptive change driven by chance, and now proven to a great extent by genetics, is the Darwinian evidence to support Heraclitus, in that it is change, but not necessarily conflict, which drives evolution. We couldn’t say that inorganic, physical tensions of vulcanicity or continental plate-tectonics are consciously in battle, though consciousness does still concern science today.
Darwin’s theory of natural selection, based on variation, inheritance, struggle and adaptation is the first aspect of his contribution to human thought. But it is his second point, on life’s common ancestry, the tree of life in which we may find the interconnectedness between all things and the organic moral community. Does Heraclitus, as Nietzche suggests, ‘raise the curtain on this greatest of all dramas?’ War is not, however, the fundamental truth to all things though it may be the behaviour of organic life from time to time. The pragmatist, John Dewey, like Darwin, saw nature as a system in constant change, as indeed are philosophical problems themselves. Existence is a risk, and we are compelled to adapt to survive. There is uncertainty in choosing which path to follow. Firstly, there is the path of appealing to a higher Being to reveal our destinies. Secondly, there’s the path where we ourselves begin to unveil nature’s mysteries and therefore our own destinies. Taken to extreme, however, the first path can lead to apathy, and the second path could lead to a very anthropocentric world whereby we can learn to control nature only to suit our ends. The two opposites can soon be seen as being in tension with each other. The second path can lead to a great epiphany, by unravelling the mysteries of nature, and is therefore more of a good thing than bad. Heraclitus shows us that ethics and metaphysics are also bound.
Wittgenstein insisted Darwin’s work has had no impact on philosophy and is entirely separate. I can’t agree. If we look at Heraclitus’s philosophical assertions on flux and Darwin’s scientific analysis of adaptation, we can see that both are inherently interconnected by cause and effect. With the principles of progressive evolution and the theory of natural selection, moreover, we can see that tension is essential.
If tension between opposites did not exist then Heraclitus is proposing the universe may fall apart. But peace and war, rather than tension, is limited to organic matter. Absolute peace might mean the collapse of ecosystems but war is not an end in itself. It is just as possible that truth is peace, and that peace is attainable, in the same way that there is a difference between myself and the river into which I step. I am not the Logos, but the Logos is within me and the River.

Conclusion

The Logos may be a quasi-spiritual flow of energy that both surrounds us and pulses within. It is something we cannot be, but it is part of us. We are and we are not. The universe, within and beyond our knowledge may be ephemeral in that it is in a constant state of change. The cosmos contains a series of opposing factors, between which oscillates existence along a connecting line of tension.
It is difficult to separate Heraclitus elegant notion of Logos from his rivers fragment, as one demonstrates the existence of the other twofold; by the unity of opposites (the sameness and differences) and by the amorphousness of flux. It is only by awakening from our own slumbers and making a personal journey that we may reach true enlightenment. That flux and opposites exist, even if we do not perceive them, means that we must partake in actively discovering them.
Heraclitus is right to suggest that each person, nee life form, entering the same river will perceive it slightly or intensely different from any other life form. Literally, both it and we are changing, therefore, change is the constant as it is throughout the universe (via entropy). If the river, as GWT Patrick asserts, means the exhalation of our soul, then this too will evolve, flux and alter each time it is revisited. We grow.
As the fragments are generally short and synonymous they may be interpreted as ideas Heraclitus expects us to challenge. Heraclitus might, therefore, be an instigator of philosophical reactive thought, as by example, Aristotle reacts, ‘ But one could quickly force Heraclitus himself to admit that contradictory propositions can never be true in the same respect…the very saying is false, that the same thing can both be and not be at the same time’.
In turn, we may contest Aristotle. A river can be good for you in that it provides sustenance. It can also be bad for you, when it breaks its banks in a torrent of flood and you are swept away. The river is birth and the river is death, yet it remains the ‘river’.

Reason and perception

The ethos of learning by doing is one to value, but we are limited by our senses and by
perceptions, as Axanimander found when he perceived the world as a flat topped drum. Eleatic philosopher, Parmenides, argued the opposite, in that our every day perceptions of the world are completely wrong and all is, in fact, One (God). Nieztche says God is dead, the starting point for recognising that a true life is one firmly rooted in reality rather than theory, and that it is only in this real world where we can progress: An existentialist development influenced by Sartre.
There is indeed, a pragmatism in spending our lives in search of wisdom, but Heraclitus, in the unity of opposites, demonstrated that both perception and reason were connected and necessary for enlightenment. Patterns are undergoing change all the time, like a moving kaleidoscope, and so is philosophy itself. Does philosophy still ‘yield the enrichment and increase of power’ that we have come to expect from scientific theories? Dewey asks of philosophy whether clarity and opaqueness are in tension. I think so.
As a philosopher, a lover of wisdom, Heraclitus enables us to imagine that we too are able to gather wisdom, independently of godly guidance or dogma resulting from ignorance of the Logos. We are invited to live our lives as seekers, because searching oneself for truths is to be ‘awake.’ Nietzche, like Heraclitus, viewed wisdom as the most precious moral good. Good and evil are a unity of opposites, with good being revelation of the Logos and evil rooted in the ignorance of it. Within ourselves, there is the tension between Mind and Body, a circular flow between which exists and cannot be separated.
A complete philosophy cannot be assumed from Heraclitus’ fragments, yet we have enough to imagine it. If he did leave his book in the Temple of Artemis, then it was an offering only to the gods with content enduring but pages and ink subject to Earthly decay. Heraclitus may well recognise this as just if he were alive today.
On justice, the Logos should nourish our written laws, somewhere on the tension line between theocracy and Platonic Philosopher King, but Heraclitus chose to abandon the chaotic corruption he was privy to witness in the City of Ephesus, to think ‘cosmically’ whilst being an individual. He made a decision to isolate himself in rural existence outside the City walls, which after all, may not have been an act of misanthropy but an act of necessity in order to think clearly. One may also see this as courageous. His private understanding was not that of a man dreaming of the mundane, but that of a man awakening to the spiritual evolution of human nature.
Emerson refers to the ‘Universal mind’, the consciousness that is ever expanding. In this sense, Heraclitus’ preference for an ‘ethos’ of self-discovery and enlightenment of all things fits well. Better still, there is now a collective drive to accumulate this individual knowledge. The cosmos still consists of unapparent physical and ecological connections and we may look no further than the mysteries of rivers as living systems. As Geldard implies, Heraclitus ‘served as as the bow releasing the arrow of exploration into the vibrant air’.

River Days

Image

Vernal equinox has come and gone for the year and we tip more towards the ball of fire that is the Sun than we do away. Longer days stretch out before us.

My daughter and I chat about our hopes for dreamy days by the river, fresh sandwiches and pink lemonade moments interspersed by cool, wild swims in a seemingly perfect halcyonic existence.

We look forward to natural abundance, to the lime green glow beneath overarching alders, and to finding our feet on slick pebbles through a cool, shallow flow.

There will be the buzz of Dipper and Kingfisher wings. There will be Beautiful Demoiselles alighting on sedges. We’ll hug each other whilst balancing on fallen trees laying across the stream.

Dreams based on memory feed the imagination of what is possible.
Whether via pictorial or descriptive representation, through any or all of the senses, to imagine is as important to possibility as it is to dream.