chain coral Chorus
something reused or altered but still bearing visible traces of its earlier form.
something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface Above are two dictionary definitions for the term Palimpsest; a term often discussed in association with Robert MacFarlane’s book, Underland, to consider the makeup of our landscapes and, importantly, the nature of our cognition as we journey in to it. This is a deep time exploration of layers and traces. Layers that underpin our everydays. Traces of everydays prior to ours. MacFarlane’s work has been instrumental to my poetics during this project. I’ve been an admirer of his musical writing that burrows into the cracks between the wild and the human and the mythical for a long time. It is in the same spirit of this Palimpsestic Journeying that I’ve undertaken my Black Country Geopoetics. My starting point for the Chain Coral Chorus has obvious links to the first definition above. The Geosites within the Black Country Geopark are rewilded places; reused and altered by time, conservation and leisure. And they hold the visible traces of earlier times and uses - mining, railways, silurian marshes. This makes them symbolically charged with drama, symbol and narrative that stretches out for eons. Traces and layers that can be measured in a socio-historical way and through stratigraphic measurement. Webs of signs that can be linked through verifiable record, feeling and folklore - no one thing being less true or significant than the other, but working collaboratively through the topography. So, through using definition one as a point of departure, we enter into definition two, and back on ourselves again. Such is the nature of geological and deep time navigation. I think the current covid-19 situation has offered a strange influence on this palimpsestic travelling too. The social distancing and lockdown restrictions have forced many of us, including myself, to rethink movement. Where we go, how far we go, how often we move and who we move with have been brought to the front of our consciousness. For many, this has narrowed our scope for travel and movement and brought what may have been a wide attention into something seemingly narrow. But perhaps not. Perhaps we’ve merely recalibrated, in the same way we did with scale, our direction of movement. We’ve been moving down, into the traces and into the layers. I may be speaking for myself, though I suspect not. If, like me, you’ve been taking your daily exercise by walking the same routes and exploring your immediate local, then perhaps you’ve begun to see things in the familiar that you hadn’t noticed before. If so, you’re an accidental palimpsetic traveller. I’m lucky, living within a stone’s throw of The Wrenna (Wren’s Nest Nature Reserve), to have covered every inch of the place over the last year. I’ve walked and rewalked in every conceivable direction and route. Every path. Every desire line. Every dead end. I’ve seen the ripple beds and the bell pits up close, from above and from within. I’ve watched the same pebble accidently moved, inch by inch, by different feet over periods of weeks until it disappears into hawthorn that casts a different shadow dependent on the time of year. I’ve seen the slow build and fall of spring and autumn in minute detail along the same patch of woodland. Through this I’ve gained a flow like state, a hyper-alertness of my grounds. Through habit, through movement, through deliberate, slow, acute observations, through touching and smelling and breathing it all in, I've gained an embodied knowledge of my grounds. I bear witness and it seems to stare back. We’re like a cobweb spread out in MacFarlane’s underlands, signalling semaphores each to each through silken strands. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2022
Categories |