“Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place”
Gary Snyder
I love walking out on the marshes of the upper Thames estuary in all seasons. It’s a wide open edgeland landscape: rewilded nature reserve and brownfield wildness bordered by a huge landfill site, warehouses, jetties and breakers yards, with a high speed rail line on the other side. And of course the wide tidal Thames, its power unleashed as it emerges from the confines of the city and spreads out again into marshes and mudflats.
Out in these open expanses, it immediately becomes apparent to the senses how we live in a circular world; the horizon, now freed from urban sprawl, is clearly curved, that mystery where sky meets land. The sun arcs its way across the vast blue firmament in a great curve to disappear into the bright horizon, only to emerge fresh the next day from out of the horizon in the East. In mid winter, as it is now, I need sunglasses against the glare of the shallow arc of the sun. Here the circling rhythm of the seasons cannot be missed.
The famous earthrise photo taken by an astronaut of the earth from the moon, is often spoken of as a pivotal moment in our environmental appreciation of the planet: a unique, and even for some, a spiritual experience. Wonderful though it certainly is, it can also have the effect of making the planet seem like an exterior object with us removed from it. And that’s not the place where I live. The earth I experience here is my home, feeling the squelchy mud beneath my feet.
The marsh path is being taken over by brambles, those tough prickly pioneers who defy the notion that plants don’t move; bramble tendrils are forever questing, sending advance shoots across the path, reclaiming it in their own rewilding project. Many of the stems are still in leaf in the winter and the scrubby tangled thickets of bramble bushes can provide protection for young trees from overbrowsing by deer. I give thanks to this often reviled plant for giving so sweetly of itself. I recall savouring the rich sweetness of the blackberries every summer, my fingers stained juice-purple: all the flavours of the sun, the earth, the air, condensed in this luscious berry.
Being out in the chill breeze, the low morning sun dazzling off the water, I feel the openness of presence. It’s much more than just being in the ‘present’ or being in the ‘now’, which feels rather thin in comparison. It’s a much deeper sense of the present. This is connected to our encultured perspective of linear time: the present then being just one of an endless succession of moments, ‘nows,’ as we progress into the future on the arrow of time, straight and linear. This perspective goes back to the Greeks, particularly Aristotle, and it is a very valuable perspective which has led to so many advances, but it is nevertheless, just one view, an abstraction. And significantly, a downside of this view is that it tends to abstract us from the landscape, as I hope will become clear.
Mindfulness and ‘being here now’ are valuable approaches and I’ve practised variations of these myself for years in a previous life. But being present, perceiving with the synesthesia of all our senses, is something else. A series of ‘now’ moments doesn’t do justice to our actual full immersion in the living landscape. Here on the marshes, my senses are wide awake, the infinite blueness of the encircling sky dotted with soaring gulls, my fingers tingling with the intense cold, the flickering light of the low sun through the tall swaying reeds hypnotising; the sudden explosion of song in a staccato burst from a reed-hidden cetti’s warbler; the roar and rush of a Eurostar high speed train hurtling by on the edge of the marshes; the sounds of winter wildfowl and waders a low background symphony, ebbing and flowing with the changing breeze. This is a much richer, deeper present, with seemingly nothing excluded.
Walking these paths throughout the seasons, year after year, my lived experience out here is more of circular time rather than linear time. Time is marked by short winter days or long summer evenings; the flowering, then fruiting of the brambles; the arrival and departure of the wild ducks and waders from arctic regions; the flooding of the marshes in winter with the willows knee-deep in water; Spring, with the ecstatic chorus of songbirds and marsh frogs. Every September, I come here to watch the acrobatics of the hobbies on passage – a small dashing falcon which stops here to feast on the dragonflies that it catches in dazzling flight before launching on its journey south to Africa. Place and time can’t be separated in my lived sensuous experience through the year.
Walking across the marshland, I walk towards the glistening horizon on this cold clear day. As I approach, more is revealed about the landscape as it unfolds to my senses: more vistas, ponds, ditches, banks of reeds. And yet the horizon remains always just out of reach, full of promise, disclosing ever more as it is approached, with more terrain hidden beyond the horizon. My sensual experience as I walk towards the horizon is that I am going toward the future with each step .
I’ve always found the horizon to be a fascinating mystery that seems to beckon with promise and a vague sense that it’s related to the future. And I have a similar sense that the past is somehow always with us here too, rather than in some separate realm or dimension. Remnants of the marsh’s past are all around, though most would be invisible under the ground. These ancient marshes have been reclaimed from the river for grazing by a protective sea wall. Small grass covered mounds curiously dot the drier grazing fields; these are the homes of yellow meadow ant colonies, built up over time, they can be as old as a century; the raised height of the mounds being the ants’ own version of flood protection.
Big metal target signs still protrude in one area, a relic of the marshes being used for a firing range in WW1, with a long mound behind to stop stray bullets. Over longer time periods, rivers like animals, wander around too, changing their courses, and forest once covered this area. Here and there, ancient tree stumps poke out of the mud like fossils, preserved from rotting by anaerobic conditions in the mud for over five thousand years. Sheep were grazed here and now it’s a nature reserve with the water deliberately let back in. Everything leaves its traces, on and under the ground.
For a long time I haven’t been able to clarify my vague feelings or intuitions that there is something more to my musings than merely attempting poetic descriptions of my experience of place or habitat: that somehow place/space and time are not as distinct or separate as we think.
Funnily enough, modern physics since Einstein endorses the reality of space-time as a unitary continuum rather than the conventional separate entities of space or time. But this view is confined to the arcane realms of theoretical mathematics and astronomy and hasn’t impacted our regular perceptual experience where space and time are still firmly assumed to be separate dimensions. We have been conditioned to mistrust our own direct sensory experience, to think that it is superficial, and to believe instead that what is real can only be determined by complex instruments beyond our unaided senses, such as electron microscopes and radio telescopes which can measure the infinitely small and the infinitely large.
Significantly, and interestingly, indigenous peoples the world over, have never seen space/place as separate from time, and early anthropologists wrongly assumed that theirs was a simplistic view and that indigenous peoples perhaps couldn’t conceive of the future.
On our living room wall, we have a small print of a famous far larger painting by Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri, who was a leading aboriginal artist from the Western Desert of Australia. I often gaze at and am drawn into the vitality of what to me looks like a swirling cosmic tableau rendered in the exquisite ‘dot’ style which he pioneered. I know from reading art experts’ analyses that it portrays a number of different stories – nine dreamings – including sacred places associated with the particular land that the artist belonged to and had special knowledge about, and key events from different times. Although I cannot enter into the indigenous perspective, I do get a taste of an aspect of what it might mean and their radically different interwoven conceptions of place and time and belonging.
I am indebted to eco philosopher David Abram for his exploration of sensory perception and a fresh engagement with the animate Earth and I’ve drawn greatly from his work. And in relation to what I’m talking about here, I’ve found his interpretations of the work of phenomenological philosophers Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on this subject of space and time to be especially relevant and enlightening. And below I’m sharing what I’ve understood from Abram.
Independently, both Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty grappled with the mysteries of space and time and perception and came to broadly similar views about this towards the ends of their lives. Merleau-Ponty wrote in his last work from 1960 about,
“This very time that is space, this very space that is time”.
Martin Heidegger wrote an essay published in 1969 entitled On Time and Being , wherein he talked of there being a deeper sense of the present behind the succession of a sequence of ‘nows’, which he refers to as ‘presence’. He says that it is only from this experience of the present as presence that ‘real time’ can become evident – by which he means what he later calls ‘time-space’. He suggests that past, present and future all draw us outside of ourselves and each carries us towards a particular ‘horizon’. So other places which are hidden from the open presence and not explicitly present in the perceivable landscape, are connected to the present landscape by the visible horizon.
It’s an initially strange sounding description of Heidegger’s, yet his conceptual structure of time does correspond very clearly with the perceptual structure of the landscape we are in the midst of. Of course we will never know what Heidegger himself might have thought of this interpretation.
Heidegger says that the future withholds its presence while the past refuses, which sounds initially mystifying but has come to actually make sense to me. He states that past and future are absences which make themselves felt within the present.
From this it confirms my experience of seeing the landscape horizon as the future, which is withheld and yet opens up continually to presence as we approach it. This is congruent with Heidegger’s saying that the future withholds.
But what has been – the past – is different. As I walk along the path through the marshes, I leave behind where I was before, but if I were to turn around and retrace my steps, it wouldn’t be the same any more. That would be clear if I came back here in a couple of months, and even more obvious from a few years ago when this nature reserve hadn’t yet been created. There’s a vast mode of invisibility very much related to the landscape – and that is the absence of what is under the ground. We take this absence of the under-the -ground completely for granted: all that could be unearthed by archaeologists about past times, the preserved tree stump I mentioned before being one example. As well as this, there is all that is ‘inside’ that is invisible: the inside of a tree trunk – its core and rings recording growth, the insides of our bodies, the inside of rocks.
Here there is the correspondence with Heidegger’s saying how the past refuses as opposed to the withholding of the future. As David Abram summarises,
“The beyond-the-horizon, by withholding its presence, holds open the perceived landscape, while the under-the-ground, by refusing its presence, supports the perceived landscape”
In the linear time view, past and future are not present in the landscape at all, whereas with the way I am describing it, the past and the future are the depths of this living place we are in. So we are placing these dimensions of past and future in the landscape. Place/space and time are together as space-time and the characteristics of the ground and the horizon depend on the presence of the earth.
As Abram says,
”Only when space and time are reconciled into a single, unified field of phenomena does the encompassing earth become evident, once again, in all its power and its depth, as the very ground and horizon of all our knowing”.
It’s hard to get to this for us westerners because we are so encultured in a linear time outlook which tends to remove us from the earth, from our actual habitat, so that the above seems weirdly worded and complicated. Heidegger had to deliberately use familiar words in strange unorthodox ways to try to get past the inbuilt limitations in our modern use of language. To an indigenous person still in living relationship with the land, I’m sure what is being pointed to here would be obvious.
As radical environmentalist Paul Shepard says,
“We must stand apart from the conventions of history, even while using the record of the past, for the idea of history itself is a western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat. It formulates experience outside of nature and tends to reduce place to only a stage where the human drama is enacted.”
I continue walking along to the sea wall which overlooks the river and is peppered with wild rose bushes full of burning red rose hips. The Thames has breathed out leaving a rich shore of mudflats at low tide. Winter visiting waders probe the soft mud for worms; godwits with their long bills and a whole flock of avocets, immaculate black and white and dainty with their thin slightly upturned bills. Through the mirage of the morning haze, a lone seal is hauled out on the mudflats, its coat an incongruous dull orange from (harmless) iron oxide in the mud, a feature of Thames seals. I walk towards the future horizon with the past under my feet, in the full rich presence of an open expanded present.
Walking in all seasons I know each rose bush, each reedy water channel and pool, and the sunny spots where lizards and frogs bask in summer, the favourite spots for kingfishers to perch and best berry patches. It’s a ritual of mine to visit all these beings at different times throughout the year. Increasingly I feel like I’m walking in a particular area of land that I love and know well, in all times, not just seasons, but amongst that which has been and that which is to come.
“For Aboriginal peoples, country is much more than a place. Rock, tree, river, hill, animal, human – all were formed of the same substance by the Ancestors who continue to live in land, water, sky. Country is filled with relations speaking language and following Law, no matter whether the shape of that relation is human, rock, crow, wattle. Country is loved, needed, and cared for, and country loves, needs, and cares for her peoples in turn. Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self.”
Palyku woman, Ambelin Kwaymullina
