I'm exhausted! And hardly want to leave my bed today, let alone stack stones.
I tell Sean I want to go – a third attempt, a round number to cap (cope) my efforts,
for now. The thought of sitting in traffic for an hour to get to Cap St. Jacques is horrible, so I settle on another
visit to Ile de la Visitation – a safe bet, if still a decent drive away. I pick up Sean in Outremont
and immediately drive off in the opposite direction to what my GPS is advising me. We cut north on Outremont
Ave, and are about to take the highway bridge when we remember the empty lot directly east of the new UdeM
campus. Creeping past it at 10 mph, we notice a decent deposit of reasonably sized stone, and wonder if we
might save ourselves the drive north – it's already almost 2 pm, so we only have a couple hours of sunlight
left in the day. Almost immediately, looking out over the train tracks, we spot another large pile of stone rubble
behind an office building on Beaumont. We drive over the Rockland bridge, double back, and pack the car full of nice
large chunks of stone, until the carriage is starting to sit low over the tires. There's some rough cement mixed in
with the stone – mostly limestone, some of it flaking off in brittle layers – one lovely lump of gneiss,
topaz-yellow flecked with black and white. We haul it off, and spin around to the vacant lot to the west of the campus
– this lot is grassier, edged all around with tall swaying reeds, and opening towards the path of the sunset in the west.
We dump the stone and spin back to the first lot, where we find a suprising amount of fairly square chunks of
black limestone – visible on the surface of almost all the rocks are thick collections of fanned brachiopod fossils,
delicate lines etched all over by the grooves in their shells. We descend into the lot, grab a stone, run up the hill,
drop in next to the car, run down, lift, run up, drop, run down, lift, run up, repeat – this is a lot of fun,
actually, a wonderful mixed strength and cardio session (if you want to look at it that way), necessary after hours
crunched on the sofa in front of a screen. We stop not because we're out of energy, but because I'm concerned the weight
of the stones will pop my tires, which are bulged and straining with only two-thirds of our scavenged rock settled and
shedding dust all over my back seat. We drive the 100 metres back to the other lot, unload the rocks, and break for a
snack, then a cigarette, text a friend nearby to tell him to come outside (no answer). Then we roll and drag the
various rocks down the hill. Two even, square slabs of granite threaten to trip us on every descent, so we claimed
them for our foundation.
Sean carrying a big rock
Big stack of rocks across the tracks
Sean in the car with the first load
Sean lifting the big rock that ended up throwing the whole structure off.
Black limestone with fossil detail
Empty lot east of UdeM, lots of big limestone chunks
We ran these rocks up the hill
Haul #3 dusting up the back seat
Rocks unloaded at the site - getting ready to striate!
Layer 1 - we went for a shape almost resembling a wall this time
A couple layers up and already the rocks start to resist our ordering
Sean proud after rolling a big rock
Completed wall
Another angle on the completed wall - wonky construction!
Another angle - at least we got an inwards slope
Close up on some stones, colour variation
She's small but i love her
Two layers in, the wall was looking almost even, almost like a wall. By the third layer, we had run out of even, rectangular stones to work with, and began to get fast and loose with our technique. Sean had hauled an enormously heavy and almost belligerently misshapen stone over from the eastern lot, and out of stubbornness and maybe sunk-cost fallacy we elected to treat it as a through-stone, weighing down an uncertain section of the foundation. Things went a bit belly-up after that. The flat section of the stone laying face down, we had to reckon with its large triangular crest, which diverged with a great fissure away from its immediate neighbour, leaving an irreconcilable crack that we tried and failed to solidify with hearting. I had brought a hammer this time, which helped wedge certain stubborn stones in between large neighbours – this was satisfying for awhile, and then became a fallback as we packed unreasonably large gaps with small stones. The large through-stone destroyed anything that could be referred to as a “layer” as soon as it was placed – a stab at foreceful and provisional stability became, if not the undoing, then the constitutive flaw in the wall, around which every subsequent stone was obliged to accommodate itself. I had spent a lazy morning on Youtube watching a boyish and laconic yorkshireman speak gently about laying foundations and rises, and the afternoon proved that no amount of watching substitutes for the complex reckonings of material tendency. Learning to build is a years-long practice! I forgive myself for my ridiculous little walls and their hefty precarity, and I forgive the stones even more for scoffing at my requests that they sit neatly, in order. One feels like an interloper in a silent world, suddenly disrupting and hustling things around. One thing I ought to be doing is arranging the rocks according to size prior to placing them – I have been, often, working against the fading daylight, against my own mercurial and fading attention, against sharp wind and chapping fingertips, but mainly against a back I should be strengthening more actively. An extra step to move rock around when ultimately the structure doesn't need to last a century or more – what's the harm in skipping it? I have a lifetime to refine a process that for me, is more about play and a minor sense of accomplishment than anything else. I cannot, I cannot underscore enough how breathtakingly fun and satisfying it is to emptyheaded touch simple and fundamental materials, to carry out the most basic possible action and arrangement, to see what was once in disarray grow in tentative order up from the ground, the magic of realizing that despite my sloppiness the wall holds. Stone knits its surface against stone, a kind of kinship that – if I didn't know better – I would say was undertaken with a kind of ironic attitude, to humour me, fine, for them, lets be firm, lets hold – I imagine them laughing both at me but also with me, just a little bit. What makes me personalize the stone? The personality of shape, of weight, and colour, and workability – which stones are compliant and which stones must be convinced, which stones must be coerced and which are passive from the outset – which stones, being smooth, appear easygoing and then let everything slip – which rough, craggy, heavy stones most helpfully weight and lock others into place – the garish patterns and colours on some totally useless stones (I challenge myself to find a use for them) – the mute and unobtrusive reliability of others – the stone that appears, ready-to-hand, as soon as you visualize the next shape you need – the way necessity and attention work together to select the next stone to lay – the way perfection and imperfection (evaluation of all kind, really) cede to the simple act of noticing this will do or this won't quite do, lets try again. By the final layer, we were left with a heterogenous gang of stones, some of which I insisted on including on the basis of colour alone. The coping in this case became a balancing act (not what one wants, typically – the final layer should weight and stabilize everything underneath it). A chorus of good enoughand I love it anyways. I was able to stand on it, tentatively – the final layer utterly unstable, but, applying my own weight and balance with some sensitivity to the shifting stones under me, I became for a minute the final cope, the stone that lets all the others know its time to settle in – not for years to come, in this wall-fragment's case, but – for the moment, for the night, for the week, maybe, until the wind picks up or someone comes along to kick it all down.
Sean carrying a big rock
Big stack of rocks across the tracks
Sean in the car with the first load
Sean lifting the big rock that ended up throwing the whole structure off.
Black limestone with fossil detail
Empty lot east of UdeM, lots of big limestone chunks
We ran these rocks up the hill
Haul #3 dusting up the back seat
Rocks unloaded at the site - getting ready to striate!
Layer 1 - we went for a shape almost resembling a wall this time
A couple layers up and already the rocks start to resist our ordering
Sean proud after rolling a big rock
Completed wall
Another angle on the completed wall - wonky construction!
Another angle - at least we got an inwards slope
Close up on some stones, colour variation
She's small but i love her
Two layers in, the wall was looking almost even, almost like a wall. By the third layer, we had run out of even, rectangular stones to work with, and began to get fast and loose with our technique. Sean had hauled an enormously heavy and almost belligerently misshapen stone over from the eastern lot, and out of stubbornness and maybe sunk-cost fallacy we elected to treat it as a through-stone, weighing down an uncertain section of the foundation. Things went a bit belly-up after that. The flat section of the stone laying face down, we had to reckon with its large triangular crest, which diverged with a great fissure away from its immediate neighbour, leaving an irreconcilable crack that we tried and failed to solidify with hearting. I had brought a hammer this time, which helped wedge certain stubborn stones in between large neighbours – this was satisfying for awhile, and then became a fallback as we packed unreasonably large gaps with small stones. The large through-stone destroyed anything that could be referred to as a “layer” as soon as it was placed – a stab at foreceful and provisional stability became, if not the undoing, then the constitutive flaw in the wall, around which every subsequent stone was obliged to accommodate itself. I had spent a lazy morning on Youtube watching a boyish and laconic yorkshireman speak gently about laying foundations and rises, and the afternoon proved that no amount of watching substitutes for the complex reckonings of material tendency. Learning to build is a years-long practice! I forgive myself for my ridiculous little walls and their hefty precarity, and I forgive the stones even more for scoffing at my requests that they sit neatly, in order. One feels like an interloper in a silent world, suddenly disrupting and hustling things around. One thing I ought to be doing is arranging the rocks according to size prior to placing them – I have been, often, working against the fading daylight, against my own mercurial and fading attention, against sharp wind and chapping fingertips, but mainly against a back I should be strengthening more actively. An extra step to move rock around when ultimately the structure doesn't need to last a century or more – what's the harm in skipping it? I have a lifetime to refine a process that for me, is more about play and a minor sense of accomplishment than anything else. I cannot, I cannot underscore enough how breathtakingly fun and satisfying it is to emptyheaded touch simple and fundamental materials, to carry out the most basic possible action and arrangement, to see what was once in disarray grow in tentative order up from the ground, the magic of realizing that despite my sloppiness the wall holds. Stone knits its surface against stone, a kind of kinship that – if I didn't know better – I would say was undertaken with a kind of ironic attitude, to humour me, fine, for them, lets be firm, lets hold – I imagine them laughing both at me but also with me, just a little bit. What makes me personalize the stone? The personality of shape, of weight, and colour, and workability – which stones are compliant and which stones must be convinced, which stones must be coerced and which are passive from the outset – which stones, being smooth, appear easygoing and then let everything slip – which rough, craggy, heavy stones most helpfully weight and lock others into place – the garish patterns and colours on some totally useless stones (I challenge myself to find a use for them) – the mute and unobtrusive reliability of others – the stone that appears, ready-to-hand, as soon as you visualize the next shape you need – the way necessity and attention work together to select the next stone to lay – the way perfection and imperfection (evaluation of all kind, really) cede to the simple act of noticing this will do or this won't quite do, lets try again. By the final layer, we were left with a heterogenous gang of stones, some of which I insisted on including on the basis of colour alone. The coping in this case became a balancing act (not what one wants, typically – the final layer should weight and stabilize everything underneath it). A chorus of good enoughand I love it anyways. I was able to stand on it, tentatively – the final layer utterly unstable, but, applying my own weight and balance with some sensitivity to the shifting stones under me, I became for a minute the final cope, the stone that lets all the others know its time to settle in – not for years to come, in this wall-fragment's case, but – for the moment, for the night, for the week, maybe, until the wind picks up or someone comes along to kick it all down.
I understand aesthetics as only minimally
concerned with the evaluation of beauty, and fundamentally as a practice of attention
that gives one access to qualitative dimensions that otherwise go unnoticed and unappreciated.
The field of “everyday aesthetics” (Saito 2019) is far too broad to dive into here; please accept
my deeply provisional and intuitive definition. For Weizman and Fuller (2021), “Aesthetics thus
concerns the experience of the world. It involves sensing – the capacity to register or be affected,
and sense-making – the capacity for such sensing to become knowledge or some kind” (33).
Aesthetics concerns perception, sensation, and knowledge-production – making-sensing, making new
forms of sensing and sensing knew forms of knowing. Aesthetic experience is typically taken to be
the experience of an object – extending object to phenomena appearing as perceptual experience to a
percieving subject – but other individuals may also be the “objects” of aesthetic experience. This,
perhaps, is what Glissant refers to when he references “the rhizome of a multiple relationship with
the other” (2000, 16). I might be collapsing poetics and aesthetics; I admit that they muddle together
in my mind. Perhaps we might say that poetics are the form that an aesthetic practice takes as its mode
of expression. In this case, then, a “poetics of relation” might become the articulation of an aesthetic relationship
with an Other; a relationship that is not determined by fixities of interpretation but which is open-ended, curious,
sensitive, attentive, willing to be wrong. Relation an enjoyment (Glissant 2000) that has gladly set aside the
“ontological obsession with knowledge” (19) to embrace tactics of improvisation and mutual composition (rather than choreography).
For Glissant, a practice of relation involves respecting the opacity of
the other. If knowledge is security, it secures a particular position of domination; legibility is demanded
only of those who are already figured as illegible. For Murdoch, conversely, an ethical disposition is
founded on a knowledge of the other. I choose to read this knowledge as a knowledge that emerges from a
place of humility; I choose to believe that this is possible. Murdoch's knowledge is one that emerges as
the result of practices of sustained and loving attention: an “infinitely perfectible” (Murdoch 1970, 23)
process that assumes that entities in the world are fundamentally deserving of loving and ethical regard.
Attention is what allows us to discern those qualities in others (humans and non-humans alike) that are lovable.
Because things are in theory entirely deserving of love, our practices of attention simply uncover more and more appreciable,
lovable qualities; attention transfigures perception into love, motivating ethical dispositions in the process. Chappel (2018)
refers to Murdoch's attention as “a special form of knowing (…) a special epistemic position, a position from which we can know
things that would otherwise be invisible or inaccessible to us.” (106). I wish to quilt my discussion of aesthetics with this point
about attention. Between Glissant and Murdoch, the status of knowledge is contested; for the former, it is a tool of colonial domination,
racist, violent, and reductive; for the latter, it is an ideal (Murdoch is, after all, a platonist) – impossible to perfectly instantiate
in the world, but a model to tend towards. Murdoch's perfect knowledge already assumes the fundamental extension of ethical regard; knowledge
and attention practices are simply the manner in which we might practice that ethical disposition, how we might learn to be ethical.
Perhaps these two knowledges are not so different. Truth does not inhere in the world; it hovers outside of it, and every human episteme
which claims to have brought it down to earth almost inevitably has some agenda motivating the claim. Knowledge is elsewhere;
do not trust it; instead, be sensitive in encounters. Take up aesthetics ways of knowing in order to learn how to be ethical. Aesthetics and
ethical attention are both modes of apprehension that withdraw from a perfect knowing into a space of being-with and "being-towards"
(Krell 2024). Per de la Cadena (2021), the space of “presence is the relation within which “not knowing” happens” (246). It is a space of humility and exploration.
Glissant's call for opacity exhorts us to go “beyond the limit of modern epistemological knowledge and its requirements of
representation” (ibid. 249). In abandoning certain forms of knowledge, we are set productively adrift; we might begin to enter
into relation. By engaging practices of attention, of loving attention, we might compose our relations along ethical lines.
The ethical project that I can only begin to develop here is one that transpires between humans, to
be sure, but equally so between humans and non-humans, humans and land. In Guattari's Three Ecologies
(2000), he reminds us that the ecological has multiple registers, all of which are shot through with ethical
implications. When we say ecology we are not only referring to the earth or nature as a discrete area of interest,
but of multiple regions of interconnection. Guattari's three ecologies are the environment, the social, and the
intra-ecology of human subjectivity. His claim that “it is quite wrong to make a distinction between action on
the psyche, the socius and the environment (2000, 40) deplores a broader “deterioration of relations” (ibid.),
effected as a result of environmental collapse and political passivity. His emancipatory project seeks
transformation at each of these levels; subjective and social transformation for environmental re-integration.
“This revolution must not be exclusively concerned with visible relations of force on a grand scale, but will
also take into account molecular domains of sensibility, intelligence and desire” (Guattari 2000, 22). It is
a project of “targeti[ing] the modes of production of subjectivity, of knowledge, culture, sensibility and
sociability” (49). At the heart of his project, as catalyst and line of flight, there is the “a-signifying
rupture” (45) – this is a fault, a gap, an inconsistency – the site at which the system reveals its limitation,
the moment at which reality is understood not to be coextensive with its contingent organizations. We are asked
to attend to these ruptures in an aesthetic – which, for Guattari, means creative – mode: to spin new significations
from sites that from the old point of view look like failure – detritus, incompleteness, illegibility, inefficiency.
When we build again, we might be wise enough to build these gaps in.
If Guattari's ethico-aesthetics denote acts of creativity that allow us to
reimagine relations under late stage petro-capitalism, Stephenson's (2017) Spinoizist ethics are grounded in
an attention to “the quality of relations we constitute with the rest of Nature” (318). Stephenson's treatment
of Spinoza's “what can a body do” is powerfully persuasive for thinking about creative relational recombination
and mutual affectivity between bodies (meaning entities – humans, plants, stones, water, bacteria, whatever).
I will quote at length: “Just as Spinoza’s ontology defines bodies by what they can do as they strive to persist
in their being, his ethics also hinges on the affective capacities of bodies. Each conatus is determined by an
individual’s corporeal, mental, or emotional interactions with other modes, which shade in its capacity to
affect and be affected by ambient forces in ways that either enhance or diminish its characteristic striving.
With this emphasis on affectivity—that is, the ways in which a body’s power to act is modified by its
encounters—ethics emerges as the practice of living well by cultivating affects and interactions that enhance
one’s power of existence, and culling those that diminish this ability to persist actively and joyfully” (319).
For Deleuze and Guattari (1987) “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do (…) what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.”
Joy and sadness are “passions”, particular qualities that characterize the poetics of how we enter into relation with others. Do we act in mutual interest, and increase our powers in tandem? Do we compose with others, human and non-human, such that each of us might go on to compose more and more joyfully in the great elaboration of life? Or do our actions depress, repress, and foreclose possibility by diminishing power, ours or others? This is a question that any aesthetic practitioner has the capacity to ask themselves – what does a particular creative act, a particular relational act, give rise to? How does motion and interaction ripple into the relational field? This will always be a speculative question, but if the imagination can come up with an affirmative answer, let that be the ground from which exploration might spring. Ethical relations – ethical encounters – are those from which every party might emerge from the field of change, more capable of affirming themselves in their being – in the persistence of their being. We always affect one another. We enter into relations open to recomposition. If we are not open to recomposition, we must question what asymmetries, what dominations might be occurring, such that one being is penetrable and another holds firm.
For Stephenson, an “emphasis on affective capacity—what bodies can do in tandem with one another under particular relations—extends the scope of ethical responsibility to ecologically-ramified scales. It considers the quality of compositions between bodies at various scales of ecosystemic life, less concerned with parsing moral subjects and objects than supporting sustainable becomings that indicate the fullest elaboration of potentia of the beings involved.” (327). I'm quoting so much because I love this paper, and want to give it room to breathe. “'ethics' inherits a layered sense of the intertwining of character or disposition (from ἦθος, ethos) and land (from ἤθεα, ethea), as in the Homeric ἤθεα ἵππων, or “the place/habitat of horses.”(...) ethics works from the ground up, so to speak, cultivating modes of existence that engender dispositions and activities conducive to flourishing. (ibid. 328).
For Deleuze and Guattari (1987) “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do (…) what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.”
Joy and sadness are “passions”, particular qualities that characterize the poetics of how we enter into relation with others. Do we act in mutual interest, and increase our powers in tandem? Do we compose with others, human and non-human, such that each of us might go on to compose more and more joyfully in the great elaboration of life? Or do our actions depress, repress, and foreclose possibility by diminishing power, ours or others? This is a question that any aesthetic practitioner has the capacity to ask themselves – what does a particular creative act, a particular relational act, give rise to? How does motion and interaction ripple into the relational field? This will always be a speculative question, but if the imagination can come up with an affirmative answer, let that be the ground from which exploration might spring. Ethical relations – ethical encounters – are those from which every party might emerge from the field of change, more capable of affirming themselves in their being – in the persistence of their being. We always affect one another. We enter into relations open to recomposition. If we are not open to recomposition, we must question what asymmetries, what dominations might be occurring, such that one being is penetrable and another holds firm.
For Stephenson, an “emphasis on affective capacity—what bodies can do in tandem with one another under particular relations—extends the scope of ethical responsibility to ecologically-ramified scales. It considers the quality of compositions between bodies at various scales of ecosystemic life, less concerned with parsing moral subjects and objects than supporting sustainable becomings that indicate the fullest elaboration of potentia of the beings involved.” (327). I'm quoting so much because I love this paper, and want to give it room to breathe. “'ethics' inherits a layered sense of the intertwining of character or disposition (from ἦθος, ethos) and land (from ἤθεα, ethea), as in the Homeric ἤθεα ἵππων, or “the place/habitat of horses.”(...) ethics works from the ground up, so to speak, cultivating modes of existence that engender dispositions and activities conducive to flourishing. (ibid. 328).
Dry-stone walls, for all they have been used to enclose land and as such
foreclose life-potentials, are themselves strikingly beautiful examples of “feral ecologies” (Tsing 2021) or
“novel ecosystems” (Collier 2012). These walls are examples of human intervention may fruitfully compose
with a given landscape or ecology, as a substrate that non-human forms of life take advantage of (Manenti 2013).
They have significant ecological upsides as “platforms for supporting endemic flora and fauna, refuges for disparate
species, seed reserves, shelter for scrub and other adjacent habitats, nesting and roosting locations in exposed
[to wind, damp, or sunlight] areas.” (ibid.). Crucially, dry-stone walls provide “niche opportunities” (ibid.)
For organisms ranging from lichens, mosses, and grasses to small birds, reptiles, and mammals. “Higher plant establishment
generally requires some crevices, fractures and interstices in the wall material to allow the wall to act as habitat; both
to trap and store mineral and organic sediment, and to allow the trapping and germination of seeds (Darlington, 1981; Francis and
Hoggart, 2009 and Segal, 1969, qtd. in Francis, 2011).Where there is a gap, life inserts itself.
Francis (2011) notes that dry-stone construction methods may serve as a model for urban
and rural infrastructure going forwards. Construction that composes itself with the landscape – with a particular ecological
context – means giving life every opportunity to settle in. While “fragments and interstices” (Francis 2011, 48) typically occur
in walls as a result of degradation over time, in dry-stone walls they are constitutive. A cement or mortared wall that has
begun to degrade may be replaced, intervening in any nascent biological processes that have begun on the substrate of the
wall. Dry-stone walls encourage the propagation of life from the outset. A goal for both urban and rural infrastructure
projects might be to consider the inherent qualities of dry-stone walls, particularly if considering how to introduce more
“living walls” (ibid. 58) into a particular setting. Collier encourages such efforts to consider the factors that may contribute
to overall biodiversity. Rather than designing for the needs of a particular and limited range of plant species, urban and
rural walls may be constructed to favour ecosystems that emerge spontaneously. “Walls may be more than simple 'habitat analogues'
but may be modified to incorporate species from a wider range of habitats to form novel ‘recombinant’ communities that may
increase characteristics such as ecological resistance and resilience to pollution or environmental change, and improve urban metabolism” (ibid.).
Dry-stone walls tend to be ecologically beneficial to the life in their immediate
surroundings. Once again due to their un-mortared composition, they facilitate water drainage, contributing greatly
to soil and crop health by mitigating flooding (Assandri et. al, 2018). Conventionally constructed from local stone,
dry-stone walls also typically involve lower carbon emission overhead, as materials need not be transported far.
(CEP-CDCCP, 2019). Of course, of major benefit to both landscapes and communities are their aesthetic qualities.
As stated by David Griffiths, a dry-stone waller appearing in the video “Yorkshire crafts: meet the dry-stone wallers”,
“if you see something that's beautifully built in dry stone, there's something really pleasurable about that (…) it seems
as though it grows from the landscape, rather than dominates it” (2004). Dry-stone walls involve a poetics of construction,
a particular form of sensitivity and attunement to the materials and landscape at hand that allows them to be ordered, gently
systematized. Across Youtube, dozens of dry-stone walling videos show wallers at work, often in large grassy fields, in the
rain, often in good company. Over and over, a refrain: that their knowledge of how to select stone matured over time,
to the point that now they barely think about it or just have to feel it out (The channel DRY STONE TV is a favourite of mine).
Connections between stones, if not immediately obvious, are made by manipulating the material in place until it locks in – a manual,
highly haptic, attentive, and sensitive practice. It is fundamentally aesthetic.
If earlier I described the effect of the walling-off of land that indexed the delimitation of property as a
prototypical case of the striation of space, I wish to retract my gaze again to the immediate and think about dry-stone walls themselves as
objects wherein where a loose striation does not entirely negate “smooth” qualities. For Deleuze and Guattari, smooth spaces are spaces of
“connections, or tactile relations” (1980, 485). The mode of connection is “accumulation” (ibid.) rather than system; it is the mutual
co-occurence of entities that oblige them to be ordered in relation to one another. Dry-stone walls, it must be said, are not entirely
smooth. There is a system to their construction; it proceeds in an orderly way, by layer – if a smooth space would refer to the pile of
stones prior to their becoming-wall, then a dry-stone wall is a space where this becoming is never fixed, easily reversed, always calling
back to a prior state of indeterminacy. A dry-stone wall is something between an accumulation and order. Well-built stone walls are
orderly enough, striated enough, to reproduce striation on a greater scale. However, they are also uniquely flexible and adaptable.
The relationship that a dry-stone wall has with its immediate environment is not one of imposition, but of haptic interactivity.
There is flexibility and indeterminacy in the individual relationships between stones. When the ground shifts, swells, and retracts,
the wall rearranges itself: in relation, the lithic becomes imperceptibly elastic, introducing deviation, deviance, into the space of
determination. This is a palpable and intimate relation. Stone touches stone, and stone touches earth, and in this unthinking
but mobile relation they adjust. Dry-stone walls are not prototypically smooth, but an element of nomadism exists in their potentiality
for repeatable reconstruction. A any time, a wall which begins to sag and fold may be taken apart and put back together again,
the same stones rearranged in a new order. A dry-stone wall is only ever settled for the time being. Its settling is agnostic, imperfect,
and always subject to revision. Once a wall starts to sag – although if individual connections are well-considered, this may take a century –
it is rebuilt. No particular order is maintained at all costs.
There is a vertigo that sets in when one looks at a thing very
closely, and then sees it very far away. Proximity and distance intermix in the mind's eye and stall
the heart. In Orkney, this phenomenon was literal as well as figurative. I could run my hands over
layers of ancient black limestone dotted with white and orange lichens, feeling along the rough surfaces
and into the gaps; texture and heft; marvel at the neat and precise construction; try to imagine how it was built –
and then, lift my eyes to the hills and witness the great imposition of line onto space, of crop into earth, profit
over growing things. Deleuze and Guattari remind us that our ontologies are never fixed and incommunicable. “Nothing
is ever done with: smooth space allows itself to be striated, and striated space reimparts a smooth space, with potentially
very different values, scope, and signs” (1980, 486). The vertiginous experiencing of loving a thing for itself, for its
aesthetic qualities, and then recalling it in context, in a very particular context of harm, capture, and division – the mind balks
at transition and uncertainty as entities escape from their positions in a broad imaginary.
For Edouard Glissant, circular nomadism –
the nomadism that moves continuously so as not to exhaust a territory – is
“a not-intolerant form of an impossible settlement” (1997, 12). His principle of
errantry is one that calls for identity to be formed as a function of relation, rather
than rootedness. This is a profoundly anti-essentialist claim about the ways that we might
constitute our being. Being becomes aesthetic; it becomes a poetics; a sensitivity and a mutual
composing-with others in encounter. It is performative and mobile: “always at some moment it is being told” (18).
I have been trying to metaphorize dry-stone walls as figures that might teach us something about tactics of relation. Initially,
I understood them as being entirely smooth – patchwork spaces of tenuous and mobile connections.
However, they are orderly, and in their order, nomadic. Glissant's circular nomads depart, only to return
again. Perhaps we might look for another concept to articulate the particular delicacy, the becoming-by-repeating,
that I am trying to articulate. Guattari's “refrain (…) delimit[s] existential territories” (2000, 7); in repetition there
is regularity, but additionally an avenue towards “new fields of virtuality” (10) as variation, error, and irregularity slip
in, effecting micro-transformations in the field of potential. A dry-stone wall rises according to a process of refrain.
The stones themselves are inconsistent, specific. Sometimes, they misbehave. We must be attentive at all times to the ways
that order and disorder make do with one another; how capture and escape exist in a field of kinship. The smooth and the
striated are fusional and repellent. “All progress is made by and in striated space, but all becoming occurs in smooth space.”
(Deleuze and Guattari 1980, 486). In dry-stone walls, the smooth interrupts striation, continuously. It is precisely these
areas interruption, microscopic breakdown, and variation that makes dry-stone structures such rich sites for the proliferation of life.
I went to Cap St. Jacques alone and panicking. The precise nature of the panic – is it relevant?
It concerns modes of relation and the ways we try to predict how to relate to others based on all that we know
at a given moment in time. Scripts solidify into practices, and their scripted nature sits hovering somewhere external
to the actions that draw them into being. Why do we fail to speak to one another? What we keep to ourselves has only a
partial being, a partial extension. The ways we try to love one another are always partial and, in some ways, wrong.
The ways we ask to be loved are equally stillborn, and we pass from hand to hand the mute effigy of a request.
One week before the day, a great foundation shifted out of place (or, I kicked it out) and
I am still trying to rebuild out of partial and uneasy pieces. I throw the same weight I am accustomed to
wielding on the new uncertain ground, and it shifts, or I withhold the force commanding me, anticipating certain
shifts, unwilling to trust in the fixity of untested material.
Arriving at the shore, it is empty. This beach is usually full of families, children, lifeguards, the smell of smoke from barbecues, several speakers contesting sonic space and syncopating each others' rhythms. I make my way to the water's edge and realize that my memory was faulty – this beach has several large (several feet across) stones holding the bank of earth from the shore, but stones of workable size and few and far between, or partially submerged. I don't want to work with wet rock, partially because the wind is chilly and partially because it will introduce slipperiness into the structure. I get back in the car and drive to the next entrance, slightly deeper in the park. Ten minutes into the woods, past an old stone house, now converted into a visitors centre, I am rewarded as I encounter the expanse existing in my memory. Large chunks of stone litter the shoreline, less sandy here than gravelly. I clear an area next to the water; there is no earth to speak of, only progressively smaller stones, shifting against one another like beads. This will not prove very stable as a surface to build on, but I concede that my structures are not intended to last – I am content for them just to stand, for awhile. As I am clearing an area, I run into larger stones that I need to dig out and throw aside. This digging feels less extractive than last time, when I was clawing stone from sucking clay. The ground is made of stone here; I do not have a hope of making a dent in it. My efforts are infinitesimal even on the limited strip of shore. I wander around, choosing stones at random. I am already running up against my own impatience, which is tempered to an extent when someone is with me. Company is its own reward, even if, like me, it is sometimes received as a trial. When does friction keep you in place?
Rocky shore and waves
Look at all those rocks!
Stacking site: selected
Beautiful mixed sedimentary rock
I still need to identify a lot of these, but look at the beautiful fluid incision
Is that white agate embedded in limestone?
Clearing a space for the stack
Rocks keep emerging embedded as I try to even the ground
Beautiful!!! What if a stone was a liquid
Not sure what these formations are
Interesting pitting
Now that's some fossilized plant matter
Foundation and first layer
Water's gradual wear
She's up!
Another angle
And another
Aaaand another, in context!
A place of prominence for my favourite stone
Structurally useless, but so beautiful
I mean, come on!!!
Many of the stones are already roughly shaped into rectangles. I look for them to build my foundation; heaviest first, then gradually upwards. Some of the stones are heavier than I can lift; I listen to this resistance, interpreting as a tacit refusal to participate. Maybe it is misplaced to read a quality either as consent, or refusal. When I can lift a stone, I thank it for its permission. The stones most amenable to being used in my structure are heavy, flat, and square – sometimes, a more triangular shape finds itself slotting perfectly into an interstice, where the heavy normality of my foundation stones reveal themselves as inconsistent in connection. In broader gaps I throw small stones in strange shapes; packed tightly enough, they create enough meeting points to ballast the exterior. There are two types of stone that I can easily detect by lifting, although I do not know what they are called. One is heavy, and splits evenly; it is fairly dark and homogeneous. I don't believe we have much granite or slate, so I assume it is gneiss or a kind of limestone. Another type of limestone seems extremely porous and light; I discard this for the most part, as it doesn't seem as if it would have the requisite density to weigh the structure down. The St-Laurence is limned everywhere by fossil deposits; I see wave patterns that resemble fossilized riverbed, pitting smoothed by water and time, the agglomeration of organic matter become solid. I select some stones for qualities that would contribute to the structure (order, normativity, homogeneous size and shape, flatness – the appearance of playing nice and knowing one's place) and others for their singular beauty. These latter do not fit easily. In a larger structure I could have used them as hearting and stuck them secretly inside the wall. In a structure of this size, they do not fit anywhere. I rest them on top, uneasily settled next to the heavier coping, weighing themselves into place for now. A quick kick test of the whole structure tells me it's fairly locked in place – but for how long? I couldn't possibly predict. I think about the endurance of dry-stone walls, their centuries of resolution. I look at my little cairn-mound. It looks like a squat little stove. I name it Here for a good time, not a long time. Maybe it will last longer than I expect. I've been lifting stone for the better part of two hours. For the rest of the day, I feel buoyant.
Arriving at the shore, it is empty. This beach is usually full of families, children, lifeguards, the smell of smoke from barbecues, several speakers contesting sonic space and syncopating each others' rhythms. I make my way to the water's edge and realize that my memory was faulty – this beach has several large (several feet across) stones holding the bank of earth from the shore, but stones of workable size and few and far between, or partially submerged. I don't want to work with wet rock, partially because the wind is chilly and partially because it will introduce slipperiness into the structure. I get back in the car and drive to the next entrance, slightly deeper in the park. Ten minutes into the woods, past an old stone house, now converted into a visitors centre, I am rewarded as I encounter the expanse existing in my memory. Large chunks of stone litter the shoreline, less sandy here than gravelly. I clear an area next to the water; there is no earth to speak of, only progressively smaller stones, shifting against one another like beads. This will not prove very stable as a surface to build on, but I concede that my structures are not intended to last – I am content for them just to stand, for awhile. As I am clearing an area, I run into larger stones that I need to dig out and throw aside. This digging feels less extractive than last time, when I was clawing stone from sucking clay. The ground is made of stone here; I do not have a hope of making a dent in it. My efforts are infinitesimal even on the limited strip of shore. I wander around, choosing stones at random. I am already running up against my own impatience, which is tempered to an extent when someone is with me. Company is its own reward, even if, like me, it is sometimes received as a trial. When does friction keep you in place?
Rocky shore and waves
Look at all those rocks!
Stacking site: selected
Beautiful mixed sedimentary rock
I still need to identify a lot of these, but look at the beautiful fluid incision
Is that white agate embedded in limestone?
Clearing a space for the stack
Rocks keep emerging embedded as I try to even the ground
Beautiful!!! What if a stone was a liquid
Not sure what these formations are
Interesting pitting
Now that's some fossilized plant matter
Foundation and first layer
Water's gradual wear
She's up!
Another angle
And another
Aaaand another, in context!
A place of prominence for my favourite stone
Structurally useless, but so beautiful
I mean, come on!!!
Many of the stones are already roughly shaped into rectangles. I look for them to build my foundation; heaviest first, then gradually upwards. Some of the stones are heavier than I can lift; I listen to this resistance, interpreting as a tacit refusal to participate. Maybe it is misplaced to read a quality either as consent, or refusal. When I can lift a stone, I thank it for its permission. The stones most amenable to being used in my structure are heavy, flat, and square – sometimes, a more triangular shape finds itself slotting perfectly into an interstice, where the heavy normality of my foundation stones reveal themselves as inconsistent in connection. In broader gaps I throw small stones in strange shapes; packed tightly enough, they create enough meeting points to ballast the exterior. There are two types of stone that I can easily detect by lifting, although I do not know what they are called. One is heavy, and splits evenly; it is fairly dark and homogeneous. I don't believe we have much granite or slate, so I assume it is gneiss or a kind of limestone. Another type of limestone seems extremely porous and light; I discard this for the most part, as it doesn't seem as if it would have the requisite density to weigh the structure down. The St-Laurence is limned everywhere by fossil deposits; I see wave patterns that resemble fossilized riverbed, pitting smoothed by water and time, the agglomeration of organic matter become solid. I select some stones for qualities that would contribute to the structure (order, normativity, homogeneous size and shape, flatness – the appearance of playing nice and knowing one's place) and others for their singular beauty. These latter do not fit easily. In a larger structure I could have used them as hearting and stuck them secretly inside the wall. In a structure of this size, they do not fit anywhere. I rest them on top, uneasily settled next to the heavier coping, weighing themselves into place for now. A quick kick test of the whole structure tells me it's fairly locked in place – but for how long? I couldn't possibly predict. I think about the endurance of dry-stone walls, their centuries of resolution. I look at my little cairn-mound. It looks like a squat little stove. I name it Here for a good time, not a long time. Maybe it will last longer than I expect. I've been lifting stone for the better part of two hours. For the rest of the day, I feel buoyant.
Over the long history of enclosure, colonialism, and settler-colonialism, colonial powers framed of
law as epistemic dominance, used to assert material dominance. I was interested in how that came to pass. There were
earls and udallers; then, there were lairds and feudal tenants; later, feudal
law was overturned by the English state. The English throne consolidated its
rule earlier than most of mainland Europe, actively working against the
“parcelized sovereignty” of feudal rule, where each fiefdom was effectively
a micro-kingdom, with the working class loyal primarily to their lord and only
to their king under extenuating circumstances (say, international war). Ellen
Meiskins offers a wonderful account of the transition of landholding relationships
in early renaissance England that ultimately led to capitalism political-economic
formations; I can only briefly touch on it here. She argues that the English nobility
were strategically demilitarized by the crown, possessing no armies independent of royal
command. Instead, the nobility where characterized by growing economic capacities thanks
to large land grants; the aristocracy were landlords. According to Meiskins, “the
concentration of English landholding meant that an unusually large proportion of the
land was worked not by peasant-proprietors but by tenants” (2020). The economic
prowess of the nobility depended on their capacity to incite their tenant farmers
to produce in excess of any subsistence or taxation needs, and instead for a market
constituted of a growing urban population (primarily inhabitants of London, already
a massive city in the 1500's). Briefly, market-motivated production incited
landlords and tenants to “increase labour-productivity” (ibid.) and compete for rental
leases on properties. “Increasingly, as more land came under this economic regime,
advantage in access to the land itself would go to those who could produce competitively
and pay good rents by increasing their own productivity” (ibid.). Customary leases – leases
based on sustained habitation and working of a given tract of land, often passed down
through families – became economic leases, acquired by financial rather than relational means.
The emergence of a proto-bourgeois class could be observed, as highly productive farmer-tenants
gained access to more land through more purchasing power. Eventually, this nakedly economic means
of land acquisition would challenge all manner of historical property rights – particularly,
those land claims that were first instantiated as relational agreements between sovereign and
noble, or noble and feudal tenant. Over the course of the 17th century, a series of parliamentary
rulings officially encoded the superiority of economic claims to land to historical ones based
on the rights of citizens. The landlord's right to accumulate land was left with few limits beyond the depths of his pockets.
Lineburgh (2010) and Lesjack (2021) take up the experiential dimension of enclosure.
For Lineburgh, “the concept of
enclosure is inseparable from terror and the destruction of independence and community” (12).
The arrogation of common land to private ownership was a force of mass dispossession and a massive
contributor to rural impoverishment. “All I know is, I had a cow and Parliament took it away from me”
(14): this was the complaint of thousands, against whom capitalist accumulation and legal disempowerment
worked in equal measure. During (extended, continuous) process of enclosure, visual striations appeared on
the landscape: hedges, walls, and fences, “barriers between people and land” (ibid.) For Lesjack, the
long afterlife of enclosure is evidenced in an everyday experience of environmental catastrophe and
climate change: “[The]constitutive violence of capitalism and processes of primitive accumulation
drove enclosure. Slow rather than spectacular, this form of violence constitutes the world as we
now know it; wending its way through the ubiquity of the everyday, it makes itself known in the least
conspicuous of manners: the workaday world, the seemingly natural hedgerow, the constitution of ourselves
as individuals, the weather” (Lesjack 2021, 8).
Orkney, indeed all of Scotland, by the mid 17th century was being aggressively enclosed by similar
agents and laws as England. I have not been able to exhaustively account for how, precisely, affectively,
spiritually, emotionally, this process of land exchange from above affected the inhabitants of the island –
I have not had enough conversations, I have not read enough. I sit at the surface of a deep and murky history
about which, from this vantage, I have only intuitions. Through this whole project and process of
exploration, I have wanted to ask what does it mean to be related to land, what does it mean to be intimate
with land, can intimacy with land be transformative, can relationships on a micro- and local level do
anything to stem the tide of climate change that threatens all life, collectively. Underwriting these questions is the premise that, on a
cultural and individual level (thinking in the context, once again, of North American ethno-capitalist culture,
the only context I can reasonably speak to and from) we are alienated from land, from the non-human. The question of the violence of alienation that figures other humans as subhuman and commodity is just as pertinent.
I am using 'land' here as an unreasonably broad term to denote entire environments and ecologies, in which we live and are
embedded. Maybe I do mean it on an elemental level; soil, air, water, animals, plants. Maybe I would know better
what I meant if I did not feel so profoundly uncertain in, barred from belonging to – whatever I
mean by land. This, more likely than not, is the condition of the settler. In questioning this condition, my intention is not
exculpation (from the criminal history of settler-colonialism, and the ongoing violence of which my White presence on Indigenous land is an index),
but to ask how identity might not, in fact, exhaust and foreclose relational potential.
What manner of connections do we have to other entities? What capacity do we have to recognize
the value of the non-human, without immediately arrogating value to the reduction and capture of capitalism:
use-value, commodity-value, exchange-value. How might we build that capacity into a robust, creative, and experiential ethics – an ethico-aesthetics – of relation?
Arriving in Orkney, I wanted to learn to love and be loved by the land. Instead, I walked directly into
dry-stone walls. In seeking to eradicate barriers of alienation and human-nonhuman dichotomy, I fell in love with the barrier itself.
Bhandar (2018) tells us that “a multitude of different forms of
land tenure covering the Scottish highlands, lowlands, English rural estates, and lavish homes in the
city are thoroughly entwined with the character, habits, cultural practices, and kinship of owners, landlords,
tenants, and laborers alike” (2). Who owns the land – who works the land – who feels themselves
imbricated in relations of belonging with the land – is a function of custom, tradition, and finally,
law. Relation and striation circle one another, until determinations of leading and following, cause and
effect fall to the ground, étourdie. For Bhandar, a history of proporty law is a history of the colonial appropriation of land.
Domestically, land was enclosed, and former landed or tenant farmers were forced to enter into wage relationships with
landowners, rather than working relationships with the land (Lesjack 2021). For Bhandar, law – and the absence of law –
was also a strategy of racialization. The “justification for casting indigenous populations as premodern was found in the absence
of private property laws and particular forms of cultivation” (Bhandar 2018, 4). This also had implications for racial subjectivity,
as the ideological processes by which land became property was similarly effected on humans: “the violence of abstraction that
transformed land more fully into a commodity over the course of a long transition (from feudal land relations to forms of ownership that
facilitated agrarian capitalism and market capitalism) has a counterpart in racial thinking that figured entire populations in a
hierarchy of value with whiteness at its apex” (Bhandar 2018, 8). We must read this, explicitly, as a homology between processes of
capture effected over land and humans. Can we also read it as more implicitly speaking to some ontological foundation of life shared
by land and humans, that leave [us, together] vulnerable to capture and exploitation? Maybe it is on this ontological foundation –
this shared vulnerability – that we can begin to understand how we – humans, land – might be intimate at all.
Orkney is flat and hilly all at once.
By flat, I mean treeless. There are few buildings – houses are minutes or miles apart. The contours of the
landscape are always visible. From afar, one can distinguish colour swatches, a patchwork of land use.
Green is is grazing land; cows or sheep dot massive field, huddling together against the mist or scattered
like dice. Yellow land is arable; large grain crops, wheat, oat or bere. At the tops of hills, the land turns purple –
peat, a sublime wildness, energetically dense, with micro-organisms, flame-red grasses, pale
lichens, mosses, spores sputtering their own multiplication over the landscape.
These patches are sectioned off. Walls and fences stripe and striate the continuous topology of hill and valley, give us the meaning of “area”, as in calculable space, as in system of apprehension. I had previously seen or heard references to the “smooth” and the “striated” according to Deleuze and Guattari (1980), but for the first time the concept clicked, or was activated, for me. If smooth space is “amorphous, nonformal” (477), then striation is the formalization of space, the imposition of a system of structure and legibility that allows certain qualities or potentialities to be captured. It is subjugated space, space made to work, to organize its being according to the exhortations of an apparatus. I should not have been so dismayed, but I was, with my eyes-full-of-moons and romantic ideas about rural livelihood. Agrarian capitalism and the particularities of property law struck me first as an aesthetic effect: the visual scarring of division, containment, and assignment. Dry-stone walls are certainly the most striking of these barriers. I was struck, and continue to be, by the everyday miracle of these structures. Let me describe them briefly, although they occur in such variety – of stone, style, and appearance – over the British Islands and, indeed, the world, that a single description belies the extent to which they wonderful in their heterogeneity. Dry-stone refers to the fact that no fixative medium – no mortar – is used to hold the wall together. Brick and mortar – these words are a necessary pair, signifying solid, robust, established. Stone and – stone? Their construction which to me initially seemed no more than an elaborate and provisional balancing act, but they are neither precarious nor unstable. Over a week in Orkney, I must have kicked (at first timidly, then every day with more incredulous force), walked on, jumped over and leaned against dozens of these walls, which typically came up to my mid-stomach in height. Weight, friction, and clever connections – these are the binding elements, the elements of coherence and stability, that let these walls last tens, if not hundreds, of years.
A dry-stone wall! 10/10 beautiful no notes
A collapsed dry-stone wall reinforced by barbed wire, together keeping me from harrassing the sheep on my night walk
A dry-stone wall with a large fault - but i love her all the more for it
A cow in a field. Note the stripes of wall in the distance
Sublime construction, sublime lichen
Barriers between humans and land indeed - why do we do this
Detail of lichen on the ruins of the 12th c settlement of Earl Magnus on the Broch of Birsay
Lovely calico cat camouflaging her way down the wall
Bad picture but the striation I'm talking about is fairly visible
Strunning natural fault lines in seaside limestone
A dry-stone fisherman's hut
More sheep, more striation - the profit incentive is cute I'll concede
Dry-stone fence overlooking the bay of Birsay at 6 am as I wonder how to say goodbye
Couple my fascination with their construction with the incredible beauty of the walls themselves, and a seed of adoration began to quicken in me. Partly due to the year-round intensity of its winds, Orkney has almost no trees – any timber found on the island likely washed up in a shipwreck, or was imported at significant cost. As such, stone is the primary building material on the island; cottages, huts, stairways, and fences all bear a family resemblance to one another, born from the lovely and variable bedrock of the island. Slick with rain and moisture, stone glows – colour emerges from the dull matte cast of dust and dryness. When the sky is consumed by deep grey clouds and mist captures the sun, the dry stone walls of Orkney pulsate with an almost immanent brilliance.
These patches are sectioned off. Walls and fences stripe and striate the continuous topology of hill and valley, give us the meaning of “area”, as in calculable space, as in system of apprehension. I had previously seen or heard references to the “smooth” and the “striated” according to Deleuze and Guattari (1980), but for the first time the concept clicked, or was activated, for me. If smooth space is “amorphous, nonformal” (477), then striation is the formalization of space, the imposition of a system of structure and legibility that allows certain qualities or potentialities to be captured. It is subjugated space, space made to work, to organize its being according to the exhortations of an apparatus. I should not have been so dismayed, but I was, with my eyes-full-of-moons and romantic ideas about rural livelihood. Agrarian capitalism and the particularities of property law struck me first as an aesthetic effect: the visual scarring of division, containment, and assignment. Dry-stone walls are certainly the most striking of these barriers. I was struck, and continue to be, by the everyday miracle of these structures. Let me describe them briefly, although they occur in such variety – of stone, style, and appearance – over the British Islands and, indeed, the world, that a single description belies the extent to which they wonderful in their heterogeneity. Dry-stone refers to the fact that no fixative medium – no mortar – is used to hold the wall together. Brick and mortar – these words are a necessary pair, signifying solid, robust, established. Stone and – stone? Their construction which to me initially seemed no more than an elaborate and provisional balancing act, but they are neither precarious nor unstable. Over a week in Orkney, I must have kicked (at first timidly, then every day with more incredulous force), walked on, jumped over and leaned against dozens of these walls, which typically came up to my mid-stomach in height. Weight, friction, and clever connections – these are the binding elements, the elements of coherence and stability, that let these walls last tens, if not hundreds, of years.
A dry-stone wall! 10/10 beautiful no notes
A collapsed dry-stone wall reinforced by barbed wire, together keeping me from harrassing the sheep on my night walk
A dry-stone wall with a large fault - but i love her all the more for it
A cow in a field. Note the stripes of wall in the distance
Sublime construction, sublime lichen
Barriers between humans and land indeed - why do we do this
Detail of lichen on the ruins of the 12th c settlement of Earl Magnus on the Broch of Birsay
Lovely calico cat camouflaging her way down the wall
Bad picture but the striation I'm talking about is fairly visible
Strunning natural fault lines in seaside limestone
A dry-stone fisherman's hut
More sheep, more striation - the profit incentive is cute I'll concede
Dry-stone fence overlooking the bay of Birsay at 6 am as I wonder how to say goodbye
Couple my fascination with their construction with the incredible beauty of the walls themselves, and a seed of adoration began to quicken in me. Partly due to the year-round intensity of its winds, Orkney has almost no trees – any timber found on the island likely washed up in a shipwreck, or was imported at significant cost. As such, stone is the primary building material on the island; cottages, huts, stairways, and fences all bear a family resemblance to one another, born from the lovely and variable bedrock of the island. Slick with rain and moisture, stone glows – colour emerges from the dull matte cast of dust and dryness. When the sky is consumed by deep grey clouds and mist captures the sun, the dry stone walls of Orkney pulsate with an almost immanent brilliance.
Around 1145, when Kolbein Hruga would have arrived in Orkney,
there would have been few Scots on the archipelago. From around the 8th century onward (Anderson 1873),
Orkney began to be enduringly settled by sailor-farmers – more commonly known to us as vikings –
who made their homes on the island to farm and as a nearby base from which to “harry” (a strategy of
invade-plunder-retreat, mobile pillaging) coastal settlements along the British islands. Eventually,
a rapprochement occurred on the one hand between Orcadian nobility and Northern Scottish nobility on
the one hand, and Norweigan (less so Danish and Swedish) nobility on the other. Orkney was valuable
middle ground between powerful kingdoms, occasionally contested, but largely autonomous.
A complicated system of earldom determined an abstract system of land tenure. Earls were warlords and
landowners; their subjects fought and farmed for them, and in turn received land and protection.
Some earls were granted title from the king of Norway; some turned and swore fealty to the king of
Scotland; some, presumably, appropriated tracts of land for themselves and existed in prickly and uncertain isolation.
This system of landownership was marginally distinct from the 'feudal' systems existing on the mainland –
precisely how I have not quite wrapped my head around. There seems to have existed what is known as “udal”
(Tait 2002) law, wherein land ownership is determined by longstanding occupation and use, rather than written
deed. To quote at greater length, “Udallers have absolute ownership of their land, with no superior, gained by
holding the land over a number of generations, normally originally by settlement. This land was held in (unwritten)
freehold, with no obligation except a duty to pay tax or skat to the king.” (ibid.)
In 1468, the king of Norway mortgaged Orkney and Shetland to Scotland in return for financial aid in a war against Sweden.
Four years later, Scotland annexed the islands. Udal law came to be a contentious system under the new order. With no written
deeds, Scottish lords – landowners all – brought the force of encoded property law against longstanding tenants.
Sean and I drive to Ile de La Visitation, a small peninsula on the northern shore of Montreal, off Gouin.
Some stone houses from the colonial era are still standing. The water's edge is largely concealed by streets transitioning abruptly
from ordinary triplexes to single family micro-mansions. The entrance to Ile de la Visitation passes over an old dike where the
remnants of several water mills, built the 1700's and active until around 1960, still stand. A sawmill, two flour mills,
and a mill for treating wool. The walls of the mills are gutted but still standing, and wood and steel structures – maybe contemporary
additions, but I'm not sure – are overgrown with vines.
I was guided to this site largely from memory – these are the minor details in a memory that only light up in retrospect, without having been particularly notable at the time. In my memory, a friend and I walk across rocks on the shore, eating fruit. Why do I remember the rocks, and not the sand, or the gravel, or the geese, or the tree trunks sighing low from the bank towards the water? Largely because it is time, now, to remember them.
Along the shore, the rocks are grey and dusty, darkening to black or deeper grey when I rinse them off in the water. The shore was much less rocky than I had recalled, mostly consisting of sand, thin gravel, and dry, compact dirt. Briefly, I worried that we would not locate enough stones of workable size. I needn't have; as we made our way along the sand away from the well-travelled entrance, the number of viable stones seemed to multiply, appearing in my peripheral vision each time I bent to lift one from the riverbed. I have previously described the quality of attention that accompanies a specific interest relating to place as something akin to an augmented reality filter; this might otherwise be recognizable as the phenomenon by which upon learning about a fact, figure, or object, it suddenly reoccurs over and over again in daily life. Elements of place previously blending into the background are suddenly highlighted. Is this what Heidegger meant when he called something “ready-to-hand” ?
Beautiful limestone fossil
Another fossil, plant matter
It took us about an hour and a half to run these up from the shore
Lovely cross-section - note the white flecks in the black body of the stone
Sean with the unformed pile
Lovely smooth variable topology
Sean carrying a big rock
Another angle on the first layer
Two layers up taking a break!!
Our cairn ... our beautiful
Certain stones lay directly on the surface of the sand. Others required some digging and scraping to dislodge. One particularly large stone was embedded so deeply sand that, scoring around it with stones and sticks, I came upon the dark, smooth clay layer of the soil. At a certain point, my digging began to feel more violent than inviting – the gestures “gouging” and “scraping” came to mind – and, as the stone remained firmly set in its clay berth, I elected to let it be. I'm feeling sensitive to questions of extraction and depletion, particularly with regards to stones taken directly from sloping shores such as this one, where they already seem to be playing a role in retaining the integrity of the terrace against erosion. My worry about “plundering” stone from the riverbed was unfounded. After about an hour of bending down to pluck small stones and haul large ones, the amount of rock available seemed only more abundant, and the limits of our ambition with regards to the scale of the imagined structure were approaching. I wasn't doing my due diligence with regards to identifying the rock or plant life around the river – I'm still unclear on what it means to draw connections or feel embedded in a place. It smelled like wet sunlight, chill and sand. I saw earthworms burying themselves in the clay. About a fifth of the stones we picked were large fossil bed chunks – small shell spirals and tiny three-pronged branches that looked to be ancient plant life. One small rock, newly split with unsmoothed edges, had a dark black interior and the cross-sections of fossil appeared as small white starbursts. We hauled the stones up from the shores towards a growing pile behind a boulder on the edge of an area of grass.
Without entirely knowing how to judge the scale of the structure from the amount of stone we had already collected, we started with a conservative ~1.5 foot square base, roughly rounded on one side and flat on another. From watching videos online and some reading, I knew that the technique, roughly, was to choose large facing stones, arrange them level by level, and add smaller stones to fill the interior, or create reasonably firm wedges. Working with neither trowel nor shovel, we also did not dig out a foundation of any size. Already by the first layer, our surface was beginning to slope – most of the stones were slightly rounded and polyhedric, although we had been fairly careful not to select stones that had been overly smoothed down by river water. Layer two fit on solidly, with our heaviest stones anchoring each other, and with enough available hearting to fill crevasses without too much selection and manipulation. By layers three and four, we were beginning to shoot for “good-enough” connections. To test the placement of larger rocks, we jimmy and rotate them slightly on the surface of the previous layer until they catch, and then place smaller stones between and around edges. Sometimes, a connection that seems precarious is far more firm than two flat surfaces that merely touch, without having been tested.
On a real dry stone wall, the “batter” – the amount that ascending layers slope inwards – is very slight, almost indiscernable between levels, but visible once the wall is complete as a difference of width of a centimetre or so per foot of height, resulting in a wall that slopes inwards. Heavy stones are finally placed on top of the wall to compress the entire structure. Sean and I chose our “cope” stones a bit at random, based on how visual qualities rather than weight or effectiveness – although at this point, I would not be able to tell what would make a good cope or face stone just by looking at it. The three stones selected to cope the structure, which was by now rounded and conical (we had begun referring to it as a “cairn” about three layers in), I had found in the woods, rather than the shore. They were rounded, colourful, and ridged – one was covered in a reticulated pattern and slightly grown over with moss, giving it a warm green glow. It resembled a large egg and seemed to hum with some kind of life or intelligence. Our batter was totally unsubtle, sloping quite dramatically. Three was no need to add any throughstones, as four layers up the large face stones were already meeting at the centre, destabilizing the upper levels. At this point, we elected to stop aiming for more height (and instability), and simply cope the whole thing. I gave the lower levels a gentle “kick test” (a technique that I developed myself in which I kick the face stones to test whether they are well jammed or likely to dislodge), and they seemed firm, with only one small wedge stone tumbling off the exterior wall. I tested the upper levels more gingerly – I am not anticipating that they will last long in the event that a passer-by chooses to interfere with the structure. Hopefully, interference on the level of light wind would be insufficient to knock them into disarray. Not having used all the stones we picked, Sean and I arranged the remaining ones around the “cairn” in a loose circle. For added ritual energy, we joked. A circle and a boundary always seem to invite respect, even if the only things it contains are more of the same. I feel satisfied with this first attempt, despite its tenuous stability. As the stack falls directly next to a popular walking path, I can only hope that witnesses choose to respect the minor effort we expended to locate and stack the stones. I can only wonder what questions they might have as to its origin.
I was guided to this site largely from memory – these are the minor details in a memory that only light up in retrospect, without having been particularly notable at the time. In my memory, a friend and I walk across rocks on the shore, eating fruit. Why do I remember the rocks, and not the sand, or the gravel, or the geese, or the tree trunks sighing low from the bank towards the water? Largely because it is time, now, to remember them.
Along the shore, the rocks are grey and dusty, darkening to black or deeper grey when I rinse them off in the water. The shore was much less rocky than I had recalled, mostly consisting of sand, thin gravel, and dry, compact dirt. Briefly, I worried that we would not locate enough stones of workable size. I needn't have; as we made our way along the sand away from the well-travelled entrance, the number of viable stones seemed to multiply, appearing in my peripheral vision each time I bent to lift one from the riverbed. I have previously described the quality of attention that accompanies a specific interest relating to place as something akin to an augmented reality filter; this might otherwise be recognizable as the phenomenon by which upon learning about a fact, figure, or object, it suddenly reoccurs over and over again in daily life. Elements of place previously blending into the background are suddenly highlighted. Is this what Heidegger meant when he called something “ready-to-hand” ?
Beautiful limestone fossil
Another fossil, plant matter
It took us about an hour and a half to run these up from the shore
Lovely cross-section - note the white flecks in the black body of the stone
Sean with the unformed pile
Lovely smooth variable topology
Sean carrying a big rock
Another angle on the first layer
Two layers up taking a break!!
Our cairn ... our beautiful
Certain stones lay directly on the surface of the sand. Others required some digging and scraping to dislodge. One particularly large stone was embedded so deeply sand that, scoring around it with stones and sticks, I came upon the dark, smooth clay layer of the soil. At a certain point, my digging began to feel more violent than inviting – the gestures “gouging” and “scraping” came to mind – and, as the stone remained firmly set in its clay berth, I elected to let it be. I'm feeling sensitive to questions of extraction and depletion, particularly with regards to stones taken directly from sloping shores such as this one, where they already seem to be playing a role in retaining the integrity of the terrace against erosion. My worry about “plundering” stone from the riverbed was unfounded. After about an hour of bending down to pluck small stones and haul large ones, the amount of rock available seemed only more abundant, and the limits of our ambition with regards to the scale of the imagined structure were approaching. I wasn't doing my due diligence with regards to identifying the rock or plant life around the river – I'm still unclear on what it means to draw connections or feel embedded in a place. It smelled like wet sunlight, chill and sand. I saw earthworms burying themselves in the clay. About a fifth of the stones we picked were large fossil bed chunks – small shell spirals and tiny three-pronged branches that looked to be ancient plant life. One small rock, newly split with unsmoothed edges, had a dark black interior and the cross-sections of fossil appeared as small white starbursts. We hauled the stones up from the shores towards a growing pile behind a boulder on the edge of an area of grass.
Without entirely knowing how to judge the scale of the structure from the amount of stone we had already collected, we started with a conservative ~1.5 foot square base, roughly rounded on one side and flat on another. From watching videos online and some reading, I knew that the technique, roughly, was to choose large facing stones, arrange them level by level, and add smaller stones to fill the interior, or create reasonably firm wedges. Working with neither trowel nor shovel, we also did not dig out a foundation of any size. Already by the first layer, our surface was beginning to slope – most of the stones were slightly rounded and polyhedric, although we had been fairly careful not to select stones that had been overly smoothed down by river water. Layer two fit on solidly, with our heaviest stones anchoring each other, and with enough available hearting to fill crevasses without too much selection and manipulation. By layers three and four, we were beginning to shoot for “good-enough” connections. To test the placement of larger rocks, we jimmy and rotate them slightly on the surface of the previous layer until they catch, and then place smaller stones between and around edges. Sometimes, a connection that seems precarious is far more firm than two flat surfaces that merely touch, without having been tested.
On a real dry stone wall, the “batter” – the amount that ascending layers slope inwards – is very slight, almost indiscernable between levels, but visible once the wall is complete as a difference of width of a centimetre or so per foot of height, resulting in a wall that slopes inwards. Heavy stones are finally placed on top of the wall to compress the entire structure. Sean and I chose our “cope” stones a bit at random, based on how visual qualities rather than weight or effectiveness – although at this point, I would not be able to tell what would make a good cope or face stone just by looking at it. The three stones selected to cope the structure, which was by now rounded and conical (we had begun referring to it as a “cairn” about three layers in), I had found in the woods, rather than the shore. They were rounded, colourful, and ridged – one was covered in a reticulated pattern and slightly grown over with moss, giving it a warm green glow. It resembled a large egg and seemed to hum with some kind of life or intelligence. Our batter was totally unsubtle, sloping quite dramatically. Three was no need to add any throughstones, as four layers up the large face stones were already meeting at the centre, destabilizing the upper levels. At this point, we elected to stop aiming for more height (and instability), and simply cope the whole thing. I gave the lower levels a gentle “kick test” (a technique that I developed myself in which I kick the face stones to test whether they are well jammed or likely to dislodge), and they seemed firm, with only one small wedge stone tumbling off the exterior wall. I tested the upper levels more gingerly – I am not anticipating that they will last long in the event that a passer-by chooses to interfere with the structure. Hopefully, interference on the level of light wind would be insufficient to knock them into disarray. Not having used all the stones we picked, Sean and I arranged the remaining ones around the “cairn” in a loose circle. For added ritual energy, we joked. A circle and a boundary always seem to invite respect, even if the only things it contains are more of the same. I feel satisfied with this first attempt, despite its tenuous stability. As the stack falls directly next to a popular walking path, I can only hope that witnesses choose to respect the minor effort we expended to locate and stack the stones. I can only wonder what questions they might have as to its origin.
I won't dwell long on Orkney, because I didn't stay long there. A week –
too brief. What can I say about it. I was looking, not to go home, but to learn what that meant– assuming that home means a particular relation,
of familiarity, mutual knowing, attunement. A creature
of urbanity, of modernity – I wondered what I would find, who I would find. At some point I expressed it as the living past –
what I was looking for, history animated, in flesh and full colour, in motion and persistence. I wanted to learn what it
meant to be connected to land. To know a place intimately. An extension of self, of home, of practices of living, in the ground, in work.
I know – I think that I know – that I know someone intimately when I can predict how they will react – to anything.
When I can predict their expression and tone of voice, how they will phrase a reply. Is this intimacy, or is it study?
Is it intimacy because the capacity to predict makes me feel safe? Prediction leaves an environment – or a person – subject
to control. At least, it gives me enough information to modulate my own reactions, or to offer specific inputs. What do I offer
of myself when I gather this kind of knowledge? What do I withhold?
Orkney is a curious place. The island is littered with evidence of prehistoric inhabitants – great and minor stone monuments, ancient
chambered houses of stone emerging like eroded anthills when the ferocity of wind and wave sweeps away topsoil. Can there be said to
be an indigenous people of Orkney? Likely not in the same way we understand indigeneity in a settler colonial context like North and
South America, Australia, Siberia, and elsewhere – where a people and their way of life are brutally and suddenly interrupted by an
alien culture seeking dominance. Orkney was settled gradually and in waves. Mark Edmonds (2024) persuasively describes
the complex and sophisticated settlements routes of early humans (say, circa 4-3000 B.C.E.) were accomplished sailors, travelling
multidirectionally from the Orkney and Shetland Isles to the Scandinavian and British mainlands. Peoples did not simply come, make their homes
and stay. Often, they left again, to trade or settle elsewhere. Migration and transit – leaving as much as arriving – have
always been inscribed in stories of settlement. So has dispossession, erasure, violence, and division.
In Tiohtià:ke/Montreal, I can list off the top of my head the very few plants I can identify by sight. Plantain,
Goldenrod, Magnolia, Maple, Star Magnolia, Mint, Dandelion, Clover, Red Clover, Queen Anne's Lace, Cow Parsley, Buttercup,
Sumac. This is the order that I notice flowers appear in the spring and summr: Siberian Squill, Crocuses, Tulips, Magnolias, Lilac,
Peonies, Sunflowers. Irises are in there somewhere. Identification is not knowledge – I fall to it because it gives me access to a
language of familiarity, of recognition. I am acquainted with the land I have lived on for the better part of my life.
I do not know it very well. It does not tell me anything in confidence. It does not trust me. I have not taken the opportunity to
get to know it.
Arriving in Orkney, I imagined myself speaking at length to local people,
learning their habits and their perceptions of place, observing their practices. In the end, I didnt. If I am modern, I am also solitary.
Without knowing how to be otherwise, I keep to myself. I watched; I watched the hills covered in rabbitholes,
and how the rabbits ran into them as I approach, the hills writhing to life and becoming still in seconds flat. I watched seabirds sit
in the air without moving on stable channels of air – not moving their wings, not moving through space, just hanging,
as if suspended by thread, both against the wind and with it. I watched the wind carve rivulets through long grass, which sways
fit to hypnotize me, parting and meeting and flowing, dull gold into threads of dull gold. I watched the sea swell and break
against the massive black stone that slopes out of the water, yard-thick layers striping endlessly on top of one another, fissured
and splitting in even geometries – eons of swelling and retracting, a latent order becoming visible, settling in the idiom of falling
apart. The stone held me, just as the stone holds the land – fast, in quiet containment.
I don't want to be romantic –
I know that's an easy trap, to draw the line between paradise / fall – but
surely, some wisdom was abandoned that could have been taken up.
Can it still be located? Can it still be learned? Can it still be helpful?
Another park, another wandering, another sadness: January 2022,
Berlin, Park Rehberge, in Wedding. The city has been grey for weeks.
I go to look for the boars that a friend, briefly a lover, told me about.
I want to see the boars, but I also want to fill his absence with the site of somewhere
he was once present. Do I want to encounter him, spectrally, in the landscape?
Do I want to imagine that, if time is really simultanous, we are here together?
Is that what we are doing when we retrace histories?
I am walking next to a cold pond, scummy. Naked willow trees lattice their
skinny branches around me. Everything is bare, exposed, damp, shivering.
The mist is thick, a force of erasure. I have been in the habit texting weather updates to friend.
Dec 28, 2021
weather report: sun briefly penetrated the thick skybuffer of cloud today before receding again, bone chill and drizzle
9:59 AM
Jan 2 2022
weather report: gentle ambient temp + absolute prehistoric sog. a mist that will outlive us all
2:52 PM
Jan 6, 2022
weather report: sun is honestly edging me. patches of blue sky appear at first like a flavour i cant name or a word ive forgotten, utterly muted and defamiliarized. breeze is serene rather than bitter.
11:26 AM
These reports give me something to look back on, to apprehend an environment that otherwise felt like it was draining through me. Next to the pond in Rehberge, something bottoms out in me, and Heidegger's Heimat floats up. Heimatlich, heimatlos. What am I, to this path and this pond? What are they to me? How does one come to dwell, to be a dweller in a place? I am so far from home. I ask again, what is home? To quote from Mark Riley's “Landscape, Terrain, and Heimat”: “The myth of what is the ‘common reality’ of Heimat as ‘the quality of humanized and spiritualized nature’ linked to a sense of ‘eternity and endlessness’ (Blickle, 125) was already haunted by what remains concealed – what was ‘ungrounded’, permeable and fractured.”
Dec 28, 2021
weather report: sun briefly penetrated the thick skybuffer of cloud today before receding again, bone chill and drizzle
9:59 AM
Jan 2 2022
weather report: gentle ambient temp + absolute prehistoric sog. a mist that will outlive us all
2:52 PM
Jan 6, 2022
weather report: sun is honestly edging me. patches of blue sky appear at first like a flavour i cant name or a word ive forgotten, utterly muted and defamiliarized. breeze is serene rather than bitter.
11:26 AM
These reports give me something to look back on, to apprehend an environment that otherwise felt like it was draining through me. Next to the pond in Rehberge, something bottoms out in me, and Heidegger's Heimat floats up. Heimatlich, heimatlos. What am I, to this path and this pond? What are they to me? How does one come to dwell, to be a dweller in a place? I am so far from home. I ask again, what is home? To quote from Mark Riley's “Landscape, Terrain, and Heimat”: “The myth of what is the ‘common reality’ of Heimat as ‘the quality of humanized and spiritualized nature’ linked to a sense of ‘eternity and endlessness’ (Blickle, 125) was already haunted by what remains concealed – what was ‘ungrounded’, permeable and fractured.”
Home is a fiction; it is about making claims, to land, to place; making claims of belonging. To be rooted, for Glissant (2000),
is to found one's identity on a fundamental intolerance, a primary totalitarianism.
What is a relationship to land that is not staked on a claim? That does not by its formal nature exclude, circumscribe, monopolize?
I'll go back again, not deep in time but several months before I sat with Mormor
at the kitchen table under the hanging lamp, folding placemats, learning for almost
the first time about the intriguing little island I would make it a mission to visit.
The summer of 2023, I began listening to Bluirini Bealoidis, a podcast produced by researchers at
University College Dublin. It is a heartwarming piece of media; affable hosts briefly
introduce a thematic deeply embedded in the fabric of popular folklore, and then, without warning,
splice in interviews with old men and women around Ireland who speak in thickly – sometimes intelligibly –
accented English. Each spins their own story, tale or yarn – or one that they heard, or were told, or in some
way came to take up so as to offer it again. The extent to which this podcast marked me,
and still marks me each time I relisten, is inexpressible. I struggle to think of any person in my life who might have told me
a folk tale, one that they believed in, such that I carry the belief forward. A friend's mother, maybe, when I was
very young, told me that a ring of twigs in the forest was a fairy ring. Her daughter (not my friend,
but his older sister) told me about Bloody Mary, who might appear in the mirror if I spoke her name three times.
(I wish she hadn't.) My own family had very little truck with enchantment,
the non-empirical, the vernacular – folk wisdom of any kind, really. My grandmother told me stories about my grandfather,
and their friends, and their friend's families – a very particular social history, rooted in the insularity, patriarchalism,
and self-interest of particular mid-century socioeconomic class. I often feel cultureless, although I realize that
this is the result of not feeling culturally distinct. My culture is the ambient, hegemonic culture that is white, christian,
bilingual, anglo-quebecois. I am a language minority in a language minority province, a matryoshka of privilege in the
Canadian context. White people (using myself as a prototype case here) are often preoccupied with their “roots”. I think
that this is less about grasping for a pre-colonial identity foundation (insofar as any but the most diligent among us
actively identify ourselves as settlers) than it is about any identity foundation point blank that might demarcate
us as belonging to the human – to the idiosyncratic, the fallible, the strange, the alien, the familiar,
the particular, the historical – rather than to the homogeneous blank hyperactivity of North American ethno-capitalist culture.
I was walking around Frederic Back. It a park rewilded some years ago from garbage dump
to exquisitely landscaped promenade, covered in native wildflowers and humming with
insects in the summer. I was a bit high – sue me. I was a bit sad – standard issue. I was listening to Bluirini.
It was a wildfire summer, and I had been hiding indoors, afraid of the pink smog, convinced that I could feel it as a thick obstruction
in my lungs. This might have been late July, by which time the worst of it I think it had cleared. I was trying to get my fill of the outdoors while it was safe for me to do so.
The wildfires – they brought climate change home, made it acute. I won't give any facts or figures on climate
change or speak at any length on it because it terrifies. Was it that summer that I would wake up at 5 am every day to blistering waking nightmares, visions of ice
sheets crumbling into the ocean? Ice become water, heat become fire, earth become dust, air become gas: an
eschatological transit of elements. In Frederick Back, the sky is magnificent in its openness – the park itself loops around a massive pit, and no large buildings
for some miles obscure the sky, which appears truly as domed, arcing, uncircumscribed. I think I tweeted that year,
“need. wide open field + wide open sky” – tall order in the middle of a city. I looked at the wildflowers, and
the sky, and the bloody, ashy yolk of the sun, and listened to old voices inflected with the musical tones of an older language,
and felt as if I had a tiny living thing inside me, maybe a bird, or maybe myself, absolutely keening – a mourning song, or wail –
for something irretrivable, or irremediable. The stories in my ear – that particular episode, I recall, spoke of farmers
who over the years had taken up machines and forgotten how to work the land by hand. Another
old voice spoke about a fairy fort that had been paved over by planners unfamiliar with the land, and the consequences
of building against the wishes of abstract natural forces. The keening in me increased; my esophagus burning, my lungs freezing, my heart petrifying, my
stomach inverting itself. The machinery of history – capital, cruelty, and shortsightedness – had wrought such a world, once in which
I did not know the names of wildflowers, nor how to help them grow? Would I share a territory with animals, and fear them sometimes, but not fear for their disappearance wholesale?
What does clean air taste like? What is it like to think of the past and the future and think repetitive instead of feeling
two very different forms of loss? A past to fall back on, and a future to look forward to – instead of a past to regret, and a future to mourn?
Let me try to dig around a little bit to give these thoughts a ground to settle into.
This is not a container, but a clearing; a opportunity to situate myself in relation to this practice I am so curious about.
I can begin with settled stone. Around the round table in her kitchen, my grandmother
(Eileen) begins – a propos of what, in particular, I do not now recall: “You know”
(she punctuates her speech with this phrase, a courtesy and an invitation – you know,
and you might know more), “you have roots in Orkney, you know” (I did not know – only a distant
memory of her telling me that her mother lived in Dundee – or Glasgow).
“A fellow named Kolbein, yes, Kolbein Hrule, or Hruga, something like that – you know,
he built a castle, and that castle came to be called Cubbie Roo. Overtime, Kolbein became Cubbie, but it also
became Cobban. And that's my name, you know. Cobban from Kolbein. So you've got roots there, you know.
Cubbie Roo is still there. It is a large rounded rectangle of stone, inset into the ground. Centuries later, locals thought it must have been built by a giant. I still have not seen it. Later that same year, I applied and was accepted to a residency in Orkney, where stone became central to my thinking, walking, and staring – “practices” all, if you will allow me. In the months before departing to Orkney, I joked constantly – and not without sincerity – that I was going home. At the same time, I had to ask – what claim do I have to call this place, this abstract site of origin, home?
Cubbie Roo is still there. It is a large rounded rectangle of stone, inset into the ground. Centuries later, locals thought it must have been built by a giant. I still have not seen it. Later that same year, I applied and was accepted to a residency in Orkney, where stone became central to my thinking, walking, and staring – “practices” all, if you will allow me. In the months before departing to Orkney, I joked constantly – and not without sincerity – that I was going home. At the same time, I had to ask – what claim do I have to call this place, this abstract site of origin, home?