ghost rivers - London’s liquid life - daylit
London grew around a confluence of waters - holy wells, sacred springs, a revered river. Tributaries numerous in their wet wearingfor the land along with humans and other creatures who massed beside them. Twenty holly wells and sacred springs are scattered through London each with their own histories of care and respect,reaching back to Celtic times. Most of these watery ways are now buried underground, beneath the heave of the city,subsumed into sewages,denied light; their life,captured and channelled within hidden chambers. Daylighting is an active practice of allowing submerged rivers, these buried waters to resurface returning their rite to light, desire to spread, to pool, to quench ecosystem aridity and resume their sprawl and sensuous intermingling with earth.
This text makes new explorations of ongoing preoccupations, such as sensuous consciousness, the reincorporation of exiled capacities, prescencing relations between physical, elemental vivacity and corporeal imaginative reach hoping to heighten awareness, at the felt level, of two way touch between these realms.
It imagines daylighting as an engagement with our sensuous consciousness, reanimating our elemental ancestorship, plumped and fleshed by allowing spill, sprawl, spread, seep and merger.Hence this text takes seriously, and urgently, how relations with the elemental dimension have a direct correllative within our sensorium, in that our lived life is hindered or enabled by how we care for, or abuse, elementals in their physical , environmental lived life. The psychic terrain of our life is not seprate from the physical terrain of life - the waters in the world are the emtional waters in us, in turn how we are with tenderness, care, connection and compassion. Elemental relationality within culture, within our collective, is the waft and weft of visceral imaginative life, that keeps eros, a progenitor god - the secret thing connecting everything - alive.
To lose erotics is to lose connection.
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ghost rivers - ghost waters submerged, swallowed by concrete, capped with concrete - seething rise; immanent
whatever we leave
in the background
tiny life-units
disseminated
distributed
the shut away, the denied always returns = double force.
the art of noticing
what is sensed below the threshold of awareness?
“haunting lies precisely in it’s refusal to stop”
(Tuck & See p.642 2018)
river; a product of design - through a line - that made a territory and empire possible “anchor in a different moment of the hydrological cycle, and you see different things rather than see things differently” (Dilip da Cunha 2019)
invisible rivers flow through our atmosphere
invisible sky rivers - never not in touch with ghost(ed)rivers beneath cities
multiplicity of the rain drop ~ the singularity of river
ubiquitous wetness
invent ways of gathering wetness rather than channelling water