Skin memories: from Stone Arthur to Nab Scar - a loop above Grasmere

7 Apr

Aim

To explore the relationship between the body and different landscapes through the notion of ‘skin memory’, and thereby to challenge the coded whiteness of the lyric ‘I’ in the Romantic lyric.

This route has been developed in collaboration with Alycia Pirmohamed. Alycia is the author of the chapbooks Hinge (ignitionpress), and Faces that Fled the Wind (BOAAT Press), and co-author with Pratyusha of Second Memory (Guillemot Press and Baseline Press). Her debut collection, Another Way to Split Water, is forthcoming with YesYes Books and Polygon Books in 2022. She is the co-founder of the Scottish BAME Writers Network, a co-organiser of the Ledbury Poetry Critics Programme, and a Junior Anniversary Fellow at IASH via the University of Edinburgh. In 2020, Alycia won the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Find her online at alycia-pirmohamed.com and on twitter @a_pirmohamed.

Background

The following intro to this experiment was written by Alycia:

“In my poetry, I have always been drawn to meditations and metaphors driven by changes in landscape — by the presence of my body, a brown woman’s body, in the natural world. As of late, I’ve been thinking more about how particular bodies navigate particular places: how both body and landscape are dynamic, and how both change over time, ageing, eroding, evolving. In Strange Encounters, Sara Ahmed writes that ‘migration stories are skin memories: memories of different sensations that are felt on the skin.’ So then, how does meaning or intention change when I write about the sensations felt on my body amongst the white spruce in Canada vs. the mangrove trees in Tanzania vs. the silver birch in Scotland? When I write about all the landscapes that piece together ‘home’?

It’s probably no surprise that when I think back to my education of poetry in Canada, I rarely came across BIPOC (Black, Indigineous, and people of colour) writers. I studied ‘the canon’, a colonial syllabus that presented white, usually male, bodies as universal, as the default. This included the Romantic poets, who I enjoyed reading for how they represented the vastness of the natural world, but who instilled in me the idea that poetry about nature was unmarked by any specific cultural or historical contexts that resembled my own. This internalised idea about nature poetry meant that I struggled to call myself a nature poet – and often still, despite my long term interest in ecological writing, ecocritical thought, and poetry about the natural world, I have to constantly remind myself that I do belong in these spaces.

In her conceptualisation of ‘skin memories,’ Sara Ahmed also writes that ‘the physical sense of moving through space is enough to trigger a memory of another place. Memory hence works through the swelling and sweating of the skin.’ To me, this idea resonates deeply with how my writing might hold multiplicity, and has presented me with a way to explore my own place in a range of different landscapes. For example, the sensations of walking up the fell, Stone Arthur, surrounded by a thick mist might trigger memories of moving through the thick heat in Dar es Salaam, or walking through the near-zero visibility fog in Vilna, Alberta. Further still, perhaps moving through space in the Lake District might even trigger the inherited or ancestral memories that have been passed down to me through familial stories…” This experiment has been designed to explore these ideas within the context of Grasmere, during a walk about Dove Cottage - William Wordsworth’s Lake District home, and a place resonant with literary memory.

Route instructions

Route: Medium-difficult (8.4 miles, 2970 feet of ascent)

Starting point: the Rydal Water car park on the north side of the A591 between Grasmere and Ambleside.

This route climbs up to Alcock Tarn then descends again to the Greenhead Gill valley before climbing up to Stone Arthur, Heron Pike and down to Nab Scar. For those who would like a less ambitious route, it’s also possible to shorten the route by turning left (east) down the valley from Greenhead Gill to Michael’s Fold, and then following the path which traverses at a lower level, parallel to the A591, back to the original path above Town End. This alternative route is approx 5km.

Accessible alternative: this route can straightforwardly be completed on any of the Miles Without Stiles routes, or indeed any accessible route anywhere! It’s particularly interesting to complete in contrasting places in order to evoke contrasting ‘skin memories’.

Click on the image above to open an interactive version of the map on Outdoor Active. Otherwise you can download the GPX file of my route here (© OpenStreetMap contributors)

Writing & Art Ideas, & Virtual Alternatives

In the 1960s, M.H. Abrams coined the term ‘Greater Romantic Lyric,’ a form that is characterised by movements between descriptions of landscape and internal reflections. The greater romantic lyric has a (loose) three part structure, briefly summarised as ‘out–in–out:’

● Out: the speaker describes the landscape. An aspect of the landscape will trigger a memory, meditation, or reflection of some kind.

● In: the poem shifts inward, and the speaker meditates on this memory or experience. They may come to a revelation or epiphany, or resolve an emotional problem.

● Out: the poem shifts back to the exterior landscape. The exterior world is implicitly or explicitly altered by the internal reflection.

This format gives a workable structure for exploring Sara Ahmed’s idea that place triggers memory of other places. It invites you to intertwine thoughts about nature with your own specific memories, experiences, inheritances, and ideas about the migrations that have comprised your own life; to reflect on your own cultural and historical contexts by overlaying the notion of skin memory upon this Romantic poem structure while out on a walk.

While completing the above walk, stop periodically to meditate on your experience of landscape and what it conjures for you. The first step is to describe (or photograph or draw) the immediate landscape (out), then to to meditate on what memories this conjures (in) and to capture this either in writing or visually, and then to return to the immediate landscape and to try and capture a sense of what has ‘changed’ during the reworking of memory (out). See Jason Allen-Paisant’s “Crossing the Threshold” as an illustrative poem. If working in the photographic medium, it might be useful to reflect on what photographic memories different scenes recall, and to present historic photographs alongside your photographs of ‘now’. Alternatively, you could present a hybrid form, where the ‘out’ sections are photos, and the ‘in’ section is a fragment of writing based on memort.

This experiment can be adapted into a virtual experience by using the images I’ve taken of the walk (shot on two days in very different weather) and observing what skin memories this landscape, in different weathers, conjures for you - image by image.

Route adaptation for Walk-from-Home

This experiment is easily adaptable to any walk-from-home; the challenge might be disentangling your current knowledge of a place from your migratory skin memories. This could be averted by choosing a local route that you’ve never done before.

One of the highlights of lockdown for me was discovering new routes around Cockermouth, and noticing new things which I’d never observed before. During one of these walks I shot a picture of a really distinctive tree, much to the confusion of a local friend who had run the same route many times, and never notice this.

Alycia’s Poetry

Freewrite with Lake District mist

A figure leans forward, moss along her spine,
branches stretched into free space like a stray memory.

In a certain kind of light
at a certain point in history
you would have stepped away from your body.

You would have left your body, shed your body
of its autumn leaves.

Now you tell yourself, “Be kinder
to the woman who has just arrived,”

who has not yet fallen in love with these trees.
Be kinder to the body not yet free
of its misunderstandings or its mythologies.
“Let her extend her arm toward you.”

Next to me, the fog slips – caresses? – cuts through
the jagged hills,
orange handfuls of ferns sing crisp autumn.

I pause next to the tarn
the sound of spilling water a robust echo;

“tell me”
she says, the tap running
washing supermarket vegetables.
She leans on her good leg.

“How is the weather over there? and reassure me
that you have been kind” –

I think the second imperative is a projection, real/
unreal, a cross-section of truth and time.

As the fog drifts away, some other illusion
is uncovered –

that time we drove across the province, silhouettes
touching the rough fabric of stars –

that way the Albertan landscape scatters
into every impression

is at the heart of every question.

Tall. Gaps of sunlight. Pure.
Leaves on the path disassemble in the breeze.
Ferns lift and glimmer with rain.

Light falls through the fell’s ridge, light
falls through the shape of palms held together
in prayer.

Elongated, reaching, lifting into bare winter arms.

She exits the stony formation and enters
a new season, water breaking at her ankles.
An invitation (a reincarnation?).

Her body is a slippery mist of its own.
Listen as she glides into a cluster of trees.

My poetry & photography

The following poem is from a series of poems that I’m currently writing which explore the trauma resultant upon a childhood car crash and subsequent events.

Nabbing scars

The mist thickens into me.
A weighted blanket.
Wet and comforting
and claustrophic as cold.

Before memory
there can be none.

My memory awoke
at the very point of impact:

I cried and cried and you
Did not answer.

The growl of unseen traffic.
The catch of smoke.
The sound of metal on metal
stored inside my bones.

And later, when I did not cry
and might have.
In every childhood story that
I wrote I then chose to be alone.

But nothing listens
better to a silenced voice
than the touch of weather.

Loss is a stream – louder than daylight.
The trauma of the drip of leaves off leaves
on leaves and your face crumpled into
blood and bruise and bone.

I choose permissive footpaths. Arrows.
My mood conditional upon
the weighted stage of autumn.

The Lion and the Lamb

The following photographic response revisits two images of Helm Crag (also know as the Lion and the Lamb) through the lens of childhood memories of times spent in the Grasmere Valley. The Out-In-Out experience is explored here through two images of Helm Crag / the Lion and the Lamb and a snatched snapshot of Grasmere village through the clouds. The ‘In’ experience (reflecting on childhood times in the Lake District) somehow domesticated my perspective on the fell during the photo editing process, illustrated here in how I have chosen to filter and edit the light in both images. The names ‘Lion’ and ‘Lamb’ here refer not to the rocky outcrops on the summit, but to the process by which the Lake District has been tamed and domesticated by humans.

Out (a certain wildness)