Dr James Bonner

In 2018 I went to a Dark Mountain Project event at the CCA in Glasgow during the early stages of my doctorate. A group of us sat down and were asked to just talk about a recent occasion in which we’d engaged with nature- a specific experience that made us *feel* something. I spoke to the person next to me about being in water, my experience of being in the sea at Arisaig on the west coast of Scotland on the morning of the recent summer solstice. They spoke of an experience touching some soil in her garden.

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But then they mentioned something that they’d recently heard on the radio, and that had affected her- and it is a thought that has stuck with me since. A discussion around the idea: what if we considered that the earth had a ‘skin’, like our primary organ of sensory touch- and where it could *feel* us in the way we are able to feel it? This seemed to intersect with some ideas I had been exploring at the time in some philosophical writings- and specifically in the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty who wrote on ideas of a ‘flesh of the world’... Anyway, without going into that here, it sparked something in my mind about considering water in this way- especially in the context of my experiences in the sea. Because, as I had come to think, that when I engaged with that ‘body’ of water- at the shoreline- its tidal ebb and flow, back and forth movement- seemed like ‘fingers’ reaching out and retracting. The water as something alive and sentient... I’ve been playing with this idea a lot over the last couple of years now- going to water, touching it, engaging with it, especially travelling there by my bike.

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“water is articulated as always both ‘being’ and a process of becoming gathering water from certain bodies and flowing back into others in return” (Neimanis, 2017)

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Arisaig, west coast Scotland. Summer solstice 2018.

 

But I had also been thinking something else. As water in nature is linked in a multiplicity of entangled flows, by touching a body of water, in essence, I became part of a direct chain of material connection to all other waters linked to it. In this sense water could be a ‘conduit’ of physical connection between me, and any other person engaging with water at the same moment!... This seemed to get at something I was really interested in- that rather than thinking about a kind of binary relationship between me and water (whether this was a subject-object, subject-subject, object-object kind of link)- this was a way of conceptualising it as a 'subject/object hybrid' or entanglement that I was part of; I was ‘within’. And that, really interestingly, could become included in- indeed fundamental to- an interpersonal relationship between me and another person from afar. A way of breaking down or deconstructing the object/subject, human/nature, dichotomy in both a material and symbolic sense? But here, it seems, I'm getting a bit close to falling off a cliff edge into a sea of philosophical thoughts. 

 

So going back to water- I had an idea. Could I set up some situations whereby I arranged (through digital communication) to engage with a body of water at the *exact* moment as someone else I knew- but who was in a very different spatial location? Where we would, for example, both go to either ‘sides’ or ‘ends’ of a river, a lake, a sea, an ocean… and make a physical (and emotional) connection in this way... By late 2019, after my fieldwork in Malawi where I'd undertaken numerous physical water engagements, I had resolved to come up with such a project in spring/summer 2020- a way for me to take my research into new places and forms outwith my doctorate…

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And then Covid-19 came. I spent so much of my time on my own, inside- both my home, and my head. My cycles were limited to nearby where I lived in the city. My water engagements were significantly limited, and I didn’t get to the sea for months. But, by summer I was able to get out more (I cycled to the coast on summer solstice in June)- and all these ideas came rushing back to me. And it occurred to me in a world of physical distancing, all of this took on a new level of significance. I’d already read about the Icelandic Forest Service having recommend people to hug trees as a means to overcome isolation during the pandemic lockdown- could water be thought of, and engaged with, in similar ways?...

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In August 2020 I started recording some connections with friends and family, near and far, through water engagements- from which I created the following audio visual montages to represent those experiences. While they were initially conceived as a way of representing human and non-human relationships, and breaking down preconceived notions of our 'separateness' from 'nature' (in this case, water), they have taken on another layer of significance during the Covid-19 pandemic of 2020 (and beyond). They become a means of maintaining and representing a level of social and physical connection with people at a time in which I had been unable to do this through more conventional means.

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I have given each engagement a short introduction and some context. This is very much a work in progress, to which I will keep adding to over time. Thank-you to all my collaborators- those of you whom I have connected with in this way. And, of course, my main collaborator and conduit for all of these- the water itself... 

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Some quotes to 'hold in tension' when thinking/feeling about water, knowing, and our engagement within it:

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"The body is our general medium for having a world" (Merleau-Ponty, 1945) yet “no body can ever fully know water” (Neimanis, 2017). And while "to understand water is to understand the cosmos" (Emoto, 2004) this seems to counter D.H. Lawrence's poetic view that “Water is H2O, Hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, But there is also a third thing, that makes water, And nobody knows what that is.” (from Deakin, 1999). 

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