Morning folks - hope everyone is doing well.
You know, there's a famous quote from the philosopher Heraclitus, which has been quoted on here a fair bit.
To paraphrase it:
No man can step in the same river twice, because it is not the same river and he's not the same man.
That's a fairly long-winded version of the original which is sort of made up of several parts.
Here's what the Latin Language Stack has to say:
The famous saying about stepping into a river is not a single fixed quote from Heraclitus, but rather several distinct ancient fragments preserved by writers like Plato and Eusebius. Plato's paraphrase in Cratylus translates to "You could not step twice into the same river," while an earlier version recorded via Arius Didymus states, "Upon those who step into the same rivers, different and again different waters flow". The popular modern addition ("and he's not the same man") is a later embellishment rather than part of any surviving ancient fragment.
So there you go.
It was pressed home to me recently when myself and my friend revisited a site of childhood adventures. It had been my home during holidays for 10 years and then my full-blown private playground for a further five.
I knew the riverbank well, better than maybe even I know myself; it had been a home to fun, serious talk, teenage dreams; spiritual growth; solace and solitude.
I had traversed it in twilights and dawns, in mists and snow.
I knew the pathways so well so that I could have walked it blindfold.
But then someone decided to revamp the A74 and in the making of the M74, the small holm of cottages and farm were compulsory purchased and demolished, except, curiously, for my families own cottage, which was stripped of every significant thing including the slates on the roof.
The building was derelict and isolated and I fully expected it to be demolished, however it was rescued . . but that's another story.
The last time I saw our cottage was roughly 1998/99 - windows smashed, home to foxes, it was slowly being swallowed by the natural world; however, my riverbank was pretty much as it had been . . maybe a bit less well travelled, but the paths were still there and moving about on it, whilst not quite as easy as it had been, was still easily possible.
So roll forward 27-odd years.
Add in global warming; invasive species; floods which saw the river rise some 15 feet higher than its normal levels; landslides; erosion and the key thing, no walkers, cattle or fishermen on that bank.
It's hard (even now, a few weeks down the line) for me to imagine a landscape so changed.
There are plenty of wild places I know pretty well. In most of them, sure there have been changes, that is the nature of nature. But this was on another level.
We genuinly felt like we were clearing new ground; breaking pathways for the first time.
There's a powerful hold of history on the place.
The paths I had followed as a boy were old, incredibly old; small, tight and rutted by generations of passage.
Yet here they were, being slowly reclaimed by nature; unrecognisable to me.
My friend and I were pretty much aghast.
The going was bloody tough.
Knees and legs were ripped by brambles; Himalayan balsam everywhere; gorse; nettles; some grasses but nothing like what there had been. Dense stands of hazel, beech and oak. Detritus from raging floods.
Banks which had once had a gentle curve down to stone banks in the river were now deep undercuts that one could not step into without serious consideration of the consequences.
The river itself, narrower and deeper.
New banks formed.
Old favourite trees slumped to the water's edge.
Fence markers and barbed wire fences repositioned.
Most boulders that had been familiar, gone.
One particular boulder, which, though large, had provided a lee for passing salmon and sea trout, and had been wadeable to, was now isolated in the middle of the river.
A landslide, which had once been walkable across, was now a dangerous threat with the constant ripple of falling pebbles, it's leading upper edge undercutting trees and bushes.
In short, calamity had come to familiarity and memory.
It was like a very old person being asked to learn their house again after it had been utterly altered.
And yet, a few things remained.
An old washhouse cast iron boiler - cracked and discarded many decades ago (a feature from boyhood air rifle practice) was still there.
And the springs, oh yes, the springs.
Our cottage had originally been called Three Wells Cottage, this was because of the alms wells on the riverbank which provided clean, fresh water to passing travellers (I know, they were right next to a river, but this has been a common feature of wells through man's history . . rivers can be polluted, but springs generally are OK).
There's an implausibility to a spring I think.
You encounter them rarely, yet there they are feeding out fresh water 24/7/365/1000/10, 000 . . . you get the drift.
These springs in all the time I knew them, were little more than boggy ground with vestigial run-off . . nowadays they are pools.
Obviously the flooding has done an archaeologist's work and scooped out centuries of detritus and kind of returned them to an ancient natural state.
It was a remarkable thing standing in the dappled sunshine, accompanied by the constant rush of the river and contemplating what had become.
Oh stfu I can hear you saying - wot's all this got to do wiv takin' photies?
Well, I'll tell you.
Prior to this trip I'd spent 20-odd years fantasising about being able to photograph a hugely important part of my life in a sensitive and meaningful way.
I wanted portraits of the trees I knew.
I wanted the atmosphere of MY riverbank.
I wanted to be able to get onto the stone banks and photograph water in a way that represents its mystery and constaunce.
But what did I get?
Well, none of that.
Instead of something that maybe at one time would have been relatively easy, I was faced with the hardest photographic situation I have ever encountered.
There was literally nothing to point a camera at that made any sense.
I was using the Hasselblad SWC/M - I'd chosen that because it feeds upon atmosphere and records it on film.
That sounds like UB (Unsubstantiated Bollocks) but I think it is true.
However even with the SW I just couldn't do it.
No way.
Chaos surrounded me.
Even spreading a tripod was a pain because there were brambles and balsam everywhere and the tripod would not sit steadily on such uneven ground and springy vegetation.
Factored into this, I was deeply aware that my companion (though taking his own digital versions of our old stomping ground) would probably wonder what the hell had become of me had I spent longer than roughly the hour it took me to make 12 exposures.
And it was into this pressured situation that I introduced a cardinal sin:
Brain fog.
My film was Tri-X rated at EI 250, usually developed (these days) in HC110 Dilution B - a combo that seems to work for me generally.
I usually use an old Minolta Spotmeter and place the shadows on Zone III in traditional manner, except this time, I forgot to do that!
Consequently I placed each shadow on Zone V by forgetting to underexpose by two stops - so I got mid-grey, and boy have I paid for it.
When I got home I realised I'd done this and chopped around 15% off my usual developing time, which sort of helped a bit . . but I could tell, these were going to be hard.
I had an initial bash, using Ilford MGFB on Grade 1, because printing on Grade 3 rendered everything harsher than I wished to make it.
I even tried split-grade and then when that didn't do it, flashing . . all to no avail.
I was taken aback. I had/have no idea whether I'll ever get back there again in this life.
To say I was disappointed at the mud-filled prints that came out would be an understatement.
They weren't much cop.
And then I remembered John Blakemore and his great book "Black & White Workshop'. Distilling a rather dense tome down, he basically felt that no matter how hard the negative, it could be dealt with in a sympathetic way - in his words . . and trust me, these are great:
I could not remake the negative, so I must make a print.
The above are all scans off the original prints which were made on (wait for it) 25+ year old Ilford Galerie - in my opinion the finest photographic paper that ever existed and (no, Harman) MGFB is not a substitute for it. It is Grade 2 - a fixed emulsion, yet to me, there's more snap to the highlights than if I were to print MGFB on Grade 2.
I know it looks a little dull, but maybe that matches my sombre mood that life moves on; my childhood idyll no longer exists as I remembered it.
Time and nature move as one and there really is no going back.
I think the images reflect that.
Because of the density of the vegetation (and also some twat forgetting to position his shadows correctly) the exposures (accounting for the reciprocity of Tri-X) were pretty long - mostly in the region of 37 seconds and not a Neutral Density filter in sight!
As such, you can clearly see the theme of nature and time, hand in hand.
There's movement in the reflections and leaves.
Sadly there's also a screen, several servers and about a million miles between us, but were you here, I'd give you a cuppa, hand you the print and say:
"Stick Your Nib Into That!"
The fine detail ability of Galerie was unmatched.
Strangely, Foma Variant has a similar look to it - it's a paper I should explore further.
I know, you're going to say to yourselves:
Gawd . . another pile of leaves!
But those leaves, the trees that produced them and the way they had folded themselves onto the land, held great meaning to me.
They had done so since time immemorial and would continue to do so long after I was nothing more than an afterthought on the great wheel of being.
For a tiny speck of time, the place had been my whole world.
It distilled my youthful yearnings for adventure; my closeness to my parents; laughter; death and the rending asunder of everything I knew; it was there through uncertainty and sadness and change.
And it was nearly all still there.
I felt it through the chunky soles of my boots - most predominantly, a yearning ache to remake what had been, to be back in our cottage on a cold evening with my Mum cooking Welsh cakes and my Dad and I scooping them out her hands before they'd had a chance to cool. To be part of fun evenings playing cards and dominoes and talking. To gain some quiet wisdom from my dear dead parents.
I'll be frank it left me breathless and brought me to tears, for time had swept it away like a Summer's end.
And, despite it all; despite long, hard winters standing around in jeans and jumper; wind cheater and DMs; despite the passing of all that time, my teenage self had waited patiently to be picked up.
"What the hell happened to you?!" was the first thing he said.
"It's alright old son, come home" is what I said.
And he's here now, looking over my shoulder, wandering through to the other room to crank a nice guitar; maybe read some Bradbury; maybe listen to The Scorpion's In Trance album, mixed in with a little of Wire's Pink Flag, by way of Radio Birdman's Radios Appear and Mott's Shouting And Pointing.
And you know what?
Time in all its ways is an interesting concept (as Clifford D. Simak once said).
As I leafed through my parents wartime letters this morning, I realised that they're still here; that he - teenage Herman - is still here.
I am a distillation of all of them.
As a wise man once said:
Sometimes I sits and thinks, and other times I just sits.
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| Me - Circa 1970 Taken By My Dad On A Kodak Instamatic |
Thanks for reading.
TTFN.
H xx
