I grew up in a small house with five other people; because I shared a bedroom until I was sixteen I never had any private space, and yet I have always had an enormous hunger for solitude. Since I was a young teenager I have sought this solitude outside in places where things have been left to grow. Wherever I have lived as an adult, I have found pockets of wildness – woods, ponds, nature reserves, country parks, beaches and dunes – where I have nourished my sense of self. It’s mostly the case here in England that wherever there is wildlife and unrestricted plantlife – you can’t exactly call it wilderness – there is some remnant of previous human occupation. It’s these places – sites where evidence of humanity is obscured, softened and overgrown that have lingered most in my mind and that I’ve returned to most often. When I first moved to Hackney the Middlesex filter beds was the one place that immediately resonated with me.
These things are ineradicably interwoven for me: the natural world consuming abandoned human artefacts, and solitude and the absence of other people. There is a powerful dynamic that seems to play itself out in those spaces. There is a theory that says that dreaming is a way for your brain to process recent events – to reinforce those neural connections that are important and to discard those that aren’t. It’s significant to me that your brain apparently can’t do this while you’re awake and still receiving conscious input. Trips into the country are like this for me: a process where psycho-social events and processes – relationships and meetings, conversations and intercourse of all kinds - are managed in the absence of their input. These landscapes of abandonment – of a vanished or diminished presence – are like a screen (in the sense of a porous boundary) that admit the presence but inhibit the power of other people to effect me. I’ve always had a difficulty, that when I’m with others I become a little overwhelmed by their reality and by this particular need to manage other people’s effect on me. There’s a kind of feedback loop paralysis that in wild places is lessened, and in its absence I feel unentangled from those binding cords. These landscapes have the quality of a dreamscape then, something that is not only itself but also a symbolic manifestation of my own internal world. This kind of landscape seems to embody something necessary: a kind of easing of a problematised connection between myself and others, perhaps an inability of mine to feel entirely distinct as a person. The sensation of dissolution in nature I sometimes feel is in fact perhaps more of an identity distillation. The necessary psychological boundary between me and other people is reified in these places, and strangely reinforced as it is a little dissolved.
It helps that these places – like the filter beds – are physically separate. You have to travel to get there, even if it’s not far. The sounds of other people are never that far away, like the overgrown evidence of their occupation, but quiet enough to be a faint reminder rather than an intrusion. It is quiet enough too, to let other sounds come to the fore. Primarily for me, this has always been the sound of the wind. Although I hear this in many places, it is only in quiet natural spaces that I consciously become aware of it. Sometimes it’s the wind in the trees – poplars particularly have a distinct pattering sound when blown by the wind – or the wind in the grasses and rushes, a more satisfyingly sibilant sound. Sometimes it’s purely the sound of the wind blowing into and past my ears. In many ways it’s a very similar sound to the rush of blood inside your head; perhaps it even holds a subconscious reminder of the blood-sound audible inside the womb. This sound of the wind is thus a kind of external representation of an internal process too, another wandering boundary.
There are few places in this country where wilderness is unmanaged: in the filter beds there is often clear evidence of tree-felling or water management. Things are kept in check. But there is always too a sense that there is something unknown, something dangerous. The raised paths around the beds circle an inaccessible wood. I say inaccessible, despite the fact it would be easy to go down into it, but I never have. In the same way, I’ve never gone down to the river Lea’s edge over the boundary wall. There is a perilous mystery that I unconsciously preserve for myself. It seems necessary to keep myself back from discovering everything: I need this boundary too it seems, between myself and raw nature.
One of the first reactions when I first visited the filter beds was a visceral sense of being in a place I had already seen: the Zone in the film Stalker by Tarkovsky. There is a scene where the protagonists find their way through a meadow ringed by trees to an abandoned building in the distance that I felt like I was in. As a landscape, the Zone is a place of psychological, irrational traps. Apart from the physical similarity between the Zone and the filter beds – the verdantly overgrown, abandoned industrial artefacts and the proximity of water – this idea of the landscape as a strange, menacing force that expresses some inexplicable, yet still weirdly human, identity, is significant for me. I don’t experience the landscape of the filter beds as psychologically threatening, but the idea of the place having a human quality – even knowing that I bring that with me, that it’s not out there – is one I can’t shake off. Indeed, it’s one I seek out, that I apparently need.
In Stalker, the three main characters travel in search of the Room, a magical place of granted desires. They reach it’s threshold, but never go in. It’s that unresolved mystery – simultaneously internal and external, indeed the place where the internal becomes external – that drives the film’s narrative. The doubt about the nature of the psychologically internal and its existential threat should it become actual is what keeps the characters from entering. The ambiguity of our own motivations and how they manifest themselves in the world, how we must interpret and deal with the way other people manifest their internal realities: all these things are metaphorically present in the the landscape of the filter beds for me. But as in the film, I never cross that boundary, I never work it out. It’s as if by approaching it and registering its realness I make sure that doorway is still there, still closed.
Keith Johnson
