Å1
—
Wading in up to the knees, the water presses the rubber of her boots against her ankles. With each step a tiny stream of bubbles escapes from the fermenting leaves beneath her feet, along with a sweet-sour smell. She had come to a closed-in corner of the river, a tributary that leaks out into the landscape rather than cutting through it in a rush. A seeping place of low, close trees whose roots lay submerged and whose trunks reach both upwards and downwards into the mirror of the water.3 She leans over, bringing her face to the surface like a crane, long legs bent awkwardly, elbows on thighs. At the cusp between air and liquid, her eyes could see two places at once: the sky, her own face, the silver of the light on water; the brown floating silt that moved gently with currents she could not feel and the teeming lives of the creatures. New lives spiralling and twisting, suspended in the amniotic fluid4 of the lake, protected from the eyes of birds and large fish by tangled plant life, waiting for the heat.
Turning her head slightly, she catches the vibration in the small bones of her skull.
A deep tremor.
She extends her tongue towards the surface, tasting its yeasty breath on the roof of her mouth. Her hands become cups.5
—
Bog, fen, mire, marsh, wetland, swamp, quagmire.6
A land of marsh lights and will-o’the-wisps:7 a flicker and glimmer of light forever in the distance, no matter how far you trudge into the sodden ground.
—
She licks. The salt tastes good. Her long eyelashes blink over the deep brown of her eyes. Au. Auðumbla, Auðhumla, Auðumla.8 She shifts her enormous bulk, bends her head once more to the ice. No green lifts up the snow.
The world is nearly new.
Her body leaks warm milk. It drips from her, melting dents in the smooth surface with a hiss. Where is her child to drink it, to ease the pain of her swollen udders? In the fog and mists she licks, at the edge of the yawning void.
Frozen yeast catches in the meeting places of warm winds and begins to thaw. Life forming itself at the edgelands, growing on the rim. Lively flesh. Multiplying, finding shape. She licks. Slowly, a form begins to emerge: coarse hair, and frozen skin.9
—
A river is a verb.10
—
They had been following ghosts.11 Down past the humming of the factory and its twenty four hour light, beyond the newly dug crater with its hanging thread of roots, mycelium, and blasted shimmering rock (purple, gorgeous).12 Down through the thicket of birch saplings and nettle growing on the bumpy ground and under the metal fence where an animal had dug itself an underpass. Their ankles buckled as they walked across the outsized gravel, towards the shimmering body of water. At its edges, something was forming, and reforming.
—
Gas, nudging gently, pushing, pressing, upwards
Silky sludge of brown doming, rising, letting go with an explosive sigh
Heat from below, life fermenting in slow motion beneath a liquid blanket of cold
Unfurling through the darkness, waiting for the sun
—
“You say it's a river and I can believe that, but when you say it's water I am suspicious.”13
—
You expand. Weeks pass as your flesh forms. Sediments of time. Suspended, you metabolise. Becoming here, breathing in these cultures of bacteria, cultivating yeasts, your cellulose forming. Lifting your body up to the surface, to the place where air and liquid meet. You float.
I hold you in my hand, feel the pleasure of the weight of you, your flesh glows a soft pink- yellow in the summer light. You smell like apples that have been left where they fell. Parched, I drink you in.14
—
Their weight flattened the moss, leaving a dent where their face had been. The moss smelled like water that had been left behind: something fishy, the cool green smell of chlorophyll, of submersion. The soles of their feet sniffed the air above, felt upwards for the sky.15 Their eyes skimmed over the surface of the lake, looking for a change in texture, a ripple in the gold that would let them in. And found it. Almost imperceptibly, they began to tip, their flesh reaching. The liquid drew back a little, as though hesitating,16 and then curled up and over them without quite touching their skin. They shivered with pleasure at the sudden shift of temperature. The hairs along their skin prickled to attention, waving as if with static towards the body of water. They danced in a subtle communion of heat: each fraction of a degree of change in temperature an untranslatable question, a curious wondering
The moss begins its slow rebound.
—
—
He followed the road and the road followed the river. It was his birthday tomorrow. His second since he’d moved here and the second he would spend alone. His one passenger was plugged in to a series. He could see the flicker of images on his face, and hear the occasional snort of laughter. He switched the radio on as he sped past another stop, trying to make up for lost time.
The river was still mostly frozen, but the light was a pale green and he had begun to see the first pairs of cranes picking at the patches of bare ground and snow melt. He used to see a single pair by the little lake behind his mum’s place in Hisingen in the Spring; he had always thought they were lost, separated from the thousands of others making their way North.
He glanced out over the water, at the boggy place in the river where it seeps out slowly into the trees. The low sun left a floating white spot in the middle of his eye. He swore quietly and looked back at the road, half-seeing. Someone was standing waving their arms. Behind them someone else, their form half eclipsed by the glowing white spot in his retina. Was that a baby in their arms? A small animal? The light spot wavered and bulged. He glanced behind him and slowed the bus down to a halt. The door opened with a hiss of air.
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Text by Alice MacKenzie. Written whilst dancing and thinking with Ina Dokmo, Siriol Joyner and elieli in various projects, and influenced by each of them in many tangled ways.
The illustrations for this article are based on drawings made immediately after dancing scores to heighten my sense of touch, taste and smell, with pleasure as a guide. They are an attempt to draw the experience of my moving body from the inside. The illustrations are painted with mushroom ink made by allowing shaggy ink cap mushrooms (bläcksvamp) to decompose in a dish on my balcony.
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FOOTNOTES:
1 “Å: River, brook, creek, oh!” From wordreference.com, Svensk-Engelsk ordbok/ Swedish-English dictionary
2 Extract from Pontus Pettersson’s series of water aphorisms in his work ‘Hydrologics: or the water practice.’ The aphorisms are sometimes direct quotes and sometimes mutations of quotes. I do not know where this one is from, but I do know that it might be an invitation to dance.
3 “A legend has said,
A story has been yoiking:
North from the fixed star,
West from the sun and moon,
Was in lichen silver and gold,
Fireplace-stones, lowering stones for fishing;
Gold glitter, silver shines,
Glaciers creating reflecting mirrors;
Sun, moons and stars shining,
Smiling at their mirror images;”
A translation of Anders Fjellner’s poem ‘Päiven Pārne’, ‘Sons of the Sun’, first published in Swedish in 1876, and - as far as my research can tell - recited or written in a combination of North and South Sami by Fjellner before that date.
4 During pregnancy, the cells of mother and child pass between each other’s bodies in a process known as foetal microchimerism. Sometimes these cells can be found in the mother’s body decades after the end of the pregnancy. These cells form part of the complicated dance of gestation, a dance that complicates notions of support, harm and healing. One body is forming within another: a new life with different DNA, potentially a different blood group, and its own immune system. What are the borders here between self and other? What levels of porosity does a body possess? Diana W Bianchi, Kiarash Khosrotehrani, Sing Sing Way, Tippi C MacKenzie, Ingeborg Bajema, Keelin O’Donoghue, Forever Connected: The Lifelong Biological Consequences of Fetomaternal and Maternofetal Microchimerism, Clinical Chemistry, Volume 67, Issue 2, February 2021, Pages 351–362, https://academic.oup.com/clinchem/article/67/2/351/6071463
5 An image partially digested from a keening - a poem of grief and in this case, rage - from 18th century Ireland by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill upon the murder of her husband by an English landowner. Finding her husband dead on the road, she scoops the puddle of his blood into her hands and drinks. I read of this poem and its tangled connection to contemporary Irish author Doireann Ní Ghríofa in her book, A Ghost in The Throat, (2021).
6 Quagmire, noun: an area of soft, wet ground that you sink into if you try to walk on it; a difficult and dangerous situation. Cambridge Dictiornary, dictionary.cambridge.org, accessed 5th October 2023
7 Strange lights have been said to appear over bogland and fens in many parts of the world. In Britain and Ireland these lights are said to lure people out over the dangerous watery landscape and are variously believed to be the souls of the dead, or mischievous spirits or fairies.
8 “Straightway after the rime dripped, there sprang from it the cow called Audumla; four streams of milk ran from her udders, and she nourished Ymir.” Then asked Gangleri: “Wherewithal was the cow nourished?” And Hárr made answer” - Sturluson, S. The Prose Edda, Gylfaginning, 6. Translation by Rasmus B. Anderson, (1880), Chicago: Griggs
9 Cannibalising my own writing. Extracted from a longer text called Gold Forgets (2020) written for a publication called The Gold Room Project. 5 artists were asked to write fiction alongside the exhibition of the Gold Room at Historiska Museum in Stockholm. The project was initiated by Mmabatho Thobejane, Jarkko Tanninen and Sara-Lot van Uum.
10 The First Water Is the Body, a poem by Natalie Diaz (2020).
11 “If the river is a ghost, am I?/ Unsoothable thirst is one kind of haunting:” Natalie Diaz, The First Water Is the Body, (2020). See also the work of elieli. elieli.se
12 Rare Earth Elements are a collection of “17 nearly indistinguishable lustrous silvery-white soft heavy metals” (Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rare-earth_element accessed 3rd November, 2023), that are used in a wide range of computing and electrical industries. They glow purple under ultraviolet light. Northmam, J. ‘It’s a journey to the center of the rare earths discovered in Sweden’ (July 18, 2023) https://www.npr.org/2023/07/18/1187075988/europe-rare-earth-sweden#:~:text=Sweden has known it has rare earths for a while&text=, (accessed 4th October 2023)
“Generally, it is estimated that extracting 1 ton of rare earth element, creates around 2,000 tonnes of waste, partly toxic, including 1 ton of radioactive waste. The largest mining site of REEs, Bayan Obo in China produced more than 70,000 tons of radioactive waste, that contaminated groundwater.” (Wikipedia again). The mining company in Kiruna, Northern Sweden is currently investigating the potential of mining REE’s there.
13 Roni Horn: Saying Water, Recorded at the Two days art-festival at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in May 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkvoe7s1NVg. I grew up in the muddy river valley of the Thames, its many tributaries buried beneath streets and houses, channelled into pipes and drains, resurfacing in the flooding of basements every year and filling the streets each autumn with thick fog that curls off the canals. When I was a child someone told me that each sip of London tap water had passed through seven kidneys before it met your lips. A river runs through me (Natalie Diaz, The First Water is the Body, 2020) and the body of 10 million others, and the many million more who have passed through it and who it has passed through.
14 Another exercise in writing cannibalism. Originally part of a collection of my writing collected in a zine called Combing texts, (2018).
Gut microbiota are the bacteria, archaea, fungi and viruses that live in the digestive tracts of animals in a mutually changing ecology of digestion and fermentation.
Infective heredity, or Horizontal Gene Transfer is a theory by which, “the movement of genetic material between organisms other than by the (“vertical”) transmission of DNA from parent to offspring” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer, accessed October 5th 2023. See also the RadioLab episode from September 2018, Infective Heredity. This transfer can be through the digestion or partial digestion of one cell or microorganism by another for example.
Eating and being eaten, cultivating and being cultivated, a mutual touch, a body as a porous temporary home, an ever changing ecology, breathing in, digesting, passing through. A hot, fleshy, compost pile.
“All that you touch you change. All that you change changes you. The only lasting truth is change. God is change.” Octavia E. Butler, The Parable of the Sower, 1993. See also, the entire Lilith’s Brood trilogy by Butler for its sensual, erotic, gene swapping joy.
15 Ola Stinnerbom set a new world record for the longest dance performed in a handstand (2022, Tromso, Vårscenefest). Ola Stinnerbom and his archaeology of Sami dance. Ola Stinnerbom taking the long way back after being upside down for more than 20 minutes. A crowd waiting for him to return.
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