LONDON’S LOW TIDE THE RIVER THAMES SHARES HER CURDLED CHRONOLOGIES Thursday, 21st September, 2017 LONDON’S LOW TIDE 03 LETTER FROM THE EDITOR – THE RIVER THAMES Dear Reader, I am an old river. I want to tell you some things while I can. There is a current running through this city that has to speak. The constant flow of information, events, chatter, analysis, gossip, feeds, disasters, story telling, announcements, reports – the news – has found its way into print for hundreds of years. Our papers tell us truths but always in a voice that represents someone’s agenda or point of view. I am going share things that are difficult for me to tell, things that trouble me from my lowest tides, and some of the things I think about to lift my spirits. You decide if you can trust me. Time is liquid flowing backwards and forwards like the tides upstream and downstream, and then circling in currents and eddies. I know of an even older river that flows through the underworld, the Lethe, drink from this river to taste oblivion, it will make you forget everything. I haven’t forgotten anything but it gets harder to remember. My memories have settled in the sediments that make up my beds. Everything is there but hidden, murky, but when disturbed, currents of brown water shift and obscure any vestige of clarity. It makes for a curdling of chronology where things thicken and get stuck, or wash up at low tide under a coating of stinking mud. I can only remember the things that I have forgotten. The past comes flooding into the present. Each time the memory surfaces it changes and I no longer know if I am remembering the thing that happened, or the last time I remembered the thing that happened. I worry that I am losing my memory, or at best loosing my chronology, my sense of one thing following another. I make lists. I increasingly sense connections, how one thing flows into another, weaving a complex web of narratives that reconfigure how time moves. It gets harder to trace time in a linear way. Now becomes the only fixed point, always now. So this is what I remember now – this day – this morning – this low tide - I wanted to tell you what I remember. We take time for granted. How can we separate time and change? We make dates that denote time having past, millennia, centuries, months, days, or hours, seconds, constructing absolute and relative chronologies. But I’m much less certain about time than I used to be. I keep forgetting things, dates, names, faces. I’ve find myself repeating things. It helps if I make a list so I make lists. I keep putting things down in places I forget. The current can carry things a long way so its easily done. Somehow its always low tide for me. I keep repeating things. BarGes on the River Thames in the Rain. ETChinG BY PerCY LanCaster, 1912 (Credit: MAry EVAns PictUre LibrAry) 04 DIRTY WATER Thursday, 21st September, 2017 Thursday, 21st September, 2017 LONDON’S LOW TIDE 05 DIGGING Funny what people will pay for a dead man’s things. place, even place has to have a place. These are WATER’S MEMORY Four legs worked fine – until you get to the water. We find things from the past when we dig. These treasures had been taken from a restless thoughts that move across the surface of I remember something else, a memory that is When you entered the shallow waters at the My sediments are full of the past. Every time particular place, but then they needed their place the water, the river’s place, always in a place and further back. There are some people who don’t river’s edge, you straightened up, the water held they ‘improve the river’ it means a lot of digging. in time. Chronologies organise what has been left always moving through a place. I am never still, realise how you evolved with the river but I know you up, and you moved on two feet, not four. This Balzelgette’s sewers meant a lot of digging. behind, relative to each other and to the history to never at rest, perhaps I am time passing, a liquid what I saw. Water has a memory, a long memory. is why you stood up. They are digging again, deeper this time. Stirring show a sequence and impose an order onto the arrow shot through the city, always held in its This isn’t easy to remember, it’s too far back, Did you ever wonder why you have up my memories so I wanted to tell someone, palimpsest that is London. London has been place by the embankments that make up my hard to reach for. I can’t get further back than subcutaneous fat all over your body just like the you, what I can remember today. Last time they written and rewritten and over written so many edges, and always in flight. this. It’s 450,000 years ago and the water is frozen whales and other mammals that live in the water. engineered the river meant dredging, bridges, times, something much messier than layering, Every dug up archaeological find has a place, into great walls of ice, so cold it hurts to You are not covered in fur like creatures of the locks, weirs, tow paths, embankments, sewers, more like a dense thicket of a multiple presents. where it was found. It’s the only thing you can be remember the pressure and noise inside the ice as earth. The skin on your fingers wrinkles in the tunnels and all happening at the same time as the The past is always a problem of interpretation. certain about. What the thing meant or was used it hollows out the valley that the river now flows water to improve your grip, and it was those birth of a new way of cataloguing time they It has always been forgotten, and is always being for is speculation and interpretation. Things are through. After a long time the air warms, the fingers that started gathering and harvesting the called ‘archaeology’; a whole new system for how remembered, but what is a memory? What do you found, numbered, and known by their place. The climates change melting the ice, and I change, shell fish, just like you had seen the birds do, to think about and measure the past. It’s as if remember – do you remember the past or the last river is full of things thrown into me. I used to be adjusting my course to accommodate the seas breaking open the shells to suck out the juicy the past didn’t exist before we could measure it, time you remembered what you had forgotten? part of the belief system. Venerated; offerings rising and falling, until I am a sparkling wide curled up creatures stuffed with Omega 3 fatty but that’s not true, Romans found things older How do you know if you are repeating yourself or and sacrifices made to me. Pilgrimages made to restless stream - nothing like the tidal canal that acids that send a rocket to your brain which than them, they just didn’t call it archaeology. how you construct your memories? And news me. I was appeased. These most precious things now flows between these constructed city encephalized at rapid rates. Some smart characters became dealers in the becomes past so quickly. thrown into the water as offerings and then found embankments. Then the river shaped the land, That’s not all - you can birth your young in past, worked out how to sell it, like ‘Stony Jack’ hundreds of years later during the digging and not the land the river - and the river was the world water. They emerge swimming, wide-eyed, Lawrence, the past was somehow more real to him ZENO’S ARROW the dredging. Look at what is thrown into me now. to those came to live close to it, a generous endless slippery and covered in vernix caseosa, a cheesy than the present. He kept his pockets full of half There is a paradox that one of those archaeologists Everything you don’t want and don’t want to source that was their key to survival. The river varnish – the exact same substance that covers a crowns and made sure all those labourers digging explained, called Zeno’s arrow. If time is a think about, your waste, human waste, stinking shaped those early people – but what I want you to newly born seal pup. All over the world you live up the city knew and trusted him. He fed this new succession of now’s, presents, or moments, an in the water, something like a week or every time know is that water shaped everyone. Some of you next to the water, and all over the world you get fever for things left behind and he made a lot of arrow in flight never moves. The arrow in flight it rains hard, the rivers that flow into me combine understand this, some of you don’t. into the water and feel better. You swim. You can money, trading directly with the navies and always occupies a certain point at a certain time. with sewers that are overwhelmed and overflow A welsh woman, Elaine Morgan wrote books shape yourself into a dive. You can hold your workmen at the end of their working day, and At rest the arrow is in a place and is its own size; into my waters.