Edgeland Visible (IV)

IV. Celebration

Written by Leonard Yip
Dated 1 Jul 2024

When haunted by devastation, edgeland art makes us attentive to memory and history, dismantling triumphal narratives of modernisation. For the detached urbanite, they also possess a tutelary power: intimating us with new perspectives for the Anthropocene’s in-between terrains, recognising and learning to celebrate its resurgent, hybrid ecologies.

Watson employs a rich phraseology of vision in explaining how Arthur Yap’s work offers a ‘powerful way to reread’ the city’s forms. It suggests that seeing space also requires ‘reading’ it; or re-reading in this case: a prevenient unlearning, and a subsequent literacy acquired for the edgelands. Macfarlane’s exploration of his local scrublands echoes this learned articulateness. Initially repulsed by and dismissive of its urban ‘mixed-up, messed-up’ aesthetic, Macfarlane writes of how ‘I have learnt to read the edgelands, and have come, if not quite to love them, at least to arrive at an intimacy with them’. The development of this literacy was nurtured by reading the work of edgelanders preceding him, in particular Richard Jefferies’ Nature Near London (1883). Walking Surbiton’s railway intersections, Jefferies grew ‘alert to the unexpected ecologies’ of the margins, finding them ‘not to have suppressed nature but to have provoked it to odd improvisations’. Curious chimerae emerge: a cinder heap strewn in a field becomes a haven for birds in the winter, foraging for morsels within. Habitation rather than harm springs out of the built world, and the new fields-of-vision offered by the edgelands are un-laired to Macfarlane’s eyes through Jefferies’ own unstable optics. Jefferies’ writing thrills in the richness suggested by visual overwhelming. Obscured sight figures as a vibrancy animating his surroundings when ‘the distant hedge quivers as the air, set in motion by the intense heat, runs along, [conveying] an impression of something living everywhere within’. Jefferies’ eye does not dictate detail with narrative objectivity, but becomes a giddy receptacle for experience. At times, he praises his edgelands’ abundance with a celebratory taxonomy of its herb species; elsewhere, the edgelands floor him into stunned speech – repeating ‘joy in life, joy in life’, so elated that his language becomes unstable too, unable to accommodate his wonderment. 

Jefferies’ work, with its ‘volatile [unruliness]’ and ‘[dynamic disobedience] to the eye’, awakened Macfarlane’s own eyes to the intermingled aesthetics of the South Cambridge edgelands. His descriptions unbind themselves from stiff focus, dancing across the chapter from the scintillating ‘night-glare of arc lights at the park-and-ride’, to vast biomes perceived within the miniature – ‘moss jungles, lichen continents’. Unruly eyes are needed for seeing the volatility of these mixed, ever-changing edgelands, and he notes how this recalls Nan Shepherd’s instructions on how best to observe in The Living Mountain (1977):

This changing of focus in the eye […] deepens one’s sense of outer reality. Then static things may be caught in the very act of becoming.

Shepherd’s catching of things ‘in the very act of becoming’ would strike a chord with Singaporean photographer Samuel Chia, in the midst of his decade-long project to document the bastard countrysides of his home country. 

Traversing the scree slopes of Shepherd’s beloved Cairngorms alone in 2013, Chia encountered another group of walkers – a radio production crew, accompanied by one Robert Macfarlane. Bonding over a shared love for the hills and peaks, Macfarlane passed a copy of The Living Mountain to Chia, who remembers ‘finishing it in one sitting. I cried through the whole train journey back’. The tender attentiveness and sensitivity of Shepherd’s sight touched a raw nerve in Chia, who had found in her observations the exact articulation of his own experience – a perception which had unfolded and deepened to compose the landscapes of home into generous new forms.

‘I have learnt that magnitude of scale is no metric by which to judge natural spectacle’, Macfarlane wrote years after their meeting, alive to the little wonders of the edgeland he once saw only as a transition zone through which to escape to the high hills. In his imagination, they evolved from simply being in between places, to in-between places: recognised as hybrid landscapes occupying their own category. In-between Places (2018) became the title of Chia’s own photography album, as he traced a similar path of learning to see his lands afresh. ‘Rather than wishing for the drama of wilderness on a grand scale, I delighted in the discovery of inner worlds within details’, Chia writes. ‘I found fascinating arrangements in mere mud, rock and sand, that I eventually grew to understand were no less significant than any mountain’. Shepherd’s observations on observation illuminate identical trails across Chia and Macfarlane’s edgeland realisations – changing the eye’s focus, enabling a full immanence and wakefulness to the captivating forms of the world at their doorstep. Consider Plate 33 of Chia’s album:

The conventional picturesque seems easily found in the photograph – the eye is drawn to a single tree in focus, the Lalang grasses around it shaky with motion blur. However, there is a greater complexity at work behind the composition and history of Chia’s image, unfolding desolations and resurrections of land and meaning. One realises that the centre-framed tree is dead, fire-swept and charred. Lingering on the photograph then destabilises this focal point – the grasses possess a rhythmic, entrancing movement of their own, and the eye wanders, following their sway. Attention turns from the burnt husk of an unmoving thing, to the rushing whirl of life springing around it, seething and teeming in the shadow of death. 

The sight-shifting power of Chia’s photography revives the qualities of terrain and ecologies previously condemned as ‘useless and noxious’. Colonial archives document the formation of Singapore’s early edgelands – vast plains of Lalang sweeping across abandoned plantations, in between pockets of primeval rainforest. In the early 1880s, as Jefferies was re-seeing and recording Surbiton’s lushness, the British botanist Nathaniel Cantley was charged with making recommendations for the creation of a department to preserve the colony’s ‘Crown Forests’. Cantley proffered a scathing assessment of Singapore’s landscape, disgusted by the ‘attendant evils’ of the Lalang ‘grass wastes’ in between deforested patches. Chia’s photography and commentary, however, re-think the totalising condemnation of such attitudes. He notes how the Lalang re-carpeted the ashen ground just three weeks after wildfires raged across Lorong Halus prior to the photograph’s capture, proving ‘the resilience and vitality of grass’. His work animates an edgeland possibility of resurrection: the ex-landfill of Lorong Halus blooms over with the very ‘grass wastes’ once reviled by Cantley, now becoming symbols of life in the plains-less era of modern Singapore. The delicate, fey elegance of the grasses in Chia’s composition restores the promise of the place-name’s etymology – Halus, the Bahasa Melayu word for ‘fine in texture, ethereal’. 

Often, Chia’s photography is made possible only by the hybrid terrains of the edgeland, realising Shepherd’s observation that by ‘altering the position of one’s head, a different kind of world may be made to appear’. The angle for plate 57, Skypools at Sunset, would have been impossible ‘without the elevated position afforded by the raised concrete embankment’ – unlocking the sight of waves ‘morphing rapidly and constantly’ against the orange detonation of the setting sun, ‘a blur of brilliant colours’ to the eye. At other times, the instability of the edgeland itself enables his work: 

Exploring reclaimed land along the eastern coastline, Chia recounts how his attempts to photograph the shell-strewn shore were constantly frustrated by tidal movement, blurring detail into ‘an indecipherable mess’. He captured this swirl of a wave past sand grains and seashells practically by accident – it ‘stopped just short of the edge of the frame before flowing back down, never to repeat the same way again’ as he ‘fought to keep the camera steady’. Though its subject matter risks straying towards cliché, Chia’s counter-gravitational perspective refreshes the image with startling newness. ‘Worlds within details’ emerge: the texture and vividness of each shell a continent unto itself, a planet in a galaxy. Chia creates a new visual epistemology of the edgelands through the unruly lens of his compositions: casting a fresh strangeness over otherwise-familiar landscapes, making the viewer newly alert and alive to them. 

*

Sight and literacy for the edgelands are achieved by returning to them.

Edgeland visionaries draw semantic links between the re-seeing and the return to their beloved margins. ‘Time spent intimately exploring these lands close to home helped me to see them differently’, writes Chia, recalling the ‘proximity and time’ which unlock the plant- and bird-life noticed by Macfarlane. Cowen notes the ‘depth that comes from revisiting a place relentlessly’. Time in the edgelands, learning to see its shifting forms and hybrid metamorphoses, leads to internalised ‘acts of becoming’ and self-transformations. As the compress of the edgelands brings us into closeness with the ecologies of our locality, Cowen writes that we become aware of ‘what we are not’ and ‘what we are’ in relation to them. These dualities, he argues, are inseparable, for they compose ‘the complex intermeshing between human and nature’ – happening right in our neighbourhoods and on the roads to our workplaces.

Cyril Wong’s 2019 poem ‘Otter City’ both affirms and wrestles with Cowen’s ideas of transformation within the edgeland’s compression. In 1998, smooth-coated otters returned to their native Singaporean rivers after years of disappearance. The otters adapted quickly to the city’s urbanised waterways, resurging into both wetland reserves and city-centre reservoirs. They have fascinated and frustrated human contact since, becoming subjects of public adoration whilst also feasting on ornamental koi reared in private ponds. Wong’s poem writes from the perspective of an encounter with these animals: 

how long have we been watching
with love and envy -
leaving us lovers and doubtful
urbanites to lumber back to the m.r.t.,
noting sporadically trees
we cannot name – tembusu
or angsana, we wished we knew –

and that sudden, darting shrew
skirting us between office buildings.
those otters still
whirling through our minds – 

our date complete; not just
with each other
but with a whole republic 
of life thrumming beneath our feet.

Human-animal collision occurs differently here from Cowen’s work. Split-second eye contact between Cowen and a roe deer leads to a rich, chapter-length imagining of himself as the deer, enabled by the novel form’s allowance for sprawling prosaic density. Recalling a long history of hunter-and-hunted, textured into DNA, Cowen’s perspective turns animal as he records scents, sounds and anatomical functions alien to human experience. Wong’s economical verse, however, is sparse with this effect. His poem’s tight lines chart estrangement in place of envisioned past; ‘seeing’ appears frustrated as the speaker watches the otters, triggering an acknowledgement of separation rather than a cellular re-ignition of prior relationships. Ocular connection produces only a deep reminder of ‘what we are not’ as urbanites: the watchers seem to be drawn apart from the wild rather than reconciled to it, so detached they cannot even name the trees. 

Yet something wonderful happens in the poem: the otters stay ‘whirling through [their] minds’, extracting the transfixed watchers from the self-obsession of their date, and extending the occasion’s opportunity for intimacy to ‘a whole republic of life’. The phrase unites manmade polity with the more-than-human things slinking back through this city, becoming as much a part of it as the watchers. Wong’s poem still arrives ultimately at entrancement, as we encounter not an old adversary, but an unknown quantity – human and animal test the waters, learning to shape the colliding spheres of their existence. His poem traces a route from ‘what we are not’, into the possibility of ‘what we can be’: one entire ‘republic of life’, gesturing at the potential to live, nourish, and benefit each other within the edgelands’ interface.

*

Out now into the edgelands again, breathing the thick air of a windless night. 

The tall fences at the canal came down two years ago, revealing a beauty I hadn’t anticipated. The widened maw of the canal was lined with decorative tiers of granite, over which creepers fell in spilling drapes. Rains periodically transform the storm-drain into a cascading weir, sending cattle egret thronging the deep channels where the tilapia once again surge. I think of how entirely possible it is that Wong’s otters might have scampered through here from the city’s estuaries. Following the canal’s mini-deltas of mud and grass, they would have caterwauled straight into the lizard country of the Pandan river, where an eagle-eyed Pang watched them posturing against the waterway’s monitors. 

This small pocket of home almost struggles to hold so much life, out of what I once thought dead. The empathy which enables us to grieve the ruin of our edgelands also informs the way we imagine them. Learning to see the edgelands fires this imagination to resurrection; at times observing ways of life uniting, as Wong does, envisioning life-forms shapeshifting with ours at others. Wong’s poem falls just short of the way that Cowen inhabits the deer’s skin, but Pang’s work is ecstatic with such hybrid confluences. ‘Raptorial’ birders peer through sharp-focused lenses, acquiring the vision of the creatures they watch – reminiscent of John Alec Baker, striving to surrender his ‘human shape’ to the ‘deep fovea’ of the peregrine falcons he obsessed over in The Peregrine (1967), or Jefferies’ anglers in the Sussex canals growing ‘silent and motionless’, ‘grave as [the] herons’ they fished beside. Each edgeland works the sightlines of its inhabitants towards and together with each other.

Swallowed in the treeline shadows hemming the edgelands, I experience this melding in my own mind.  My imagination turns itself wild in the strange darkness of a night that will not reveal itself to me. It conjures ghosts of long-gone things: straggly, gaunt deer stalking back into bamboo groves, tigers prone in the Lalang, thin-ribbed and hungry…running out past the lights of the houses, I feel provoked into vigour by the edgeland’s eerie veil. I imagine my human gait tumbling into something animal – a mousedeer’s, bringing my knees high and vaulting the uneven soil; a leopard cat’s, sprinting the slopes hard. Part of me wants to catch the thought in its childlike silliness, but I can’t bring myself to. The edgelands and their phantoms have dreamed themselves too fiercely into my head. All alone in the dark, exhilarated, I whoop for joy as lightning starts to feather the far edge of the night. 

In their amorphous porosity, where ecologies press up against and into each other, the fringe becomes itself a literary form. Pang’s work exceeds verse and syntax convention, where overheard sounds meet with invented hybrid-land lexis in a prose-and-poem elision. Cowen’s novel sheds singular agency, inhabiting insectoid, animal, and human consciousnesses. The edgelands are experienced as affect, too: reading their literature and art, resetting our bodies as we return to its landscape, the land scapes itself into us. Sensitive to its intense, co-existing lives, we become as the edgeland itself, a nexus of colliding perspectives. Re-mantling how we see, experience, and imagine this space, the edgelands teach us to feel – and feel for – them. Celebrating this terrain in all of its complication and threat, we find ourselves a part of its composition, personally grounded in its fate. 

I crest the top of a knoll onto an open field. The apartment lights around me buzz the lay of the night into a neon humming darkness. Turning for home, hackles raised against the charge of a coming rainstorm, the sharp echo of the nightjars follows me. 

Blessed be the light upon the tiny dark plains. 

V. SACRALISATION >