Edgeland Visible (VI)

VI. Answering the Edgelands

Written by Leonard Yip
Dated 1 Jul 2024

Freshly splintered from the storm clouds, the light today has turned the edgelands luminous. 

I’m taking in the edgelands today with the volatile focus of Chia and Jefferies, watching things shimmer in their becoming. Across the canal, Yellow Flame trees tower over the grasses, gatekeepers to the rainforest beyond. In their season, countless yellow petals burnish the air like solid falling light. Craning my neck to take in their fullness, I’m struck by a sudden sense of reverse vertigo, the feeling of falling upwards into a kingdom of leaf and cloud. 

Nan Shepherd, writing of her Cairngorms, says that ‘the thing to be known grows with the knowing’, and I have found this to be true also of these small ways and storm-drains. For all I have read and thought about the edgelands, they hold mysteries yet to be unlocked. There remain histories still layered into the soil and yet to be learnt, and the names of a dozen more things elude me. Where the forest edge spills into concrete verge, a girl leaps and clings onto the hanging, aerial roots of a tree like a rope. I have no words for its name. Half-remembered alphabets ghost into my mind – ficus? There is a vague recollection of first fascinations; passing trees as a child on runs with my mother, and her telling me their names. Years later now, I can’t be sure. 

Watching the girl swing from her root, I think of my parents who set me loose into the edgelands. I would want my own children to come to know these fringes, too. Yet a present anxiety of loss always looms unshakeably over my hopes for the future. To Sellars’ belief that the edgelands are where the future waits to happen, warns Macfarlane’s assessment that ‘the edgelands are where the future is already underway’. On each return, I find reminders that my edgeland will not always stay the way it is. Soil-measuring machines have positioned themselves over the plain by the canal, auguring the ground’s eventual repurposing into land for housing. Macfarlane’s words stay in my head, reminding me that the Anthropocene’s great changes are immediate concerns, rather than passive hibernations. I dream of my children’s future in this land at the same time I am confronted with signs of its changing.

New edgelands will be created, and other edgelands lost. Thus they embody, and are at the mercy of, the modern day’s knife-edge. Perennially threatened, they are terrains inhabiting different time-zones: bringing us close to the memories and meanings of the past, promising futures yet to happen, always awaiting desolation. The urgent, will-have-been tense of the Anthropocene inflects them, the way that it wonders over what will be made of this present age by future generations looking backwards. The question must be asked to those of us who live with and within the edgelands: how can we act as responsible ancestors to these generations? How can we be good parents of the children to whom we will leave such lands? Such questions lie at the heart of already-ongoing decisions to be made about these places, arising faster than we can theorise them. Letters sent to newspapers debate the fate of burgeoning otter populations. Policy-makers decide that, for cost savings, a new underground subway line should tunnel beneath Singapore’s last primary forests, threatening miles of subterranean mycorrhizal root networks and the habitats of the animals above them. 

These questions of responsible ancestry also animate the desperation behind Amitav Ghosh’s call for literature reflecting the Anthropocene’s alterations. Imagining future inhabitants of a transfigured world, looking back to the art of our epoch, ‘will they not look [urgently] for traces and portents of the altered world of their inheritance?’ Ghosh asks. ‘And when they fail to find them, what should they – what can they – do other than to conclude that ours was a time when most forms of art and literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight?’ Ghosh argues that our legacy will hinge on how our current forms of cultural activity might have been blind to the Anthropocene’s changes, and the braided sympoiesis of my essay has thus been an attempt to make visible these occlusions. I have tried to explore the edgeland cycles of devastation, celebration and sacralisation, from deep within the fields of immediate experience rather than the comfort of objective distance. In attempting to better register the Anthropocene’s urgent griefs and joys through this hybrid form, I think also of the world I want to leave to my children. I imagine them learning how to mourn, as Leong, Ho, and Lim have done; growing the dynamic sight of Macfarlane and Chia’s eyes, sensing a world sprung to entangled life like Pang and Cowen, and sharpening their ears like Maniam, hearing the language of praise belonging to each and every brilliant, created thing.

For future generations’ sake, we must learn to read the edgelands through the diaries, photographs, poems and histories sensitive to its changing. This collective noun, ‘we’, is both locally-specific and globally-reaching. Though this essay is concerned with Singaporean particularities, the Anthropocene and the edgelands it creates engulf us all. To make meaningful decisions impacting the lives of our children, we must grow literate in the edgelands’ languages of grief and hope, becoming archivists, celebrants, and harbingers – singing the dirges of our devastated landscapes, warning of future losses, hoping and fighting for future possibilities. We must become good ancestors of those who will inherit these edgelands, ‘where living is tasked, tried on, ticked off. Takes place’.

*

Coming home, I tell mum that I’ve been out in the edgelands. 

‘Did you fall off?’ she asks jokingly. I pause in my steps, remembering my upwards descent into the Yellow Flames, engulfed again by the edgeland. In some way, I suppose, I did. I ask her if she remembers the names of the trees I used to point out on our runs – the ones with their long, roping filaments, spilling through the air until they find the ground of their rooting. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Those are ficus trees’. I smile.

I head for the shower as the sun starts to set. Beyond the kindling clouds, the edgelands will be firing into new rhythms. The chorus of a thousand toads and crickets froths the heavy air like a kettle coming to boil. Nocturnal things bead the dark with fresh, open eyes, even as other lives come to slow and rest. I close my own eyes and let cold water rush over me. Somewhere, a sparrowhawk comes to roost, deep amidst the Albizias and the Green Corridor’s sleepless ghosts, and two heartbeats settle finally into one gentle rhythm. 

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