Feet crunch upon an ochre’y path. Sandstone peppered with dense nuggets of grit. Leaves like falling fires. Martyrs to life’s cause. Greens dilute into vermillion, nectarine, peach & cadmium. A blazing display before their earthen descent. Birch & Oak & Beech & Whitebeam. Holly. Sycamore. Hazel’s silvery spine glimmering through an opening amongst it’s cousins. Branches arch over us. Cocoon us. Into the rabbit warren. Into a place where folk have sought sanctuary, where folk have prayed & gossiped & rebelled. Into a place where legends sought hiding. Where root & rock are pregnant with secrets. Air laden with stories. The Luddites. Robin Hood. Sir Gawain. Imagine what these woods have witnessed. Imagine what they’ve heard.
From the path all that can be seen is the rolling hill of the woodland carpet. Deepest of deep green. Fern. Sienna, umber, molasses, moss. Trees dendritic against a cerulean sky. Cut right. Up the cragg. Right again. Slide through the thighs of Millstone Grit, petrichor & iron filling the nose. Descend now. Carefully. Slowly. Temperature drops. Into the realm of rock. Into deep time. A time beneath the woodland floor.
On either side is a towering giant - thrumming, uhmmming with the vibration of a chasm torn into the earth. Bands of red slash against a body the colour of pewter & steel. A palette of green climbs the landscape. All olive, lime, emerald & chartreuse. Pennywort & elf cup nestle into the suckling. Polytrichum commune constellates the nooks & crannies - tiny universes for an eye willing to see.
Champagne light. All hazy & bubbles, veil like, washing over & between the fronds of the ferns, the deep pewter of the rock. Like a waterfall. Like a waterfall made of golden light. This is a breathless place. A place so beautiful I want to hold my breath. Surreal in it’s display. Baffling, that I am alive & this is the planet I live on. Baffling that I am alive & this is the planet I get to call home. Luds Church oozes the quality of a time before this time. Beauty shears through the sticky headiness of now. Drags the body deep into stillness. Into the green chapel of clearness. Reverence. I want to taste it. smell it. touch it. Rub my bare breasts upon it. I want to breathe this place deep into my lungs so a piece of her is in me. Stoppered in a brown glass bottle for a time when beauty is in short supply.
We are not alone. Sickly sweet perfume wrestles the moss. Phones attached to selfie poles point upward towards the light. A brigade of folks flock together, lips plumped to popping, bodies wrapped in Lycra, bellies bare against the beauty of Luds Church. Pugs are fucked. Grunting. Choking. A couple pose - orchestrating the selfie to capture the best of the light. They clamber up and down the rocks, arms stretched outwards, heads tilted to the left, smiles brittle, forced. Snap. Snap. Snap. Folks walk through. Glade through. Irreverent. Chortling & laughing. Not once stopping. Not once touching. Not once taking a moment to acknowledge her, to be still.
I do not care for judgement. I am not illuminating the latter to mock or belittle. I’m not illuminating the latter to draw comparison between the right way & wrong way to behave in a place of beauty. I’m illuminating the latter because what I’m curious about is reverence. The collective relationship to reverence.
There was a time in my life, where I could’ve walked through a place as beautiful as Luds Church & dismissed it. A time when the only way I really knew how to engage with the beauty of a place was through the avoidance of my own discomfort at being there. Yes. There was a time in my life when I felt uncomfortable to be in beautiful places. A time when I felt places like these were not for me to enjoy. An ancient legacy of oppression passed through the intergenerational line. There was a time in my life when I would’ve rather have gone to Meadowhall than the Moor. Would’ve preferred Primark to the rolling swathes of purple heather. I’ve wrote many essays about this. About the undercurrent of history & violence - the conditioning of the body within place, within space & how these cultural grooves inevitably encourage folks to continue reproducing the tropes of violent histories.
I can only speak to my own experience & for me, for a time, cultural reproduction took the form of a young woman plastered in make-up more bothered about booze & boys than moors & woods. It’s easy to point the finger & say yes, it’s those folks over there with their pugs & Lycra who are the problem. It’s easy to point the finger & find all manner of aversions in the behaviours of those who are ‘ruining’ our special time.
Systemic degrading of reverence is not & cannot be found solely in the actions of a few individuals. The behaviours of individuals are in relationship with emotions, emotions in relationship to histories, histories in relation to collective behaviour, collective behaviours in relation to a stimulus, an epistemology, an ontology - that has it’s roots not just in our own bodies but our genealogies. Mocking people reduces this web of interrelation. It reduces what is possible to see. Mocking people merely fuses the perceiver back into the cultural loop; judging who should & shouldn’t be in a space is a manifestation of desire is it not - a desire to control space - a desire to control people & behaviour. A desire to keep places for a select enlightened few. Judging eliminates possibility. It invokes symbolic violence.
Besides, I’m prone to feeling the tragedy these days. The tragedy of the spectacle; a people displaced. Because it is tragic - that we find ourselves in a time-place where taking selfies takes priority over the gift of champagne light. There’s something eerily poignant about this predicament. Poetic even. And in that, there is a sort of reverence I suppose. So close is reverence to terror & awe. So close is tragedy to this sense of powerlessness & smallness - a cowering in the face of an unholy mess. A feeling which inhabits both the rock & the quality of irreverence the passing crowds display. Two dialectical phenomena, umbilically linked, placed side by side simultaneously. Both contexts speaking in different tongues. Irreverence & reverence. Two giants, two brothers squabbling for land.
We clambered up & out of the belly. Read a poem to the rocks. Gave an offering of thanks to the place. An acknowledgement & an appreciation of the beauty we’d seen there. As we continued on the sandstone trail, we found litter discarded in the trees, plastic wrap & bottles shoved between branches like distorted clooties.
What if? I think. What if? The irreverence has more to do with loss than choice. What if people are doing the best with what they’ve got - ontologies limiting the parameter of what place can be, limiting the parameters of how they can see themselves within this place, how they can relate to it. What if selfie taking was a thwarted display of reverence, an attempt to capture as a means to appreciate. What if taking selfies in a chasm bathed in champagne light is a cultural adaptation for reverence? What if the ways in which we demonstrate reverence are shifting - transforming - assimilating into something more cyborg - more plastic - more machine. What if there is more nuance, more colour between the lines of this preconceived binary. What if people want to do better but they don’t know how? What if the bottles & wrappers stuck in the tree were a reproduction of a displaced memory - an aching for the holy - a signifier that suggests somewhere the body remembers.