Heavy Time

SONIA OVERALL

Sonia Overall is a writer, psychogeographer and writing tutor living in East Kent. Her published work includes novels, poetry, short stories, academic articles and features, many of which touch on psychogeography, spirit of place and aspects of the weird. Sonia is a member of the Walking Artists Network and founder and curator of Women Who Walk, a network for walking academics and creatives. She is currently a Senior Lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University, where she runs the MA in Creative Writing.

OLIVER BARRETT (ILLUSTRATOR)

Oliver Barrett is a musician and illustrator based in Somerset. He releases music under his own name, Petrels, Sun Do Silver, Glottalstop, Sphagnum Moss, and many more besides. His first, self-illustrated book, The Nuckelavee, was published by Tartaruga Press in 2015. You can see more of his work at floatinglimb.com

ALSO BY SONIA OVERALL

FICTION

The Realm of Shells (Fourth Estate, 2006 / HarperPerennial, 2007)

A Likeness (Fourth Estate, 2004 / HarperPerennial, 2005)

POETRY

The Art of Walking (Shearsman Books, 2015)

NON-FICTION

walk write (repeat) (Triarchy Press, 2021)

PUBLISHED BY PENNED IN THE MARGINS

Toynbee Studios, 28 Commercial Street, London E1 6AB

www.pennedinthemargins.co.uk

All rights reserved

© Sonia Overall 2021

The right of Sonia Overall to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Penned in the Margins.

First published in 2021

Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International

ISBN

978-1-908058-83-6

ePub ISBN

978-1-913850-01-2

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

In fond memory of Christopher Cherry: tutor, mentor and friend.

Heavy

Time

The Call

trinities

ridge   furrow   desire line

ditch   dyke   holy well

leaf   stock   root strike

SOME MORNINGS, YOU STAND IN the shower for as long as you can, savouring the momentary space it gives you. After that, the erosion begins, wiping away all creative thought: the demands and refusals of a child; the clamouring of social media; the screaming headlines of billboards; the slow ratchet of traffic and public transport as you slidewalk to work; the petulant ping of another email skating into your inbox. Then home, the tension of your bow another notch tighter: clothes to wash, meals to cook, errands to run – a multitude of small tasks undone by the hands of others. Reverse the routine: unpeel, reset. Repeat. Your imaginative life is, as Adrienne Rich wrote, ‘thought sleeping…certified dead’.

Then an idea comes to you. It comes suddenly, a rare flash in a rarer moment of solitude. You are in the bath. You picture yourself stepping out onto a path like The Fool in the tarot, a bundle on a stick, tripping lightly. You imagine shedding responsibility, stepping off the treadmill, wandering the lanes. But not an idle wandering: this has meaning. It is the recovering of sanity and sanctity. You want to remember what it feels like to have the freedom of ideas, to follow your interests, to scrutinise encounters. To stop the endless chatter and absent yourself from the secular spectacle. You picture yourself on a pilgrimage.

Pilgrimage, according to Pope Benedict XVI, is the stepping away from oneself in order to encounter God. There is something in that. You do not expect to find God; you are an agnostic with animist tendencies. But you do want to find thin places: pockets in the landscape where the membrane is so tightly stretched that other worlds might shine through. You want to see the holy in the everyday – in hedgerows, in the shredded ectoplasm of plastic bags clinging to chain-link fences, in a field of sugar beet.

You might find it if you walk the old pilgrim ways, if you put your feet on the same paths and seek your version of the sacred. You remember a small town near the coast: you were fourteen, fifteen maybe. Little Walsingham. It had a souvenir shop and a shrine, candles and bookmarks and a tearoom. But it also had something else: a stillness like snow, a reverence. You’ve never forgotten standing in its hushed, narrow streets and feeling your body hum like a plucked string, vibrating from an unseen force. Later, reading about the shrine and the priory, the footfalls of visitors over the centuries, you wondered if it was the press of the past that struck you, the longing of all those people. You regard reliquaries as artefacts – the interest comes in the investment of others. What do you invest in? Place. Walking. Process.

Once upon a time there was a little girl who lived in a place that was very flat. The land stretched out and rolled towards the horizon. The skies were huge. The soil was black.

A river ran through the town where the girl lived. There were ducks and swans on the river, and long, low boats that came and went. Some of these boats were floating houses with gardens on the roofs, flowers in pots and brightly-painted enamel jugs that shone in the sunlight from those big, open skies.

The river called to the girl. She knew that it ran from the town to other places. The water had to start and end somewhere, because it was always moving, even when it seemed still. The girl longed to follow this river; to discover the secret places where it ran; to see its banks and the fields that lay either side; to see how it broke those banks when it grew too large and became greedy, spreading itself out over the black soil and swallowing up the roots of trees.

As she grew up, the girl longed to explore alone beyond the town. She longed to follow that river and wished herself into those black fields, where she might look back at the town and see its towers and the lights in the houses glowing like lanterns in the darkness.

One night, the girl lay awake in her bed. Her brother was asleep. Her parents were asleep. But she could not rest. Something stirred in her that would not be quiet. She sat up in bed and looked at the curtains drawn across the window. She could hear the sounds of the night from behind those curtains: the cry of a creature somewhere in the blackness, the hum of the vast skies. She drew back a curtain and looked into the navy-dark garden below. After a while the shapes of the garden began to form. She could see the trees and the swing, the chicken coop and the tool shed. She wanted to be out there. She wanted to smell the black earth and the apple tree as its leaves breathed into the cool night air. She wanted to feel the damp of the ground climbing, the dew settling around her feet.

She got out of bed, put on her coat and shoes and tiptoed through the house. She opened the garden door. The air was cool and the night called her. The sky was huge and splashed with stars. The moon winked at her from its place above the far fence.

Don’t tell, she said to the moon.

Never, the moon replied. This is our secret. Come and see.

So the girl crossed the damp grass to the back fence. She opened the gate and went out towards the moon. The moon nodded in the sky, so she followed it, walking between the quiet houses, past the empty playground, through the streets, into the horizon.

The girl walked until she grew cold and tired and wanted her bed again. She thanked the moon for showing her its secret night-time town and the way that the houses and paths and the long, low horizon all seemed so different.

The girl lay down and went to sleep. In the morning she looked out of her window again and all was back to normal. The only changes were the line in the damp grass where she had walked to and from the gate, and the hem of her nightdress still touched with dew. Nobody else had noticed.

The girl and the moon kept their promise. But the girl’s night walk told her something that she had always suspected: she was restless. The horizon and the sky and the river and the fields would keep on calling, and sometimes she would answer them, and leave.

When you grow up in the flatlands, the horizon is always in sight. The edge of the landscape calls to you. Challenges you. Look out of a first-storey window and you can see for miles. Vast black fields of fen soil, edged with the stocky lacework of hedgerows. Dykes and ditches that hold back rising floodwater with their strong-armed banks. Railway sidings and towpaths. Squat church towers nudging the skyline. If you’re lucky, a village green, where the genius loci of a yellow-eyed billy goat is tethered to a post.

There is always something out there. Over there. You can almost see it, but it will take you hours to get there. The fen horizon is peripheral, perpetual; the sky is enormous. Walk towards the edge and watch the rotoscope turn. You can lose yourself, but it’s hard to get lost. With so much lined up along the edges – farm buildings like ornaments on a shelf – there is always something to steer towards.

Pilgrimage has distinct stages. Like weathered stone or a passage worn by many feet, this form of walking has been shaped and smoothed through time and use. Labels differ according to faith and creed, but the structure is universal.

First, the call: a yearning, a summoning, the catalyst for pilgrimage. Then the stage of preparation: extricating the self from everyday life, making arrangements, seeking permissions. Next, the journey itself, taking in solitude or companionship on the way. At some point on the journey, the pilgrim is immersed in the landscape: no longer a mere observer, they reach a stage of absorption and spiritual contemplation. Arrival is the stage of culmination, the achievement, marked by the ritual of a shrine visit, the lighting of a candle, a chosen intervention. The journey back must follow if the pilgrimage is to be a distinct experience, rather than just part of a greater wandering. Finally there is reintegration, returning to the former life. The result is, ideally, peace, humility and clarity; the healing of ills, the descending of grace, the world seen with fresh eyes.

You have heard the call. You know what you need to do: you are going to walk to Walsingham.

The medieval pilgrim travelled in search of the sacred, but to journey forth was also a symbolic setting-apart of the conventional self, stepping away from the responsibilities and restrictions of the ordinary. I too want to unwind the spool, to disentangle myself from the everyday, to find space and clarity and maybe – maybe – a little chink of faith.

I am not a long-distance walker. I have never climbed a mountain or trekked across a moor. But I’m sturdy, and stubborn, and relentlessly curious about place. My creative life is bound up with walking: walking-writing, psychogeography, the layered sensory experiences of moving through, and dwelling in, different spaces. I walk and write, carrying a notebook, sniffing out settings and stories. I walk to understand characters in fiction, my own and others; to become a character, seeing and reimagining the world and moving through it, one foot in the real and one foot in the fictional, balancing between them or tipping over. I write walking poems, lines created by ambulant observation, the rhythms and shifts of pedestrian movement. I walk streets and country lanes and footpaths, trackways and barrows and standing stones, edgelands and margins and unloved in-betweens, out-of-season resorts and derelict pleasure gardens.

Unlike a medieval pilgrim, I’m not looking for miracles. I am looking for the everyday divine, the gods of hedgerows and laybys. I am on the psychogeographical scent, a hunter of spirits of place. Psychogeography is the study of how place makes us feel and act. It’s a loaded term, roots deep in Situationist theory and resistance against consumerism, a rejection of urban monotony and private land ownership. Psychogeography is bound up with the dérive or drift, a practice that encourages the walker to push back against expected ways of moving through public space, following curiosity rather than signage. It’s a form of re-enchantment as well as resistance, a playful response to feeling for the unseen signals of place. So far, so good. But as numerous detractors have pointed out, psychogeography is a predominantly white, working class, male affair. It is often seen as an extension of the idle wanderings of the flâneur, a figure that first features in the literature of Edgar Allan Poe, Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Observing, strolling, judging: not walking as necessity or expediency, but as an expression of heteropatriarchal privilege. Psychogeography, it would seem, is something men do.

But it isn’t. I do it. I know lots of women who do it. And I claim the term for myself: I am a psychogeographer. Why? Because ‘psychogeography’ does exactly what it says on the tin, intersecting mind and place. Because although I often walk to get from A to B, and do not drive, and although walking for its own sake is a rarity that I must snatch between daily demands and responsibilities, I can still drift, and wander, and resist with my feet if I want to.

At least, I do when I get the chance.

A psychogeographical drift is a time out, a walk that resists notions of busyness or productivity. So does pilgrimage. Both are ways of walking that explore our sense of self: challenging habits, being with our thoughts, rejecting materialism. Both practices seek to connect the walker with the environment in meaningful ways. I want to see if I can bring these methods of walking together. I want to carve out the time to walk to places that are meaningful to me, and to drift a little along the way, embracing serendipity. As a psychogeographer, I want to tune into how the places I encounter affect me, physically and emotionally. As a pilgrim, I hope this tuning-in will lead to a state of immersion and, ultimately, a meaningful arrival. Whatever happens, the journey will give me the time