Watching the water flow past a bend in the river. The same place, the same time of day, every week for 52 weeks. A year in the life.
Week 1
Finish at noon and walk to the river, tired from my work and a night of elusive sleep, but gripped by the excitement of a new project, that heady initial surge of enthusiasm and ideas. The day is cold and damp but defiantly bright. The river is bloated, its flow relentless, while on its surface sunlight dances and shadows play. Brendan, Ciara and Dennis: an alphabet of storms have passed this way, bringing down the sky and leaving their watery mark upon the land.
A river passing through a landscape catches the world and gives it back redoubled: a shifting, glinting world more mysterious than the one we customarily inhabit. Rivers run through our civilisations like strings through beads.
Olivia Laing – To the River: A Journey Beneath the Surface
Have you also learned that secret from the river; that there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of the future.
Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha
Thank you Wendy, that’s beautiful. It’s actually one of the quotes I had in mind to use in a subsequent week!
An interesting project – I’ve been taking photographs of the confluence of two S London rivers for 3 or 4 years when I pass in daylight – the changes in season, flows, weather, light and sounds are fascinating. I’ll convert into a blog post at some stage, although part of me doesn’t want to as it is in part drawing a line on a project as happened with my ‘A View From The Point’ https://runner500.wordpress.com/2017/02/01/a-view-from-the-point/
Thank you Paul. I love the way you use your blog to mark out and record your particular territory.