Immersed by David Cooper

Eventually I am overwhelmed. I cannot grasp this place. Everywhere I see not arcs of a circle but curves without a centre. And I cannot measure this place: as I look out west, I cannot tell the difference between sand, surface water, deep sea, sky.  [1]

***

Place writing is various. To scan the shelves of a bookshop in Britain and Ireland is to encounter texts documenting and reimagining a diverse range of landscapes and locations. Then, on opening such books, the reader finds contemporary place writers drawing upon a variety of literary tropes in situating their practices in – or against – a variety of literary traditions. In spite of this variousness, however, threaded through all of this writing seems to be a preoccupation with immersion. Place writers privilege verticality over horizontality, depth over breadth, to record and reflect on emplaced experience. Place writers absorb themselves, corporeally and imaginatively, in the textural materialities of their chosen sites. Acts of immersion, then, are instrumental to the palimpsestic thickness of the writing of place.

A process of immersion is similarly integral to the experience of reading place writing. Place writers can transport readers to locations – from a garden in Aberdeen to a car park in Newport – that, in all probability, they’re never going to experience for themselves. If the writing of place is predicated – at least in part - on a multisensory openness to geographical experience, then the reading of place writing pivots on an openness to someone else’s textual account of such experience. As the reader digs deeper into a work of place writing, they become increasingly immersed in the author’s textual articulation of embodied immersion; they become absorbed by the author’s own absorption. The reader of place writing, therefore, undergoes a dual immersion as they are occupied by both the practice of reading and the geographical content of the text. Their immersion is both real and vicarious.

In the practice of everyday life, immersion is a term that’s generally used to describe an absorption in something. The practice of place writing, then, can be understood to be an attempt to get a purchase on the world of geographical matter. Of course, though, the word ‘immersion’ can also refer to the act of being plunged and submerged in water . . .

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Immersion (I):

[ . . . ] immersion in water offers a ‘lulling’ rocking motion. Immersion or flotation produces a state of ‘weightlessness’ defying the gravity of normal life. [2]

***

According to the literary geographer, Sheila Hones, literature can be understood to be ‘a spatial event’. As Hones explains: ‘As reader and writer, you and I, we are currently sharing a moment of text-based spatial interaction, a geographical event.’ [3] Hones then goes on to map out the different geographies of the literary process, inevitably considering both the how and the where of reading: ‘Writing and reading technologies are part of it, too, not to mention lighting, heating, the view from our windows, and ambient sound: my chair, your desk, and our bodies.’ [4] In summary, Hones invites us to consider the contexts and atmospheres in and around which the geographically situated act of reading unfolds.

For just over seven years, my reading life happened on the morning commute. As a result, my memories of particular place writing texts are inextricably associated with recollections of the landscapes of north-west England. I remember breaking off from Elizabeth-Jane Burnett’s The Grassling to try to spot the progress of an extension on a village hall on the outskirts of our home-town of Lancaster. I remember being moved by Amy Liptrot’s account of surveying corncrakes on Papay and looking up to spot a heron on the banks of the Ribble in Preston. I remember becoming lost in Tim Robinson’s literary cartographies whilst keeping an eye out for the house that has always marked, in my mind at least, the absolute outer edge of the city of Manchester. As the Transpennine Express trains rocked their way towards Piccadilly, the movement between work and home offered a temporary suspension of things; the commute provided the chance to become immersed, if only for a while, in yet-to-be visited rural topographies in Devon and Orkney and the Connemara.

Standing up on the journeys home, I longed for the ambient soundtrack to be something other than yet another ‘See It. Say It. Sorted’. Each evening, I fantasised about shattering the glass that framed the Lancashire landscape and imagined stepping out of the carriage and into the world of weather and feeling.

***

Immersion (II):

Human subjects of experimental immersions have demonstrated measurable physiological effects which include the lowering of pulse rates and changes in EEG. Moods following short immersions were reported as ‘energetic’ and ‘buoyant’, and with longer immersions people reported visual and auditory hallucinations, suggesting stimulation to the imaginative centres of the brain. [5]

***

For many – for far too many – 2020 was a year of immeasurable trauma. For others, the first national lockdown afforded an opportunity for immersion in the hyperlocal. Looking back, I was lucky. Instead of spending over two hours each day on trains, I was able to stay put and become absorbed in the usually overlooked particularities of the near-at-hand. The spring lockdown also meant home schooling and, in between extended paddling pool sessions, we enthusiastically did our best to learn the names of the flowers and plants in our back garden. The highlight of the daily routine was an excursion to what became known as the-little-wood-around-the-back: an irreplaceable pocket of green, sandwiched between our road and the mainline, that – miraculously - has managed to escape the attention of developers. During those first weeks, every day we walked, up and down, up and down, up and down, the same narrow path through Dorrington Road wood. We installed an app to identify the fungi that we spotted. We did what so many other people did. We endeavoured to root ourselves in our local habitation by embracing the knowable world of things and names and facts and sensations. Over the years of commuting, I’d read countless literary accounts of lives spent going over the same ground; and, now – through the horror of a pandemic - I was able to forget the names of the commuter stations between Preston and Bolton and to experience, for myself, the pleasures of geographical circumscription. There was so much to see and to hear and to smell and to touch and to taste.

As the days turned into weeks, we found ourselves dreaming in the edgeland wood. We took it in turns to describe the kinds of home – from my lazy cliché of a Thoreauvian cabin to our son’s vision of a gaming pleasure dome made of glass - that, one day, we’d build among the trees. We paused to listen and invented tales of outlaws and ghosts triggered by the soundscape of the wood. We went looking for the fairies that we were sure were hiding down towards the Scout hut. Our sylvan space was a world of play and shadows.  

By the start of May, the local volunteers had introduced home-made signs mapping out a new one-way system through the trees.

***

Immersion (III):

Baptismal water [ . . . ] retains its meaning as the medium which provides the loss and dissolution and the rebirth of the self. It is seen to “liberate” people from their old life and identity, and the sins (and mortality) of the flesh. [6]

***

During the spring lockdown, reading time was at a premium. At first, I got up early and managed to read a little before the children woke up and the first lesson began. Pretty soon, though, that hour of hush was needed to maintain the illusion of keeping on top of work. Later on in the day, reading was a necessarily clandestine act. M. and I had an unofficial rota for escaping upstairs for half an hour or so at the end of the school schedule. We also took turns to spend time in our car that had been left, deliberately, at the end of the road. We couldn’t, and didn’t, go anywhere; but, during the spring of 2020, our old VW served as a not-so-mobile library.

Saliently, as well as the when and the where, the what of reading changed during that first lockdown: the spatial focus constricted as I obsessively focused on books about our part of north Lancashire. I started with our little city of Lancaster. I then became obsessed with writing about Morecambe Bay: the intertidal expanse of mudflats and sand that we can make out, just about, from the back bedroom. I returned to passages of place writing by Karen Lloyd and Norman Nicholson. I revisited sections of novels by Jenn Ashworth, Sarah Hall, and Andrew Michael Hurley. Moreover, I discovered new texts: poems and blogs and fragments of guide books and plays. I became immersed in the pleasures of what Bertrand Westphal has described as ‘a geocentred approach’ to literature. [7] Then, at the end of the day, when the insufficiently exhausted children finally dropped off to sleep, we caught up with The Bay on TV.

For the eighteenth-century cultural tourist, the channels and gullies of Morecambe Bay offered a thrillingly treacherous route towards the fells and waters of the southern Lake District. In many textual accounts, the passage across this ambiguous space is described in explicitly or implicitly Christian terms: the journey through water leading to a quasi-resurrection when the traveller reached ‘the Hyperborean elsewhere’ on the other side. [8]

Imaginatively, I was endeavouring to immerse myself in the Bay; but, unlike those first tourists, I wasn’t moving anywhere.

***

Immersion (IV):

In discussing immersion in water, people tended to use terminology commonly used to describe other sensual experiences – ‘pleasure’, ‘fun’, ‘exciting’, ‘relaxing’, ‘you feel really good’ – underlying a reality that water can provide sensual as well as sensory experiences. [9]  

***

Perhaps it was due to its manageable length; but, as spring moved into summer, there was one particular book that I managed to read from cover to cover. A few years ago, I picked up a copy of I Know Where I’m Going: A Guide to Morecambe and Heysham, by Michael Bracewell and Linder, in the Maritime Museum in town. As I remained stuck in suburban Lancaster, the book provided the promise of movement as the ‘guide pursues a selective route, following the coastline from Sunderland Point to the south, through Heysham Village and Morecambe itself, around the coastal road to the northern shores of Morecambe Bay and Silverdale.’ [10] I Know Where I’m Going also reminded me of the things that were still out there in this terrain: from the rough rock-cut graves at Heysham to the Art Deco geometry of the Midland Hotel; from the oystercatchers on the saltmarshes to the sea of flowers on the headlands. Whether it be documenting ‘the late summer smell of woodsmoke’ at Sunderland or recalling ‘the seaside glamour’ of dances in the holiday camp at Middleton, Bracewell and Linder’s marriage of text and archival images created – for me, at home - images of bodies enjoying the sensing of place around the Bay. [11]

I Know Where I’m Going, though, is also a book in which a materialist understanding of place is destabilised and dissolved as the area around Morecambe Bay is framed as a liquid landscape. It’s a process that begins, at the start of the text, with Forton motorway service station. For the driver travelling north, the ‘small, architectural drama’ of its coming-into-view signifies that ‘you are entering a region which is both a minor chord and a major; an edge and a destination’. Yet, on first spotting the service station, the footbridge across the motorway appears ‘almost to float above the crest of an incline’. [12] The sense of the physical world dissolving before our eyes emerges as a leitmotif running through the guide. The authors suggest that the residents of Sunderland Point seem ‘to exist within some rust-gold enchantment’ as, ‘cut off twice daily, land and sea are caught in tidal tension’. [13] A little to the north, at Sandylands, Bracewell and Linder come across the late-Victorian splendour of the Grosvenor Hotel: ‘We found it, locked and empty, a few years after the last guest had left’. [14] The authors illustrate how their immersion in this particular littoral has led to an obsession with the sense of things slipping away . . .  

At the same time, the Bay is presented through earlier cultural representations of place and the haze of nostalgic recollection. Taking its title from a 1945 film by Powell and Pressburger, I Know Where I’m Going, over its seventy pages, names a litany of writers and artists and performers associated with the area: from Turner to Thora Hird via Erics Ravilious, Gill, and Morecambe. Alongside this, the book’s archival images include a black-and-white photograph of George Formby outside Morecambe’s Winter Gardens and a brilliantly colourful plan of Heysham Head Holiday Park from 1975. It is a sense of pastness that’s reinforced by Bracewell’s autobiographical reflections of childhood holidays by the sea: ‘Almost before I had memories, I had memories of sun-filled bedrooms in small hotels. How the window sills turned the colour of vanilla ice-cream as the long afternoons passed by.’ [15] As I immersed myself in the text, the Morecambe Bay presented by Bracewell and Linder resembled a dreamscape; a place of liquidity as well as materiality.

I Know Where I’m Going ends in the limestone terrain of Silverdale in the far north of north Lancashire and with a turning away from land to look out into the expanse of the Bay: ‘At sunset, light thickens. Wader sea-birds maintain their cacophony.’ [16] The book closes on the elegiac note that has been evident for much of the text; there is a sense of things – land, day, text - coming to an end. Reading the book for the first time last summer, though, I resisted this closure. I went back to the beginning of the guide and read it again. And again, I embarked upon the imagined journey along the Lancashire coast. With each reading, I felt that I was deepening my obsession with this text as well as my knowledge and understanding of the Bay. With each reading, I felt that this place was becoming increasingly liquescent.

***

Immersion (V):

Water’s potential to give sensory enjoyment, and to provide a feeling of ‘oneness’ with the elements, is clearly important. However, as in its other qualities, there is always the potential for the opposite, and some people’s experiences of immersion are far from pleasurable. [17]

***

Over the past few months, time has opened up a bit as the children have returned to school. Reading, then, has ceased to be a surreptitious act and I’ve even enjoyed the luxury of reading in the kitchen and the living-room. There’s been a change in the what as well as the where of reading. I’ve found myself turning to place writing about landscapes that are, to me, completely unknown topographies beyond this archipelago: books about Berlin and Taiwan, Barbados and Uganda. As I write, wrongly or rightly, lockdown restrictions are being relaxed here in the UK. Pretty soon, then, I suspect that I will be reading about such otherly geographies as my train picks up commuters at Chorley, Adlington, Blackrod, and Horwich Parkway. After fourteen months of immersion-in-place, there is a longing for the sensation of movement whilst reading of potential – but, in most cases, never-to-be-reached – elsewheres; there is a longing for the longing generated by journeying whilst reading of other people’s immersive experiences of being-in-place.

Yet, as space slowly dilates, I suspect that – after a year of involuntary immersion - the world, and the place writing that represents it, will feel a little less solid than before.

***

Like limestone we are porous, even the supposedly hardest and strongest of us. Life pours into us. Life slides into our skin and into our hearts and seeps into our minds. [18]

Notes

[1] Nigel Stewart, ‘Dancing the Face of Place: Environmental Dance and Eco-Phenomenology’, Performance Research, 15:4, 32-39 (p. 37). In this article, Stewart draws upon phenomenological thinking to reflect upon a series of ‘improvisations’ performed ‘far out on the expansive sands of Morecambe Bay’ (p. 36).
[2] Veronica Strang, The Meaning of Water (Oxford: Berg, 2004), p. 54.
[3] Sheila Hones, ‘Text as it Happens: Literary Geography’, Geography Compass, 2:5 (2008), 1301-1317 (p. 1301).
[4] Hones, p. 1301.
[5] Strang, p. 55.
[6] Strang, p. 92.
[7] Bertrand Westphal, Geocriticsm: Real and Fictional Spaces, trans. by Robert T. Tally Jr (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 111.
[8] Peter Davidson, The Idea of North (London: Reaktion, 2005), p. 224.
[9] Strang, p. 57.
[10] Michael Bracewell and Linder, I Know Where I’m Going: A Guide to Morecambe and Heysham (London: Book Works, 2003), p. 7.
[11] Bracewell and Linder, p. 15 & p. 37.
[12] Bracewell and Linder, p. 11.
[13] Bracewell and Linder, p. 14.
[14] Bracewell and Linder, p. 62.
[15] Bracewell and Linder, p. 60.
[16] Bracewell and Linder, p. 70.
[17] Strang, p. 57.  
[18] Anita Sethi, I Belong Here: A Journey Along the Backbone of Britain (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), p. 146.