Rob Sowden

Environmental Psychologist
Max Planck Institute

A Sinking Feeling

...

She sat up on the bed with the map in her hands, crumpled at the edges where her wiry fingers clasped around it. HOLDERNESS was written in large, scrawled handwriting at the top of the page. Nobody calls it that anymore, she thought.The fading year penned at the bottom of the paper gave away the history, neat and clinically written.

She sat on the inside ledge of her window propped up by a fraying cushion. In the corner of the window where the caulk and sealing strips had begun to decay, mould was being harboured. Through the scratched panes of glass, if she squinted, she could see that the damp had spread over the fields and divided itself amongst the neighbouring villages. It was stuffy in the house but less so than outside, which brought her temporary relief.

In the relic fields nearby the dropwort and orchids were less plentiful than they had been in years past. Cowslip still grew in hardy pockets of grassland surrounding the town and the distant murmur of rust-covered tractors filtered through, especially when the wind blew in from the coast. Further down the estuary she thought of duckweed and pond-sedge in abundance, though some time had passed since the last survey of the area and she wasn’t sure of their abundance now.

Venturing outside of the house she saw a lone roe deer, bounding through brown grass taller than her front door, the enamel panelling corroded by a caustic heat that had recently settled over the land. Further down the road she went to the nearest village still pumping its own fresh water. For a while she followed the young deer at a distance, thinking about whether it was going to find shade and if its family were close. Kicking dust up small clouds of white trail dust behind her, she began to bound too, towards the village, hoping to make it before night fall when the water would grow stagnant.

An excerpt taken from Tales of Old Holderness. ...

All we can rely on is memory.

Memory turns itself into a document in the absence of the written word. Discoloured and faded; there is only ever partial memory, bolstered by tall tales told by those who were there at the time. They saw the fields turn a paler shade of green, and they witnessed the quieting of birds as sunrise fell against a patchwork land. How I thought of the world as a child is how I will always think of the world. A combination of sound and of feeling and of touch. Photographs come with their own smells. So it goes that you will also build your own constructions.

Last night I thought that ecosystems are constructed, and not just naturally there. Some live within us – literally inside of us – and they are driven with grit into our bodies through stories gathered by our elders, disseminated across time and space. Others are those that we build between friends and loved ones, collectively weaving a tapestry of fleeting smiles and offhand comments far larger and far more expansive than we imagined when we cast the first stitch.

Dreams are part of this changeable system too. I often mix my dreams up with my photographs and forget to rewind the film. Instead of adding their stitch to the tapestry I write them down in a notepad I leave beside my bed, and by midday I have forgotten who I was chasing and who was losing their teeth.

I would like to remember this world repeating itself in time with the rhythms beneath my feet. Like the stories woven into farming soil by the calloused hands of the protectors of our land, I would like to remember the here and now under duress, because there is no other way.

- Alexander Stubbs, 2024