Islanding
Sam Francis
Island (n) a piece of land surrounded by water.
Isolated. Detached.
From the Old English īgland, iegland ‘an island,’ from ieg ‘island’
Isle from the Latin ‘insula’
--
Island (v) islanding, to island, islanded
to become an island, to island oneself
‘I am islanding’
‘To Island’ is to take oneself off somewhere. Somewhere where a feeling of being adrift or marooned might occur. When upon, or inhabiting an island somewhere, or, to find oneself upon a somewhere island, one can be certain to be un-mainlanded whilst still finding one's feet upon some form of land.
Not quite set adrift.
Out to sea and yet not.
A destination that is over there, on its own.
Not here - with all this.
‘To Island’ then, is to take space for oneself, for solitude, isolation, separation.
Yet how do, and how can one transform into an islanding state?
An island is still land, with an ‘I’ in it.
That is, I, or even, you.
And what for the ‘s’?
Can it be plural of I as in ‘I’s’, as in mine, or even ‘ours’?
Since living in Weston super Mare on the south-west coast for the past few years, I have been getting to know the brown murky Severn estuary by wandering its edges, and swimming in its waters. Between here and Wales over the way, two Islands sit in the midst of this long tidal landscape; Flat Holm (Ynys Echni) and Steep Holm - the former being Welsh, the latter English. On clear bright days, they appear so close to the mainland that I can see details of their edges, and can imagine leaping or swimming over to them. In the fawn fog of shortening days, they are barely there. At night, the bright blinking eyes of Flat Holm’s lighthouse send out a flash-call reminder of its presence.
From different locations up and down the south-west coast, I have often been surprised by how different the Islands appear. They seem closer somehow, despite being further away. As if they are moving land bodies drifting with the tidal pull of the waves being sucked up into the mouth of the estuary to become river-bound. Seen from the edge of West Somerset, their shape, size and position in relation to each other is so different that I wonder what the solitary landmass in the middle of the estuary is, only to realise that it is Flat Holm Island obscuring the view of its taller long-lost cousin. The lay of its land mass seems to have morphed unrecognisably with the rise of the sea, and the shape-shifting horizon line towards Wales.
After a ground-scorching, high activity summer, I feel a pull to the Island to Island myself. To disconnect, and reconnect. To gather myself and be surrounded by water. To take some time away from human-filled places and digital spaces, and the eternal grind of mainland life. Though both islands appeal, I feel the need to go further than the seven miles over the water from home to Steep Holm. It’s too easy. To Island, a longer journey is necessary, and my more-Welsh-than-not blood calls me over to Cardiff to get the boat to spend 24 hours upon Flat Holm Island. It is strange to see the Islands from the opposite side of the water. I am the only person onboard the ferry. This pleases me.
“Are you ready?”
These were the first words of the world's first radio transmission across water made from Flat Holm to Lavernock Point in south Wales in 1897.
I am ready to Island……..
When one thinks of an Island, what may initially come to mind is the white-sand aesthetics of an archetypal desert Island; an eden-like dream-place made from the sun, lush with dense glades of palm trees. Islands are places to go to, to get far away from the buzz hum of everyday live and grounded mainland living. Places far out in the ocean with nothing but the enticing endlessness of long stretched out oceans, and blinking blue skies. Places where we can get away from it all for a brief hiatus, a pause. To live a simple, slower pace of life, even for a short while appeals.
To visit an Island, is to incite with intention, the space and time for sways of imagination and creativity to occur. These kinds of outlying places can be fertile spaces. Unobstructed by life's clutter. Places where the mind can be susceptible to newness of thought and connection that can, at times, be harder to come by with everyday distractions. I have come here in part to do this. To detach in order to connect with a place, in order to reconnect with myself. To explore, and walk, and think, play, imagine and dream beneath the wide open sky and its big white clouds. To listen to the beating sounds of the waves, aching from the relentlessness of the continual motion of their beingness.
“Dreaming of islands—whether with joy or in fear, it doesn't matter—is dreaming of pulling away, of being already separate, far from any
continent, of being lost and alone—or it is dreaming of starting from scratch, recreating, beginning anew.”1
It’s this combination of separation and creation that has drawn me here.
There’s something about islands being separate from a main place, a solid place, a real place with all of its trappings, that makes them compelling and mysterious. Like the charismatic outsider who makes their own rules, and defines their own ways of being that is other to the mainstream, and the mainland. Islands by their very nature are defined by mystery and by magic. One only has to think of the utopian legend of Atlantis, and the Greek Islands - with all of their watery mythologies of seafaring heroes, sky-bounding goddesses, and deep-water miscreants that are born of such shimmering dreamscapes with their beyond-turquoise waters - to get caught up in the fantasy of the magical deserted island. This, though, is a long way from the churned up chocolate waters that skirt the edges of Flat Holm.
The line between such white Island fantasies, and the nightmarish horrors of complete and utter desertion is thin - nobody wants to be marooned all alone for time immemorial, living off tree-bark, with nothing to drink but salt water. Thinking of the innate human need to be, and to feel connected to others, to life, and the world, the cosmos, brings to mind John Donne’s line ‘no man is an island’. And, he continued, that after all, ‘...every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main’. And he is right, in that we want our Islanding to be finite and temporary, not endless and forever.
Yet for now, I am here to Island. To un-mainland, just for a short while.
I step upon the land of the ‘Is’, my eyes wide open, mind relaxed.
Walking my way around the pathways that weave across, and skirt around the edge of the island, it is like an open palm with multiple ways of navigating its lifelines, bylines, and throughlines. Each step landing on new ground, mapping a new route through the Island body. Each step a slight deviation from the last as I walk further away from the mainland with each step despite being no further away. I am searching for signs in the cracks, and the ruins, the fortified buildings. Walking through the stories, geographies, ecologies, and histories of this place with my eyes, feet, fingers, and head, I encounter line-cut stones, six feet tall wild leeks gone to seed, still rabbits with pale milky eyes, a long-silent foghorn, the bone-scattered pathways and bird shit tinged purple from the gorged blackberries and elderberries that grow in abundance here. Evidence of the colony of lesser black-backed gulls that has since departed for the year.
I find that the island has more of a circular, oblong shaped profile, which is quite different from the long, thin, form that I observe from the mainland. Steep Holm also floats in much closer proximity nearby; much larger than it appears from over there. I think about the sheer mass of the ocean and its wind-racked beingness, and how the water seems to affect my perceptions of distance and form. Each wave shifting and shaping the edges of the islands as they graze the rock-lined perimeter, bashing pebbles into grains of sand.
Sitting now upon the low-slung edge of the Island with the swelling body of water at my feet, looking out towards the location that I am so familiar with looking at it from, I find I can barely identify where that is. The other land, the mainland feels unfamiliar, unrecognisable, despite inherently knowing that it is where it is. I just can’t make it out and struggle to summon the sense I have of looking out from there to here, to where I look out from here to there now. Switching my view in reverse feels strange. The newness of this different perspective, unknown, and even uncanny somehow.
The atmosphere shifts through my gaze and position. My inner compass becomes uncalibrated, and I don’t know which way to turn, or which way to look.
Nothing looks the same and nothing is the same and yet is.
In an attempt to position myself, I walk to the lighthouse at the highest point on the island. It’s as if I’m walking on stilts. My body does not know how to steady, my legs do not know what to do. I feel quite disoriented. A touch giddy. Lost at sea. My position uncertain. My grounding as murky and unsure as the long estuarial tides that move things around this place reconstructing its realness. My sense of self and of place dissolving with the shape of the Island's edges.
I am neither here nor there. In all places and none.
I move in slow rotations to see what happens to my sense of spatial orientation. I can see land and sea and life at each turn. Whilst all around me is sea, I am struck that I am also surrounded by land. Signs of life just four miles away over the water, that of industry, docklands and the sun-glint of windows clutching the coastline of south Wales.
I am islanded, yet landed. I am fluid like water, yet not.
This close proximity to the mainland on both sides of the estuary's throat makes me feel exposed, conspicuous, surrounded. The notion of being deserted and isolated on an Island suddenly feels like a hoax. I am experiencing a sense of exposure that brings about a feeling of acute vulnerability. It’s heady, yet I can also feel it in my core. While I am unseen and isolated, I also have a sense of being visible and seen. A bit like the lighthouse. Alone here, away from all the people over there. Just one person versus many thousands of people who occupy the coastline I am looking over at. All of those pairs of eyes looking over here, and I, on stage now, unable to return their gaze. The thought of it spins me out.
Spinning eyes, all those eyes.
Everything pulses and throbs.
I stop spinning.
A ground-lifting pause hovers the mainland, holding the sea and the Island in a blur of sediment, salt, silt. A contraction of time-space that makes everything seem to move in slow motion. I cannot tell where the sea ends and the land begins. A kind of spatial disorientation is happening. It is not entirely unpleasant, more curious, mysterious, unknown. And I ask myself; is this what it is to Island? If so, I surrender to it. Mind, body, spirit acclimatising to the contours of an Island as the night takes the sky. The slim moon with its solitary eye blinks. All thoughts gone, as I spin in a mystery of Islands.
Spin spin spin goes the lighthouse spinner lurching the dark back and forth across the night-spurred waters from England and back to Wales in the act of turning things into other things, day into night.
All is luminous light. And then dark.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
The first light of the day steals in through the thin veneer of the tent walls. The dawn birds chatter thickly in Welsh. I unzip the door to gold-topped choppy waters turning over from Wales, almost green underneath.
It is considered by sailors that to remain stable whilst out at sea, one must look out towards the horizon where its unfailing flatness defies the continuous motion of the water. The up and down of it. The never truly staying put, or remaining the same of it. Each new wave never quite understanding, or knowing much for certain as I.
The lighthouse - eyes closed now - silently whirs.
1 Gilles Deleuze ‘Desert Islands’, 1953–1974
