Sex with a river; a forest instead of a saxophone: change as a constant, music like the woods

A forest-inspired track used as the audio for the video below

I’m writing a new a novel and there’s a scene where my protagonist, who is a witch, slides into a river and has sex with the river. She feels the river is alive and so connects with it. She becomes intimate with the river.

I’ve been thinking about the idea of rivers as being alive but also of rivers as home. We are familiar with the notion of a particular place as home. And we imagine that place to be unchanging, or unchanging beyond the cycle of its seasons and the larger patterns of weather, of climate over the long term—large scale weather patterns, ice ages, great freezes, drought and so on that occur historically or even geologically. Changes that have nothing to do with climate change, with the Anthropocene.

But how does the climate crisis and the Anthropocene change how we think of place?

Most of us have a idea of the land, of home, of our sense of place as one where we’re from, as a part of earth that we live in relation to. This is something particularly felt and articulated by Indigenous people (well, and often, xenophobic ethnonationalists.)

But most of us do have some version of this relation to place. I was thinking about how that changes when that place continually changes, is continually subject to continuous change. When all places are continually subject to change. How to frame this beyond solastalgia, that sense of grief and loss from environmental change? Our place is still our place, changeable as it is.

My witch protagonist is Jewish. She lives in Medieval Norwich, England. As a Jew, she lives in the so-called Diaspora, this notional true home, the place of the centre—of the religion, of one’s being. Thisrelationship for which Jews were “chosen” was thi particular land, that is, Israel.

But I was thinking about how my witchy Jewish woman considers rivers and trees and other non-human entities as “beings,” as “being alive,” as living in creature to creature relation with her.

But instead of “The Holy Land,” she thinks of the river—and the woods—as home. The river is a place (you could draw it on a map), but what makes it a river is that it flows. It’s a river because of its movement. I was listening to Robert McFarlane read from his new book, Is a River Alive? and he was saying that considering humans are mostly made of water, if we sit down, we’re a pond, and if we run, we’re a river.

I’m thinking of place like that. If a place changes, that place is a still the same place. Like a river, that place is fluid. And so one’s home is fluid.

In this way, all of us humans are not disaporic, we’re metamorph-poric. Our place, our home is change. It’s not to take rights from people who have a relationship with a particular place, but to think about that place as flow. If as Heraclitus said, you can never step into the same river twice, these days you can never belong to the same place because place inherently changes. The world is always already changing.

Once the sky was filled with birds. The sky is no longer filled with birds. Our place is birdless and heating up. So we have to think of this kind of change as a working paradigm for the world. And we have to consider how to think about that.

Perhaps if things can change, if things are implicitly always moving, they can be not so much restored as healed. We have a new world and it’s unlikely we’ll ever get the old one back. However, since change is a basic fact and we know that in the Anthropocene nature is dynamic on a shorter time scale than ever before, we don’t just have to accept it as it is. We don’t have to accept the degradation and commodification and pollution of nature . We can work to work with that change. We can treat nature as if it is a living thing. We can love rivers as if they are alive. Forests as if they are truly in relation with us as living things.

And so over the last few days as I was thinking of all of this while walking in the woods on the edge of Cootes Paradise in Hamilton, I was also thinking about the relationship between rivers and walking. Walking is by definition movement. It’s change. It’s a noun that is a verb. You move like the water of a river but the walk, like the river, stays with you.

All of this brought me back to a film I made by taking a video of what was above me as I walked, the sky and trees as I walked through the woods on Old Martin Road in Ancaster, Ontario. I had written music to go with this video, derived from Charles Ives’ amazing piece, The Unanswered Question. I taken the audio file and slowed it way down and then played with the resulting digital file. I added microtonal keyboard sounds (piano and organ) as well as some tenor saxophone. In adding the saxophone, I was thinking about Floating Points’ and Pharoah Sanders beautiful record Promises.

Initially, I had created the music without the saxophone. In a way I feel I’ve perhaps cheated or “sold out,” and made the music on more of a human scale by adding the saxophone. Before I added it, it was just a very slow moving texture, filled with small details and changes. Like the forest, or the video of the forest. What now sounds like background, was the foreground. But I feel that I somehow chickened out. I felt the need, the impulse to change the time and the density of information, the pace of the musical narrative to make it more on a human scale. The way I had composed it originally, the music felt like it was happening on a more foresty scale. It was more hylophonic. (Hylo- meaning wood or forest.) And now I think I have to figure out how to make a hylophone. A forest as instrument. Though I guess it already is.