Entering the Ark, Two by Two

From our post-collapse logbook, this month's special offer

What do you keep when the storm comes in, and the tide goes out?

Our twenty-second issue is not an ARK you might expect: a seed bank to buffer us against an uncertain future, or a queue of iconic animals rescued from extinction, a museum hoard of civilisation's spoils.

Instead its pages hold a cargo of another sort: an assemblage of stories gathered from the wreckage left by a flood that has already come. Built in collaboration with the Wilderness Art Collective, it’s a work of creative salvage, with a cover and content pages forged from the flotsam of abandoned archives and old typewriter keys. We created it is a testament to the imagination of writers and artists, gleaners in a world that has lost its way, to show how we can build and regenerate an Earth-centred future.

Where most illustrative book collaborations (including our own fiction-based volume FABULA) come from artists illustrating writer’s work, for this book the relationship was reversed. Instead writers selected images from the Collective’s ‘gallery’, and created texts in response to them: ranging from Theophilus Kwek’s luminous poem Parable of Feet and Wings to Louise Crispin’s concertina sculpture Flight Path, to Micheál Mac Gearailt’s wild fable about banshees and forestry activism with William Bock performative artwork, ‘Exquisite Corpse’.

Here we republish Eleanor Morgan's lyrical essay about tilting horizons on seeing the short film, To the Ends of the Earth by Hannah Scott. And, to introduce the book, an editorial, gathered from those storm-damaged fragments, shored against our ruin.

Cover for ARK by Graeme Walker

Notes on The Finding of This Logbook

Tear down the house and build a boat!
Abandon wealth and seek living beings!

– The Epic of Gilgamesh
Translated by Maureen Kovacs

WE WENT DOWN TO THE SHORELINE as we do, with our nets and baskets, to see what had been left behind. The storm and the king tide had washed mud up to the branches of the trees, those that remained and were not torn out and taken back by the sea. A few of their derelict forms lay stranded on the flats, halos of roots writhing toward the sky. Around them the mud was carved by small watercourses, like a map of a lost continent, or inverted blood vessels, the mark of the sea’s departure.

What we found deposited by the tide: boards waterlogged and broken at the ends, as though the surf had chewed them apart; bright shards of plastic going pale in the sun; sodden cardboard; thin films of tape. So much was clearly flotsam of some lost vessel. A chest wrapped in bands of iron; a painting depicting heaven and hell, though tipped on its axis and half buried in mud; a pile of matted canvas, tent or sail or burial shroud; a crumpled mask; a carved flute; a knot of human hair. It was not so easy to say the origin of other things: an erratic granite boulder on this shore of shale and mud; a cactus somehow taking root on a bare peninsula; fungi fruiting from the shaded mould; chips of ochre in the silt; the yellow bloom of a wild sunflower; a clump of woody heather, black soil still clutched in its roots.

Had they come on the tide or been revealed by the tearing of the waves? Everything in flux, every object melancholy in its broken edges, speaking of a lost home. Everything luminous in its disjointed mosaic beauty.

We went to see what we might save, what might be of use, what exquisite scrap we might glean. We paused at the edge of the forest, where the mudflats begin. Scanning for salvage, we were met with the scent of this small cold stream emerging from the stone, flowing down to meet the rotting sea wrack, reflecting shards of light on the tree trunks. The electric shrilling of cicadas. The flash of an antler in the dappled light of the forest, caught in the corner of the eye. The sounds of now-rare birds off in the woods: nightjar, blue tit, mistle thrush. Turtledove, dunnock, carrion crow.

We shaded our eyes to follow a line of prints toward the tideline, large ovals with the marks of claws, slowly filling with water. The curving ribs of a ruined craft rose before the horizon’s clouds. As we blinked against the sharp light, the colours of the world seemed to invert, the foaming waves turning storm-black, the boat keel white as bone.

Some things were left intact: beside the little stream, as though in memorial to the vessel that had carried it, rested a child’s toy boat still bearing its enduring passengers. A coat with words stitched into its fabric, folded as if to pillow some absent head. And this book, found held in the crook of a tree limb, as though set on a shelf by the hand of the tide.

Still from ‘To the Ends of the Earth’ by Hannah Scott

Seasick

A response to Hannah Scott’s ’To The Ends Of The Earth’

IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME since I was at sea. My nearest beach is a pile of imported sand on the edge of a reservoir. The reservoir is fenced off due to safety concerns, but there is a foot of shallow water that we can paddle in. Some children climb the fence to get to the deeper water. Adults shout at them. The children climb back to the beach. Pause. They climb back to the water. Shouts. They climb back to the beach.

I moved here five years ago from the city, where my view was into the neighbour’s window. I could not see a horizon line and I think it damaged my eyes, always focusing on the house opposite, the building above, or the pavement. My eyes never got the chance to really relax into it, as I feel they do when I look out to sea.

In the spring my two sisters and I went to Venice. It was a special occasion. Not a birthday, but an acknowledgment of our shared and separate grief, a way of asserting ourselves and asserting life. For months we had sat together in the dark, with death and illness. Now it was time to get the boat to Venice.

On our first day we walked up a canal to the church of Madonna dell’Orto where Tintoretto is buried. Nicknamed ‘Il Furioso’ because he churned out paintings at such a lick, Tintoretto’s Last Judgement is in the apse, roped off from visitors so that it can only be viewed at an oblique angle. It was dark and raining in Venice, so the painting met our eyes slowly. We looked up at the saved and the condemned.

This painting is generally considered Not One of his Best. A wonky composition. We loved it. The saved are in the clouds looking stressed and serious, necks craned to Jesus. Beneath the waves, the damned are sleeping off a wild party, some with skulls exposed, like Halloween fancy dress, others stripped off altogether, lolling and leaning. Across the centre of the painting is a line of aquamarine, a horizon dividing the good and the bad. It is not clear from our angle if the damned are already under the water or if the water is about to flood over them. There are a few figures who are partly submerged, tossed upside down with a foot or a leg appearing above the waves. It is because it is so watery here, my eldest sister says. Your hell is whatever you fear most and whatever is familiar. I suppose for him it was the waters rising in Venice and the threat of drowning in the canals. The constant sound of lapping against his house.

In her film To The Ends Of The Earth Hannah Scott has created an artificial horizon that splits the screen in two, showing two oceans one above the other tilting at slightly different speeds. Occasionally we glimpse the real horizon to add to the sense of rocking. It is, at first, a reminder of sea sickness. When I am on a boat, I can never remember whether you are meant to look at the horizon or not to avoid feeling ill. In this film, there are too many horizons on which to rest your eyes. Diagonal lines of ocean currents move across the screen at different speeds. Two stripes, cerulean and aquamarine, sky blue and tropical ocean, are joined together from different worlds. Other awkward twins appear: a bloom of bioluminescent algae with the green glow of an aurora. Accompanying these images are rhythmical sounds of flowing and pulsing, in and out. We never see the world under the horizon line, only reflections on the water.

If the camera dipped under the waves, I would like to imagine that Tintoretto’s party of the damned would appear to us, but a newspaper headline reminds me that underwater animals are disappearing, from plankton to whales, and the urgent demand to act is met by my anxiety that I do not know what to do. Like the effects of Scott’s film, I am sick with sea worry.

Before grief came, I had been reading Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and had been thinking about what skills and knowledge I had that would help in case of the apocalypse. What did I carry within me that did not depend on external objects? I know a bit about plants, enough to make a nettle tea and avoid the wrong berries, and I have a good sense of direction. I can recognise the call of a green woodpecker, the cry of a squirrel and the yellow slime of an angry slug. I like looking under rocks and digging soil. I have taught myself to do a slow front crawl and can keep going at this for a long time. I can tell you how spiders spin their silk, how caddis fly larvae build their cases and how a sea anemone cleans itself. I cannot remember, in detail, why the sky is blue.

None of this seems of much use to survival. They are scraps of my being in the world, and I tell them to my children. These facts are interchangeable with other facts. They are special only to me because they are how I attach myself to the world. I would like my children to find their own attachments and their own ways of asserting life.

The horizons tilt and the eye slips off the screen. I tell my children about the anemones and how we will touch their tentacles when we visit the coast this summer. It will be the first time they have seen the sea.

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IMAGES:

Film still from To the Ends of the Earth by Hannah Scott

To The Ends Of The Earth is an experimental film reflecting on my relationship with the sea, horizon, and sky – my three constants within the marine environment as I discover the remoteness and connectedness of each location – pristine environments broken by our presence. Using film and photographs shot during my journeys on board a cargo ship, a tall ship and a yacht in the Arctic, Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans.

ARK cover artwork by Graeme Walker

After the flood, our digital lives rusted away, papers from the world's libraries float to the surface, to be collected and reassembled by future explorers and archivists.

I designed three fonts for this issue: 'O Brother' is based on my old Brother typewriter, 'Discontinued' and 'Issue' are both based on rubber stamp sets in my collection. A fourth font, Telegraphem, was designed by Volker Bussse,. Many of the engravings and drawings were source from the Internet Archive's extraordinary public domain book images repository.

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BOOKSHELF

Each month we have a special offers for readers and subscribers from our store. This month we have selected Dark Mountain: Issue 22 ARK, as well as Issue 25 on the struggle for land rights, and the living land itself. If you enjoyed these extracts, do visit our shop or read about this double offer here.

If you take out an annual subscription to Dark Mountain you can also buy the current issue Issue 27 for a reduced price.