Kneel Here/Fall Into My Arms
Written and Photographed by S. Parke
Embroidered artwork by Ellie Bird
Kneel down, right here. Fall into the arms of the earth. Put your body into the grass. Knees hard on rocks in the loch. Your stomach against the yellow moss, leaving the jagged edge of your shoulder blades to rise out of the ground like a range of spiny hills; the soft inwards curve of your spine a valley, two natural declensions mirroring each other. Become a cairn of stones, another facet of the landscape — bodily and geographic contours, fleshly crags and real stone precipice — all blurring into one.
(rain-soaked grass)
I haven’t had a hands-on minute with nature in quite some time, really. Admittedly, I’ve done the quiet hands-behind-the-back stare over the landscape recently, standing atop Meikle Bin and drinking in the spectral land, hazed through a little early morning fog. It was a perfect moment of quiet reverence. But it’s all very adult, isn’t it? An unrequited love letter from you to the landscape, a respectful and untouchable moment from a prerequisite distance. I wonder at what age someone grows out of having that real intimacy with the land. I am conscious of my phrasing here — it’s hard to phrase my intent without sounding like I’m trying to promote an al fresco wank. That’s not really the intimacy that I’m getting at. I suppose what I’m really asking is: When do you become too old to play outside? When comes the definite point where you stop chucking stones and paddling and making paths for the ants? Even the granola muncher boys with five blurry hill summit pics and a Tinder bio like, “My first girlfriend is the outdoors,” often interact with nature in manners that are surface level. Ascend hill, intake view, photograph view, descend hill, all while protected by hiking boots and Gore-Tex trousers, studiously avoiding any contact with nature itself. I want to see photos of them lying atop the summit, like boys of times long past, braiding the grass with their fingers, and rolling down the soft sides of the mountain.
(riverbed)
(amethyst)
Admittedly, I’d never really bothered my arse thinking about my changed relationship with nature until I read Yuriko Saito’s Everyday Aesthetics. Saito’s seminal work is major in the field of art criticism, drawing readerly attention to the non-aesthetic objects (which exist to be functional, rather than beautiful — e.g. a chair, rather than a painting). She describes how interaction with paradigmatic Western art forms prescribes a participant to move into ‘spectator mode,’ in which one ‘[appreciates] the aesthetic value’ in a very rigid manner, and privileges the senses of sight and sound. Essentially, Saito explains that art is to be stared at, not fucked with. Saito dichotomies this spectatorial experience with our interaction with non-aesthetic art objects — chairs, teapots, desks, etc. — in which we interact with it “not only by inspecting its shape and colour, but also by touching its fabric, sitting in it, leaning against it, and moving it, to get the feel for its texture, comfort, and stability.” She describes the dichotomy as ‘contemplation-oriented’ versus the latter, ‘action-oriented.’
While Saito’s argument ultimately relates to the varying interactive modes applied to art versus object (or aesthetic versus function), I thought about it in relation to nature. When did our relationship with nature move from ‘action-oriented’ — pulling leaves off the trees, making rock piles, writing your name in the dirt, lying, really lying, face down on the grass, eating apples straight off the branch — to ‘contemplation-oriented,’ where one climbs a hill with the expressed purpose of looking at the view at the top while eating a Marks and Spencer’s sandwich? Perhaps it’s to do with social notions of adult decorum, that throwing stones is simply not considered acceptable behaviour for grownups. Maybe social media is to blame, as our tendency to view the world through an Instagrammable phone camera lens places precedence on the visual aesthetic of a place, thus neglecting authentic immersive experience. Up crops a TikTok on my feed: Most Instagrammable Nature Spots. Who knows what the root cause is, but regardless of the reason, it is a crying shame that one day we decide to put distance between ourselves and our landscapes.
(rocks, boulders)
Ellie, a Brighton embroidery artist, and I collaborated on this piece, Kneel Here/Fall Into My Arms, as a way of encouraging people to make physical contact with their landscapes again. Ellie stitched the slogan onto lace, choosing the softer term to illustrate nature’s welcoming invitation to us, and I had the pleasure of photographing it. To do so, I had to get down on my knees myself. Rolling up my trousers and sitting in the dirt, or climbing trees to hang the fabric, or paddling in the riverbed. I moved into experiential mode as commanded by this fragrant scrap of fabric.
Initially, the experience made me feel very self conscious, perhaps exacerbated by the small collection of local perverts who gathered to watch me wade through the river in my skirt to take my pictures. Although surely enough, the experience started to feel quite special. It was nice to rekindle that sensory intimacy, whether that was feeling water around my ankles in the River Kelvin, or standing waist-deep in the rain-soaked grass of the Callander Crags at 343 metre elevation, feeling wet, feathery strands touching exposed bare midriff. The very wise art critic John Berger once wrote that “to touch something is to situate oneself in relation to it … We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves” (Ways of Seeing). It felt good to shrink the distance, to form a relational value between myself and my environment once more. A tiny, fleeting embrace between a big Scottish girl and Scotland, mediated by a piece of art which looked like little more than an ephemeral piece of white froth atop the landscape.
(‘cells of life’ landforms, charles jencks)
(riverbed)
So do it. Get over yourself. Roll your expensive, fancy fucking Gore-Tex trousers up, and get your knees muddy. Go on, do it tomorrow; take a train and go up a hill with your mates, but make sure that you really do some proper fannying about up the hill. Scuff your knee a bit doing some scrambling. Jump in the loch, or at least have a paddle. Pick up some rocks and chuck them for the sake of it. The world is going to shit, my friends. Modern society is on the verge of collapse, great toppling columns of infrastructure cracking before our eyes. Cost of living crisis, strikes, rubbish filling the street — fucking Rishi Sunak became PM. If things are going to get pagan — and they are — you might as well do the good bits. Get back into the landscape. It’s not too late. You did it as a kid. It’s somewhere inside you. Nature is welcoming you in. Kneel here. Fall into her arms.
(riverbed)