time on holiday walking the King Charles III Coastal Path
Barbara Prezelj
What follows are some of the thoughts I gathered while walking the coastal edge from Great Yarmouth to Cromer, pier to pier, updrift. They are accompanied by three mappings, or choreographic/musical scores, which unfold the spatiotemporality of three sections of my walk.
In Philosophical Investigations , Wittgenstein writes that ‘philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.’ 1 What he is describing is the quality of language that sets in when words are detached from their familiar context and set loose. Liberated from what ordinarily gives them their meaning, they lose their original place in the order of things and stop making practical sense. This creates problems and enables words to begin to relate in unforeseen, strange, philosophically interesting ways. Something similar is at the moment happening to time. To live through the climate crisis is to experience time that has gone on holiday. How we experience time is grounded in place and its rhythms and today much of the ‘old time’ is gone. In some ways, the way ‘new time’ feels isn’t that different from how we experience time on actual holiday - free from deadlines, schedules, routines, patterns of intelligible reality. On holiday, time is at its most freeing, although it is possible, however rare, that after a week or two of unstructured bliss, we slowly start feeling a little homesick, a little tired of temporal looseness. As much as we seek the release that holidays offer, familiar temporalities offer us a sense of measure and satisfy that deeply human need for structure and grounding. Much has been written about the social construction of such temporal grounding and about the damage and violence that our Western, modern frameworks have done to otherwise non- linear and fluid worlds of multiple temporalities and rhythms. We now know that our desire for stability got us into deep trouble. We only have to look at how unprepared we are in the face of a rapidly changing climate to understand the fallacy of trying to deny the inherent dynamism and complexity of the living world. As familiar temporalities begin to destabilise, they can no longer be trusted, or relied upon, causing widespread anxiety and confusion. Spring is now but two-weeks long, record-breaking heatwaves begin as early as in May, first frost is delayed until the last weeks of autumn. This past June, I decided to set off on a three-day 34-mile East Anglian coastal walk to explore these altered times, as it happened in the week when the UK Health Security Agency issued rare red weather warnings for six English regions. Unlike W. G. Sebald, who in The Rings of Saturn wrote about the experiences of walking the coasts of Suffolk, my journey focused on the Norfolk coast, on the stretch that is today rapidly eroding due to accelerated climate change. What I set out to do, beyond taking stock of the many coastal rhythms, was to think about the possibility of duration in a place of constant flux. If coastal communities are to accept that a coastal sense of place is fluid, what, if not solid ground, might serve as an anchor?
1 Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations . Oxford, Wiley- Blackwell, 1953 [2009], p. 23e.
all images and drawings Barbara Prezelj
12 on site review 49 :: shorelines
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