Folding Time at South Stack
The forecast for the Snowdonia mountains was too wet for scrambling, so we headed to the coast. At South Stack on Holy Island, Anglesey, we walked a short way to the cliff edge of folded sandstone and quartzite. Conditions here were better, as our instructor James had predicted.
Fifty metres down, sprayed by waves thrown upon the cliff, we perched on the lowest ledge. The swell against the rock was a composite sound: a low gurgle with an almost metallic, undulating melody; the sea a softer kind of water than the taut surface of a lake, but loud, and increasing the tension we felt. On the rising tide, the sun on the green sea broke into luminous shapes, paving a wide shimmering path across the water to our pitch. Lone rocks to the south reflected no light in our direction; north-faces in shadow concealed their weathered skin. No holds for the eye, hand or foot.
Reaching over smooth red surfaces and wary of the slippery white quartz and orange lichen, we climbed rock worn to the grey beneath – pitted, striated, cracked; thoroughly beaten by time. The past and future looped in as I tangled with myself over how to move confidently with a shoulder injury from a previous climb, while staying alert to the current ropework and, inappropriately in this situation, imagining a future in which I’d master all of this on top of the fear that was scattering my mind into brittle shapes.
I didn’t yet know about ‘expertise-induced amnesia’ – when elite athletes, like tennis players, are able to forget an error just made and focus only on the ‘now shot’, preventing negative internal chatter from coalescing into pressure that makes them choke. There’s a time to remember and a time to forget. Here on the cliff I couldn’t forget. I carried each minor error with me up the rock face, never fully in the ‘now move’.
I hadn’t climbed above water before and if there was any ground it was vertical. I crawled from sea to sky, green to blue, as if the colours of the rainbow were not continuous but discrete as quantum particles, and to cross the divide you have to leap.
It wasn’t until later, after a harder and longer climb which flung me right into the moment, that I reassembled myself from the pieces into which I’d dispersed. Then, at last, I was able to properly enjoy being here, being now, watched by an inquisitive seal who paddled upright in the water, his domed head and huge black eyes so much like a cartoon I felt rather unreal myself. Gulls overhead confirmed that, yes, our antics were bizarre and unnecessary from the perspective of other species. Later, reflecting on this alternative viewpoint, I wondered whether other species are also burdened with the need to continually construct their sense of self from a maelstrom of sensations, intentions and emotions.
Needing a break from the relentless self-orchestration, too often my mind wants to fix itself into a portrait, a static depiction of who I think I am. And in the city, where the predominant movement is mechanical or digital, so removed from the feeling that my body is made to move and can move other parts of the world too, I can forget I’m an agent in my own life. Gradually my parameters narrow, as muscles rarely stretched to their limits grow tighter and weaker as the body prunes that which isn’t needed.
But moving your body in challenging ways outside in the elements shifts your perception. You don’t have to accept your recently-degraded image. You see yourself in the act of being adventurous and capable, as you thread these traces of your experience into a continuous line secured by anchors of varying strengths and carry yourself from one day to the next. And now you’re inserting the dynamic images of your first multi-pitch sea cliff climb into the narrative. Changing it, changing yourself, propelling the whole of you into new challenges that after too much time indoors you’d forgotten you were adapted for. Today, after this spectacular climb, you can build yourself anew out of different pieces, different memories, editing the sluggish, anxious ones out of the narrative; dropping those dulled beads from the thread.
In every moment you can decide who to be. Be the person in the photos climbing above the luminous sea, free of yourself and yet situated intensely in your own powerful body. You’re looking forward again: to how you can continue to grow and participate in the world beyond your thoughts, as a creature equal to the seal that’s wondering about you as you’re marvelling at its fluidity in the water. You too are fluid, if you let yourself; if you keep doing adventurous things and storing those memories from which you weave the story of yourself through time, through your life, because it’s ‘memory that solders together the processes, scattered across time, of which we are made,’ the physicist Carlo Rovelli writes in The Order of Time.
Memory is how we create a sense of time, which is the variable we use to measure change. But, Rovelli says, ‘The difference between past and future does not exist in the elementary equations that govern events in the world.’ At the fundamental level, the world is just an ocean of randomly fluctuating quantum particles. We create time ourselves, as a way to describe our interaction with the physical world, to create an order that we can live within.
‘We do not see the atomic structure of matter, nor the curvature of space… We think of the world in terms of stones and mountains, clouds and people, and this is “the world for us”.’
We create our world of concepts by using our brain to collect memories of the past so as to forecast the future. But when there’s a time to remember and a time to forget, we can change our concepts, break open our sense of the world as settled; unfold time and allow ourselves to fluctuate.
*
Sea cliff climbing on Anglesey and scrambling on Y Garn in Snowdonia with James Monypenny of Gibbon Adventures.