THE GLEANERS

It's usual for me that when I come to the sea I go gleaning. What I’m looking for are the hag stones, holey stones – the ones you can see right through the middle of. It's a tradition that started on my first trip out to Dungeness, to Derek Jarman’s garden. He collected holey stones on his walks along the shingle, threading them, heavy ones, on coarse thick twine. Stacks of them loop about the driftwood stakes, or drape from hard iron hooks on the walls of the cottage like livery collars. In a black-and-white Sooley photograph he sits enthroned in pebbled glory, ordained by flotsam and jetsam – gleaned remains. 

At Dungeness I'd found my first real holey stone, threaded it with string. Jarman’s tradition moves through me – sends me out up and over these rocks. There are others moving about over there in a similar sort of way, bending and stooping their rickety human frames, absorbed in their task, their hunt. This movement of the body is secondary to the mind’s playful scheme, an inadvertent choreography. To glean: to gather what is left behind by reapers. The sea thus reaps and strips this ragged stretch of land, the widest fluctuation of tidal reach recorded, they say. You can't make much use of land that spends half its time submerged, rendering these rocky ranges apt for the scavenging labours of our own imagination.

The figures arch and sway, rooting about, uncovering the majesty of the mundane. A whole community of these beings, united by the nature of their work, emerge as though from the hollows of the rocks themselves; their livelihood depends on this uncertain ground, they make home of the place in between. Their activities are invisible to most for they operate largely within the intermediary channels, with materials and modalities often quite misunderstood. Strange things can happen as they work – observers from the nearby town have reported over the years on a number of inexplicable cases: objects or individuals disappearing into thin air, gone missing for days to resurface elsewhere, quite transformed; and just the most unusual behaviour. 

The ones called to dwell upon this scape are drawn by some peculiar inner faculty, it seems. What makes someone fit for this work is not necessarily qualified by any sort of education or training, nor is it passed through family chains or trees. An inclination of the spirit, is how some describe it, yet there’s little to do with the regulations of religion, philosophy, science or invention – however analogous these may be. Yet how disciplined these dwellers are, and what intelligence! they say, so why can’t they figure things out, they say, at least get themselves a steady pay. But the gleaners, inhabiting the channels between, exist such that their reality is only ever half dictated by the laws that govern the town. The other half is something else entirely – with its own aquatic architecture, its very own equivalent set of physics regarding property, currency, materiality. 

Oh how I long to join them as they gather on the shore, as the tide recedes and the light plays on in glares and leaks, and the image flickers in and out of view that for a moment I doubt myself, all by myself – hesitating here at the threshold.