Caitlin Desilvey - Hydroplutonic Kernow

The other day on a drive home from Truro I noticed that the spring tide was only inches from overtopping the edge of the road between Devoran and Perranarworthal. In another eighty years, that stretch of road will be a brackish marsh. The backstory to the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy presented in this book is now our front and future story. We went and turned the world inside out, and look what happened: the water scavenged the metals, which settled in the rock seams; the people pulled the metals out to make machines; the machines consumed the other under-elements, the coal and oil; the excess carbon was cast into the atmosphere; and now the water knows its time has come again. Or, as noted in the epigraph from Pliny the Elder, the things that she has concealed and hidden underground [] are the things that destroy us.

There is a passage in Ben Smiths 2019 novel Doggerland describing waters work in the replication of fluid patterning in growing plants:

This is water turning to solid mass, taking its liquid formsripple, eddy, vortexand translating them to tendril, flower, leaf. This is water reaching skywards, arching and holding its shape.

This is water repeating itself. Cells dividing like foam, bark creasing into peaks and troughs.

Hydroplutonic Kernow traces waters work not upward, through the movement of cell and sap, but downward, into the stew of stone and seep, the leaching and the scouring, solution and precipitation. Both worlds are unfamiliar to us, and require new habits of mind to sense and represent.

If there is a spirit guide to the project documented in this book, it may be Novalis (born Friedrich von Hardenberg in 1792), a German searcher and sceptic who wrote a series of poems about the fusion of human consciousness into outer worlds, his insight enhanced by his study of Kant and Fichte and his attendance at the Freiberg Mining Academy in his youth. Another contender is Cornwalls own Humphry Davy (born in 1778 in Penzance), also a geologist-poet, who established his scientific reputation as a chemist with a report on the effects of inhaling nitrous oxide. Davy went on to invent the miners safety lamp and to carry out pioneering investigations into volcanism, magnetism, electrolysis, and zoology. With its acknowledgement of such ancestors, Hydroplutonic Kernow can be understood as a return to an older, synthetic sensibility, a resurrection of natural philosophy as practiced in the early eighteenth century. If, as the authors state, [n]ot only does Kernovian Syndrome exacerbate the Hydroplutonic Conspiracy; in fact, Cornwall is the site of its becoming self-conscious, then the project was at its core one of consciousness-raising, focusing radical attention on the possibility that humans are both natures way of generating ideas and natures way of self-destructing.

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Ten years ago, we went on a field trip. It was May in Cornwall and the sun shone. The air was one of exploration and instruction. The description of the field trip in the Falmouth Convention programme promised that under the guidance of rogue scientists, agrosophists and geophilosophers we would go on a journey into a historical process that assembled the powers of geology, mechanics, hydraulics, mineralogy and metallurgy, salvation and combustion, steam and capital into a mighty infernal machine that traumatised the Cornish landscape and kick-started the industrial revolution. A brown bag lunch was provided.

Our guides assumed, rather than solicited, our interest and attention. The tone of deadpan urgency was never broken. This was information we needed, but that we did not always know how to receive. Reflecting on the field trip now, Im reminded of one of Novaliss aphorisms:

A man will never achieve anything excellent in the way of representation so long as he wishes to represent nothing more than his own experiences, his own favourite objects, so long as he cannot bring himself to study with diligence and to represent at his leisure an object wholly foreign and wholly uninteresting to him.

We were presented with knowledge that had been obtained through diligent study, excavated from obscure sources and assembled into an alt-geography of places that we thought we knew, but apparently didnt. Much of the information, on first impression, was dull and brittle, fixated on exact historical detailshow many, how heavy, how farwhich yielded their significance only grudgingly. Shared on location, in the landscape, however, these details set up a sympathetic resonance that slowly drew us in: Here, this happened, but stranger and deeper.

The guides maintained an air of quizzical narration, the collapse of concept into case, and then expansion out again into ideas. Fact and fabulation were twinned, tightly bound to each other, because to let either have the upper hand would be to risk legibility and abandon speculation. They kept us guessing. The most valuable contribution of Hydroplutonic Kernow may be its design of an experimental methodology for unfolding landscape in multiple dimensionscultural, chemical, material, mystical (an expanded cartography materialised in the projects elaborate folded map). The tour took our awareness underground, mapping connections and flows, but also travelled through overlooked ideas and isolated instances of encounter or collapse. In its grounded exploration of matter and meaning, the project aligns with Rose Ferrabys cultural geology, and with other attempts to excavate local place while simultaneously exploring expansive intellectual territory.

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In June 2018 I was a passenger on Ghost, artist Adam Chodzkos handcrafted wooden kayak. We met at Point, on Restronguet Creek, just down from Devoran Quay, on water borne out of the leaking adits in the upstream watershed. I climbed into the boat to take my place, recumbent, in the passenger compartment set into the prow. Adam paddled behind me. I felt held, but also propelled, and oddly passive. My view over the gunwales was thinned to a slice of sky and tossing treetops, and glimpses of the passing banks and midstream islands. We pushed against the falling tide on the route the Norwegian ships would have followed to deliver their cargo of shaft-propping timbers. We did not speak, and in the waterborne peace an old poem floated back to me:

Once more my deeper life goes on with more strength,
as if the banks through which it moves had widened out.
Trees and stones seem more like me each day,
and the paintings I see seem more seen into:
with my senses, as with the birds, I climb
into the windy heavens out of the oak,