Gala Water Unbordered

“The river is within us; the sea all about us”.
— T.S. Eliot, The Dry Savages, The Four Quartets (1940–42)

“Everything in a stretch of water is new when morning comes. What vitality the chameleon-river must have to respond so immediately to the kaleidoscope of new-born light. The life of the trembling water alone renews all the flowers.”
— Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Material Imagination (1951)

What does it mean to walk like a river? To recast the very idea of drifting so that it not only shifts the terrain from urban to semi-rural space but also allows for alternative ways of existing in time, ones that, as Gaston Bachelard hint at, allow all of time to tremble when morning light rekindles water? These ideas came to mind as I took part in the ‘Town to River, River to Town’ project, a collaboration between Connecting Threads and the Galashiels Walking Festival, run by the Hike and Bike Hub.

The project took place over three days towards the end of April 2024 on the banks of Galashiels, a town whose history, indeed whose very being, is dependent on the confluence of Gala Water with the River Tweed. Participants were invited to go on a series of walks in the hills surrounding Galashiels and to sign up for two art walks and a workshop. The first walk took us along the Black Path to the confluence with the River Tweed at Galafoot and was interspersed with a number of art installations made by local communities, facilitated by artists Georgie Fay and Balandino di Donato; the second started at the Hike and Bike Hub and reversed the trajectory, taking us on a route behind the town up to the view at Poets Corner and back to the Tweed. In this walk, participants were asked to alight on an image or impression of Gala that they would then impress onto a piece of glass in order to make their own ‘map’ of the territory. We were expertly guided in this enterprise by artist Inge Panneels and led by our walking guides, Angela, George and Dougie.

There is an intimate relationship between walking and water. To walk is to find oneself immersed in an element that is impossible to grasp, that we are surrounded by and mixed up with. Normally, when it comes to walking, we think of this element as air, not water. But the more you reflect on the matter, the harder it is to distinguish the two. Not only are water and air mixed up with each other chemically and part of the same hydrological cycle, but to walk in the mist, rain, sleet and snow is to find oneself inundated by water, liquified, ‘unbordered’.

That sense of being ‘unbordered’ by walking is apparent in the etymology of the word dérive, a term invented by avant-garde, militant group, the Situationist International, in the 1950s in Paris. As the Situationists practised it, the dérive was an anarchic, sometimes absurd act of collective walking, an emancipation from the disciplined worlds of work and money, a poetic and random way of occupying (or rather being occupied) by space. In English, dérive is commonly translated as ‘drift’, a word that while certainly evoking a sense of being pulled along by a current (as if one were a piece of driftwood) nevertheless works to obscure a more profound and disruptive link between water and walking that is at play in the French. A possible literal translation of dérive is to break the banks of a river, to be flooded, in a sense all definitive borders washed away. Though certainly cruder, this re-phrasing underscores the way in which to go on a walk is to participate in a flow, to ascend to something other, to let mind and body stream.

According to Rebecca Solnit, one of the great modern-day theorists of walking, the rhythm of a walk is naturally attuned to the pace of thinking, a perfect ‘fit’ between mind and body which Solnit uses to account for the role that wandering has so often had in the works of European philosophers from Socrates through to Nietzsche. “I like walking,” Solnit says in Wanderlust: A History of Walking (2001), “because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.”

Solnit’s thesis is beguiling, but is it true? Is there really such a convenient explanation for the intellectual force of walking, its capacity to stimulate thought? Can we think of alternatives? A very different relationship between mind and matter comes to the fore when walking is no longer bound to the movement of the foot beating out a rhythm on solid ground but rather is associated with the trembling flux and flow of a river. This relationship is evoked by the very name of Galafoot, the spot where the Gala Water flows into the beautiful open expanse of the Tweed. Thinking here is no longer slow or repetitive. It is aquatic; it slips and slides. It folds in on itself intimately, like some secret wind seen on the surface of a river. Something we can feel but never know.

To compare a walk to the pull of a river allows for new ways of existing in time and space. The movement of a river is not a single flow in which time washes everything away. Rather the time of a river is more complex. It is composed of eddies, swirls, undercurrents, contraflows. In the river, time is anarchic. It moves backwards and forwards, it stops and starts; its rhythms are discordant and atonal. No single movement. Only chaotic pulsings and ripples. To be in a river is to be multiple, heterogenous, diverse; and so it is with walking.

This more chaotic idea of walking is especially resonant in group walks – something that the dérive was particularly concerned to champion. To walk with a river is to stop and start, to look at its eddies, to feel, for instance, the different pockets of air pressure along the narrow Black Path hugging Gala Water before its meeting with the Tweed. It is also to engage in a kaleidoscope of conversation, to move from one topic to another with indiscriminate enthusiasm, to point things out, to become neighbourly, to be open up in unexpected ways.

“The river feels freer here, more wild, bigger somehow,” one of the participants said, as she looked with her partner for the name of a wildflower on a phone app.

“I came here to relax, to wind down from my job in Edinburgh,” another walker said as we stopped and took in the river at Galafoot.

Robbie Coleman and Jo Hodges, Connecting Threads artists in residence along the Middle Tweed this summer, were thinking otherwise. They saw the Tweed as a connector, a body without borders, a mythical river in which all of sorts of experiences and events were entangled. They saw it as a new way of thinking about history, one in which flow and stasis, duration and event are held together in tension.

Other walkers spoke of the football stadium, the amazing brutalist stand designed by the architect Peter Womersley in the 1960s, which draws architectural enthusiasts from around the world to the clubhouse at Gala Fairydean Rovers.

Others from the town told me of its history, its industrial past, its murals, its connection with rugby football, its place in Scotland’s fashion industry, in part because of the Heriot-Watt School of Textiles and Design in Galashiels, and, of course, its present: the disastrous effects that two huge supermarkets on the edge of the town have had on the high street, a once bustling thoroughfare full of butchers, bakers, and pubs that are now abandoned or transformed into charity shops.

“It used to take me hours to get through the town on a Saturday,” Dougie said. “I was always being stopped by people, called in for a chat. Now I just bomb through it.”

In Galashiels, however, it does feel like new possibilities are emerging to fill these gaps. Both Hike and Bike Gub and Little Art Hub, for example, are both located in former retail spaces on Channel Street. Their goal is to exist as sites for community, offering routes of communication and connection, axle points.

As these examples show, to walk as a group is not to move steadily at 3mph, to keep up a steady pace. To walk as a group is to move in all directions at once, to embrace the random. It is also to pause, to interrupt, to follow a thought, idea or image just to see where it might lead. On our way back from Galafoot with Angela on a soft Saturday afternoon, we talked of the many murals that decorate buildings in Galashiels. Each might be seen as an attempt to mark a history, to show that ‘something happened here’, and indeed that things are happening here still. This attachment to place need not be limited to towns or regions or nations; it can encompass a jumbled geography of different spaces and scales. To stay close to the river is to think of what it means to be unbordered, ready to move through history, as if one were playing a series of musical scales, here and elsewhere at the same time.

What I’m suggesting is that a new temporal politics is made possible by the riverain quality of the dérive, a dissolution of those imperialist models of history that would divide the world and its cultures into a punctuated sequence of past, present and future. Like the river, the walker is everywhere at once, haunted by ghosts not only from the past but also the future.

On Sunday morning, in the hills above Gala, Robbie Colman and I talked of Martiniquan poet, Édouard Glissant’s figure of the nameless, faceless walker from his book Poetics of Relation. We noted how Glissant’s walker goes in circles, always following the same route in an act of “enclosed errantry”. Crucially, though, the walker is not confined to the circle; he never repeats the same movement. Rather, he returns in order to create something new, to disclose “a pattern we would catch if we had the means to discover it”. To discover that pattern is to go back to the future, to commune with ghosts that call out for some kind of reckoning with the present, an appointment with new possibilities to come.

Later, I recalled another moment from Bachelard’s Water and Dreams:

The reader will recognise in water, in its substance, a type of intimacy that is very different from those suggested by the depths of fire and rock. They will have to recognise that the material imagination of water is a special type of imagination… Water is truly the transitory element… A being dedicated to water is a being in flux.

For Bachelard, the imagination is not an abstract faculty and neither does it belong to the human alone. It is always materialised, predicated on the capacity of each of us to feel the impress of the world on our skin, in our lungs, to undergo the charge of things, to ‘course’ with them. The body is porous, full of holes, de-rived

In common with Bachelard’s materialism, these reflections on water and walking are situated. They are a confluence of my body, the bodies of water surrounding Gala, and the bodies of other walkers. A sort of communion took place in those encounters, something that was bigger than the sum of its parts, a connection that took me out of myself. There was no need to enter the river to feel part of that larger flux; the river was already inside me, going in all directions at once. Just like the mesh of multiple trails – those desire lines – that scored the Black Path by Gala Water and seemed, at least to me, to embody the presence of so many pasts in the presents, a throng of lively ghosts, a temporal labyrinth by the river.

Where did these minor paths lead? How to meet these ghostly companions drifting with us through time? A clue, perhaps, was given in the negative, in the physical surroundings of the town, in how life in Galashiels – human and non-human – had been so rationally distributed. To walk the banks of Gala Water today is to see the river exploited for its industrial properties. In Gala, water was ‘laded’ – diverted through gated channels to drive the linen mills of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From then on, the river was no longer allowed to be itself, to dérive.

Hard, as I walked past, not to make a comparison between the industrialised fate of Gala Water and the workers installed in those Victorian mills that bank the river. Both dammed up, controlled by clock time – a time without drift. As if to make that analogy palpable, during Galashiels Walking Festival, artist Inge Panneels had installed a huge facsimile of a map in Little Art Hub. The map depicted, in pink and white, the topography of the town in the 1860s, a waterscape of canals, borders, and incisions, a territory in which ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, if not separated (how could they be?), were certainly policed and disciplined so that no anarchic or useless crossing between the two could take place. On the map, water is something to speculate on, not something to feel or walk beside, to tremble and flow with.

In imagining possible futures for Galashiels, I want to walk the desire lines as a collective, allowing the bodies – all the bodies – to drift where they will, where they can, in an affirmation of aggregated movement. We are not here to make use of things or to extract from them. Poets and artists know that. We are here to feel and be touched by them. Walking like a river is one way of doing that, of affirming elemental life, existing as an emancipated body, receptive to healthy connections – those that paradoxically ‘unborder’ by situating us in place, so that, as Glissant says, we can develop a “passion for the land where one lives” in order to produce “an aesthetic of the earth”, an “art of interruption and connection”. In common with a river, this passion, this art, insists on variation and movement. In doing so, it intervenes into and disrupts capitalist time, the model that now, as in the abandoned factories of Galashiels, wants always to control rhythm and manage flow. The dérive also disturbs those rhythms. It insists on multiplicity, in diversifying patterns, in forking the pathways.

Through its mazy wanderings across time, the dérives around Galashiels that I took part in in late Spring 2024 tapped into the dreamtime of the factory workers, the men, women and children who operated the looms and carding machines in those imperialist centuries. In its recovery of forgotten pasts and erased imaginations, these dérives allowed us (re)discover the same dream that continues to haunt the contemporary, the dream of a future without labour, the dream that capital seems so terrified by, even as its technological systems and digital phantasmagorias have actually brought that dream into being, as a tangible reality. This is a dream made real, in those moments when we down tools and walk the desire lines that have already been mapped out for us by those companions of the past, the ones who have never left us, waiting, as they do, in the crook of the river, in the gala of Galafoot, on the other side of time; in those unborderings solicited by what Gaston Bachelard, at the very beginning, described as ‘the life of the trembling water’.

‘Town to River, River to Town’ was initiated in April 2024 as a creative partnership between Connecting Threads and Galashiels Walking Festival.

Carl Lavery is Professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Glasgow. His main research interests are in the fields of ecology and environment, contemporary French theatre and performance and performance writing. Much of this work is informed by a cross-disciplinary interest in site, politics, and aesthetics.