O Beautiful River: Making the Familiar Strange

O Beautiful River is a phenomenological project, as I aim to suspend whatever preconceptions I may have about the river in order to discover what is hidden in my everyday relationship with it. Dance scholar Maxine Sheets-Johnson states that phenomenology — deep observation liberated from predeterminations — makes the familiar strange. This idea resonates with me as it has in relation to other land-based projects I’ve done. As I’ve shifted away from my habitual, passive relationship to the river, characterized largely by glances through train windows or while hurtling downtown on a bike or in a car, the river has begun swelling with meaning in my mind and perceptions. Now my perception of the river is not incidental to some other goal: it is the reason I am sweating, week after week, as I bike upriver under a blazing summer sun, putting all other obligations on hold in order to dedicate attention to what would otherwise remain a backdrop to everyday life. In turn, the Schuylkill is evolving into a being altogether different from the one I’d constructed in my my mind, the familiar picturesque, couple-miles of urban waterfront morphing into an awesomely long, branching vessel gathering the aspirations and waste of innumerable lives and systems of life across multiple counties and townships. Of course, as rivers go, it is very modest, its 135 miles dwarfed by nearer and farther cousins such as the Mississippi (2300 miles), the Ganges (1600 miles) and the Nile, which clocks in at an astounding 4300 miles. Still, I have never traveled 100+ continuous miles on my own steam, and have therefore never experienced the accumulating sensation of distance through working muscles. Something about the effort — the aching back, the skin prickling in humid air, the greedy inhalation of water every other mile — brings me orders of magnitude closer to the river than I ever am while gazing passively through car, train or plane windows. My working body senses the ongoingness of her work carrying upstream messages towards the sea while, in deep time, carving her signature — a joyfully rippling, snake-like figure — into the skin of the earth.