“And the cause that they died for [is] lost in the idling bird calls, and the records they left are cryptic at best, lost in obsolescence. The text will not yield, nor x-ray reveal, with any fluorescence where the hand of the master begins and ends.”
- Joanna Newsom, ‘Sapokanikan’
My first encounter with the concept of ‘Everywhen’ was through Daniel Sherrell’s book Warmth -- which contains some of the best writing on climate change I have read. He explains the term, coined by anthropologists to describe the religio-cultural worldview of Aboriginal Australians, as “a time so fluid and capacious that sequence fades toward irrelevance”, “[a time] much bigger than the “present” conceived by Western philosophy.” A useful tool, Sherrell argues, in our fight against climate change, because the spatial element of the Everywhen makes both our past and our future inevitable. It’s already here, all around us.
For his book, Sherrell walked the ancestral land of the Goolarabooloo clan of north-western Australia, where Aboriginal culture has continuously existed for at least 50,000 years. That same land carries tracks of dinosaurs, hundreds of millions of years old, everywhere, “preserved in stone and set down in the everywhen.” His companions point out to him, “Three paperbark trees — out of place, set apart from any grove – […] the digging sticks left over by three sisters, who have themselves become three pillars of rock further down the coast.” Such depth of time in one place will feel like an epiphany to anyone.
Having had a very poor grasp of (the anthropological concept of) Everywhen before, I recently had an epiphany of my own in the much younger Old World, when I spent a long weekend in Thessaloniki. Now, I’ve been to many ‘historical places’ all over Europe, but never has the past felt so ubiquitous. It was everywhere, unavoidable. Not in an overly conservative or precious way – sure, half of the city is an UNESCO World Heritage site, whole blocks in the centre are excavation sites, but the sheer amount made it feel almost commonplace. Like traffic lights, or weed stores.
So what struck me most was not any individual monument, or simply the juxtaposition of Ancient and Modern Greek, Paleochristian, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, and Sephardic Jewish building styles, but their confluence, the way in which all of Thessaloniki’s many pasts seem to still exist functionally today, all of it beautifully interconnected.
It was the 14th-century Vlatades Monastery and one of the monks’ bright red Smart Frontwo parked in front of it. It was the 4th-century Rotunda of Galerius and the stray cats that had made a home for themselves in the overgrown, Byzantine ruins in the surrounding gardens. It was the Arch of Galerius and the fifteen or so Greek teenagers chain-smoking underneath; the Church of Saint Panteleimon and the 1970s apartment building that enveloped it; the city walls – modern renovation on top of rugged Ottoman brickwork on top of abiding Roman ingenuity on top of 2400 year old foundations – and the anarchist symbols spraypainted on them. I think a lot about my place, our place in history, and for a few days it felt like this was that place: the then and now as one.
Which brings me to an album that I’ve been dying to write about ever since I first discovered it, and that I thought about a lot while in Thessaloniki: The Water is the Shovel of the Shore (2022) by Shovel Dance Collective. An album so vast, so specific, so nerdy, so inventive, and so genuinely cool, I couldn’t and still can barely believe my ears. In four increasingly grim movements, the group blends traditional folk songs from all over the British Isles (and Guyana) with field recordings, tape hiss, and musique concrète, all of it revolving around the concept of water. It manages to feel both like an Alan Lomax style document of ethnomusicology and the exact kind of abrasive tomfoolery you’ll find all over your average Rewire Festival line-up. During the first movement, the sounds of the Thames make way for a group rendition of ‘The Weary Whaling Grounds’, recorded at the very dock from which whalers in the 1840s set off to the titular waters of Greenland, which in turn makes way for the sounds of sirens, construction, and the incessant clanging of empty flagpoles.
There’s a strong sense of anachronism to the work of Shovel Dance Collective: many of the songs and the way they’re sung feel incredibly out of place alongside the sounds of traffic and modern construction. Perhaps that’s what makes it feel so bold and radical: we’d collectively moved on from both the substance and aesthetic of traditional folk songs, and here’s a bunch of twenty-somethings proving it’s everything but an ancient relic. The group explains as much in an (excellent) interview with The Quietus’ Alastair Shuttleworth:
The colloquial meaning of ‘traditional’ (‘the same as it’s always been’) is often misleadingly mapped onto ‘traditional music’. The band suggest the latter is better defined by the music’s loss of fixed authorship to history, essentially making it public property which is covered, rearranged and redistributed through the generations. “Experimentation is a huge part of things in traditional music” as a result, claims harpist and whistler Fidelma Hanrahan. “It’s not frozen in time – it’s constantly changing.”
Rather than emphasizing creative reinvention or subversion, which seems to often be a prerequisite for artistic relevance, Shovel Dance Collective much prefers embracing the richness of the material. Here, the crux lies in partaking in a practice that is ubiquitous throughout generations, instead of the dogmatic pursuit of individuality that underlies most of today’s pop music. In the words of my favourite fictitious folk singer, “If it was never new, and it never gets old, then it’s a folk song.” This is community across generations. The 1840s in folk music seem much closer in time than the 1970s do in pop music; chronology is hardly of the matter.
I have found great comfort recently in these kinds of undertakings; by people who are in no way of a traditional or conservative persuasion (quite the opposite), but whose work exists in this kind of Everywhen. They make take from artforms long considered archaic, but that’s much more to do with our collective fixation on modernity and progress. To me, the work of Shovel Dance Collective, or their kindred spirits Broadside Hacks, or my favourite Zeeland volkszanger / paper cutter broeder Dieleman, although inevitably tied to our current predicament, summons real and imagined pasts, presents, and (crucially) futures alike.
More concretely, it’s gradually changing the way I view my own work. Now that I’ve been without a regular publication for a few months, I’ve been dipping my toes in the hellish ordeal that is pitching, something that ostensibly demands originality and novelty above all. How else are you going to distinguish yourself in a hundred-or-so words? With that in mind, it’s been healthy to access, from time to time, that timeless space, to realize the beauty in retelling stories that have been told a thousand times over. Because some things never get old.
Great post, Ruben! Everywhen is such a beautiful vision of the world. Similarly, I had this wondering recently: is memory a reaffirmation of linear time or a rejection of it?
This paradox of tradition that you're wrestling with at the end reminds me of this line I've been mulling over this week by Ursula K. LeGuin "To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return." They seem connected.