Reading the Runes

When he read at the University of Edinburgh last week, poet and author John Burnside made some illuminating points about his own work. First, while he appreciates the problems that are inherent in using a “fallen” language, Burnside also likes to explore the conjuring capacities of that language, best represented by the figure of Orpheus, who is able to sing creatures into being. Second, he can identify only a few moments in his life when he has been able to “step outside” of this problematic medium of language: when taking LSD, and when experiencing certain states of mind brought about by phases of mental ill health. In relation to this second point, Burnside attributes his poetry’s repeated attempts to gesture towards meaning or pattern in the universe, without recourse to a named deity, to his status as a sufferer of apophenia – the tendency to assign meaning to randomly occurring events. Habitually reading the runes of the meaningless informational “noise” of the everyday, the apophenic can drift towards paranoia, but also towards elation (depending on the way the signs appear to tend).

Apophenia is one state among several connected to “magical thinking,” a form of thinking that can produce anomalous beliefs of causality, apparently supported by experience, but having no necessary basis in truth. This is not, of course, so very far from religion, which haunts the work of lapsed Catholic Burnside (who claimed last week to have “a crush on Presbyterianism”). The phrase “magical thinking” is perhaps most familiar not from the field of psychiatry but from the title of Joan Didion’s grief memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. In the latter, it is understood in its anthropological sense, as a belief that a series of rituals or behaviours can put off a terrible event, or alter what has already occurred. It is a kind of fantasy of control in an unresponsive universe. This anthropological interpretation of the phrase is of course also relevant to Burnside’s work, which contains many small, ritualistic gestures of tribute or hope.

Last week, the writer read in part from a work-in-progress, a novel set in the Arctic Circle. Given the notes above, it will be interesting to see how Burnside tackles the far North, these days more heavily freighted than ever with ideas of a sacred space under threat, carefully watched for signs of the planet’s fate.

Put Off Thy Shoes

This summer’s collaboration between poets Melanie Challenger and John Kinsella, published on the RSA Arts & Ecology website, draws attention to the sense of touch. Mel’s fourth poem in the series refers to the “Unconquerable eye, dux of body’s province” which, with its passion for sites and sights, is “A blight at the dying rootstock of body’s / Other charms.” The series was born out of the mutual agreement between the poets that travelling by aeroplane to complete readings was indefensible. The recalibration of the hierarchy of the senses that results in touch being foregrounded is therefore a product of the attempt to refocus on the regional, to reconnect physically and mentally with immediate surroundings. The capacity of the human body to be in touch with its environment through being restricted to its own, unmediated scope is hymned by these poems.

In a recent “green book group” session organised by the novelist and environmentalist Gregory Norminton, participant Alette Willis read from The Woman Who Watches Over the World: A Native Memoir by Linda Hogan. Her chosen extract included an incident of barefoot walking, an episode that tied into the book’s contentions about the corrective that Native American thinking can offer to a Western culture that connects knowledge and intellect with the visual sense. Hogan’s approach to landscape is resolutely multi-sensory, but the barefoot walk is particularly resonant in that it enacts a range of emotions, states and intentions. To walk barefoot may, I think, be interpreted in the following ways:

1. An act of humility
2. A punishment or penance
3. A tribute (these first three forming parts of the pilgrimage experience)
4. A ritual, often involving suffering (e.g. firewalking)
5. An indicator of disenfranchisement via class, enslavement or other form of submission
6. Therefore, a marker of poverty
7. A sexual practice (thinking in particular of barefoot dancers)
8. A claim to freedom
9. A statement of nonconformism
10. A claim to fashionable status (e.g. hippy chic)
11. A spiritual act
12. A claim of connectedness to the earth and, therefore, the Earth
13. An act of mourning
14. An indicator of innocence (e.g. unshod children)
15. A mark of respect (removal of shoes in holy places)
16. A means of treading lightly, in order to prevent harm (as in the Jain tradition)
17. A marker of commitment to peace
18. A statement of elemental connection

There may well be more interpretations of the barefoot walk, some stemming from readings within other cultures that might contradict my own reading of the gesture. But crucially there is something about touch, and in particular about touching the land with one’s feet, that suggests both a connection to the regional, and a humble approach. Perhaps a barefoot walk is, at the metaphorical level, the way we should all choose to travel. As Exodus 3.5 has it: “Put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground.”

Ecopoetics Rule 1: A Good Workman Always Blames His Tools

In searching for a new springcoppice “Poem of the Month,” I have been reminded of Andy Brown and John Burnside’s poetry collection Goose Music (Salt, 2008). Here the poets set out explicitly to address the question of how human beings might dwell ethically on the earth. An ecologically engaged collection, it explores the capacities of an ecopoetic mode to analyse and explicate relationships between human beings and the wider natural world. One poem, “The Other Brother – Part III: My Brother Audubon,” describes the undertakings of the great ornithological illustrator:

“The bird he sees and the bird he draws

are one. Which begs an inner silence,

shifting from the world of words

to the language of tone and line. 

He must forget the names he knows – 

neither ‘tail’ nor ‘wing’, nor ‘beak’ nor ‘claw’ – 

and simply more along the edge of each, 

with his eye set in his pencil-tip,   

thinking of no sound at all – save that of ink

on paper – to catch the truth

of their existence, out there, in the world.”

[…]

   

Throughout his career, Burnside has demonstrated a particular interest in the notion of language as a Fall from a direct relationship with the natural world. His work incorporates a fascination with Adamic naming, and the implication that the poet himself must always work with broken tools. Yet one of the most distinctive features of Burnside’s poetry is his rhythmic listing of plants, animals and features of the landscape. He appears torn between poetic cataloguing that is a kind of hymning, or perhaps incantation, and the notion that naming succeeds only in letting the described world escape.

In the poem “Taxonomy I: Flora,” Burnside notes that “looking always worked towards a word: / trading the limits of speech / for the unsaid presence.” In this reading, any act of articulation has an elegiac quality, since language displaces this presence of what remains unsaid. (The elegiac note is an appropriate one for the work of Audubon, who famously killed vast numbers of birds in order to accurately record their appearance.) Further, in “Taxonomy 2: Fauna,” Burnside reports that “Once we are close enough to give them names / we cannot help but treat them as our own,” one of the poet’s more explicit statements about the consequences of knowledge, inevitably framed in language, and its links to the use of the natural world as resource. The latter claim suggests that an ecopoetic work would necessarily acknowledge the faultiness of language, its displacement of the real and, most importantly, its unfair claims to environmental ownership.

In “My Brother Audubon” the problem of interceding language is side-stepped by the illustrator as he creates a link between his direct experience of the sight of a bird, and the picture he captures on the page. The closing down of the language gap – in which the witnessed bird is described in the mind, before being transcribed on the page – is indicated by the transfer of the eye to the tip of the pencil. Looking and touching / drawing “are one.” The pencil-point eye becomes an organ of touch and trace – it is epidermic, a particular modification of the skin. Yet while language must be removed from Audubon’s endeavours in order for accuracy of depiction to be enabled, such a practice is described through the medium of just this faulty, fallible language. The artist may be able to side-step words, but the poet(s) of course cannot.

In Nature Cure (Chatto & Windus, 2005) Richard Mabey delivers a credo: “I believe that language and imagination, far from alienating us from nature, are our most powerful and natural tools for re-engaging with it.” Ecopoetics must, then, continue to work with the only tools available, the broken ones of a language that claims false ownership, intercedes and ill describes. In doing so it must acknowledge this problematic toolkit. A good ecopoetic workman must always blame his tools.

"A Certain Just Quality"

I somehow missed John Burnside's "Jura Diary" when it was originally published in The Scotsman at the end of last year. The Scottish Book Trust, who funded the writers' retreat which Burnside recounts, have now posted the diary here. It includes the following musings on sound, a recent preoccupation of springcoppice (here; here):
"The writer's first concern is attention to sound. Not to marks on the page, and - for the poet at least - not to questions of meaning. It might seem mystical to say so, but I do think meaning emerges from the sound. [...] And what of the word 'sound' itself? It's one of my favourite notions: a magical, immensely rich feature of coastal waters, the word for what my trade is all about, and one of the aptest ways of talking about things being right, about a certain just quality to a thing, or a person or an event. She's sound. This boat is sound. All the joy of using language can be summed up in that use of the word."

"Love. Art. Gardening."

The May 2009 edition of fashion and lifestyle magazine Harper's Bazaar bears the headline "Fashion Gets Natural." An edition inspired by the natural world, it features a fashion spread entitled "Primal Passions," promising that "A hint of evolutionary theory adds a powerful edge to summer's nature-inspired looks," a claim that appears to have something to do with "fossil-inspired textures." A page devoted to "Natural Facials" requires a visit to a London salon and an outlay of between £50 and £575. It is easy to laugh at the "greening up" of fashion magazines (see also Vanity Fair's Environment section), but such obvious attempts to tap into the marketability of ideas of nature are a useful reminder that, as understood by human beings, "nature" has always been subject to fashions. It is impossible to step outside of trends of thinking and commune with nature, although our language is filled with the husks of such attempts - back to nature, in touch with nature, in tune, in harmony, at one with nature. Is there any way out of this impasse?

Much as so-called "wilderness travel" is on the rise, it remains beyond the resources of many people. But one encounter which we might have with nature on a day to day basis is the activity of gardening (I use the term loosely, writing as I am from my own "garden" - a series of plants in pots on the common stair of a block of flats). The garden is of course a regulated and circumscribed space, often seen in contrast to the "true wild" (although I am short of examples of the utterly "natural" and free from human intervention). But as a place where anyone can interact with soil, weather and cycles of growth and decay, the garden offers a great place to think through human understandings of nature, and the language we use to describe it. Gardener poets such as Alice Oswald, Sarah Maguire, Kathleen Jamie and Stanley Kunitz (discussed by Jamie at the National Library of Scotland, write-up here) have made this connection.

In Harper's Bazaar, Jeanette Winterson muses on the joy of gardening, under the title "Earthly Pleasures." After the obligatory reference to her own childhood, and a nod to the gardening talents of Vita Sackville-West (whose Sissinghurst garden is pictured), Winterson writes convincingly about the useful meeting points of garden-tending and storytellling:
"Gardening, like storytelling, is a continuing narrative. One thing leads to another. Like stories, there is always something going on in the garden long after the gardener has gone to bed. [...] Love. Art. Gardening. Each is about relationship; our relationship to one another, and to the mythic narrative of our lives, and to our one and only real home: planet Earth. [...] It seems to me that to be in relationship to the soil is at once vigorous and robust, peasant-like in its obviousness, and also strangely metaphysical. It embodies so much of what we are - the food we eat, the land we walk upon, our final end."

Perhaps stepping outside of fashion means stepping into the garden? While the eternal connection between man and earth has been re-thought according to ideological fashions (most notably Nazism's "blood and soil"), and while getting one's hands dirty is a Harper's-approved fashionable move, tender care for plants and animals might also be the most accesible way for many of us to move beyond the faddish and find an unencumbered pleasure in the natural world.

Dead, Mad or a Poet

The storyteller Eric Maddern has just completed the second leg of a story tour entitled "What the Bees Know" (of which he has much experience, as a bee keeper at his Cae Mabon retreat). Throughout the tour he has used bees as a "metaphor for what we're doing to the planet," he tells the BBC here. (This may be a case of synecdochic thinking, but as Maddern is an Honorary Chief Bard of the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, we will presume a more holistic approach). In the course of his interview with the BBC he reminds us of the legend of Cadair Idris, one of the mountains of his neighbouring Snowdonia range. The story goes that anyone spending the night in the "Devil's chair," the hollow or seat of the mountain, wakes up dead, mad or a poet. This was a tale we were told growing up in Shropshire - what a great testament, I now think, to the power of landscape. The Victorian poet Felicia Hemans, according to her poem "The Rock of Cader Idris," teetered on the brink of outcomes one and two, before happily settling on number three:

[...]
I lay there in silence-a spirit came o'er me;
Man's tongue hath no language to speak what I saw:
Things glorious, unearthly, pass'd floating before me,
And my heart almost fainted with rapture and awe.
I view'd the dread beings around us that hover,
Though veil'd by the mists of mortality's breath;
And I call'd upon darkness the vision to cover,
For a strife was within me of madness and death.
[...]
I saw what man looks on and dies-but my spirit
Was strong, and triumphantly lived through that hour;
And, as from the grave, I awoke to inherit
A flame all immortal, a voice, and a power!
Day burst on that rock with the purple cloud crested,
And high Cader Idris rejoiced in the sun;-
But O! what new glory all nature invested,
When the sense that gives soul to her beauty was won!

Nature Writing Manifesto Draft 1

"If it was really Shelley who stood and listened to the skylark, it was not Shelley in any important sense; he did not mean for me, reading the poem, to be thinking about him listening to the bird; he was entirely willing to vanish, and to let me become the 'I'.” Mary Oliver, Blue Pastures. Listed among “John Burnside’s Favourite Poetry Sayings” at Poetry Archive (link here).

Spring Coppice

I grew up in a house not far from Spring Coppice, Lyth Hill, Shropshire. By my day the 1970s sprawl of Bayston Hill village had spoilt the surrounding area, but Lyth Hill always had something special about it, no matter how beset with Sunday walkers and misbehaving dogs. Relatively few walkers go all the way to the coppice, but the rewards are many – Bluebells, Snowdrops, just enough trees to get lost in. It was interesting, too, as a place where work had been done. Any small wood kept for the purpose of periodical cutting to near ground level may be considered a coppice. That “periodical” is crucial; coppicers must know just how much timber to take from the trees, and when, to allow them to continue to flourish. The trees return this care with further growth. It’s a labour of the hand and the head that enforces a symbiotic relationship between man (usually man) and tree. The term “coppice” is both a noun and a verb – reflecting the doing that goes into using and maintaining such a woodland.

In Tennyson’s The Princess there’s a lovely use of this evocative word: “Said Ida; ‘let us down and rest;’ and we / Down from the lean and wrinkled precipices, / By every coppice-feathered chasm and cleft, / Dropt through the ambrosial gloom to where below / No bigger than a glow-worm shone the tent / Lamp-lit from the inner.” It’s a feeling that every wild camper knows (although not necessarily with princess in tow).

But it wasn’t Tennyson who was the presiding literary spirit of our Shropshire coppice, but Mary Webb. Living in nearby Spring Cottage from 1917-1927, the author famously gained inspiration from the Shropshire landscape. Webb’s literary reputation has waxed and waned over the years – following her early death, then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was fulsome in his praise, but later readers (including, famously, Stella Gibbons) were less impressed. Whatever we might think of her novels, I’ve always found Webb’s “Spring of Joy” nature journals thoughtful and instructive – albeit unfashionably religious and somewhat over-written for contemporary tastes. Perhaps we might do better to understand Webb as primarily a nature writer, and not as a kind of non-modernist novelist of the modernist era. With the current resurgence of interest in all things “green,” Webb is worth further consideration. In naming this blog I invoke Webb’s attentive and wondering attitude towards the natural world – whether on her doorstep or beyond.