Category: Landscape

By the rivers of Babylon

The second day of September, the rain has relented, it’s 7am and the sun is shining, and down by the Thames the Canada geese have gathered, and I have as usual to navigate my way around both them and their droppings. The perils of running.

All so peaceful, though I can hear a gentle sloshing from the river if I stop beneath the big sycamore, and listen.

I run back into traffic, and a little bit of civilisation, although schools are still not back, and the roads still have a hangover August holiday calm.

I think of Sangatte, and the migrant crisis further afield in Europe as I head back home. Good fortune hardly describes my situation. We rejoiced so much in the Arab Spring, and it’s turned out to be the last and terrible throw of the neo-con mentality, where we assume that our western democratic ways are somehow inevitable, that history is pre-determined. I trust we will never think or feel or argue that way again.  It may be the highest aspiration of mankind, but the wholly unnecessary and unpredicted fate of Syria, visited on Aleppo, on Homs, on Palmyra, and the open channels for migrants through Libya, remind us that we meddle at our peril. We may affect to dislike the el-Sisi regime in Egypt, but we know it will serve a purpose in the end. Syria was on a slow irregular and tortured path before 2011, but it was stable, and the old country survived alongside the new middle classes in the cities.

I will read again William Dalrymple’s description of traveling through Syria in From My Holy Mountain. The image of a building shared as a place of worship by Christian and Muslim communities stays in my mind. And there was Palmyra to visit, a place of wonder.

Sometimes I run quietly and enjoy the silence and, God willing, the sunshine. On other days the thoughts come flooding in.

Gooseberries …

Today I’ve planted a gooseberry bush. There is a first in one’s life for everything. For now it’s straggling, but I look forward to a rich harvest, and gooseberry crumbles and fools and ice cream in years to come. I read that gooseberries and gooseberry bushes were especially popular among cotton-spinners in late 18th century Lancashire, which may in a minuscule way explain why we had one in my North Cheshire edge-of-spinning-country garden in the 1950s. I have I believe a silk-weaver in my Lancashire (Leigh) family tree. But I’ve yet to find a cotton-spinner.

Cotton mills were well-established in Manchester by the early 19th century. Up to 80,000 people gathered in St Peter’s Fields at the time of the Peterloo Massacre. Spinning had been industrialised on a massive scale, and there would have been no space for vegetable patches, and no gooseberry bushes.

High-rises don’t allow for small spaces out back. They remain emblematic of an older, more stable and (as we imagine it) quieter life, preserved now maybe in smallholdings and the gentle art of pottering.

The apple tree, the gooseberry bush and the rhubarb patch: part of old England…

Blackberry breakfast

Walking on a summer’s morning in Bushy Park, by a river (no name!), between the river and a stream, where no-one else goes. I can run, walk slowly, meditate as I walk, stop and linger, hear the slightest of sounds, watch fish swimming upstream, catch burdock burrs on my shorts, break a hemlock stem, pick early blackberries.

I see but don’t read articles on secret places in newspapers. They tell you where they are. Any special place that depends on quiet. Where? They tell you. There is space to fill in newspapers.

I will not divulge the whereabouts of my secret corner.

I’d not had breakfast that morning, and the two blackberries which melted in my mouth at maybe about 9.30 were my first food, and first of the year. And that was the high point of a beautiful day. Silence and sweetness and all things simple focused down to a single moment.

Ravilious and Rembrandt at the Dulwich Picture Gallery

Place in our modern world has been usurped by space, extended space, we’re always looking beyond the boundaries, for the next place along the line, rather than exploring where we stand….

The Ravilious exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery is all about place, about the artist’s acute sense of landscape, and all the man-made items (fields, chalk figures, fences, ships, propellers…) which give each landscape its identity.  I’m reminded of Finlay MacLeod’s wordlist drawn from the Isle of Lewis (see Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks, pp16,17): recording a living landscape woven through with the workings of man over many ages.

Ravilious is painter re-creating landscape, but the sense of place is almost palpably real.

Also in the Dulwich gallery is Rembrandt’s A Girl at the Window. This is enigmatic, extraordinary, a simple place, by a window, real, and yet imagined. Place needn’t be landscape!

Barbara Hepworth (exhibition at Tate Britain, summer 2015) identified not with a specific landscape, but with the forms of landscape, the Yorkshire hills of her childhood, and the hills and tors and megaliths of west Cornwall. Place is internalised and abstracted, but the sense of connection remains, and Hepworth’s work is all the more powerful if we’re aware of that Cornish link.

Also at the Tate just at the moment – Tracey Emin’s bed. If ever there was ‘place’ it’s this… but it’s momentary, woman-made, personal. And with no connection with any external landscape. Place without history and connections other than what we can glean about her own life story. Very much a place for our own time.

She was asked by the Tate if she’d like to choose two paintings to place on the wall near her bed – a curious kind of installation, and all the more so given that she chose two Francis Bacon paintings, one of a woman slumped over a settee, the other of a dog. The images are cerebral, disturbing and simple, they have no history, and the dog indeed needs a circle drawn around it to give it any kind of ‘place’ at all.

We need a place outside ourselves, place with history and with future, place where we’re part of a continuum. Ravilious and Hepworth do of course freeze place in time, but at the same time they open our eyes as observers, they enhance the experience of place. And as they moved on, to the next painting, the next sculpture, so do we as observers.

But in the case of the Rembrandt I have to admit I’m loathe to move on! There’s something in her gaze, and we don’t know who she is… There is history there, and a future, an enigma we’ll never resolve.

The night sky – and spacetime

From Russia, to the Welsh hills, and a retreat last week.

Up at 5, cup of tea in hand I’d stepped out and looked up, expecting cloud and drizzle, and …the stars were bright, the quieter stars of summer evenings (the stars of course roll right around the heavens once a year) which give a first showing to early risers in February and March. Long gone are Orion and the twins and the lion, it’s now the swan and the lyre rising up from the east, and the huntsman, Bootes, above, and Arcturus, no longer an evening announcement of spring, but in its full glory on a February morning.

The sky almost floats above you, pre-dawn just touching the hills.

Anything but floating…

Reading Philip Ball on the general theory of relativity (100 years this year since Einstein presented his paper on the subject) my usual puzzlement is just a little allayed by his comment that ‘Isaac Newton’s apple fell to Earth because it was, in effect, sloping down the slope of the dent that the planet’s mass induces in the fabric of spacetime’. Which means that it’s not gravity as an an invisible force holding me to Earth, rather I’m slipping down a dent in the fabric of spacetime.

This rather changes my way of thinking about things…

But my sense of wonder at the night sky, which first took a hold of me when I was eight-years-old, remains as it always was, and a spiritual sense is still a part of that wonder. I touch the Earth and the hand of God.

January – battening down – maybe not

Zenpolitics it seems has taken January off, almost unwittingly. It’s a month for battening down the hatches, keeping out the winter chill and all that sort of stuff, but unless you’re a determined recluse in acres of snowy countryside with a icy wind blowing so you hardly dare venture out, and ideally there are one or two wolves a-roaming and howling just to drill home the message… unless you’re all that and a bit more you’ll be on the train to work, driving round the M25, all the usual headaches but just a bit more in the dark than at other times of year.

And with almost February comes the snow and the ice, but no wolves yet.

Now the serious stuff. January has been the month of Charlie Hebdo, and much talk, wise and foolish, on the subject of free speech. And inequality in the wider world, with wealth ever more concentrated, has had a local reflection in the impact of the spending cuts on social welfare in the UK.

Two quotes have penetrated through to me in my eyrie above west London –

‘Like most religions, Christianity contains a faintly left-wing, anti-wealth message,’ said Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph. ‘Naively utopian, anti-growth.’ Christianity, Jeremy, was around long before left and right-wing came into common speech, and we trust that the message from the archbishops, wiser men than you, that economic growth alone won’t solve the country’s economic problems, and that the effect of recent spending cuts has been seriously damaging, will resonate with many, including most Telegraph readers. Rarely has a journalist looked so egregiously foolish.

Just to even things out, there’s Polly Toynbee, in the Guardian, claiming that in linking his mother and his faith, and suggesting (playfully) he might punch someone who insulted his mother, the Pope is using, in her words, ‘the wife-beater’s defence’. Quite how she got there only she knows, but it’s cheap and anyone who listened to the Pope’s actual remarks will know that it entirely misses the subtlety of the point he was conveying. To misrepresent wilfully (and I assume it is wilfully) is … let’s just say poor journalism.

Faith let it be remembered is deeply personal to countless millions and they will take insults against their faith seriously. If discrimination, bigotry or cruelty attaches to a faith it should be criticised, I’d almost say hammered, but for the attachments it carries, not for the faith that lies at its heart.

Free speech is priceless and an absolute, but so too are compassion and understanding. And of their nature, or rather human nature (everyone having their own point of view, as many shades of opinion as there are individuals on the planet),  they will conflict, and we all must strike a balance as best we can.

But, please, avoid barmy remarks, and cheap swipes. We can all do better than that.

Another New Year…

One day, Ming extravagance, and the epic achievements of Gutenberg and Luther, the next shove ha’penny (which can be highly competitive, but no history of fights as far as I am aware) and singing Auld Lang Syne outside a country pub. Yes, it’s New Year. And I wake to greet a murky and windswept morning with, no, not a hangover, but a stonking cold. (Origins of ‘stonking’?)

England can get no greyer than this, which lunch at another, lesser country pub hardly alleviated. The sin of serving no real ales was cardinal and all but unforgivable. And yet there was something appealing about the desolation of the Cotswold landscape, and braver, healthier souls than us were walking the country paths and straggling along the roads, and leaving muddy boots in pub porches.

Dustin Hoffman and Judy Dench falling in love on TV surprised us, less so Miranda marrying Gary. Hot toddies and we were both of us off to bed, early bed. With the ‘Blue Danube’ lightening a heavy step: we’d watched the New Year’s Day concert from Vienna in the morning, almost an indulgence, a perfect world, perfectly happy, music and ballet and gilded Baroque a bright concoction that always serves to erase the old year and set us out with optimism into the new…

Reasons to be cheerful

Two reasons to be cheerful:

1] Finding a poem which distills meaning in a moment, which stops the onward rush of events, and holds you still. You return to the fray a little bit calmer, and a little bit wiser.

2] Walking… I recently returned from four days on the South West Coast Path. Walking on a perfect early September morning down from Zennor to the coast and then with rapt concentration climbing and scrambling, gazing back across the headlands or out to sea, watching and listening for seals, a curlew calling, the early morning clarity, the play of light on water, and at that early stage of the day the complete absence of other people. Just me and a granite fastness on one side and the sea wide-stretching on the other. The mind didn’t wander or reflect on a world beyond, it stayed with the rough ground and the old stones and the bright sky and the big sea.

Spring is very much sprung

Some wonderful descriptions of spring.

Check out the earthbound Roger Deakin in Notes from Walnut Tree Farm: (7th May)

‘Everywhere this morning in the May sunshine I notice the sudden, magical growth of trees. The mulberry has just come into leaf overnight…yesterday there was no sign of anything more than the tiniest buds. The ash tree is sending out shoots. The laid hedge of the wood is bursting into fresh leaf. The coppiced hazels…’

Or the more heavenbound Thomas Merton: (12th March), in Kentucky:

‘The sun was warm. I stood by the wall and watched the lambs, I had not known of their arrival. Little black-eyed things, jumping like toys on the green grass. I thought: ‘Feed my lambs.’ There is certainly something very touching about lambs, until they find their way into holy pictures and become unpleasant.’

I would agree with him there.

Some of our own recent spring days have been days simply to live in and not to describe. Hopkins nobly attempts to describe the indescribable…

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—/ When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;/ Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush/  Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring/  The ear…

And finally, illustrating how even the high heavens can be brought down to earth,  compare Hopkin’s wonderfully elevated Windhover

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-/ dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding/  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air,…

with the this-time-earthbound Thomas Merton’s dental chair:

‘The dentist came from Cincinnati and I spent three-quarters of an hour in the chair watching the buzzards circling in the grey sky over the old sheep barn while he drilled a wisdom tooth.’

Merton would seem to have had a very superior out-of-doors dentist.

No Country For Old Brits

Just finished a quick reading of No Country For Old Men. A landscape of violence, where even Sheriff Bell finds no hope, where the devil at work maybe the only explanation. Compare the very different noir landscape of Brighton in the recent Brighton Rock movie (based on the Graham Greene novel of course), Pinkie the Chigurh equivalent, the difference being that Pinkie is on his way down, faced with life and death decisions, where he chooses death, another person’s, each time. Chigurh is already there, the only decisions he makes are death decisions, save for when he tosses a coin to decide Carla Jean’s fate (the coin falls the wrong way), but even that palls before the degradation of Pinkie urging suicide on Rose.

That really is enough of that. I turned for restoration (by way of extreme contrast!) to January in Roger Deakin’s Notes From Walnut Tree Farm where there is peace in landscapes where man and nature have evolved side by side, rather than one all but seeking the destruction of the other. Texas may have redeeming features (we know Brighton has a few), but Cormac McCarthy sure as hell doesn’t want us to know about them.