Guest blog: Reading the Cards, by Nancy Campbell

January 26, 2012 By 3 Comments

Nancy Campbell is a writer and printmaker. Her publications include ‘After Light’, ‘The Night Hunter’ and ‘How to say I love you in Greenlandic: An Arctic Alphabet’. In 2012 she will be working with Siglufjörður, a small fishing community in northern Iceland, to record the changing marine environment. http://www.nancycampbell.co.uk

Reading the Cards

There is a card game which differs from pelmanism in that every card is different and from solitaire in that there can never be a conclusion to it. As a child I was given a shabby nineteenth-century deck; down the generations the packaging had been lost and the cards were held together with a rubber band of comparable antiquity. Lacking its original case and any rulebook, to this day I have been unable to discover its name, or whether I played it as the maker intended.     

The fifty cards, slim and furred with age, depicted not hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds but whimsical landscapes. One showed a magnificent medieval fortress; another, boats on a lake bordered by palm trees; and still others, sublime mountain ranges. Yet whatever the scenery, there was always a road on the horizon, along which a tiny carriage was driving.     

These views were not self-contained vignettes. I could join each card to any other, because, however unpredictable the inclines and settlements at the centre, the road reached the edges at the same point on every one. Aligning these extravagant geographies, I made a cardboard continent. The passengers in the little carriage can scarcely have felt a jolt as they crossed from Alpine pass to desert dune; however far they travelled, they never had to fear dropping over a precipice or reaching a closed border, for there was always a card in my hand, ready to lay down to prevent their vehicle rolling into annihilation. And, sure enough, there the carriage was, pictured on the next card.      

Not all explorers are so fortunate.

Later I learnt to play with language: juxtaposing letters; shuffling words within sentences; diverting the reader’s passage. No sequence of chromolithographed cards could represent the world as vividly as these alphabetical arrangements. Yet last winter, travelling in Greenland, I found myself surrounded by scenes that none of the cards had prepared me for, and which even my language was barely equipped to describe.     

The Arctic landscape is forged from water. Glaciers advance, churning a path through basalt cliffs, and thunder into the ocean. The fast ice creeps across the bay, extending the shoreline by a mile and more, only to vanish on a stormy night. In calmer weather icebergs drift with the tide, forming protean mountain ranges on the horizon; as their peaks crumble, they turn to restore their balance as slowly as dreaming sleepers do.      

The inhabitants of this mutable landscape speak Kalaallisut, or Greenlandic. Their daunting words express concepts that other languages tiptoe around with a phrase but, when spoken, the suffixes are uttered so softly that an untrained ear cannot hear them. Verbs accrue morphemes, while nouns tend to disappear. It was once customary to name people after objects, but since a taboo forbade reference to the dead, the favoured objects were repeatedly renamed. The power of such words is not diminished by their absence from the vocabulary.     

Longing to make sense of these silences, I borrowed an early Greenlandic–English dictionary from Upernavik Museum. I found the bowdlerised English definitions almost as puzzling as the original Kalaallisut; several corrections in a contemporary italic hand suggested that the dictionary was fallible. On seeing akiatsianga – officially defined as ‘take hold (of it) together with me’ – amended to ‘carry me, please’ I wondered what circumstances had led an amateur lexicographer to discover such an error.

The early history of Kalaallisut is unwritten; records begin with the arrival of Danish missionaries in Greenland during the eighteenth century. The Danes set down Kalaallisut in the Latin alphabet while asserting sovereignty over the land and establishing Danish as the language of administration. In contrast with other Eskimo-Aleut languages, Kalaallisut does not use the Inuktitut syllabary. The orthography of the language was still being debated when my dictionary was printed in Copenhagen at the start of the twentieth century. Today the alphabet contains eighteen letters, although only twelve are used at the beginning of words. A few cards create a winning hand for those with the courage to play them.

Greenland achieved a degree of political autonomy with the establishment of Self Rule in 2009, and once again Kalaallisut became the official language of the nation known, in its own words, as Kalaallit Nunaat. But government recognition does not guarantee survival. In the same year, the United Nations culture agency designated Kalaallisut ‘vulnerable’ and predicted that Avanersuaq and Tunumiit oraasiat, the North and East Greenlandic dialects, would disappear within a century. (Qavak, a South Greenlandic dialect, is already extinct.) While many Greenlanders adopt the languages of international culture and commerce, climate scientists have noticed that Kalaallisut catalogues the Arctic ecosystem with empirical precision. Can the environment survive without the language? Can the language survive without the environment?    

 Nancy Campbell

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Is nature writing too nice?

January 20, 2012 By 15 Comments

I never much liked the English Romantic poets; even as an English literature-obsessed teenager, forced to write dreary essays about Wordsworth and Keats, something about them always made me want to spit. (But then, I was always more inclined towards the likes of Moby Dick than ‘Ode to a Nightingale’.) It’s not that I didn’t or don’t admire much of what the Romantics stood for: I do. It was absolutely necessary to provide an intellectual and artistic alternative to the increasing mechanisation of thought and rationalisation of nature in the wake of the industrial revolution and the Enlightenment.

What I can’t tolerate is the way some of them executed it, and here Wordsworth (especially in his later years) is arguably the worst culprit. Faced with the growing understanding that however many nice poems you write, ‘nature’ isn’t all pretty daffodils, Wordsworth retreated into depression, and then decided that nature was probably subordinate to humanity after all, in the ongoing search for transcendence which none of these writers could seem to leave behind. So much Romantic writing is filled with talk of nature’s ‘sublimity’ and so much moralising nonsense accompanied it – and it can be argued that this only succeeded in further enhancing duality – the very division between man and nature that they set out originally to heal. They run the risk of putting ‘nature’ so far above human capability that in fact nature becomes God – something to be aspired to, but never attained by mere sinful humans.

Not surprisingly perhaps Nietzsche couldn’t much tolerate it either, referring to “The insipid and cowardly concept ‘nature’ devised by nature enthusiasts ( – without any instinct for what is fearful, implacable and cynical in even the ‘most beautiful’ aspects), a kind of attempt to read moral Christian ‘humanity’ into nature – Rousseau’s concept of nature, as if ‘nature’ were freedom, goodness, innocence, fairness, justice, an idyll …”

Fortunately for the future of British ‘nature writing’, antidotes to all this sublimity came along in the form of DH Lawrence, Ted Hughes, RS Thomas – poets for whom nature simply WAS, and did not need to be more than it was, or to represent any features that humans could superimpose on it. More on all that later, no doubt, on this blog.

And yet, and yet – so much of the ‘nature writing’ we see today still falls right into the same trap. We have seen it very clearly recently, in so many of the submissions we’ve received for our forthcoming ecopoetry anthology. Except that now, what is curious is that the poems which are focused on ‘poetic moments’ of admiring pretty daffodils are matched by poems that can only be described as self-flagellating guilt dumps. We aspire to an ecopoetry – to an ecoliterature – that moves beyond all of that. None of which is to say that guilt isn’t appropriate when we look at what we’ve inflicted on the planet – and none of which is to say that there isn’t still a need for very fine poems that celebrate the beauty and mysteries of the natural world too. But what we really long for is writing – whether poetry or prose – that connects the two conflicting responses to the natural world and then moves on. What we need from ‘nature writing’ is to replace it with genuine ecoliterature – literature that doesn’t just acknowledge, but that actively embraces all the contradictions and discomforts inherent in our relationship with the natural world – those contradictions which surface in all of our genuine attempts to reconnect.

Sharon

Filed Under: Nature writing Tagged With: ,

Henry Williamson: Tarka the Otter, read by the River Taw

January 17, 2012 By 1 Comment

We are grateful to Tim Halpin, who is one of the contributors to the May issue of EarthLines Magazine, for saying that we could ‘steal’ the rather unusual reviews from his blog, Read by the River - subtitled ‘Book reviews on location’. Tim has a new take on book reviewing: ’I don’t read books just anywhere. The location has to be appropriate somehow. Maybe there’s an obvious connection between the setting of the novel and the place where I read it. Maybe there’s a connection with the author. Maybe there’s an obvious disconnection (I doubt I’ll ever get a chance to read a book about the Arctic on location, so why not tell you about reading it on the train, which is where most people will read it anyway). Maybe, if it’s a really absorbing book, it doesn’t matter where you read it.’ We hope you’ll enjoy Tim’s reviews as much as we do … and here is the first of them: Tarka the Otter.
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North Devon is all Tarka country now: there’s Tarka Tennis, Tarka Housing Association, Tarka Holiday Park, even Tarka Chimney Sweeps. But, to my shame, I’ve never read Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter, despite having lived in Devon for years. So I’ve come to one of my favourite spots on one of Tarka’s rivers, the River Taw, to finally read the book.

I parked at Chapelton Station, on the Tarka Line, and walked across a field and over a footbridge to one of the best wild swimming spots on the whole river. In summer, at least. As I look for a good place to sit and read, a buzzard erupts out of a nearby tree. He struggles to find a thermal on a grey second of December, and instead lopes over to another standard hedge tree, his wings beat long, sullen strides. The khaki brown river is full. When I was last here I sat under the bridge with my legs dangling in the water, squeaming as small fish nibbled my feet. Now, a fallen ash tree that has been swept down the river is jammed in front of the bridge, pinned between two of the bridge’s brick supports. The noise of the river slowly crushing and stripping the corpse is not quite loud enough to drown out the sound of the wet A377 or the nearby timber merchant. I can’t even imagine an otter swimming here now. I settle down with a picnic blanket and Thermos flask next to the chainsawed remains of a tree trunk, and begin.

Something that Williamson does very well is give the reader a different perspective on the countryside. I’ve read that whilst writing he would crawl about through the grass, to get an otter’s-eye view. But even in the first chapter, the narrator goes further, describing different perspectives of time on the river. The river can remember the 300 years of a now-dead oak tree’s life, and knew rumours of the Roman occupation. A water vole hurries breathlessly to clear out its nest hole. My favourite measure of time (a bit later on) was when Tarka found an egg and “ate it before the shadow of a grass-stalk had moved its own width on the bank” (35).

As I get to the end of Chapter One, I realise that I’m having more trouble than usual falling into the book world. It has begun to rain gently, and there are now engineers working on the Tarka Line, as loud as the train, when it passes. But more than both of these, it is the river that’s hindering my imagination. The real river seems to be acting as a barrier to the river in the book, not letting me imagine otters swimming about placidly in the standing waves, eddies and debris. This is somewhat disappointing; not at all the result I’d expected.

Rather than raw fish and eels, I brought a flask of sugary coffee, which I drink whilst waiting for the rain to pass. It wouldn’t do to go getting library books wet, not even this one. I stare at the river, but see no sign of otters, or any other water creatures for that matter.

Williamson’s anthropomorphism is beautiful. Usually I can’t stand that sort of thing, but here it seems based on such close observation that instead of pretending the otters are like little fishermen with moustaches, it helps me see the otter’s behaviour in my mind’s eye. In fact the book is helping me a lot more than the Taw is, to imagine otters.

A duck! Finally an animal! I was beginning to think the river had been poisoned or something. A kingfisher! ‘Halcyon the kingfisher sped down the river, crying a short, shrill peet! as it passed the holt’ (22). A flash of electric blue and the shrill peet! was all I saw of this kingfisher too. But it did feel like a connection between my Taw and the river in the book. I shift position to get more comfortable.

As I carry on reading, I’m starting to understand what’s stopping me from wrapping myself up as much as usual in the book. Tarka’s family have just escaped the hunt and sought sanctuary in a new pond, where a dog otter is picking over the feathery remains of a drake it has just killed. Tarka finds the half-dead frog that the drake was eating as it was attacked, and takes it to a thorn bush planted by a lark beside the pool. All the while, the drake’s mate and her brood of ducklings look on in fear from a patch of bulrushes, which themselves were dropping pollen to make a yellow film over the pond. It’s a violent but beautiful snapshot of the pond’s ecosystem, painful but not cruel (the only cruelty comes from the humans with their gins and cries of Tally ho!). I look up from the book, the red line of the text still burnt into my cornea as I gaze at the green, green, green of the riverside. I’m a total alien here. The river is another planet, and I can hardly even breathe the atmosphere. The sawmill by the A377 screams with every new plank. Wrapped in bright red GoreTex, I feel less connected to the river for reading Tarka by the Taw than if I was curled up by the fire at home, pretending. The real world is constantly ridiculing any attempt at empathy. It’s like a play where Brecht’s ‘forth wall’ is constantly being broken. And it’s sad.

To put it politely, after sitting for two hours on a not-quite-waterproof picnic blanket, I need to stretch my legs. As I stand up, three pigeons explode from a tree on the other side of the river. I walk to the soft riverbank, down where the cows go to drink, and a cock-pheasant that had been hiding in what was left of the dead reeds flees noisily. Almost every animal I have seen this afternoon has been trying to escape from me. Tarka’s intimacy with the other animals, even his contact with those he hunts, makes me feel more alien by comparison. Instead of enjoying a day by the river, I feel like I’m walking through a village fête firing a Kalashnikov into the air.

I start reading again, and soon start to understand what else is making me feel uncomfortable. Williamson describes much of the action from the point of view of a bystanding animal, an owl watching as the otters find a new place to stay after one of the family is killed by an iron gin, a grey wagtail catching insects in the evening as the otters swim downriver. It gives me the feeling that I’m being watched. Perhaps this paranoia is exacerbated by my not really wanting anyone to see me here. I’m not actually on a footpath, though I’m not doing any damage, and reading by the river in the middle of winter might look a bit weird. I’d rather not face the awkwardness. Though I would love to be able to explain myself to the wildlife.

I’ve only read forty pages when I decide to pack it in for the day. My feet are getting painfully cold, and although it’s only 3pm, it’s dimity. I certainly want to continue reading Tarka the Otter. Williamson’s writing is engaging and not at all what I expected. But I think I’ll finish it inside, or at least in the summer. Don’t expect this book to bring you any closer to nature. In fact, I found it drove me further away.

Tim Halpin was reading Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson, publishing as a Penguin Classic in 2009 (first published 1927), on loan from Barnstaple Library, where there is a rather good Henry Williamson collection.

Filed Under: Book reviews

Guest post: Perihelion

January 13, 2012 By 2 Comments

Ian Hill is a writer, bookbinder, printmaker and lover of wild places. He lives in Cumbria, with a view of the hills. His blog is The Printed Land. The perihelion Ian refers to was January 5, 2012.
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“And all those sayings will I over-swear;
And all those swearings keep as true in soul
As doth that orbèd continent the fire
That severs day from night.”
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night

We are as close to the sun as we can be. I turn this thought in my mind as I walk over fields dense with the weight of winter’s rain, each rutted furrow containing a pool of ochre water, each gateway a Passendale of hoofprints, footprints, the deep trenches left by agricultural machinery. The sun, low in the south-western sky, has not risen above the level of the trees, as though a balloon has snagged in their branches and is struggling to break free. The watery light of the late sunrise elides into the peach-coloured soft light of dusk; the day is bracketed by twilight.

We are as close to the sun as we can  be. The idea seems so improbable in these crepuscular days of half-light and shadows, this time of year when our thoughts and activities turn inward, to rooms pooled with artificial light, to homes warmed by fires to banish the darkness.

This day in the year, this point where our flattened ellipse of an orbit around the sun reaches its closest point, is known as the perihelion; precise, greek, the word contains the authority of science as though it alone is responsible for changing the shape of our otherwise circular orbit. The timing of this event bears no relation to any of the other fixed points of our celestial calandar; it does not occur on the equinox or the solstice, it is not related to the moon or the seasons. It seems odd to us, in the northern hemisphere, that this close touch of the sun should fall in the depths of winter.

Coincidentally, the perihelion occurs each year at, or near to, twelfth night: a night of feasting and merrymaking, a time to celebrate the end of the winter holiday period. In historic times, for twelve nights the world had been turned upside-down; by tradition, the twelve days of the christmas holiday were goverened by the Lord of Misrule. It was a time when servants gave orders to their masters, when the natural order of things was subverted for a short period. A time when we could believe that things need not necessarily be as they always have been; a time for change and chance, for revolutions and revelations.

In the Christian tradition, this is also the time of the epiphany, when the wise men saw the beauty of God in the face of the infant Jesus. And it is indeed a time of epiphany even in the steeped hedgerows of my native Cumbria; snowdrops diminutive amongst the mulch of winter’s leaves, the pallid flesh of mushrooms slicked with moisture, the snicker of long-tailed tits as they rise like motes of dust from the hawthorns.

My daily walk from home takes me beneath ancient hedgerows which catch the light from the low sun: the angular shoots of blackthorn like tarnished iron, the burnished red of the hawthorns. Amongst them, a single elder rises above the twisted growths of the thorns. It glows almost golden, as though the grooved boughs hold the memory of spring, of the dense heads of creamy flowers which will sit like late fallen snow on the hedges. In this winter light, the branches are gold like a sweet cordial, gold like the springtime sun whose muted sibling ghosts the line of distant trees on my way home.

Filed Under: Nature writing Tagged With:

Eco-literature 1: DH Lawrence ‘The Rainbow’

January 10, 2012 By 2 Comments

Our intention is to gradually grow the EarthLines blog to be a resource for information about/ reflections on/ reviews of books that fall loosely into the category of ‘eco-literature’ i.e. books about nature, place or the environment. This includes nonfiction, fiction and poetry. If you’d like to contribute something, please contact us. Books covered can be old or new. We’re not necessarily looking for complete reviews; we’re open to reflections on specific aspects of a book, and discussions of ideas that they convey.
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Curiously perhaps, the first book that I ever read in the category of what I’d now consider to be ’eco-literature’, and that had an enormous impact on me, was DH Lawrence’s novel The Rainbow. It was one of a small number of texts that I studied for English Literature ‘A’ level. As a student at an all-girls grammar school who had long been force-fed a diet of the likes of Jane Austen and John Milton, the summer holiday of my sixteenth year was one to remember – not just because of Lawrence, but also because of Albert Camus’ L’Etranger, which we were given to study for ‘A’ level French literature at the same time. A heady combination of ideas and, in the case of Lawrence, the beginning of a whole new love affair with metaphorical and imagery-laden language …

The Rainbow is often overshadowed by its more famous sequel, Women in Love, but  I always thought it both the better and the more interesting book. Lawrence wrote it in 1915, and like so much of his work, it was immediately banned on charges of obscenity. Modern readers won’t find much that could be considered obscene in The Rainbow, but those were more innocent days … A number of themes run through the novel, including the sexual emancipation of women – or, indeed, arguably of both sexes – but what most captured my imagination then and now is Lawrence’s representation of the deep and instinctive connection between humans and the natural world, and all the ways in which it was threatened by the industrial machine. Growing up as the son of a Nottinghamshire miner who taught him the names of plants and trees and how to recognise animal tracks, Lawrence was well aware of the tension between those two worlds.

That connection between the Brangwens, a family of farmers, and the land runs deeply through the novel – especially in Lawrence’s men: ‘They felt the rush of the sap in spring, they knew the wave which cannot halt, but every year throws forward the seed in begetting, and, falling back, leaves the young-born on the earth. They knew the intercourse between heaven and earth, sunshine drawn into the breast and bowels, the rain sucked up in the day-time, nakedness that comes under the wind in autumn, showing the birds’ nests no longer worth hiding … They took the udder of the cows, the cows yielded milk and pulse against the hands of the men, the pulse of the blood of the teats of the cows beat into the pulse of the hands of the men. They mounted their horses, and held life between the grip of their knees … the body of the men were impregnated with the day, cattle and earth and vegetation and the sky … So much warmth and generating and pain and death did they know in their blood, earth and sky and beast and green plants, so much exchange and interchange they had with these, that they lived full and surcharged, their senses full fed, their faces always turned to the heat of the blood, staring into the sun, dazed with looking towards the source of generation, unable to turn around.’

The women, though, were different: ‘The women looked out from the heated, blind intercourse of farm-life, to the spoken world beyond. They were aware of the lips and the mind of the world speaking and giving utterance, they heard the sound in the distance, and they strained to listen.’

And so begins Lawrence’s portrayal of the modern move from pastoral to urban life, from agricultural focus to the industrial machine, beginning with the description of the Brangwen farm, now cut off from surrounding countryside by a railway and a colliery and a canal: ‘At first the Brangwens were astonished by all this commotion around them. The building of a canal across their land made them strangers in their own place, this raw bank of earth shutting them off disconcerted them. As they worked in the fields, from beyond the now familiar embankment came the rhythmic run of the winding engines, startling at first, but afterwards a narcotic to the brain.’

The novel is filled with the language of connection and dislocation, and contains some of the most memorable and evocative representations of that connection between people and the land in English literature – for example, the scene with Anna and Will Brangwen stacking sheaves of corn under a harvest moon, laden with typical Lawrentian imagery that foreshadows the nature of the future relationship between the two characters: ‘She took her new two sheaves and walked towards him, as he rose from stooping over the earth. He was coming out of the near distance. She set down her sheaves to make a new stook. They were unsure. Her hands fluttered. Yet she broke away, and turned to the moon, which laid bare her bosom, so she felt as if her bosom were heaving and panting with moonlight. And he had to put  up her two sheaves, which had fallen down. He worked in silence. The rhythm of the work carried him away again, as she was coming near … And there was the flaring moon laying bare her bosom again, making her drift and ebb like a wave.’

Lawrence’s vision of the modern industrial mechanised world on the surface appears to be gloomy, and yet at the end of the novel, as Ursula Brangwen reflects on the shape of her life, the rainbow imagery that lends the novel its name offers a different vision of a more distant future:

‘She saw the stiffened bodies of the colliers, which seemed already enclosed in a coffin, she saw their unchanging eyes, the eyes of those who are buried alive: she saw the hard, cutting edges of the new houses, which seemed to spread over the hillside in their insentient triumph, a triumph of horrible, amorphous angles and straight lines, the expression of corruption triumphant and unopposed, corruption so pure that it is hard and brittle; she saw the dun atmosphere over the blackened hills opposite, the dark blotches of houses, slate roofed and amorphous, the old church-tower standing up in hideous obsoleteness above raw new houses on the crest of the hill, the amorphous, brittle, hard edged new houses advancing from the Beldover to meet the corrupt new houses from Lethley, the houses of Lethley advancing to mix with the houses of Hainor, a dry, brittle, terrible corruption spreading over the face of the land, and she was sick with a nausea so deep that she perished as she sat. And then, in the blowing clouds, she saw a band of faint iridescence, colouring in faint colours a portion of the hill. And forgetting, startled, she looked for the hovering colour and saw a rainbow forming itself … And the rainbow stood on the earth. She knew that the sordid people who crept hard-scaled and separate on the face of the world’s corruption were living still, that the rainbow was arched in their blood and would quiver to life in their spirit, that they would cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven. She saw in the rainbow the earth’s new architecture, the old, brittle corruption of houses and factories swept away, the world built up in a living fabric of Truth, fitting to the over-arching heaven.’

SB
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The Rainbow was published in 1915 by Methuen & Co, London. It was followed by Women in Love, a sequel, in 1920. The Rainbow was the subject of an obscenity trial in late 1915, as a result of which all copies were seized and burnt. After this ban it was unavailable in Britain for 11 years, although editions were available in the USA.

Filed Under: Book reviews
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