Guest Post: Tess of the D’Urbervilles on Marlborough Down, by Tim Halpin

February 26, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We are grateful to Tim Halpin for another of 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.’ 

Here are Tim’s thoughts on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
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I’m sitting on one of the many outcrops of chalk hills that carve Wiltshire up into distinct Vales, looking down over the Vale of Pewsey to Salisbury Plain. I’m partially sheltered from the wind by the remains of some ancient earthworks, now called Adam’s Grave, but whose original name has been forgotten and purpose is unknown. A thin veil of cloud bleach whatever warmth the sun might have had. Beneath the clouds,‘fields so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape, the lanes are white, the hedges low and plashed, the atmosphere colourless’ (9).

So not the most delightful scene. In the fields below, the fields, planted with winter wheat, are poster-paint green slabs. Tractor lines in the leached, chalky soil have a sickly pallor, the colour of putty. Row upon row of parallel pairs of lines are overlaid on top of the ghost of the previous season’s rows, which ribbed the field at a slightly different angle.

The last time I was here, just a few months ago, it was so hot that my girlfriend and I fell asleep watching paragliders playing in the updraughts above the Alton Barnes white horse. Now there are only crows hovering wind that races up the steep hillside, and in the distance two military helicopters are rehearsing amongst the dull thumping of the artillery range on Salisbury Plain. Wrapped up in the dubious camouflage of a tartan National Trust picnic blanket, I settle down to read.

About as far from the figure I cut as it is possible to be, Hardy describes women like Tess who work in the fields as becoming part of the landscape. “She becomes part and parcel of outdoor nature, and is not merely an object set down therein…a fieldwoman is a portion of the field; she has somehow lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surroundings, and assimilated herself in it” (111). It’s too cold for me to really grapple with the gender politics of this, but looking up, I half expect to see a gang of Tess-like women emerge from the ground like moles, and set to work on the fields below. Instead my eye finds a tractor making its way along a lane. And the land is empty. Hardy describes the rural community as something timeless, natural and eternal, but also, paradoxically, as fragile. I wonder if he would even recognise this Wessex.

I skip on to the section where Tess is at Flintcombe-Ash Farm in Winter, reduced to hacking swedes from a field as high and exposed as the one I am in today, desperate not to drag the name of her estranged husband down with her. She makes the landscape feel inescapably bleak. Her suffering is so passive that she normally makes me angry, but now, numb to the bone despite my mum’s Peruvian gloves, wind-raw cheeks, I’m only glad I don’t have to hack swedes. I don’t usually quote long sections, but this is too grim to miss:

‘The upper half of each turnip had been eaten off by the live-stock, and it was the business of the two women to grub up the lower or earthy half of the root with a hooked fork called a hacker, that it might be eaten also. Every leave of the vegetable having been consumed, the whole field was in colour a desolate drab; it was a complexion without features, as if a face, from chin to brow, should be only an expanse of skin. The sky wore, in another colour, the same likeness; a white vacuity of countenance with the lineaments gone. So these two upper and nether visages confronted each other all day long, the white face looking down on the brown face, and the brown face looking up at the white face, without anything standing between them but the two girls crawling over the surface of the former like flies.’ (363-4)

I remember reading this section at home, regarding it as almost Dickensian in its melodrama. But with hundreds of acres of uninterrupted fields laid out below me, I have never felt more grateful for tractors, or tartan blankets.

I read on until the sun begins to set. The rooks have given up their individual hang gliding and have crowded together to caw their evening chorus. I think I have always blamed Tess’s fatalism or lack of initiative for her passivity and disempowerment. Now I’m not sure. The narrator lays the blame on political inequality and fate. But on top of this she also seems to be afflicted by some kind of Landscape Affective Disorder (thought LAD wouldn’t make for an appropriate acronym), oppressed by the malevolently featureless fields into accepting her own condition as hopeless. If she did represent part of the landscape, she would be a poppy, thistle or fireweed struggling to grow amid the glyphosate monoculture. Hardy describes the ‘patience’ that sustains Tess as a ‘blending of moral courage with physical timidity’ (363), which is faint praise at best. I imagine her working in the poster paint fields, ending up like Adam’s Grave, having ‘lost her own margin, imbibed the essence of her surroundings, and assimilated herself in it’ (111).

I was reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891, but the copy I read was published by Penguin Popular Classics, and was bought from the Elephant English-language bookshop in Barcelona. I think it actually belongs to my girlfriend, but these things get a bit hard to keep up with.

Filed Under: Book reviews

Three fine things, circles, and a poem

February 23, 2012 By 4 Comments

As a former narrative therapist specialising in storytelling, I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that we’re narrative beings. But what people don’t often understand is that all the best narratives take the form of circles, not straight lines. In this wild place where we live and croft, our lives are tied up with the circles of the year in a way that is hard to explain to people for whom the seasons are an add-on, almost a fashion accessory. But it’s not just about the seasons: there are other things that recur at certain times every year that we wait for, even depend on. And so this morning it was a particular joy to rediscover three cyclical things that have become very important to me: the first goose egg of the year, laid by the eldest of our beautiful Roman geese; the first pair of oystercatchers of the year, down on the beach, and the first lapwing circling over the headland. Because, as we become older, each February brings both a sense of anticipation and a small lurking fear that grows each year as the number of extinctions on this planet grows – that one year February will come and the oystercatchers won’t.

I’ve lived for many years now in places where oystercatchers are a regular feature of February and a signal of the return of the light. But lapwing is new; lapwing for me came with our move here, two years ago, to Lewis. And now that the lapwing has returned, for weeks to come my early morning walks on the headland with the dogs will be punctuated by their wedge-winged circling in the skies and their constant warning cries. And underneath them the darting oystercatchers, each protecting their own nesting site.

It was particularly appropriate that the first lapwing should arrive on the birthday of my husband and the other half of Two Ravens Press and EarthLines, David Knowles. A couple of years ago in South Uist he wrote a poem about lapwing. Here it is.

Lapwings Against Cloud

Downsun from sunset
small flock of aldis lamps
tapping out
blinking out of battleship grey
at this, their frequency and pause
wings high before beating
their message. Just this
is lapwing, over.
This is lapwing, over.
This is lapwing.

David Knowles

David Knowles’ first collection of poetry, Meeting the Jet Man, was shortlisted for the Scottish Arts Council First Book of the Year Award in 2009, and a poem from the collection was Highly Commended in the 2010 Forward Prize.

Filed Under: Ecopoetry Tagged With:

Why storytelling has any relevance at all to ecoliterature

February 16, 2012 By 4 Comments

You’ll be seeing quite a lot of references to storytelling in and around the EarthLines project; some of you may be wondering what, if anything, it has to do with ecoliterature. Especially given that it springs from an oral rather than a written tradition. Well, there are a number of reasons for it, and we’ll explore them over time in this blog. One of the main reasons for my interest is that I believe that the future of good ecoliterature is multidisciplinary in nature: that inspiration comes not just from other writers but from philosophers, anthropologists, artists, and storytellers… (Among others, of course.) When I talk about storytelling, I’m not talking about storytelling for children, or even storytelling as entertainment for adults. I’m talking about a kind of storytelling that penetrates into the heart of who we are and how we see ourselves. And especially, how we see ourselves in connection with the rest of the world.

That’s the kind of storytelling personified by Martin Shaw’s Westcountry School of Myth and Story (http://schoolofmyth.com) and by what he has to say in his book A Branch from the Lightning Tree: Ecstatic Myth and the Grace of Wildness. I’ve reviewed Martin’s book for the May issue of EarthLines magazine, but thought it made a good introduction to the whole issue of why we think storytelling is important. So here’s the review now, below.

Sharon
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Martin Shaw gave up a three-album recording deal with Warner Brothers to live in a tent in the Welsh mountains for four years, during which time he learned to live outside in ‘the kingdom of wood lice, badgers, elder, nettles, brambles, roe-deer, and ivy that gave feral lectures endlessly into my fool ear, the shattering cold of the waterfall that was a morning shower, [while] bellowing out ancient stories from the black hills of Wales, the source of the stream.’ If there’s a better qualification for a rites-of-passage wilderness guide, let alone a storyteller and mythologist specialising in initiatiory experiences, I haven’t yet found it. Martin is now based in Devon, and runs the Westcountry School of Myth and Story (http://schoolofmyth.com) in between teaching in the US, UK and Europe and serving as a visiting lecturer in Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s Leadership Programme at Oxford University.

A Branch from the Lightning Tree explores the relationship between myth, story and the wild in prose that is beautiful, poetic and vividly alive. It’s a book that is both entertaining and scholarly, and if you like your Barthes, Derrida and Heidegger leavened by Trickster and Baba Yaga, then it’s a must-read. The heart of Shaw’s thesis is that we have forgotten how to be wild: we have exchanged the old longing, the old call to a deeper knowledge of the world for ‘a trance state, engineered by clumsy media spells’. And so the essence of this book is a rediscovery: the psyche’s journey from the civilised world back to the wild. We can, Shaw tells us, regain a Culture of Wildness through rites of passage, through necessary initiations into the wild that is still within us. And we can be guided through this process of initiation by myths and stories. ‘The heart of ecology is mythology,’ Shaw says. ‘With this in mind, it’s possible we could re-vision through story a kind of curious genius that wraps us back into accord with the great tapestry of earth. In short, we could remember what story we are actually in.’

But what precisely does myth bring to this process of returning to our wild selves? ‘We are each a strange container of unique experience, a castle full of erotic chambers, dust-filled cupboards of old bones, great halls with unending feasting, small towers of arcane literature, and balconies from which heartbroken lovers hurl themselves into the moat. All this is going on inside us all the time. Poetry and myth are divining tools that dip into these waters and dredge it to consciousness, giving it form.’ And indeed, that is precisely the transformative power of myth and story.

In all the best stories, initiation is never a comfortable process. To be initiated we have to sever ourselves from the comfort and security of what Shaw calls the Village – the ordained track – and head off down the Road of the Forest. We need, he tells us, to go into the darkest wildest woods, to climb the unclimbable mountain … we need to become the Wanderer. ‘To find an authentic centre we have to wander lonely beaches and sleep under hedges, longing for something we know is lost.’ And so Shaw’s initiation is a kind of vision quest: a journey into the heart of the wildness that lies within each of us – because wildness is not just a place to visit, but something inside ourselves that is in desperate need of nurturing. In other words, we need to become familiar with our own depths to be able to look at the natural world and see it as it is, to understand our deep need for wildness, ‘to recognise its mirrors’.

But to Shaw this necessary psychological process of journeying back to the wild is not just a question of heading off  into the wilderness, and not even just about the journey that you find yourself on once you’ve embarked on your quest – it’s very much about what you bring back with you when, inevitably, you return. About how you integrate yourself back into the community. This is critical because we have, Shaw tells us, become addicted to Severance: we find it easy to leave things behind, to move on, but we’re much less good at negotiating return. Because Shaw’s aim in this process of personal rewilding is by no means to remove us from the world, but precisely to show us how to live in the world while at the same time living with the newly discovered wildness inside of us. It is about integration. ‘Wildness is a form of sophistication, because it carries within it true knowledge of our place in the world. It doesn’t exclude civilisation but prowls through it, knowing when to attend to the needs of the committee and when to drink from a moonlit lake. It will wear a suit when it has to, but refuses to trim its talons or whiskers. Its sensing-nature is not afraid of emotion: the old stories are full of grief forests and triumphant returns, banquets and bridges of thorns …’

A Branch from the Lightning Tree is by no means a book just for storytellers – though if a storyteller is what you are, you’ll find Shaw exhorting you to be a specific kind of storyteller – a ‘Griot, a Seanchai, the Cunning Man or Woman, Bard, Skald, Trouvere, Minnesinger, Ashik … a “Myth Teller” … This is little to do with external theatrics and everything to do with a new way of seeing.’ This is a book that can be read by anyone interested in why myth and story are important, by anyone interested in experiencing the Culture of Wildness that they can help us find our way to and through.

Filed Under: Book reviews, Myth & story

Guest post by Ian Hill: ‘Changing the rules: Rebecca Solnit and Kathleen Raine’

February 9, 2012 By 2 Comments

A reflection on the work of Rebecca Solnit and of Kathleen Raine, by regular guest contributor Ian Hill (http://www.printedland.blogspot.com/)

In my sitting-room at home, in the bookcase beside the chair onto which falls natural light from the window, is my collection of books about place: some nature writing, some travel writing, psychogeography and environmental activitism; the categories meld into one another with a satisfying imprecision. 

What strikes me about these books, however, is how few of them are by women. I believe that this does not simply reflect my taste, and it certainly does not reflect the abilities of women to write about these subjects; rather, I suspect it reflects an assumption which equates environmental writing with science, with the known and accountable, with that which can be measured and proved, and which favours a kind of anthropocentric bullishness which asserts a hold over the natural world. In Granta magazine’s 2009 volume on The New Nature Writing, only two of the eighteen contributors were women.  Even now, some of our most popular books on the environment are a version of writing-as-collecting, a reduction of the world to that which can be pinned on the page like antique butterflies. From Gilbert White to David Attenborough, we are in thrall to the belief that all will be known, all will be quantified. 

The exceptions to this generalisation are the bright stars in the firmament: the books which make us wonder, but which leave us with as many questions as facts. Writing which truly exposes the incongruities and uncertainties of the natural world is a rare beast, and is not easily classified into sub-genres of ‘travel writing’ or ‘nature writing’. It is, for me, writing which also leaves the longest impact, glimmering like a bright light burned on the retina.

This is certainly true of Rebecca Solnit’s work. Each of her books is a wunderkammer of ideas and reflections, a meander through ideas and reflections that is more akin to a walk through the back streets of an unknown city with an eccentric friend. She is often described as a cultural historian, but her work transcends boundaries so brazenly, so recklessly, it is unclassifiable.

What struck me about Solnit, however, when I first read A Field Guide to Getting Lost, is her willingness to follow trains of thought not knowing where they might lead, to pursue ideas and connections for their own sake, and to present us with conundrums and questions that do not sit neatly with our desire to quantify and account. “Science is how capitalism knows the world” she observes in the middle of a lengthy digression on Yves Klein, and I find myself grinning with the sheer audacity of the assertion.

Solnit has probably crystallised my ideas as a writer more than anyone else I have read, not just in her style, but also in the way she approaches her subject: tangentially, with a sense of awe and wonder. It is an open-mindedness which I also see in the poetry of Kathleen Raine, although these two exceptional writiers are from different generations, different continents, and write in different styles. What unites them, for me, is they way that they change the rules of our limited perceptions of the world around us.

Kathleen Raine brings a humility to her writing which creates the impression that each of her observations is left as a gift between writer and reader. Message from Home captures this sense perfectly, sharing the bond we have always had with the natural world:

Do you remember, when you were first a child,
Nothing in the world seemed strange to you?
You perceived, for the first time, shapes already familiar,
And seeing, you knew that you have always known
The lichen on the rock, fern-leaves, the flowers of thyme,
As if the elements newly met in your body,
Caught up into the momentary vortex of your living
Still kept the knowledge of a former state

I came to Kathleen Raine much earlier in my life than to Rebecca Solnit. I was handed a photocopy of her poem Heirloom, and I can recall still that sense of twenty-something bewilderment at the sense of magic and mystery, the willingness to suspend judgement in the presence of beauty and wonder. It is a poem brief enough to quote in full:

She gave me childhood’s flowers,
Heather and wild thyme,
Eyebright and tormentil,
Lichen’s mealy cup
Dry on wind-scored stone,
The corbies on the rock,
The rowan by the burn.

Sea-marvels a child beheld
Out in the fisherman’s boat,
Fringed pulsing violet
Medusa, sea gooseberries,
Starfish on the sea-floor,
Cowries and rainbow-shells
From pools on a rocky shore,

Gave me her memories,
But kept her last treasure:
‘When I was a lass:’ she said,
‘Sitting among the heather,
‘Suddenly I saw
‘That all the moor was alive!
‘I have told no one before.’

That was my mother’s tale.
Seventy years had gone
Since she saw the living skein
Of which the world is woven,
And having seen, knew all;
Through long indifferent years
Treasuring the priceless pearl

Sometimes books tell you what you already knew. Sometimes, just occasionally, they offer you a confirmation of a sense or a feeling which you didn’t even know you had. “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” asks Rebecca Solnit in A Field Guide to Getting Lost.  It reminds us of a necessary humility in the face of a world too complex and marvellous for us to understand. I cling to this this sense of hope, this openness to magic and chance, and go out again into the beautiful world.

Ian Hill

Filed Under: Book reviews

Weather

February 3, 2012 By 5 Comments

We are told by the older residents of our local crofting townships that this autumn and winter have been the worst in living memory here in the Outer Hebrides. Wetter and windier. It’s true that we seem to have been battling gales since October, and the already boggy ground has been sodden for months. In November, on our personal blog, I wrote a post, The Gods of Days, in which I talked about wind and suggested that there was little point in living in a place where the dominant weather was wind and rain, and then sitting indoors and complaining about it when it was windy and raining. Of course, a lot of wind and rain has happened to us since November … and a couple of normally hardy friends are now jumping up and down and demanding that I recant and admit that wind and rain is a terrible thing and that I wish it were mild and sunny like everyone else does.

At one level there ’s no question about it – I’m tired of battling the wind and sloshing about in the mud when it’s time to feed the animals and walk the dogs twice a day, because this has to be done whatever the weather. I’d be ecstatic if a few mild and sunny days happened along, and I’m eagerly anticipating spring like everyone else … but the truth about weather, about our relationship with weather, is very much more complicated than that.

The point about weather is simply that it can’t be divorced from place. Weather is an intrinsic part of the character of a place. It’s not just a question of weather being what happens to you every day when you are in a place: it goes much deeper than that, in a number of different ways.

First: weather shapes a place. The Outer Hebrides are what they are precisely because of centuries of wind and rain. The land is boggy, treeless, hard, pared back to the bones and vivid precisely for that reason. It seems like an obvious point to make, but it’s surprising how often people come to live in the Outer Hebrides and start to long for periods of hot dry sun. Hot dry sun isn’t the Outer Hebrides, it’s Provence, or Tenerife. And I mean that literally: the weather IS the place, not something superimposed on it. The Outer Hebrides IS wind and rain, rain and wind, and more wind and rain. If you can’t love wind and rain, you can’t love the Outer Hebrides for what it really is, and then it really isn’t a very smart place for you to live. And if you live in a place and won’t go outside because you hate what that place is, then there’s a very strong argument indeed that it’s not a healthy way to live.

Second: weather is what you walk in, as well as landscape, when you walk in a place. It isn’t something that happens to you as you walk on a surface: it’s something much more than that. Recently I’ve been reading acclaimed anthropologist Tim Ingold’s book of essays, Being Alive. There’ll be a review of the book in the May issue of EarthLines magazine, and Tim has agreed to write something new for us for the November issue. One of the many things that struck me about Tim’s perspective on the world is what he has to say about weather – that expressed exactly what I’ve been struggling to say. Here’s a flavour:

To inhabit the open is not, then, to be stranded on a closed surface but to be immersed in the incessant movements of wind and weather, in a zone wherein substances and medium are brought together in the constitution of beings that, by way of their activity, participate in stitching the textures of the land.

Landscape is constantly being transformed by weather. Think of the difference between a range of mountains covered in mist, and the same range of mountains in the glare of the  sun at midday. In the former case, the mist isn’t something you can just extract from the mountains, as if there’s some permanent reality underneath that is represented more truly by the second case. The mist and the mountains merge, and create something that is entirely different to those experiencing it. Mist, wind, rain – they’re not things that interfere with the reality of a place – they are the place – they bring the place into being.

The weather, in short, is ‘the world’s worlding’ – to adopt Heidegger’s expression – and as such it is not a figment of the imagination but the very temperament of being.

And so how can you divorce yourself – dissociate yourself – completely from the weather of a place? True, there are some types of weather that are more comfortable than others – though I have always had an odd affinity for wild windy, rainy misty places – to the extent that I’ve had severe reverse seasonal affective disorder when living in climates that are warm and sunny year-round. One of my favourite kinds of weather here is the slightly misty, very gentle continuous drizzle – or ‘broom‘, from the Gaelic - that pervades the entire landscape on a wind-free day. It’s soft, gentle, and to me it epitomises the spirit of this place more than any other weather.

The ground on which we stand is a zone of formative and transformative processes set in train through the interplay of wind, water and stone, within a field of cosmic forces such as those responsible for the tides … Sea and land are engulfed in the wider sphere of forces and relations comprising the weather-world. To perceive and to act in the weather-world is to align one’s own conduct to the celestial movements of sun, moon and stars, to the rhythmic alterations of night and day and the seasons, to rain and shine, sunlight and shade.

I think Ingold has it. If we can’t inhabit the weather-world that constitutes the place where we live, then there is a very strong argument that we’re not really, to return to the title of his book, ‘Being Alive’.

Sharon Blackie

Filed Under: Nature writing Tagged With: ,
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