Remember that beautiful, plaintive old Carole King song, So Far Away? ‘You’re so far away/ Doesn’t anybody stay in one place any more …’ Seems like a theme song for the most recent crop of British ecoliterature. Two that stand out as examples are Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways and Merlin Coverley’s The Art of Wandering: the Writer as Walker, but there are more. Kathleen Jamie’s Sightlines. Books based on walking through places, visiting places briefly and then writing about them. Closer perhaps to travel literature than any other genre. What is striking is that relatively few books spring to mind when I think of modern works of ‘nature writing’ (from the UK; this is perhaps less true in the US tradition) that are based on deep, lived knowledge of a particular place – Neil Ansell’s excellent Deep Country perhaps being the most recent example I’ve read. (There are more older examples, but I’m focusing here on contemporary literature.)
This is a theme that is taken up by Wendell Berry, in his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, where to his insistence on the importance of place he adds that of community. Berry has written extensively on this theme; one of my favourite essays is from The Art of the Commonplace:
‘Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.’
Standing still has become unfashionable. And yet, having spent much of my own early adult life in the usual peripatetic modern fashion, tottering from place to place in search of that indefinable (unreachable) something that would make me stay, it became very clear to me several years ago that belonging isn’t about the place that’s outside of you, it’s about the place that’s inside of you. The ability to reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again. The understanding that it’s necessary to grow out of the ground. And now, the deep, daily, working knowledge of a place and its landscape and weatherscape brings with it an infinitely richer ground of being. Patrick Kavanagh said it too: ‘To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience. In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width.’
The economic and social reasons for our modern mobility fetish are well understood, but what is perhaps less well understood is that when we lose a sense of place and a sense of belonging, we lose a way of being in the world . And although the books I mentioned at the beginning of this post are nevertheless fine examples of writing in their own way, British ecoliterature, in particular, is all the poorer for that lack.
SB
Having been a gypsy myself, depending on the placeholding of others, I relate to all that you write here. And I’m thinking that just as it would be good to regain our appreciation for elders, it would be good to appreciate the ‘holders of place’. Some are wanderers though, and the quality of their wandering may be what matters most if the land is to be cared for. I have developed a sense of place in the forest where I now live. But here’s a nagging thing, when I ask myself where I would like to be buried or have my ashes scattered, I cannot yet answer. When I can, perhaps I will have recovered or discovered my sense or understanding of belonging. Thanks for another thought-provoking start to the day!
Interesting. And yes, coming from a family that includes Irish gypsy stock, I think it’s perfectly possibly to travel and have that same sense of belonging to the land – it’s just spread out a bit more
But there’s an unrooted kind of wandering that’s different …
Ah
Reminds me of concepts from Rebecca Solnit’s piece in Orion “The Most Radical Thing You Can Do” (i.e. stay home . . .): http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/3628/
Rebecca has it
Oh, I like this in Rebecca’s article: ‘The word radical comes from the Latin word for root.’ How powerful words can be when we trace them back!
Oddly, I’ve just recently watched “The Way” by Emilio Estevez, about the Camino of St John of Compostela, and so have been contemplating the idea of movement through landscape as a way of knowing it intimately. The Camino is something I’ve thought about for several years, and I’m wondering why it has such a powerful pull even today, when most people probably do not walk it for religious reasons. I think it has much to do with the idea of slowing down to a pace we rarely bother with these days, and moving slowly through a landscape so you experience it fully. In thinking about a sense of place, and the notion of belonging to a place and knowing it intimately, I think that movement is actually really vital, but it must be that slow, walking pace movement. The aboriginal people here in Australia certainly knew the land better than anybody, and yet movement through it was part of that intimate knowing. They had a responsibility to walk the land, to visit the sacred sites, to sing the songs and perform the ceremonies that kept the land healthy. They covered vast distances (the Bibblulman track here stretches almost 1000km from Perth to Albany) but it wasn’t just a passing through, it was a cyclical, seasonal revisiting, reawakening. But I agree too, that this constant, fast, modern movement distances us from the land and from each other and breaks a sense of community.
Yes, I absolutely believe there is power in walking, in that kind of ‘pilgrimage’ or journey. Just that it runs the risk of turning into an alternative to a real and deep connection rather than an important part of it, if we’re not careful. There is of course a necessary movement even in apparently standing still. Though I sometimes sound like a broken record on this book, Tim Ingold’s ‘being Alive’ conveys that perfectly.
Beautifully put. As one of those young, early career types who has spent the past five years rushing about attempting to find something that looks like fulfilling work, I feel that sense of rootlessness keenly. I think it’s under-appreciated what good would be done for our collective quality of life if it were easier to live and work in more stable, grounded communities that really knew the place we lived in.
Interestingly the idea of tending to a ‘local patch’ has rather taken off of late in birding circles (my own particular obsession, or is that vice?!) and more widely amongst naturalists, of course largely as a response to rising transport costs and as a concious attempt to reduce what I freely confess are mostly wasted carbon emissions spent chasing rare birds. Though I haven’t entirely stopped doing so: sometimes the call of the coast is just too strong!
But I also wonder if it helps to answer something of that lost connection with the land, in the absence of widespread opportunities (or maybe widespread desire – though I’m tempted!) to take up smallholdings, become farmhands, or live in a remote mountain cottage. Locally based nature watching is hardly a novel innovation of course, thinking of Gilbert White and his ilk, but is certainly now ‘in fashion’ – and I actually would suggest it is feeding through into nature writing, I think for example of Stephen Moss’ ‘Wild Hares and Hummingbirds’ about his Somerset parish, which I just finished – a lovely little book, although I still got the feeling he was describing events almost as a visitor, an outsider of sorts, despite it being the place he now lives. Roger Deakin’s ‘Notes from Walnut Tree Farm’ also springs to mind. He writes about his home so beautifully and intimately I ache to know a place, any place as well as he did. I’ve been meaning to read Deep Country for some time, so thanks for the reminder and recommendation.
In my experience walking the same fairly small stretch of hedgerow or wood edge or lakeside as often as possible, at a deliberate pace, just to see what I find, is immensely cathartic – trouble is, as soon as I think I’m getting under the skin of a place I end up moving again. But it still helps me to feel at home, even if it isn’t for long. Sorry, a long comment for my first!
Chris.