O Sweet Woods

…the delight of solitarinesse? I am not sure this is always the case. Dowland’s song is lovely, and does all those Elizabethan/Jacobean things about how countryside allows escape – from court, from love, from mess. The re-read of this play (I’ve sprinkled some allusions throughout this post) has given me much to think about tonight. However, just as the Duke in As You Like It retreats to the Forest of Arden not alone but with his company, the social aspect of the pictures below cannot be denied. Hey nonny no.

Maria Popova’s Brainpickings Blog is a mine of beautiful sources for all sorts of things. Here, she excerpts some of the writings of Hermann Hesse on trees, which sparked some thoughts on Twitter and in me. What makes a place special? Is it simply memory? Here I want to post some pictures and some brief explanations with really no thought but to explore some of the sites that have meant something to me over the past two or so years. So this is really just a resource for further reflection, taking account of space, memory and relationship. They aren’t in chronological order, or really in order of importance, except that the last is the most recent.

I’ll start at Wittenham Clumps, where I learned the value of Forest School back in 2000. This is a later picture, of course, with two grandchildren making dens. I’ll come back to Forest School, that almost incidental thing that was therapy for me after Theo died and then went on the inform my educational world view. Making dens in the Wittenham Woods, watching physical skills and inventiveness and imagination come together is still a great joy.

But the next has to be the first dawn looking to Ludchurch from Gradbach. The rising of the sun and the running of the deer. Wild Spaces Wild Magic defines so much of my work-thinking over the past two years: that it has such personal significance is down to the “geological pantocrator,” the pareidolic Green Knight (here in the initial project outline), and to the quiet glory of this dawn – and (back to the humans) to the team. It was mat who showed me that face, and if I have lost my heart to the project it is in part because of that experience, and then this glorious autumn morning, and also to the variety of gifts of the team – Debbie, Jane, Roger, Mat:They make me think and feel and create (and fail and pick myself up) but it is this half an hour at dawn in a solitary wooded valley that was a moment of transcendence with

…tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones and good in every thing.

***

To create a methodological framework for this, I suppose I am looking for a visual approach to autoethnographic study – but in reality, I am not there yet. Where I am, or where I was the other week at any rate, was seeing woods not as a place of solitary contemplation as in my previous post, but as a place of meeting. A place of shelter, companionship, release, exploration: Who Will Go Walk? Here then, to end, is a series of photos: Nettlebed, a place of glory in bluebell time, where in Rob Macfarlane’s words “Each step in taken in an ocean” and where in autumn Maggie and I have walked the red-gold of beech leaves. I could wish this were the site of Cooper’s fantasy sequence, so powerful it is, so amazing the visits I make with Maggie.

And then there’s Wychwood, the “strange caper” where I broke my finger trying to keep up with Jon. The memory stays, brings a smile. The finger is still wonky. Maybe the woods, like Arden, like a monastery, like life’s different contexts, are places we are accompanied by our follies? Maybe I needed to learn I am more “Full of wise saws, and modern instances,” a bit like this blog, than a nimble Orlando under a greenwood tree.

I cannot omit the 2016 autumn trip with Mat on the first, splendid visit to Alderley Edge. Here he is photographing away in the woods on our weekend in Garner Country. I’m not sure we found anything of real insight at Alderley that tentative first morning – but it does deserve another trip, maybe on its own. The Edge was maybe eclipsed for me by the later activities of the weekend, notable, of course, the meeting with the Green Knight, whose photos are all over this blog, and in whose magic wood on our last trip I felt both lost and found.

Nearly there. Three more shots: my local nature reserve, the Lye Valley where the ways the woods open out into fen are like a curtain drawing back… again the grandchildren, or two of them: watching them teaches me more than reading about outdoor learning. ..

…and the domestic woods at Harcourt where much of my Outdoor Learning practical work takes place… and yes, I did smoor that little fire. What started as what I think of (unkindly) as my hobby module has become a major part of my understanding of my role.

And finally to say nothing much but to bring the blog post to a finish, here are Chris and Jon and me. Woods and friendship again. Solitary they can be, as in the previous blog I cited – but they are also places of meeting. Another form of therapy?

Secrets of the Sea

“We live in one envelope with a multitude of voices…”

In a marvellous blog post on a marvellous book, Mat Tobin explores the role of the sea as it affects the psychological landscape of the book Town is By the Sea. It raises a challenge for me about how I understand and select what I mean by “landscape.” Of course the very syllables of landscape tell us about the shaping of the “dry land” and mirrors the foundation text of the opening of Genesis “And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas” (1:10). Who shapes the sea? Genesis and Job give the Judeao-Christian response. Job, full of glimpses of nature and acute turns of phrase, is of course worth a look, but is clear who shapes the sea:

He bindeth up the waters in his thick clouds; and the cloud is not rent under them.
He holdeth back the face of his throne, and spreadeth his cloud upon it.
He hath compassed the waters with bounds, until the day and night come to an end.
The pillars of heaven tremble and are astonished at his reproof.
He divideth the sea with his power, and by his understanding he smiteth through the proud… (Job 26)

Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? declare, if thou hast understanding
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Or who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb?
When I made the cloud the garment thereof, and thick darkness a swaddlingband for it,
And brake up for it my decreed place, and set bars and doors,
And said, Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further: and here shall thy proud waves be stayed? (Job 38)

We are left in no doubt about the beauty and terror of the sea, and the descendants of these passages are Melville’s Ishmael in Moby Dick and R S Thomas in the religious meditation Sea Watching

You must wear your eyes out
as others their knees…

In contrast, Richard Greene sets his own journey from his native Newfoundland resolutely as a people study. In “Islands in Memory,” in Crossing the Straits, he does talk (as I think Schwartz and Smith do, at one level) of

Grey stones and poverty
engendering a discontent
that is hospitable, quaint
in the tourist’s eye…
ledgers of seasonal obligation,
tricks of credit,
lies over what a fish was worth,
but more so
the sea that stood outside
all resentment…

but in the eponymous poem, Greene centres on the people, the solid, repeating practices of crossing by ferry from Newfoundland to Nova Scotia

and Newfoundlanders crossing
the Straits see water enough in warmer times
to forego the prospect now, but this moment
of pent chances, between home and home,
is not mine alone, and for most who travel
there is some tear in memory between
the longed for and the given, what they left
and what they are. Nova Scotia looms…

The sea is a highway to a new place, just as in Town is By the Sea it offers beauty and rest, a wider horizon of light – but it is an ambiguous offering, since the town also offers (?or maybe demands) stability…

Mat also mentions the

desire for change and new opportunities. Small, tight communities have a way of holding on to you and not letting go. Their comforting sense of familiarity, of friends and their families, homes and play spaces or shops, sea fronts and country lanes beguile you in believing you cannot live without them.

A multitude of voices – a multitude of views, The visuals of the sea are fascinating in Town is By the Sea (Simon Smith has a subtly animated version here in his own review), where the sea is often “all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen” as Montgomery says in Anne of Green Gables. The play of light in Town is By the Sea immediately makes me think of this model, as it were, of light and beauty, although Martin Galway does wisely point out that there is a lot to be said about line and colour in this book – as Thomas puts it “Light’s peculiar grace/In cold splendour” (Song at the Year’s Turning). In Town is By the Sea the wide sweep of light is in opposition to the claustrophobic mine under the sea…

But there is still more to think about when we look at sea and seaside. Here, in what is proudly announced as Allan Ahlberg’s 137th book, a mum takes the children and the dog shopping, and – a bit like Bear Hunt – they encounter a seaside with buildings – Fife or Dorset, Cellardyke or Lyme… It is not all that different from the Nova Scotia mining town in Town is By the Sea in that we seem to need to define sea by where it isn’t… With the poet of Job, we are depicting sea as boundaried and measured by human experience.

The structure and conventions William Grill employs in Shackleton’s Journey mean he is able to be bolder, so that the ship is almost there just for scale in one picture

From William Grill’s “Shackleton’s Journey”

and not there at all in the other.

This is a different sea again: almost as inhospitable as it can be.

Iain Sinclair, who begins this post, deserves a fuller quotation here, from his Edge of the Orison:

He (John Clare) had to learn the difficult thing, in different places we are different people. We live in one envelope with a multitude of voices, lulling us by regular habits, of rising, labouring, eating, taking pleasure and exercise: other selves, in suspension, slumber but remain wakeful.

Picturebook artists are as aware of this as Sinclair, I think, and share the insights too of Philip Hoare whose work on sea and culture in The Sea Inside could be seen as running alongside Peter Fiennes’ Oak and Ash and Thorn, dealing with marine rather than arboreal culture(s) we encounter and shape. Hoare gets is right when he says that the coastal terrain

may be managed by man [sic], but it has been edited by the wind.

Edited by wind and wave and light and bird and… all of these editorial hands, or debating voices, whichever metaphor we choose. The woods in Fiennes’ book likewise are cleared, colonised, full of missed histories and unknowable opportunities; his scale is time, where Hoare’s is spatial. Hoare is right when he challenges his reader

Take out your atlas and look at it.

You can’t. Just as no two-dimensional map of the world represents the true proportions of its continental masses, so no chart represents the reality of its greatest ocean.

Maybe this is a place for fiction. Town is by the Sea gives us a beautiful but threatening presence, and the threat – and something of the scale – is in William Grill. There is an attempt to domesticate in much of the seaside of children’s literature, but all of these give different faces to a goddess with many personas. Maybe we are better off in the richness of poetry and fiction and picture, back in the pagan mysteries of Susan Cooper’s Greenwitch instead? Or maybe we admire and classify but cannot fully comprehend this vast presence in the world we crawl about on?

The facts defy that paltry layer of land which we call home.

This is just a blog post, and can’t approach the work of Hoare and Fiennes, but the danger is that the openness of the sea (like the Great Wood where the unwary can get lost) is that the “multitude of voices” means “There is no such place as home” as Hoare reminds us in his bleak final pages.

Language Play

Overheard on the bus, a four-year-old explaining patiently to his mum:

Only dogs are allowed to catch a cat.
And cat is allowed to catch a mouse.

The “play” here is at a number of levels. I really appreciated the repetition, but most of all the slightly ponderous cadences and pulses. I could have looked at David Crystal’s eye-opening book Language Play, which makes a plea for language enrichment precisely through valuing children’s (and adults’) play with their language. I could have looked more seriously at Bruner, whose book on Child Language I explored for myself this semester as part of the Brookes module on Practice and Pedagogy. I was drawn instead to a book that suggested to me ages ago (wrongly) that this was what Education research had to look like: the detailed transcripts in Martin et al’s 1976 Understanding Children Talking, and I was reminded of Jason and his life-story poem “I wish I was a raindrop.” I am struck by what he plays with here in terms of rhythm and structure:

I wish I was a raindrop, a raindrop, a raindrop
I wish I was a raindrop and lived in a cloud
And it would be all warm, all warm, all warm,
And it would be all warm and we’d have a nice cup of tea.

(NB: there are four more verses to this).

I am struck by the rhetorical rhythm the boy on the bus gave to his Dogs and Cats pronouncement, which gave it authority. Martin et al call this “bardic,” which I wouldn’t want to lose as a concept.

The ideas expressed are influenced by the hidden demands of the mode.

and it’s this hiddenness that requires play. We could not teach Jason how to make a poem like this (very like “I’m walking like a Robot” and “Poor Jenny sits a weeping”) but we can allow him room to try out the various structures. As adults we introduce, repeat, maybe reinforce – but it is the child’s playful exploration that makes the creative leap.

Martin et al ask big questions of language, but I’ll end with the challenge of literature:

Are our novelists, poets and dramatists reaching back into their earlier days and, with the added skills of literacy, exploring and extending those same frameworks through which as children they talked out their fantasies?

Till We Have Faces

Three voices to follow up on my last post, and anchor it in my reading (because I really can’t stuff any more quotations into that last one):

In Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, one of the young adults caught up in the “sorrows of the valley,” the claustrophobic setting of the novel, challenges the handyman whose story holds the secrets of the recurring tragedies:

You’ve got to straighten yourself out over what you know and what you’ve read or been told. It’s a muddle inside you.

It might be that this (or indeed the character Gwyn from whose mouth it comes) is Garner’s own challenge to himself: it certainly chimes with some of the reflections Garner himself makes of his own life, seeking a unity between his book-learning, his understanding of landscape and his search for personal belonging, that he expresses most vividly (for me in Boneland and Thursbitch). To know that Garner has sat where we took this photo and that from this has come a great work of fiction on myth and ritual, time and belonging I still find immensely moving. The Matter of Britain as autoethnography? I read much of his work as born from these tensions, and really hope the tensions have not been too painful, the knots too hard to cut – but I suspect this is a fond hope.

Susan Cooper maybe has the keener knife at the end of Silver on the Tree, her final book in the Dark is Rising sequence, when (as I’ve noted before) she takes the task of straightening out the mythic and moral muddle of fantasy and hands it back to the reader:

We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control…. For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you.

In an earlier writing period – although not much earlier, really, from today’s perspective, although between the 50s and 70s seems a great gulf fixed – C S Lewis comes very close to this “muddle” in the life-long anguish of regret and misdirected affections of Queen Orual, the protagonist-narrator of Till We Have Faces, for me his most moving and clear-sighted novel. Here, towards the end of the book, she challenges herself and the world view that has been disintegrating around her:

When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over… I see now why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

For thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and favour the dust thereof

What is a ruin? Some initial thoughts on applying Jane Carroll’s topoanalysis to Thursbitch and Ludchurch.

Whether there are night-ravens or pelicans in one’s insomnia (the psalm commentaries spend some time on the animals in Psalm 102: I think I encounter them both sometimes) there is an undeniable power to the lament over the fallen city that marks the exilic poetry of the Hebrew Bible. It is the definining shock of the kingdom of Judah: the central symbol of trust is smashed into smithereens of hope and despair. The echoes comes down not only into Judaism but into the Catholic liturgy which in Tenebrae sings of the city that sits alone that was so full of people, and then of the destruction of a people and society. It gives us the beauty of the second Isaiah-poet, the wretchedness of Jeremiah: it creeps, too, into the landscape of “bare ruined choirs,” in post-dissolution monastic history and in Shakespeare. Just as it is woven into Judaism, the collapse of Romano-British society and then centuries later the destruction of the monastic presence have woven ruins into English history. The heritage industry feeds on the failing grandeur.

But Thoon and Thursbitch are not such a grand site. Upland clearances and enclosures bring about the same destruction in other, more domestic ways, and I guess the abandoning of the farm at Thursbitch is one of these. A farm, discernible by a brook, grass meadows, higher hills. I am reminded of the deserted upland farm buildings in Cooper’s The Grey King. Domestic tragedy.

What did we go out into the wilderness to see?

When Looking for Thursbitch became finding Thoon on a windy autumn afternoon, we found last year what we had missed before, a place central to Garner’s Thursbitch, the high seat from which one of the central actions of the book is observed. In this first picture, Mat is looking down from just below Thoon to the green pastures by Thursbitch. If we are looking for Biblical parallels this is one of the unorthodox High Places so mistrusted by the prophets, now peopled, perhaps, only by working farmers, walkers and the curious. The ruin of the farm is poignant, some walls, a sense of rooms and purpose, but little else. Perhaps.

Jane Carroll’s point (in her book Landscape in Children’s Literature) is that a ruin connects as well as divides: “the lapsed topos …provides the strongest connection between past and present”… “by physicalizing the human past, the ruin, like the grave, becomes a memento mori.” She is writing about the Dark is Rising’s young hero, Will, discovering links to the Roman past of Caerleon, and is leading the readers through the ambiguity (I love how my predictive text wants first Mabinogion then LeGuin for my mistyping) of past and present to the powerful vision of a humanist future. Garner is looking elsewhere, not for the Matter of Britain (at least, not directly) but for the Matter of Humanity. Story becomes the bigger thing, maybe the Big Thing itself, of which the þurs is only a metaphor. Sal and Jack are those who have “wrought that shall break the teeth of Time,” as Yeats has it, and Garner gathers us into this story, here – Carroll uses the idea of “poetry that contemplates the dust,” where death unites across time. For me, her most powerful section in the whole book is where Carroll argues around the ruin ( the cave, the grave) as a site of folkloric as well as physical excavation. It is in Boneland that landscape and memory jumble into so many half-told stories, and for us it was impossible to do more, on our last visit, than choose one path – Gawain – and dig with/travel along it. In Boneland Garner all but passes (there’s another post to write) Thursbitch and links Alderley, that autochthonic centre of Garner Country with its myths and creations, to Lud’s Church, Ludchurch, that Garner renames Ludcruck. Can a crack in the Rock, the stuff of so many of the high rocks around here be counted as a ruin? It is no Caerleon and no Aquae Sulis this chill, mossy fissure, but when contemplated as the possible site a poet has given to a key encounter in English literature, is it in some way at least the same sort of space, claiming attention as a ruin? Is it possible for a natural phenomenon to move from what Carroll calls a sanctuary topos to a lapsed topos? Or (and this is where I think I’m coming to) can Carroll’s topoi all coexist in one place? Ludchurch, it seems to me, is sanctuary as Green Chapel, green as a Wilderness and magical Green Space, a pathway (and it certainly has that, both in attaining it and passing through) and the sense of abandonment. Is it possible for a sanctuary to be a ruin? And what of that oddity of pilgrimage, the Camino, the ley, the sacred road? Not to deny Carroll’s powerful assertions of the distinctions between her topoi, it is as if, as significant narrative elements in Garner, they can be seen as merging into one.

An indeterminate space such as Ludchurch has a final challenge, the one we find (or look for and miss) when seeking something beyond the ruin. Carroll proposes the past-present-future of the ruin, the lapsed topos as not without hope. For me this is about the spiritual aspect of Ludchurch, centred for me on my final image: even in a damp evening, or (as it must be now as I write) a chill gone-midnight darkness, it still seems to me a place of immense significance, where, maybe “prayer has been valid” (another perhaps), or where at least some sense of transcendence is rooted in the slow fall of rock, the trickle of waters, the challenge the Green Knight gives Gawain to be honest, to grow, to meet Something Big and return wiser. Is there another topos, the place of enlightenment, or is this where Cooper’s Oldway Lane and the Mountain in Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and the selva oscura in Dante (and at Gradbach) show their narrative power?

How Wild the Space?

I saw a lovely student from another University today. She’s researching Harry Potter and wanted to chat it over. We met in the Weston Library and talked about her project, a reader-response exploration of an illustrated version.

It struck me as odd to be sitting in the Bodleian, in Hogwarts, doing this – odder still (but still a delight) to zip round the Designing English exhibition (I hope this link stays after the exhibition closes: it has been a treat), walk through the main Bodleian quad and then past Exeter/Jordan College (we discussed La Belle Sauvage as we walked). For me at least this is potentially an everyday possibility: to walk through film sets, through putative locations, through ghost stories and narrative devices: trees under which sundered lovers sit; pubs where the righteous and unrighteous plot; rivers that carry fugitives and storytellers. In a short walk to the bus from a cup of coffee I was able, with a light touch, to “explore the concept of investigating key locations within [my] own mythologies and their connection to the landscape and to the literature which they inhabit…” In other words I mirrored in a short and urban way, the Wild Spaces Wild Magic project. So here are some questions about my chat about locations and my walk this afternoon:

In what way does Wild Spaces Wild Magic differ from the solitary reader’s exploration of location?
In what way might it differ from the crocodiles of tourists on The Harry Potter tour?
Does it matter that Oxford provides an urban setting, and in southern England – in other words, do we need mud?
Does it need to be a “real” Oxford?

Of course, the solitariness of the lone scholar doesn’t preclude the investigation – but I think it’s about investigation, not just “being there.” If all we can say is that ‘[i]t was (you may say) satisfactory…” then we are mere tourists. If going to Gradbach and ascending to the Green Chapel is just about a tick on a score card we are a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal, as St Paul writes; if sitting in Thoon was simple finding and possessing, we see only through a glass, darkly. It may be that this superficiality accounts for some of the lack of engagement I suspect in the ungainly crowds who come to see where Daniel Radcliffe trod, and who find a busy city full of traffic and buses and the everyday…

Oxford isn’t Hogwarts – although I did draw the parallel with my visitor today. Rowling never intended it. For Philip Pullman, at least two Oxfords occur in his great His Dark Materials project, and the urban Oxford that is “our” Oxford is carefully delineated so as to distinguish between it and Lyra’s Oxford. But is Oxford magic? If the city cannot really provide, in its old lanes and towers, a setting that is full of a psychogeographic nostalgia (Brideshead, Sayers, maybe even a Pullmanesque wistfulness for les collèges d’antan) then why come here to tell the towers thereof? Perhaps it’s because the visitor hopes- perhaps I hope – not for the gods of the high moors with their new roads and secret gates, but the possibility of stories “that made us who we are and still design us.” Oxford makes stories; it allows people to make their own stories. Maybe Oxford comes closest to the Wild Magic when it demands of us, as Mat and I have posed before, “What will happen to us when we stop looking back; when we can no longer dreamwalk into a history?”

So does Oxford need to be real? The College Myth I subscribed to from 1976 (until, really, I came back to my Grandpont interview in 1991 and stayed in the Fellows’ Guest Room at Magdalen ) was never real; we came and with our posture made some passing scribble on the air – and then left. Kings and gods of fantasy, we were that most temporary type of Ozymandias, cocky undergraduates.

It was not ours, really, to possess. In some ways, the cruel thing about Oxford is that it keeps growing – up, out, into a more modern place, whether that growth seems pleasant or not. And we – I – grew too. All children grow up, anyway, and this was not Neverland, either. Oxford is, in that sense, not a city of aquatint, but a city of myth. Maybe, as Andrew Marr has suggested, this is why Oxford is the seminary for the classic fantasy writers: Carroll, Lewis, Tolkien, Cooper, Garner…

Because what would happen if we could no longer dreamwalk?

End of the Matter

Spoiler alert: this is the Matter of Britain as explored at the end of the Dark is Rising Sequence, the last few pages of Silver on the Tree.

All good things come to an end, and the narrative that begins (tentatively or with deliberate simplicity) with three children in a tussle over Arthurian legend in Over Sea Under Stone comes to a conclusion in a wild confusion of drowning cities, wounded kings, Welsh and English topography- and the three original children with their guardian, Merlin/Merriman, and his protégé Will facing off the Dark. Capital D, just as Will and Merriman and others are the Light.

What shocked and delighted me was the post-War humanism with which it concludes. Transcendence goes onto the ship with the previous guardians of the Matter of Britain, with Arthur “and all the hosts of the shades of Light.” Tir Nan Og, Tolkein’s Undying Lands, Aslan’s Country beckon, and the myths of Britain depart. It is a more dramatic rupture than in Tolkien or Lewis because of what follows:not Tolkien’s wistfulness or the hope of a new dawn in Lewis’ afterlife, but the rupture coming out of Auschwitz, of Hiroshima – and now the threats, ecological and military of our own time. The end of the matter becomes the start of a new struggle?

Bran, the boy who gives up his right to be part of the myth “stood watching until there was no ship to watch, but Will could see no regret on his face.” The charge laid on Will and the Drew children by the departing Merriman/Merlin is worth at the very least a tribute here: it is really worth reading the whole sequence of novels for, a humanist rabbit pulled from a transcendental hat:

“For remember…that it is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth…

For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and joy.”

Vocation I: thoughts in a bleak time.

A first thought on what makes me do what I do – or rather to voice something much deeper than curmudgeonly impatience at the world of work we face as the new year starts.

It comes in response to a sense that the world around me has changed so much, so quickly and in such ways, that I seem to have fallen out of it, to misuse Tolkien’s phrase about the fall of Gandalf. Higher Education is subject to market scrutiny and handed over to hugely paid leaders and people frankly unsuitable not because of past misdemeanours but because of attitudes that seem at their heart a monstrous parody of past views of class and merit. Early Years is again subject to the kind of battlegrounds I thought we had left bloodied but unbowed. Literacy will get some bits of funding to make hubs but schools continue to be short of money to do the everyday job which really would improve social mobility. It is acceptable for the pedagogologues who enjoy the attention to characterise children as “in need of a good slap” (this post so disgusted me I can only link to it obliquely: why give such stuff the satisfaction of hits?) and a young person who seeks inclusion as a “functionally illiterate troglodyte with a mental age of six.” This is painfully and angrily expounded in the heartfelt blog “Troglodytes in the chocolate factory: the disabled child as rhetoric” linked here. So to go back to that sense in fantasy – in Le Guin’s Earthsea, in Garner’s Elidor, in the elves in Tolkien’s Middle Earth – the glory has departed, my time seems to be past.

And if this gloom and doom were all there was, any sense of vocation would seem lost. What is the point – other than the salary – of going in tomorrow? I sound like Fungus the Bogeyman, rather than Elrond.

And what can I say to my students? Dispassionately I can observe we have been here before. Personally I can go back – as I did in a previous blog post – to the teachers and leaders who inspired me or spurred me on. I look at them with gratitude.

What about the longer view, however? I find my answers – and I don’t presume to say they are anybody else’s – in literature, especially in the heady punch of Alan Garner and the clear waters of children’s literature. As Cooper works to “unriddle” the world,” Garner too talks about the truth of story. His despair at the collapse of the culture of the Man in Boneland captures it in mythic form:

I have a Story.

Tell me your Story, said the other.

The world was full, and the people hunted, and the sun was young. Then two people of the Crow held each other, and the Stone Spirit wept and the sun moved its face. Then came cold, and the herds went. The Hunter and the people followed them and the world was empty; but the Bull stayed. And every night of winter he comes above the hills, watching to see that there is life; and the Stone Spirit looks to send out eagles from its head to feed the stars.

And because the Crow flesh brought the cold they stayed to dance and cut and sing in Ludcruck to make new the Bull and the beasts on the wall of the sky cave above the waters for the time when all will be again, with the Hunter striding. But if we do not dance and cut and sing and make the beasts new on the sky wall the Stone Spirit will not send eagles.

And who is it that you hold? said the other.

No one. She and the child went to the ice. No one is left to hold. No child to teach. I am alone. After me, no one will give my flesh to the sky, take my bones to the nooks of the dead. The sun will not come back. The Stone Spirit will not send eagles. The world will end.

That is a true Story, said the other.

Garner (and Cooper, and Pullman) are explicit about how storytelling takes you back to the universal, a window into truth.” This particular storytelling shows a man, The Man, despairing as his world closes around him: some hope is also coming, however, as we read on, but it is longer term than we could possibly imagine.
If fantasy provides a heady mix of images and hopes and fears, I would also choose the clear stream of children’s literature because – well, at one level the lampoon of adult nostalgia that is Moomipappa is enough to prick any bubble of self importance and regret.

Nature Books

The AHRC Favourite Nature Books project closes its nominations at the end of November. I made a nomination in the end, but with a very heavy heart: it felt like taking one book and saying goodbye to the others. I am wary of lists, as I’ve said before, back in April. However, I do feel I want to record some of the books I considered, a sort of cheat list of ten books I have thought about as contenders for my “favourite.”

Rob and Jackie’s The Lost Words
Roger Deakin Wildwood
Caspar Henderson The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
Oliver Rackham’s Woodlands
Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts Edgelands
Philip Hoare The Sea Inside
Annie Dillard Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Richard Fortey Life: an unauthorised biography
Richard Mabey Weeds
Robert Macfarlane Landmarks

and of course there are others I’m sure I’ve overlooked. I couldn’t really decide: we live in an age where Nature Writing (if we want to think of this as a genre: there’s an essay there for starters!) is of a very high quality and justifiably well promoted. There were criteria in this selection, in that I wanted to choose only one from each author but cheated with Robert Macfarlane because of how different Landmarks is from Lost Words and is anyway the latter is a joint creation – but in the end I wonder how different they are…

But I didn’t include writings that indirectly provoke me to think about nature – novels, for example – or poetry, so no Heaney or Thomas. So that indirect provoking also means no Garner, no Cooper, no Paver, no Pullman… I noticed after I’d compiled it that there are no children’s books unless Lost Words counts.

This is a lot harder than it looks, but at least my one nomination is in, for what it’s worth.

It was Landmarks, in case you wondered. I just can’t think of the other nine (and then some) not getting washed up on the desert island.

Green Thoughts, Green Shades, Green Knights

What sort of journey does Gawain go on? I asked this when thinking about the interior and exterior journeys in children’s literature and traditional tales. Today – cold as cold, but sunny even in the woods as the leaves lose their grip – I was struck by the challenge in how I ask my students to take some time alone and quiet in the woods. No ‘phone, no eye contact with one another, just ten minutes (today five, since they were so cold) stood or sat alone in the sunshine of a little wood.

I do this because one of the dominant things when we think about outdoors is the opportunity for boisterous play – the “let kids be kids” argument is full of this. However, I saw this picture of one of my class and suddenly remembered a little girl who “played camping” all one long summer afternoon in a nursery garden. I repeatedly asked her if she was OK, if she needed anything, and she always smiled and said “no.” Letting humans be human is often about the powerful and energetic ways we interact; today’s shelter building and “One Two Three Where Are You?” games were great examples of this. But to “be” outside may also need time: time to listen to the angry little wren, the panic of a jackdaw, the wary crackle of feet (a hoof, I suspect) in the undergrowth. Time to not listen to me melling on, or to the demands of social media –

till what I find, I find
because it’s there

as John Burnside puts.

Rachel Kaplan‘s sustained work on the benefits of being outdoors (for example here) emphasises the restorative effects of being out in nature. She is also clear you don’t need a wood, and I can understand that. I might contend that these forays into expansive environments also can/might include a spiritual encounter – with silence (or, as the students today identified, a lot of different, smaller noises), with our own feelings and intentions. For some this is familiar, welcome; for others, I know from debriefing this activity in the past, it might entail a confronting of an individual’s own discomfort. What sort of journey do we go on to our respective Green Chapels, and what might we find? Time to be alone with (or without) our thoughts can lead to all sorts of different paths and encounters – even in five minutes in an autumn-cold wood.