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.

Lost, like my name.

“The trouble is, Nick, you don’t know who you are.”

It’s true. This Lent I have been occupied by a phrase from the letter of St James: purify [your] hearts, dipsychoi, people with divided souls. Like some kind of fidget toy, I’ve twisted it this way and that, coming back again and again to wondering about honesty, authenticity and truth. The headline challenge from a friend this week came with greater force than the discussion in Confession the weekend before. Three or four, or even more voices and choices have been raised in me and around me, and the nail is hit home with that phrase: “you don’t know who you are.” Dipsychos, a person with a divided soul, and it is friendships, two revelatory friendships in particular, that have shone a light on that division. This post isn’t about them, really, but is trying to make some sense of this “unknowing” model in terms of my work and my research.

It would be lovely to talk about how being outside clears my head, about “the mountains, the solitary wooded valleys,” but is it just about walking?
When Rob Macfarlane writes, it’s not just about walking; in today’s looking at my relationship with Garner’s Thoon and Ludchurch it seems hardly to be about walking for me at all, but a sort of pilgrimage (that overstates it) towards a personal integration. When I have written about “being real” before it has been about creating a relationship with place through story; this post, this week’s thinking is about me making sense of me through people, through place, through story but as I attempt it…

…I am back to Ludchurch and the disquiet I felt when I met that dark place, the darkening wood and the disempowerment of the Green Knight in the dusk. Maybe what I turned from there, the thing that chased me from Thursbitch for weeks after our first visit, was a shapeless Big Thing made of what I couldn’t see: an anxiety that I cannot find a self under all the guises I carry. One of the coats I wear is about the research, the language and literature reading and thinking and walking I have been involved in, the Wild Spaces Wild Magic project. I come back to it again today in something of the spirit of Richard Mabey’s Nature Cure, where he suggests that walking can be “like gazing into a crystal ball.” Walking, maybe, and reflecting on that walking – but he also warns that “the imagining and mythologising of nature is an ambivalent process.” So while pressure of work and demands of family mean not much one-foot-in-front-of-another walking has been going on, there has been a lot of (very ambivalent) crystal ball scrying: it has been a week where time and again, sitting in my office or in my meditation or as I drift off to sleep I have walked from the Gradbach hostel up to the Green Chapel, and as I reflect on this I keep coming back to the blog post and the John Fuller poem I cite often, where in the one I claim I am my own Gawain and in the other Caliban concludes, angrily:

… I think it is not good
To be unhappy with your freedom or
My language (learnt, but nothing understood),
Lost like my name within the magic wood.

This Good Friday evening, the first night of Passover, let me add some more thoughts.

Perhaps it is the rhythm of spring and Liturgy in both Christian and Jewish traditions have been (in part) agents of bringing me to a point where I have to acknowledge, as Rob Macfarlane describes it in The Old Ways, “the co-present ghosts of the former and the future.” The ghosts of past relationships and the uncertainty of present ones; the ghosts of past half-finished research so beautifully topped by more able medievalists at home and elsewhere; the hopes and fears of all the years. Maybe “imagining and mythologising [of anything] is an ambivalent process” – solvitur ambulando, but I feel like I am on a fatigue run, carrying so much. It feels like time to stop running: to change the metaphor, it feels like time to look to the ordering of my life, to make sense of the bits I am carrying, like a hiker rummaging in a disordered rucksack, or a mosaicist faced with the task of creating a picture from random tesserae.

The poet who “got me through” the bleak and beautiful four years of studying and working in Durham, Anne Stevenson, challenges the reader at Easter with the lines

What god will arise and slouch
through this realm of rubbish?

And I think the place I am at the moment is just what she describes in North Easter: a realm of rubbish with real flashes of beauty. That is to say that I am unconvinced by the Olympic myth of “anyone can be what they want to be,” but I am in sympathy with Auden (in lines again I have come to this Lent):

Instruct is in the civil art
of making from the muddled heart
a desert and a city where
the thoughts that have to labour there
may find locality and peace
and pent-up feelings their release…

Let Fuller and Anne Stevenson end this. She complains in her poem A Sepia Garden of creating identity as

the daily irritation,
the cramped frustration of attempting
the jigsaw with pieces missing

and my plaintive joining Caliban in saying

…I framed what syllables I could

because we all create who we are with what we have. The trouble is I’m not sure what the picture I’m creating should look like.

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?

Outdoor Learning – “Lost like my name…”

The poem by Fuller I cite in one of the research diary posts on Looking for Ludchurch is there to underline how important this project is – and how when we invest something with credibility or significance, we give it power to make or mar us. I am still in the process of digesting it all. The entries for the Wild Spaces, Wild Magic visit days take me through a process I am clear I have not yet finished:

The First is a poem I am still unsure of, although colleagues and friends have been kind.

The Second was the visit to Thursbitch, so unlike what had come before (blogged in detail here) it almost – almost – was not the same place. Except Mat and I sat in Thoon.

The Third is the account of the first visit as people better prepared to the Green Chapel. I remain wary of identification of the place, but with Ralph Elliott’s book, with Garner in our ears, with the Google project to do, this was another different experience.

The pace and tone changes in the Fourth, for Friday afternoon, when Debbie arrives, Mat comes back from Ludchurch, Roger and Jane arrive and with as little commentary as possible we take our new visitors up to the Green Chapel. Then that evening read together the stanzas of the Gawain poet.

Saturday morning, grey skies and a last whole-group visit to Ludchurch: this is my Fifth diary entry, the one I have most difficulty with. Not that it was bad, in any way – but I needed to set the order of event out clearly.

Entry Six is my attempt to recount the visit that stays with me, my walk alone up through the evening wood to say goodbye to the Green Knight, and to reflect on how challenging that- and the writing and thinking of the day – had all seemed.

Why “a language learned but nothing understood/Lost like my name within the magic wood”? Because Caliban’s despair at his lot echoes my own impatience: I want to write weighty, interesting pieces, to communicate my utter love for this valley in the autumn, for the myths that run through it (and other places such as along the Ridgeway) or for the people I worked with this weekend in Gradbach – and yet I see that so often my image of myself gets knocked when I try, and I end up somewhere as intellectually or spiritually or emotionally magical as writing about literature and landscape but feel disempowered. Like Gawain I have “groned for gref and grame” (line 2502); all the tricks of academia are at my disposal, just like all the trappings of knighthood are for Gawain – but we both return with a simpler lesson. I read the message to be to stop posing and get on.

So I’m back, and now the work starts: turning this – all this – into papers, into projects for students, into return trips. This is, after all, what we went out into the wilderness to do.

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.

We’re Not Scared

Bear Hunt is an improbable book: wonderful, but not really a narrative of an afternoon’s outing. The children move through a variety of landscapes and seasons in a re-playing of an older nursery game (with possible variants about lions, guns &c.) and we are not, I think expected to view this narrative as reliable. Grassy hills in summer, mud flats, forests, snow and then to a seaside cave: wild, funny, incongruous, and fantastically depicted by Helen Oxenbury. It is open, therefore, to a lot of very playful interpretations – and therein lies some of its strength: the rhythms and the scenarios carry us along to the encounter with the bear and then back again. There could be debate about why the bear chases them, too – and whether it is hungry or lonely as it returns to its lair at the end. Michael Rosen’s own energetic performance of it differs from my own; I suspect everyone who has shared this with a child or a group of children will have done something similar: a pace-change here, an inflection there.

I might as well shrug and say “literature is like that.”

But one reason why literature allows so many interpretations is that we each bring to any interpretive act – reading, walking the landscape, whatever – the acts that have come before it.

And so Bear Hunt presents itself to me afresh as I prepare for my next encounter with the Big Thing we might suggest is not dissimilar to a bear in a cave: the dwelling of the Thurs (þyrs) that gives us Thursbitch. In that light the bear is a figure of terror as it is often in folktales, and actually that’s how I first read the Rosen-Oxenbury collaboration. Children, the innocent protagonists, play out a possible trespass and run home. Red Riding Hood’s great-grandchildren have to learn the lesson for themselves.

When we went to Ludchurch that feeling of trespass was not so much one of danger as of nefas, of the unhallowed intruding. The Green Chapel was a place of wonder, and if it is the site of Gawain’s encounter with the Green Knight, I can understand why. A place of awe and wonder – but also one from which Gawain returns chastened, wiser.

The next day’s expedition in the fog to Thursbitch felt different.

Here is Garner’s own evocative description of his visit not only to Thursbitch, but to the elusive Thoon above it:

At high noon in high summer, Thursbitch is visually different from the first visit, when I didn’t notice the bump on the horizon. Now I did. In the two-mile stretch of the valley, this outcrop is the only interruption of the peat ridge. We went to look.

It’s an extraordinary feature, entirely geological: a natural recess, shelter and cave, above a confluence of waters at a ford.

The combination of a natural cave above a confluence of waters at a ford made sense. In my background reading I’d discovered that such a place was the one most favoured by a þyrs.

When I – we – went there I was definitely a bit spooked, and it wasn’t a beautiful day: this was my account. Our haste at leaving felt more like a dismissal than being chased – and yet the dreams that followed certainly suggested I had felt more menaced than I had let on. To borrow Garner’s words “A novel may be finished. A journey is not.” Which is why I am sitting in a busy University atrium, planning the next trip – and why, thinking about We’re Going on Bear Hunt makes me wonder: trespass and return is a powerful theme, and if Garner’s mastery of his narrative means there is, in some sense, no return for the protagonists in his novel, this is an arabesque on the more familiar plot line: leaving home, trespass and initiation are deep-seated in our communal storytelling psyche.

Bear Hunt retains power as a story not only because of the lovely illustrations and the driving, rhythmic storytelling – and it does have both of those – but because it taps into a deep source. The children are Red Riding Hood’s descendants; they are also Gawaine’s.

Yellow Skies and Red Suns

Monday 16th October:

What a day today has been! And while words like “apocalyptic” were bandied about on Twitter, the epic skies made me think not only only of texts like this manuscript of Beatus of Liébana’s commentary on the Apocalypse , with its rich and terrifying visions of the end of all things, but of the icon gold of Jackie Morris’ art work in The Lost Words. The icon is important here, the translation of the Divine into the here and now. I remembered the colours in the Corfu Icon Museum and the gold in the Palatine Chapel in Palermo and Monreale Cathedral in Sicily. It is as if I am back with de Hamel and the Remarkable Manuscripts again: so much beauty. Back to myth and might-have-been.

I have said I won’t review The Lost Words, although I have commented on it, notably in response to Rob McFarlane’s wonderful essay and on the original movement around excising words from the dictionary. My avoiding a “proper” review is partly because Dara McAnulty’s blog reviews it so much better than I could. I will however comment on this one other aspect of the work: how nature writing and art have an astonishing double edge to them, revealing the instant beauty of the thing or event, and at the same time revealing the “mystery…instressed, stressed,” that is at the heart of the icon, maybe at the heart of this book of spells and the pictures than conjure not only this kingfisher, those otters, but also an almost Platonic ideal. Nature -dare I personify it? – herself.

And maybe this is the revelation, an apocalypse: the eternity in the gold behind Jackie Morris’ kingfisher, the “quick now here now always” of Rob McFarlane’s Wren.

More on lost words

When, a while back, I made a brief mention of the disappearance of some words from the Oxford children’s dictionary I acknowledged the limitations of the lexicographer, who needs to balance all sorts of needs. I also mourned (briefly) the way that “country” words might fade into ignoble disuse. Today, Robert Macfarlane picks up the linguistic gauntlet, reporting and critiquing a paper (which I must read) on the capacity of children to assimilate knowedge about real species, but contrasts this with what appears to be a preference for Pokemon, which Macfarlane characterises as part of a “lack of natural literacy.” I could, maybe, try and contrast this with the walk I’ve just taken where 7yo granddaughter made up a song about conkers- but as I type, I see “conkers” is not recognised by my predictive text or spellchecker….

His writing is detailed, moving, insightful, and ranges from Barker’s Flower Fairies through Le Guin and Garner. I feel, as I read Rob’s thoughts in the paper, that I have been trotting behind him for a long while, as well as looking at other stuff along the way, and am looking forward to hearing him and Jackie Morris as part of their book tour for Lost Words. His name-checking of authors and critics we both admire – or that a growing community that I am amazed to find I inhabit with him, and Mat, and the great Alison Lurie and others all have read – is enlightening about how a scholarly community is constituted, made up of links and lines as complex as a set of ecological interrelationships.

Jackie Morris explains the evolution of the new book. Here is her blog post on the book, itself well worth a read, and she explains how the vision for their new book moved from protest letter through initial conceptions of a “children’s book” through to something rich and strange. I am looking forward to buying my own, and to having it signed in due course…

But this essay in the paper takes me further, and I am immensely grateful. It seems to me that we (whoever that comprises, but I hope it means me, and Mat, and The Landreader project, as well as bigger names) are no longer marginal children’s lit ecocritics, but part of a bigger movement of eco-literacy. I feel a call, if not to arms, then at least to get my critical compass out, to set out again (and again) on the paths that lead from the crossroads where The Chaperon Rouge meets B’zou, to where Gawain meets the Green Knight – and back again, through the riches of folk tale and legend, through traditional tales and modern inventive fictions, so we can help people appreciate, in Macfarlane’s words, how “nature, naming and dreaming are all tangled together.”

Three (sets of) Ravens

Those who know me well enough – and even some people that don’t, becasue I am such a show-off – know that I have three ravens tattooed on one shoulder. I love them, and listen out for the Cronk Cronk of the one that occasionally heckles me on the allotment. They are there because I used to sing the Thomas Ravenscroft song to my children in the hours of walking them back to sleep when they were babies. This link takes you to the text, and this one to the first version I knew, sung by Alfred Deller. One lot of ravens.

The second is the lino cut Corvus Corax my daughter has made:

Full of humour in that beady eye, agile even in print form, it tells me so much about our shared love of the big birds we see at the local Falconry Centre. Corvus Corax: the Common Raven.

The third is another raven from my adolescence (yes I still watched Jackanory when I was in VIth Form) and my children’s childhood, Arabel’s comic and anarchic raven in stories by Joan Aiken, among them the three I know best, Arabel’s Raven, The Escaped Black Mamba (I left that out of the precis below) and The Bread Bin. In the first, the respectable taxi-driver Ebenezer (Ben) Jones picks up a distressed raven which his daughter Arabel names Mortimer, much to her mother Martha’s despair. Adventure follows, as the raven becomes entangled in a kidnapping and bank heist. In the second, Mortimer is firmly established in the Jones’ household, although not without protest from the grown-ups. Chris the babysitter is involved this time as Arabel’s parents go out, and the raven gets stuck in a trumpet, and more gangland involvement ensues. In the third story, Arabel gets bronchitis and goes to hospital, and Mortimer goes missing. There is a happy ending, if you’re worried. Other stories also came out in similar vein: the riotous Mortimer, Carnival in black; robbers; clashes with the establishment in the form of police, librarians, huntsmen and research scientists.

And there we have it with Arabel and The Common Raven. Aiken is careful with her class distinctions, drawing heavily, it seems to me, on the conventions of Ealing Comedy to depict her colourful inhabitants of NW London. What amazes me is her ability to write about an ordinary family in N London and hint at accent and (therefore, indirectly underline) class without becoming incoherent or patronising. There is a wobble, perhaps, in the depiction of the Irish Mr Plunkett who does say “Glory Be!” and “Begorrah” and uses “Ye,” but little else. Much of the comedy that does not come from Arabel’s trust for the raven’s really poorly adapted way of living with humans comes from Mrs Jones and her outbursts:

“Oh good gracious me did you ever see anything so outrageously provoking in all your born days?” said Mrs Jones. “I never did, not even when I worked at the Do-it-yourself delicatessen: don’t you go running after that black feathered Monster, Arabel, you stay right here.”

Notice the punctuation. We are meant, I think, to hear this as a stream of outrage; I can imagine Kenneth Williams in full flood (it was actually Bernard Cribbins who read them on Jackanory and I do recall he was fantastic: here is Cribbins in fine form in a later story). Her annoyance makes her instantly believable, and a true foil for Arabel’s innocence. As with the latest film adaption of Paddington, where his migrant refugee status is played up, there is perhaps a hint that Mrs Jones over-emphasising the blackness of the raven – the “black fiend of a bird” – but ambiguous, and in character, not as narrator, and nothing to compare with the more explicit comments of Roald Dahl. As a final thought, and very revealing of his own processes, Quentin Blake is here commenting on the process of preparing for the illustrations in Jackanory and the printed books.

Where the social distinctions are drawn in the Raven stories, it is mostly in the clashes with authority. The doctors in Rumbury Central are somewhat exempt (except for nervous rashes), but the fierce ward sister Sr Bridget Hagerty and in a later story the visiting GP are not; the police investigating possible GBH in the Jones’ household are stock figures of po-faced ineptitude; bank managers and solicitors all get some sort of come-uppance. We are in the realm of Capt. Mainwaring and the Ealing Comedies. The record shop bosses in Arabel’s Raven, for example, who try and dun the Joneses for the damage the raven causes, employ solicitors to try and recoup their loss; they are described as “that pair of sharks” by Mrs Jones and end up being arrested. Dominant Aunt Olwen in Mortimer’s Cross, a descendant of Saki’s humourless older women bullies, is abandoned unceremoniously in favour of the much nicer Auntie Meg in Bangor. The gentle representation of a Welsh dialect is telling:

“Ben never said anything about sending you, lovey,” she said. “Company for me you’ll be, while Gwennie’s in hospital. Nice, that is.”

Aiken plays with stereotypes skillfully by not over representing them, by hinting through the characters’ use of language. It becomes natural that Mr Jones’ family are Welsh – why would a Jones not be? – and the pomposity of the establishment is lampooned and dismantled – as any comedy from Moliere (and before) suggests they must be. The Raven stories thus represent a first satire for young readers on societal difference, in which the comedy is found in the situations and language of an ordinary family and their interactions with their world, the catalyst for adventure being the Loki-like disrupter, Mortimer the raven. Mortimer is thus the inheritor of the mantle of the divine trickster (a good Wikipedia entry [sic] here). That the Joneses and Mortimer are a far cry – a far Kaaark – from the Wolves of Willoughby Chase and the other, more solemn, work Joan Aiken did for an older audience is only a testament to her skill.