“The story could not be more simple or more perplexing” writes Peter Bradshaw in his review of The Green Knight, and this is as true of the new film as it is of the romance found in MD Cotton Nero A.x., Art 3. Here we are nearly at Michaelmas, a special time for me as I reflect on forty years of being married, and also the season when I think again and again of Gawain, and Garner, and the challenges of those trips up to the Peaks, and so this is well timed for me, even though The Green Knight has been much delayed, at last we get to see the new film.
It presents a game of colours and shadows that intrigues, delights (for the most part) and challenges: the costumes were fantasy-wonderful – the peculiar crown was a particular favourite of mine. The scenery was mostly well researched: if the forests were a bit Forestry Commission, the high moors looked wonderfully bleak – was that actually Thor’s cave in one scene? Maybe it was an odd way to get from St Winifrede’s Well to Lud’s Church, but in Oxford we get used to scenes of people crossing one quad into an entirely different college. Loads of fog, and silhouettes of the lost traveller while crows caw and perspectives shift. The Green Chapel – over-lush for Christmas, but teeming with a Spring promise of greenery – was everything one might imagine of Lud’s Church painted in mythic colours. While it is a retelling rather than a cinema version of the poem (but yes, there is a very quick flash of the MS at one point) it maintains much of the tension and the ambiguity, and sticks with one of the poem’s principal dilemmas: how does Gawain prove himself when he is so out of his depth? Yes, I did like it.
But there are holes in the film – some deliberate (unless I missed it, we are not given many names other than Gawain and his girlfriend: is this all in Gawain’s head, some sort of Mantel-like psychodrama?); some…well, I’m not sure. A lack of reveal about the witchiness of the plot was odd – and although the ‘magic’ of the women was brilliantly portrayed, I was unsure why we were left to infer quite what they were up to, with Gawain’s mother in on it all, and a creepy Morgana an olde auncien wyf for sure, unintroduced, wandering around Castle Bertilak. And are those ettins, the giants that sort of added atmosphere but not much else? And what was the fox there for? What was St Winifred doing there? A sort of nod to a topography of Gawain’s journey, or a quick footnote on the folklore of the headless? Lots of questions – and it won’t be a hard task to sit and watch it again – but did we really need quite such a dim and draughty pile for Camelot?
Ah yes, Camelot. It was a bold move to set distant castles on hilltops, and some times looking rather (let’s be generous) storybook – but once one of us had humphed “It’s only a model,” and Monty Python and the Holy Grail (that excellent parody of Medieval Mud and All imagery) had been mentioned, it took some time to recover.
Recover we did. Bertilak goes off hunting and so does Lady Bertilak, openly sexually assertive towards Gawain, and a sight more explicit than the poem – and she is given the best speech in the whole film, a quick mini-keynote on what the imagery of Green might signify. Then the kiss of Lord Bertilak to Gawain was just long enough, just suggestive enough to make you think that the Bertilaks are well aware of each other’s game. Gawain (well played by Dev Patel from young and lost in his first scene to old and lost in a scene towards the end) is caught between ‘real’ goodness and the fake goodness of simply keeping up the Christian chivalric code. How does this play out?
Bradshaw and I agree on how successful the atmosphere of “shroomy toxicity and inexplicable moral grandeur” is: the second half, with all that wet-dream (or whatever) tension and the might-be visions of eschewing the Green Knight’s blow is a genuine tour de force. I’m going to avoid spoilers – but the end is every bit as ambiguous as the end of the poem, and I have to say completely won me over. It’s only a game, the King tells us – but what kind of a game are we playing?
…and liddle lamzy divey, as the song goes. Words baffle, words elucidate, words induct you into a club – or exclude you. Consider this opening sentence to chapter one of a book I was looking at last night:
The vascular plants, or tracheophytes, which possess specialised conducting system include four phyla of the plant kingdom: 1, Psilopsida (chiefly fossils); 2, Lycopsida (clubmosses); 3, Sphenopsida (horsetails) and 4. Pteropsida (ferns, gymnosperms or cone-bearing seed plants, and angiosperms or flower-bearing seed plants).
Abraham Fahn: Plant Anatomy, second ed. (1974)
Does it invite? Intrigue? How much there can I read (if reading is decoding)? How much of this can I read (if reading includes understanding)? I suppose I am thinking about this because I have been reading the book I ought now to call Clements and Tobin (“I hope you all did the reading from Clements and Tobin this week? Good.”), Understanding and Teaching Primary English, with its detailed account of all sorts of aspects of reading in Early Years and Primary education and (key to my point here) the holistic, contextualised and meaningful reading experiences which convince children of the purpose and pleasure behind reading.
What I miss from Fahn is that contextualising element. It’s not his fault: I have plunged in medias res with trying to learn technical building-blocks terms from an advanced book. In other words, as Maggie gently pointed out to me “I do have some more basic books if you like.”
A bit of Greek is my way in, but leads to more and more questions. Psilopsida are naked forms (and I now see the term is no longer used); are Lycopsida wolf-shaped – but why? Sphenopsida are wedge-shaped forms (yes, I’m looking them up by now) but what gives Pteropsida their winged shapes? I enter a maze of definitions and four paths open in front of me – my only guides the indices of books and a bit of etymology. Gymnosperms I knew both parts to, and could work out, but find at this point that I do not understand why they are gymnos, why naked; and I do not (yet?) understand what vessel or container holds the seed for an angiosperm. What does endo- mean in endosperm? A further level of comprehension is needed, more knowledge to understand what these things do, to understand why we have called them what we have. I am learning the words on this first page of chapter one like I learned the details of W S Gilbert lyrics (still not sure what dimity is here, in the Pirates of Penzance) or like, as an unlatinate child, I learned the Credo. In the right place, at the right time (and with the right people to support and inspire) these strange utterances have their own power. No wonder magic is often brought to life in spells, in words in a particular context.
Heaney, in his wonderful poem In Illo Tempore (text here) attests to the power of language: The verbs/ assumed us. We adored. And we lifted our eyes to the nouns… It is this power that provides me with motivation, just as the experience of being able to explore with my Vygotskian more knowledgeable peer (i.e. my Maggie!) gives context to my wondering. But as I think about how I dig about for meanings in an unfamiliar context, I think again about how I fight shy of the technical terms I am more used to.
I have no idea if a scandicus is a term in plant anatomy – maybe putting it in the title of this blog was just a bit naughty – but it is a term in in chant notation. We could start with a list of words a bit like Fahn does, and, like the intended readers of his Plant Anatomy, a beginner in chant could learn quilisma, pressus, podatus and the rest. The Liber Usualis, a sort of compendium of resources for western Church chant, takes this approach. In a similar way, a young altar server might learn responses and prayers and be drawn into the cadences of the text of the Mass (see Heaney, above), or – a more everyday experience in early learning – the glory of the names of dinosaurs (and I do love this list). However, the nomina nuda do not tell us much, unless you delve into word derivation. A passage from the Liber Usualis such as this:
Scandicus and climacus: these groups may be made up of three, four or five, or more notes…Not to be confused with the Scandicus, [the salicus] can be recognised by the vertical episema placed under one of the notes.
Liber Usualis, 1959
is as inscrutable without a guide as are Lycopsida and Pteropsida, Amygdalodon or Riojasaurus.
What does a reader need? One thing my dive into plants this week has shown me again is that we are all, if we let ourselves, learning to read. There is a power and a joy in reading a text or reading a landscape that for me is enhanced by an enriched vocabulary and a facility for diving into detail. So what the support do we need, whatever our age? Well, to look again (in conclusion) to a lesson straight out of Mat and James’s book, we need Margaret Meek‘s human connection, someone to read with us, to tread the path with us, pointing out this feature of a plant, or singing along with us or appreciating the teeth of a large therapod.
Scallywag Press have sent me some intriguing titles to look through and maybe write about, and I will, in various fora. But this is is spring, varying in its weather; and Lent (as I write this), full of its water imagery: Antionette Portis’ Hey Water seems a good place to start. After all, here in Oxford we have had water-butt-filling rainstorms, dry days so warm as to encourage t-shirts to be discarded… and the end of March, that month that for me is encapsulated in Jobim’s watery theme song: the Waters of March is a wonderful, chaotic evocation of bringing spring rain and floods which “carry sticks, stones, bits of glass, and almost everything and anything” (Wikipedia actually being lyrical for once). And this brings me to the various images and descriptions of water in Portis.
With a picturebook like this it is sometimes easy to fall into the line of describing it as “deceptively simple.” After all, this isn’t the disturbing, rich imagery of Maurice Sendak in Dear Milli or Outside Over There or the detail of a busy page of detail in any one of a hundred beatiful books – say, Castagnoli and Cneut’s The Golden Cage .
Simplicity is not always easily achieved; it requires as much dedication as complexity if it is to succeed. Design is crucial (see Mat Tobin here on another watery glory, The Tale of the Whale ). Portis really has one thing absolutely, beauitfully in her control, and that is balance. What might have been a duller “Look at this – now look at that” has a richness about it that comes from the varying colours and from the ways in which water floods some pages and is minimal in others. “Tear” exemplifies this perfectly: a line of text, a closed eye and a grey, translucent tear has a huge impact where one might have been tempted by all sorts o of distracting commentary. It is followed in the same opening by rain (see above), maybe the wettest page in the book – and my photo here hints, I hope, at this strophe/antistrophe that Portis handles so well.
We see water as snowflakes, fancier than lace, fog hiding the world, steam, clouds… the ubiquity of water is shown through all sorts of forms in which a reader might encounter it or might have seen it in other books. Each opening invites a very basic appreciation of the visual power, and the text skips alomg with it. The illustrations and text are – until the coda of more instructive material at then end – in a dance of images, spare and generous, and text, beautifully plain. All sorts of ways of looking at water are presented – again, like The Waters of March, there is a flow of all sorts of ideas here, all presented with a refreshing simplicity.
But this is not “deceptively simple” in some tricky way that invites us to look here and there for clues, but just that one thing: simple. In reading it now I am reminded of St Francis too, and his portrayal of “Sister Water…”
…la quale è multo utile et humile et pretiosa et casta.
…who is very useful, humble, precious and chaste.
Canticle of the Creatures
The direct and simple style of Antionette Portis is perfect here for that most varied – and yet most simple – of the building-blocks of life of earth.
I took with me one of the books I was given as a present: Qing Li’s Into the Forest, (pictured above, left). This is a well-produced and scholarly look at Shinrin-Yoku, Forest Bathing – and this blog post is, in part, a response to the book and the practices it affirms. Qing Li is an epidemiologist in Japan, and the book is at once a toe-in-the-water popular account of the research, and a “how-to” guide to a practice of which Dr Li is a major proponent. Oh yes, in the West it’s a fad perhaps, and, at its lightest, simply a wish-list of mindfulness practices in nice places, but its underlying messages are worth consideration – the kind of thing I clumsily contemplated back in 2018. For example, here (p121) are Qing Li’s proposals for engaging the senses:
Listen to the birds singing and the breeze rustling in the leaves of the trees
Look at the different greens of the trees and the sunlight filtering through the branches
Smell the fragrance of the forest and breathe in the natural therapy of phytoncides
Taste the freshness of the air as you take deep breaths
Place your hands on the trunk of the tree. Dip your fingers or toes in a stream. Lie on the ground
Drink in the flavour of the forest and release your sense of joy and calm. This is your sixth sense a state of mind. Now you have connected with nature. You have crossed the bridge to happiness
And here I was on my birthday with a walking pole – a bare, stout stick – in a sunny, chilly local wood. A raven kronks and kaarks overhead. I sit by a brook and watch a robin. A muntjac comes up to me and then, suddenly spooked, disappears into the bushes and bracken. What did I go out into the wilderness to see?
I didn’t go out to see the beautiful photography that genuinely enriches this book (so much so that I sent it to my rather immobile and certainly locked-down dad). I know Shotover, I know Oxfordshire in winter when blood is nipp’d and ways be foul; this is not the hinoki tree, or the Sagano bamboo forest in the book – or the massive stands of bamboo we met while in Montpellier on holiday. This isn’t a criticism of the book, which has, I know, to have a wider appeal that just to me – but its gorgeous photographs of forests and leaves and sky make me wonder about the woodlands we have access to here in southern England in winter.
Connection to people may well be part of the human condition, and certainly forms part of what I would think of as my own experience of spirituality (I look back at this post and see how it is crammed with names) but on my birthday I spent time alone, not fretting over tasks to be done, or mooning over missed friends or thinking of crass mistakes and mishaps of the past. It was as if my present to myself, or maybe my present from Maggie (who gave me the Into the Forest book) was an opportunity to look over the shoulders of these concerns. I’m aware of the human activity around me, aware of what human activity there has been in the past, but today it’s about hearing the leaves. It’s not even remotely transcendent: it’s just leaves and robins.
As Qing Li puts it,
The sounds of the forest soothe our frazzled heads, lift us out of mental fatigue and give us the silence in which to think… In the forest we can let our ears be captured by the sounds of the natural world and have our senses refreshed and rejuvenated.
Into the Forest, p166.
Rachel Kaplan’s Attention Restoration Theory is worth citing here, both from the 1989 book The Experience of Nature she and Steven Kaplan wrote, and from other writers looking at their work such as this readable little introduction. I explored it here in a blog post just as my last year at Brookes was coming to a close. To relieve the overburdening experiences of desk bound, urban life, “mental fatigue,” she recommends being engrossed in the environment, purposeful exploration and a real sense of “being away.” It is remarkably similar to the Japanese movement – but again, can we truly escape in suburban Britain? The wood I was in, Brasenose Wood, at the foot of Shotover, has a constant thrum of traffic from the Oxford ring road, and although it is possible to screen it out, doing so is an extra task.
The trees were so grey it made the greens of mosses stand out as if they were lit from within; the sky, when it is blue, is likewise full of light, and on my birthday, it was like Inchbold’s Study in March. As the recent snow melted the trickles were everywhere. At my first stop, I listened under the traffic burr to the water, the robins, a kite high up in the sky. The increased quiet as I went further up and further in (the reference is to C S Lewis) was obvious. The high trees moved and rattled in the wind. On Shotover I am not away in a wilderness miles wide, but making the Edgelands a place where at least some of this escape is possible.
“Go in obedience and you will find love. You will have no more dreams. Have children instead.”
C S Lewis’ Christ-like hero Elwin Ransom, Pendragon of the mystical Logres, virginal (Lewis’ own term) channel of the celestial powers, Doctor of the University of Cambridge, dismisses Jane Studdock, the main female character of his Fantasy/Sci-Fi That Hideous Strength with these words. She gives up her power as a Seer to descend the ladder of humility (Lewis’ own image) to become a dutiful Christian wife. In the final paragraphs we know she will enter into a more generous (I think this is a word Lewis could appreciate, but I am at a loss) relationship with her wayward husband Mark: her impulse is to realise she will start by tidying up before the sex.
My first readings of this novel* saw Lewis explore – as in Perelandra, its predecessor- the gendering of mythological/angelic creatures, and the imperious Venus leading Mark to his own understanding of the new relationship seemed key to the finale. I got that.
Later readings caused me some disquiet. Is this really Lewis setting out a theology of marriage? Does Christianity for Jane have to entail submission to her husband because of some inherent maleness in Divinity? Not helped, perhaps, by the ‘of their time’ references to Mark and Jane’s troubled sexual relations (C S Lewis is not D H Lawrence), we are in a rather coy world of Jane needing to submit and Mark appreciating the stupidity of his importunity. I don’t necessarily need to have much more detail, but it is clear their times together has not been fulfilling in some way. Lewis is entitled to his authorial choices; it’s just that we have to acknowledge that if we are not at Wragby, then we are not On Chesil Beach either. The time of love-making (or whatever we call it) immediately after the end of That Hideous Strength is somehow for Lewis’ characters going to be more successful – successful because Mark and Jane will come together with a view of their relationship much more conformable to the reciprocity of St Paul’s vision in Colossians: wives be subject; husbands love your wives and be not bitter; children obey; fathers provoke not, &c.
But it would be a cheap trick to confine Lewis’ thinking about sexuality and the Great Dance of Being (his image) to the bumpy start to one young academic couple starting married life He may use them as exemplars, but his myth of gender is more fully explored in Perelandra, Lewis’ Eden-Myth, second in the trilogy. Limited still we might see it – written in the 40s, after all – he is at least open to a bigger picture than the who-does-what minutiae of Jane and Mark – or even the feelings of Elwin Ransom, the virginal and attractive Cambridge don whose adventures with the ancient gods pull all three books together.
In the final section of this second book, a sort of grand opera Finale, Ransom is witness to the establishment of the rule of the “humans” in Perelandra, in the presence of the tutelary spirits of Malacadra-Mars and Perelandra-Venus, the warrior and the lover. He explores a binary M/F sexuality while dividing masculine from male, feminine from female (and this will sit at odds with the depiction of the cruel, cigar-smoking Lesbian in That Hideous Strength), which fits this in his overall intention: to wed traditional Graeco-Roman mythologies with his world view:
Malacandra seemed … to have the look of one standing armed, at the ramparts of his own remote archaic world, in ceaseless vigilance… But the eyes of Perelandra opened, as it were, inward, as if they were the curtained gateway to a world of waves and murmurings.
and it is with this insight that Ransom (and with him, Lewis) understands
…why mythology was what it was – gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility.
And so with his gods sorted (sort of), Lewis pulls out all the stops, his prose full of beauty, of awe and wonder and celestial power, his own quasi-scriptural voice pouring out: but is it only in myth that he can confront the realities of gender and sexuality?
This recognition of the mess of human understanding is key, and Alister McGrath ends his essay on Lewis in Curtis and Keys’ Women and C S Lewis with something of a plea for clemency:
Yet there is a more compassionate and more realistic way of understanding Lewis – as someone trapped within the social norms and conventions of a bygone age in British culture.
We are all condemned to live in a specific historical context, which we struggle to transcend.
McGrath “On Tolkien, the Inklings and Lewis’ Blindness to Gender.”
Lewis turns finally (before Ransom’s return to Earth) to the Adam and Eve of this new-founded society on Perelandra-Venus, Paradise in its two Persons, Paradise walking hand-in-hand. Lewis glories in the both the wonder of the woman’s breasts, a splendour of virility [sic] and richness of womanhood unknown on Earth, and the feeling trembling on the lips and sparkling in the eyes, the might of the man’s shoulders.
He writes here with what seems to me to be more conviction than he does in his hinting at the post-wedding courtship of a young male academic and his (it seems to me) oppressed wife. Certainly
All this is a roundabout way of highlighting the contrasts in the sexual politics of Earthsea. Ged’s ordinariness at the end of Tehanu is part of this, but it is worth noting the sequence of events: the destructive High Fantasy episodes in The Farthest Shore (I knew I would return to this) have left Ged weak and wounded. He is already at the end of his power in The Farthest Shore, enduring, and longing to avoid, some pain with a restlessness…greater than his strength, which soon gave out. As it turns out (at this stage at least) in facing death Ged is no longer the thing that we have defined him by: a man full of magic, archmage. It is his liberation by Tenar, whom he liberated in The Tombs of Atuan, that allows the two to come together in companionship and love, in physical affection and sex – and in the ordinary life of farming. Vocation – Rise – Fall – and then… Then, a restitution of life in the work of herding and in the house of someone who loves him. If, like me, readers had not seen the sequence of books as an elaborate Princesse Lointaine narrative resolving after long years and painful crises, there is at least a sense of completion.
The Finder, in LeGuin’s next text, Tales from Earthsea, picks up the story – or revisits it by asking why Le Guin’s great mages are celibate anyway, and what is the sociology of the mage world, and where this comes from. It is a story bursting with themes of oppression and resistance, with quotable quotes relevant to any reading of the news at the moment (The great and the mighty go their way unchecked… The lords of war despise scholars and schoolmasters), as well as insights into a more personal spiritual life (We must keep to the center. And wait…).
“My master Highdrake said that wizards who make love unmake their power”
And do they? It would seem not: but they lose their status. Celibacy in Earthsea is a construct of power, and in various ways it is the setting aside of power that allows people to be something more (?better?) than powerful: it allows them to be loving, to be good. I come back again and again to images of pomp from secular and religious occasions and how the set, pious expression seems deliberately enclosed, distant, even disdainful. Cardinals in Cappa Magna; Presidents almost pouting to look grand: they look to me stiff necked and cruel: Gilbertian Mikados. Tenar was freed by Ged in the Tombs of Atuan from her awe-inspiring, dread-full charge as the priestess, the devoured one (shades, to refer maybe more charitably to C S Lewis, of Orual, his brilliantly drawn narrator/protagonist in Till We Have Faces), celebrating empty rites over the dark labyrinth. Ged was freed from the weight of death and of power by Tenar, by warmth, love, and a final setting aside of the burdens of his magic and his status.
The moving story in The Finder – the high-fantasy novella at the start of Tales from Earthsea – has a touching Male-Female relationship at its turning point, where avoidance and coyness become a sexual relationship and a lasting love. In the shorter story that follows, we deal with the simple idea that some people just don’t feel cut out for life as a mage: young Diamond comes home (to the disappointment of his wizard-tutor), picks up with Darkrose, his old girlfriend, and (to the disappointment of his father) goes off as a singer. Ordinary might also mean disappointing the visions grown-ups have for you – but you might end up being happy. There are other ways to unmake or set aside your power.
We see more of Ged in the book The Other Wind, no longer a mage – as the old order changes – but one with experience and knowledge. Tenar in this final book is in ascendance, advising the king, facing the dragons – and the role of women and power is explored further.
And it is Tenar’s wisdom with Tehanu her adopted daughter that in some ways brings this long arc back to earth:
“Ah you dragons,” Tenar said.
It was spoken lightly but it was not lightly said…
“I don’t know what I am, mother,” [Tehanu] whispered in her voice that was seldom more than a whisper.
“I do,” Tenar said. And her heart beat heavier and harder than before.
Le Guin: The Other Wind.
When she returns to Ged he is watering the cabbages like an extra from Voltaire’s Candide, and they share a glass of good red wine. Breaking the world to make it whole sums all the Earthsea revolution (not {but this is another story} unlike the twin volumes of the Handmaid’s Tale and The Testaments).
“Well, I’m back,” she said – to paraphrase.
Ursula K Le Guin The Other Wind: Endpaper (extract)
*I should note that Piers Torday and Neil Gaiman have commented with more thoughtfulness and authority that I can on his portrayal of girls and women in Narnia. In a piece looking wholly at Lewis I would have explored their ideas, and given Alister McGrath’s interesting essay more than a passing mention. For the record, Michael Ward’s work on Jane Studdock is very clear sighted and less defensive. It was a chance comment of mine that Perry Nodelman picked up that started me thinking about LeGuin’s Earthsea as a whole.
Quotation after quotation after quotation is required, punctuated by image after image. Reading The Girl Who Became a Tree (Joseph Coelho and Kate Milner: Otter Barry Books) requires some response but beyond reproduction of the book, what can sufficiently portray its complex creativeness? Part A Monster Calls, part Mythago Wood, riffing Caliban and over and over the praise of reading, of libraries… I am full of praise for the inventive, tricksy, frightening and (sometimes) comforting aspects of this rich text. There are, of course, other beauties around, and if I explore and praise this book in the way I have some of last year’s writing for adults or the marvellous debut of Dara McAnulty, that’s not to say that this is a text that shines alone: we are at a rich time in the creation of high quality children’s literature, as Mat Tobin’s blog attests (check it out, and look at his interview with Seaerra Miller and his review of her Mason Mooney, or his exploration of the Wanderer– recent posts, before we even look at Sydney Smith). But this is different.
The Girl Who Became a Tree is a story told in poems, disjointed and broken, like a jumble of faces and patterns in a stained-glass window or maybe more aptly a woodland left to its own devices – I’ll come back to this. But the woodland is a jumble, even a threatening one sometimes, just like nature itself is, just like the mess Daphne the protagonist has to find her way out of, lost after her own loss, using a language (A picture in my head I could not draw, A language learnt but nothing understood as Fuller has his Caliban say) of love, of attachment and of loss that she has to relearn.
Images and turns of phrase from Daphne’s flight and way back stay with me. I have to praise the joining of inimical nature and failing manufacture in
…crows and ravens
with ‘out of battery’ eyes…
or the menace of simple lines
Amongst the dead branches
sat a throne
and this interweaving of kenning and metaphor is a magnificent section:
I am rage,
stone-cracker,
soil-despoiler,
copse-corpse maker.
So why is my stomach
frozen leaf mulch?
I am frenzy,
field-bomber,
hill-raker,
mountain-puncher.
So why are my eyes
winter mist?
The situation – of tragic loss, of the misapprehension of technology as cure when it merely dulls, of the power of reading – speaks clearly of Phillip Pullman’s assertion (which I cited here) that stories teach in many ways. Woodland is made to speak: the dulling, menacing presence of Tolkien’s Old Man Willow or of the enclosing pine tree that trapped Shakespeare’s Ariel is powerfully at work here, and the poem that first presents its genius loci is direct and plain:
Tree monster big
with its tree monster claws
tree monster mumbles
tree monster roars.
and the terror with which Daphne reacts is likewise vivid:
The way your stomach
lurches to sickness.
The way your heart
stalks every beat.
This is not a monster to be trifled with. This blog has as its headquote a line from Gawain: Very wild through the wood is the way they must take. The tree-woodwose-monster Hoc is of the same shape-shifting as the Green Knight or the wood itself in Mythago Wood. Daphne is, Gawain-like, all but seduced into comfortable half-truth; almost her desire/to hold tight the past traps her. the temptation is not unlike Diggory’s in Lewis’ The Magician’s Nephew – he is offered Mother well again; she is offered memory so vivid it will bring her father back.
The voice of birthday surprise
When the monstrous Hoc, the devouring spirit from tombs of trees… crumbled towers/for fungi to rent offers Daphne the unthinkable, this is a struggle at the hardest of levels; I felt on first reading that she could so nearly have not made it through. As I have said before – in the context of A Monster Calls – misappropriated, mishandled, a spiritual experience might well be damaging. If she hadn’t made it, she – and we – would be lulled, trapped, tapping endlessly on our ‘phones in search of comfort and connection.
As Daphne confronts her loss, her being crushed by the false promises of technological ensnarements which give an impression of connection, she begins to see a way out, a real, emotional rescue/resolution I won’t share here, as a new springtime comes for her. Without breaking the magical realism that is at the heart of this narrative, it is wholly believable: a redemptive friendship, a saved message; a mother’s support…
Illuminated by the artwork Kate Milner offers in the text – meditations on wood, and tree shapes, and the detritus of technology – this is a powerful book, but not an easy read. Pictures need careful examination, and the wordplay and the poetry and storyline likewise need careful following: for me it is not a book to read at a couple of sittings, although I wonder whether more rapid reading would have had a different rhythm and that that in turn would make it more accessible to a younger reader. My issue: not the creators’.
By using myth in a more subtle way than simply updating it, author and illustrator have created a story of confronting death and return from all-consuming grief not unlike Aeneas and Odysseus, but with the modern twist of dealing at once with modern communications and a landscape that is entrapping, dangerous, devouring. There is a tradition of the antiqua silva, the selva oscura here in which it is not a pleasant place, but a place of challenge, where the unwary get into trouble – shades of the woods of Red Riding Hood?
In praise of libraries and librarians (with this author and illustrator how could it not be?), a parable warning against the soft and easy answer, a story of growing up which gives the teenager a place in the adult world, hard-won and precious.
It is a wet Saturday evening as I start to write. That’s not to say that damp days are always a bad thing, but tonight as I look out the world looks gloomy. Somehow the continued botches of our current government around schools and safety in this time of potential illness are the worst, filling me with dread for what is to come: popularism that does not even have efficiency on its side, last-minute patches on policy: adhocracy as someone described it to me.
This sat with an increasing but largely unacknowledged personal malaise – sleeplessness, irritability, all sorts of stuff I should have seen as part of a tide of – what? Anxiety and a feeling that I was alone and unloveable. The moan of the irrational snowflake? The weariness that attaches itself to people just fed up of so many things going wrong: plague after plague: the boils and lice of 2020. The weariness of isolation so perfectly caught by Shirley Collins in her haunting Locked in Ice – the fearful guarantee that I’d be run aground. Not so much a snowflake, then, but a blizzard.
There is sometimes a temptation to see the present hard times as very limited “over by Christmas” – but it is worth remembering that the concertina effect of some historical reflection sees Henry VIII’s destruction as a short blip, or the Vikings who came and were violent and then set up the Danelaw in a few episodes, or even further back, the siege of Jerusalem and exile to Babylon as soon over: a blizzard soon past, when in fact they lasted years, with effects still felt in culture and outlook. The malaise we suffer spiritually will not, I fear, pass any quicker than the physical illness. And that makes me sad, to say the least.
But if we’re going Biblical, the gloom of the prophet Jeremiah is worth considering here. In Ch 8 his poetic/prohetic voice depicts a rudderless land where hopes have withered.
When I would comfort myself against sorrow, my heart is faint in me.
The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.
Transiit messis finita est aestas et nos salvati non sumus.
Jeremiah 8:20 (KJV/Vulgate)
Why isn’t it (define “it,” of course) sorted by now? All those utopias we wanted by the autumn: where are they? Why can I not track this package, of all the packages I ordered?
Of course the reason it’s not here is the complex relationships to all the solutions people want: ecojustice; social liberation; touch; an end to greedy politicians squirrelling away money and holding power by sweaty lies. The recent protest against vaccinations and masks is enough to show how divided we all are, how mistrust in all sorts of causes and solutions is deeply eating into what passes for society. Mistrust, selfishness and what seems like no way out: we seem in a quicksand of grime, and so when C S Lewis’ saintly hero Ransom is explaining to Merlin how the world has changed since the time of Arthur, he describes modern society vividly:
…maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands.
C S Lewis, That Hideous Strength
But Lewis’ near-apocalyptic, celestial intervention will not do, even for a Christian reading a Christian apologist. We are back to that other Merlin, Cooper’s Merriman Lyon and his charge that it is up to us. The writer of the Apocalypse – as I read it, full of an impotent rage as persecution strikes the early Church – looks for a world where a new heaven and a new earth (Revelation 21:1) will replace the turmoil of the present. He is looking to external agents for a big show-down, when I think we need to look closer to home, as I have said in a previous blog post – to compassion, to peace-making.
We feel we are on the edge of time, as individuals we feel helpless, despairing. The situation is dangerous, injustice is so widespread, the danger is so close. In this kind of situation, if we panic, things will only become worse. We need to remain calm, to see clearly. Meditation is to be aware, and to try to help.
Thich Nhat Hahn: Being Peace
I got so far in my thinking about the lessons I took from Jeremiah and from Thich Nhat Hahn and I ask: what might my response be to the current crises – these interlocking disasters of various kinds – which despite the noises and wishes I see in my corner of Twitter will not go away quickly: what do I do as Jeremiah is persecuted and the city falls, and the Babylonian exile begins? The Shirley Collins song summed it up: a little Ghost Ship on the Beaufort Sea: where the ice goes, I go.
And then the ice breaks, just a bit. Enough. It starts with a sunnier day, the warm, open expression of gratitude from a dear friend, and then Maggie and I started sharing Helen Macdonald’s new collection of essays, Vesper Flights (some of which I had already heard on the BBC). She laments the loss of a meadow from her childhood and hopes for its restoration in a new building development:
The pull on my heart is also the pain of knowing that this is possible, but that it is very unlikely. Centuries of habitat loss and the slow attenuation of our lived, everyday knowledge of the natural world make it harder and harder to have faith that the way things are going can ever be reversed.
Helen Macdonald, Vesper Flights. Tekels Park
Never reversed. Yes, I can see that, almost taste it sometimes. Yet just as I’ve cited the idea of 3 Ways of compassion – for self; for others; from others – there is also something of an answer in these first pages:
Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those who are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.
Alcuin has to join those writers I have discussed before – Walafrid Strabo, Paulinus, Ausonius – as worthy of particular mention at this time, and I just want to explore briefly some of the phrases in the poem called Cella Alcuini, in the little collection that came to me recently. I’ve found the Latin text and a translation here, but not before I stumbled through it with (as the first photo shows) a fat Latin dictionary.
The poem starts as a kind of monastic eclogue: Alcuin rejoices in his “cella,” his enclosure, where the apples are ripe, the lilies and little roses bloom. Everything in the garden really is lovely.
But the tone changes. The transitory nature of this comfortable life is underlined; poetry is gone, the boys are no longer singing. It is different from Horace (another Flaccus: Alcuin is not unaware of his predecessor) in that the Horatian ode Eheu fugaces seems to me to be about approaching Death, whereas Alcuin, leaning on his staff sees his youth departing but another vocation pressing (Ian Chadwick, by the way, has a good exposition of Horace here; perhaps a drier blog, but with the full text and translation is to be found here from John Derbyshire). His youth departing: an unintentional double meaning here? I think it is not unreasonable to see Cella as mourning not so much the arrival of wrinkles as the departure of a way of life or a a much loved younger companion. The tone changes – and I am unsure about whether the awkwardness of this is purposeful or not. When seems clear to me in that second half is that the post-Horatian praise of Alcuin’s dwelling – not a “cell” as commonly understood, but a compound, a settlement – is interrupted by the more passionate writing.
Two images stand out for me:
Quae campis cervos agitabat sacra iuventus
Incumbit fessus nunc baculo senior
And
Nos miseri cur te fugitivum mundus amamus
Alcuin is missing the mundus, the physicality of his garden, of the sacra iuventus out in the fields, even of his religious life – ces voix d’enfants chantants dans la coupole from Verlaine and Eliot. There are other points of reference, but I’m reminded of the “sacred days” of Ray Davis and Kirsty McColl, and Days (another link for me might be Sainte-Colombe’sTombeau Les Regrets, but this isn’t the place to explore all these thems in every genre): Alcuin’s regrets are a spur to something else…
I am struck by the image of an old man and his stick (an abbatial staff?) looking back at the lads chasing deer: it is so vivid I cannot help but think it is “drawn from the life” in some way: Alcuin’s memory of his own youth or an experience with his students. How, then, do I want to translate that phrase sacra iuventus? What is sacra? My initial thought was to see this use of “sacred” as akin to the idea of the precious freedom of childhood, an early exploring of the ideas that emerge in the Romantic and post-Romantic period in poets and educationalists alike.
Maybe that innocence and excitement is there in germ, but I think I want to explore briefly is how sacer is used where Alcuin would have seen it most: the liturgical texts, where a sacrifice makes something sacred. Is that what Alcuin is suggesting? The boy chasing the deer is one consecrated to God? A youthful cleric? Or does iuventus stand for a gang of lads from the school in York? That would work: the holy youth (singular or plural) chase[s] the deer, the older man leans on his staff – tired: a suggestion that the dedication of the young has past. Ah, except that the rest of the poem suggests that it is in old age we turn to something more demanding, more transcendent: that play between cur…fugitivum…amamus and Christum nos semper amemus then becomes key: why do we love you, fleeting world? Fly, fly: let us always love Christ… A pious thought.
And yet I come back to “those endless days, those sacred days.” Is the old Alcuin leaning on his staff and looking at the energy of a long-gone youth and seeing it as having its own unattainable glory? Can he discern with Larkin and Marvell and Yeats and the rest that what he partakes of is only their scrap of history? Does his wistfulness suggest he protests too much when he needs to repurpose his love (amor and amemus dominate these last lines of the poem)? Or is he suggesting in his own way that
When a writer – fiction, non-fiction, prose or poetry – identifies closely with a place or event in the natural world, a number of possibilities are open to them, from distant observer to intimate dialogue. They are often trying to reach into the dearest freshness deep down things, as Hopkins has it.
Sometimes there are attempts to understand and even to communicate. Bob Gilbert’s programme about Susurration is a joy: like Fiona Stafford‘s magisterial exploration of the Long, Long Life of Trees, it gives an account of the relationship between humans and plants, and looks at how listening to trees gives insights into their lives. Between them, they produce a vision of woodland that helps answer some of the deep ecological questions about reading a landscape, and prompt me to think especially about the imperilled landscapes as we face global warming, the threat of extinction…
The traveller or writer on landscape is “The I that is the Eye:” observer and commentator. Think of the vivid writing and passion of George Monbiot in Feral:
The squall passed suddenly and the sun slashed through the sky, almost violent, its intensity somwhow heightened by the coldness of my skin, as if, frozen hard, I could no longer absorb the concussion of light.
George Monbiot, Feral
or the poignant, almost despairing reflections of Peter Feinnes:
And I am wondering, do beavers foul their own nests? Do they knock down their own houses, obliterate their woods, poison their own land? And if they don’t, what does that say about us? Put it this way: if you live in a place, are you more likely to cherish it? How close to somewhere do you have to live before you feel inclined to look after it?
Peter Feinnes, Oak and Ask and Thorn
Looking at fiction, the Man in Garner’s Boneland faces similar deaths, cultural and at a species level, with his woman and child dead, as he explains:
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.
Alan Garner: Boneland.
I was starting to think about Alan Garner – never far from my mind, and the header to this blog reminds me whenever I log on – because of a challenge to identify stories in which landscape is the narrator, which brought me straight back to Garner and the sentient landscape. And if Garner, then I am already departing from the original challenge, by thinking Boneland and Thursbitch. In neither is the landscape – and even defining that would take a while – the narrator, but it is a slow and not-quite-visible agent. And therefore capable of siding with one or another action? Or working so slowly but the glacial power that our lives are shaped by its inexorability.
First person narrator. In poetry it has a long tradition, from Riddles to out and out personification. Whitman questions the soft-falling shower and imagines it answering him in The Voice of the Rain (very apt for today, a wet Monday morning). Cruelly (and comically) satirised by Geoffrey Willans, Tennyson’s The Brook was however the first that came to my mind: here the poem and its parody get a mention from Alison Flood on reciting poetry by heart, with its repeating lines
For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever.
Except that “forever” is a long time, even for Ents, Tolkein’s spokesmen [sic] for the natural world, whose wrath against Saruman’s ecocide is such a turning-point in the Lord of the Rings. Lewis, too, uses the tree as symbol of nature: in The Last Battle the death of the dryad is the atrocity that starts the action. The warning of industrialised destruction in Lord of the Rings and Narnia has a voice – but still not quite the narrator I was seeking. While Jane Carroll (I have discussed this aspect of her work here) sees the ruin as a place with a past and a present – but also a future – I think I am beginning to have to see that future extending certainly beyond me, but also beyond humanity.
{An aside: I find I had completely misremembered The Ruin, that very odd old English lament for a culture the invading tribes had themselves destroyed, in that I had it placed as a first-person lament when actually it is closer to the Lamentations of Jeremiah:
Beorht wæron burgræced….
Crungon walo wide..
Bright were the halls….
Slaughter spread wide….
I wonder whether this misremembering was because of my need to think of the Ruin as a particularly affective piece of writing.}
It seems to me – and I know Jane Carroll is thinking about this herself at the moment – that I need to distinguish between various tangles of nature writing. So here are my first thoughts: five strands.
Aetiological storytelling;
Writing in which place is key to the development of plot or argument;
Brilliant and affective writing about place;
Story in which “landscape” (or, in a kind of metonymy, a creature in the landscape) tells its story;
Story in which “landscape” is personified.
Examples of the first three (yes, they move around between them, and are in any case contestable) might be:
Peter Dickinson’s The Kin is a powerful example of a complex set of origin-stories, as early humans grow in their understanding through their adventures and their myths. We are way beyond Just So stories here, but Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill would be admissible, I think – as would Sutcliff’s Sun Horse, Moon Horse.
Thursbitch and The Overstory would give me examples of the second but while Garner and Powers are monumental examples, to reach into children’s literature I look at Lucy Boston, and Green Knowe. Tolly isn’t Tolly without the Manor; Ping isn’t Ping without the River.
At this point I almost want to compile an anthology: I hope my avoiding links to bookselling sites &c will allow anyone reading this to follow more reflective writing.
But I am still left with these last two. Have I just been shuffling round, trying to avoid them?
Well, the final one does have me stumped. The Overstory comes close, with the interactions between trees and humans having at once abstract and a biochemical connections – but even here it is the humans who are the principal focus. In the same way, in The Secret Garden, the locked and rediscovered garden calls (in the person of the robin) to Mary, and she – and Colin – are transformed by its reawakening, but the humans remain centre-stage. In Prince Caspian, the awakening forces of nature likewise interact with the humans and respond to the divine grace of Aslan, but while they are agents, they are none of them protagonists. So (apart from the examples below) I draw a blank.
The penultimate category was suggested to me by re-reading Rob Cowen’s account of an eye-to-eye meeting with a deer, in which he imagines himself into the deer, standing for every hunted deer of the past and as a commentator on the world in which it lives:
I feel my heart quicken, thump, and prepare for flight. Snorting to clear wet nostrils, I stand and breathe, pulling air into my lungs to determine direction, but I find only the clean, safe scents of the forest again. Things are restored.
In writing for (and maybe with) children, first person narration can occur in similar ways: I am the Seed (the trailer here is lovely) has the narration in a particular tree-seed, but not every poem in this marvellous collection does the same, and this is not the landscape as a broader concept, rather a single tree standing for a landscape. Powerful writing – but short and focussed, not sustained. Perhaps Tennyson’s Brook and Whitman’s Rain succeed because the movement of water is itself a quick thing for the eye to focus on; immediately dynamic, not of massive, tectonic slowness?
*
Why do I keep coming back to extinction? At a simple, personal level it’s because I feel my mortality keenly in these days of pandemic. But in the Lit Crit I see it in so much of the material I have thought of as “brilliant and affective writing about place:” the fragility of the human presence in the walnut forests in Deakin’s Wildwood; the postscript to Macfarlane’s Landmarks; the trees making connections and spurring the humans to action in The Overstory. These are not written as a message from nature in its own words, but words explicitly by good human writers acting as advocates, reading the signs of the times and warning us as surely as Old Testament prophets.
Because the voice of the landscape is unimaginably distant and immanent, all at once. Is it merely a personification, a trick of perception, of how we see this connection or that rock shape, some sort of pareidolia to help us discern a place, a role, a meaning? Is it a different tack on the same pathway that gave us Sky Gods, talking/spirit animals, Green Knights?
I started out with the intention of finding fiction in which the landscape is in some way a character – I’ll keep it as vague as that. I don’t think I managed it. However I seem to have ended up thinking about some kind of End Times for the Anthropocene. I am conscious that some of the predictions about the end of Homo sapiens might mean that “nature” (however we define it) will outlast us, those oak trees that are weeds in odd corners may be here when there are no humans to admire or curse them. What value then, does our pareidolia/anthropomorphism have, if any? It seems a little pathetic: we cannot own the post-human in any way other than by “being good ancestors” and if these tricks of the light spur us on to that, then so be it.
Just a quick comment to contextualise these quotations: they are otherwise presented without interpretation – just in case anyone needs them in days when we need hope. Boy do we need it at the moment, and this weekend in particular seems a hard time. As I have prepared them it strikes me how almost scriptural they are: patristic and matristic readings for an Office of another culture.
I suppose I’m really putting them here because I need them. I have used them all before in various ways: the texts are referenced (sort of) by the URL embedded in the title: the URLs to elsewhere in this blog indicate where I have discussed the quotation or the writer in another post. Not all of them have such a link, of course.
I’m hoping, really, that they also stand as an advert for the longer texts from which they are taken. However, if you own the copyright for any of these extracts and don’t want these texts used like this, tell me and they’re gone.
So the first sees the characters whose adventures are set in Sutcliff’s vision of the “collapse” after the withdrawal of Rome: treachery, cowardice, offset by compassion and heroism.
“It may be that the night will close over us in the end, but I believe that morning will come again.
Morning always grows again out of the darkness though maybe not for the people who saw the sun go down. We are the Lantern Bearers, my friend; for us to keep something burning to carry what light we can forward into the darkness and the wind.”
And the next is the charge given to the children at the end of the sequence of The Dark is Rising, as Merlin, like Gandalf before him, prepares to sail away, with humanity very firmly in charge of its own destiny:
“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.”
“Sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold.” Rob Macfarlane, half a mile under Yorkshire, discusses what is left by previous lives:
We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the mist leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes in fact all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.
And (hard to choose a section from this book: Sara Maitland on a wood in Scotland; Alan Garner deep (physically and spiritually) in among the alder near his home [where else?]); the question What should we do? from Richard Mabey then Paul Kingsnorth and a call to action:
If there is one thing that the current ecological crisis teaches us it is that we have got our relationships wrong, with woods as with nature more broadly. If we see a wood as a machine, we will behave very differently to the way we would behave if we saw it as an animal. Alive or dead, resource or living place: our attitude, our understanding, directs our behaviours.
Perhaps the old indigenous ways of seeing and the new revelations from scientific investigation might slowly help to change our attitudes, which in turn may help to change our behaviour. It might be a long shot, but it seems the best shot we have; maybe the only one. And I think it begins where so many of the best and oldest stories do: the woods.
And Mary Oliver? Her poems are full of lines and sections of hope, of staring at a sudden bird or fox and seeing something of beauty and compassion in the event. There is a challenge in The Summer Day that is worth putting into this little gallery; the final idea in When Death Comes, too, is hard-nosed but hopeful; Why I Wake Early is oft-cited and very positive. Hard to choose just one, but I chose the last of these simply because this morning I was awake early, and out seeing fox and muntjac, and listening to all the birds:
Hello, sun in my face. Hello, you who make the morning and spread it over the fields and into the faces of the tulips and the nodding morning glories, and into the windows of, even, the miserable and crotchety–
best preacher that ever was, dear star, that just happens to be where you are in the universe to keep us from ever-darkness, to ease us with warm touching, to hold us in the great hands of light– good morning, good morning, good morning.
Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
And finally, in part to say “thank you” for all these paragraphs and their creators, Alice Walker, from her collection Living by the Word, on the continuing presence of people from history/”herstory” who have helped her and us:
The spirit of our helpers incarnates in us, making us more ourselves by extending us far beyond. And to that spirit there is no “beginning” as we know it (although we might finally “know” a historical figure who at one time expressed it) and no end. Always a hello, from a concerned spiritual ancestor you may not even know you had – but this could strike at any time. Never a good-bye.
Alice Walker “A Name is Sometimes an Ancestor Saying Hi I’m With You.”
nicktomjoe 