Dyadic

Brilliant Sky

Never between the branches has the sky
burned with such brilliance, as if
it were offering all of its light to me,
as if it were trying to speak to me,
to say - what? what urgent mystery
strains at that transparent mouth?
No leaf, no rustle . . . It's in winter,
in cold emptiness and silence, that the air
suddenly arches itself like this into infinity,
and glitters.
This evening, far from here,
a friend is entering his death,
he knows it, he walks
under bare trees alone,
perhaps for the last time. So much love,
so much struggle, spent and worn thin.
But when he looks up, suddenly the sky
is arrayed in this same vertiginous clarity.

The End Of Summer

Time
which will
take us

we take
sometimes
by the tail

like a handsome blue
lizard which deftly
breaks itself off

For one wild moment
it gleams
between our fingers

2 poems by Jean Joubert, translated from the French by Denise Levertov and contained in her collection Oblique Prayers.

Not So Wild Camping

Although I love travelling on foot, long distance walking, short distance walking, linear walks, circular walks, discovering new places (the countryside and wilderness for sure, but sometimes towns and cities too), camping and experiencing the great outdoors whatever the weather, although I love all of these things I'm not really a backpacker-wildcamper. Or not yet, that is. Lately I've been following with great interest many of the lightweight backpacking and wildcamping blogs and websites such as Backpacking In Britain. For years I've been reading other people's personal accounts such as John Hillaby's Journey Through Britain or more practical guides such as Chris Townsend's Backpacker's Handbook. And dreaming.

The self-sufficiency of backpacking-wildcamping is, I suppose, the hiker's ultimate freedom. You're not tied down to the strictures of a B & B, a hostel or an official campsite. You can make camp for the night in a beautiful and remote location of your own choosing (within reason). You can come and go as you please. You have the immense satisfaction of knowing that everything you need you're carrying with you. However a successful trip like this (compared with car camping) does require some experience and a certain amount of forward planning, a degree of imagination and a smidgen of practicality, an ability to improvise and some careful research into the right lightweight equipment to buy.

You could say wildcamping is more purist - the ultimate in wilderness connection. If car camping is the regular army, then wildcamping is the SAS. With wildcamping you can be truly eco-friendly by leaving the car behind and reducing your carbon footprint. I look forward to doing it myself before very much longer - when I can afford the initial outlay on the right gear. But car camping does have some plus points. Weight is not an issue so you can bring what food you want - and books, a radio, lots of spare clothing etc. And on campsites it is nice to have hot water, showers, toilets, a place to wash socks and cooking pots etc. But you have to be very careful about which campsites to choose and when to go there. I've learnt from experience to avoid weekends, and school and public holiday times.

I like small, obscure, simple sites. Often these are attached to farms. Their facilities are often basic but that's fine by me. Of course they're cheaper (I don't like paying more than £5) and, generally speaking, quieter than the bigger, more commercial sites. Though there are always exceptions. I've been family camping in Brittany on a big, popular site where you couldn't hear a pin drop after 11 pm. Yet on the other hand I've been on small farm sites in Shropshire and the Lake District where noise (I won't go into detail!) from a few isolated tents lasted most of the night... On another occasion I went to the Literary Festival at Hay-on-Wye and camped on a small pub campsite. I was kept awake the whole night long by mind-numbing high-volume trance music pounding out from a rave taking place miles away. So it can all be a bit of a gamble.

The photos show my tent in peaceful (except for the peacocks - see yesterday's post!) Cwm Bychan - views of it, in it and from it.

Molehills And Peacocks

...You cannot live in the present,

At least not in Wales.

There is the language for instance,

The soft consonants

Strange to the ear.

There are cries in the dark at night

As owls answer the moon,

And thick ambush of shadows,

Hushed at the fields' corners.

There is no present in Wales,

And no future;

There is only the past,

Brittle with relics,

Wind-bitten towers and castles

With sham ghosts;

Mouldering quarries and mines...

From Welsh Landscape by R. S. Thomas.

I've been camping on my own in Wales for just over a week.

I wanted a break from the flat, ploughed fields of the grey-skied English Midlands, and its congested roads, shopping plazas, retail parks, industrial estates. I needed to de-stress and chill out. I craved a simple life for a while, far away from computers and hypermarkets and the niggling, ever-present problems of work and society and family life. I had an overwhelming urge to take myself off to some wild countryside and blend into nature. An ancient landscape called me, a landscape of many different margins: sea and shore, mudflat and sand dune, river and estuary, cliff and heath, rock and heather, valley and hill, sheep pasture and moorland. This was the landscape of West Wales - its coastline, and its mountains rearing up just inland from the coastal rim. From the cliff path high above Llanbedrog on the Lleyn Peninsula I was soon to see these splendid mountains in a line before me, stretching in shapely profile from Snowdon and Moel Hebog in the north, through Cnicht, the Moelwyns and the Rhinogs, to the great bulk of Cadair Idris in the south.

But that comes later. First I had to drive there. On the morning of Friday 11 April I set off with maps and rucksack, warm walking clothes and camping gear. I stopped off near Llangollen for an hour and explored the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct which carries the Llangollen Canal over the River Dee and was built by Thomas Telford (see photos). The view westwards from the aqueduct was very fine.

It was late afternoon when I pitched my tent on the no-frills campsite at Dinas Farm which is situated in the stunningly beautiful valley of Cwm Bychan east of Llanbedr. A red kite soared above me. A buzzard perched watchfully in a tree. The campsite was green grass dotted with the little black mounds of molehills. Every now and again a herd of strikingly marked feral goats (black head, white body, long brown tapering horns) would stealthily appear to crop the grass. Then they would vanish just as suddenly. I pitched in the lee of an old stone wall and some windswept birch trees. There were no other campers. Apart from the bellowing of distant cattle the only sounds were some unearthly wailing cries I couldn't quite place. It was like a band of souls being tortured in hell. Einir, the campsite owner, enlightened me. " They're peacocks," she explained, rather disdainfully. "But they're not natural. Like buzzards and kites are natural." Whereupon she zoomed off on her quad bike to flatten the molehills.

It rained all night. An owl hooted, competing unsuccessfully with the peacocks. I listened to the rain pattering down on my tent and lulling me to sleep. I love sleeping outdoors and hearing all the different sounds, registering all the changing moods of the weather. I was very happy.

Finding Pennies

There are many things to see, unwrapped gifts and free surprises. The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But - and this is the point - who gets excited by a mere penny? If you follow one arrow, if you crouch motionless on a bank to watch a tremulous ripple thrill on the water and are rewarded by the sight of a muskrat paddling from its den, will you count that sight a chip of copper only, and go on your rueful way? It is dire poverty indeed when a man is so malnourished and fatigued that he won't stoop to pick up a penny. But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplicity, so that finding a penny will literally make your day, then, since the world is in fact planted in pennies, you have with your poverty bought a lifetime of days. It is that simple. What you see is what you get.

From Pilgrim At Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

The Confusing Sex Life Of Trees

Yesterday afternoon I took a short walk through Besthorpe Nature Reserve which is managed by the Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust. Like so many of the Nature Reserves in the Trent Valley, it was a former sand and gravel extraction site. Though it's more or less on my doorstep, surprisingly I don't visit that often. It's a little bleak and neglected, rubbish-strewn in parts. Some of the paths through the Reserve are tangled with briars in the summer months and difficult to negotiate.

There are various different habitats: river, reeedbed, freshwater pools, sandy heath, hawthorn woodland, willow scrub, wildflower meadow. The sandy heath swarms with rabbits. I've seen evening-primrose and orchids here. On an large treed island in Mons Pool there's a rookery, a heronry and a colony of nesting cormorants. There was such a din there yesterday as nesting activity was in full swing. On the pool itself were a flock of greylag geese and more cormorants, some mallard and tufted duck, a great crested grebe and a solitary wigeon.

Noisy groups of fieldfares were still feeding in the fields, a hang-over from winter. No wonder - the temperature is very cold for April. Soon they'll be flying back north to Scandinavia. Over in the wood chiffchaffs were chiffchaffing furiously (still no willow warblers yet), interspersed with the musical, sweet song of the robin. I've heard grasshopper warblers here too in the past. Their song is always likened to the sound of a winding angler's reel. Other warbler migrants - sedge and reed warblers - will be arriving on the reedbed before long.

I caught sight of a great spotted woodpecker swooping from ash tree to ash tree along Trent Lane. I had a clear view as it froze half-way up one grey ash trunk, its head and bill pointing upwards. It was an adult male, glowing vivid red on the nape of its neck and on the patch beneath its tail. The common ash, to which it clung, is a very sexually confused kind of tree. Some ash trees are all male, some all female, some male with one or more female branches, some vice versa, some branches male one year and female the next. The flowers come out before the leaves, which unfold from sooty black buds. I think my photo shows the densely packed, purple, globular bunches of the emerging male flowers.

The Country Of My Heart

...continued...

Yes, of course, the passage below is by D. H. Lawrence, and it's the 1st paragraph of his early short story Odour Of Chrysanthemums. Lawrence sent the story to The Literary Review. (Earlier, Lawrence's girlfriend Jesse Chambers had submitted some of his poems to the same journal.) The Review's editor, Ford Madox Ford, scanned this 1st paragraph late one evening after a long day's reading. He placed the manuscript on the acceptance pile. His secretary looked up and said: "You've got another genius?" Replied Ford: "Yes, and it's a big one this time."

And so it proved to be. This resulted in the publisher Heinemann taking Lawrence on board, and led to Lawrence's astonishing, often controversial output of short stories, poems, plays, essays, travel books, paintings and novels. 4 of these novels, in my opinion, will always remain 4 of the finest novels ever written in the 20th century: Sons And Lovers, The Rainbow, Women In Love and Lady Chatterley's Lover.

The photo below shows the restored headstocks of Brinsley Colliery, the colliery mentioned in the extract, and the actual place where Lawrence's father worked as a miner. This lay near the large mining village of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, where Lawrence was born in a small end-of-terrace house at 8a Victoria Street. This is now a museum. I've been there several times - it's little more than an hour from here - and it's fascinating. In fact the whole area round Eastwood and the Erewash Valley and along the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire border - just west of the M1 motorway above Nottingham - is extraordinarily evocative of Lawrence and much of his work. So many of his characters, situations and locations were drawn from this small, unexceptional corner of England - the part of England he called 'The Country of my Heart'.

I've got so much to say about Lawrence, who is one of my very favourite writers, if not my best loved writer of all. But I'll do it gradually - I don't want to risk boring everyone to death!

Quiz Time

...continued...

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full waggons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black waggons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon's stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black headstocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.

Anyone know why this fine opening paragraph of descriptive writing has such literary-historical importance? The clues are all there!

(The photo is credited to Garth Newton at http://www.ilkcam.com/ and reproduced under a Creative Commons License.)

...to be continued...

Partners In Time

A Marriage

We met
under a shower
of bird-notes.
Fifty years passed,
love's moment
in a world in
servitude to time.
She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
'Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
partner for
the last dance. And she,
who in life
had done everything
with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
for the shedding
of one sigh no
heavier than a feather.

This poem by R. S. Thomas reminds me of this by D. H. Lawrence, the concluding lines of his poem Bei Hennef:

You are the call and I am the answer,
You are the wish, and I the fulfilment,
You are the night, and I the day.
What else? It is perfect enough.
It is perfectly complete,
You and I,
What more - ?

Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!

And this reminds me of...

...to be continued...

Hopes And False Hopes

2 quotations from Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections...

We rush impetuously into novelty, driven by a mounting sense of insufficiency, dissatisfaction, and restlessness. We no longer live on what we have, but on promises, no longer in the light of the present day, but in the darkness of the future, which, we expect, will at last bring the proper sunrise. We refuse to recognize that everything better is purchased at the price of something worse; that, for example, the hope of greater freedom is cancelled out by increased enslavement to the state, not to speak of the terrible perils to which the most brilliant discoveries of science expose us.

********************

Yet death is an important interest, especially to an aging person. A categorical question is being put to him, and he is under an obligation to answer it. To this end he ought to have a myth about death, for reason shows him nothing but the dark pit into which he is descending. Myth, however, can conjure up other images for him, helpful and enriching pictures of life in the land of the dead. If he believes in them, or greets them with some measure of credence, he is being just as right or just as wrong as someone who does not believe in them. But while the man who despairs marches towards nothingness, the one who has placed his faith in the archetype follows the tracks of life and lives right into his death. Both, to be sure, remain in uncertainty, but the one lives against his instincts, the other with them.

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Erinnerungen, Träume, Gedanken) is the title of the last work by the great Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1865 - 1961). He wrote this semi-autobiographical book in collaboration with Aniela Jaffé. It was published 2 years after his death. If I were to recommend an accessible way of approaching Jung's thought and method, I would urge that you read this book first of all.

One of Jung's original contributions to the illumination of the human mind and soul was his idea of the Collective Unconscious - later renamed by him the Objective Psyche. In contrast with the Personal Unconscious, the Collective Unconscious is "a reservoir of the experiences of our species", and is manifested in common archetypes and symbols across all cultures and peoples, and through the intuition of dreams.

My Camino was an experience shared alike by pilgrims of all ages and nationalities and sexual orientations and skin colours and socio-economic groupings and religious faiths; pilgrims of the past, the present and the future. A kind of Collective Camino Unconscious at work. And by extension this applies to any pilgrimage, every pilgrimage. Indeed, to the pilgrimage we call Life itself.

The photos were all taken in simple pilgrim albergue lodgings on the Camino Francés in northern Spain. They show Jim at Astorga, Philippe at Mansilla, and Tere, Fernando and Irene at Belorado.

April Pilgrimage

Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote

The Droghte of Marche heth perced to the rote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth

Inspired hath in every holt and heeth

The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne

Hath in the Ram his halfe course y-ronne,

And smale fowles maken melodye,

That slepen al the night with open ye, -

So priketh hem nature in hir corage:

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages -

And palmers for to seken straunge stronde -

To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;

And specially, from every shires ende

Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,

The holy blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke...

[When the sweet showers of April have pierced

The drought of March, and pierced it to the root,

And every vein is bathed in that moisture

Whose quickening force will engender the flower;

And when the west wind too with its sweet breath

Has given life in every wood and field

To tender shoots, and when the stripling sun

Has run his half-course in Aries, the Ram,

And when small birds are making melodies,

That sleep all the night long with open eyes,

(Nature so prompts them, and encourages);

Then people long to go on pilgrimages,

And palmers to take ship for foreign shores,

And distant shrines, famous in different lands;

And most especially, from all the shires

Of England, to Canterbury they come,

The holy blessed martyr there to seek,

Who gave his help to them when they were sick...]

The opening lines of the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343 - 1400). The translation from the Middle English is by David Wright.

"Palmers" are pilgrims, so called because they carried palms to show that they had been to Jerusalem.

"The holy blessed martyr" is St Thomas a Becket, murdered in Canterbury Cathedral in 1170.

The illustration is a 15th century woodcut.