Sca Fell

After my tiring day on the Mosedale Horseshoe I woke on the Thursday feeling much fitter and raring to go. The previous night I'd thought to myself there was no way I'd be pushing myself up another high fell today. But here I was at 9.30 am on the steadily rising Lingmell Gill path up to Sca Fell, the 2nd highest mountain in England. All week I'd been gazing up at its awesome crags, which are separated from its sister fell, Scafell Pike (England's highest peak), by the high, stony, stunningly situated Pass of Mickledore. The 1st photo shows the view back to Wast Water at a point where this popular, stepped path crosses the gill before ascending, ever more steeply, Brown Tongue.

It was already very warm. The Lake District weather had been getting hotter and hotter all the week - as the forecast had predicted. Soon the path split in two: the left fork to any number of Lakeland summits including Lingmell, Great End and Broad Crag, and, in a roundabout way, Scafell Pike; the right fork to the lofty Pass of Mickledore, the col between Scafell Pike and its slightly shorter sister, Sca Fell. My sights were set on the less accessible, less frequented top of Sca Fell, so I took the right-hand path. Soon the crags closed in, notably Scafell Crag, which is the northern buttress of Sca Fell and famous for its rock climbs. There were very few walkers about as I scrambled up the final slippery scree slope to the col. The view from here is simply breathtaking. You feel quite exposed (though you're not really) among the high crags, steep gullies and acutely angled slopes all around you.

I didn't even contemplate ascending via Broad Stand (this is Grade 3 scrambling), Lord's Rake (now dangerous because of a fallen pinnacle of rock and very loose scree) or Deep Gill (scary!) I had neither the experience nor the energy. (I later met up with a couple that had combined Lord's Rake with the West Wall Traverse - and they looked mightily relieved and pleased with themselves! I also met 2 brothers from Barrow who'd climbed Lord's Rake past the fallen boulder and up to the top - though they said the crux was slippery and the handholds friable.)

No, what I did was descend a little way towards Eskdale down some unstable, awkward scree, then scramble fairly easily up a damp gully to Foxes Tarn - a tarn so tiny it's more of a puddle. Then a zigzagging path up another steep scree slope brings you quite soon to the saddle between Symonds Knott (959 m) and the true summit of Sca Fell (964 m) where I ate my lunch in its stone windshelter. I spent a long time exploring these wild and rocky eminences. The views were hazy but extensive. This is a view of Deep Gill (2nd photo) and this is a view across Deep Gill from Symonds Knott (3rd photo).

The return route to the campsite - south-west off Sca Fell towards Burnmoor Tarn (one of Lakeland's largest, and full of trout, perch and pike) then north along a clear bridleway to the head of Wast Water - was long but unproblematic. What a day this had been - one of my very best in the fells.

Half A Horseshoe

On the Wednesday I picked an ambitious high level route: The Mosedale Horseshoe. This classic walk began at the Wasdale Head Inn just beyond my campsite. I set off at 10 am, passing this shapely, old stone bridge on the way (1st pic). At the foot of Kirk Fell you join a bridleway which heads north into the remote and beautiful valley of Mosedale (2nd pic). At once you feel that you've left civilization behind. Mosedale Beck meanders along the valley floor to your left and a semi-circle of fells towers above. Soon I forded Gatherstone Beck - an easy stream crossing - and climbed to the summit of Black Sail Pass, where some other walkers were pausing for a rest. Then it was onwards and upwards - to the first 'nail' of the horseshoe: Looking Stead at 627 m. From here you could see the lonely Black Sail Youth Hostel at the head of steep-sided Ennerdale - which is now being stripped of its ugly conifer plantations, thank goodness. Just beyond the Youth Hostel you could make out very clearly in the shadowed sunlight an area of domed glacial moraines. I think these are called 'drumlins', or 'basket of eggs topography' - because they look just like eggs in a basket.

Not long after this there was a choice of routes up to Pillar (892 m), the next and the highest summit of the horseshoe: the direct path up the ridge (steep at first but then the angle lessens) or the much longer and more arduous High Level Route via Pillar Rock. On the spur of the moment I recklessly went for the latter, more difficult route. You really had to concentrate on where to put your feet on this high, vertiginous path clinging to Pillar's northern crags. It eventually deposited you at Robinson's Cairn and at the foot of a scree slope which led steeply up to the Shamrock Traverse and Pillar Rock (3rd pic shows part of Pillar Rock and the view down into Ennerdale). I was pausing more and more often to regain my breath, it must be said. I rested for quite a while overlooking Pillar Rock and watched some climbers preparing for an ascent. The final scramble up to Pillar was exhilarating but tiring. Again I made frequent stops. The summit was wreathed in mist - and mist enveloped the next part of the route across Scoat Fell and Red Pike. I felt my energy draining away. So I abruptly changed my plans and decided to descend the ridge back to Looking Stead rather than carry on round the horseshoe. And this I did - and half-way down all the mist evaporated, and it became a perspiringly warm and clear afternoon.

Tenets Of Wisdom

Years ago I met a barefoot Buddhist on High Rigg in the Lake District. Then again he may have been a Hindu. Or a Christian. I'm sure he was a religious man - but he was not an evangelical one. We had a conversation. I can't remember exactly what he said. I should have written it down. But these are the main tenets by which he tried to lead his life so far as I can approximately recall them:

1. I have learnt to be content whatever the circumstances. St Paul.

2. Trust God. Trust yourself. Trust the god within yourself.

3. Everything changes, everything is temporary, nothing remains the same. Everything passes - even worries and anxieties, griefs and heartaches.

4. You must first help yourself before you can even contemplate helping others. Learn to respect and value yourself - then you may be of some use to others.

5. The past is dead. Don't regret it. Forget it. The future does not and will never exist. The future is always in the future and will remain there forever. Live in the present moment if you can. For it is all you have. Absorb it. Become it.

6. Do not care about what others may think about you. Do what you have to do and feel is right without caring about how others judge your actions.

7. Try to eradicate negative feelings such as anger, jealousy, pride, greed, hate, offence and so on. They will harry you, wear you down and block your development.

8. You can justifiably view life as often chaotic, senseless, unfair and unpredictable. (Thomas Hobbes called life without a social contract solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.) How to achieve redemption in this chaotic, senseless, unfair and unpredictable world? Through the grace of God.

9. Have empathy with your fellow suffering human beings. They are all suffering like you in one way or another, even if they do not realise it.

10. I have tried to live my life according to these principles, but have generally failed miserably. But, to paraphrase Samuel Beckett, I will try again and fail better.

Old Bob

Tuesday morning in Wasdale dawned dull and damp, with low cloud shrouding the tops. Since my right foot was hurting (more of this later), and since the weather forecast for the rest of the week looked very promising indeed, I decided on a gentle, restful day just pottering about the valley. I didn't fancy putting on socks and walking boots and raingear - it was drizzling with rain but quite warm - so I opted for no socks, a pair of lightweight Teva sandals and ... an umbrella!

I set off up Lingmell Beck towards Sty Head, receiving surprised glances from some more conventionally attired walkers. But I wasn't going far, and the kit suited me fine for my particular purposes that morning. It was fun negotiating minor obstacles of stream and stone in sandals instead of boots - a completely different technique was involved. Obviously I would have been dressed rather differently had I been going further and higher and into rougher territory, but my goal was this isolated conifer tree (see 1st pic) at the foot of Great Gable and opposite Lingmell - where I sat and meditated about this and that for a while.

Earlier I'd stopped for a short chat with the farmer at Burnthwaite Farm (2nd pic). He was on a quad bike and had been gathering sheep, aided by an elderly Border Collie. He assumed - I think because of the umbrella - that I was staying at the Wasdale Head Inn (see 3rd pic). "No, I'm camping", I explained. "I prefer it." I praised his lovely old black and white sheepdog. "The dog's getting old, like me," he said. "When I'm feeling lazy, I take old Bob out on to the fell to gather sheep. He knows the routine. The younger dogs are quite lively, and hard work to train and control..." My father's 1st Border Collie had been called Bob too.

Earlier still I'd walked across wildflower meadows of buttercup and clover to St Olaf's church at Wasdale Head. It's been rather poorly restored, but is roofed in local slate, and the interior roof beams look very ancient - reputedly coming from a Viking longboat. The graveyard surrounding this tiny church however is most interesting. It's circled by yew trees and full of climbers' graves (4th pic). Also there are several gravestones commemorating the Naylor family. These Naylors must be related to the legendary fell runner, Joss Naylor, who lives round here, and who, for 13 years, held the record for the Lake District Round, ascending 72 peaks over 2000 ft in 24 hours. He ran 108 miles and climbed 40,000 ft - an incredible achievement.

On the way back to the campsite I saw stonechats perching on fern tops and stone walls, and heard their rather grating, click-clacking calls, and now and then glimpsed the white rump of wheatears (or 'white-arses' as they should more properly and more exactly be known - what a great example of taxonomic gentrification) disappearing before me down the path.

After a simple lunch of bread, cheese and fruit outside my tent (it had now stopped raining) I drove to the nearby village of Gosforth for a phone signal, to stock up on provisions, and to buy some cheap, more comfortable sandals (£20, Hi-Tec). On the way back, I parked near Cinderdale Bridge in Nether Wasdale, and did a circular walk via Easthwaite Farm to the pumping station on Wastwater's south-westerly outlet. The path skirted Low Wood, crossed the river Irt at Lund Bridge, edged Woodhow Tarn which was covered in water lilies, and tracked back to my starting point along old country ways.

The flora and fauna were amazing during this last stroll of the day. I was too lazy to look up and identify any flower species new to me, but birds I noted included great spotted woodpecker, spotted flycatcher and the ubiquitous buzzard. One buzzard I saw at very close range as it flew unhurriedly away from me down a shallow valley, gliding low with languid wingbeats until it landed on a knobbly, heathery, rocky outcrop. I noticed that some of the ferns were already beginning to crisp and turn brown.

Straight, Unbending Law Of Herons

While I was writing the last post I heard a strange knocking sound coming from the utility room. I ignored it at first. But then I went to investigate. It was a young grey heron which had walked into the house through the open kitchen door and was beating its bill on the patio windows. How unusual - I've only seen a heron once before in the garden, and that was 8 years ago when there were fish in the pond. Though there are lots of herons close by on the River Trent and its flood plain.

I managed to steer it outside through the conservatory doors, whereupon it collapsed in the middle of the lawn to recover. It had been traumatized. Half-an-hour later it suddenly stood up on its gangly legs and strode purposefully down the garden towards the vegetable plot and the compost heap. It did not appear injured in any way.

Wasdale

On Monday, just after lunchtime, I arrived at the National Trust campsite in Wasdale and pitched my tent. It had taken all morning to get there. I'd set off from Nottinghamshire up the A1 stressed and uptight. Then, gradually, on the circuitous route to the western side of the Lake District, the cars thinned out. I began to unwind and relax. Slow down, I told myself. You can't go anywhere fast here. And why should you want to? I forced myself to adopt a slower pace and a less rigid mental attitude. By Wednesday I'd slowed down so much I knew it would be a shock to return to the 'real world' on Friday.

The western side of the Lake District is the connoisseur's part. Here you're a world away from the crowds at Keswick, Ambleside and Windermere. 5 lovely valleys radiate outwards like the spokes of a wheel, with the Sca Fell massif at its hub: counting clockwise, there's Dunnerdale or the Duddon Valley (about which I've written before); lush, green Eskdale; magnificent Wasdale, dominated by some of Lakeland's highest peaks; narrow, remote, high-sided Ennerdale, with its iconic Youth Hostel, Black Sail Hut, a former shepherd's bothy; and the gentle Vale Of Lorton, another of Wordsworth's favourite valleys.

Though I don't usually like campsites in July and August, there was plenty of space on this one and it was reasonably quiet - so long as you didn't pitch anywhere near the noisy generator in the toilet block. It was far less crowded than the National Trust campsite in busier and more accessible Langdale where I camped last year. I spent the afternoon and early evening sunbathing on the grass, walking to a nearby farm shop to buy milk, and meandering along local paths around Wasdale Head.

This campsite, like the one in Langdale, had been carefully landscaped among trees - you couldn't tell it was there from the road or from the fells above. As I prepared my evening meal, tame robins, chaffinches, dunnocks and thrushes approached for crumbs. Very tired, I crawled into my sleeping bag at 9 pm and slept solidly for 10 hours, waking only once.

My photo shows Wastwater in glaciated Wasdale, looking for all the world like a Norwegian fjord. The fells hemming in the head of the valley are Yewbarrow, Kirk Fell, Great Gable and Lingmell.

Colin Mortlock

Colin Mortlock - rock climber, teacher, outdoors enthusiast, writer, author of The Adventure Alternative (1984) and Beyond Adventure (2001), inventor of the climbing wall. Can this be the only photo of him on the World Wide Web?

No human being is more or less important than any other human being.

No human being is more or less important than anything else in Nature. For human beings to regard themselves as in anyway superior to anything else in Nature is to take a stance of arrogance rather than of humility.

From Beyond Adventure.

Mad, Mystic Moments

Through the mad mystic hammering of the wild ripping hail/The sky cracked its poems in naked wonder/That the clinging of the church bells blew far into the breeze/Leaving only bells of lightning and its thunder Chimes Of Freedom BOB DYLAN

I've just returned from 5 days' camping and walking in the Lake District. Except for a damp and drizzly Tuesday, the weather was hot and sunny all week - though rather hazy for good photographs. It certainly wasn't a repeat of the thunder, lightning and hailstones of my recent Welsh trip - though the Dylan lines quoted above are more relevant than you might at first think. For I did experience some of those mad, mystic moments which ambush you just when you're least expecting it. I had one here (1st pic, a footbridge in Wasdale) and here (2nd pic, Great Gable from Wasdale) and here (3rd pic, water lilies on Muncaster Tarn).

I can't really describe adequately these moments. I'll leave that to the otherworldly poets, the spiritual gurus and the mystical writers. But they come at you without warning, disarm you, take you completely by surprise. They soften you, melt you, slay you. And then they're gone as quickly as the sun ducking behind cloud. They're evanescent.

Colin Mortlock in his book Beyond Adventure (Cicerone, 2001) relates one such mystical encounter (specifically with a raven on a Lakeland fell), and he generalizes thus about the defining characteristics of these spiritual flashes:

There was always the sense that I was experiencing something I could never really understand let alone explain.

They were unexpected and unpredictable. I would suggest therefore that trying to seek them would be counter-productive. I had hoped in my older and wiser years that my long, solo wilderness journeys would increase the likelihood of their happening, but I knew I could never make them happen. They were beyond control and more elusive than rainbows.

They were timeless. The ego or unconscious self was suspended; thinking was suspended. In terms of feelings - and words are inadequate here - individuality was replaced by a merging of performer and action, observer and observed, person and place.

They were immeasurable, and yet I felt they were of elemental importance in any quest for happiness.

The beauty of the experience was awe inspiring and unforgettable.

They could happen anywhere. They might be expected to occur at places of worship, gardens and in the presence of artefact and architecture which intensely affect the emotions. Inevitably, because of my own enthusiasm for adventure and wilderness, I could see the latter as the major environment for such experiences, and especially when alone. It is possible that being aware that such experiences exist, spending time away from other people, and developing a natural skill and a sense of place may help to create an atmosphere where they occur.

I could have sworn I met Colin Mortlock half-way up Sca Fell on Thursday morning. If not, he was a dead ringer for the guy in the photo on the back cover of his book.

The 300 Mark

I've just realised that the last post was my 300th post! I began blogging on 23 June 2007. So that's about 23 posts a month! I don't know if I'll be able to keep this up. I may be starting a new job in September which will take me away from the computer in the daytime. (Perhaps a good thing?) We shall see.

Half Revealing, Half Concealing

The sonorous, melancholy style of the 18th century poet Thomas Gray has brought to mind another poet, but a much greater one; one whose life spanned the subsequent century of the Victorian era: Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Can I make a plea for Tennyson? He's little read nowadays, I know. He's come to represent the royalty-loving, reactionary poet of literary convention, penning as Poet Laureate (he succeeded Wordworth to this post in 1850 and kept it till his death in 1892) swathes of verse on popular classical and mythological themes. Yet Tennyson deserves to be considered a little more deeply.

He was born quite near here in Somersby, Lincolnshire - a rector's son and the 4th of 12 children. His life was shattered when a close friend and fellow poet, Arthur Henry Hallam, died suddenly of a brain haemorrage in 1833. Also that same year his second volume of published verse had been critically savaged. He didn't write again for 10 years. But all this resulted in his greatest poem, the long and moving elegy In Memoriam A. H. H., which contains these wonderful 3 stanzas from Section V:

I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.

But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.

In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er,
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.

Tennyson is talking here about the inadequacy of words. This is a very modern preoccupation. As is Tennyson's obsession with dreams and trance-like states, found in poem after poem. On the surface not very Victorian at all - perhaps a precursor of all that came afterwards in Freud and Jung, Woolf and Lawrence - and just about everything in serious 20th century literature. The Unconscious was there all the time. It just needed to be discovered. Or rediscovered.

Many years ago, in my school days, there were 2 English teachers who held diametrically opposed views about Tennyson. The one loved him, and forced us to learn off by heart The Lotus-Eaters and Ulysses - which I still think are 2 of his finest poems. The other found in him all music and no meaning, all sound and no content. I disagree with this. As I've hinted above, if you read between the lines Tennyson's foot was tentatively and unconsciously wedging open the door into the 20th century (the word 'tentative' is not one you'd normally associate with Victorian poets!)

His religious doubts were also strikingly modern - he tended towards a kind of Pantheism - and he wrote that There lives more faith in honest doubt,/ Believe me, than in half the creeds (In Memoriam).

Yes, Tennyson (in common with most poets of any era) was occasionally pompous and sentimental, that's undoubtedly true. But we must be careful not to judge him out of context, from the standpoint of the cultural mores of our own vastly different times.

These are a few lines from the stirring Ulysses. This is the older Ulysses, made weak by time and fate, but still strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. I identify with the following lines completely:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd
Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone...

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

Do these sentiments remind anybody of the older Yeats, the Yeats who wrote An aged man is but a paltry thing,/A tattered coat upon a stick (Sailing To Byzantium) but who also wrote Why should not old men be mad? (Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad?) But I am not content (Are You Content?) and A foolish, passionate man (A Prayer For Old Age)?

I'll end with a quotation from the druggy, dreamy, hypnotic The Lotus-Eaters:

There is sweet music here that softer falls
Than petals from blown roses on the grass,
Or night-dews on still waters between walls
Of shadowy granite, in a gleaming pass;
Music that gentlier on the spirit lies,
Than tir'd eyelids upon tir'd eyes;
Music that brings sweet sleep down from the blissful skies.
Here are cool mosses deep,
And thro' the moss the ivies creep,
And in the stream the long-leaved flowers weep,
And from the craggy edge the poppy hangs in sleep.

Common People Like You

I want to live like common people/I want to do whatever common people do/I want to sleep with common people/I want to sleep with common people like you Common People JARVIS COCKER

In Thomas Gray's finest and most well-known poem, Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard, which I quoted in my last post, the dead lie all around - and of course they will continue to lie all around: Can storied urn or animated bust/Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?

Gray muses that many of these ordinary villagers, these 'rude Forefathers', had many shining skills, talents and virtues which were forever destined to remain secret and unremarked: Full many a gem of purest ray serene,/The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;/Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/And waste its sweetness on the desert air. In just a few lines Gray shows how history is written by society's tiny percentage of the rich, the influential and the literate; and how popular history, ordinary everyday history, the history of the 'common people', has by and large been erased from the records - or it was never recorded in the first place.

In one of the most often-quoted verses from this poem, Gray characterizes again the 'hidden' life of the long-suffering, country poor: Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife,/Their sober wishes never learnt to stray;/Along the cool sequestered vale of life/They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.

This verse may sound a bit patronising - but I don't think it's meant to be so: Let not ambition mock their useful toil,/Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;/Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile/The short and simple annals of the poor.

Elegiac

This blog seems to be changing a little - or evolving, as someone has commented. Well, that's life for you. Never stays in the same place for more than a minute, does it? The Solitary Walker has travelled far and wide - from the fells of the Lake District to the dales of Derbyshire, from the ancient volcanic landscape of the French Auvergne to the gruelling flat plains of the Spanish Meseta, from the Celtic seaboard of Wales to the seafood smorgasbord of Norfolk - to arrive back in his own village once more. Since then he's been taking more of an interior journey. Didn't T. S. Eliot say in Four Quartets that ...the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time?

The aim of this long-winded preamble is simply to state this: in a blog which is, after all, called 'The Solitary Walker', there have been very few accounts of solitary walks of late. Yep, it's an undeniable fact. Guilty - as charged by myself. Mitigating circumstances? Well, I've been doing a lot of 'imaginative walking', your Honour. Pathetic. No excuse.

However we did enjoy a walk round the village this evening, which was lovely, and probably timely - as the weather will apparently get colder and rainier later in the week. Two greenfinches and a pied wagtail were lined up on a telephone wire. This combination was a first for me, at any rate. And scores of swifts screamed round the gable-ends and flitted skywards like aerial crossbows. As usual we ended up in the churchyard (I won't be morbid and say that we all end up there sooner or later) where I took some photos; and then Thomas Gray's poem, Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard, came to mind. I know it's the wrong time of year for the 'ploughman' - but it won't be long before he's turning the soil once more...

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,

Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,

And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds:

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tower

The moping owl does to the moon complain

Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,

Molest her ancient solitary reign.

Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,

Where heaves the turf in many a mouldering heap,

Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,

The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

Juvenilia

I thought I'd destroyed all my embarrassing juvenile poems until I discovered a little cache of them in an old writing desk the other day. I've always written poetry - but seem to have been particularly prolific during my dreamy, romantic, angst-ridden teens and into my early twenties. At which point in my life it suddenly hit me how hard it was to write original, non-derivative poems and to 'find one's own voice'. Instead of putting in the time and effort to improve, I abandoned writing completely for many years. It's only comparatively recently that I've started writing seriously again; and strangely enough it's this blog - and also knowing a few writers plus some other influences - that has encouraged me. My output is still small, and often I find it difficult - but I hope I'm getting somewhere.

It might be fun to share 3 of these early poems I thought I'd lost. If nothing else, I think that it's an insight into the mind of an impressionable teenager - one who is a would-be poet, one who is mad on girls but too shy to approach them, one who worries equally about death and acne...

This poem is obviously very derivative, and drenched in adolescent yearning and romantic melancholy:

Autumn Thoughts

The leaves are falling through the air.
The smoke is clinging to the trees.
Your eyes are cloudy with blue smoke.
Your breath is redolent of leaves.

A man is sweeping into heaps
The leaves fresh fallen from the trees.
Your hands are stiller than my thoughts.
Your hair is yellow as the leaves.

The sun sinks low among the trees.
The heaps of leaves are now alight.
We watch the burning of the leaves.
They smoke all through the scented night.

We stand and watch the yellow dawn.
It gilds the frosted, leafless trees.
You weep into an ice-blue wind.
My thoughts revolve like falling leaves.

Leafy breath, eh? Interesting! I've obviously been reading too much Laurence Binyon or Rupert Brooke. Yet there's something about the atmosphere of this poem, with its hypnotic repetitions and faint air of mystery, that I don't find entirely displeasing even now...

This next poem makes me smile. It's set in such a specific time and place - late 60s/early 70s London - that it really is a period piece. Even the very word 'typist' is archaic.

Typist

The sixties saw her mini-skirted,
Beatle-mad and blonde. She flirted
With the multi-coloured shirted
Hip young dudes, to dope converted.

Now her breasts have lost their bouncing
Innocence. She's cool, not flouncing.
Tall and thin and trouser-suited,
Henna-haired and leather-booted.

The typist of the last decade
Was never typecast, born not made,
Her keyboard cast in greenest jade,
With jewelled keys, ribbons of braid.

But now she's full of seventies' sense,
Losing pounds and counting pence,
A house in Kent as recompense.
Is she serene or is she tense?

Or is she dreaming while she's typing,
Crashing keys with icy rage?
The noise is like a bird's wings breaking,
Beating on its gilded cage.

Mmm... It's about time those jade keyboards made a comeback! Not to mention bouncing, innocent breasts.

Finally I grow up a bit and try to write something more objectively based on actual observation. Mary was my girlfriend's aunt - a kind, frail, elderly lady, who lived near the top of a block of council flats in Benwell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Revisiting the area a few years ago, I found it more or less unrecognisable, as most of the surrounding street terraces - which used to be popular back-to-back rental housing for Newcastle University students - had been knocked down. Mary was quite deaf and had permanent muscular tremors which I think must have been a symptom of Parkinson's disease. She never married and had been a domestic servant all her life.

Mary

Others talk past you. But you are not deaf
To kindness or the lack of it,
Though subtleties slip by. You simply smile,
With a child's wonder, with an old maid's regret.

Catching a word or glance your jellied face
Sets in a smile, which we observe. We grin
Stupidly. Then, embarrassed, shift our gaze
From you back to each other. The frozen stream
Of conversation thaws, melting our silence,
But isolating yours. Your lineaments,
Drawn tight with joy, sag and collapse again.

Your loveless life knew just one brief affair:
A cyclist, who pedalled off one bright morning,
Whistling, to the war, and not returning,
Leaving you to rub and scrub away
His image with your housemaid's brush.
But memories are not effaced this way.
They lie deeper than all the dust and grime.
And now you wait in stillness, trapped by time.

Just yesterday, in city crowds, you trembled,
Suddenly more naked, more alone.
Your clumsy fingers clutched my arm. Your fear
Shook that frail domicile of skin and bone.

Yes, I think this captures something - especially the 2nd stanza which betrays an honesty and a carefulness of observation which has rather surprised me. Though the last line of the 3rd stanza is forced and very poor.

We Are Stardust, We Are Golden

We introduce ourselves/To Planets and to Flowers/But with ourselves/Have etiquettes/Embarrassments/And awes EMILY DICKINSON

Hello? Are you looking? Can you see? Ah, there you are. And this is me. I know I must often disappoint you, as you often disappoint me. But that is a fact of life. It should not be a disappointing fact. It is just a fact of nature. That is all. If we are disappointed with each other we might as well say we are disappointed with a frog, or with the beached shards of flotsam and jetsam at the sea's edge, or with the gentle soughing of the wind in the alder trees encircling the lake. In other words, 'disappoint' is the wrong word. In this context the whole idea of 'disappointment' is the wrong idea, and a uniquely human idea.

I will put it another way. Here I am. And there you are. Yes, I am somewhere in here, and you are somewhere out there. Indisputable fact? I think you may be in a small space, perhaps in a woodpecker's hole, or in a hare's form maybe, hidden in a little resting place in the woods or the corn fields, in a small refuge scooped out and sheltered from the wind and the rain.

Or perhaps you are to be found in one of those bigger spaces, exposed in the vast nothingness or somethingness between the stars, in the interstices of thought, or somewhere out among the uncaring, ice-cold molecules of the oceans.

Wherever we are, whoever we are, we are both insignificant - from the perspective of the universe. But from another viewpoint - and everything has another viewpoint - we may possess some tiny piece of significance, some unique, pulsating, significant identifier, some beating energy pulsing at our own eccentric rate, an erratic rate unique to ourselves.

We are all frighteningly yet also comfortingly unique. We are all the product of a completely individual set of genes and influences and experiences and other unalterable circumstances. And if we can recognise this uniqueness, this potentially alienating, yet also healthy, human, natural, necessary, inevitable difference between us, and respect it, and not fear or fight or criticize or ignore or reject it, then I think we may be getting somewhere. We may even be able to embrace this unique difference which keeps us apart; indeed, in the end, it may be the very thing which binds us together.

Hello? Let's look. Let's look and see. Here am I and there are you and you and you and all of you. A million miles away, yet somewhere here inside of me too, in some peculiar, mystical, electromagnetic way. Didn't Joni Mitchell once sing about us all being stardust? And about getting ourselves back to the Garden?

Let us all bow our heads to the different gods within each one of us.

Namaste.

Look And Learn

My brief mention of The Eagle yesterday has really set me off down Memory Lane. The first comic my sister and I were allowed to take was Playhour. How we loved it. Remember Pinky and Perky and Harold Hare anyone? I see that it was first published in October 1954 - a month before I was born. After that I can't remember any comics until the first Eagle landed on the doormat. Brother and sister diverged at this point. While she pored over Bunty, then a little later Jackie, I was imaginatively engaged with the space-age adventures of The Eagle's Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future.

However I can't believe that I was reading Look and Learn at just 7 years old. But I've rediscovered my old copies in the attic (carefully slotted into binders!) and it's true. Some people are a little sniffy about Look and Learn and talk about it as being rather earnest, pointedly educational and so on - but I used to think it was absolutely wonderful and still do. Double-click on the pix above and see what you think. These are of the 4th issue which came out on 10 February 1962.

(At school we used to "trade" amongst ourselves American DC and Marvel comics - featuring all those Captain America, Batman, Spiderman and Superman super-heroes - and I remember there was always something deliciously subversive about this activity, as though there was something about these comics our parents and teachers wouldn't totally approve of... Innocent days!)

Irony And Pity

I think my love of the written word must date from way back. Even when very young I remember looking forward to receiving, on birthdays and in my Christmas pillowcase, books above all: A. A. Milne, Beatrix Potter, The Brothers Grimm, Kenneth Grahame, Captain W. E. Johns, Arthur Ransome, J. M. Barrie, the Eagle annual. Strangely enough I never appreciated Lewis Carroll until I was much older. One book given to me by a great-uncle (which was battered then and is even more battered now) was an old copy of Hendrik van Loon's The Story Of Mankind. This book still has a special, even totemic, significance for me, though I couldn't explain exactly why. Perhaps it's something to do with its age, its yellowing, thick, rough-cut paper, its endearing, personal style of explaining 500,000 years of human history, its artless illustrations.

Hendrik Willem van Loon (1882-1944) was a Dutch-American historian and journalist. He reported on the 1905 Russian Revolution, and later became professor of history at Cornell University. He was a prolific writer of books, but his children's history book, The Story Of Mankind, is perhaps the best known. Since his death there have been many editions as the work has been constantly updated - originally by his son, then afterwards by other historians. It was first published in the US in 1921, and won the first John Newbery medal the following year. My own copy of this venerable book is the first British edition, published by George G. Harrap in September 1922.

The book begins like this. For some reason I've never been able to get these four simple but powerful sentences out of my mind since first reading them:

High up in the North in the land called Svithjod, there stands a rock. It is a hundred miles high and a hundred miles wide. Once every thousand years a little bird comes to this rock to sharpen its beak. When the rock has thus been worn away, then a single day of eternity will have gone by.

Beginnings (and endings and titles) of books are so important. The success or failure of a book can depend upon them - and I don't mean by this simply some clever marketing trick. Beginnings and endings and titles have a magical power either to draw you in or to exclude you for ever.

Talking of endings, I can't recall ever reading the ending of The Story Of Mankind. So I've just turned to it, and here it is:

'The more I think of the problems of our lives, the more I am persuaded that we ought to choose Irony and Pity for our assessors and judges as the ancient Egyptians called upon the Goddess Isis and the Goddess Nephtys on behalf of their dead. Irony and Pity are both of good counsel; the first with her smiles makes life agreeable; the other sanctifies it with her tears. The Irony which I invoke is no cruel Deity. She mocks neither love not beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. Her mirth disarms and it is she who teaches us to laugh at rogues and fools, whom but for her we might be so weak as to despise and hate.' And with these wise words of a very great Frenchman I bid you farewell.

Van Loon is quoting Anatole France here. All I can say is amen to the wisdom of it.

Anatole France also once wrote: I prefer the folly of enthusiasm to the indifference of wisdom. I say amen to that too.

Ecstasy Of Truth

I feel compelled to write a few words about film-maker Werner Herzog, one of my favourite European arthouse directors, after reading Chris Townsend's latest post on Herzog's new 'documentary' film set in Antarctica, Encounters At The End Of The World, and after seeing Alan Yentob's reverential interview with Herzog on BBC1 last night.

Although I've a lot of respect for New German Cinema in general - particularly for Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Wim Wenders - the director who really does it for me is Werner Herzog. When I was living in Frankfurt in the mid-1970s a friend and I went to a showing of Herzog's magnificent, hauntingly bleak film The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser. It affected me most profoundly at the time. In this film the 'madman', the 'simpleton', the Dostoyevskian 'idiot' - played frighteningly well by Bruno S. who had never acted before - is totally misunderstood and often violently victimized by a 19th century German bürgerlich society.

Legends about this unconventional, eccentric, iconoclastic film director abound - indeed they have been encouraged by Herzog himself. I can't possibly recount all of them here. But, yes, I think it's true that he was once shot in the stomach in the middle of an interview; that he stole his first movie camera; that he dragged a ship over a mountain for the film Fitzcarraldo; that he once ate his own shoe...

Herzog's films and documentaries (for him fiction and non-fiction are always blurred) aspire to a kind of mystical revelation, and all are charged with poetry, resonate with meaning and are full of unforgettable images. These images may or may not be symbols - it appears to be intentionally vague. It seems to me his movies have a strong correlation with music - and the actual musical soundtracks to his films are always carefully thought out and indescribably evocative.

He has described the aim of his film-making as an ecstasy of truth.

This is Herzog's advice to someone who wants to make a career in film:

Work as a taxi driver, work as bouncer in a sex club, work as a warden in a lunatic asylum. Do something which is really into pura vida as the Mexicans would say, into the very pure essence of life. I would prefer you to work as bouncer in a sex club to earn money. You have to take the first steps yourself because nobody is going to be on your side. And once you have something presentable, from there it may or may not take off, but at least you have a much better chance. At least you can make the film.

Herzog hates the superficial naturalism of cinéma vérité:

...there are very deep strata of truth inherent in cinema which we have almost stopped asking for. I seek a deeper truth than the cinéma vérité truth which only scratches the surface.

I end by quoting in full Herzog's 1999 Minnesota Declaration:

Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema "Lessons of Darkness"

1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Vérité is devoid of vérité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.

2. One well-known representative of Cinema Vérité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. "For me," he says, "there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail."Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.

3. Cinema Vérité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.

5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.

6. Filmmakers of Cinema Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.

7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.

8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity."

9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.

10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn´t call, doesn´t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don´t you listen to the Song of Life.

11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.

12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species - including man - crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota April 30, 1999