A Walk In The Trent Valley

Perhaps the truth depends upon a walk around the lake. WALLACE STEVENS

A kink in the west-easterly-flowing Atlantic jet stream meant cold air coming in from the north, so the morning dawned cold with a frosty start. The high atmospheric pressure pointed to a fine, clear day with weak sunshine.

I decided to take a walk in the Trent valley not far from my home, and thought it would be fun to list all the different species of bird I saw along the way. I made a flask of coffee, packed some lunch, found camera and binoculars, then set off towards the river. It was chilly, so I was glad of my thermals, my fleece, my hat and my gloves. The habitat through which I walked was sparse woodland, arable farmland, meadow, river and lake. These are the birds I spotted, thirty-three in all:

Wood pigeon, collared dove, crow, rook, jackdaw, blackbird, starling, chaffinch, blue tit, great tit, robin, grey heron, cormorant, dunnock, great spotted woodpecker, pheasant, black-headed gull, green plover, Canada goose, greylag goose, coot, moorhen, little grebe, goosander, tufted duck, mallard, goldeneye, wigeon, pochard, gadwall, shoveler, shelduck, whooper swan.

The pheasant on the list I only heard not saw, but I'm counting it. However, I haven't counted two species of gull which I wasn't sure about. I'm hopeless at identifying gulls. 

At one point a huge flock of geese (probably pink-footed) several hundred strong flew high above me in a V formation. Geese and other migratory birds use the Trent as a navigational aid.

Spring was definitely in the air despite the cold weather. Birds were pairing up, and rooks and cormorants were ferrying materials to patch up their nests.  

Vertigo

Some time ago I read WG Sebald's The Rings Of Saturn and found myself agreeing with the critic James Wood, who called it 'a great, strange and moving work'. So I began another book of Sebald's recently in a state of high anticipation. I was not disappointed. But how do you describe Sebald's output? His books seem to defy categorisation. Are they novels, travelogues, histories, autobiographies? The fact is — his genre-busting work is a mixture of all these things.

Like The Rings Of Saturn, Vertigo takes you on a uniquely Sebaldian journey of melancholic meanderings, unreliable memories, Kafkaesque encounters, unexpected connections and bizarre coincidences. His lucid, logical, vertiginous style of writing only serves to reinforce how odd the thought processes of human beings really are. Reading him, we realise that when we look at objects and events hyper-closely, and become conscious of the real or imaginary connections between them, the world can seem a very mysterious, and at times sinister place. Spliced in with the angst, Sebald also reveals a sly humour too.

To give a flavour of what I've been talking about, here's a passage from The Rings Of Saturn:

My way from Dunwich took me at first by the ruins of the Grey Friars' monastery, through a number of fields, and then to an overgrown scrubland where stunted pines, birches and rampant gorse grew so densely that the going was very hard. I was beginning to think of turning back when all of a sudden the heath opened out in front of me. Shading from pale lilac to deepest purple, it stretched away westward, with a white track curving gently through its midst. Lost in the thoughts that went round in my head incessantly, and numbed by this crazed flowering, I stuck to the sandy path until to my astonishment, not to say horror, I found myself back again at the same tangled thicket from which I had emerged about an hour before, or, as it now seemed to me, in some distant past. Only in retrospect did I realize that the only discernible landmark on this treeless heath, a most peculiar villa with a glass-domed observation tower which reminded me somehow of Ostend, had presented itself time and again from a quite different angle, now close to, now further off, now to my left and now to my right, and indeed at one point the lookout tower, in a sort of castling move, had got itself, in no time at all, from one side of the building to the other, so that it seemed that instead of seeing the actual villa I was seeing its mirror image. Moreover, my sense of confusion was deepened by the fact that the signposts at the forks and crossings of the tracks gave no directions to any place or its distance; there was invariably, to my mounting irritation, no more than a mute arrow facing pointlessly this way or that. If one obeyed one's instincts, the path would sooner or later diverge further and further from the goal one was aiming to reach. Simply walking straight ahead cross-country was out of the question on account of the heather, which was woody and knee-deep, so that I had no choice but to keep to the crooked sandy tracks and to make mental notes of even the least significant features, even the slightest shift in perspective. Several times I was forced to retrace long stretches in that bewildering terrain, which could perhaps be surveyed in its entirety only from the glass tower of that spectral Belgian villa. In the end I was overcome by a feeling of panic. The low, leaden sky; the sickly violet hue of the heath clouding the eye; the silence, which rushed in the ears like the sound of the sea in a shell; the flies buzzing about me — all this became oppressing and unnerving. I cannot say how long I walked about in that state of mind, or how I found a way out. But I do remember that suddenly I stood on a country lane, beneath a mighty oak, and the horizon was spinning all around as if I had jumped off a merry-go-round.

WG Sebald The Rings Of Saturn (Translated from German into English by Michael Hulse)      

One added frisson for me is that I actually know this area of Dunwich Heath in Suffolk, which Sebald describes so disconcertingly.

Poetry Cornwall

Issue 36 of Les Merton's magazine Poetry Cornwall is just out. In it there's a short review of The Passionate Transitory. Thanks, Les!

The Strange Case Of Telfour Tremble

Paris: home of the unfortunate Telfour Tremble.

If any of you followed the extraordinary story of Dominic Rivron unearthing the neglected work of little-known English poet Margery Clute, you may also be intrigued by my own similar tale of literary detection.  

I was rummaging through some dimly-lit poetry shelves in the basement of a local second-hand bookshop the other day when, as chance or perhaps destiny would have it, I came upon a slender, leather-clad volume of verse bearing the gold-blocked inscription: Signes et Symboles: Poèmes Melancholiques. A closer inspection revealed the name of the author printed below the title in much smaller Gothic letters — a certain M. Telfour Tremble, Poète. Immediately a sharp frisson of excitement ran from my coccyx up my spine then into my neck. Just to be doubly sure, I took this rather tattered-looking book from the shelf and turned over a few mildewed pages. A short foreword written by none other than Paul Verlaine confirmed my original suspicion that this was an incredibly rare copy of the only published work of obscure French Symbolist poet Telfour Tremble, contemporary of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, and close friend of Jean Moréas, author of the Symbolist Manifesto of 1886.

I knew from my specialised knowledge of the period that Tremble had lit up the Parisian literary salons like a shooting star when this, his first and only collection of poems, was published; but the initial excitement seemed to quickly wear off and, after a particularly malicious review of the book had appeared in the literary journal, the Mercure de France, sales of the small print run plummeted, and Tremble vanished without trace. It was generally assumed that he joined the ragged ranks of the army of down-and-out poets who thronged the whorehouses and drinking dens of Paris at the time, and that he died in squalor — a poverty-stricken, absinthe-addicted dipsomaniac. All we know for sure, however, is that he expired, coincidentally, on his thirty-first birthday, 1st April 1900, and was buried in an unmarked grave in a remote suburban graveyard — not, as you might think befitted the status of a gifted Symbolist poet, in the cemeteries of either Père Lachaise or Montparnasse.

I bought the volume at a ridiculously cheap price from the unsuspecting bookseller and returned home gleefully with my prize. The collection contained forty-six poems in all, and I began at once the pleasurable task of translating them. Indeed, I have high hopes that eventually these English translations of mine may eventually be published in their own right — perhaps in a bilingual edition. At any rate, come what may, I'm delighted to present in this blog a sample of the work of the late M. Tremble, thereby rescuing him from obscurity at last.           

Idyll In A Sylvan Hut

How can I leave it all behind?

This slice of moon —
This wedge of Camembert —
This hot and clamorous night

With its chorus of frogs
And symphony of mosquitos
And angelic choir of nightingales?

This sturdy cabin at the woodland edge,
Its windows open
To the still air, heavy with thunder?

This humble, splintered table,
This slick knife
Which hacks at a stale baguette,

Then scores an orange skin
Quarter-wise — peasant thumbs
Peeling it like unfolding petals?

This bitter wine,
Cinnamon-spiced, with a hint of gall,
And thick and red as oxblood?

This sultry woman by my side,
Her skin gleaming with sweat,
Sticky as the summer night itself?

Her body, slight as a young boy’s,
With buttocks scarcely rounded
And breasts like tangerines?

Her animal eyes
Darting from moon to table
Then back to moon again?

This moonlit path
Winding through forests
On and on and on

And even further —
From this cabin’s portal
To the mighty Pyrenees?

How can I leave it all behind?
Yet leave it I will
For when the morning sun

Bathes the east in a diaphanous pink glow,
I’ll lift the latch and set off in the dawn
Whistling a melancholy tune.

Telfour Tremble (1869-1900)

Translated from the French by The Solitary Walker

The Labyrinth Of Literature

Spiral path at Château de Choisy-le-Roi, France. (Image: Wikimedia Commons.)

Recently I've had more time to read than usual — a case of enforced immobility due to a sprained hamstring. And it's made me realise just how much I love books (though I suppose I always knew that). Reading wakens me up, proves I'm alive, stimulates and provokes me. It stretches my horizons and reveals other lives, other worlds, other points of view and perspective. Equally it also goes inward, deepening the mind, refreshing the spirit and invigorating the soul. It illuminates things within myself I didn't know were there; it reconfirms things I'd put to one side and forgotten. It's a beacon in what can sometimes seem the darkness and boredom of routine life. It tells me that we are not alone in the world, that we are all in this together, struggling through as best we can.

It's also really come home to me how one book leads on to another, how one writer suggests a further one, how one textual clue has you chasing a second clue which provides a third clue and so on, ad infinitum. Literature is a connective web, an endless maze, a labyrinth in which you can both lose and find yourself.

For example, reading a narrative on DH Lawrence a few weeks ago led me to Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu and Thomas Merton. And from Thomas Merton's journals I see that I've scribbled down in my notebook the names Karl Barth, the Swiss theologian; Shantideva, the eighth-century Indian Buddhist scholar; Julian of Norwich, the English Christian mystic; Eugenio Montale, the Italian poet, prose writer, editor and translator; René Char, the twentieth-century French poet; César Vallejo, the Peruvian poet described variously as 'the greatest universal poet since Dante' and 'the greatest poet in any language'; and DT Suzuki, the Japanese author of books on Buddhism, Zen and Shin, who was instrumental in bringing these philosophies to the West — all referenced in Merton's text. And if I investigate all these fascinating religious and poetic byways, where will all these extra new writings take me? Truly, literature is an infinitely exciting world of discovery and exploration.

(If you interested in my accounts of reading Lawrence, Merton, Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu — and more recently Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Verlaine and Rimbaud — do check out the latest posts on Turnstone.)  

Epiphanies

I never made one of my discoveries through the process of rational thinking. ALBERT EINSTEIN

All that man has eternally here in multiplicity is intrinsically one. Here all blades of grass, wood, stone, all things are one. This is the deepest depth. MEISTER ECKHART

We read about epiphanies in Joyce's Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man and we see characters in his Dubliners stories experience sudden transformative insights. Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea undergoes an epiphany of understanding when he hears the song One Of These Days in a dingy bar and when he stares at the roots of a chestnut tree. What's going on here, and what are epiphanies?

Magical moments, mystical moments, eternal moments, liminal moments. Gateways to something much larger and more significant. Portals into the unknown which vanish as mysteriously as they appear. Sudden shafts of illumination, insight, knowledge. Unexpected, unsought hits of joy and ecstasy. Unheralded instants of revelation, transformation, transcendence.

Epiphanies don't come to order; they usually happen when least expected. The places where they occur may be, or may briefly become, 'thin' places. (There exists in Celtic mythology the notion of 'thin places' in the universe, where the visible and the invisible world come into their closest proximity.) In an epiphanic moment the 'I' may disappear briefly as one is united with the cosmos.

One of the most important stimuli and excitements in my life is the recollection of past epiphanies and the expectation of future epiphanies.

Four personal epiphanies:

Climbing a small, rounded lump called Potter's Hill overlooking Woolacombe, Devon, at the age of twelve. Throwing myself down on the close-cropped turf, feeling the warm sunshine on my skin, listening to the screaming seagulls, their voices stifled by gusts of wind. Discovering all at once that I was incredibly happy — there, in that unremarkable place, on my own, in total freedom, in a state of grace. Recently I wrote a poem about this which you can find here. 

Art class at school at the age of fourteen. The bearded, gruff and eccentric art teacher, Billy Booth, had brought in some photographic slides for us to look at — it was an end-of-term treat. Projected on a white screen were pictures he'd taken of Crete, of the sites of Mycenae and Knossos, of the fabulous Lion Gate. A sudden shudder, a violent frisson overwhelmed me, and I was granted a deep, imaginative insight into history and culture and art and the transformative power of art — an experience which is still almost as vivid to me now as it was over forty years ago.

The Derbyshire Peak District at the top of a bluff above Monsal Dale. I was now in my thirties. A view of the old viaduct, the winding valley, the glinting river, the distant purple hills. Peace descended on me, calm and perfect peace, and a feeling of oneness with myself, with others, with nature, with the universe. I could have died happy at that moment.

Several times on the Camino, in France and in Spain. I can't remember clearly all the occasions. But definitely the penultimate day on the GR65 from Geneva to Le Puy-en-Velay: hot sun, brilliant blue sky, autumn colours of red, orange and gold setting the wooded slopes on fire. I crossed the watershed and a panorama of rounded hills, extinct volcanoes, stretched in front of me as far as the eye could see, wave upon petrified wave receding ever more hazily to a smudged horizon.

Can you remember your own epiphanies?

I Ching

Every so often, perhaps once or twice a year or less, perhaps at a crossroads in my life, perhaps during times of doubt or despair, always seriously and sparingly — I consult the I Ching. I did this the night before last. The throw of three coins six times produced hexagram 62, Thunder on the Mountain (title of the first track on Bob Dylan's Modern Times album!): Hsiao Kuo/Preponderance of the Small. After converting the changing lines to their opposites (I had just one, top line number 6) as you are supposed to do for a more exact reading, this led me to hexagram 56, Fire over the Mountain: Lü/The Wanderer or Pilgrim. I combined the import of both these hexagrams.

Without going into the technicalities of interpretation, I'll give a brief summary of what I gleaned from my reading. My source books were: I Ching Or Book Of Changes translated by Richard Wilhelm with a foreword by CG Jung, The I Ching Or Book Of Changes: A Guide To Life's Turning Points by Brian Browne Walker and Total I Ching: Myths For Change by Stephen Karcher.

In a great storm the wise bird returns to her nest and waits patiently. (Hsiao Kuo)

We are all wanderers in the Unknown. Those who travel beside the Sage are protected from harm. (Lü)

These are difficult and dangerous times — but it's no solution to struggle or be aggressive. Wait patiently for guidance, bide you time, fly low and safe. Don't react with fear, panic or anger. Take non-action rather than action. Be humble, accepting, independent, reliant on your own resources, flexible, adaptable. Think small, take small steps, do small not big things. Don't lose the ground (mountain) under your feet by trying to fly too high (into thunder or fire). Retreat into your centre and stay focused. Harness the power of the yin, the dark, the moon, the feminine, the subtle, the hidden.

This is a time of transition, of being a stranger in a strange land. You have few real friends, but the friendships you do have are incredibly deep and meaningful. Survival depends on treating strangers with tolerance, generosity, modesty, gentleness, caution, sensitivity and lack of pretension, avoiding all disagreement and conflict. Then you will never be alone. Be reserved but also yielding. You are an exile on a quest, a wanderer, a bird flying low through liminal places and spaces. Be open as far as you can, but also be on your guard. Ultimately there is the chance of creative and alchemical transformation. 

Quinterview 18

Here's The Passionate Transitory's eighteenth quinterview — this time with Bulgarian poet Ivanka Mogilska.

TPT: What does poetry really mean to you?

IVANKA MOGILSKA: What my leg or my arm mean to me...

Ivanka Mogilska

The Tannahill Weavers

Back from seeing Scottish traditional folk band The Tannahill Weavers in the village hall at Dry Doddington, a village near us. They closed with this version of Auld Lang Syne by Robbie Burns. There was not an empty seat, and everyone had a great time.

Hopes And Dreams

The Solitary Walker in duck-egg blue. No idea what happened to the short, woollen trousers — or the blond hair.

I have a piece just up on Rachel Fox's excellent new site all our hopes and dreams. You can find it here.

Anyone can contribute, and these are the submission guidelines.

Rachel gives some prompts to inspire thoughts about your own hopes and dreams:

What were your hopes and dreams when you were a child?

Did any of them come true in any sense?
What are your hopes and dreams now?
Do you really think any of them are possible?

Rachel would love to receive more contributions to this fascinating and intimate archive.

Let's Do It

Is it possible there's anyone who doesn't know this clip? I still roll helplessly with laughter on the tufted Wilton each time I see it (painful to do right now as I have a sprained hamstring). Victoria Wood — doyenne of English comediennes.

Constant Change

On Turnstone Thomas Merton replaces DH Lawrence, and on words and silence a New Beginning becomes a False Start.

DH Lawrence: A New Consciousness

DH Lawrence at 21 years old (Wikimedia Commons).

I have beside me a stack of books by and about three of my favourite writers: Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Hardy and DH Lawrence. Right now I've nearly finished DH Lawrence: The Savage Pilgrimage by his friend and admirer Catherine Carswell. It's a fascinating narrative. Through Carswell I feel I've got closer to the character and personality of Lawrence than in any other biography of him I've read.

Lawrence spent some of the happiest times of his relatively short life (he died of complications resulting from tuberculosis at the age of forty-four) in Taos, New Mexico. He identified immediately with Native American culture, joining in at times with ritual Indian dances. Out of this experience, and his trips over the border into Mexico, came the novel The Plumed Serpent. For Lawrence, old pre-Christian ways of life still retained a true consciousness of what it was to be fully human, a primal life-force guided by feeling not intellect — far removed from what he regarded as insipid, sanctimonious, hypocritical western Christian society.

In New Mexico, and for the first time, he found physical relief from the 'cheerful, triumphant success' which was killing the white races with ennui. He became a partaker as well as a spectator. Not by the abnegation of the Christian saint or the Oriental fakir, not by the psychic powers of the yogi, not by the short cut by which a modern world contemplates the conquest of the cosmos by science, not by any victory over matter by either the spirit or the intellect did Lawrence see the possibility of our salvation from boredom and sterility. We were all starving in the midst of plenty. Nothing was needed but for us to perceive religiously that the cosmos itself was alive, and to enter into the richness of that perception. In wrestling with a live cosmos men would immediately become themselves gods of a kind — fallible still, but potent with cosmic energy. Then, and only then, could man properly solve his great problems. But to do so we had to 'destroy our own conception', our accustomed consciousness.

CATHERINE CARSWELL DH Lawrence: The Savage Pilgrimage    

Quinterview 17

The Passionate Transitory's seventeenth quinterview is with the multi-talented Hélène Cardona: actor, poet, translator, interpreter, dream analyst. Read about her influences and favourite writers, and discover the first poem she ever wrote.

Embracing And Letting Go

Santiago Cathedral, Spain. Image: Wikimedia Commons

The real traveller finds sustenance in equivocation, he is torn between embracing and letting go, and the wrench of disengagement is the essence of his existence, he belongs nowhere.

Read the full quotation from Cees Nooteboom's book Roads To Santiago in my new Turnstone post.

The Viking Way: Horncastle To Belchford

Last Thursday I continued my long, interrupted walk along the Viking Way. On climbing out of the car in Horncastle I almost regretted my decision, as the afternoon was cold, with a strong, face-searing wind. But after a mile or so I relaxed, and all my cares and worries blew away.

What do the botanists know? Our lives should go between the lichen and the bark. The eye may see for the hand, but not for the mind. We are still being born, and have as yet but a dim vision of sea and land, sun. moon, and stars... HENRY DAVID THOREAU A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees / I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees / Asked the Lord above, Have mercy, now save poor Bob, if you please. ROBERT JOHNSON Cross Road Blues

Roads are a record of those who have gone before. REBECCA SOLNIT Wanderlust: A History Of Walking 

We are but dust and shadow. HORACE The Odes Of Horace

In the small village of Fulletby...

... I came across Winn Cottage opposite the church. This had once been home to the remarkable Henry Winn (1816-1914). Henry left school when he was 10, became Parish Clerk at the age of 14, and held this post until he was 90 years old. Entirely self educated, he also worked as the village grocer, draper, ironmonger, constable and schoolmaster. And as if that were not enough, he somehow found time to found a local library, and write poetry and newspaper articles about village life. Even more astonishingly, he fathered 21 children — although only four daughters grew to adulthood.   

The Church of St Andrew, Fulletby.

I was now walking along the spine of a low range of chalk hills known as the Lincolnshire Wolds. I reached Belchford, my destination, but had to detour down a muddy bridleway for a couple of miles to catch the Louth bus back to Horncastle.

Quinterview 16

Our sixteenth Passionate Transitory quinterview is with talented young Indian poet Dhirendra Kumar Shah. Dhiren also edits Teesta Rangeet, a bimonthly poetry magazine with an emphasis on the work of Indian-Nepali writers.

Dhirendra Kumar Shah

Langford Lowfields

Wednesday was a fine but blustery day, and I set off on one of my local walks. Passing this oak tree, I followed an old stone wall... 

... until I came to a three-way junction of paths.

The familiar route took me under power lines...

...  to a small bridge crossing the river Fleet. The floods had largely receded, but a pool of water remained in this ploughed field. A flock of fieldfares rose from the field's edge...

... as I turned up this woodland path. The path is new...

... as is this other bridge over the Fleet. The area is now all part of the Langford Lowfields nature reserve owned by the RSPB.

Near the gravel pit lakes I met up by chance with Jenny Wallace, the warden of the reserve, and we had an interesting chat for twenty minutes. She told me they'd had big problems with the flooding, but the water levels were gradually dropping. She described the insect life, and the butterfly life in summer, and the birds: there are several types of owl here, also reclusive bitterns, and even, if you're lucky, marsh harriers. These summer visitors bred a couple of years ago, and she was hopeful they'd return this year. (You can read Jenny's blog here.)   

Bitterns like reed beds, and there are extensive reed beds on these old gravel workings. The reserve also attracts wildfowl and wading birds.

Before I made my way back along Westfield Lane, I paused on the bank of the river Trent which borders the western side of the reserve. As you can see, the water was still very high.