Walking, Art And Nature (10)



Camino, Spain


I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least - and it is commonly more than that - sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. THOREAU Walking

The political philosopher and educationalist Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) believed that human beings were inherently good, and that they were only corrupted by the evils of society. He gradually lived an ever simpler life, becoming closer and closer to nature, studying botany, and enjoying the solitary walks he recounted in his ten, classic meditations Reveries Of The Solitary Walker.

Walking, art and nature - these three things are so bound up in Rousseau, and, since his time, have been inextricably linked.  



Camino, Spain

Walking, art and nature. We think of Thoreau's ecstasies in Walden and in his Journals; the mystical outpourings of Richard Jefferies in The Story Of My Heart; William Wordsworth's 'emotion recollected in tranquillity'; the labourer-poet John Clare's walks among the dispossessed pastures of English agricultural history; Gary Syder's Beat and Buddhist mountain treks; Richard Mabey's gentle, literary eco-strolls through the Chilterns and Norfolk; Robert Macfarlane's explorations on foot of Britain's wild places; John Constable walking and painting in Dedham Vale; JMW Turner walking and painting in Europe.    



Camino, Spain

As well as walking in nature being an inspiration for art and literature, walking itself can be an art form in its own right. Richard Long, whom I've written about before, gives walking a totemic resonance through natural artworks created on the walk, or even through the signature of the actual walk itself: its mark, footprint and track across the landscape.

 

Camino, Spain

Sadly (for me at least!) I've reached the end of my ten-part journey through walking country. I hope some of it has been inspirational, or at least informative. Most of all I hope that's it's motivated you to go walking, or, if you're walkers already (which I know many of you are), to go walking even more. It's a land without class, without prejudice, without materialism, without competition, without complication, without compromise, without celebrity culture, without bonds. Rousseau famously wrote at the beginning of The Social Contract: Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains. Why don't you throw off those chains, and start walking?



Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain



Here's the Roman arch at Caparra in the Spanish region of Extremadura. I walked under it nearly a year ago on my pilgrimage along the Via de la Plata. Why don't you join me as I step beneath it again, right now? Let's walk together towards those distant hills, that blue horizon. You never know what we might find... 

Caparra, Via de la Plata, Spain

Purgative And Blackberry Pie

To loosely paraphrase, nay to subvert, Shakespeare: 'If food be the music of love, let's eat.' Or something like that. Dedicated readers of this blog will know that the subject of food and drink looms large in Solitarywalkerville, and I can't go too long without my fix of foodie posts.

First of all, a big thank you to blogreaders Bella and Karin for their suggestion of onion, garlic and chilli soup as a cold-busting remedy. I tried it and, by God, it worked! As usual I was too lazy to surf for a recipe, so I casually sauteed red onions in butter and olive oil, added an unprecedented quantity of freshly chopped garlic (this called for emergency measures), then finally an eye-watering amount of chilli powder (should that have been a teaspoon not a tablespoon-ful?), which I figured would blast the virus like a visit from some culinary Spanish Inquisition. I poured in chicken stock and whizzed up this lethal concoction. It looked bad, though innocuous enough: a sort of thin, brown, watery gruel. It tasted bad, too. And the aftertaste lifted the roof of my mouth clean off, leaving it somewhere west of Penzance on the Cornish coastal path. Screaming neural messages - was it pain, was it pleasure? I wasn't quite sure - ricocheted in shock waves from mouth to gut via oesophagus and stomach. These splenetic telegraphs seemed to shout: yes, this hurts, but it's good for you! And it was good. So, so good. This wondrous purgative shook the remnants of the virus from my system like Cynthia Payne thoroughly working out one of her more masochistically-inclined clients. I haven't had a sniffle since.

Next, and slightly more seriously, I wanted to tell you we've been out blackberrying. (For any younger readers - blackberry in this context is a wild fruit not a smartphone thingy. 'Wild fruit', I said - you know, growing in the hedgerows? With seeds? Oh, never mind ..!)

Foraging is heaven at this time of year and for the next month or so. (Remember Richard Mabey's book from the early 1970s, Food For Free?) On my Caminos I've picked walnuts freshly fallen from the tree, grapes missed by the harvester, nectarines and peaches from the orchards of the Camargue. I've shared raw, olive-oil-brushed wild mushroom delicacies with fungi gatherers in the woods of south west France. Oh, it's so satisfying and rewarding to go out into the countryside and pick your own food from nature's larder. We've already collected pounds of blackberries, and turned them into blackberry and apple crumble, blackberry and apple pie, blackberry fools (see pic). And I've just made some blackberry jus in a twinkling of an eye - from fresh blackberries, vanilla sugar and a little water - which will perfectly complement some delicious Lincolnshire ice cream. Or perhaps a venison steak.

Thanks for indulging me in my foodie post. Normal travel-and-poetry service will resume before long!

Contact! Contact!

In wilderness is the preservation of the world. HENRY THOREAU.

Continuing my exploration of Richard Mabey's insightful book, Nature Cure, I found this, his belief about wilderness: Truly wild places should be for the wild creatures that live there, and only secondarily to give us revelatory experiences. If we go into them it should be as a privilege, and on the same terms as the creatures that live there, unarmed and on foot. They cannot be treated as convenience habitats, available off-the-peg...

150 years earlier, Thoreau spoke in favour of the tangled fringes of Walden Pond in Walden; Or Life In The Woods; and in Walking And The Wild he wrote: I derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native town than from the cultivated gardens in the village... When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most interminable, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, - a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow of nature.

For Mabey, his renewed appreciation of what he calls the unmanaged energy of nature is a key element in his recovery from depression and breakdown. Thoreau too found release and illumination in his contact with what Mabey describes as nature's membrane, pulsing with interconnected life, busy with communications: Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature, - daily to be shown matter, to come into contact with it, - rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The common sense! Contact! Contact!

But it isn't only wilderness, or deep woods and dank swamps, that can provide a 'nature cure'. Country walking pure and simple can help sort out emotional and mental problems (Solvitur ambulando, as the Romans put it). And, as Mabey states: The medievals made mass pilgrimages to rustic shrines. John Keats, mortally ill with tuberculosis, fled to the Mediterranean to find that 'beaker full of the warm South', away from that place 'where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies.' 'The country, by the gentleness and variety of its landscapes,' wrote the philospher Michel Foucault, 'wins melancholics from their single obsession by taking them away from the places that might revive the memory of their sufferings'.

Crane Dance

The cranes' full dance eludes me... Yet it's been a compelling, infectious motif throughout history. A crane dance was performed by Theseus on his return from Crete with the youths and maidens he had freed...There was a 'dance of wild cranes' in China in 500 BC with a ritual pattern so similar it is hard to avoid the suspicion that the two were related... John Clare describes a dance called 'acting the crane' which was played at the Harvest Home feast... In nineteenth-century America, when whooping cranes were still common, the Florida backwoods naturalist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote an evocative account of their evening ceremonials: 'The cranes were dancing a cotillion as surely as it was danced at Volusia. Two stood apart, erect and white, making a strange music that was part cry and part singing. The rhythm was irregular, like the dance...

From Richard Mabey's book Nature Cure.

(Photo taken last year at Pensthorpe Nature Reserve in North Norfolk. Double-click to enlarge.)

Play

At times it seems as if the whole company of nature, ourselves included, is simply at play.

It's evident to me that animal 'play' happens out of sheer spontaneous joy, curiosity and invention - rather than purely to fulfil some narrow, evolutionary purpose. Look at puppies running after a ball. Lion cubs pouncing on their mothers' tails. Young polar bears play-fighting. Dolphins blowing bubbles, chasing them to the water's surface, then bursting them. Homo sapiens applying pigments such as ochre, manganese oxide and charcoal to cave walls and with them creating images of horses and bison, aurochs and reindeer.

Play is the opposite of Management by Objectives, the current creed which rigidly screens out spontaneity, imagination and surprise as parts of the creative process.

Spontaneity. Imagination. Surprise. All of which, at least for me, are essential to the human experience. And the animal one too?

So many of the transactions between different organisms seem almost incidental, wildly gratuitous.

What is the nature, the meaning of these 'gratuitous transactions'? To my mind they can't be completely understood simply by following worthy-but-dull, cause-and-effect scientific reasoning. Is 'sympathetic magic' coming into play?

(All quotations come from Richard Mabey's book Nature Cure. All opinions are mine alone.)

Sympathetic Magic: All Is Metaphor

Every tree is strange to me. JOHN CLARE (Written during his illness).

Some time ago I read Nature Cure, Richard Mabey's confessional book about his nervous breakdown. (I mentioned this book recently, and Beating The Bounds blogged about it here.) Mabey recounts how his recovery was made possible thanks to writing, the kindness of friends, and the love and dedication of one particular woman. With the help of these he was finally able to re-establish, as a human being and as a natural history writer, his connection with the natural world - in an East Anglian setting of fen and breckland, under huge skies, between long horizons, and in the company of multifarious wild plants and birds.

In chapter 4, The Naming Of Parts, Mabey writes: Certainly... a natural science confined to the naming of parts and simplistic models of cause and effect is neither adequate nor particularly helpful in describing a world in which memory, feeling, spontaneity and a growing and necessary sense of the wholeness of things are intertwined.

He amplifies this by introducing the ancient and primitive belief in 'sympathetic magic': Sympathetic magic is often simplified to the formula of 'like cures (or generates) like'; but it is really a more comprehensive (and seemingly almost universal) approach to the search for order and connectivity in nature. At its heart is the idea of analogy, the ecological, if 'un-scientific', belief that the different layers of life are not only connected, but in some way physical reflections - metaphors, if you like - of each other. Exterior likenesses are clues to inner processes and likely resonances. The shape and colour of plants reveal their powers. The mating dances of animals, if mimicked by humans, will make the animals more prolific - and maybe the dancers, too. The woodpecker thunders, and the heavens will thunder as well. (In the myth and folklore of many cultures woodpeckers are believed to foretell rain, influence the growth of crops, even predict the future.)

Mabey makes clear that Sympathetic magic isn't some primitive stage on the upward journey towards real science. It's a different way of understanding and, its followers hope, influencing the world. It begins with observations and experiences, but then, instead of attempting to explain these by reducing them to ever smaller and more discreet parts or 'atoms', looks at them more broadly until they seem to fit into the weave of the world.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as unscientific, New Age nonsense, but I think it deserves more serious consideration. I myself think it's an exciting, provoking, imaginative and wholly different way of looking at the world - one that I (and I suspect many of us) have likely been practising all the while without realizing it. The poetry of William Blake fits in very well with this holistic world view - as do the Gaia theories of James Lovelock (to quote a quite different sage from more modern times).

One example of this approach (which is beyond the purely taxonomic or test-by-theory methods - and more inclusive, as it brings together the personal and the human, observation and memory, both science and art) is the idea of 'play' in the animal world. Consider the acrobatic jackdaws I saw on my recent walk, swifts screaming in fast and joyful flight, kittens mock-fighting, humans messing about with paint or clay or words. I think you'll find that science alone hasn't yet come up with a convincing, watertight reason why animals indulge in these 'playtime' activities, 'games' which seem to serve no immediately 'useful' purpose, and which seem to arise from no other motives than pure pleasure and delight.

More of all this in a coming post... But in the meantime, can I ask: do you believe in sympathetic magic? Is it the stuff of mysticism, or is it really, objectively out there? I'd like to believe so.

Talkers And Dreamers

There had never been anything wrong in my life that a few good days in the wilderness wouldn't cure. PAM HOUSTON

Richard Mabey, one of our foremost English nature writers and compiler of Flora Britannica (about the folklore of British plants), published in 2005 a highly personal memoir called Nature Cure which documented his nervous breakdown. His recovery is closely bound up with his rediscovery of and reconnection with the natural world. He says this about language and nature: It is as if in using the facility of language, the thing we believe most separates us from nature, we are constantly pulled back to its, and our, origins... Learning to write again was what finally made me better - and I believe that language and imagination, far from alienating us from nature, are our most powerful and natural tools for re-engaging with it... Culture isn't the opposite or contrary of nature. It's the interface between us and the non-human world, our species' semi-permeable membrane. This is in fact similar to what The Grizzled Scribe was saying in his comment on my post from yesterday.

Mabey cites various writers who have explored this 'interface' - Aldo Leopold, Henry Thoreau, Gary Snyder, Annie Dillard, and the poet John Clare, of whom he writes: Clare was one of the few writers... to have created a language that joined rather than separated nature and culture. I would also add the name of Edward Abbey to this list - for out of the wild anarchy and bitter irony, the anguish and contradictoriness of Desert Solitaire, comes a plea for the absolute necessity and importance of wilderness, and an appeal for a true, universal 'civilization' rather than the one-sided, prejudiced, short-sighted 'culture' of a particular society in a particular tiime and place (when his book was published, in the 1960s, issues such as overpopulation, nuclear catastrophe, industrial tourism and the destruction of wilderness were very much on Abbey's mind). Through his brilliant writing, through his words, thoughts and ideas, Abbey demonstrates (to me at any rate) very much a 'civilized' mind - pointing out as he does the gulf between mankind and nature, and hinting how it may be possible to bridge it.

Yes, language and imagination are quite definitely natural products of human evolution, and may be used by poets, by writers, by all of us in order to reconnect with the natural world, a world we lost in the Garden of Eden after the Fall from Grace (if we choose to see it in these mythological terms). As Mabey writes: We have evolved as talkers and dreamers. That is our niche in the world, something we can't undo. But can't we see those very skills as our way back, rather than the cause of our exile?

In summation of the rather difficult subject I've tried to tackle in these last few posts (hopefully I haven't tied myself in too many knots!) I'll quote Gary Snyder from his book Unnatural Writing: Consciousness, mind and language are fundamentally wild. 'Wild' as in wild ecosystems - richly interconnected, interdependent and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient and full of information... Narratives are one sort of trace that we leave in the world. All our literatures are leavings, of the same order as the myths of wilderness people who leave behind only stories and a few stone tools. Other orders of being have their own literature. Narrative in the deer world is a track of scents that is passed on from deer to deer, with an art of interpretation which is instinctive. A literature of bloodstains, a bit of piss, a whiff of estrus, a hit of rut, a scrape on a sapling, and long gone.

Essence Of Juniper

In the chapter Cliffrose And Bayonets from Desert Solitaire Abbey wrestles philosophically and emotionally with his favourite juniper tree: I've had this tree under surveillance ever since my arrival at Arches, hoping to learn something from it, to discover the significance in its form, to make a connection through its life with whatever falls beyond. Have failed. The essence of the juniper continues to elude me unless, as I presently suspect, its surface is also the essence. Two living things on the same earth, respiring in a common medium, we contact one another but without direct communication. Intuition, sympathy, empathy, all fail to guide me into the heart of this being - if it has a heart... At times I am exasperated by the juniper's static pose; something in its stylized gesture of appeal, that dead claw against the sky, suggests catalepsy. Perhaps the tree is mad...

Another significant, highly charged passage - so typical of Abbey. I think it's complex what he means here, a complexity which truthfully reflects our ambiguous relationship with nature. Just look at it closely. He has the tree "under surveillance"! What an interesting and revealing choice of phrase, suggesting both a stealthy wariness (it's almost as if the tree were up to no good or were suspiciously reluctant to bare its secrets) and also a certain clinical, scientific observation.

Abbey goes on to reinforce the idea that "surface" is also "essence" (an idea which should be familiar from my previous posts) - yet at the same time this isn't enough for him. He's obviously frustrated as hell at not being able to penetrate any further into the tree's essential tree-ness. He's actually "exasperated" that the tree is motionless, seemingly comatose, possibly "mad"! Despite his best intentions, he's anthropomorphizing the tree - something he philosophically never wanted to do!

So it seems inevitable and necessary that we have recourse to human words and emotions in order to relate to the non-human world, to bridge the gap between culture and nature. I would go further and say that it is good and right that we do so, and that we've now come full circle from the concept that words and feelings and human culture can alienate us from the natural world to the idea that they may in fact be the very things that connect us to it. But more of this tomorrow when I'll give support to this view from the English nature writer Richard Mabey...