Landscape And Memory

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

WILLIAM FAULKNER

I was transfixed by the TV series A History of Britain and Simon Schama's Power of Art, but this is the first time I've read any of Schama's books. Landscape and Memory —which was also made into a TV series — has been on my bucket reading list for some time. I was not disappointed, though I struggled with some of the detailed digressions which form the book's main narrative. But this is to quibble. It's a bold and compelling work, magnificent even — immense in its knowledge, broad in its scholarship, crackling with humour, enthusiasm, sophistication and irreverence. His prose is poetic and inventive — Schama is no dull academic or art historian. He revels in the quirky, colourful details of history, delighting in revealing the foibles and vanities of humanity, and laying bare, both mercilessly and affectionately, our well-intentioned, ill-intentioned and haphazard human endeavours.

The book explores the intimate relationship human beings have with the landscape: how we mould the landscape and how the landscape moulds us; how we inescapably view the landscape through the prisms of culture, history, myth and imagination. This can be a bad thing, but it is by no means always a bad thing. Nature and culture, the primitive and the pastoral, the wild and the civilised, the rural and the urban, rough scrub and cultivated garden, Schama argues, exist together and always have done — ever since hunter-gathering nomads became the first settlers.

Literary and artistic heroes emerge from these pages — Ruskin, Turner and Thoreau for example — though none can evade the barbs of Schama's ironic wit. He is particularly good at skewering vainglorious characters in history — such as Gutzon Borglum, the Ku Klux Klan card-carrying sculptor responsible for the presidents' heads on Mount Rushmore — and exposing their eccentricities, egocentricities and territorial greeds. A forest is never a forest in Schama's eyes — but the scene of murder and mayhem, economic exploitation, colonial expansion. A river is never a river and a mountain never a mountain — but symbols of nationalism, of religious or political conviction, or manifestations of psychological states. For much of humankind, trees, streams and rocks are not simply trees, streams and rocks, but come loaded with all kinds of cultural, political, mythic and religious  associations. Rousseau's child of nature remains an impossibly romantic ideal; and Thoreau's wilderness is always subtly tamed and humanised (Thoreau would not have wanted it any other way).

In one sense, at least, I have tried to keep faith with Thoreau's aversion to running after the esoteric, and with his conviction that the whole world can be revealed in our backyard if only we give it our proper attention. But the backyard I have walked through — sauntered through, Thoreau might exclaim — is the garden of the Western landscape imagination: the little fertile space in which our culture has envisioned its woods, waters, and rocks, and where the wildest of myths have insinuated themselves into the lie of our land. For that matter, there are places even within the boundaries of a modern metropolitan sprawl where the boundaries between past and present, wild and domestic, collapse altogether. Below the hilltop clearing where my house stands are drystone walls, the remains of a vanished world of sheep-farming and dairying, made destitute a century ago. The walls now trail across a densely packed forest floor, hidden from view by a second growth canopy of tulip trees, white ash, and chestnut-leaf oak. From the midst of this suburban wilderness, in the hours before dawn, barely a fairway away from the inevitably manicured country club, coyotes howl at the moon, setting off a frantic shrieking from the flocks of wild turkey hidden in the covers. This is Thoreau's kind of suburb.

SIMON SCHAMA Landscape and Memory          

At Home Nowhere And Everywhere

I wish to speak a word a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil — to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make a emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school-committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks — who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Saint Terre' — to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer', a saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds, but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours and come round again at evening to the old hearth side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again — if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man — then you are ready for a walk.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU Walking.

Also recommended is Thoreau's essay A Winter Walk.

Lake

Grebe Lake, Whisby Nature Park, Lincoln.

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature. HENRY DAVID THOREAU

What Is Truth?

Tell me lies, tell me sweet little lies FLEETWOOD MAC

According to a piece in last Saturday's Guardian, John Steinbeck's classic travelogue Travels With Charley is no factually accurate report of his famous road trip. (I'll remind you that, in this incredibly popular memoir from the early 1960s, Steinbeck and his French poodle Charley make a 10,000 mile odyssey round the US, romantically roughing it in a camper truck he names after Don Quixote's horse Rosinante.) It's now been shown that Steinbeck's narrative is completely unreliable. The van is driven on an artistic licence; the story is peppered with 'creative fictions'. Just one example: although Steinbeck makes out the trip was a solo voyage, it seems he was almost never alone. Indeed, half the time he was accompanied by his wife, Elaine, and for much of the trip stayed at luxury motels or parked up on friends' properties. He even spent one week on a cattle ranch owned by a Texan millionaire. Steinbeck spins such a good tale. You feel you're right there beside him and Charley, cooking your beans with them on a campfire under the stars. So do these embellishments, these omissions, these flirtations on the borderline between truth and fantasy, really matter?

This kind of authorial malleability is nothing new, of course. Writers have always been prone to embroider the truth in their autobiographies. Thoreau, for instance, somehow neglected to mention in Walden that his self-sufficient, hermit-style sojourn in the woods was enlivened by regular visitors, frequent excursions to the nearby village, boxes of food sent weekly by his mother or sister, and yet more emergency parcels regularly delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife. In A Moveable Feast Ernest Hemingway led us to believe he was living in Paris almost as a down-and-out - but this was in fact far from the case. Lillian Hellman's memoirs are notorious for their cobweb of 'factual errors' (I put it politely). And, quite recently, James Frey was exposed as being 'economical with the truth', to say the very least, in his drug-addled memoir A Million Little Pieces. But should we care about any of this too much - as long as the account's a good one, and well written, and keeps us enthralled?

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

Walking As A Cultural And Aesthetic Act (8)

Camino, Spain

Nowadays we take it for granted that walking is a laudable pastime and recreational activity. We tend to give a positive nod to the walkers we see: they are taking exercise, they are getting out in the fresh air, they are enjoying being part of nature. All Good Things. It was not always thus.

Up until the late eighteenth century no one walked unless they could help it, unless they were poor and could not afford horse, carriage or coach. And, for the ubiquitous poor, walking was not always a pleasurable pursuit. It was a means to an end, not an end in itself - the practical, indeed the only way to drive cattle and pigs to market, to reach crops grown on feudal agricultural strips, to visit friends and family. Beyond the village, routes were uncertain, if not dangerous. Highwaymen and footpads roamed the highways and byways, and folk in other settlements could be suspicious of, or downright hostile to, strangers. Even as late as 1782 the German minister Carl Moritz, walking across England, found himself abused by innkeepers, and ejected from hostelries where he wished to spend the night. His crime? He was on foot! He wrote: A traveller on foot in this country seems to be considered as a sort of wild man, or an out-of-the-way being, who is stared at, pitied, suspected, and shunned by everybody that meets him.

But, by the early nineteenth century, all of this had changed. Influenced by the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who originated the idea of the 'noble savage' living free and uncorrupted in the wild, poets and writers like William Wordsworth and Henry David Thoreau wholeheartedly embraced the cultural, aesthetic and moral value of nature. And, to get close to nature, you had to walk through it. Thoreau's two-year sojourn in a hut by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, is well known. He wrote: When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and the woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?

And Wordsworth - often accompanied by his sister, Dorothy, or fellow Romantics like Coleridge or De Quincey - must have walked tens of thousands of miles during his lifetime. He would regularly cover fifteen or twenty miles a day, and, even when at home in his Lakeland cottage, would stride endlessly up and down the garden in a creative reverie. Walking in nature gave him solace and inspiration, and he would commonly compose his poems while walking, rather than at his desk. To return to Thoreau, Thoreau also wrote: When a traveler asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, 'Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.' Wordsworth's masterpiece of a poem, The Prelude, is really just a long walk in words. 

Throughout the nineteenth century, this walking lark really caught on. Tourism was invented - helped by the boom of the railways - and people travelled further, and walked further, to admire and be awestruck at picturesque views, raging cataracts and terrifying mountain scenery. Hikers and climbers started to explore the European Alps and other mountain chains. Souvenirs were manufactured, and cameras began to record it all. The activity of walking also began to appear in the literature of the day. If you read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice or Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, you'll find they are full of people walking.

Walking: Curiosity And Discovery (5)

Camino, Spain

The most soulful places are almost always reached only on foot. THE SOLITARY WALKER

I've written about the health benefits of walking, both physical and mental; about walking as an escape hatch from the demands of society and a fast-paced world; about the therapeutic value of walking; about walking as an aid to meditation; about how the simplicity of walking strips everything down to life's bare and necessary essentials. But what actually is the basic, primal driving force behind our desire to put one foot in front of the other, endlessly?

I believe it's curiosity. As human beings we are naturally curious. I know I am. I always want to know what's around the next bend, what's at the top of the hill, what lies beyond the horizon. Or even just what's at the end of the garden. Without any excited sense of expectancy, of insatiable curiosity, walking would be in danger of becoming a mere treadmill. Curiosity keeps our minds sharp, our senses finely tuned; keeps us alive.

It's limitless what is waiting to be discovered, explored and learnt through walking. And walking - in its immediacy and simplicity, its freedom and flexibility - is, I'm convinced, the best way to grasp the world. Not only can walking take you to places most other methods of transport can't reach, but it gives you an inimitably physical, visceral, hands-on experience of the journey. Whenever I'm on a long walk, my senses gradually become more alert as each day goes by. As I slowly lose the built-up fumes of contemporary industrialised, mechanised, homogenised 'civilisation', my mind begins to see more clearly, I can breathe more easily, I rediscover senses - smell, taste, touch - which have been long muted, I rejoice in the freedom of what I'm doing, I melt into the unique presence of each moment, I'm glad to be alive. As Whitman wrote: I celebrate myself and I sing the body electric. And as Thoreau said: Talk of mysteries! — Think of our life in nature, — daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it, — rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact!

Walking day after day in a new country is a wonderful way to appreciate it, to get to grips with it, to comprehend it in a profound way. I know from my own experience that I feel I 'know' England and France and Spain in a wholly different way by walking across them, by feeling their earth under my feet and their dirt under my fingernails, than by cruising through them in car, coach or train. In walking you go at Nature's pace, slow and deep. You encounter Nature one-to-one.The barriers between you and Nature, between you and other people, are down. Your feet are planted right there, in the puddles and the mud, on the piney forest floor, on the springy downland turf, in the sand at the edge of the sea. It's instinctive, it's primitive, and it somehow feels just right.

The Way, The Word And The World: The Language Of Walking

The history of walking is an unwritten, secret history whose fragments can be found in a thousand unemphatic passages in books, as well as in songs, streets, and almost everyone's adventures. REBECCA SOLNIT Wanderlust.

Thoreau once wrote somewhere that walking inevitably leads to other subjects. He was right. The subject of walking itself is a vast one, but the paths upon which it takes you circumscribe the whole physical and mental world.

One of my favourite books on walking, and, I think, one of the best and most eclectic ever written on the subject, is Rebecca Solnit's Wanderlust: A History Of Walking. This book crosses so many boundaries, it's uncategorisable. Walking's the theme, but it encompasses so much else - poetry, philosophy, anatomy, history, religion, politics, psychogeography, mountaineering, landscape gardening, personal confession. All the things you encounter while walking. And consider while walking.

Solnit believes the culture of walking has evolved out of the disembodiment of everyday life resulting from automobilisation and suburbanisation. She also uncovers a long historical association between walking and philosophising. When walking, she says, the mind, the body and the world come into alignment. She points to a strong sympathy between writing and walking, between language and the path: Language is like a road; it cannot be perceived all at once because it unfolds in time, whether heard or read.

The photo below shows some of my 'walking book' shelves. The books assembled there are wide-ranging in their scope, 'fragments' of a 'secret history'. For walking is the starting point for a thousand byways, a thousand ideas, a thousand connections. There are all sorts of subjects here - social history, landscape history, nature writing, travel, adventure and exploration, farming and agriculture, autobiography, mythology. All these things are written into the landscapes and mindscapes through which we walk...

Books Which Change Your Life

I like to think of mindfulness simply as the art of conscious living. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a yogi to practice it. In fact, if you know anything about Buddhism, you will know that the most important point is to be yourself and not try to become anything that you are not already. Buddhism is fundamentally about being in touch with your own deepest nature and leting it flow out of you unimpeded. It has to do with waking up and seeing things as they are. In fact, the word 'Buddha' simply means one who has awakened to his or her true nature. JON KABAT-ZINN Wherever You Go, There You Are

That's the last of my quotes from Jon Kabat-Zinn. It's time to move on to other things. My recent readings of his books Coming To Our Senses and Wherever You Go, There You Are came at just the right time in my life and have affected me deeply. It's strange how sometimes exactly the right book is 'gifted' to us at exactly the right moment in our lives - a book which may quickly become a landmark book, influencing us, rescuing us, inspiring us in profound, often life-changing ways.

When I was in my late teens I read The Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and The Second Penguin Krishnamurti Reader and these books fired a life-long interest in Zen Buddhism and were mind-blowing for me at the time. They affected absolutely the way I thought and the way I lived. Other books which have done this to me are Thoreau's Walden, the novels of Hermann Hesse and John Fowles, and (this may surprise you) the novels of Henry Miller. I read all of these writers in my twenties.

I wonder how many of you have totemic books you read at a critical time in your lives - books which altered your mindset? The power of the written word can be truly astonishing.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake. THOREAU

In Praise Of Non-Doing

There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sang around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveller's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing, like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so I had my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest. THOREAU Walden

(Quoted by Jon-Kabat-Zinn in his book Wherever You Go, There You Are.)

An Infinite Expectation Of The Dawn

Daybreak's coming earlier and earlier each morning as spring advances. I love the dawn and the early mornings. When I was young I had to drag myself out of bed. Now I relish that quiet hour or two before the workaday world begins to stir. There's something special about it, magical even. It's a good time to meditate, and rinse the mind, before its relentless daily stream of thoughts starts to flow.

Thoreau liked the mornings, too, and in this piece he considers the dawn, but ends up contemplating something wider...

Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me... We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep. I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look ...To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

THOREAU Walden

Not Quite Free And Ready

Well, that's quite enough reflecting for a while. On to the penitential bit! God knows, I've enough to be penitential about. The glory stage seems impossibly far off as I write this, morosely cocooned in the house in the middle of Britain's Big Chill. Must get out for a walk or two in preparation for the Big Walk which I start in mid-January - the Vía de la Plata pilgrimage route from Seville to Santiago.

Talking of walking, here's what Thoreau had to say on the subject...

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil - to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks - who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived 'from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going à la Saint Terre,' to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, 'There goes a Sainte-Terrer,' a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearthside from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of underlying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, wife and child and friends, and never see them again - if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man - then you are ready for a walk.

Hmm... Better fill in that Income Tax Return and pay that gas bill as soon as I can...

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'.

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.

Water Is Interestingly Strange

Although many readers will be familiar with Thoreau's Walden, I'd like to put in a plea for his unjustly neglected work A Week On The Concord And Merrimack Rivers. I have an old hardback public library edition published by Harrap & Co and bound in green cloth with handsome gold leaf tooling on the front and spine. However the 1st 1849 edition was hardly a success. Publisher after publisher rejected the manuscript, and it was only published at all because Thoreau agreed to bear the cost. Although I myself can quite happily read it straight through - I love quirky books! - I suppose it's best dipped into and browsed for its literary, natural-historical, self-revealing gems.

To say that a man is your Friend, means commonly no more than this, that he is not your enemy.

In human intercourse the tragedy begins, not when there is misunderstanding about words, but when silence is not understood.

Another great Thoreau treasure trove is his Journals. I have only a selection of these, published in a 1961 Dover edition called The Heart Of Thoreau's Journals. I would like to read a whole lot more.

We are slow to realize water - the beauty and magic of it. It is interestingly strange to us forever. Immortal water, alive even in the superficies, restlessly heaving now and tossing me and my boat, and sparkling with life!

How fitting to have every day in a vase of water on your table the wild-flowers of the season which are just blossoming!

That last one sounds just like some Chinese aphorism, doesn't it? There are hundreds upon hundreds of aperçus like these to be discovered and delighted over in the Journals...

Morning Mist

Emerson and nature philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) were both Transcendentalists and big mates in Concord, Massachusetts in mid-19th century New England. I've written before about Thoreau here. There's a charming little book I possess, Morning Mist: Thoreau and Basho Through The Seasons, published by Weatherhill of New York, which points out the similarities in outlook between Thoreau and the 17th century Japanese haiku poet, Matsuo Basho. These are some extracts from it. I hope you enjoy.

My solitude shall be my company/ and my poverty, my wealth. Basho

I never found the companion that was as companionable as solitude... Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth. Thoreau

A good house -/ sparrows delight in the millet/ behind the back door. Basho

Meanwhile also came the chickadees in flocks...to pick a dinner out of my woodpile or the crumbs at my door, with faint flitting notes, like the tinkling of icicles in the grass. Thoreau

At my hut/ all I can offer/ is that the mosquitoes are small. Basho

My dwelling was small, and I could hardly entertain an echo in it... flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters. These forms are more agreeable to the fancy and imagination than fresco paintings or... the most expensive furniture. Thoreau

The bush warbler -/beyond the willow,/before the grove. Basho

I hear the bluebirds... the blue curls of their warblings thawing the torpid mass of winter - assisting the ice and snow to melt and the streams to flow. Thoreau

I am like a sick man tired of people, or someone weary of the world. What is there to say?... A morning glory/on the fence of my gate,/shut all day. Basho

I want to go soon and live away by the pond, where I shall hear only the wind whispering among the reeds. It will be success if I shall have left myself behind. But my friends ask what will I do when I get there. Will it not be employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons? Thoreau

"Employment enough to watch the progress of the seasons..." I could think of many worse occupations...

Life In The Woods

With all this talk of Rousseau and Revolution, you may think I'm going way off the walking topic. But no! As fellow blogger Loren Webster has reminded me, another literary walker was the admirable philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), the quiet revolutionary - whose philosophy of non-violent resistance influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King. His essay Civil Disobedience (1849) promoted the following of individual conscience over civil law; and his address Slavery in Massachusetts (1854) and essay A Plea for Captain John Brown (1860) furthered the abolitionist cause. But it's for his classic Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854) that he's perhaps most remembered today. Thoreau's meditation on a 2 year sojourn by Walden Pond, Massachusetts, in a small self-built cabin, has never been more popular - though it was little liked when first published. But nowadays it chimes in so well with our current concerns of individualism, self-reliance, nature conservation. This short extract is taken from his essay Walking (1862): Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth's servant to show him her master's study, she answered, Here is his library, but his study is out of doors. Great stuff!