9 November 1989: ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall’

Though nothing will drive them away
We can be heroes just for one day
We can be us, just for one day

I can remember
Standing by the wall
And the guns, shot above our heads
And we kissed, as though nothing could fall

And the shame was on the other side
Oh, we can beat them, forever and ever
Then we could be heroes just for one day
We can be heroes
We can be heroes just for one day

Heroes, David Bowie

On 9 November 1989, three days before this iconic photograph was taken, the East German government – amid some confusion – announced that anyone wishing to visit the West would be granted a visa. Ecstatic crowds surged at the Berlin Wall and guards were left with no choice but to open the various gates and checkpoints. That night ended  forty years of division between East and West Berlin. I was born three months into the Berlin blockade and airlift; on the night of 9 November 1989 I watched Newsnight broadcast the amazing scenes from Berlin, a five-year old daughter asleep upstairs, dreaming, perhaps, of a brave new world.

A YouTube video captures the drama and emotion of that incredible night:

The other day, Timothy Garton Ash wrote in his Guardian column about the promise of  ‘the year of miracles’ (and goes on to discuss the reality of its legacy):

Nineteen eighty-nine was the biggest year in world history since 1945. In international politics, 1989 changed everything. It led to the end of communism in Europe, of the Soviet Union, the cold war and the short 20th century. It opened the door to German unification, a historically unprecedented European Union stretching from Lisbon to Tallinn, the enlargement of Nato, two decades of American supremacy, globalisation, and the rise of Asia. The one thing it did not change was human nature.

In 1989, Europeans proposed a new model of non-violent, velvet revolution, challenging the violent example of 1789, which for two centuries had been what most people thought of as “revolution”. Instead of Jacobins and the guillotine, they offered people power and negotiations at a round table.

With Mikhail Gorbachev’s breathtaking renunciation of the use of force (a luminous example of the importance of the individual in history), a nuclear-armed empire that had seemed to many Europeans as enduring and impregnable as the Alps, not least because it possessed those weapons of total annihilation, just softly and suddenly vanished.

On opendemocracy.org, Neal Ascherson wrote:

It wasn’t until June that I realised what was underway. In the Europejski Hotel in Warsaw, we journalists read the inrush of election-result printouts and realised – suddenly – that Polish communism had collapsed. And even then, realising that a non-communist Polish government was about to upset the whole balance of Europe, we did not quite get it. Even then, none of us understood that the whole imperium from the Bug to the Rhine was no more than an old wasps’ nest hanging from a roof – dried-out, abandoned by the stinging hordes, ready to fly to dust at a blow.

But the people did get it. They had lost something – not exactly their fear, but their patience. Suddenly it seemed unbearable to go on accepting these systems, these portly little idiots in their blue suits, for another year, and then for another day, another hour. That special sort of impatience is the power-surge of revolution. As they poured into the streets in Leipzig and Prague and Tbilisi and Riga, did they think they might be shot? Yes, possibly. In Georgia and Latvia and Lithuania, many were. But, with their patience, the people in the street had also lost their respect for the men with guns, the portly idiots in uniform. They could kill, but they were no longer real. A future without them had all at once become very real.

We know so much more now about how 1989 happened. The fall of the wall was consequence, not cause: it was made inevitable by the opening of the Polish Round Table the year before. Above all, by Gorbachev, who went round Europe and the world unlocking the gates and telling everyone that the tanks would not come. Western diplomats and journalists didn’t take him seriously. The party leaderships beyond the Elbe did, and they knew real fear.

It was a real revolution. But with one missing feature. That is the feeling in a people that “We have done it once, and if the new lot let us down, we can do it again!” It was that proud, menacing confidence which made the French revolution special. But it’s not around in 21st-century Europe. After 1989, the people handed over liberty to the experts. Will they ever want it back?

Over 100,000 people attempted to cross the border between East Germany and West Germany or East Berlin and West Berlin between 1949 and 1989. About 1,000 of them died. The first victim at the Berlin Wall was Ida Siekmann who died on 22th August 1961 as a result of injuries caused by jumping out of a window at the Bernauer Strasse, where the Wall divided the street down the middle. The first victim shot at the Berlin Wall was Günter Litfin, who was killed on 24th August 1961. The last victim shot at the Wall was 20 years old Chris Gueffroy, who was killed on 5th February 1989.

Probably the most horrifying death was the shooting of Peter Fechter. At midday on 17 August, 1962, he and Helmut Kulbeik, two teenage citizens of the GDR, jumped from a ground floor window on Zimmerstraße, Berlin, into ‘the death strip’ – an area of no-mans land leading up to the Berlin wall. As they reached the wall, ignoring orders from the GDR guards to halt, they were fired upon, with a total of twenty one shots. Helmut made it over the wall to safety but Peter was hit a number of times in the back and abdomen. Seriously wounded, he lay a few yards short of the wall shouting for help. Hundreds of citizens of West Berlin gathered, shouting demands at the GDR guards and American soldiers to help Peter, though they did nothing. Bystanders were prevented at gunpoint from assisting him and it was reported that American soldiers received specific orders to stand firm and do nothing. After fifty minutes of cries for help, Peter fell silent. It was events like this that had a powerful effect on my generation; I remember one of the first imaginative essays I wrote in school at the time was about a Berlin Wall escape attempt.

His body was eventually removed  by East German border guards. In March 1997, two former East German guards faced manslaughter charges for Fechter’s death and were sentenced to 20 month’s imprisonment on probation.

The last person shot trying to cross the Berlin Wall was Chris Gueffroy, was just 20 years old when he died in a hail of bullets as he tried to flee East Germany on the night of February 5, 1989. His mother, Karin Gueffroy, appeared movingly in Saturday night’s BBC2 documentary, The Secret Life of the Berlin Wall, in which she recalled hearing the shots that night, and went on:

I’d always compared him to a small wild horse who you couldn’t cage in.  I had to go to the Stasi again and again, and when I was there they explained to me that the state had acted properly – my son was a criminal.   Then one of them said to me, ‘Frau Gueffroy, you saidyourself that your son was like a wild horse.  And what do you do to wild horses that can’t be tamed?’  I looked at him and said, ‘You shoot them’.  And he nodded.

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbours?’ Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbours.’

Mending Wall by Robert Frost

And have the walls gone? Far from it; in 2009 there are walls built, being built or planned in numerous locations around the world, including: Israel’s 436 mile through Jerusalem and the West Bank, the wall that American soldiers built around the Sunni district of Adhamiya in Baghdad, the U.S. – Mexico wall built to prevent entry to United States, walls of earth, rock and sand stretching 1,700 miles between Morocco and Western Sahara, border fortications separating North and South Korea.

Nilin, West Bank: A demonstrator places a Palestinian flag on the Israeli barrier during a protest marking the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Links

• The Berlin Wall: A Pictorial History (Time)
• Berlin Wall: Wikipedia
• Berlin Wall: 20 years on video series from The Guardian
• The Berlin Wall – Lessons Learned: 30 minute video covers the history of the Iron Curtain from 1961 to its wall in 1989.
• Chronicle of the Wall: comprehensive multimedia source
• The Lost Border: photos of the Iron Curtain
• Twenty years on, how Germany has healed the scars of the Berlin Wall: brilliant then and now photos (Mail online)
• 1989 – moment, legacy, future: essays on opendemocracy

Leasowe to Meols

Yesterday we walked along the promenade from Leasowe lighthouse to Meols.  It was a brisk November morning, bright where we were, but offshore we could see rain clouds track across the bay and eventually make landfall at Formby.  The sunlight produced a rainbow, but the most spectacular effect of the lighting was to see a large flock of oystercatchers wheel and swirl above a sandbar out at sea,turning from black to silver like a shower of fireworks falling as the sun caught their plumage.

The name Leasowe comes from the Anglo-Saxon leasowes or ‘meadow pastures’. Its sand dunes are the largest on the Wirral, but much of the area is at or below sea level and is protected by the concrete coastal embankment.

Leasowe Lighthouse was built in 1763 by Liverpool Corporation’s Docks Committee and is the oldest brick-built lighthouse in Britain. It was operational until 1908. There are seven floors which can be reached by a cast iron staircase of one hundred and thirty steps. Over the entrance there is a tablet bearing the inscription M.W.G. 1763, this is commemorating the then mayor of Liverpool, William Gregson.

The last keeper of the lighthouse was a woman. Mr. and Mrs. Williams were formerly keepers of the Great Orme Lighthouse in Llandudno and they transferred to Leasowe. Shortly after moving Mr. Williams was taken ill and it was during his illness that his wife took over the duties. When the building ceased to function as a lighthouse Mrs. Williams was moved into a cottage but she kept the lighthouse as a teahouse for summer visitors and it became extremely popular. After the death of Mrs. Williams in 1935 the lighthouse was closed to the public and put to no further use. In 1973 it was painted white but nothing more was done until 1989 when it became the base for the ranger service of the North Wirral Coastal Park.

That rather strange name, Meols, originates with the Vikings, deriving from melr, the Old Norse for ’sand dunes’. But this has been a place of human settlement for 2500 years.  Since about 1810, a large number of artefacts have been found relating to pre-Roman Carthage, the Iron Age, the Roman Empire, the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings. These include items as varied as coins, tokens, brooches, pins, knives, glass beads, keys, pottery, flint tools, mounts, pilgrim badges, pieces of leather, worked wood and iron tools. They came to be discovered after the beginning of large-scale dredging (to accommodate the needs of the nearby growing seaport of Liverpool) started to cause notable sand erosion along the coastline near Meols.

These finds suggest that the site was used as a port as far back as the Iron Age some 2400 years ago, and was once the most important seaport in the present-day northwest of England. Thus trading connections are believed to have reached far across Europe. The objects (which will be on display in the new Museum of Liverpool from 2011) show that the port began to develop about 2400 years ago, during the Iron Age. Finds such as a silver tetradrachm (a coin) of Tigranes I of Armenia, minted in Syria in the 1st century BC and bronze coins of Augustus, suggest that there had been contacts with France and even the Mediterranean before the Roman occupation of Britain. It is probable that a major item of the trade was salt from the brine springs of southern Cheshire.

Many of the present day inhabitants of Meols show Viking ancestry. In 2002, University of Nottingham researchers began investigating the degree of Viking blood still extant in the village.

Links

• Meols, Wirral: an ancient port: Museum of Liverpool
• Great Sites: Meols: article by David Griffiths, Oxford University in British Archaeology magazine, December 2001

Robert Macfarlane walks the South Downs

Paths that cross
Will cross again
- Patti Smith

Another brilliant series of essays this week on Radio 3’s The Essay in which Robert Macfarlane, author of The Wild Places, reflected on paths, poetry and folk memories as he described walking the South Downs this summer, for 100 miles or so from Winchester southeastwards to the cliffs of Seven Sisters near Eastbourne, exploring its chalk paths and landscape.

‘Paths are the habit of a landscape.  They are determined and sustained by usage, scored into the land by customary behaviour.  They are acts of consensual making, and in this sense, quietly democratic’. In this respect, he contrasted the making of paths with the tracks of Richard Long (for example, in the Sahara, above), concluding that ‘you can’t make a path on your own’ and that his work ‘was to path what a snapped twig is to a tree. For path connects, almost always, with path; paths join, this is their duty. They relate places and, by extension, they relate people’.  As evidence of this, he tells of  meeting Lewis, who has been on the road for seven years, since the death of his wife, recording his walks in notebooks he posts back to his brother in Newcastle.  ‘Somewhere near Amberley a barn owl lifted from a stand of phragmites reeds.  We stopped to watch it hunt over the water margin, slowly moving north up the line of the river, a daytime ghost, as white as chalk, its wings beating with a huge soundlessness. ‘You go ahead’, said Lewis to me, ‘I’m in no hurry.  I’m going nowhere, fast’.

With him as he walked, Macfarlane carried a book of the poems of Edward Thomas, whose work was deeply influenced by the landscape of the Downs, and he told of attempting to memorise his poem, Roads:

I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.

Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten as a star
That shoots and is gone.

On this earth ’tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:

The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.

They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.

From dawn’s twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.

The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.

Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on forever.

Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion tales
Is one of the true gods,

Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,

And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter

At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer

Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps’ press,
As Helen’s own are light.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road may bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

On Macfarlane’s first night sleeping out in the open, the rain sluiced down. Edward Thomas returned often to the imagery of rain.  Macfarlane mentioned his 1911 prose work, The Icknield Way, from which this passage comes:

I lay awake listening to the rain, and at first it was as pleasant to my ear and my mind as it had long been desired; but before I fell asleep it had become a majestic and finally a terrible thing, instead of a sweet sound and symbol. It was accusing and trying me and passing judgment. Long I lay still under the sentence, listening to the rain, and then at last listening to words which seemed to be spoken by a ghostly double beside me. He was muttering: The all-night rain puts out summer like a torch. In the heavy, black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invisible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the grave when my ears can hear it no more…

The summer is gone, and never can it return. There will never be any summer any more, and I am weary of everything… I am alone.

The truth is that the rain falls for ever and I am melting into it. Black and monotonously sounding is the midnight and solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age – for it is all one – I shall know the full truth of the words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days of nature, in the days before the rain: ‘Blessed are the dead that the rain rains on.’

For 20 years, Thomas walked what he called ‘the long white roads’ and ‘frail tracks’ of England’s chalk country. Then in 1916, he enlisted and was sent as an officer to the chalk landscape of Arras in Northern France, with its far more dangerous paths. He was killed on Easter Monday, 1917. Not long before his death near Arras in 1916, Thomas wrote this:

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying tonight or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Rain, Edward Thomas, 7 January 1916

Macfarlane spoke of how Thomas developed a method of making one-day walks in the design of “a rough circle”, trusting that, as he put it in The South Country (1909), “by taking a series of turnings to the left or a series to the right, to take much beauty by surprise and to return at last to my starting-point”. On these walks, Thomas would follow what he called “the old ways”: the holloways, pilgrim paths and Neolithic-era chalk paths that seam the Downs. Thomas’s walks knowingly laid new tracks on an already marked ancient landscape.

Walking from Bramber Bank to Kingston Down, in the company of writer Rod Mengham, Robert considered the Australian Aborigine concept of the songline, in which walking, wayfaring, singing and folk memory are aligned. On Edburton Hill they stopped to rest in a ‘kee-high wildflower meadow’, described vividly by Macfarlane:

‘We lounged under a clear sky within a dry, westerly wind. I knew only a few of the dozens of plant species that made up the meadow: agrimony, wild mignonette, red clover, yellow rattle, marjoram, knapweed, scabious, ladies bedstraw.  It was a wild and chance-made garden; through it all wandered the string-like stem of the bindweed.  Lying there, drowsy from the sun, the walk and the druggist’s scent of the flowers, with the flies weaving a gauzy mesh of sound above me, I began to imagine that, if I fell asleep the bindweed tendrils would lace around my limbs and fingers and I would wake like Gulliver in Liliput bound to the ground.’

In a brilliant and moving essay, Robert re-imagined the life of artist Eric Ravilious, who was fascinated by the ‘pure design’ of the South Downs – their paths, ridges and light. Ravilious’s passion for aerial landscapes eventually led him northwards, to Norway and Iceland. He disappeared off the coast of Iceland in September 1942 while on a rescue flight.

Ravilious…Downsman, follower of old paths and tracks, lover of whiteness and of light, and a visionary of the everyday…’The Downs’, he wrote once, ‘ shaped my whole outlook and way of painting because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious’. ..He made expeditions, slept out and walked for hours following the lines of the Downs, their ridges, rivers and tracks…From the late 1920s to the late 1930s Ravilious painted: deserted fields and Downland hillsides, abandoned farm machinery, waterwheels, fences – and paths. Paths fascinated him.  He had read deeply in the work of Edward Thomas, revered the work of Samuel Palmer…He worked with a lightly loaded brush, allowing the white of the paper to show through, like chalk.

The paths of the Downs compelled Ravilious’s imagination; so did the light of the Downs, falling as white on green, and evoking ‘the strange downs magic’ of which Angus Wilson once spoke. The light of the Downs is distinctive for its radiance, possessing as it does the combined pearlescence of chalk, grass blades and a proximate sea. If you have walked on the Downs in high summer or high winter, you will know that Downs’ light also has a peculiar power to flatten out the view – to render scattered objects equidistant. This is the charismatic mirage of the Downs: phenomena appear arranged upon a single tilted plane, through which the paths burrow. In these respects the light of the Downs is kindred with another flattening light, the light of the polar regions, which usually falls at a slant and is similarly fine-grained. The light and the path: the flattening (the light) and the beckoning (the path). These are Ravilious’s signature combinations as an artist.

For most of Ravilious’s life, the Downs answered his landscape needs. Especially in winter – when the beech hangars stood out like ink strokes in a Chinese water-colour – they embodied his aesthetic ideal: crisp lines, the fall of pale light on pale land. But as the 1930s wore on, he began to desire an elsewhere, an otherworld. He located that elsewhere in the high latitudes of the far north – the envisioned land of the Arctic circle and the midnight sun. By the time the war began, he was restless to travel, hungry to swap chalk for ice, and south for north. His chance to do so came with his appointment in late 1939 as an official war artist, which gave him some control over his postings. In the last three years of his life, as Davidson has finely written, ‘the snow and the snow light on bare hills drew [Ravilious] steadily northwards’.

7 September 1942: at Castle Hedingham, a letter arrives for Tirzah from the Admiralty, signed HV Markham. ‘My lords desire me to express to you their deep sympathy in the great anxiety which this news must cause you…’. Tirzah stumbles over the grammar first time through. The next morning the postman brings a letter addressed in a familiar hand, and there is a momentary flare of hope. No, of course not. It is dated 1 September, and written in pencil. ‘We flew over the mountain country that looks like craters on the moon’, he tells her, ‘the shadows very dark and striped like leaves….’

Walking the final miles of the South Downs with artist Chris Drury, Robert explores the sometimes eerie relationship between walking, collecting and creation. Drury was the part of the first generation of land artists that emerged in Britain. ‘I was drawn to Drury’s work’, says Macfarlane, ‘because of its preoccupation with paths and waymarkers, with cairns, shelters and objects found along the path.  Drury’s best-known work, Medicine Wheel, was an 8-foot diameter wheel of bamboo, radiating from a central circle of straw-pulp paper.

Between the bamboo spokes were strung the objects that he had picked up while out walking each day for a year, from August to August: a sheep’s backbone, a little owl feather, a dead tiger moth on a thistle, a piece of petrel-blue flint, a bluebell seed-pod, a lapwing’s secondary, a crab’s claw.  Hundreds and hundreds of found objects, sculpture functioning as almanac, calendar, wunderkammer, astrolable’.

For years, said Macfarlane, Drury had also been experimenting with cairn sculptures and shelters. This reminded me that earlier this year, in Kent, we came across one of his shelters:

Links

• Robert Macfarlane on Richard Long (Guardian)
• Edward Thomas: Wikipedia
• Eric Ravilious: Wikipedia
• Chris Drury: his website
• Chris Drury: Heart of Reeds at Lewes
• The South Downs Way
• The South Downs Way: guide to walks and transport

Childwall Woods

After posting images of trees yesterday, I decided this afternoon that I’d take a walk with the dog in Childwall Woods, one of those magical places you can’t believe exist in the confines of a city.

Childwall Woods is one of Liverpool’s wildlife havens, a Local Nature Reservewith a diversity of urban wildlife including small blue, small copper and red admiral butterflies; linnets and sparrow-hawks; English bluebell and southern marsh orchids. Bats, voles and foxes are also regular inhabitants of the area.

There are sixteen types of trees in the woods, predominantly Beech with a mixture of other deciduous and evergreen species, including English Oak, Sweet and Horse Chestnut, Lime, Silver Birch, Sycamore, Whitebeam and Yew. At least 60 species of bird inhabit the site, with Grey Partridge being notable in this urban area. Kestrels and Sparrowhawks regularly nest in the woods along with Great and Lesser Spotted Woodpeckers. Herons can be seen in the marshy wet areas of the fields and in the autumn Long tailed Tits and Goldcrest flit through the woodland treetops.

The woods were originally part of the grounds of Childwall Hall, a gothic house often known as Childwall Abbey, built by Bamber Gascoyne in 1780 and designed by the architect John Nash. The hall was used as a clubhouse by Childwall Golf Club in the 1920s and 30s.

When Liverpool Corporation wanted to establish a further education college there in 1949 the old building was demolished and a new one built. I began my career there as a college lecturer in 1972, teaching British Constitution to Post Office telegram boys (do they still have those?), police cadets and fire service apprentices.  The building is now the headquarters of Phil Redmond’s Mersey TV (now Lime Pictures) where Channel 4’s Hollyoaks is produced.

It was at Childwall Hall County College that a 22-year old Willy Russell got his big break:

At Liverpool Education Department he saw an advert on the wallfor a package of O level courses. “For two years I’d been asking where such courses took place.” He caught the first bus there, and asked to see somebody. “I must have been in a terrible state. The deputy head came out, sat me down in his office, calmed me down and asked me what the problem was. “It was such a tender thing to do. I must have talked for an hour. I went on and on about not having being able to find what I wanted.” The man told him that subject to him passing a test proving he was capable of basic English, he would be offered a place. “I said: I’ve got English O level. He said: You’re in. “It was one of the most significant moments of my life.”

He was told he would have to find a grant, but that didn’t bother him. He knew he could carry on working, if need be, to support himself, and that is exactly what happened. And so he went to college full-time for a year, a man of 20 amongst an initially suspicious class of 15-year-olds. “They thought I was a CIA plant. Fortunately I played guitar and after about eight weeks everything was fine. “The experience was “just unbelievable. It was a year’s idyllic learning, drinking beer and playing guitar.

He did O level law, British Constitution, History, Sociology, General Studies and Drama, and English Literature A level. And he learned how to type. He ran for student union president against a young Derek Hatton, then a fireman doing day release. “I won, but it would have been better for the students if Derek had won.” That further education, he declares, saved his life. “I have no hesitation saying that. It let me go back to the beginning. It gave me the chance to start again.”

I walked out of the woods and into the open scrubland of Childwall Fields. I was in bright sunshine, but over to the northeast a squall was pushing in off the river, a rainbow dropping down to tower blocks on the skyline.  Childwall Fields was once a landfill site which was closed in the early 1970s. In recent years it has been planted with native deciduous trees as part of the Mersey Forest project. The view from the fields on a clear day is superb, looking over the Lancashire and Cheshire plain with the Peak District to the south east and the West Pennines and Pendle Hill to the north east.

Links

• The history of Childwall: Childwall Hall

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922

I’ve just finished reading Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance by Giles Milton.

Smyrna had had a Greek population since about 1000 b.c. It was one of the cities which claimed to be the birthplace of Homer. For centuries, as part of the Ottoman Empire, it was a prosperous trading port, and by the end of the 19th century had grown into a rich and cosmopolitan citywith large Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities. One of Milton’s striking pieces of evidence for this: there were 11 Greek newspapers available in the city, as well as seven in Turkish, five in Armenian, four in French and five in Hebrew.

The city was home to a number of fabulously rich Anglo-Levantine merchant families – the Whittalls, Girauds and Woods -  and it is largely through their stories that Milton recreates the tragedy of the city as a whole. The Girauds owned the Oriental Carpet Manufacturing Company, which employed 150,000 people, while the Whittalls controlled an even larger fruit exporting empire.

One of the first Christian communities in the world and one of the few places to escape the 1915 Armenian genocide, Smyrna still retained its ancient cosmopolitan character at the end of World War 1. However, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Greece occupied Smyrna and the surrounding region in 1919, encouraged by the Allies, and in particular Lloyd-George, to protect western oil interests – and a Greek-Turkish war began. Milton narrates these developments in a clear and balanced way,  weaving in the personal recollections he has gathered from interviews and memoirs.

When the Turks entered the city on September 9, few guessed the scale of the horrors that would be meted out on the city. Estimates vary but some suggest that  100,000 people were killed, with many times that number turned into homeless refugees. There was a large ethnic Greek population living in the area occupied and it was these who suffered terribly when the Greek army was routed, defeated by Kemal Ataturk, Turkish nationalist leader and founder of modern Turkey. His troops slaughtered the Greek and Armenian population, and burnt the Greek and Armenian part of the city.

Then suddenly, in 1922, Smyrna was snuffed out in a single week of mass-murder, rape, looting, pillage and one of the greatest acts of arson in the 20th century. At the end of it, the New York Times ran the headline: “Smyrna wiped out.”  The chapters recounting the events of the days during which the city burned are filled with vivid depictions of terrible atrocities that are as difficult to read or comprehend as Holocaust accounts.

The Great Fire of Smyrna destroyed much of the city in September 1922. It occurred four days after the Turkish forces regained control of the city thus effectively ending the Greek -Turkish War. Milton provides convincing evidence that it was Kemal Ataturk’s nationalist troops who brought in thousands of barrels from the Petroleum Company of Smyrna and poured them over the streets and houses of all but the Turkish quarter. Moreover, he argues, it was done with the full approval of Ataturk, who was determined to find a final solution to his ‘minority problem’ to ensure the future stability of his fledgling Turkish republic.

This is the story told by Giles Milton, in a book that constitutes gripping and well-written history. I would have been interested to read more about the city in its golden heyday – and more about the lives of its ordinary citizens, particularly those of the impoverished Turkish community. But theirs are lives that go largely unrecorded, unlike the rich Levantines and Americans whose stories provide the backbone of this book.

No-one comes out of this story well: neither the Greeks with their ill-advised occupation and dreams of the Great Idea of a Greek Empire in Anatolia; nor  Lloyd George, whose naive politics worsened the situation; nor the Turks (troops or irregulars) pouring petrol to start the fires; nor the commanders of the Allied warships in the harbour who refused to do anything to save the thousands starving on the quayside (the British poured boiling water on desperate refugees who swam up to their vessels).

But there is one inspiring story that Milton records. As the city burns and half a million refugees huddle on the quayside in desperate straits, facing death by fire and suffocation or at the hands of rampaging Turkish troops and irregulars, one man, in Milton’s words, ‘would lead what must rank as the most extraordinary rescue operation of the entire twentieth century’. Asa Jennings was an employee of Smyrna’s YMCA, a Methodist minister from New York who had only been in the job for a few weeks. But, as Milton recounts, he engages in a determined bid to rescue as many of the refugees as he can. He negotiates with high-ranking French, American and Turkish representatives in a successful bid to utilize some of the multitude of ships moored offshore to transport the refugees away from the city.

Among the Greeks forced to flee were the family of the Greek poet George Seferis,who was studying law at the Sorbonne in September 1922 when Smyrna was recaptured by the Turks and its Greek population fled. Seferis would not visit Smyrna again until 1950; a recurrent theme in his poetry is exile and nostalgia for the Mediterranean and his birthplace, Smyrna.

Just as if one night
you happened to enter
the city that reared you,
and later they razed it to the ground and rebuilt it,
and you struggle to transpose older times
to recognize again…

The evil has been committed; the significant question is who will redeem the evil. Notebooks, 1950

The houses I had they took away from me. The times
happened to be unpropitious: war, destruction, exile;
sometimes the hunter hits the migratory birds,
sometimes he doesn’t hit them. Hunting
was good in my time, many felt the pellet;
the rest circle aimlessly or go mad in the shelters.

Don’t talk to me about the nightingale or the lark
or the little wagtail
inscribing figures with his tail in the light;
I don’t know much about houses
I know they have their own nature, nothing else.
New at first, like babies
who play in gardens with the tassels of the sun,
they embroider coloured shutters and shining doors
over the day.
When the architect’s finished, they change,
they frown or smile or even grow stubborn
with those who stayed behind, with those who went away
with others who’d come back if they could
or others who disappeared, now that the world’s become
an endless hotel.

I don’t know much about houses,
I remember their joy and their sorrow
sometimes, when I stop to think;
again
sometimes, near the sea, in naked rooms
with a single iron bed and nothing of my own,
watching the evening spider, I imagine
that someone is getting ready to come, that they dress
him up
in white and black robes, with many-coloured jewels,
and around him venerable ladies,
gray hair and dark lace shawls, talk softly,
that he is getting ready to come and say goodbye to me;
or that a woman — eyelashes quivering, slim-waisted,
returning from southern ports,
Smyrna Rhodes Syracuse Alexandria,
from cities closed like hot shutters,
with perfume of golden fruit and herbs —
climbs the stairs without seeing
those who’ve fallen asleep under the stairs.

Houses, you know, grow stubborn easily when you strip
them bare.

The House Near the Sea, 1946

In 1963 Seferis was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  In his acceptance speech he said:

The behaviour of human beings does not seem to have changed [since the ancient Greek dramas]. And I should add that today we need to listen to that human voice which we call poetry, that voice which is constantly in danger of being extinguished through lack of love, but is always reborn. Threatened, it has always found a refuge; denied, it has always instinctively taken root again in unexpected places. It recognizes no small nor large parts of the world; its place is in the hearts of men the world over. It has the charm of escaping from the vicious circle of custom. ..

In our gradually shrinking world, everyone is in need of all the others. We must look for man wherever we can find him. When on his way to Thebes Oedipus encountered the Sphinx, his answer to its riddle was: ‘Man’. That simple word destroyed the monster. We have many monsters to destroy. Let us think of the answer of Oedipus.

Links

• Sunday Times review by William Dalrymple
• Review by Christopher Walker, author of Islam and the West
• George Seferis
• George Seferis: Nobel Presentation speech 1963
• George seferis: Nobel acceptance speech 1963
  

Len Deighton’s book covers

Caught part of an interview with Len Deighton on Radio 4 the other day in which his pre-novelist career as art director in a London advertising agency was mentioned – and the fact that he is designed the first British cover for Kerouac’s On the Road.

Len Deighton’s career – had he not become a writer – could easily have been as one of the UK’s leading graphic designers and stylist. Not only was he himself an talented designer; he knew, worked with and encouraged many other designers in the 1950s and 1960s who would go on to become leading lights of the British design scene.

Iin his book Burning the Box of Beautiful Things, which looks at the development of a post-modern sensibility in British art and design from the ‘fifties onwards, Alex Seago highlights the work of design students of the Royal College of Art (where Deighton was a student) and St Martin’s College of Art who were aware of the social and artistic implications of postmodern culture. It was a rejection of the cosy, neo-Romantic, Victorian vision of what art should be, and the genesis of a generation of artists who took it upon themselves to shake up the art and design establishment and strike out on their own path. Life centred on Soho, where the heady mixture of art, music and a party culture created an explosive combination. Len Deighton was at the centre of this revolution, first as student and then a writer.

Links

• Len Deighton’s covers at The Deighton Dossier

Hockney notes Picasso’s balls

In today’s Observer Magazine, there’s this from a feature on David Hockney:

Picasso remains a touchstone for Hockney, particularly the late work, which as he gets older he sees ever more clearly. “I went in 1973 to see the original show of his late paintings in Avignon,” he recalls. “I went with Douglas Cooper, who was quite a Picasso scholar. He was telling me how terrible the paintings were, but I said I would like to go all the same. So we went over there and Douglas is going on and on about how poor the work is. And eventually I said: ‘Do you mind if I just have a look for a while?’ So I looked around for a bit. And I went back to Douglas, and I said: ‘You may not be interested, but these are paintings about being an old man.’ There was a painting of an old guy, his legs crooked, his balls on the floor, a woman trying to hold him up. I said these are the themes only the greatest take on: Rembrandt, Van Gogh. You wouldn’t get it in Andy Warhol.”

Here’s that ‘painting of an old guy, his legs crooked, his balls on the floor, a woman trying to hold him up‘ (Embrace, painted in 1971):

One of my favourite late Picasso works is L’Aubade (The Serenade), painted when he was 84 years old in 1965, and still full of a vitality that shimmers from the canvas.  I love it, too, for its sense of the joy of music:

I enjoy myself to no end inventing these stories. I spend hour after hour while I draw, observing my creatures and thinking about the mad things they’re up to.
- Pablo Picasso, 1968

On Artchive.com they say this:

In the last two decades of his long career, Picasso produced more work than at any other time of his life. During this period, some works are not only dated by month and day, but with a numeral (I, II, III, etc.) indicating multiple works created that single day!  This late period tends to be overlooked, but contains some of the finest of Picasso’s paintings. Some critics maintain Picasso was creatively lazy at this point, but a close look at the work is very rewarding. He had achieved a level of effortless artistic expression that, I believe, has still not been fully appreciated after more than 25 years.  Regardless of your position on Picasso’s personal and artistic life, each of us can, in view of our own mortality, be awed by his final Self Portrait (painted when he was 91, in 1972):

Wikipedia notes of this last period that:

Devoting his full energies to his work, Picasso became more daring, his works more colourful and expressive, and from 1968 through 1971 he produced a torrent of paintings and hundreds of copperplate etchings. At the time these works were dismissed by most as pornographic fantasies of an impotent old man or the slapdash works of an artist who was past his prime. Only later, after Picasso’s death, when the rest of the art world had moved on from abstract expressionism, did the critical community come to see that Picasso had already discovered neo-expressionism and was, as so often before, ahead of his time.

On June 1, 1972 Picasso painted his last painting, The Embrace (Étreinte). He died in 1973, just 10 months after making the work.

Their bodies entwine in the height of passion, their body parts a jumble. A blue wave of death is approaching the couple. The curtain falls. The game is over. The background is white nothingness.
- Brigitte Sträter, Painting Against Time, Atlantic Times

The grand old painter died last night
His paintings on the wall
Before he went he bade us well
And said goodnight to us all.

Drink to me, drink to my health
You know I can’t drink any more
Drink to me, drink to my health
You know I can’t drink any more…
- Paul McCartney, Picasso’s Last Words

‘What will the art world do when I am no longer…They’ll have to go over my dead body! They’ve no way of getting past it, have they?’
- Pablo Picasso

November blows in

And all the leaves on the trees are falling
To the sound of the breezes that blow
-Van Morrison, Moondance

Across the evening sky, all the birds are leaving
But how can they know it’s time for them to go?
Before the winter fire, I will still be dreaming
I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?
Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone while my love is near me
I know it will be so until it’s time to go
So come the storms of winter and then the birds in spring again
I have no fear of time
- Sandy Denny

Funny – it’s not often that the first day of a new month marks such an abrupt change in the weather.  But that’s how it was today. The calm and generally warm and sunny days that we’ve experienced through September and October – marked by what many have claimed to have been the best autumnal colours for many years – came to an abrupt end with today’s gales and driving rain.  The storm has pretty much stripped the trees of the last of their autumn-tinted leaves.

The rain of a night and a day and a night
Stops at the light
Of this pale choked day. The peering sun
Sees what has been done.
The road under the trees has a border new
of purple hue
Inside the border of bright thin grass:
For all that has
Been left by November of leaves is torn
From hazel and thorn
And the greater trees. Throughout the copse
No dead leaf drops
On grey grass, green moss, burnt-orange fern,
At the wind’s return:
The leaflets out of the ash-tree shed
Are thinly spread
In the road, like little black fish, inlaid,
As if they played.
What hangs from the myriad branches down there
So hard and bare
Is twelve yellow apples lovely to see
On one crab-tree.
And on each twig of every tree in the dell
Uncountable
Crystals both dark and bright of the the rain
That begins again.

– After Rain by Edward Thomas

How better to illustrate this theme than with David Hockney’s vast Bigger Trees Near Warter, depicting the bare bones of proud winter trees? Particularly as the painting  has just gone on view at Tate Britain.  Hockney donated the work -  covering 50 canvas panels and measuring  5 by 12 meters – to the gallery last year.

Last Thursday, Jonathan Jones wrote on his Guardian blog:

Hockney believes that painting must renew itself by confronting nature. It is about hand, eye, brain and heart. You look, you feel, you sketch. Putting his easel in the open air like a 19th-century French landscape artist, he has set out to paint in a pure and honest way. And as you contemplate one of the best pictures he has ever made, you’ve got admit he has a point.

And last July, Jones wrote:

You’d have to have a heart of stone if you weren’t moved, just a little bit, by the prospect of an elderly painter standing in a wide open east Yorkshire landscape, touching clouds and sky and trees into a second existence on a canvas that is blowing in the wind.

Looking for a poem to summon the mood, I found this by Thomas Hood (1799 – 1845),  perhaps best known for a poem entitled The Song of the Shirt which was a lament for a poor London seamstress. Although I try to avoid slumping into the SAD winter blues, the following poem does capture a certain feeling around this time of year as the clocks go back and the afternoons dim – and do note the topical touch in verse four!

November by Thomas Hood

No sun – no moon!
No morn – no noon!
No dawn – no dusk-no proper time of day -
No sky – no earthly view -
No distance looking blue -

No road – no street-
No “t’other side the way” -
No end to any Row -
No indications where the Crescents go -

No top to any steeple -
No recognitions of familiar people -
No courtesies for showing ‘em -
No knowing ‘em!

No mail – no post-
No news from any foreign coast -
No park- no ring- no afternoon gentility -
No company- no nobility -

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member-
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!

Finally, another resonant image – from the best photoblog on the Web, Kathleen Connally’s A Walk Through Durham Township:

Elizabeth Bishop: Brazil, January 1, 1502

I first came across this when I read The Song of the Earth by Jonathan Bate, which includes an extensive discussion of the poem. He writes:

On 1 January 1502, the Portuguese sailed into a bay on the eastern coast of South America, thought it was a river and named it from the date: River of January, Rio de Janeirio. From that moment on, Brazil was sucked into European history.

Furthermore, the Westerner’s perception of the place cannot but be influenced by Western aesthetics.  Bishop’s poem carries as its epigraph some lines from Kenneth Clark’s book Landscapes Into Art, a study of how the artistic representation of nature is always just that – a representation, part of the meaning of which is prior representations and symbolic formulations.

Brazil, January 1, 1502

… embroidered nature… tapestried landscape.
- Landscape into Art, by Sir Kenneth Clark

Januaries, Nature greets our eyes
exactly as she must have greeted theirs:
every square inch filling in with foliage—
big leaves, little leaves, and fiant leaves,
blue, blue-green, and olive,
with occasional lighter veins and edges,
or a stain under leaf turned over;
monster ferns
in sliver-gray relief,
and flowers, too, like giant water lilies
up in the air—up, rather, in the leaves—
purple, yellow, two yellows, pink,
rust red and greenish white;
solid but airy; fresh as if just finished
and taken off the frame.

A blue-white sky, a simple web,
backing for feathery detail:
brief arcs, a pale-green broken wheel,
a few palms, swarthy, squat, but delicate;
and perching there in profile, beaks agape,
the big symbolic birds keep quiet,
each showing only half his puffed and padded,
pure-colored or spotted breast.
Still in the foreground there is Sin:
five sooty dragons near some massy rocks.
The rocks are worked with lichens, gray moonbursts
splattered and overlapping,
threatened from underneath by moss
in lovely hell-green flames,
attacked above
by scaling-ladder vines, oblique and neat,
“one leaf yes and on leaf no” (in Portuguese).
The lizards scarcely breathe; all eyes
are on the smaller, female one, back-to,
her wicked tail straight up and over,
red as red-hot wire.

Just so the Christians, hard as nails,
tiny as nails, and glinting,
in creaking armor, came and found it all,
not unfamiliar:
no lovers’ walks, no bowers,
no cherries to be picked, no lute music,
but corresponding, nevertheless,
to an old dream of wealth and luxury
already out of style when they left home—
wealth, plus a brand-new pleasure.
Directly after Mass, humming perhaps
L’ Homme arme or some such tune,
they ripped away into the hanging fabric,
each out to catch an Indian for himself—
those maddening little women who kept calling,
calling to each other (or had the birds waked up?)
and retreating, always retreating, behind it.

The Song of the Earth

I’ve been reading The Song of the Earth by Jonathan Bate, first published in 2000 when he was King Alfred Professor of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. It’s a book that has been described as ‘the first ecological reading of English Literature’. As Bate explains in the preface:

‘This is a book about why poetry continues to matter as we enter a new millennium that will be ruled by technology. It is a book about modern Western man’s alienation from nature. It is about the capacity of the writer to restore us to the earth which is our home.’

In a book that’s about both writing and philosophy, the English Romantic tradition is the essential thread, with readings to Wordsworth, Keats,  John Clare, Edward Thomas, and Ted Hughes, set alongside philosophical ideas from Rousseau and Martin Heidegger,to develop the idea of ‘ecopoetics’. Bate also draws in the work of 20th century poets  from other places, such as Gary Snyder, Elizabeth Bishop, and Les Murray, calling the latter ‘the major ecological poet currently writing in the English language’. Poetry, Bate concludes, can be ‘the place where we save the earth’.

In Chapter One, ‘Going, Going, Gone’, Bate discusses the divide between nature and culture that opens up with the Enlightenment, illustrating his argument with reference to the novels of  Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. These ideas are developed further in the second chapter, ‘State of Nature’, where Bate sets out how, from Oliver Goldsmith to Cobbett to Austen and Hardy and up to Philip Larkin, the rural idyll, the state of  nature, is always just behind us. But this myth of rural nostalgia is important :

‘Myths are necessary imaginings, exemplary stories which help our species make sense of its place in the world. Myths endure so long as they perform helpful work. The myth of the natural life which exposes the ills of our own condition is as old as Eden and Arcadia, as new as Larkin’s ‘Going, Going’ and the latest Hollywood adaptation of Austen or Hardy. Its endurance is a sign of its importance. Perhaps we need to remember what is “going, going” as a survival mechanism, as a check upon our instinct for self-advancement’

I thought it would last my time -
The sense that, beyond the town,
There would always be fields and farms,
Where the village louts could climb
Such trees as were not cut down;
I knew there’d be false alarms

In the papers about old streets
And split level shopping, but some
Have always been left so far;
And when the old part retreats
As the bleak high-risers come
We can always escape in the car.

Things are tougher than we are, just
As earth will always respond
However we mess it about;
Chuck filth in the sea, if you must:
The tides will be clean beyond.
- But what do I feel now? Doubt?

Or age, simply? The crowd
Is young in the M1 cafe;
Their kids are screaming for more -
More houses, more parking allowed,
More caravan sites, more pay.
On the Business Page, a score

Of spectacled grins approve
Some takeover bid that entails
Five per cent profit (and ten
Per cent more in the estuaries): move
Your works to the unspoilt dales
(Grey area grants)! And when

You try to get near the sea
In summer . . .
It seems, just now,
To be happening so very fast;
Despite all the land left free
For the first time I feel somehow
That it isn’t going to last,

That before I snuff it, the whole
Boiling will be bricked in
Except for the tourist parts -
First slum of Europe: a role
It won’t be hard to win,
With a cast of crooks and tarts.

And that will be England gone,
The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,
The guildhalls, the carved choirs.
There’ll be books; it will linger on
In galleries; but all that remains
For us will be concrete and tyres.

Most things are never meant.
This won’t be, most likely; but greeds
And garbage are too thick-strewn
To be swept up now, or invent
Excuses that make them all needs.
I just think it will happen, soon.

Going, Going by Philip Larkin (1972)

Bate’s principal argument is that writers in the Romantic tradition, beginnning in the late eighteenth century, have been especially concerned with the progressive severance of humanity from nature that has licensed the ravaging of the earth’s finite resources. Romanticism, Bate asserts,  declares allegiance to what Wordsworth called ‘the beautiful and permanent forms of nature’. It proposes that when we commune with those forms we live with a peculiar intensity, and conversely that our lives are diminished when technology and industrialization alienate us from those forms. Bate regards poetic language as ‘a special kind of expression which may effect an imaginative reunification of mind and nature, though it also has a melancholy awareness of the illusoriness of its own utopian vision’. He labels  this broad  reinterpretation of  Romanticism as an ‘ecopoetic’, from the Greek poiesis (‘making’) of the oikos (‘home’ or ‘dwelling-place’). He says:

The freedom of birds – Keats’s nightingale, Shelley’s skylark – is a necessary imagining. I stand in the field behind my house, watching and listening as the skylark rises. My heart leaps up. But my mind has fallen into knowledge: a biologist will be able to explain to me why the lark rises. Freedom has nothing to do with it. The freedom ofthe lark is only in my imagination, just as the state of nature – Arcadia, Ariel’s island – is but a necessary dream. Maybe the true poets are those who hold fast to the dream even as they rccognize it as a dream. We have [been] thinking back to the island of the Shakespearean imagination which forces the European mind to re-examine itself. To end …let us hear a voice from a real island where Western man has again and again been forced to confront the strangeness, the beauty and the violence of a nature that is Other. The voice is that of Les Murray, Australia’s truest poet, meditating on a bird’s flight, then coming down to earth with knowledge of the food chain:

ARIEL
Upward, cheeping, on huddling wings,
these small brown mynas have gained
a keener height than their kind ever sustained
but whichever of them fails first
falls to the hawk circling under
who drove them up.
Nothing’s free when it is explained.

Not free when explained. But that does not stop us gaining the keen height each time we read the poem.

Bate compares Gary Snyder’s ‘Mother Earth: Her Whales’ with Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Moose‘, which, he argues, exemplifies the ecopoetic:

‘Worthy as [Snyder's] sentiments may be, they do not in any sense grow from the poetry. The poem has been written as an expression of a set of opinions, not as an attempt to transform into language an experience of dwelling upon the earth. In this respect, it is not what I call an ‘ecopoem’; it is not a thinking of the question of the making of the oikos [ie, earthly dwelling place]’. By contrast, Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Moose’ celebrates the non-human without making a paraphrasable pronouncement’.

Bate quotes Mariane Moore on Bishop: ‘At last we have someone who knows, who is not didactic. Bate argues that ‘The Moose’ is ‘a poem which knows why we need wild animals’. He goes on:

‘Bishop knows that we can only know nature by way of culture. The wood [described there] is “impenetrable”. The moose is encountered on the road, a road being a piece of land that has been transformed by the demands of culture, from city to city. The moose comes to the bus, rather than vice-versa. This is a poem not about getting back to nature, but about how nature comes back to us. It is a poem of wonder in the face of the sheer physicality of the moose: its smell, its size’

As a demonstration of what this approach to poetry might involve Bate analyses the poetry of John Clare: ‘the record of his search for a home in the world’ and, in Bates view,a form of early ecological protest. Here, Bate reflects on Clare’s ‘The Pettichap’s Nest’:

‘A human being can do everything except build a bird’s nest. [Bate is quoting an old French proverb.] What we can do is build an analogue of a bird’s nest in a poem. We can make a verbal nest by gathering and cherishing odd scraps of language, the words which stand in for the bits and pieces of hay, rotten leaf and feather that are the pettichap’s material. We spend our time as well in gathering words as in working over things. Even if you have never found a bird’s nest and wondered at it, you may by means of Clare’s poem begin to find a sense of why bird’s nests matter… For Clare, to be drawn to a nest, to stoop towards it but still to let it live, is to be gathered into the fabric of the earth and in being so gathered to secure the identity of the self.’

Well! In my many walks I’ve rarely found
A place less likely for a bird to form
Its nest – close by the rut-gulled wagon-trod road,
And on the almost barefoot trodden ground,
With scarce a clump of grass to keep it warm!
Where not a thistle spreads its spears abroad
Or prickly bush, to shield it from harm’s way;

And yet so snugly made, that none may spy
It out, save peradventure. You and I
Had surely passed it in our walk today,
Had chance not led us by it! – Nay, e’en now,
Had not the old bird heard us trampling by
And fluttered out, we had not seen it lie,
Brown as the roadway side.
Small bits of hay
Plucked from the old propt haystack’s pleachy brow,
And withered leaves, make up its outward wall,
Which from the gnarled oak –dotterel yearly fall,
And in the old hedge-bottom rot away.

Built like an oven, through a little hole,
Scarecely admitting e’en two fingers in,
Hard to decern, the birds snug entrance win.
’tis lined with feathers warm as silken stole,
Softer than seat of down for painless ease,
And full of eggs scarce bigger even than peas!
Here’s one most delicate, with spots as small
As dust and of a faint and pinky red.

We’ll let them be, and safely guard them well;
For fear’s rude paths around are thickly spread,
And they are left to many dangerous ways.
A green grasshopper’s jump might break the shells,
Yet lowing oxen pass them morn and night,
And restless sheep around them hourly stray;
And no grass springs but hungry horses bite,
That trample past them twenty times a day.
Yet, like a miracle, in safety’s lap
They still abide unhurt, and out of sight.

Stop! here’s the bird – that woodman at the gap
Frightened him from the hedge: ’tis olive-green.
Well! I declare it is the pettichap!
Not bigger than the wren, and seldom seen.
I’ve often found her nest in chance’s way,
When I in pathless woods did idly roam;
But never did I dream until today
A spot like this would be her chosen home.

The Pettichap’s Nest by John Clare

There’s a poem by Les Murray (not quoted in the book) that I think contains the essence of its argument:

Everything except language
knows the meaning of existence.
Trees, planets, rivers, time
know nothing else. They express it
moment by moment as the universe.

Even this fool of a body
lives it in part, and would
have full dignity within it
but for the ignorant freedom
of my talking mind.

The Meaning of Existence, Les Murray

Links

• Elizabeth Bishop: Brazil, January 1, 1502
• Elizabeth Bishop: The Moose