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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
"Nature has had her day; she has definitely and finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes the patience of refined temperaments...In fact, there is not one of her inventions, deemed so subtle and so wonderful, which the ingenuity of mankind cannot create." - Huysmans
George Eliot once wrote that "A human life should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth." This conception is one that is woven throughout Victorian literature (though even there, the themes of displacement and exile are beginning to manifest themselves) but is less commonly found in modern times. As Anthony Shaffer wrote in Equus, the modern era has gone a long way to banishing the very idea of place, as travel has the effect of making all places seem to dissolve into each other. It was with that in mind then, that I was surprised to come across this wonderful piece by Richard Mabey, which begins with an analogy as to how the mandrake would scream when its roots were torn up:"When I think about my unweaned experience of the Chilterns, and what I made of it in my writing, they both have the air of ritual acts of possession. There were fixities in it, a kind of vocabulary of place: a valley with a woe-water, supposed only to flow in time of trouble; bluebell woods and dragon trees; the ludicrously romantic lychgate to my old school. But it was the rites and ceremonies through which I folded this landscape into my young self that counted then. The marking of the first swifts, over a particular meadow on May Day; the libations poured on bee orchids; an obsessive walk I took maybe three times a week, following the same route, touching trees, beating my own bounds.
When I lost my Chiltern house as well, moving became another act of serendipity, and I was blown like a fleck of spindrift to a river valley in south Norfolk, a thin seam of fenland slap in the middle of the great grain prairie. There isn't much scope for appropriating the landscape here, even if I'd wanted to. The flatness, the treelessness - they give you no cues, no signposts. Back in my childhood woods, there was no trouble in finding a niche in the intricate tangle of natural growth and human markings. But here the fieldscape has been flattened out, simplified...
The wetlands can't be pinned down in neat charts and perambulations either, not because they've been drained of meaning, but because they are elusive. They shape-shift. They're defined less by landmarks than ebb and flow and the gradations of wind. When I walk around the fen at the end of the lane in winter, it's not the same two days running. The paths vanish underwater. The trees collapse, the reedbeds are blown flat. The half-wild Konik horses are browsing in the alder thickets one day and wading deep among the darting teal the next... Water makes renewal a continuous possibility, and is a central feature of East Anglia's narrative about itself."
For myself, I've never really had such an intimate relationship with nature. To me, it is the artificial parts of a landscape that give it sense and meaning, whether they are the redbrick pottery kilns, blackened sandstone cathedral walls and dry stone walling of the Midlands, the flint walled churches of the South East, the honey coloured stone of the Chilterns or even the Portland stone that was used for so many of the London's landmarks.
Growing up in the Midlands, it was impossible to forget that the landscape was the product of man's design rather than nature. England is a country that for the most part lacks the wild and hidden The nearby lakes had formerly been gravel pits, while electricity pylons stalk across this landscape while the cooling towers from a disused power station competed with a radio transmitter mast to dominate the horizon. As many hedgerows and trees were cut down and burnt over the years, the flat plains of the Trent valley came to take on an ever more barren aspect that was only occasionally relived by surviving copses. For all of the English tradition of pastoralism, the English countryside has always been more utilitarian than beautiful. Nonetheless, there was what could be called a pastoral beauty to the place, as the screams of owls filled the nightime air and tree sparrows threaded through the sky during the day.
By contrast, the South East of England meets all the conventions of pastoral. Its landscape remains more heavily wooded, with beech trees leaving thick carpets of mast behind in autumn that are than covered in bluebells as the spring arrives. The villages remain more traditional, with many retaining their village greens. To my eyes, it nonetheless has something wrong with it, a sense that these places have been preserved like a fly in amber. At the very least, the Midlands always left me with the sense that these was a landscape that had been lived and worked in for centuries and that it continued to be so. The South of England does not, resembling instead and idealised Constable painting that corresponds neither to wilderness nor to a place where people live and work.
Perhaps because of this, my own attitude to nature is essentially post-romantic; I recall being fascinated to read Hardy's Sue Bridehead describe railway stations as the cathedrals of her age or hear of Auden taking picturesque walks to disused factories. Benjamin's flaneur has come to mean great deal more to me than Wordsworth's meanderings down country lanes. If I think of gardens, it is the tradition of the formal garden, where nature was artfully contrived and sculpted into patterned forms (rather like how wunderkammer artists would turn nautilus shells and ivory horns into sculpted objects that retained vestiges of the original shape), that interest me, rather than Capability Brown's romanticised landscapes, which are every bit as contrived as earlier gardens but instead seek to create the illusion of naturalism. Today, it is places like Little Sparta, or Jarman's garden at Prospect Cottage that most appeal to me, places where nature and sculpture have been combined to blur the distinction between art and nature, in the way that Japanese gardens like Ryoanji do. Consider the role of Bonsai, the deformation of a living entity into a sculpture. Something similar can be seen with Barbara Hepworth's sculptures, which ape the organic form but are cast in cold metal and therefore always seem an anomaly when they are seen alongside nature itself.
posted by Richard 6:09 pm
