The waves were like agate

 

Eugène Delacroix, Sunset, c. 1850

I have been reading the Journals of Eugène Delacroix in a lovely, pristine Folio edition I found in a secondhand bookshop in York (the selections were originally translated by Lucy Norton for Phaidon in 1951). Most of what Delacroix writes about concerns art - how to achieve the effects he wants and admires in great artists of the past like Rubens and Titian. Landscape art as such was not a particular concern for him, although he was always looking at the way other artists painted skies, trees and waves. The appeal of the journals is the way they mix his ideas on aesthetics with everyday concerns - health, relationships, conversations, travel. I thought here I would just extract a few moments where he writes about walks in nature and describes views with the eye of a great painter. In 1849 he was fifty-one and dividing his time between Paris and Champrosay, now in the city's southern suburbs, with holidays on the Normandy coast near Dieppe.

Champrosay, 24 June 1849

In the morning it had been thundery and oppressive, but by the afternoon the quality of the heat had changed and the setting sun lent everything a gaiety which I never used to see in the evening light. I find that, as I grow older, I am becoming less susceptible to those feelings of deepest melancholy that used to come over me when I looked at nature, and I congratulated myself on this as I walked along.

Valmont, 9 October 1849

We went down to the sea by a little path on the right which was unfamiliar to me. There was the loveliest greensward imaginable, sloping gently downwards, from the top of which we had a view of the vast expanse of sea. I am always deeply stirred by the great line of the sea, all blue or green or rose-coloured - that indefinable colour of a vast ocean. The intermittent sound reaches from far away and this, with the smell of the ozone, is actually intoxicating.

Cany, 10 October 1849

Magnificent view as we climbed the hill out of Cany; tones of cobalt in the green masses of the background in contrast to the vivid green and occasional gold tones in the foreground.

Champosay, 27 October 1853

Went for a stroll in the garden and then stood for a long time under the poplars at Baÿvet; they delight me beyond words, especially the white poplars when they are beginning to turn yellow. I lay down on the ground to see them silhouetted against the blue sky with their leaves blowing off in the wind and falling off about me.

Paris, 5 August 1854

A lump of coal or a piece of flint may show in reduced proportions the form of enormous rocks. I noticed the same thing when I was in Dieppe. Among the rocks that are covered by the sea at high tide I could see bays and inlets, beetling crags overhanging deep gorges, winding valleys, in fact all the natural features which we find in the world around us. It is the same with waves which are themselves divided into smaller waves and then subdivided into ripples, each showing the same accidents of light and the same design.

Dieppe, 25 August 1854

During my walk this morning I spent a long time studying the sea. The sun was behind me and thus the face of the waves as they lifted towards me was yellow; the side turned towards the horizon reflected the colour of the sky. Cloud shadows passing over all this made delightful effects; in the distance where the sea was blue and green, the shadows appeared purple, and a golden and purple tone extended over the nearer part as well, where the shadow covered it. The waves were like agate. 

Dieppe, 17 September 1854

A rather miserable dinner. However, when I went down to the beach, I was compensated by seeing the setting sun amidst banks of ominous-looking red and gold clouds. These were reflected in the sea, which was dark wherever it did not catch the reflection. I stood motionless for more than half an hour on the very edge of the waves, never growing tired of their fury, of the foam and the backwash and the crash of the rolling pebbles.

Path of the Wind

December's Wire magazine included an interesting 'Aeolian Harp Music 15' chart compiled by Irish experimental musician Natalia Beylis. There is no explanatory text, just the list, but a bit more info on a Dublin Digital Radio mixcloud site: 'I went to buy a theremin off a retired plumber in Clare. He toured me through his workshop of trinkets & said "I'm building an aeolian harp inspired by this fellow" & showed me a copy of an lp by Sverre Larssen. Back at home, I fell down a windharp rabbit hole & put this show together...' You can listen to the Sverre Larssen album shown above on Spotify. Here's what his Bandcamp page says:

In the early 1970s the Norwegian businessman Sverre Larssen decided to construct a wind harp at his cabin at Sele, Jæren on the west coast of Norway. Using his free imagination and amateur engineering skills, Larssen constructed a harp with 12-strings, which was brought to vibrate by the wind. Based on the principle of the electrical guitar, Larssen amplified the strings using four contact microphones and then recorded the sounds direct to tape. Word about Sverre Larssen’s instrument began to spread and during the 1970s notable artists such as Liv Dommersnes, Åse-Marie Nesse, Ketil Bjørnstad, Kjell Bækkelund and Jan Garbarek utilized the sounds of Larssen’s wind harp.

The next one on her list is The Wind Harp, an LP released by United Artists. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about it: 

In 1972, Chuck Hancock and Harry Bee recorded a giant 30-foot-tall (9.1 m) Aeolian harp designed and built by 22-year-old Thomas Ward McCain on a hilltop in Chelsea, Vermont. United released their double LP titled The Wind Harp: Song from the Hill. An excerpt of this recording appears in the movie The Exorcist. The harp was destroyed in a hurricane, but it was rebuilt and now resides in Hopkinton, New Hampshire.

There isn't a huge amount about this online and I get 'this content isn't avilable in your region' when I try one link. Nevertheless, if you go back more than a decade, when for example I wrote here about the wind resonating wires of Alan Lamb in New Zealand, it was a lot harder to find out about modern Aeolian harps. Now it really is possible via Discogs, YouTube and Google to just click away and head down a "windharp rabbit hole", even if you are often left with incomplete information. Another American wind harp Natalia Beylis lists is a case in point. 

Ron Konzak came up with the idea for his Aeolian harp in 1982 and, as his article on the Harp Spectrum website relates, he began building it at a location on Bainbridge Island, Puget Sound. Sadly a few years later it had become 'a forlorn sight: a two-story harp, perilously close to an eroding cliff, surrounded by young alder trees that screen it from the very breezes that could bring it to life.' He said there were plans to rebuild it, but did this ever happen? I found a recent blog post on a sailing site that describes seeing the harp's building but not the harp itself. The author tried to get in contact with Konzak but learned he had died in 2008. 'Other efforts to find more information, including asking a harp-playing friend who lives on Bainbridge Island were also unsuccessful.'  

I've mentioned the environmental recordings put out by Gruenrekorder before (see for example a post I did back in 2009) and they are very good at providing background information on what they release. One of their albums included on this list is Path of the Wind by Eisuke Yanagisawa - music made on a small home-made Aeolian harp. The landscapes he took it to include 'Kehi no Matsubara, a quiet and scenic beach with many pine trees', Mt. Oeyama where 'nature and objects on the mountainside fade in and out as the place where the sunlight shines gradually changes' and Yosano-cho, where he placed the harp near a 1,200-year-old Camellia tree. You can read reviews and commentary on the Greunrekorder website.

Drift by Mark Garry and Sean Carpio began with a site-specific performance. As explained on the Kerlin Gallery site, this

took place in a natural amphitheater called “Horseshoe Bay” on Sherkin Island, located off the coast of West Cork. This one-off performance took place in and around the bay, with audience members arriving on two passenger ferries, moored next to a traditional Irish wooden sail boat which bore an Aeolian harp (a harp played by the wind). On land, a brass quartet performed a series of short musical pieces based on Sumerian Hymns, which were controlled by a form of improvised conducting.

A subsequent record was made with two saxophonists, an accordionist and three Aeolian harps positioned in a small forest in Dublin’s Phoenix Park. 

Of course Aeolian harps were all the rage in the Romantic period and this list includes some recordings made by Mins Minssen using an instrument built in 1837 by Wilhelm Peter Melhop (1802-68). Melhop is quite an interesting figure from a landscape perspective - he wrote poems, stories and descriptions of his walks. According to German Wikipedia he 'kept a diary from 1816 to 1844, which he provided with his own illustrations. The entries show that he was often in nature, especially in the Wandsbeker wood, where he was impressed by the “magical abundance of nightingale song”'. In addition to building Aeolian harps he constructed a telescope and discovered a comet.

Another historical recording with a link to nature writing is Kenneth Turkington's Walden Winds, an attempt to recreate the sound of the kind of harp Thoreau built for himself (see sleeve notes from Discogs below). I looked into getting a window harp myself a few years ago (they were available on EBay) but decided it wouldn't be worthwhile as any subtle wind-plucked notes would be drowned out by the noise of children in surrounding gardens, delivery vans trundling down the road and police sirens heading up our local high street. 

If you want to continue down the rabbit hole, here are the other wind harps mentioned on Natalia Beylis's list...

• Mario Bertoncini was an Italian avant garde composer whose music for Aeolian harps can be found on a CD and accompanying book.
  
• Nature's Dream-Harp: Aeolian Music, Played by the Summer Wind on Devaharp I is a 1979 private pressing album by Robert Archer, about whom I can find no further information. 
• Aeolica was recorded in 1988 by Pier Luigi Andreoni and Francesco Paladino and features them improvising on synthesisers to the sound of a wind harp created by the artist Mario Ciccioli.
• Voices of the Wind is a set of recordings of his Aeolian harps made in the nineties by Roger Winfield.
• There are some field recordings of wind made in 1996 in France by Toy Bizarre (Cédric Peyronnet) - the ep cover shows the harp used for this purpose.
  
• Rick Tarquinio's experiments using fishing string and natural forces to create soundscapes are available on his Bandcamp page - they're pretty good.
• Something more recent from Tara Baoth Mooney is hard to envisage from a description - I'm not sure whether this genuinely used an Aeolian harp??
• And finally there's Rhodri Davies, a much more familiar name from his own harp recordings and collaborations (including the mighty Hen Ogledd). He is in the list for Five Knots from 2008, made with an electric harp: 'left channel: harp facing Anglesey', 'right channel: harp facing Lochtyn island'.

Dosso di Trento

Albrecht Dürer, Trintberg - Dosso di Trento, 1495

 

I recently visited the National Gallery's Dürer’s Journeys: Travels of a Renaissance Artist, which I had been looking forward to all year, although I was forewarned that it would be a disappointment by Laura Cummings' Guardian review. She notes that 

There is no clear chronology and barely any discernible narrative. The show feels on the one hand congested – too many passengers on board – and on the other, lacking in the forcefield presence of the German master. A humdrum portrait medal of Dürer, instead of a single one of his many self-portraits in ink, chalk, silverpoint or paint – so spectacular, so pioneering, so original – can only mean inevitable bathos. Still, there are marvels by Dürer along the way. He is up there in the Alps getting an image of the shelter down on paper: noticing the fragility of the ruined roof and the weirdly human profile of the foreground rocks...

I let that quote run on to the comment about the shelter because I too was struck by this incomplete sketch. I had been hoping to see in this exhibition some landscape sketches like the wonderful View of the Arco Valley in the Tyrol owned by The Louvre. There was just one - see my photo above: a simplified view of Trento outlined against what appears to be a blank sky. In reality Trento is surrounded by green hills and mountains. This erasure of the landscape is even more striking in his sketch of the mountain shelter from twenty years later. It's almost as if the wider view is too vast and beautiful to capture in paint and so the artist turns his back on it, ignoring the towering rocks and trees around him and electing instead to draw the crumbling stone walls and roof beams of a vulnerable human structure.

Albrecht Dürer, Ruin of an Alpine Shelter, 1515

Trees, possibly beside a lake

 Thomas Gainsborough, A View in Suffolk, c.1746

In 2017 Lindsay Stainton discovered that an album of 25 drawings in the Royal Collection were the work of the young Thomas Gainsborough. They are currently on show at York Art Gallery. These views may have been influenced by Dutch painting but they also reflect a deep engagement with the patterns and shapes of trees and paths near Gainsborough's home. I particularly enjoyed seeing his experimentation with different techniques. In the example below, he uses black and white chalk, sharpened and held in a porte-crayon. The curators note that 'he blended the chalks into the paper with a wad of tightly rolled leather, called stump, to create smoother tones and more subtle light effects. He employs this technique extensively to depict the soft outlines of the clouds and the misty pool.' In a finished painting (above) you still feel he's experimenting with ways of animating a simple view, with hazy light through mobile clouds creating interesting effects in every turn of the road and slope of the dunes.

 

Thomas Gainsborough, Trees, possibly beside a lake, c.1746 - 48 

It was a pleasure to leave the congested streets of York for the tranquillity of this exhibition, with its peaceful wooded vistas only occasionally interrupted by a distant figure or a donkey. In addition to the Gainsboroughs the exhibition includes a video installation, Clay, Peat, Cage (2015) by Jade Montserrat and Webb-Ellis, described as 'a contemporary counterpart to Gainsborough’s landscape practice.' Gainsborough mentally immersed himself in the details of his local woods and heathland. In 'Clay' Montserrat physically immerses herself in the soil, squatting naked, digging and smearing herself with earth. 'Clay' also provides a thematic link to the ceramics on display upstairs, which have become a speciality of the museum. If you are near York I would recommend popping in as you may have the exhibition almost to yourself as I did (see photo below). And Gainsborough's landscapes are a great tonic for the spirit in these difficult days. As John Constable once said, 'on looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them.'

Loss of the Rhône

Jean-Antoine Linck, The confluence of the river Valsereine with the river Rhône, c. 1800-20

The British Museum currently has a small temporary exhibition, 'Enticing Peaks Swiss prints from the Lloyd Bequest'. It is confined to part of one room and so they don't have space for more than a tiny fraction of the 'collection of over 5,000 Swiss prints and books' amassed by Robert Wylie Lloyd (1868-1958). Sadly  there are no books on display, but there are some interesting landscapes, like the one above by a Swiss artist whose work was very popular at the time. Of course some of these Alpine views have changed significantly in recent years with the retreat of the glaciers, although this one was already altered by the construction of a dam. The BM's curators explain:

'This print represents a phenomenon known as the ‘Perte du Rhône’ (‘Loss of the Rhône’) near Bellegarde, France, which today no longer exists. In the dry season, the Rhône used to plunge into an underground gorge ninety metres deep, emerging downstream close to the confluence with the river Valsereine. The river is seen here appearing from its subterranean passage. Platforms were created for visitors to view the thundering river emerging from below ground. The construction of the Génissiat Dam south of Bellegarde in 1948 transformed the underground section of the Rhône into a reservoir, just over twenty kilometres in length.'

 

Christian von Mechel, Bird's Eye View of the Mont-Blanc Massif above the valley of Chamonix, 1790

Another print (above) was produced by a Basel print shop owner in 1788 to commemorate the ascent of Mont Blanc a year earlier by pioneer Alpinist Horace Bénédict de Saussure. This interested me because it was based not on direct observation of the mountains but on a model of the landscape.

'The model was produced in relief by Charles-François Exchaquet (1746-92), a Swiss engineer, cartographer and keen mountaineer, who sold his models in different sizes, together with rock specimens from the area, across Europe. Today, five are known to have survived, including one in Haarlem (Teylers Museum) and another in Geneva (Swiss Alpine Club). The long inscription provides information about Exchaquet’s model, and refers to the main peaks, glaciers and refuge huts. The red line shows the route taken by de Saussure for his ascent in August 1787.'

I have looked on the Teylers Museum website and their photograph of this model makes it look less impressive than you might imagine (then again, I guess you wouldn't expect tourists to carry home with them huge table-top relief sculptures). Here's their description of it (I used Google translate from the Dutch):

'The relief consists of nine glued blocks of wood that were chiselled into the correct relief, modelled with plaster and covered with crushed quartz to represent the glaciers. ... It is unknown how many models were made. The model was donated in 1799 by the Amsterdam merchant Govert Lups.'

The Teylers Museum's director Martinus van Marum apparently made a trip through Europe in 1802 and visited the son of de Saussure. He bought 'a fine collection of his father's rocks from him, including the top of Mont Blanc, the highest piece of rock found just below the ice cap.'

Indigo fields, sun-warmth

The NYRB Poets series has a volume devoted to Li Shangyin (c. 813–858) contaiing the work of three translators. All of them have a go at his most famous poem, 'Brocade Zither' (or 'The Opulent Zither' or 'The Patterned Lute)'. I first read the last of these many years ago in A. C. Graham's Poems of the Late T'ang and was intrigued by one particular line: 'On Blue Mountain the sun warms, a smoke issues from the jade.' Graham explained this as a reference to Dai Shulun (732-89) who 'said that the scene presented by a poet is like the smoke which issues from fine jade when the sun is warm on Blue Mountain (Lan-t'ien, "Indigo field"); it can be seen from a distance but not from close to.' Although I understood the idea that poetry presents things imprecisely, like smoke on a mountain, and that its richness cannot be studied at close quarters, I was still a bit baffled by the metaphor.

Lantian (Blue Fields) is in Shaanxi province and is most famous now perhaps for Lantian man, the early hominid species. 'In Lantian,' according to Wikipedia, 'white and greenish nephrite jade is found in small quarries and as pebbles and boulders in the rivers flowing from the Kun-Lun mountain range northward into the Takla-Makan desert area.' There is a specific area called Yushan, Jade Mountain, famous for its fine jade. In recent years the Chinese architect Ma Quingyun has established a winery here (as described at some length in an article in The California Sunday Magazine). Back in the eighth century Dai Shulun was saying that in intense heat, the jade hidden in the rocks of Lantian rises into the air. If this is taken literally, I guess he was referring to fine clouds of jade powder from the quarries. 

It is possible to go further and read into this line of poetry deeper allusions to its elements: heat, smoke, jade. Just to give one example, there is a story of a girl called Purple Jade who returned after death to redeem the reputation of her lover, accused of tomb robbery. Her mother wanted to embrace her spirit but she just turned to smoke. Therefore, as Maja Lavrač writes in 'Li Shangyin and the Art of Poetic Ambiguity', jade can symbolize something unattainable. Li Shangyin may be alluding in his poem to something or someone attractive but inaccessible. And this is done through a single landscape image that simultaneously alludes to the mysterious beauty of poetry.

There is a lot more to say about Li Shangyin of course - see for example an excellent interview with translator Chloe Garcia Roberts at The Critical Flame. But I will simply end here with her own rendering of this single line of Li Shangyin's:

Indigo fields, sun-warmth,
Jade begets smoke

From sea's wide spring out flows the tide

This is The Book of Taliesin, which I have been reading in the new translation by Gwyneth Lewis and Rowan Williams. Authors and dates for the poems it contains are impossible to identify, although they are ascribed to the shadowy figure of Taliesin, a sixth century bard associated with one or more of the leading royal houses of the Old North. Of course there are no proper landscape descriptions in these poems, but natural imagery occurs within certain lines. An example is the 'Elegy for Cú Roi mac Dáir' which opens with the movement of the tide. The translators note that the second half of the second line below 'employs two words spelt differently but almost identical in pronunciation, as if to suggest that the water and advances and retreats an equal distance, as it would at high or low water':

Dy ffynhawn lydan   dylleinw aches,
dydaw, dyhebcyr,    dybris, dybrys.

From sea's wide spring   out flows the tide:
It advances, retreats,   it smashes, crushes.

The most appealing poem in the book is 'Taliesin's Sweetnesses', a catalogue of the bard's favourite aspects of creation that reminded me of those lists you find in Sei Shōnagon's Pillow Book, such as  her 'Things that make your heart beat fast'. Taliesin's list covers everything from jewellery and mead to 'a cleric in church if he's faithful,' but I've extracted below some things he enjoys in nature. When you put these together - berries, leaks, purple heather, ospreys on the shore, cattle on a sea marsh - you can start to picture the landscape of Wales and western Scotland that a real Taliesin would have known

Sweet are the berries at harvest time;
Sweet, also is wheat on the stem.

Sweet is the sun on clouds in the sky;
Sweet, too, is light on the evening's brow.

Sweet is a thick-maned stallion in a herd;
Sweet, too is the warp of a spider's web.

Sweet are ospreys on shore at high tide;
Sweet too is watching the seagulls play.

Sweet is the garden when leeks are thriving;
Sweet also, is field mustard sprouting.

Sweet is heather when it blossoms purple;
Sweet, too, is a sea marsh for cattle.

Sweet are the fish in the shining lake;
Sweet, too, is water's play of light and dark.

The Fortress of Königstein

 

For various reasons it's much harder at the moment for me to go to exhibitions than it used to be, but I did pop down yesterday to the National Gallery to see Bellotto: The Königstein Views Reunited. These five views (two of them in my photograph above) were painted  in 1756-8 when Bellotto was court painter to August III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. I last mentioned Bellotto back in 2007 after I had seen the recently restored Bellotto room of the Royal Palace in Warsaw. I would love one day to visit Königstein which looks still looks spectacular in photographs. The fortress was still being used as a prison until 1922 and among its famous inmates was Frank Wedekind, author of the Lulu plays, who got into trouble for some satirical verses. Here are a few observations on the five views from left to right as they appear in the exhibition:

The Fortress of Königstein: Courtyard with the Brunnenhaus

One of two views inside the fortress. Its rows of railings, windows and chimneys drawing your attention to the painting's lines of perspective. As you get closer your attention is drawn to the figures of guards and gardeners and you begin to wonder about individuals like a beggar leaning against a wall and a man walking along in traditional Polish costume. The light picks out peeling walls, blossoms in the garden and a dog's upturned face.  

The Fortress of Königstein from the North

The first of three broader landscape views, with the castle lit more brightly than the forerground and tiny soldiers visible on its ramparts. The ground sloping up to the castle is interesting in itself, with holes worn into the bare sandstone. Again the figures in the scene suggest unknowable stories - a tired looking herdsman, a coach and horses heading off into the distance...

The Fortress of Königstein from the North-West

Here there is a second mountain, the Lilienstein, repeating the shape of the castle. In the distance a dark rain cloud casts shadows on the plain. The foreground is spotlit like a stage, although the pastoral figures arranged on it seem rather contrived. On the slope below the fortress there is a kind of doorway - the entrance to an underground dungeon.

The Fortress of Königstein from the South-West

This one has a diagonal composition (see photo, right) and the massive sandstone castle wall resembles an impregnable cliff. By this time I was starting to get a feel for the geography of the place, spotting towers from the other paintings and orientating myself imaginatively through the given directions.

The Fortress of Königstein: Courtyard with the Magdalenenburg

The final view includes a building that was apparently home to a 60,000 gallon cask of wine! The figures dotted around range from two gentleman and a lady apparently admiring a carved doorway to some washerwomen laying out laundry. The stained, cracked walls are beautifully painted and the whole scene takes place under a cool blue sky that made me long to be far away from rainy London.

 

 Bernardo Bellotto, The Fortress of Königstein: Courtyard with the Magdalenenburg, 1756-8

 

Back in July Jonathan Jones in The Guardian gave this little exhibition a five star review. He claims Bellotto is a 'forgotten artist' and that the Seven Years' War in which he got caught up is a 'little known conflict'... Nevertheless he does make a good point about the atmosphere of these works which I'll quote: 

A delicate white kiosk balances on a cliff edge among green trees, suggesting this has become a pleasure park, but near it is a much older tower from days of feudal war. The fortress appears daunting from certain angles, oddly elegant from others. Which is the real mood: coffee and Handel concerts – or defensive might? The works have an aura of decay that might suggest Dracula’s castle, if there wasn’t so much life here. It looks as if the entire Dresden court are whiling away their time in the castle precincts, waiting for the Prussians to come.

Laura Cumming's review is more informative and I'll conclude with a quote from her about the way these scenes mix landscape with human interest.

Wandering through these scenes, the eye is taken dramatically into a doorway, up to a balcony strewn with washing, or down to the facade of a church and then back out through the landscape to a dark and distant quietude beyond – a faraway land, unknown and stirring, where hermits might be found in caves, or Nosferatu in a haunted castle. ... Trysts succeed and fail; pot plants slowly decline on high windowsills. Carts bring food effortfully up to the fortress. But down below, where we are, at eye level, the rural world continues through the seasons as if the big people had nothing to do with them. And in some profound sense this was true.

Island Zombie

 

Last year Princeton published this collection of Roni Horn's Iceland writings. The cover image beneath the yellow titles is one of 23 visual editorials she published in 2002 for the weekly culture supplement of Iceland's national daily newspaper (you can see the pinkish paper and newsprint showing through from the next page). It is an interesting choice for a cover as you might expect them to have used one of Roni Horn's photographs, but then this is a collection of her writings. Reading them with few of the familiar images of rocks, pools, icebergs and horizons puts more emphasis on the quality of her words. As a collection of brief reflections they reminded me of other kinds of poetic place writing I've enjoyed, like the Paul Claudel I highlighted here in May. 

The section of Island Zombie covering her newspaper contributions includes some poignant longer pieces written twenty years ago, at a point when Iceland still had a choice over whether to preserve its landscape from development. The book also has a speech ('My Oz') and samples from her 'Weather Reports You' project in which Icelanders relay terrifying stories of high winds, treacherous seas and blizzards. But the bulk of the book is given over to writings that formed part of Horn's art practice, spanning her years in Iceland, beginning with the texts already published in To Place IV: Pooling Waters (1990-91) and adding others written during the last thirty years.

Some landscapes...

• On a foggy day in 1979 at Bakkafjörður, she discovered a white stone among the dark rocks on the bank of a stream. The white was almost transparent and it looked as if something dark lay within, a mystery. Writing in 2018 she rolls the stone in the palm of her hand, 'whole, complete, not a fragment of something else.' Over the course of her lifetime, handling the stone, she herself has been a mildly erosive force and feels 'the softness and smoothness of this white rock intensifying over years of intimacy.'  
  

• At Dyrhólaey, where she lived for a time in the lighthouse, the cliffs form a city of birds. Approaching the edge, all is quiet but for the sound of the wind, until she reaches a point where suddenly the cacophony of bird sounds emerges, a noise that 'is part of the landscape here, like the bluff itself. It doesn't go away. When I arrive, I become the audience for this geologically scaled performance.' 
  

• Standing on the mountain Kerlingarfjöll one warm evening she finds the atmosphere focuses the view like a lens, with everything visible through the thin air. 'Looking around I can see the ocean way out there, in all directions,' she says, reminding me of a magical flight of fantasy in Virginia Woolf's Orlando. She can see each pebble and flower, each lava field and river, simultaneously and without hierarchy. The way the landscape is taking shape is visible in its boiling water, lava fields and tectonic plates and all of this 'takes you one step deeper, beyond appearance, beyond the simple visibility of things.'

The Succession of Strata

I was recently given the splendid Thames & Hudson volume STRATA: William Smith's Geological Maps, which has contributions from a range of experts and a short foreword by Robert Macfarlane. The book is a thing of beauty as you can see from the gallery on the T&H website. In addition to Smith's maps, it includes photographs of the fossil collection he amassed, which was fundamental to his understanding of geology and which he arranged on sloping shelves to represent different geological strata. When Smith got into financial trouble he was forced to sell these fossils to the British Museum but twenty years later they remained unopened in their boxes (reminding me of a similar story of indifference from a century later, when Apsley Cherry-Garrard donated to the museum an emperor penguin egg collected in the Antarctic after 'the worst journey in the world'). There is an interesting story of social class running through the book, with Smith having to earn his living from practical work in mining and land improvement and only fully appreciated by the intellectual elite at the end of his life.

From a landscape perspective the most interesting drawings are the panoramic sections that show how strata lie underground and where they emerge on the surface. The example above is on a separate bookmark / legend which comes with the book; its reverse shows the sequence of strata and their colours, ranging from London Clay to Granite, Sicnite and Gneiss. The example below (published in July 1819) shows part of Britain I am familiar with, the chalk downs near Brighton. The text underneath the image here is very practical - 'Much Chalk goes from these Hills by the Ouse Navigation to the interior of Sussex and is there used on the Land either in a crude state or burned to Lime by Wood fires for that purpose. The Sussex Clunch or Gray Chalk like that of the Surry Hills makes an excellent Lime for building in Water.' Colourists were employed for his maps but Smith himself was an enthusiastic draughtsman and STRATA includes a selection of portrait drawings of acquaintances from his sketchbooks. To quote Robert Macfarlane, Smith's great map ' now exists somewhere between artwork, dreamwork and data-set.'

 

 

Untitled (Moon Image)

 

The oceans and deserts of Vija Celmins are monochrome patterns of pencil marks and brush strokes - no landmarks, just abstract surfaces. She may have looked at particular sites but the artworks only reproduce her photographs, or photographs taken by others - landscape at two removes. Their sources are hidden in titles like Untitled (Desert) and Untitled (Ocean). Nevertheless, the patience and attention needed to make her art seems to ask questions about how closely we attend to the world and really spend time in a particular environment. Observational drawing has a long history - Briony Fer cites the examples of Dürer's Large Piece of Turf and Ruskin's advice in The Elements of Drawing in her essay in Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory (ed. Gary Garrels). But art of this kind is closer to still life than landscape. Celmins' drawings of the sea are each 'a graphic rendering of a ready-made image and not a record of the vastness of the ocean.'    

 

A page from Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory showing moon drawings from 1968-9

One sentence from another essay in this book by Russell Ferguson particularly struck me. In discussing Celmins' early paintings he suggests that 'T.V. (1964) shows an everyday object from the studio - a television set - but a very contemporary one: this is probably one of the earliest representations of a TV in painting.' If this is true it is remarkable to think that art can have ignored such an important object in people's lives for twenty years. One could also say that in the late sixties Celmins was one of the first artists to depict the landscape of the moon, although her drawings of NASA photographs are clearly at second hand, deliberately reproducing the blurring and imperfections in the source images. In this way they are quite different from the pastel drawing John Russell made nearly two centuries earlier using a telescope, which despite the vast distance was based on direct observation. 

 

John Russell,  The Face of the Moon, 1793-97

Knowing the East

Paul Claudel (1868 - 1955) joined the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs after university, where he had begun writing poetry and attending Mallarmé's 'Tuesdays', and in 1895 was made vice-consul in Shanghai, following junior postings in Boston and New York. He would spend the rest of his life as a prominent diplomat and writer, although I suspect that in England he is a lot less well known than his sister Camille (portrayed in the 1988 film Camille Claudel by Isabelle Adjani). When he arrived in the Far East he began composing prose poetry; the first one was written in Ceylon before he reached his destination in China. Some of these poems were sent home and published in outlets lke La Revue de Paris and La Revue blanche. Claudel returned in 1899 intending to become a priest, and his book Connaisance de l'Est came out in 1900. But having abandoned his religious vocation and returned to China, he supplemented this volume with a smaller group of poems written in the period up to 1905. 

No doubt Knowing the East can be read critically in terms of Orientalism and French imperialism, but I found a lot of beauty in these poems. Some titles: 'The City at Night', 'Sea Thoughts', 'The Sadness of Water', 'Noon Tide', 'Hours in the Garden', 'Libation to the Coming Day'. Things I was reminded of as I read them: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Francis Ponge, Lafdacio Hearn, Victor Segalen, Empire of Signs, Invisible Cities. This quote, from their translator James Lawler, summarises my first impressions of the book.

'With what pleasure do we savour these landscapes, this continent so far removed from our own: coconut palms, banyans, Japanese pines; the Yang-tse of 'Drifting', 'The River', 'Halt on the Canal'; Confucian, Buddhist, and Shinto temples and tombs; hermitages, suspended houses; crushing heat, night as clear as day; festivals for the dead, a festival for the rivers; wheat harvests, rice harvests; torrential rain, apocalyptic storms; cities that seem chaotic but have a concealed pattern and sense, 'flayed' Chinese gardens, the Shogun's golden ark. One may label the images picturesque but that is not the way I read them. I recall Julien Green saying of Claudel that he was a man "who had known how to live elsewhere," words I take to mean that we do not find a quest for oddness but affectionate deployment fold by fold of a reality the poet comes to know.'

In keeping with the theme of my blog, here are a few examples of how Claudel treats landscape in his poems:

• Stopping to survey the mountains that surround him, he measures with his eyes the route he will take. As he walks, he savours the slow passage of time and thinks about 'the bridge still to cross in the quiet peace of the afternoon pause, these hills to go up and down, this valley to traverse.' He already sees the rock where he will watch the sunset.  
  
• One December day, 'a dark cloud covers the entire sky and fills the mountain's irregular clefts with haze: you would think it dovetailed to the horizon.' He sweeps the quiet countryside with his hand, caressing the hyacinth plains, the tufts of black pines, and he checks with his fingers the 'details embedded in the weft and mist of this winter day - a row of trees, a village.' 
• On the vast yellow river he thinks about the nature of water. 'As the segments of a parallelogram come together and meet, so water expresses the force of a landscape reduced to its geometrical lines.' Each drop expresses this as it finds the lowest point of a given area. 'All water draws us, and certainly this river...' 
  
• He describes knocking on a small black door somewhere in Shanghai and being led through a succession of corridors to a garden. He follows a labyrinthine path until he can look down on 'the poem of the roofs'. Later he reaches 'the edge of the pond, where the stems of dead lotus flowers emerge from the still waters. The silence is deep like that of a forest crossroads in winter.'
• And in a Tokyo shop, he finds himself looking at miniature landscapes (bonkei). 'Here is the rice field in spring; in the distance, the hill fringed with trees (they are moss). Here is the sea with its archipelagos and capes; by the artifice of two stones, one black, the other red and seemingly worn and porous ... Even the iridescence of the many-coloured waters is captured by this bed of motley pebbles covered by the contents of two carafes.'
  

In the twilight there is a field

Yosa Buson, Travels Through Mountains and Fields, c. 1765
Source: Wikimedia Commons

I've been reading The Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, translated by W. S. Merwin and Takako Lento. The collection was put together just after Buson's death in 1784. Such brief verse can evoke a landscape through metonymy but rarely makes you think immediately of landscape views like the Buson painting above, the Met's Travels Through Mountains and Fields. I did notice a general exception to this rule though and it occurs when fiels are the subject of the poem - you can't really talk about a field without evoking a landscape. There are 868 haiku in the volume so I think it is probably OK under fair use to reproduce just four here, one for each season. For spring it is a toss-up between numbers 58, 140 and 183 but I'll go for the first, which actually has a 'landscape' title, 'Looking across the Field'.

Mist in the grass

the water silent

just before sunset

This summer poem, no. 317, also has a title, 'On the Way Home from Seeing the Nunobiki Waterfall with Tairo and Kito'. Tairo and Kito were his disciples. Nunobiki Waterfall I have mentioned here before in connection with The Tales of Ise (c. 900).

Evening sun slipping behind the hills

a waterwheel is turning

in the field of ripening wheat

The autumn poem, no. 487, is again set at sunset

The mountains darken after the sun goes down

in the twilight there is a field

of silver grass

And finally, no. 742, winter

Vast dry field

out in the desolation

the sun slips into the rock

Clearly these are all variations on a theme: the field and the sunset are constants, but the atmosphere is different in each poem.

 

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Finally, a message I have to pass on from Blogger. 'Recently, the FeedBurner team released a system update announcement , that the email subscription service will be discontinued in July 2021.
After July 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported.' Sorry about this...

A Landscape Painter in Albania

  

 Edward Lear, The valley of the Shkumbin River
near Elbasan in central Albania, 26 September 1848 

Edward Lear's travel writing is, as you would expect, written with a sharp wit and punctuated with discriptions of landscape. The fact that he was travelling and then writing as a landscape painter gives his books a double interest for me. Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania for example begins with a description of his equipment - only the essentials needed to travel light, in what was then still a region barely visited by English travellers. He complains a lot about his accommodation but explains that he had no choice but to stay in roadside khans - if he had tried to stay instead with the local pashas he would need to have fitted in with ceremonies and meals that would have left no time for sketching. Lear was there in the autumn of 1848 and mentions finding a German newspaper to read and being amazed at the news of revolutions across Europe. His route through what is now Albania was partly forced on him by widespread quarantine and travel restrictions (cholera, rather than Covid-19, in those days). It began in the east, after he had travelled overland from Thessalonika via Bitola and Ohrid. He then headed towards Tirana and just before reaching it wrote this description of the mountain landscape.

'How glorious, in spite of the dimming scirocco haze, was the view from the summit, as my eyes wandered over the perspective of winding valley and stream to the farthest edge of the horizon — a scene realizing the fondest fancies of artist imagination! The wide branching oak, firmly rivetted in crevices, all tangled over with fern and creepers, hung half-way down the precipices of the giant crag, while silver-white goats (which chime so picturesquely in with such landscapes as this) stood motionless as statues on the highest pinnacle, sharply defined against the clear blue sky. [...] 

It was difficult to turn away from this magnificent mountain view — from these chosen nooks and corners of a beautiful world — from sights of which no painter-soul can ever weary: even now, that fold beyond fold of wood, swelling far as the eye can reach — that vale ever parted by its serpentine river — that calm blue plain, with Tomohr in the midst, like an azure island in a boundless sea, haunt my mind's eye, and vary the present with visions of the past. With regret I turned northwards to descend to the new district of Tyrana; the town (and it is now past eleven) being still some hours distant.

 

Edward Lear: Tepeleni, Albania, c. 1848–1849

Unfortunately, as this suggests, Lear's descriptions of scenery are not all that interesting, even if they do make you want to visit Albania. You wouldn't expect anything like his nonsense verse but you might hope for a more original mode of landscape description. In an NYRB review (from which the image above is taken) of a reprint of the journal, Brad Leithauser says

'The book imparts almost no sense of Lear’s reading, the literary spirits he might have been seeking to commune or contend with during his travels. Most of the few literary references are to Byron, only because he happened to precede Lear to Albania by a couple of decades. Sentence by sentence, the book gives scant indication of a poet’s sensibility, for Lear was a slapdash prose stylist. Edward Lear in Albania often seeks to portray panoramic landscapes through words, a challenge that typically elicited from Lear sweeping and obvious adjectives: “noble,” “majestic,” “sublime.” He was especially fond of “picturesque,” which at one point appears three times in a single paragraph.'

Despite this defect, it is fascinating to read about Lear's experiences of a country that had so recently been under the rule of Ali Pasha. I'll end here with his decription of visiting Tepelenë:

'At the end of the space enclosed by the walls, and overhanging the river, is a single mosque — solitary witness of the grandeur of days past ; — and beyond that, all the space, as far as the battlement terrace looking north and west is occupied by the mass of ruin which represents Ali's ruined palace. The sun was sinking as I sat down to draw in what had been a great chamber, below one of the many crumbling walls — perhaps in the very spot where the dreaded Ali gave audience to his Frank guests in 1809 — when Childe Harold was but twenty- four years old, and the Vizir in the zenith of his power. The poet is no more ; — the host is beheaded, and his family nearly extinct ; — the palace is burned, and levelled with the ground ; — war, and change, and time have, perhaps, left but one or two living beings who, forty years back, were assembled in these gay and sumptuous halls.'^*

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^*I'm not sure what Tepelenë is like today. In 2013, Tim Neville, on the trail of Byron, described it in a travel piece for the Financial Times: 'I drove to Tepelena, where the remains of Ali Pasha’s palace stood derelict and littered with rubbish. A plaque celebrating the poet’s visit hung from the side of a wall next to a petrol station...'

the quiet island

Last year Carcanet published The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems by Thomas A. Clark, a writer I have often referred to on this blog. There is an introduction by Matthew Welton that briefly discusses the poems' language and formal properties. He notes, for example, the repetition of words from poem to poem: 'the hills, clouds and water give us a sense of where we are in the landscape. And the mentions of nothingness, aloneness and longing, say something of what we can expect from territory of this kind.' He suggests that the 'reuse of a limited vocabulary across a range of poems feels appropriate to the landscapes that are the focus of these poems.' These places are only occasionally identified but it is clear that we are reading about the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Perhaps some of the poems are about the idea of this landscape rather than anything more specific - 'the quiet island', for example, is like a parable where the narrator finds peace but misses the melody of events, and so one morning, quietly leaves.

I could mention several of the book's landscape poem sequences but will just highlight one here. 'a walk in a water meadow' suggests that we will be given a series of ambulatory observations, but in the first stanza, a gentle mist closes in. This mist dampens sound and detaches objects from their context. The walker attends to the world in a different way: as places disclose themselves, vision is both impaired and repaired. The water meadow takes on the forms of mist: fine webs, cotton-grass and cuckoo-spit, alders wrapped in wool and skeins of mist snagged on larch. A walk in mist, he concludes, 'makes no progress / history is suspended / resolve dissolves.' History feels suspended in almost all of these poems, which offer the chance to concentrate on timeless phenomena: dusk and dawn, wind and waves, raindrops in a pool, light falling on a leaf, water flowing over roots and stones.

There is a YouTube clip where Tom introduces the book and reads 'the quiet island'. I have embedded it below and transcribed here what he says about the Highlands and Islands:

'These are landscapes of great clarity and resilience; they often have a surprising gentleness - all qualities that I want to percolate into the poetry.  But this is not where I live. I live on the east coast, above Edinburgh. So I'm always at some distance from the landscapes I write about. No doubt this distance sharpens desire. I always want to head out into the Highlands. Somehow I feel more relaxed there than anywhere else. I seem to be more responsive and resourceful than anywhere else. It's as if a whole set of cultural accretions has fallen away, or more likely, blown away. And this is one sense of The Threadbare Coat, the title of this new book from Carcanet Press. It's an image of poverty and exposure, as if there could be only the lightest membrane between you and the landscape.'

The Mummelsee, a supposedly bottomless lake

I have been looking back at some books I read before starting this blog and have never got round to mentioning. One of these is Simplicissimus, the picaresque novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, written in 1668 and translated for Dedalus by Mike Mitchell. Near the end of the book, its hero Simplicius hears various tales told about 'the Mummelsee, a supposedly bottomless lake on one of the highest mountains in the neighbourhood.' (Wikipedia's entry on this Black Forest lake begins, disappointingly: 'the Mummelsee is a 17-metre-deep lake...') The stories told to Simplicius concern disappearing animals and sightings of water sprites. On one occasion, he learns, a Duke of Württemberg tried to measure the depth of the lake with a length of twine but his boat started to sink and he had to abandon the attempt. Curious about this strange place, Simplicius decides to set off to see it for himself.

When he arrives with his companion after a walk of less than six hours, the two of them polish of the food and drink they brought and then proceed with some scientific observations, drawing a map and tasting the water to see if it would explain why some trout that had been introduced on one occasion all died. They then locate a spot 'where the water, otherwise as clear as crystal, seems to be pitch black on account of its awesome depth'. Ignoring his companion's advice, Simplicius throws stones into the lake. Storm clouds begin to gather and, looking into the water, he sees creatures swimming up from the depths, bringing back the stones. One of them, the Prince of Mummelsee, comes to the surface and takes Simplicius back down with him. Eventually they reach the centre of the earth where they discuss politics, religion and geography. He doesn't spend long there before returning to the surface, but he does give a memorable short description of the way this land of the sylphs is lit by the lakes of the world.

'While I was there I observed how the sun shone on each lake in turn and sent its rays down to these awesome depths, making it as bright in this abyss as on the surface and even casting shadows. The lakes were like windows for the sylphs through which they received both light and warmth. Even if they didn't always come directly, because the sides of some lakes were twisted, they were transmitted by reflection because nature had set whole slabs of crystal, diamonds and rubies where necessary in the angles of the cliffs.'

The Mummelsee
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The magical lake of Mummelsee also appears in a poem by Eduard Mörike, who I wrote about here last month. 'The Ghosts of Mummelsee' is one of his poems later set to music by Hugo Wolf. There is a New York Festival of Song blog post on this Lied, which gives an English translation by Charles L. Cingolani. The narrator, hiding in some bushes, sees a funeral procession for the king of the lake. The ghosts walk over the water and then enter it through a sparkling gate. However, there is a twist at the end when they realise they have been watched...

How lovely the fires glow on the water! 
They flare and then turn green;
Fog moves in clusters along the shore,
The pond is turning into a sea—
Be still!
Is there something stirring out there?

In the middle a twitching—For heaven’s sake! Help!
They come back again, they are coming!
A bellowing in the reeds, a crunching in the rushes;
Make haste, take flight!
Away!
They sense trouble, they are on my tracks!

Landscapes of Detectorists

When I look back on this period of lockdown I think the 'highlight' will probably be the fortnight or so we spent as a family watching Detectorists on the BBC iPlayer. What my sons say they most appreciated was the gentle humour and escapism of it, but I suspect too there was something comforting in the idea that historical imagination and curiosity can transform a small stretch of landscape. Despite some sunny weather, this has been another weekend of staying indoors except for the short permitted exercise along familiar streets, and yet each time we walk them we see some new detail in the design of a house or the contents of a garden. Every day I pass a house with a blue plaque to the poet Louis MacNeice but I have long since taken as much interest in the houses surrounding it, wondering about the lives they have contained. The terminus of my regular walk is Canonbury Tower, an old Tudor building once owned by Thomas Cromwell which reminds you of the layers of history anywhere in London.

Last year Colin Sackett's Uniformbooks brought out a book on Detectorists in which four geographers analyse the series in terms of different ways of reading landscape, aspects of verticality, gender roles and the resonance of lost, everyday objects. It is a pleasure to read, although if you have just binge-watched the series you'll find it covering familiar ground. In some ways I was more interested in what writer Mackenzie Crook and producer Adam Tandy had to say about the making of the programmes and the ways in which they made metal detecting more televisual. I didn't realise, for example, that it is best done in autumn or winter on muddy, unattractive ploughed fields - very different from the sunny Constable-like landscapes we see in the series. Crook took up the hobby when he started writing the script and actually managed to find a piece of gold Roman jewellery, which is now in the British Museum. And it was wonderful to learn that one of the more poetic moments in Detectorists had happened to him in real life. One day, while he was out detecting on a farm in Suffolk, he 'dug down four inches to find an exquisite bronze hawking whistle.'

'I took a few minutes to unclog the mud with a piece of straw, then held it up to my lips and blew. The note that issued from the whistle was a ghost, a sound unheard for centuries, and the last person to hear that sound, that exact sound, was the person who dropped it just yards from where I was standing. And it wasn't a faint, feeble ghost either: it was an urgent, piercing shrill that echoed across the field and back through time.'

The floating islands of Lake Vadimon

In these interminable lockdown days it is easy to get sick of walking the same streets over and over again. Of course there is always Google Earth, although I always suspect I may not always be looking at wha tI think I am. I thought I would travel in the footsteps of my blog namesake, Pliny the Younger, to the small lake 'called Vadimon'. According to Wikipedia its waters have now almost evaporated - 'the lake is almost completely underground and fed by sulphurous springs that pour milky waters into it'. But is there anything really still to see? Google Maps does show a small blue circle but Google Earth doesn't seem to allow you any closer than the image above (photograph taken in 2011). I think the 'lake' is to the right of the road, somewhere in that field.  

Pliny begins his letter by observing that one doesn't have to travel far to see natural wonders, sometimes they are practically on our doorstep. It is a point always worth bearing in mind, although I think I've seen all there is to see within a short Covid-restricted walk from our home. He then describes 'one of these curiosities', a lake

'perfectly circular in form, like a wheel lying on the ground; there is not the least curve or projection of the shore, but all is regular, even and just as if it had been hollowed and cut out by the hand of art. The water is of a clear sky-blue, though with somewhat of a greenish tinge; its smell is sulphurous, and its flavour has medicinal properties, and is deemed of great efficacy in all fractures of the limbs, which it is supposed to heal. Though of but moderate extent, yet the winds have a great effect upon it, throwing it into violent agitation. No vessels are suffered to sail here, as its waters are held sacred; but several floating islands swim about it, covered with reeds and rushes, and with whatever other plants the surrounding marshy ground and the edge itself of the lake produce in greater abundance.'

Pliny then explains how these islands sometimes move in a cluster and sometimes get dispersed, seeming to race each other. Grazing sheep from the surrounding fields board the islands, seemingly oblivious to the fact they have left dry land. The lake empties into a river which,'after running a little way, sinks underground, and, if anything is thrown in, it brings it up again where the stream emerges.' He signs off the letter by saying: 'I have given you this account because I imagined it would not be less new, nor less agreeable, to you than it was to me; as I know you take the same pleasure as myself in contemplating the works of nature.'

On a Winter Morning before Sunrise

In his poem 'On a Winter Morning before Sunrise', the twenty-one year old Eduard Mörike (1804-75) wrote of his emotions on seeing the first light-as-down light of dawn: 'my soul is like crystal'. He felt his mind still as still water, opened to wonder by a ring of clear blue sky. A perfect way to start the day, certainly better than listening, as I do, to the latest grim news on the radio. The editor/translators of this poem, David Luke and Gilbert McKay, link it to 'Urach Revisited’ (1827), another 'major expression of the poet's youthful sensibility.' Bad Urach is a spa town at the foot of the Swabian Alb where Mörike studied at the evangelical seminary. His nostalgic return as a young man is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s poem on Tintern Abbey. A stream flows heedlessly past without any sorrow at the flux of time and the poet questions the landscape surrounding him:   

Here you all are, ancient and new,
Bare sunlit hills uprearing, summits made
For cloud-thrones, woods where scarcely noon breaks through,
Where balmy warmth mingles with deepest shade:
Do you still know me, who once fled to you,
Whose heavy head sweet-slumbrously was laid
Here in cool moss to hear the insects humming –
Do you know me, and shrink not at my coming?

Eduard Mörike wrote one of the stories most special to me, 'Mozart's Journey to Prague' - one I have re-read before in bleak times and found myself reaching for again recently. Although tinged with sadness, because we and the narrator know what will happen eventually to Mozart, it is a story of a brief, idyllic encounter, a moment (in the words of the translators) of 'festivity and conviviality, badinage and Lebenslust, memories of an earlier golden age of culture.' This sparkling novelle is not really about landscape although it begins with Mozart and Constanze journeying through the Moravian mountains. They then descend into a valley and stop at a village and Mozart decides to take a short walk. He enters the park of a local Count, sits down by some orange trees and, with his mind on his music, inadvertently picks one, an action which sets in train the events of the story.     

I will end this brief post on Mörike by mentioning a couple more poems on the subject of spring. In 'Frühlingsgefühle', translated as 'Intimation of Spring', violets wake and dream their time is near. It puts me in mind of the crocuses I saw on my lockdown exercise walk yesterday. 'In the Spring' find the poet lying on a hill: clouds drift, rivers flow and sunlight enter his veins. And yet he still feels a yearning, 'for what I cannot say'. It makes him wonder what memories are woven into 'this twilight of the gold-green leaves? / - The nameless days of long ago!'

7000 Oaks

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Eichen
Photograph taken in 2003, from Wikimedia Commons 

Following on from my last post I thought I would briefly mention another famous European environmental art intervention from the eighties, Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oaks (1982-87). Here's a description by the Dia Foundation, who partly sponsored it:

Joseph Beuys’s project 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) began in 1982 at Documenta 7, the large international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. His plan called for the planting of 7,000 trees—each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high and positioned above ground—throughout the greater city of Kassel. With major support from Dia Art Foundation, the project was carried forward under the auspices of the Free International University and took five years to complete; the last tree was planted at the opening of Documenta 8 in 1987. Beuys intended for the Kassel project to be the first stage in an ongoing scheme of tree planting that would extend throughout the world as part of a global mission to spark environmental and social change. Locally, the action was a gesture toward urban renewal.

I have never been to Kassel but it must be fascinating to wander round and see how these trees are getting on. How many of the originals are still there? It is easy to imagine that the basalt columns are no more resistant to developers and planning decisions than the living trees. There were large protests near me recently at the felling of the Happy Man Tree, a much-loved 150-year old London plane tree. It made me think back to one of the first posts I wrote for this blog, on Charlotte Mew's poems about the 'murder' of the great planes opposite her home. 

I came across an interesting essay on a blog by Andrew Bruce that gives some information on how the Joseph Beuys trees have fared. He draws on an article by Stephan Körner and Florian Bellin-Harder, 'The 7000 Eichen of Joseph Beuys – Experiences After Twenty-Five Years' (2009). Perhaps unsurprisingly, many trees had not been well cared for. They estimated that '70 replacement trees are required annually – these replacements are not true Beuys trees, the basalt column is removed upon the death of an original.' However,

There are exceptions to the poor state of the trees as reported by Körner and Bellin-Harder. Volunteer groups have carefully maintained several groups of trees. Other trees have become beloved foci of community activity. The study gives an example of a Beuys tree planted at an intersection that was closed to traffic at the behest of a citizens group just prior to Beuys’ action. The linden in this Plätzchen (little square) has been the site of ‘street festivals, baptisms, and other parties such as children’s birthdays’, children also meet there to walk to school together and play there after school. The lives of trees like this one come closer to the social relevance Beuys intended...

die wiese

herman de vries in the Steigerwald
(source: Vince de Vries, Wikimedia Commons)

The meadow planted near Eschenau in Upper Franconia by herman de vries, die wiese - one of the best known works of European land art - is no longer being maintained. According to a comment on the artist's website, 'in 2019 herman de vries decided not to intervene anymore and now the meadow will become part of the Steigerwald.' It is not surprising, because the artist is now eighty-nine, although I sometimes think artists who work out in nature must be a lot fitter than the average. There was a short interview with him in The Independent five years ago that said he was scaling back his work. 'The artist walks in the nearby forest every day, although health problems in the last year have slowed him down. He keeps a map charting his walks on the wall of his kitchen, which becomes an art work at the end of the year. He finds fallen trees: "They are nice sculptures, no? A sculpture that nature makes."'

I have been looking back at the Michael Fehr essay 'Herman's Meadow' (1992), which was reproduced in the Kastner/Wallis book Land and Environental Art (Phaidon, 1998). It was written six years after de vries and his wife Susanne began the project. I was struck by the lists of species in Fehr's descriptions of the meadow's development. Here is a quote from the essay with the lists turned into columns:

As a border, they planted a hedge composed of a variety of shrubs:

hazel
hawthorn
blackthorn
dogrose
euonymus
viburnum
rowanberry
privet

as well as a row of cultivated and semi-cultivated trees:

hazelnut
rowan
cornelian cherry
medlar

and older varieties of

apple
pear
plum

- and let it take its natural course. Late in the year, after seeding, half of the area was cut and the cuttings removed, so that the fodder meadow - overfertilised up till then with artificial fertilisers and liquid manure three times yearly - would lose some of its richness. In the following year, herman and Susanne collected seeds along embankments, paths and the edge of the forest from plants that had been resistant to the farmers' machines and liquid manure sprays and planted them in their meadow: in molehills and earth which had bcen dug up by wild boars. Consequently,

columbine
naked lady
alchemilla
scabious
pincushion flower
agrimony
angelica
avens
meadow salvia
primrose
valerian
mugwort
leonorus
yellow iris
comfrey
carnations
hops
byrony
rhinanthus and
belladonna

had a chance to spread. These were joined spontaneously by

spiraea
saxifrage
red clover
wood anemone
blue cranesbill

and runners from the aspen at the end of the forest developed shoots in the upper part of the meadow.