Drunkard's Rock

Bill Porter (who uses the pen name Red Pine) wrote a wonderful account of his travels in search of places associated with ancient Chinese poetry, Finding Them Gone: Visiting China’s Poets of the Past (2016). Arriving now at these historic sites could involve encountering coachloads of people at a vast newly-built tourist site or finding nothing at all, just assurances from elderly locals or descendants that an old poet had indeed once lived in the vicinity. To take just one day and four Tang Dynasty poets as an example: leaving Xi’an to visit Wang Wei’s famous estate, Red Pine discovered it is now being used to make nuclear warheads. He then asked his taxi driver to make for the village where Liu Zongyuan had lived, but was met there with shrugs. A shrine to Du Fu was easy to find but Du Mu’s grave in a nearby village was removed by officials in the seventies and is now a pit full of trash.

Given the dense literary history of Mount Lu (which I briefly covered in a 2010 post here) you might think Red Pine would have had no difficulty seeing everything associated with its famous poets. And in Chaisang (Mulberry-Bramble) he did find a grandiose memorial and museum devoted to Tao Yuanming (T'ao Yüan-ming, 365-427), founder of the fields-and-gardens tradition. But when he attempted to see the poet’s grave he was told it was off limits, located now inside a military base, and the soldiers on guard would not let him in. 

Tao Yuanming was born at Chaisang and returned to the area ‘to dwell in gardens and fields’, as his famous poem of retreat put it. However, as Burton Watson wrote in The Columbia Book of Chinese Poetry, Tao’s poetry is ambiguous – ‘exclamations upon the beauties of nature and the freedom and peace of rustic life sit uneasily alongside confessions of loneliness, frustration, and fear, particularly of death. He sought solace in his zither, his books, and above all in wine, about half of his poems mentioning his fondness for “the thing in the cup,” though in one of the poems he wrote depicting his own funeral, he declares that he was never able to get enough of it.'

Tao Yuanming in a painting by Chen Hongshou (1598-1652)

Leaving Chaisang, Red Pine's taxi drove south past the giant Donglin Buddha, heading for Wenchuan village at the foot of Lushan. On a previous visit back in 1991 he discovered Tao Yuanming’s last lineal male descendant had still been living here until his death just a few weeks before Red Pine’s arrival. Returning now, twenty-five years later, he found the village had been bulldozed and replaced with hot spring hotels. But fortunately it was still possible to see Drunkard’s Rock, where Tao met his friends and was inspired to write his wonderful account of the Peach Blossom Spring. The great eighteenth century poet Yuan Mei (1716-97) came here in 1784 and reflected on the fact that a mere ‘scrubby piece of stone / has been cherished and admired for more than a thousand years.’ Red Pine showed his taxi driver the rock and the faded signature carved into it by Confucian scholar (Chu Hsi, 1130-1200). His taxi driver, amazed, wondered why it wasn't in a museum but Red Pine was glad it wasn't and 'given its size, I didn't think it was going anywhere anytime soon.'

The Willows

When I reached the point of sand jutting out among the waves, the spell of the place descended upon me with a positive shock. No mere “scenery” could have produced such an effect. There was something more here, something to alarm.

I gazed across the waste of wild waters; I watched the whispering willows; I heard the ceaseless beating of the tireless wind; and, one and all, each in its own way, stirred in me this sensation of a strange distress. But the willows especially; for ever they went on chattering and talking among themselves, laughing a little, shrilly crying out, sometimes sighing—but what it was they made so much to-do about belonged to the secret life of the great plain they inhabited. And it was utterly alien to the world I knew, or to that of the wild yet kindly elements. They made me think of a host of beings from another plane of life, another evolution altogether, perhaps, all discussing a mystery known only to themselves. I watched them moving busily together, oddly shaking their big bushy heads, twirling their myriad leaves even when there was no wind. They moved of their own will as though alive, and they touched, by some incalculable method, my own keen sense of the horrible. 

This is from Algernon Blackwood's 'The Willows' (1907), 'foremost of all' his tales according to H. P. Lovecraft. In it, 'the nameless presences on a desolate Danube are horribly felt and recognised by a pair of idle voyagers. Here art and restraint in narrative reach their very highest development, and an impression of lasting poignancy is produced without a single strained passage or a single false note.' Blackwood was a great explorer of the outdoors and 'The Willows' was based on his own experiences camping 'on one of the countless lonely islands below Pressburg.' This area on the modern border of Slovakia and Hungary looks like it would be pleasant to visit these days - there is an attractive-looking nature reserve at Dunajské luhy which I am sure is a lot less menacing than Blackwood's 'waste of wild waters'.

Another Blackwood story that deals directly with landscape is 'The Face of the Earth', in which a German professor obsessed with the idea that the Earth is a living Being discerns the semblance of a face in the Dorsetshire Hills. He tries to entice a young student to sacrifice himself in a mouth-like chalk pit ("Come quick. It is the feeding-time.") This and 'The Willows' can be found in a new OUP anthology of Blackwood stories The Wendigo and Other Stories. Editor Aaron Worth points to Blackwood's continuing relevance in 'his pioneering exploration of such topics as plant consciousness and agency, ecological catastrophe ... and monstrous entanglements within natural systems.' A story beginning to attract renewed critical attention for its relevance to colonialism and environmentalism is 'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' (1912). This is set on the edge of the New Forest and concerns a former employee of the Imperial Forest Service in India whose love for the forest outside his English home takes over his life and estranges him from his wife. The way these trees form a single communicating entity anticipates recent debates about the wood wide web.  

'The Man Whom the Trees Loved' may be interesting material for ecocritics but as a story it is, I'm afraid to say, pretty tedious and long-winded. 'The Willows', by contrast, is perfectly paced and compelling. Initially the two canoeists feel menaced by the landscape, but what begins with disquiet at the way the trees move becomes something much bigger, the kind of cosmic horror Lovecraft would specialise in. 

The eeriness of this lonely island, set among a million willows, swept by a hurricane, and surrounded by hurrying deep waters, touched us both, I fancy. Untrodden by man, almost unknown to man, it lay there beneath the moon, remote from human influence, on the frontier of another world, an alien world, a world tenanted by willows only and the souls of willows. 

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Last weekend we went to The Garden Cinema to see the new Wilhelmina-Barns Graham film A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things. There was an interview afterwards with director Mark Cousins which has been uploaded to YouTube (I can see myself in the audience!) The documentary turns on an epiphany she had at Grindelwald Glacier, while holidaying in Switzerland in 1949. Tilda Swinton reads the quote about her 'terrifying desire' to roll down the mountain that I included in a post about Barns-Graham I wrote here six years ago. I've always thought of her glacier paintings as a facet of modernist landscape painting but perhaps I shouldn't really be talking about her at all on this blog, because as Cousins points out she wasn't looking up at the Alpine landscape, she was looking down at the ice. Numerous paintings and drawing examine the structure, light and translucent colours of the glacier and a new book edited by Rob Airey has just been published dedicated to these. The variations she found over the years are shown in one of the highlights of the film, a long sequence that just just puts these glacier pictures on screen one after the other in an old fashioned slide show, accompanied by Linda Buckley's music.

A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things won top prize at the Karlovy Vary film festival this year and I would love to have asked Mark Cousins about it, because earlier this year we visited this extraordinary old spa town on holiday. But we were actually there on a Grand Budapest Hotel pilgrimage and I'm sure he would have had no interest in talking about award ceremonies and a place that has nothing to do with Wilhelmina Barns-Graham! Another place he didn't talk much about was St. Ives and the art colony she's always been associated with - as he says in a BFI interview, this is limiting for a painter who saw herself as an independent 'lone wolf'. Cousins thinks there are three particular reasons why 21st century audiences may be interested in her art: climate change (so evident at Grindelwald), the contemporary focus on relatively neglected female figures and her neurodiversity. This last aspect is really his central theme - A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things is a portrait of the artist's 'brain'. It includes some beautifully shot footage of her obsessively compiled notebooks, where she explored the mathematics of colour combinations. All in all I think it's an excellent film that sidesteps the familiar approaches of an arts documentary. Peter Bradshaw gave it a four star review in The Guardian yesterday. His article starts with a photograph of Barns-Graham out sketching in the landscape, so maybe it's not too inappropriate to talk about her again here. 

From the official trailer for A Sudden Glimpse to Deeper Things

Lost in the sand

I've been on an Irish culture kick over the last month: first the film Kneecap, then Juno and the Paycock with Mark Rylance and then Arán & Im, a performance in which Manchán Magan talked about the origins of Irish words while making sourdough bread (very tasty). Magan is the author of Thirty-Two Words for Field: Lost Words of the Irish Landscape so there was a lot that evening of relevance to this blog. However, I'm going to focus here instead on my fourth Irish cultural event, a trip today to Matt's Gallery to see Remnant, Willie Doherty's new exhibition of black and white photographs and video footage. There were foggy woods (see below), dead leaves and branches, empty streets, blank walls, peeling paint, stains, graffiti, broken bricks and roadside puddles. The videos (shot in Derry, Donegal and by the River Boyne) also showed a moon seen through bare black boughs, a stretch of fast flowing water, rocks slowly dripping and flat waves covering and uncovering a small stretch of sand.  

I've not really kept up closely with Willie Doherty's work since discovering it many years ago when I first got into Hamish Fulton and Richard Long, who were also combining landscape photography with text. The curators note that images like the one I've included above resemble his early work, but instead of having text imprinted on them - words like 'undercover', 'shifting ground' or 'the other side' drawing links to recent political history - Doherty installs them here alongside three videos that contain relatively little movement and words read aloud by Stephen Rea. In the course of this monologue he says things like "fear trapped in the gaps where men and women were displaced" and "the living and the dead side by side" and "all traces lost in the sand, absorbed into the sea". It is all pretty gloomy, but Rea's quiet voice made me want to keep listening.

The gallery has copies of an interview Doherty did with Tim Dixon and I'll end here by quoting something interesting in this about the woods he photographed.

These forests which sprung up all along the border, [are] usually in places where the land is not really of any great agricultural value. These forests were planted, I don't know when they started really, probably sometime in the seventies and eighties. And they're kind of horrendous because they're just very generic pine forests, which are planted in rows and not really maintained or looked after very well, so they become a bit of an eyesore really. But significantly, at least one of the people who was assassinated and then buried by the IRA in the early seventies, one of 'the disappeared', Columba McVeigh, whose body has never been recovered, was buried in a remote border area somewhere between a bog and one of these forests. So it has a significance in that respect, and the first section of one of the strands of dialogue in the work refers to a figure who's dead—a kind of ghost who talks about being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Lagoon city

I enjoyed Martin Gayford's new book Venice: City of Pictures. Reading it felt like returning to a well-loved painting and finding new, interesting details. For example, he cites a book about Tiepolo I've not read, written by Svetlana Alpers and Michael Baxendall, which describes the ceiling of the Gesuati, painted in 1738. The surrounding roofscape reflects and absorbs light and 'Alpers and Baxendall seem to have spent days observing the resulting fluctuations in illumination, such as occasionally visible 'moving ripple of light' bouncing up from the waves of the Canale della Giudecca, the wide expanse of lagoon that lies in front of the church. There is also 'an electrifying occasional five minutes in late afternoon when the sun is low enough in the west both to shine direct through the west windows and to reflect back strongly from the east wall on which it falls.'' Venice has been painted by countless topographical artists but here is an example of the way light and the cityscape transform even the art inside its churches.

Paul Klee, Lagunenstadt, 1932

I could talk here about some of the landscape paintings Gayford discusses by Canaletto, Turner, Ruskin, Whistler or Monet, but instead I'll just features this one by Paul Klee, because I particularly like it. Klee's visit was 'the most fleeting of all the artists chronicled in this book' - just a few days in the autumn of 1932. Lagunenstaft (Lagoon city) 'is in its modest, whimsical way one of the most perceptive of all the vistas of this most painted of places.' The confusing city streets are conveyed by those rectangles at the bottom. Above them 'a few higher and more separated trapezoids' probably represent the structures around the Piazza San Marco that Klee described as 'a unique creation in stone'. And above and beyond these are the water and the sky.

Streams had burst their banks and sallied out

In 1809 Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) published his first collection of twenty-three verse fables - over time the book grew to include 197. Gordon Pirie’s translations of a few of these were praised in reviews of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry. Ever since Aesop, fables have mainly featured animals - wolves, lions, foxes, tortoises, hares etc. - but Krylov's ‘The Peasants and the River’ concerns landscape features. Local streams are in spate and inundate the peasants’ land (I can picture this now from all the flooded fields I saw on a train to Cambridgeshire yesterday). The peasants believe that the main river, bordered by country estates and flowing through towns to the sea has 'never been guilty of such misdemeanours.' So they go to this river to ask her to bring her tributaries into order, only to see their own possessions, 'precious things they'd lost', carried along in the river like 'discarded lumber'. The moral of the story is this: ‘great men profit from the small man’s crime, / to seek redress is just a waste of time.’ 

Has landscape been used in other fables? Trees and plants occasionally feature, sometimes debating which is the most beautiful, or providing comparisons like the unbending oak and pliant reed, an idea referred to in Troilus and Criseyde but found much earlier in the Tao Te Ching. There is also the plane tree that assures travellers it is not 'useless' because it is providing them with shade, and the trees that object to being cut down by axes made from their own wood. A river is the setting for fables that illustrate the proverb 'still waters run deep' - in La Fontaine a peasant drowns in a smooth flowing river. Elsewhere, a farmer blames the sea for a shipwreck only to be told by the sea that it was the wind who was to blame, not her. In The Seven Wise Masters, a medieval collection, rivers complain to the sea that she spoils their sweet water, only to be told if that's how they feel they should avoid contact with her. Despite these odd examples, I have to acknowledge that in comparison with animals, it is hard to personify human behaviours in whole landscapes. Nevertheless, a mountain is the protagonist in one of Aesop's fables, illustrated below, 'The Mountain and the Mouse'. 

Auguste Delierre's 1883 etching of 'The Mountain in Labour' (Wikimedia)

Summer storms, sea, light, silence

Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-73) is included in The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry but his landscape poems are given rather faint praise: 'the themes of his nature poems are conventional - blazing sunsets, snow mountain peaks, etc. - but he presents these scenes from an unexpected point of view.' His greatest work according to the editors was his love poetry, although their selection is too small to give a good sense of these (and they miss out the one quoted at the end of Stalker, then turned into a song by Björk, 'The Dull Flame of Desire'). Charles Tomlinson, as you might expect, was keener to highlight the side of Tyutchev I'm interested in here. In his Translations (1983) he says 'Tyutchev's poetry, with its evocation of summer storms, sea, light, silence, is true to the quality of the present moment as it reveals itself in the landscape of the mind.'

As usual I won't quote whole poems, but here are some lines that illustrate what Tomlinson says, taken from the translations he made with linguistic help from Henry Gifford.

Summer Storm: 'Bursts out of ravaged clouds / To smear the blue, to charge / Impetuous on the wood'

Sea: 'Winds / Called to one another and the waves / Sang me to deafness'

Light: 'Beneath the sun-gold / Lake currents glint'

Silence: 'Entering autumn, there ensues / (Its beauty is in brevity) / A season of crystalline repose'

Although Tyutchev has been overlooked so far by the publishers of literary classics, you can find an online PDF of translations by John Dewey (not the philosopher). There is a section covering early poems on 'Nature' and another one of late 'Russian Landscapes'. Back in the day, when people still wrote blogs, there was a good one called Poetry in Translation that had a long post about this book, providing a summary of Tyutchev's life and work. Here's a section of it - Ovstug was the poet's family estate. 

Ovstug and the surrounding countryside inspired some of the finest of Tyutchev’s later nature poems, including the following:

There comes with autumn’s first appearance
A brief spell full of wonder and delight:
Whole days of crystalline transparence
And evenings luminously bright…

Where once the sickle strode through wheat-ears tumbling
An air of space and emptiness reigns now;
Only a wisp of cobweb, trembling,
Gleams on the idle furrow’s brow.

The empty skies fall still as birds forsake us,
Yet distant still is winter’s first unruly storm,
And, seeping from above, a blueness pure and warm
Is added to the drowsing acres…

This was another of Leo Tolstoy’s favourites. He particularly admired lines 7 – 8, where a few deft strokes (Tolstoy singles out the evocative use of ‘idle’) are sufficient to create a whole picture of rural tranquillity and repose following the hectic activity of the harvest. ‘The art of writing poetry lies in the ability to find such images, and Tyutchev was a great master of that,’ Tolstoy commented.

Charles Tomlinson translated this poem, written on 22 August 1857, as 'Entering Autumn.' He rendered Tolstoy's favourite lines thus: 'Cobweb on idle furrow / Stretches its gleam of subtle hair.' Another version by Anatoly Liberman makes it into the Penguin anthology, although the word 'idle' doesn't feature in it. You can still visit Tyutchev's estate in Ovstug, although of course I never will. Russia is off limits now, but some English-speaking traveller gave it a five star TripAdvisor review back in 2015 and said it is 'open from early morning (9 a.m.) even off season, pleasant staff, well-kept both house and grounds and you can buy the most poetic leaflet I've ever stumbled across.'

The temple’s firm towering

Years ago when I studied art history I was very taken with a particular passage in Heidegger's essay 'The Origin of the Work of Art'. He deliberately looks at a non-representational work of art: a Greek temple which 'portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rock-cleft valley.' But it is through such a temple that 'the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human being.' He goes on to describe how the temple affects the landscape:  

Standing there, the building holds its ground against the storm raging above it and so first makes the storm itself manifest in its violence. The luster and gleam of the stone, though itself apparently glowing only by the grace of the sun, first brings to radiance the light of the day, the breadth of the sky, the darkness of the night. The temple’s firm towering makes visible the invisible space of air. The steadfastness of the work contrasts with the surge of the surf, and its own repose brings out the raging of the sea.  

This passage is quoted in Sarah Bakewell's 2016 history of existentialism and phenomenology, At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being & Apricot Cocktails - one of the most off-putting titles for a book I have ever come across and one which (I'm sorry to say) stopped me picking it up until recently. Don't judge this book by it's cover - it's very good! She says of Heidegger's temple, 'I'm prepared for the possibility that someone else will find this boring or even odious. But Heidegger's idea that a human architectural construction can make even the air show itself differently has stayed somewhere behind my perceptions of buildings and art ever since I read the essay.'   

Heidegger had never seen a Greek temple when he wrote this but in 1962 he finally decided to go on an Aegean cruise, along with his wife and a centre right politician friend 'who had a past at least as embarrassing as Heidegger's since he'd joined the Nazi Party in 1937.' Cromwell describes Heidegger's disappointment with Olympus, ruined by 'hotels for American tourists', and also with Crete, Rhodes and Athens. Finally though, they encountered some gleaming white ruins on a headland - the Temple of Poseidon on Cape Sounion.

The bare rock of the cape lifted the temple towards the sky. Heidegger noted how 'this single gesture of the land suggests the invisible nearness of the divine', then observed that even though the Greeks were great navigators, they 'knew how to inhabit and demarcate the world against the barbarous'. Even now, surrounded by sea, Heidegger's thoughts naturally turned to imagery of enclosing, bounding and holding in.

Edward Dodwell, Temple of Poseidon, 1821

In her concluding chapter Cromwell acknowledges the continuing interest in Heidegger's writing about technology and ecology but highlights again a claustrophobic quality in his writing - 'his dimly lit world of forest paths and tolling bells'. She prefers Simone de Beauvoir's enduring fascination with the world and quotes (twice) from Force of Circumstance in which de Beauvoir lists some of the experiences that have made up her life. I'll end with these, a sequence of condensed landscapes: 'the dunes of El-Oued, Wabanasia Avenue, the dawns in Provence, Tiryns, Castro talking to five hundred thousand Cubans, a sulphur sky over a sea of clouds, the purple holly, the white nights of Leningrad, the bells of the Liberation, an orange moon over the Piraeus, a red sun rising over the desert...'

Refulgent light in the Sonian Forest

Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Vision of Saint Hubert, 1617-20

I have been reading Woodland Imagery in Northern Art c. 1500-1800 by Leopoldine van Hogendorp Prosperetti, published with beautiful illustrations by Lund Humphries two years ago. It is written in a slightly eccentric, charmingly old-fashioned and accessible style with short chapters covering various artists and genres of sylvan imagery, from van Eyck to Rubens. The iconography of trees is linked to an interesting range of sources in Latin vocabulary, religious traditions, pastoral poetry and the wider influences of politics, patrons and print technology. A chapter on Dürer includes sketches made in Nuremberg and a linden tree on the bastion of the castle that I mentioned here last month, I could discuss this or other interesting topics I found interesting, but I'll focus here on a painting by the artist Leopoldine Prosperetti has specialised in, Jan Brueghel the Elder. 

The Vision of Saint Hubert (1617-20), now in the Prado, was one of Brueghel's collaborations with Rubens. It shows one of the two famous saints who had a conversion experience while out hunting - he is not to be confused with Saint Eustace, the Roman general who features in the Canterbury Cathedral wall hanging and Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. Hubert (c. 656-757) was the 'Apostle of the Ardennes' and the two Flemish artists may have chosen this subject to please their patrons, Archduke Albert and Archduchess Isabella. This quote is from Prosperetti's chapter that focuses on woodland imagery associated with the Sonian Forest on the edge of Brussels. The passage includes two words you don't often come across: reflexy-const and talud.

The finishing touches in these pictorial settings would be passages of light that enhanced the scenery. The term in art theory is reflexy const (the art of reverberated light), which assigns to bounced-off sunlight the function of bringing scenery to life. In classical paintings, these areas of luminosity appeared on the smooth facets of grottoes, rockeries or ruins, to scatter the light to neighboring surfaces. In a sylvan setting, where there would be no resplendent surfaces other than leaves, painters would focus their attention on patches of sand, which, with the right amount of sunlight falling through the gaps in foliage or the opening of a clearing, would create pools of refulgent light. One such opportunity is provided by the talud, the sloping shoulder of a sunken path that is typical of the traveled road in age-old forests. An example of this curious land formation rises above Saint Hubert, bearing a slanted oak barely holding on to the sandy soil. It pairs visually with an illuminated sandy patch below the group of oaks on the other side of the path, which serves as a platform for the stag. 

The deer's antlers and the broken branch on the highlighted patch of ground form another pair: forked forms which Prosperetti finds frequently in Brueghel's paintings and which suggest the forking path of a decision. The cross which Hubert will choose is hovering above the antlers, so small you probably can't see it on your screen... Prosperetti suggests that the hart (cf. heart) at the centre of the forest was like the ducal court at the heart of the Duchy. Isabella's grandfather Charles V, whose hunts in the Sonian Forest are depicted in tapestries that now hang in the Louvre, chose as his motto a verse from the Psalms: 'As the hart panteth after the water brooks, So panteth my soul after thee, O God!'

Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head

Emma Stibbon, Cliff Crevice, Beachy Head, 2023

We went to Eastbourne at the weekend for the Emma Stibbon exhibition 'Melting Ice | Rising Tides', which combined paintings of retreating ice in Svalbard and Antarctica with art made around the retreating chalk cliffs of East Sussex. Having studied the Seven Sisters a few years ago, I was taken aback to see how they have changed recently, with so much undercutting now that it looks like caves are forming in them, although of course the chalk will topple before that happens. Below you can see me posing in front of a rock fall sculpture in the gallery. Stibbon assembled old postcards to chart changes to the cliffs and re-sketched a view drawn in the nineteenth century by Elizabeth Smith Paget, allowing us to compare and contrast. She did something similar a few years ago at Chamonix, where Turner had painted the glacier and Ruskin (with Frederick Crawley) had produced a striking daguerreotype. While her predecessors 'observed the drama of a sea of ice almost at the level they stood, Stibbon looked down into an exposed deep valley with “a dark moraine-covered floor, almost completely devoid of ice.”' (Observer review)  

The drawing above, Cliff Crevice, was done in part with chalk found on the beach at Eastbourne. I always like the idea of some small element of the landscape directly entering the artwork. Here, in an interview for Studio International, she describes two more examples:

On the subject of mediums, I have also used seawater. There’s a big sea drawing, Breaker, done in Indian ink. Oddly, I haven’t tried using seawater before, and the pigments dispersed quite strangely, organising themselves into some other form. One of the galleries features a series of drawings of the sea which I made on the deck of a wooden boat, while we passed from the north of Norway to Svalbard, which took three days and was very rough. I made drawings not intended as a work to exhibit, but it became apparent the further north we got that the ice in the ink was taking over. I had 20 or so drawings, and when I laid them out, you could see that progression: it starts out as normal drawings, and then you can see the crystals formed in the ink. I like that as a document of weather taking over the drawing.

I'll end here with a photo of one of those ink sketches, in which you can clearly see the crystals.

Blue Sky

Fifteen years ago I started a blog post on Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet by explaining that I had just joined Twitter.

Encouraged by Geoff Manaugh's defence of the practice, I have followed the example of some of my favourite blogs and started a Some Landscapes twitter (not sure I've mastered the idiom yet, can the word be used as a noun like 'blog'?) The idea is to include a few quick quotes and links and comments as they arise - some will get incorporated in later posts here, others won't. The 140 character constraint is a challenge to write with almost Flaubertian concision. Here's the sort of thing I've twittered: One of Flaubert's 'Accepted Ideas' - 'Landscapes (painted): always look like a mess of spinach.'

Everyone knows the story of the rise and fall of Twitter, with many people lamenting 'the golden days' when connections could be made and online friendships form through mutual shared interests. I have not been able to bring myself to post on it since last year. I briefly tried Threads but nobody seemed to be on it, although a few nature writers and cultural commentators have nailed their colours to its mast and occasionally encourage its use as an alternative to 'X'. I thought Bluesky seemed much more promising - a bit less mainstream with fewer trolls and likely to be used by interesting people not necessarily after as many likes as possible. That has proved to be the case but only in a limited way - disappointingly some of the people I first met through Twitter started accounts there last year but haven't really been using them. Anyway, we'll see - as someone said recently, it took Twitter a while to take off.

As this blog is beyond the reach of X I can safely encourage you here to join Bluesky and follow me there, andrew-ray, if you want some old school 'tweets' on landscape and the arts. I do Instagram too but that's just for my own photos. I should probably reiterate that my job prevents me from ever mentioning my political views or government policy on social media, but that's OK as I'd rather focus on things like Northern Renaissance landscape painting anyway (see my previous post here). This morning I've put this quote up on Bluesky which I found in an old notebook - and as I type this I've just got a 'like' from the excellent Longbarrow Press, although I don't anticipate too many more!

A Swedish explorer had all but completed a written description in his notebook of a craggy headland with two unusually symmetrical valley glaciers, the whole of it a part of a large island, when he discovered what he was looking at was a walrus.’ - Barry Lopez on mirages in Arctic Dreams

Probably one reason I like the idea of Bluesky is its name (Threads, by contrast reminds me of that terrifying eighties drama about a nuclear holocaust). I was intrigued to see how many times I had used the words "blue sky" on this blog so I did a ctrl-F. The first thing that comes up are two quotes from J. A. Baker's The Peregrine, from near the start and near the end of that book's freezing cold winter: 

• October 14th: One of those rare autumn days, calm under high cloud, mild, with patches of distant sunlight circling round and rafters of blue sky crumbling into mist...
• February 10th: This was a day made absolute, the sun unflawed, the blue sky pure...

The Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer who I wrote about after he won the Nobel Prize, describes the end of winter in 'Noon Thaw'. The world has a new language: 'the vowels were blue sky and the consonants were black twigs and the speech was soft over the snow.'

Here is George Eliot in The Mill on the Floss describing the simple pleasures of an English landscape in spring.

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white star-flowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet - what grove of tropic palms, what strange ferns or splendid broad-petalled blossoms, could ever thrill such deep and delicate fibres within me as this home-scene?

Sussex-based poet and clergyman Andrew Young once compared thistledown to 'ghosts of day ... silver against blue sky.'

A century earlier, Eugène Delacroix was looking up through the trees.

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.

The beauty of forms silhouetted in this way was something I observed myself in Rome and mentioned in connection with Walter Benjamin's description of Heidelberg Castle ('Ruins jutting into the sky can appear doubly beautiful on clear days ...')

The sky can also been seen in water: here is Ruskin on Canaletto's Venice:

It is one of the most difficult things in the world to express the light reflection of the blue sky on a distant ripple, and to make the eye understand the cause of the colour, and the motion of the apparently smooth water, especially where there are buildings above to be reflected, for the eye never understands the want of the reflection.

And in Florence, from A Room with a View  in E. M. Forster's novel, you could look down and see river men, children, soldiers and a tram temporarily unable to proceed.

Over such trivialities as these many a valuable hour may slip away, and the traveller who has gone to Italy to study the tactile values of Giotto, or corruption of the Papacy, may return remembering nothing but the blue sky and the men and women who live under it.

There is a blue sky visible from my own window now. 

Study of a rock-face

I was recently in Nuremberg and had been keen to see the Albrecht Dürer house, although I was a bit disappointed to be honest, hoping for something that felt a bit older and less-restored. You can see the city's castle from Dürer's upstairs windows, just the other side of a square, with walls made of distinctive red sandstone. Inside the castle they have a reproduction of the sketch above and a text explaining that this particular sandstone was laid down about 215 million years ago. 'Albrecht Dürer painted sandstone formations at rock quarries in the Nuremberg region. These rocks are still used for restoration work at the imperial castle, the Peller courtyard, or the structures at the zoo. The last quarry still in operation for Nuremberg sandstone is the one in the Lorenz Reichswald Forest.' I've uploaded a photograph from Wikimedia of this Steinbruch Worzeldorf quarry below:

Source: Derzno 

The Dürer sketch is in the British Museum and you can zoom in on it at their website to look at the details of the rocks. The BM curators say that 'he would have referred to drawings such as these when he designed the detailed rock-face in the background of his engraving, St Jerome in Penitence of about 1496-7.' The reason this is inconsistent with the 1506 date is that they think the monogram was added by a later admirer. I've reproduced the Met's copy of the St Jerome engraving below. In London we have the National Gallery's Dürer painting of St. Jerome, which has some reddish rock formations and the kind of trees the saint would have seen if his wilderness had been somewhere near Nuremberg rather than the Syrian desert. 

From Art to Archaeology

Back in 1991 I went to a fascinating exhibition at the Towner Art Gallery in Eastbourne (in its old building) called From Art to Archaeology. It featured contemporary artists with work inspired by ancient British land art, like the Long Man of Wilmington and the cup and ring stones of northern Britain and Ireland. As this was years before the internet got going I thought there wouldn't be anything online about it, but the British Council website has a page describing the touring show. You never know how long these pages will last though (clicking on the British Council's 'past programmes' I get a 'fatal error' message). So I thought I'd just make a note of it here for posterity! Although who knows how long Blogger will survive...

The exhibition included work by artists I have featured on this blog before: Thomas Joshua Cooper, who photographed cup and ring sites, Richard Long with Cerne Abbas (1975) and Roger Ackling, whose And they cast their shadows (1977) was made in the Vale of the White Horse. Ackling was subsequently 'commissioned by the South Bank Centre to revisit the Uffington site after 14 years to produce a companion piece to this earlier work.'

The artworks I noted down at the time that particularly interested me were

• Barry Flanagan's bronze anvil with the outline of a figure on its point: Pilgrim on Anvil (1984). You can see a picture of this sculpture on the late artist's website.
  
• Malcolm Whittaker's Incised Figure (1991) - a broken board circle with a faded Long Man figure on it. Whittaker's art has often been inspired by geology, fossils and archaeology.
  
• John Maine's crayon drawings of strip lynchets (ridges marking boundaries of ancient field systems, where the plough stopped at the edge of a field)
• Kate Whiteford's Sitelines and Symbol Stones which resembled chalk hill drawings - white paper showing through black oil paint. 

Kate Whiteford has continued making art inspired by ancient forms, particularly Pictish art. Ten years after this exhibition she created a land art piece Shadow of a Necklace at Mount Stuart House on the Isle of Bute. Yves Abrioux's essay about it explains that 'in 1887, the third Marquess uncovered the grave of a Bronze Age woman at Mount Stuart. This contained a scattering of beads from a jet necklace, which was reconstructed and removed to Edinburgh where it is still on display at the Museum of Scotland. ... Kate Whiteford’s land drawing explicitly returns the exiled Bronze Age artefact to a site close to the cist where it laid undisturbed for several thousand years. Simultaneously, it hands the necklace back to the people of Bute.' 

Footnote: I'm joking about posterity, because there was a proper catalogue, which annoyingly I didn't buy it at the time. It was written by Alexandra Noble, who was later the curator at the Estorick Collection. 

View of Frankfurt/Oder

Last month we were in the The Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg which contains some wonderful Northern Renaissance art and the world's oldest globe. For the purposes of this blog though I was intrigued by a modern painting, a View of Frankfurt/Oder seen from Güldendorf (1975) by the East German artist-writer Karl Hermann Roehricht, which has a slightly surreal and dream-like quality. Here is the museum's description of it:

The painting does not show Frankfurt/Oder, which was constructed as an ideal city of GDR-Socialism after World War II. Instead, the artist composed an idyllic landscape with only a few buildings evoking what really could have been expected behind the hills. Hence, the painting was meant to be a hidden criticism of the GDR town planning. However, from 1976 to 1990 it was presented in the Palast der Republik in Berlin where the East German parliament resided.

I'll unpack this with a bit of help from German Wikipedia:

• Karl Hermann Roehricht (1928-2015) lived in Leipzig but studied painting in West Berlin, although he returned to East Germany when it looked as if his figurative art was going to be permanently out of fashion. 'He repeatedly refused to work as an unofficial employee for the Ministry for State Security. Because of his uncompromising attitude, he came under increasing pressure and was subsequently spied on and harassed. The television version of his comedy Familie Birnchen was banned in 1976 because of alleged fascist tendencies and was not broadcast on GDR television until 1982.' After his paintings were included in the Palace of the Republic he won the GDR Art Prize, but he was continually harassed and applied to leave in 1984. He wrote plays and poetry, fiction and memoirs (an American review of one of these isn't very complimentary). 

• Frankfurt (Oder) did have to be rebuilt after the war (93% of the centre was destroyed) but I'm not sure it was an 'ideal city'. A 2020 travel blog notes that 'the town was badly neglected after the war, the communist authorities could spare little money for reconstruction and while some efforts have been made since German reunification, this is not a typical tourist destination.'

• The Palace of the Republic opened in 1976 after three years of construction in which 5000 tons of sprayed asbestos was used, which meant that it was closed down in 1990. In addition to hosting the Volkskammer (parliament), it included a theatre, cafes, concert halls, a post office and monumental paintings prompted by the question 'are communists allowed to dream?' Tacita Dean's lovely 2004 film Palast doesn't show the whole building but is tightly framed on some bronze-mirrored windows that reflect a neighbouring dome. She described it as a building that 'always catches and holds the sun in the grey centre of the city.' As a recent resident in Berlin, she had 'no inkling of what the building meant when it had meaning' and admits she felt attracted by the totalitarian aesthetic. By then the original white marble had all gone, leaving just raw wood and dirty metal. It could have been left as a gradually rotting ruin but 'the sore in the centre of the city' would have been too public. When we last visited Berlin in 2019 it was long gone.
  

Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm

We just got back from Prague, where there is a lot of interesting landscape-related art I could talk about. When I last went there photography in museums was prohibited; now I find my phone full of images and snaps of the accompanying wall texts. I thought here I would highlight three nineteenth century Czech artists in the National Museum, none of whom I've mentioned before: Antonín Mánes, Julius Marák and Otakar Lebeda. Here are the images, the curators' brief explanations and a few additional thoughts prompted by them.

Antonín Mánes, Landscape with Temple Ruins, 1827-8

Text: Mánes is considered to be the founder of Czech landscape painting. During 1836-1843, he was the professor of the landscape school at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague and prepared his three children, Josef, Quido, and Amalie, for careers in painting. Landscape with Kelso Abbey Ruins was inspired by the popular poem Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard by Thomas Gray, translated into Czech by Josef Jungmann with the title Elegie na hrobkach veskych in 1807. The view of the landscape with the abbey ruins is a symbolical reminder of ephemerality and death - memento mori; therefore, the painter placed his signature 'Antonius Manes Bohemus' on the tombstone.

I was intrigued by the idea of a Czech landscape painting in the classical style (which we associate with Italian scenery) based on a ruin in Scotland but also (according to the above), derived from a poem written about a Buckinghamshire churchyard. Of course Gray's Elegy (1751) was so influential that the general idea of writing about the passing of time in a landscape with ruins quickly caught on and spread to other sites - John Langhorne's Written among the ruins of Pontefract Castle in 1756, to name just one example. The Elegy was also quickly translated into many languages - in a 2013 study Thomas N. Turk found at least 266 versions in forty languages (he mentions the Jungmann Czech translation but has it down as 1886 - maybe he's referring to a later edition). 

There are several notable families of painters in the history of Czech art. Mánes's daughter Amálie Mánesová actually specialised in landscape (see for example Landscape with a Figure, 1843) although appranently this was because her father thought portrait painting inappropriate for women.

 Julius Marák, Sumava Virgin Forest in a Storm, 1891-2

Text: In 1887, Julius Marák, who was in Vienna at that time, was called to the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague to be in charge of the landscape painting studio. In 1891, he received a commission from the Ministry of Culture and Education to paint two large canvases of old-growth forests. Marak created the preparatory sketches in Boubin Virgin Forest, which was designated as a protected area as early as 1858. He first completed Sumava Virgin Forest in the Storm while he worked on the counterpart canvas Sumava Virgin Forest in the Sun (today in possession of Ceská sporitelna bank) until 1897. The delay was caused by Marak's health problems and his full-time position at the Academy, where he educated many young landscape artists such as Antonin Slavicek, Frantisek Kaván, and Otakar Lebeda.

This is a large canvas showing trees engulfed in darkness and swirling strands of mist with what light there is illuminating broken stumps and moss but barely penetrating the depths of the forest. It feels like a primal scene with no hint of human activity. It woud be interesting to see the companion piece owned by the Česká spořitelna (Czech Savings Bank) - I can't see this online. What's particularly interesting here is the idea of art being commissioned as part of the effort to preserve old-growth forests. This sounds quite progressive. Sumava is now a National Park, on the southern border with Bavaria. It stretches northwest of Horní Planá, the town where Adalbert Stifter was born, and it was in this region that he set many of his stories. The park website explains that when the prtected area began in 1858 it  extended to 143.7 hectares, but 'the wind and subsequent bark beetle calamities, especially in the areas affected by wood extraction on Pažení mountain and in vicinity of Boubín peak' reduced this to less than fifty.  

Julius Marák also had a daughter who became a painter. One of the highlights of the fourth floor of the huge Trade Fair Palace in Prague is an 1896 self-portrait by Josefina Mařáková with her father. Sadly her health wasn't good and she died in 1907.

 

Otakar Lebeda, Mountain Lake in the Krkonoše Mountains, 1896

Text: Otakar Lebeda painted this canvas during his last holiday stay in September 1896. Lebeda painted the two glacial lakes, Small and Big, today in Poland, several times, always choosing an unusual view from above to the depth. The realistic depictions of steep stone hillsides sloping down to the water may also be interpreted as a view into a soul, or as a symbol of death. In June 1897, Lebeda graduated from the landscape painting studio of Julius Marák at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague where he was one of the most talented students. Four years later, he prematurely ended his life and promising career by shooting himself with a revolver as a result of depression and physical exhaustion. 

Otakar Lebeda was only twenty-three when he died and during his final months he was working on a large painting Killed by Lightening, 'inspired by a true event that took place in the Chodsko region' (NGP). What to make of the idea that a landscape like this mountain lake reflects a depressed mental state? Is there anything documented that supports this or is it over-interpretation? It certainly is a gloomy scene. 

I wrote here in 2016 about the affect of mental health on the landscapes of Lars Hertervig, where the painting style does seem clearly disturbed. (Last year's Nobel Prize winner for literature Jon Fosse has written two novels about Hertevig, Melancholy I and II, but I haven't felt like wanting to read them). There are other examples where we are tempted to look for signs of depression in landscape painting, most obviously Vincent Van Gogh, whose last painting was Wheat Field with Crows (1890)... Except it actually wasn't, as the Van Gogh Museum explains. 'It is often claimed that this was his very last work. The menacing sky, the crows and the dead-end path are said to refer to the end of his life approaching. But that is just a persistent myth. In fact, he made several other works after this one.'

A grassy couch

I have written here often about the importance of a viewing point - one of the pleasures of any walk is finding a natural seat from which to survey the scene in comfort. On occasions, my family have expressed frustration at my desire to wait and find just the right circle of rocks or inviting, mossy logs, away from other people, where we can finally crack open a picnic. Ideally these perches allow for both convivial conversation and contemplation of the landscape (and are close enough together to facilitate the sharing of crisps). Sometimes a small bit of harmless rearrangement is required - moving an uncomfortable stone or temporarily pinning back a branch. Those lucky enough to live near the countryside will have favourite natural seats, outcrops of nature that connect the walker with the land; here in the city we have street furniture and park benches that are more like extensions of the surrounding buildings. 

Resting on rocks in the Lake District

I have been reading an old article published by the Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America in September 1945 (the month the war ended), intrigued by its mildly amusing title, 'The Symbol of the Sod-Seat in Coleridge' (although I don't think the word 'sod' has any offensive connotations in American English). In this essay, Charles S. Bouslog identifies a 'mild obsession with sod-seats' in the early writings of Coleridge and the Wordsworths. For example, there is the Hermit who sees the ship of the Ancient Mariner from his vantage point: 'He kneels at morn, and noon and eve- / He hath a cushion plump: / It is the moss that wholly hides / The rotted old oak-stump.' And there is Coleridge's 'Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath', a poem I talked about in one of my earliest blog posts : 'Here Twilight is and Coolness: here is moss, / A soft seat, and a deep and ample shade.'

Bouslog identifies three actual sod-seats that the Romantic poets referred to in their writings: 'the "Windy Brow" seat, the orchard seat at Dove Cottage, and the "sod-built seat of Camomile" made for Sara Hutchinson.

• Wordsworth's 'Inscription for a Seat by the Pathway Side Ascending to Windy Brow' warns readers to imagine the relief older walkers will feel on finding this seat (although surely we all enjoy the 'excuse' to rest that a seat with a good view affords...) There is a later 'version' of this poem published under Coleridge's name, 'Inscription for a Seat by the Road Side Halfway up a Steep Hill Facing South' which describes the ascent of those bent double with weak frames until 'at last / They gain this / wished-for turf, this seat of sods'. Here they 'Repose, and, well admonished, ponder here / On final rest.

• At Grasmere on September 1, 1800, Dorothy recorded that "after dinner Coleridge discovered a rock-seat in the orchard. Cleared away the brambles. Coleridge obliged to go to bed after tea." They must have managed the job eventually, with or without Coleridge, because on October 22 "C. and I went to look at the prospect from his seat." The following year there is an idyllic scene in May as William and Dorothy sowed "scarlet beans in the orchard, and read Henry V there. William lay on his back on the seat." Later, with Coleridge gone, Dorothy laments: 'how happily could we sit with Coleridge upon the moss seat!"

• It is in 'Dejection: An Ode' (1802) that Coleridge wishes Sara Hutchinson had been sitting in the 'weather-fended Wood' on 'the sod-built Seat of Camomile.' Bouslog detects the influence of Wordsworth's The Excursion, written at the same time, which mentions a kind of shelter built by children 'to weather-fend a little turf-built seat / Whereon a full-grown man might rest, nor dread / The burning sunshine, or a transient shower.' Years later the image of such a seat was still in Coleridge's mind, appearing in an unfinished text from 1822 with, Bouslog thinks, a 'tell-tale opium tone'. Its hero enters a deserted garden where, 'beneath a bushy elder-tree, that had shot forth from the crumbling ruin, something higher than midway from the base, he found a grassy couch, a sofa or ottoman of sods, over-crept with wild-sage and camomile.'

A thickening flurry

 

Determined now to rid ourselves of Netflix and save some money, we have started watching a few last films that we hadn't got round to before cancelling: last night it was Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020). At some points in this, Jessie Buckley's character is a landscape painter (I won't spoil the story by explaining why I say "at some points"). There is an awkward conversation over dinner at the parental home of her boyfriend Jake (Jesse Plemons), where she tries to explain that she imbues landscapes with "interiority". David Thewlis, Jake's father, says he wouldn't understand a landscape to be sad unless there was a sad person in the painting looking at it. Elsewhere in the house there is a reproduction of Friedrich's Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818) - a man looking at a landscape, but one that is so obscured in mist that it may not even exist. Jake's father will descend (or has descended) into dementia, gradually forgetting everything. Plemons and Buckley spend a lot of the film surrounded by darkness and a blizzard of snow.  

When Jessie Buckley pulls up some images of her paintings on her phone to show the parents, they are actually by Ralph Albert Blakelock (1847-1919) - later we see posters of his work in Jake's basement. Blakelock was a fairly obscure painter until late in life when his work began attracting attention and started selling for high prices. But he never got to enjoy the recognition - he had succumbed to mental illness in the 1890s and spent his last two decades in institutions suffering from schizophrenic delusions. There are echoes of this in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, with Jake's feelings of paranoia and the way he slips into an elaborate fantasy at the film's climax (winning the Nobel prize on the set of Oklahoma!) 

Ralph Albert Blakelock, Moonlight, c. 1885-89 
Source: Google Art Project
 

This Blakelock painting in the Brooklyn Museum also features in Moon Palace, a novel by Paul Auster, whose work occupies a similar territory to Kaufman (I've been an admirer of Auster since New York Stories and was sad to read of his death in April).  'A perfectly round full moon sat in the middle of the canvas - the precise mathematical center, it seemed to me - and this pale white disc illuminated everything above it and below it: the sky, a lake, a large tree with spidery branches, and the low mountains on the horizon...' I won't quote the full ekphrasis, although you can find the extract on a website for German English teachers. Instead I'll end here with the moment Auster's protagonist starts to notice something odd about the painting.

The sky, for example, had a largely greenish cast. Tinged with the yellow borders of clouds, it swirled around the side of the large tree in a thickening flurry of brushstrokes, taking on a spiralling aspect, a vortex of celestial matter in deep space. How could the sky be green? I asked myself. It was the same color as the lake below it, and that was not possible. Except in the blackness of the blackest night, the sky and the earth are always different. Blakelock was clearly too deft a painter not to have known that. But if he hadn't been trying to represent an actual landscape, what had he been up to? I did my best to imagine it, but the greenness of the sky kept stopping me. A sky the same color as the earth, a night that looks like day, and all human forms dwarfed by the bigness of the scene - illegible shadows, the merest ideograms of life...

Mountains and Seas

Page from The Classic of Mountains and Seas in the National Library of China

The Chinese Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Shanhai jing, composed between the third century BCE and second century CE, ought to be a brilliant source for ancient landscape ideas. Three thousand places are named and briefly described. But unfortunately they are very hard to identify and their is little on their appearance - instead we get information on the presence of valuable deposits like jade and gold, plants (often medicinal), animals, mythical creatures and gods. Anne Birrell, who translated the Penguin edition, is so adamant that the whole book should be seen as mythology that she refrains from supplying any notes speculating on real locations and gives everywhere an English name - so for example Book One, Chapter One starts with Mount Magpie, Mount Raiseshake, West Sea, River Sveltedeer and so on. 

Why can't these mountains and rivers be pinned down? Apart from the fact that ancient cartography is inevitably unreliable, Chinese toponyms are always changing. The book may preserve some historic names from pre-Zhou times - geographical units were overhauled by the early Zhou emperors and all changed again when the dynasty fell. But it's more than this - the moment you start reading the descriptions you realise they are unlikely to be about real places. Just one example:

Two hundred leagues further north is a mountain called Mount Northpeak. Oranges, wild date, and hardwood trees are plentiful here. There is an animal here which looks like an ox but it has four horns, human eyes, and the ears of a sow. Its name is the all-dote. It makes a noise like a honking goose. It eats humans. The River Alldote rises here and flows west to empty into the River Hubbub. The dwarf sturgeon is plentiful in the River Alldote. It has a fish's body and a dog's head. It makes a noise like a baby. If you eat it, it will cure madness.

'In sum,' Birrell concludes, 'although there are some recognizable landmarks in the early part of the Classic [I wish she had footnoted them!], due to the vagaries of regional culture, the process of historical change, the lore of ritual practice and the mythological mode, the world the reader is invited to circumnambulate, for all its seemingly precise details and place-names, is largely an imaginary and mythical landscape.'

Cry woe, you glades

 

Still thinking about the landscape of Sicily (above) which we saw on our holiday at Easter, I have been re-reading the Idylls of Theocritus, along with translations of other bucolic poems and fragments collected in the Loeb volume Theocritus, Moschus, Bion. Theocritus and Moschus were from Sicily and Bion also wrote in the Dorian dialect but originally came from Phlossa, near Smyrna. I thought I would focus here on the Lament for Bion which has always been published with work by Moschus but cannot be by him - the author is unknown. Here, translated by Neil Hopkinson, is the first stanza, in which the whole landscape weeps for Bion.

Cry woe, you glades and you Dorian waters; you rivers, weep for the lovely Bion. Lament now, you plants that grow; moan now, you groves; you flowers, breathe your last, your clusters withered; you roses and anemones, bloom red now in mourning; you hyacinth, make your letters speak and take on your leaves more cries of woe: the fine singer is dead. 

Begin, Sicilian Muses, begin your grieving song.

The reference to the hyacinth's letters here is interesting for anyone who likes the idea of finding writing in nature. Its leaves had marks that resembled the letters AI. Myths related these to Ajax or the exclamation "aiai" (alas!). In one of these stories Apollo, lamenting the death of Hyacinthus, creates a flower from his blood and inscribes its leaves with the word "alas". The plant referred to here is not actually the modern hyacinth, scholars haven't identified it (maybe they could trying using AI? - sorry!!)

One thing that strikes you in reading the Lament for Bion and other pastoral poems is the way they focus on sounds. In the Idylls of Theocritus, 'song is such an integral part of the countryside that in essence it becomes its metonymy' (Ippokratis Kantzios in a book chapter, 'Theocritus Idylls 11 and 6: The Limitations of the Natural Landscape'). 

In the pastoral world, it is not only the cowherds and shepherds who constantly engage in singing competitions and pipe-playing. It is also the cicadas, frogs, linnets, finches, trees swaying in the wind, the falling water of the cascades, even the pebbles, when struck against one’s boots. The pastoral world, as imagined by Theocritus, is inconceivable without its melodious component.

In the Lament for Bion, nightingales 'lament among the dense foliage' and their song is picked up by 'the Sicilian streams of Arethusa'). They perch on branches with swallows and sing dirges to each other. The swans of Strymon also sing a lamenting dirge - Strymon was the river in Thrace that carried the head of Orpheus, still singing (a strange image I still recall from reading Russell Hoban's novel The Medusa Frequency many years ago). Bion was an oxherd and his cows also lament the loss of his music, unable to graze, while the mountains around them are silent. Meles in Smyrna, the 'most musical of rivers', grieves again because it was said that Homer, like Bion was born nearby. 'They say that from your lamenting waters you made moan for your fine son, and the whole sea was filled with the sound of your voice.' Mythical figures who cried at their loss are invoked by the poet: a Siren on the seashore, Aedon on the crags, Chelidon on the high hills and Cerylus on the green waves.

Bion himself is best known for The Lament for Adonis, a poem referred to by Ovid and Catallus and a source of the long tradition of classical elegy which would eventually lead via Milton to Shelley's poem on the death of Keats, read out in Hyde Park by Mick Jagger in memory of Brian Jones: "Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep / He hath awakened from the dream of life..." The Lament for Bion ends by imagining him in Hades where Persephone resides, able to play for her a sweet country tune. 'She too is Sicilian who used to play on the shores of Etna, and she knows the Dorian mode.' And perhaps the goddess will even restore Bion to the hills, as she once gave Eurydice back to Orpheus.