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. 

 

Sealore

 

It is nearly a decade since I featured Laura Cannell on this blog soon after she released her debut solo album Quick Sparrows Over the Black Earth. In that time she has made records that respond in different ways to specific landscapes and sites, bird and animals, folklore and local legends. Her current project is 'A Year of Lore' - a set of 12 EPs released one a month. These began in January with 'Sealore', inspired by the red deer antler harpoon found in 1931 by Norfolk fishermen off the coast of Cromer, once owned by an inhabitant of Doggerland. The latest is 'Ravenlore' which 'embraces the low tones of Raven vocalisations and was improvised and recorded live in St Andrews Church in Raveningham, Norfolk.' 

I was curious to see a map of the buildings where she has improvised and made recordings, so I made one (I'm sure this isn't remotely exhaustive). St Andrews Church is the place she keeps returning to, for New Christmas Rituals, The Sky Untuned, Sing as the Crow Flies, Reckonings and that early record, Quick Sparrows over the Black Earth. In 2022 she made We Long to be Haunted using the church's organ and 'overbow' violin, plus 'field recordings of bells and a tawny owl from her garden.' Here's how she described the experience of arriving at the church: 

In the blazing August heatwave I drove along the Waveney Valley past scorched remains of the recent field fire at Stockton. I turned into the long drive of the Hall grounds where the church resides and rattled over the cattle grid, slowly passing the animals who were sheltering from the heat together under a single tree. I longed that the church would still be cool from the night before and empty of people. Leaving my car on the dry meadow I walked the stony path alongside the woods and pushed the oak and iron door open. Inside I said hello to the familiar names carved into the stone floors and marble walls and began our conversation.

A year earlier she was engaged in These Feral Lands, a year-long project with Kate Ellis and a few other collaborators documented on Caught by the River, although as this was still the time of Covid it didn't involve too much travelling about. Another recent venture is the zine Marshlore, focused on East Anglian folk stories. I said at the start of this post that Laura Cannell responds to landscapes but she cast doubt on this notion in a 2022  Wire interview: "I don’t think about the landscape at all, so it’s interesting to me when I’m associated with it.” She says much the same thing in Justin Hopper's recent Uncanny Landscapes podcast, although she accepts that 'landscape' is there in the music. When Quick Sparrows over the Black Earth came out, "people were describing it in such a way that was so related to the landscape... It's exactly what I was in but I just never knew you could hear it."

At the brink of dawn, the morne

 At the brink of dawn, the morne, forgotten, forgetful of blowing up.

- Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land 

Near the start of Césaire's long poem about Martinique there are five passages beginning 'at the brink of dawn, the morne.' To an English reader it sounds like a reference to morning, but he is actually talking about a West Indian landscape feature. The Bloodaxe translation by Mireille Rosello and Annie Pritchard includes a glossary and this is their explanation:

morne: In the West Indies, the word 'mornes' designates hills of volcanic origins. Metropolitan French people would not be familiar with the term. Symbolically, the 'morne' is linked with marooning because runaway slaves usually tried to hide there. Sometimes groups of maroons managed to establish more permanent settlements. In Caribbean literature, a paradigm exists opposing the plain, cane fields, submissiveness and the 'morne,' marooning, revolt and the woods.

I have never travelled in the West Indies but a quick google will show up 'mornes' in various islands aside from Martinique (where le Morne-Vert, le Morne-Rouge and Gros-Morne are the names of three Communes). There is Morne Fortune on Saint Lucia, Morne-à-l'Eau on Guadeloupe and various Dominican volcanoes with names like Morne aux Diables and Morne Plat Pays. Travellers to Martinique like Paul Gauguin and Lafcadio Hearn encountered mornes. A University of Plymouth blog post describes a visit to Morne d'Orange in pursuit of the vantage point from where Gauguin painted Martinique Landscape, now in the National Gallery of Scotland. A Telegraph article mentions Morne Lacroix in this context and quotes a curator who says it was painted from Habitation Beauregard - anyway, it's a bit confusing, but safe to say a morne is undoubtedly involved somewhere!

 

 

Paul Gauguin, Martinique Landscape, 1887

 

Lafcadio Hearn's Two Years in the French West Indies includes another definition of mornes: they 'usually have those beautiful and curious forms which bespeak volcanic origin even to the unscientific observer: they are most often pyramidal or conoid up to a certain height; but have summits either rounded or truncated;—their sides, green with the richest vegetation, rise from valley-levels and coast-lines with remarkable abruptness, and are apt to be curiously ribbed or wrinkled.' Search for 'mornes' in his text and you'll find numerous descriptions of landscape. I'll quote just one here, on the mornes of Martinique (ths could literally be described as purple prose):

Day wanes. The further western altitudes shift their pearline gray to deep blue where the sky is yellowing up behind them; and in the darkening hollows of nearer mornes strange shadows gather with the changing of the light—dead indigoes, fuliginous purples, rubifications as of scoriae,—ancient volcanic colors momentarily resurrected by the illusive haze of evening. And the fallow of the canes takes a faint warm ruddy tinge. On certain far high slopes, as the sun lowers, they look like thin golden hairs against the glow,—blond down upon the skin of the living hills. 

This is not how mornes appear in Notebook of a Return to My Native Land. Césaire's island is a 'sick paradise' (Mireille Rosello), with colonial diseases, rural poverty and a long history of slavery. Hearn describes a beautiful sunset view; here is Césaire's morne at the brink of dawn...

At the brink of dawn, the morne squatting in front of a boulimia a craving for thunderstorms and mills, slowly vomiting its human exhaustion, the morne alone and its spilt blood, the morne with its bandages of shade, the morne with its rivulets of fear, the morne with its great hands of wind.

The Angle of a Landscape

The renowned American poetry critic Helen Vendler died a few weeks ago; there was a nice piece in The Atlantic by Adam Kirsch comparing her to Marjorie Perloff, who also passed away this year. I thought I'd pick three poems from Vendler's Emily Dickinson anthology and quote from her illuminating commentaries. I'll begin with this one, which has one of those arresting first lines that draw you straight into Dickinson's poems (see my earlier post on how these have been used by artist Roni Horn).

 

Our lives are Swiss—
So still—so Cool—
Till some odd afternoon
The Alps neglect their Curtains
And we look farther on!

Italy stands the other side!
While like a guard between—
The solemn Alps—
The siren Alps
Forever intervene!

Here, Vendler says, 'while the blocking Alps are obscured by mist, one cannot even speculate about what lies beyond; but when they let down their guard, and forget to draw the curtain over their landscape, one can see, beyond the passes, an ecstatic vista. The still, cool, white life of an Alpine region remains untroubled until one senses a possible warmth. If only one could traverse the mountains!' I've always loved this idea of glimpsing a promised land, somewhere sunny and beautiful summed up in that italicised word, Italy. The Alps here are both solemn - "thou halt not" - and sirens, leading us on. Eden could be ours if it weren't forever barred from us.

 

The Angle of a Landscape – 
That every time I wake – 
Between my Curtain and the Wall
Upon an ample Crack – 

Like a Venetian – waiting – 
Accosts my open eye – 
Is just a Bough of Apples – 
Held slanting, in the Sky – 

The Pattern of a Chimney – 
The Forehead of a Hill – 
Sometimes – a Vane’s Forefinger – 
But that’s – Occasional – 

The Seasons – shift – my Picture –
Upon my Emerald Bough,
I wake – to find no – Emeralds – 
Then – Diamonds – which the Snow

From Polar Caskets – fetched me –
The Chimney – and the Hill – 
And just the Steeple’s finger – 
These – never stir at all – 

Vendler describes this as three sequential poems in one. The first three stanzas provide 'an enticing picture of a small sliver of landscape that is familiar to Dickinson because she sees it every morning between the edge of her curtain and the wall of her room.'  Then she moves through autumn and winter with emerald leaves replaced by diamond frost and snow. Finally there are the last three lines which leave us with a static chimney and the finger of a steeple. 'The denuding of the landscape in the last stanza is an almost invisible process' and we are left with 'a heartbreaking picture of a once-enhanced Nature which, with the death of its participatory observer, itself suffers rigor mortis.'

 

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Vendler ends her book Dickinson with this beautiful epigram, long a favourite poem of ours and one I've quoted on this blog before. She looks at the poet's word choice - for example, "prairie" is a good rhyme, distinctly American and reflects in its spelling the Latin pratum, "meadow". She also analyses the poem's linguistic game that is one of its most appealing features: the way "a" and "one" reverse their order. A bee needs just one random clover to sip nectar from, but in the second line they are separated by a comma and joined by the third essential term, "revery", which seems to arise 'as a "surprise" even to herself'. The word "revery" has various meanings, ranging from a vision to a state of being lost in thought. Its three syllables make it 'spread out' in a way you wouldn't have with the simple word 'dream'. This poem's last six brisk monosyllables bring us 'out of the dreamy reverie itself (here a clover, there a bee) into the poet's argument for the power of reverie alone, even when it is unsupported by correlative natural images. Dickinson is a rapturous poet of nature's flowers and bees, but her more abstract meditations can arise powerfully from reverie alone.'

Bitter Rice

I was at the BFI this week to see Bitter Rice (1949), a classic Italian neorealist film that also draws on elements of film noir and (in its climactic scene) the Western. It has four fine, photogenic lead actors: young Vittorio Gassman as a charming thief, Doris Dowling as his reluctant partner in crime who hides in a train full of women leaving Turin to plant rice in the Po Valley, Raf Vallone (an actor who had once played in midfield for Torino) as the good guy, a soldier stationed near the paddy fields, and, most notably, the extraordinary nineteen-year old Silvana Mangano (above) in a star making role as one of the rice workers. Its director Giuseppe De Santis, like the later nouvelle vague auteurs, had started out as a film journalist. In 1941 he wrote an article called 'For an Italian Landscape', arguing that there are 'some emotions that man cannot give voice to so we must draw on everything that surrounds him to express them.' The rice fields (which have recently suffered severe drought) act in this way, a sunlit tree-fringed mirror when the workers first arrive and a churned-up sea of mud when torrential rain threatens their livelihood.   

Pasquale Ionnane recently included Bitter Rice on a list of 10 Great Italian Pastoral Films. Although his choices are set in rural Italy you wouldn't necessarily think of them as landscape films, although I did once write a blog post here about one of them, Le Quattro Volte. The list includes Alice Rohrwacher's The Wonders (2014) and he quotes an interview with her from when it was released: “my desire to show the changes the Italian landscape has gone through – the transformation of the countryside from a place of work to a theme park celebrating ancient values […] I wanted to show how agricultural work in the here and now isn’t being safeguarded.” Rohrwacher's next feature film Happy as Lazzaro was set in a landscape lost in time (not exactly an idyll though...) Her most recent one La Chimera, which I saw with my son a couple of weeks ago (we loved it), concerns the search for Etruscan antiquities lying underneath the Italian landscape.

Perspective of the Trevi Fountain

 Office of Sir John Soane, Interior of Hagia Sophia (detail), c. 1806-19

 

Sir John Soane’s Museum currently has a small exhibition called 'Fanciful Figures', focusing on the evolution of staffage in architectural drawings. I have included here a couple of photos I took when we visited yesterday. The painting above is by an unknown artist and was used for Soane's Royal Academy lectures. He was not really interested in the design of the building ('very defective'); the point was to illustrate the vast scale of the Hagia Sophia, at that time the world's largest interior space. I think the image resembles contemporary landscape watercolours, with small figures gazing up at awe-inspiring mountainous walls. The beautiful drawing of the Trevi fountain below includes figures so small as to be somewhat surreal - they are not only tiny compared to the architecture,  they are also out of scale with each other. 'Even more strange,' the curators note, 'is that the figures stand with their feet below a thick ruled line - possibly a border line - indicating their placement outside the principal composition'. It is as if figures in a landscape have been minimised to such an extent they have been pushed outside the frame.

Laurent Pécheux, Perspective of the Trevi Fountain, c. 1755

William Aslet has written a piece for Apollo about this exhibition which mentions this question of scale. 

If we look closely at Leonard Knyff’s c. 1695 drawing of one of Sir Christopher Wren’s schemes for Greenwich Hospital, for example, we see that many of the figures are comically out of scale and that the galleons in the drawing’s foreground are the same size as the rowing boats alongside them. If they do not convey the building’s size, what purpose do these details serve? Here things become more nuanced. Knyff’s drawing of Greenwich is for a project that was never fully realised. The staffage here works alongside the exaggerated – and unrealistic – sense of perspective to beguile the viewer with vignettes that do not just give a sense of scale, but also make the building seem alive. It is no coincidence, then, that several of the most impressive drawings included in the Soane’s exhibition are for buildings that probably never could have been executed.

Boating on Ruoye stream in the spring

The Government of Zhejiang Province have recently launched the Poetry Road Cultural Belt. There is a fascinating article on the literary sources for this, ‘Spatial patterns, causes and characteristics of the cultural landscape of the Road of Tang Poetry based on text mining: take the Road of Tang Poetry in Eastern Zhejiang as an example’ by Xuesong Xi, Xingrun An, Guangming Zhang & Shifan Liang. They analyse 1593 poems written in Eastern Zhejiang by 451 poets of the Tang Dynasty. These relate to 79 places ‘which are classified into four categories, including natural land-scapes, residences of celebrities, Buddhist temples and Taoist temples, and administrative zones.’ The authors find 47 natural landscapes covered in the poems, ‘of which 36 are related to mountains and 11 to water landscape, such as Mount Tiantai, Mount Wozhou, Mount Wanwei, Jinghu Lake, Ruoye River and Shanxi River’. I've reproduced their map below.

The ‘celebrity houses’ the poems refer to are Lanting (the ‘Orchard Pavilion’ associated with Wang Xizhi, who I've mentioned on this blog before) and the houses of the politician and poet He Zhizhang (c. 659-744), Zheng Qian (a Han Dynasty diplomat) and Yan Wei (a brave Three Kingdoms period general). The Tang poems also reference the ‘folk-cultural landscape’: ‘the perch and Brasenia of Eastern Zhejiang, the Shan paper and wine of Shaoxing, the famous tea of Eastern Zhejiang from the Shanxi River and the Mount Tiantai, the various kinds of valuable medicinal herbs produced in the Mount Tiantai, and the rattan of Yuezhong, the Huading Rattan, which was preferred by the literati.’ 

I feel I should now conclude by mentioning some actual Tang Dynasty landscape poetry from Zhejiang. However, the study only covers the area south of the Fuchun River, so excludes Wuxing, where the poet-monk Jiaoran had his tea farm, Duqing where Meng Jiao lived, and the great city of Hangzhou, where Bai Juyi (as governor) built a causeway and Meng Haoran wrote a poem about watching the tidal bore (maybe I'll write about this natural phenomenon in a future post). I could talk about Hanshan (Cold Mountain) and his Buddhist friends in the Tiantai mountains, but they have featured here before. So I'll go for Qiwu Qian (692-749), whose 'Boating on Ruoye stream in the spring' is in the famous anthology of Three Hundred Tang Poems (a fraction of the number analysed by Xuesong Xi et al!)

Qiwu Qian was a friend of Wang Wei, who wrote a poem immortalising his failure to get into the civil service, 'To Qiwu Qian Bound Home After Failing an Examination'. Ruoye River is at the foot of the Kuaiji Mountain. As Stephen Owen says (in The Great Age of Chinese Poetry), Qiwu Qian's poem traces ‘the oldest thematic pattern in Chinese landscape poetry: the poet moves through the landscape, attaining enlightenment or understanding the futility of public life.’ Qiwu’s boat is blown by the evening breezes. ‘Mist over pools flies billowing, rolling, and the moon of the forest lowers behind me.'

A tin flash in the sun-dazzle

 

I'm going to write about landscape in this book, but it needs a bit of explanation first. Here's the New Directions publisher's blurb:

Rummaging through his papers in 1958, Ezra Pound came across a cache of notebooks dating back to the summer of 1912, when as a young man he had walked the troubadour landscape of southern France. Pound had been fascinated with the poetry of medieval Provence since his college days. His experiments with the complex lyric forms of Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, and others were included in his earliest books of poems; his scholarly pursuits in the field found their way into The Spirit of Romance (1910); and the troubadour mystique was to become a resonant motif of the Cantos. In the course of transcribing and emending the text of “Walking Tour 1912,” editor Richard Sieburth retraced Pound’s footsteps along the roads to the troubadour castles. “What this peripatetic editing process… revealed,” he writes, “was a remarkably readable account of a journey in search of the vanished voices of Provence that at the same time chronicled Pound’s gradual discovery of himself as a modernist poet.”

This transition towards Imagism was leading Pound to look for precise observation of nature in the best troubadour poetry. In Sieburth's introduction he describes Pound's attempts to read their poems in elements of the landscape he passed through. 

Ambling down the valley of the Dronne near Arnaut Daniel's birthplace at Ribérac, he verified the vernal vegetation of the countryside against vocabulary of the poet's cansos. Observing the rhythm of "cusps & hills, of prospects opened & shut" as the road climbed northward toward Mareuil, he wondered whether the structure of Arnaut's sestinas might not derive from patterns of recurrence in the local terrain. Having fought the wind and rain through the greater part of his journey, he reflected that he now "found a deal more force in certain lines & stanzas than I had ever expected ... if we consider them as sung by men to whom the condition of the weather was a necessary concomitant of every action & enjoyment... the prelude of weather in nearly every canzon becomes self evident, it is the actual reflection." (Three decades later, exposed to the elements at Pisa, the full force of these observations would hit home.)

Pound also had a theory about troubadour topography: that Bertran de Born's 'Lady Since You Care Nothing For Me', about a composite ideal love with features taken from the fairest beauties of Provence, actually disguised a military plan to take the castles where these ladies lived. Sieburth suspects that 'Pound was in fact unconsciously projecting his own private scenarios of phallic beleaguerment and grandeur onto the landscape of his troubadour alter-ego'. 

The notes Pound made are fragmentary - readable but hardly polished travel writing. They nevertheless contain flashes of imagistic description that anticipate the Cantos. Sieburth quotes one example, where light on the river Dordogne, 'a band of bluish metal with rippled chevrons in the shadows', looks forward to this phrase from Canto 2: 'There is a wine-red glow in the shallows, / a tin flash in the sun-dazzle.' 

The book also includes three poems from 1915 that were directly inspired by the walk - one of these, 'Provincia Deserta' provides 'the first occurrence in Pound's poetry of that rarefied, virtually Chinese landscape of mountains and valleys which provides the elevated topography of the paradiso of the late Cantos.' Sieburth quotes lines from this poem that refer to the town of Foix in the Pyrenees and I'll conclude here with some of the original notes Pound made in 1912:

To Foix by night...

We are come again to a place where the waters run swiftly & where we have always this chinese background. The faint grey of the mountains...

I had at last my plan of starting late in the day so the hills were full of cloud & mist & there were bright & dim colours upon them. I went into this Coliseum of hills with Foix like Caesar's stand behind me, but with a veiled light over it & scarcely visible. I went out the other end where a great sheet of rock juts thru the quarry, out & into a paler basin that faced me with light emerald & pearlish shadows. Then you go up & over till the sky shows blue before you. It is not the rd. of the diligence. One may lie on the earth & possess it & feel the world below one.

Of related interest:

'Ezra the Troubadour' - an article on Pound's travels and poems that includes Sieburth's map.

'Poundian Itineraries': An attempt to map Pound's later 1919 walking tour (and another article on his third walking tour in 1923).

The Fountain of Arethusa

 There is sweet music in that pine tree's whisper...

- Theocritus, Idyll 1, trans. Anthony Verity

Last week I was in Syracuse, the home of Theocritus and, by extension, pastoral poetry. The first of his Idylls begins with two comparisons of nature and music. The words above are spoken in the poem's opening line by Thyrsis, praising the music of a goatherd's pan pipes. The goatherd replies 'shepherd, your song sounds sweeter than the water tumbling / over there from the high rock.' Thyrsis is persuaded to sing The Sufferings of Daphnis, the lament of a dying Sicilian cowherd (the reasons for his death are left mysterious). I have described here before Virgil's references to Daphnis in his Eclogues, and also the ancient novel Daphnis and Chloe, although in that story Daphnis tends goats on Lesbos. Re-reading Theocritus after visiting Sicily reminded me that many of his poems are set in the wider Greek world, although Idyll 16, is addressed to the tyrant of Syracuse, Hieron II. Both Idyll 16 and Idyll 1 refer to Arethusa, a spring that you can still visit on the island of Ortygia (the old centre of Syracuse). It is just be the sea and walled in to create a pond inhabited by fish and ducks.  

 

In Greek mythology, Arethusa was a nymph who fled from her home in Arcadia, emerging eventually as a fresh water fountain on Ortygia. The predatory male in this story was Alpheus, a river god, who pursued her until she prayed to be transformed into a cloud. But Alpheus wouldn't let up and, perspiring with fear, she turned into a stream and flowed through the sea until she reached safety in Syracuse. Ovid called her Alpheius - the name of a Greek river (it is said that a wooden cup thrown into the Alfeiós will eventually turn up in the Spring of Arethusa). Virgil alludes to this story when Aeneas reaches Sicily: 'an island lies over against wave-washed Plemyrium, / stretched across a Sicilian bay: named Ortygia by men of old. / The story goes that Alpheus, a river of Elis, forced /a hidden path here under the sea, and merges / with the Sicilian waters of your fountain Arethusa.' Virgil addresses his tenth Eclogue to Arethusa and refers to the story of Daphnis told by Theocritus, relocating the setting from Sicily to (an imaginary) Arcadia.

John Martin, Alpheus and Arethusa, 1832

 

Unsurprisingly Arethusa gets frequently mentioned in later pastoral poetry, right up to Wordsworth, who wonders in The Prelude whether 'that fountain be in truth no more'. Milton had referred to it in his elegy Lycidas, along with Mincius, a river in Italy that features in Virgil's Eclogue 7. 'O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood, / Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds, / That strain I heard was of a higher mood.' But Samuel Johnson was not impressed with poetry of this kind. 'It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.'

A Tale of the Wind

Mentioning Bert Haanstra, a Dutch documentary maker, in my last post reminded me of the great Joris Ivens. I referred to him back in 2008 when I wrote about the city symphony films being made in the late 1920s. Rain (Regen, 1929) displayed an interest in the elements that persisted all his life. The image above of Ivens on a mountain in China is from A Tale of the Wind, which was released sixty years later, three months before he died. Derek Jarman was an admirer and mentions it three times in Modern Nature:

• 'Before we turned in: a ravishing film by Joris Ivens, at 90 chasing the elusive wind in China. The most refined work, it made the Hitchcock season look dreadful.'

• 'So late at night. I weep for the garden so lonely in the shingle desert. Dear Jean [Cocteau], am I the only one who, besides you, has funded a film on his name? Joris Ivens' perfect film of the wind? So few escape to tread this path. Hedges of money, fixed stars.'

• 'Joris Ivens walking breathless into the desert to find the wind. Asthmatic.'  

Like Jarman and Ivens I have always had asthma and love the idea of the aged director setting off to discover the secret of breathing in the rhythm of the autumn wind. Ivens was born in 1898, so was almost as old as cinema itself and A Tale of the Wind includes a fantasy sequence based on Georges Méliès’A Trip to the Moon (1902), as well as clips from a couple of his own films made in the thirties. When Jarman saw it he was forty-seven, almost half as young as Ivens, HIV positive and starting to suffer from the respiratory illnesses that would restrict his film making. In Modern Nature he describes listening to the wind at Dungeness and storms rattling the old walls of his cottage: 'a wild wind roared through the night, chasing sleep to the edge of dawn.' That morning he woke to 'crystalline sunlight, all the dark humours blown away by the wind. The crocuses open quickly, bright yellow petals spread wide open at noon. The purple and white in the shadows. The snowdrops are out; and before the sun disappears round the house the first daffodil has opened.'

There is an excellent article on A Tale of the Wind by Jonathan Rosenbaum, written in 1992. He concludes by describing its final scene. 

Still later, trekking across mountains and desert with his camera and sound crew in search of the elusive wind, he is told by a Chinese peasant woman, perhaps a witch, that she can draw a magic figure in the sand that will beckon the wind out of hiding. She needs, however, two electric fans, and these are promptly sent for and delivered to the site by a camel, leading to the ecstatic miracle that forms the film’s climax. Like the Mélièsian warrior sequence, it is yet another instance of folklore and technology, archaeology and fantasy being brought into a sublime proximity, even a communication with each another. It is Joris Ivens’s message to — or is it from? — the 21st century, if only we are brave and alert enough to listen.

Mirror of Holland

This morning I walked along our local canal, with bright sunny weather creating reflections of the barges and bridges, the buildings of Hoxton and Haggerston, a few trees and many joggers pounding down the path. This evening I watched Mirror of Holland, made up entirely of shots of canal reflections, which won the short film Palme d'Or in 1951. It begins with the windmill below and a young lad who bends down to see the image the 'right way round' - the rest of the film continues in this way, with the reflections turned into water-blurred moving images of farms, gabled houses, a church tower, locks and canal boats. The director Bert Haanstra went on to make many other documentary films - his other big success was based on another reflective medium, Glass (1958).

Mirror of Holland put me in mind of Haanstra's Dutch contemporary M.C. Escher, whose compositions like Puddle and Three Worlds are interested in how water can contain a landscape. There are some abstract moments in the film that look like Escher's Rippled Surface which also dates from 1950. Of course there are reflections in Dutch Golden Age paintings too and you could probably make a version of Haanstra's film by montaging these together - the example below is in Jan Van de Heyden's Country House on the Vliet near Delft (1665). 

The purple glow of evening

Carl Gustav Carus, Woman on a Balcony, 1824
(used as the cover for OUP edition of The Mysteries of Udolpho).

The Mysteries of Udolpho is one of those famous novels like Wuthering Heights or Frankenstein that I've read with certain prior expectations, only to be surprised by how much else there is beyond the story I imagined it would be. One reason is that, like many people, I came to Ann Radcliffe's Gothic bestseller with a caricature in mind, formed by Jane Austen's parody Northanger Abbey (a book I quoted here back in 2008). But it is also a novel designed to frustrate your expectations, with slow sections and plot digressions that must be read before its numerous mysteries are explained. The obvious reaction on putting it down is that this 670 page novel could have been an exciting 200 page story if it had stuck to the Castle of Udolpho and not allowed its heroine an anticlimactic and relatively easy escape from the villain Montoni. But if you are interested in landscape and the way it was appreciated there is much of interest before and after Emily is incarcerated in the Apennines.

Ann Radcliffe's reference points are the standard ones in Britain at the time:

• The Mysteries of Udolpho is greatly influenced by Edmund Burke's theory of the Sublime and the term itself is frequently used. Descriptions of mountain landscapes, the great gloomy castle and Montoni's fierce face are clearly designed to evoke feelings of delightful terror. 
  

• The perilous paths Emily travels are straight out of Salvator Rosa. Banditti and murderous armed men are not just figments of her imagination. The novel is set in the sixteenth century but a 'scene of barrenness' interrupted by 'the spreading branches of the larch and cedar, which threw their gloom over the cliff, or athwart the torrent that rolled in the vale' was 'such a scene as Salvator would have chosen, had he then existed'.
  

• The novel's chapters begin with quotations from poets and it is no surprise to see James Thomson's The Seasons featuring along with Shakespeare, Milton and others. Verse epigraphs are still standard practice (Thomas Halliday uses them effectively in his recent book on prehistoric landscapes, Otherlands) but Radcliffe pioneered this technique. 

Like other writers from the Romantic period, Radcliffe's way of viewing nature was influenced by William Gilpin and she had followed him to the Lake District in search of picturesque scenery. Her heroine meets and falls in love with a free-spirited young chevalier encountered while he is on the kind of walking tour alone in the mountains that Coleridge and Wordsworth would later enjoy. As the OUP edition's editor Bonamy Dobrée says in his notes 'it is surely no accident that Radcliffe's villains do not care for landscape'. 

Because Radcliffe had never at this stage set foot in the south of France or Italy, her descriptive passages are based on those of travel writers like Hester Thrale. Some readers might dislike the idea of landscape imagined from a distance and through the prism of other books in this way, but there are moments where The Mysteries of Udolpho reminded me of the dream-like journeys I have praised here before in books by Kafka and Eichendorff. Radcliffe's vision of Venice, with its unintentional anachronisms, is as unreal as Kafka's New York and Eichendorff's Rome, but it has a poetic quality that would appeal to Byron. 

Terry Castle, in her introduction to the OUP edition, describes the early part of the novel as a 'bizarre quasi-travelogue' where 'the narrative repeatedly dissolves into extended diffuse, often phantasmagoric descriptions of landscape'. And she quotes the passage, below, saying that at moments like this the novel 'seems hypnotized by the possibility of not becoming a Gothic novel - of remaining instead in a world of beautiful unfolding description. Transported by the hallucinatory 'charms' of nature, Emily and her friends may in turn remind us of moon-walkers, travelling in endless slow motion through a mauve-tinted dusk.'

It was evening when they descended the lower alps, that bind Rousillon, and form a majestic barrier round that charming country, leaving it open only on the east to the Mediterranean. The gay tints of cultivation once more beautified the landscape; for the lowlands were coloured with the richest hues, which a luxuriant climate, and an industrious people can awaken into life. Groves of orange and lemon perfumed the air, their ripe fruit glowing among the foliage; while, sloping to the plains, extensive vineyards spread their treasures. Beyond these, woods and pastures, and mingled towns and hamlets stretched towards the sea, on whose bright surface gleamed many a distant sail; while, over the whole scene, was diffused the purple glow of evening.

Cloud tracks and tide-ripples

 

Last weekend I went to Cambridge to see the Kettle's Yard exhibition Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia and Friends. Laura Cumming wrote in her review last November 'I can hardly think of a more uplifting show for the dying days of autumn' and I felt the same way on a cold day in January. 'Everything about it,' she goes on to say, is bright, beautiful, hopeful and as amiable as the subtitle suggests. For the Chinese artist Li Yuan-chia (1929-94) had many friends, and attracted so many more to his extraordinary “museum” in Cumbria in the 1970s that over 300 artists eventually came to work in Banks, a remote village beside Hadrian’s Wall. This show is filled with their spirit.' There's a lot to say about Li Yuan-chia and his gallery space YLC, so if you're not familiar with it I'd recommend reading that review or an article Nicholas Wroe wrote for The Guardian, '"There’s a story of racialised exclusion": the forgotten Chinese artist who transformed Cumbria'.

Li himself wasn't primarily a landscape artist, although there are abstract ink drawings he made before arriving in England that could be imagined as referencing the shapes of roads, fence posts, waves or tree forms. However, deciding to live in Cumbria and establishing the YLC in 'a landscape of farmland, fells and forestry, of uncultivated moors and unpredictable mires' (Ysanne Holt) unsurprisingly brought him into contact with artists working locally with natural materials like David Nash and Andy Goldsworthy. And some of his work did draw on the history of these borderlands - there is a photograph of him in the LYC in front of an artwork based on a map of Hadrian's Wall that resembles the gallery works made by contemporary land artists. A catalogue essay by Elizabeth Fisher compares his decision to work away from urban art centres to Kurt Schwitters in his Merz Barn and Ian Hamilton Finlay creating Little Sparta.

Li Yuan-chia's friends and associates included people I have referred to here before, like Winifred Nicholson, Frances Horovitz, Delia Derbyshire and Elsa Stansfield. The exhibition also includes Nash and Goldsworthy, Naum Gabo, Ian Hamilton Finlay (The Land's Shadows) and a Cumbrian artist I hadn't encountered previously, Donald Wilkinson (an etching/aquatint of The Greta Joining the Tees/Winter). They are among the long list of LYC Museum artists on the Li Yuan-chia Foundation website. There were also several examples of concrete poetry by Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh), including SANDROCKTIDE, shown in my photograph below. The correspondence between dsh and Li is referred to in Amy Tobin's interesting essay 'Friendship as Method' and I'll end with a nice quote from this. 'dsh said his work was akin to 'dual-space probes of inner & outer' that should be read like 'cloud tracks and tide-ripples, lichen patterns and gull flights, or simply as horizons or spirit levels.''

Radical Landscapes

Back in 2022 Tate Liverpool held an exhibition of 'Radical Landscapes'. I didn't make the effort to go because it sounded like I would be familiar with a lot of the work as well as the underlying theme. I have written here before about exhibitions questioning 'traditional' ideas of landscape and land use in Britain - see for example my post in 2012 on Patrick Keiller's Tate Britain installation The Robinson Institute. I was also rather put off by Jonathan Jones's review (even though my views often diverge from his). He took the curators to task for their naive view of Constable and illogical politics. By defining Constable’s 'love of the British countryside as something retrograde, oppressive and literally Tory, it makes nonsense of its own thesis that the land belongs to us all, as well as its warnings of the urgency of climate crisis. If loving green fields is wicked, why go there? If nature is exclusive, why save it?' Laura Cumming also noted that 'Constable gets the usual pasting for showing a rural England where the poor are free to farm and roam the land as if the Enclosure Acts had never happened,' but was overall much more positive. Anyway, I didn't get to go, so I can't really comment on all this.

The reason I mention this exhibition now is that a cut down version of it has been on display in Walthamstow's William Morris Gallery. This is just a short tube journey away for me, so I popped along last week. It was certainly full of familiar work - Derek Jarman's garden, Peter Kennard's Constable missiles, Homer Sykes' Burry Man - and went through some predictable radical history landmarks: Kinder Scout, Greenham Common, Newbury. I've seen footage of the Spiral Tribe in various music documentaries and exhibitions and it never makes those nineties outdoor raves look remotely appealing! The Neo-Naturists were on show again here - they are unavoidable at the moment, getting naked at the Barbican in RE/SISTERS and (apparently - I haven't been yet) in Tate Britain's 'Women in Revolt!' But I was expecting to see a lot of this and in such a small show there were also inevitably obvious omissions - no Ingrid Pollard or Fay Godwin for example, both of whom are in RE/SISTERS.

 

Anwar Jalal Shemza, Apple Tree, 1962

If you want to read about this Walthamstow exhibition, there is a comprehensive review of it in Studio International by someone a bit less jaded than me! I suspect I might have found more eye-opening art among works from the original Liverpool exhibition that had to be left out here. But it was definitely worth a trip (and free!) and I will end here by mentioning a Klee-like painting by Anwar Jalal Shemza that I particularly liked. I don't recall seeing this one before. Shemza was born in India and published Urdu novels in the fifties before permanently relocating to Stafford, his wife Mary's hometown, in 1962. The Hales Gallery website notes that 'throughout his career, Shemza’s visual vocabulary drew on an array of deeply studied and lived experience, from carpet patterns and calligraphic forms to the environments around him: Mughal architecture from Lahore and the rural landscapes of Stafford, England.' 

Renamed City

Talking this weekend with my teenage son about holiday ideas, we agreed that the place we would both most like to visit is St. Petersburg. I wonder when that might be possible again... I have never been, but I've always assumed I would go one day. I’m not sure I associated Leningrad with anything much when I was a child - it was when I started to read Russian literature that St. Petersburg came into focus, accompanied by a shock of recognition. In Gogol, men ‘scuttle between their offices in vast ministerial buildings and the equally soulless tenement apartments in which they live.’ When I first read his stories, I too was a lowly, alienated civil servant living in shabby accommodation. And then there was Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, ‘full of dreamers, a fact which he explained by the city’s cramped conditions, by the frequent mists and fog which came in from the sea, by the icy rain and drizzle that made people sick’ (Orlando Figes, Natasha's Dance).

 

 Vasily Sadovnikov, Panorama of Nevsky Prospect, 1830s

 

In his 1979 essay 'A Guide to a Renamed City' Joseph Brodsky talks about how the city has been reflected in Russian literature. The presence of the Neva means that St. Petersburg's 'architectural landscapes' are already reflected in water, 'as if the city were constantly being filmed by its river, which discharges its footage into the Gulf of Finland, which, on a sunny day, looks like a depository of these blinding images.' But behind these surfaces, it was the interior of the city that became the subject of Russian poetry and novels. And as this was happening, St. Petersburg itself grew and changed at extraordinary speed, until the Revolution came and it entered a long period of stasis and decline - 'quiet, immobilized, the city stood watching the passage of the seasons.' Brodsky concludes his essay with Russia's literary city preserved in the memories of Soviet school children, as they learn verse and re-read nineteenth century prose. He ends with a memorable final paragraph, that describes the cityscape in June...

A white night is a night when the sun leaves the sky for barely a couple of hours - a phenomenon quite familiar in the northern latitudes. It's the most magic time in the city when you can write or read without a lamp at two o'clock in the morning, and when the buildings, deprived of shadows and their roofs rimmed with gold, look like a set of fragile china. It's so quiet around that you can almost hear the clink of a spoon falling in Finland. The transparent pink tint of the sky is so light that the pale-blue watercolor of the river almost fails to reflect it. And the bridges are drawn up as though the islands of the delta have unclasped their hands and slowly begun to drift, turning in the mainstream, toward the Baltic. On such nights, it's hard to fall asleep, because it is too light and because any dream will be inferior to reality. Where a man doesn't cast a shadow, like water.

Scenery-Killers

Derangements of My Contemporaries is Chloe Garcia Roberts's 2014 translation of Li Shangyin's Za Zuan ('Miscellaneous Notes'). This work is a delightful oddity in literary history - the most obvious comparison is The Pillow Book that Sei Shōnagon compiled at the Heian court in Japan around a hundred and fifty years later. They both feature whimsical Borgesian lists and many of Li Shongyin's concern people's potential failings, ranging from 'Judgment Lapses' and 'Brief Odiums' to 'Raging Stupidity'. His notes refer to things you can still easily agree with, but also aspects of ninth century Chinese life that now seem remote or bizarre. 'Aggressive Posturing' for example starts with 'Seeing another's writings, aggressively rifling through them', which would sound relevant if it wasn't for our recent move from writing on paper to laptops. Next comes 'Seeing another's saddled horse, audaciously riding it', which is maybe less relevant unless you live in Texas or go in for show jumping. 'Seeing another's bow and arrow, aggressively drawing and shooting it' also sounds rude, and even less prevalent in the twenty-first century. Then we are back to something many people will have experienced, 'Reading another person's essay, aggressively drawing out its contradictions.' And so on.

I have referred here before to the poetry of Li Shangyin (c. 813–858). The reason I'm now mentioning this book (published as New Directions Poetry Pamphlet #14) is because one of his lists pertains to landscape: 'Scenery-Killers'. Here are the thirteen things Li complained about, which I've re-ordered and accompanied with a modern interpretation.

Damaged landscape: 'A weeping willow, felled'

Inappropriate architecture: 'Raising a tower on the ridge of a mountain'

Land use confusion: 'Vegetables planted in a fruit orchard'

Incongruous nature: 'Under a flowered arbor, rearing poultry' 

Incongruous underwear: 'Undergarments drying below blossoms'

Poor parking: 'A horse tethered to a stone pillar'

Disrespecting the beauty of the night: 'Carrying a flame in moonlight'

Obscuring nature with something artificial: 'A mat spread over moss'

Encumbered landscape appreciation: 'Carrying something heavy on a spring outing'

Hierarchy disrespected: 'A high-ranking officer on foot'

Nature appreciation thwarted: 'Among pines, ordered to make way'

Unexpected sadness: 'Looking at flowers, falling tears'

And not rising to the occasion: 'Speaking of mundane affairs at a banquet of courtesans'