A place with a pond

A place with a pond, in the fifth month when the rains are falling, is a very moving thing. It's deeply affecting to sit for hours on end staring out at the garden, a sea of monochrome soft green with the pond's water as deep green as the sweet flag and reeds that crowd it, and the heavy rain clouds hanging above. Indeed all places with ponds are at all times moving and delightful, and of course this is so too on winter mornings when the water is frozen over. Rather than a carefully tended pond, I find delightful the sort that have been left neglected to the rampant water weed, where patches of reflected moonlight gleam whitely on the water here and there between the swathes of green.
All moonlight is moving, wherever it may be.

- The Pillow Book of Sei Shōnagon (trans. Meredith McKinney 

I don't seem to have ever devoted a blog post to Sei Shōnagon, whose Pillow Book has been an inexhaustible source of pleasure over the years. Many of her entries on landscape are simple lists of place names she found attractive. As McKinney says in his notes, 'the charm mostly lies in the poetic associations of the name, and/or its meaning. The place itself as a geographical entity is not the point.' In an earlier section of the book, she describes why she highlights nine favourite ponds.

1. Katsumata Pond - Sei Shōnagona simply names this place, which features in the Man'yōshū collection of waka poems. It was near Toshodaiji and Yakushiji Temples in Nara.
2. Iware Pond - the possible remains of this pond in Nara were uncovered a few years ago. There is a monument there with lines from a poem written by a son of the emperor: “This is my last chance to see the ducks singing in the Iware Pond as I am destined to die today.”
3. Nieno Pond - this was somewhere Sei Shōnagon visited while on a pilgrimage to Hase. 'It was marvellous to see seemingly endless flocks of water birds rising noisily from this pond.'
4. Waterless Pond - so called because it sometimes dried up. It sounds very similar to the pond on Blackheath that I wrote about here recently. 
5. Sarusawa Pond - a 'special place' because it features in poems composed for an emperor to mourn one of the Palace Maidens, who had drowned herself. Sei Shōnagon quotes a memorable line attributed to Hitomoro that describes 'her hair tangled as if in sleep.'
6. 'Divine Presence Pond' - Shōnagon doesn't know why this one got its name. 
7. Sayama Pond - another literary site. She recalls a poet who said you can draw burr reed out of the water but if you to try to draw him from his lover's bed, 'ah I break'. 
8. Koinuma Pond - 'there's also Koinuma Pond' is all she says and I'm not sure what was special about this place.
9. Hara Pond - the last pond in her list was associated with a popular song: 'oh do not cut the jewelled weeds.'

Hasui Kawase, Sarusawa Pond, Nara, 1935

It would of course be possible to come up with similar lists of favourite ponds in England, but I will conclude here with just one example. Last summer I visited Silent Pool in Surrey, which has an evocative Japanese sounding name, although as our Rough Guide explained, it is not completely silent because you can hear traffic from the road. The water was a vivid green with pondweed, eelgrass and the reflections of surrounding trees in full leaf. The guidebook records a folk legend associated with this place that Sei Shōnagon might have appreciated: ‘A woodman's daughter was bathing in the Silent Pool when a caddish nobleman appeared. He rode his horse into the water to reach her and she drowned trying to escape him. Her father found the body and the nobleman’s hat floating on the water, which, in a sinister twist, bore the emblem of Prince John, suggesting that the future king of England was the culprit.’

Silent Pool, August 2025

Borgøya Island

I just finished reading this wonderfully depressing novel by Jon Fosse. It is about the Norwegian landscape painter Lars Hertervig (1830-1902), whose strange paintings I wrote about here a decade ago. I was writing then about a TV programme in which Andrew Graham-Dixon suggested that Hertervig's traumatic move from a poor farm on the west coast of Norway to the city of Düsseldorf was like the shock of Norway's transition from a rural backwater to a modern state. Here's how I related the artist's sad story, which inspired John Fosse's Melancholy I-II:

One day, Hertervig, who had fallen in love with the beautiful daughter of his landlady in Düsseldorf, was told that a rendezvous had been arranged with her. But when he arrived to meet her he found no one there but a bunch of bullying, mocking students. This practical joke contributed to a depression which led him to return to Norway, where he was placed in the asylum at Gaustad. After eighteen months, 'incurably insane', Hertervig went home to his family.

That terrible bullying experience at the hands of his fellow painters is powerfully evoked through interior monologue in the first part of the book. In Part 2 we find Hertervig suffering in the Gaustad asylum, while Part 3 is told from the perspective of a modern-day writer who has an emotional, quasi-religious experience in front of Hertervig's painting Borgøya Island. The fourth part, Melancholy II, was added in 1996 and is perhaps the most upsetting section of all, tracing the thoughts of Hertervig's elderly, incontinent sister during the course of one afternoon, soon after his death in 1902.

Lars Hertervig, Borgøya Island, 1867

While reading the first part of the novel, set on that fateful day in the Autumn of 1853, I was curious to know more about the "painters who can't paint", as Hertervig describes his contemporaries. He excludes from this judgement Hans Bude, the Düsseldorf Art Academy's young Norwegian tutor. Hertervig, in the novel, frets about whether Bude will criticise his art, although when they meet each other in the street Bude is encouraging. It wasn't artistic criticism that precipitated Hertervig's breakdown. Fosse also mentions 'Tidemann' who I took to be Adolph Tidemand, another older Norwegian artist. Tidemand's talent for figure painting led him to collaborate with Gude on landscape scenes like the Bridal Procession I have reproduced below. The place where all these painters used to meet up in Düsseldorf was Malkasten, which I imagined as a large beer hall full of students. In fact it was a renowned artist's association ('Malkasten' means Painter's Box) which in Hertervig's day hired out restaurant rooms. Malkasten was founded in 1848 and is still going today, having undergone numerous changes over the years (they now have a bar 'where art meets gastronomy').

Adolph Tidemand and Hans Gude, Bridal Procession on the Hardangerfjord, 1848 

When Hertervig first enters Malkasten, already in a fragile state, he encounters 'Alfred', who will later go out of his way to deceive him into thinking Helene, the girl he loves, is sitting somewhere at the back of the bar. There were a few real artists at that time called Alfred, but I am guessing he is not based on an actual person? (If any Fosse or Hertervig experts are reading this, feel free to put me right!) Another artist we encounter is 'Müller' who must be Morten Müller (1828-1911), a painter whose views of fjords and pine forests can be seen in Norway's National Gallery. 'Capellen' is briefly mentioned too, presumably August Capellen (1827-52) although he died of cancer the year before the novel is set and doesn't appear as a character. Alfred's main accomplice is 'Bodom' and he too was a real person, the Norwegian landscape painter Erik Bodom (1829-79) who Hertervig admits "can paint. But Bodom is not as good a painter as I am." 

Erik Bodom, Landscape with a Waterfall, 1855

As Hertervig talks to Bodom he is increasingly confused with sexual delusions, visions of Helene and images from his past life on Borgøya Island. Something is clearly wrong... 

This is your first time at Malkasten, isn't it, he says.
And I look straight into Bodom's eyes, and his eyes are grinning, I see Bodom's eyes grinning and just like that his eyes turn into bog-holes, black, wet, and then someone pulling, sinking, splashing in the bog, hard, the hand moves fast, pulls up, down, tightens, tightens, and I can't pull my foot free and it's stuck and then, up ahead, is the light that sucks and comes at me and pulls me down...

Listening to Insects at Dōkan Hill

Utagawa Hiroshige, Listening to Insects at Dōkan Hill, 

from the series Famous Places in the Eastern Capital, 1835-1845 

This is one of the prints that was on display in the British Museum's exhibition Hiroshige: artist of the open road last year. Lafcadio Hearn published an essay on 'insect musicians' and the listening practices surrounding them in his collection Exotics and Retrospectives (1898):

There are charming references to singing-insects in poetical collections made during the tenth century, and doubtless containing many compositions of a yet earlier period. And just as places famous for cherry, plum, or other blossoming trees, are still regularly visited every year by thousands and tens of thousands, merely for the delight of seeing the flowers in their seasons,—so in ancient times city-dwellers made autumn excursions to country-districts simply for the pleasure of hearing the chirruping choruses of crickets and of locusts,—the night-singers especially. Centuries ago places were noted as pleasure-resorts solely because of this melodious attraction;—such were Musashino (now Tōkyō), Yatano in the province of Echizen, and Mano in the province of Ōmi. Somewhat later, probably, people discovered that each of the principal species of singing-insects haunted by preference some particular locality, where its peculiar chanting could be heard to the best advantage; and eventually no less than eleven places became famous throughout Japan for different kinds of insect-music. [He goes on to list them...]

The Hiroshige print is analysed in a 2023 acoustic ecology paper by soundscape researcher Keiko Torigoe. She includes a description of Dōkan Hill from the Edo Meisho Zue (1834-6).

There are many medicinal herbs in this area, and people who gather medicines always come here. Especially in autumn, pine insects and bell ringers make exquisite sounds. Therefore, courtesans and persons of elegance and refinement all come here to recite poems in the winds and sing songs under the moon, appreciating the sound of the insects.

The pine insect is the matsumushi 'much esteemed for the peculiar clearness and sweetness of its notes', according to Hearn, and the bell ringer is the suzumushi which 'in certain lonesome places might easily be mistaken,—as it has been by myself more than once,—for the sound of rapids.' You can hear what they sound like on YouTube: here are links for the pine cricket and bell cricket. There is actually a temple in Kyoto known as Suzumushidera because the monks keep bell crickets there to sing all year round.  

Dōkan Hill features in other 19th century prints. Hiroshige's son-in-law Suzuki Chinpei (Hiroshige II) composed a scene similar to the one above in 1864: Listening to insects on Dōkan Hill. There is a comic 1859 scene by Utagawa Hirokage called Catching fireflies at Mount Dōkan, which the Library of Congress describes as showing 'four men drinking alcoholic beverages in a field at night' (one of them is rolling round, clearly pissed as a pudding). And in 1884 Kobayashi Kiyochika depicted a couple climbing the hill to enjoy the views, whilst in the foreground a horse looks startled, perhaps by the sight of some huge white daikon radishes lying on the floor. I'll end here with another example: a simple and rather lovely pink and turquoise view of the landscape below Dōkan Hill, by Hiroshige himself.    

Utagawa Hiroshige, Below Dokan Hill, 

from the series Twelve Views of Edo, c. 1835 

Over stones, under alders

 

At the Small Publishers Fair last year I caught a reading by John Bevis from A Surrey Naturalist, his new collection of eighty found poems derived from an old book by the broadcaster and conservationist Eric Parker. Afterwards I talked to John and his publisher Colin Sackett about the techniques of found poetry and the challenges of writing about the landscape of your childhood. His main method was erasure, where poems emerge from the original work by retaining only a few words, in their original order, arranged into stanzas. I liked his simple idea for 'Swifts innumerable', a poem where everything is erased but the punctuation, which floats freely on the page like swifts glimpsed in a cloudy sky. He also used a Jonathan Williams-style cutout - 'a piece of card, smaller than a postcard, with a central rectangle about the size of a matchbox removed' - and an approach inspired by stargazing where he would visually sweep Parker's pages in order to spot interesting words in his peripheral vision. 

Having grown up in Brighton, I always viewed Surrey as the place you had to pass through on the way to London. John addresses the stereotypical view of Surrey in his introduction and regrets that it is 'pretty much at the bottom of the heap in terms of poetic credibility, authenticity of voice, rootedness.' It has a strong association with stories of childhood - Lewis Carroll, J. M. Barrie, E. H. Shepard. I remember as a teenage Tolkien fan reading Michael Moorcock's description of the Shire (in 'Epic Pooh') as 'a Surrey of the mind', and thinking how unfair it was to compare Middle Earth to a place I associated with retired bankers. However, as John points out, there were always elements of industry here and links to writers like Wells and Huxley who had darker visions of humanity. Eric Parker's book, published in 1952, covers this cultural history but also provided fresh and vivid observations of nature that John felt he could rework into poems evoking the landscape of his childhood whilst bypassing the selectivity of memory.

A Surrey Naturalist (this version but evidently the original too) varies its approach from chapter to chapter, providing different lenses on the county and its topography. I particularly enjoyed a section called 'Country Chances', the first page of which is reproduced on the Uniformbooks website. You can see there the Ian Hamilton Finlayesque 'Visitors from Sea', a brief meditation on travel in 'Thought of a Journey' and the enigmatic 'Riddles of a Lawn'.  Later in the chapter there is a poem called 'Cuttings of Hazel' that turns Parker into a haiku poet: 'Difficult to choose / a carpet of snow // over a carpet / of primroses.' I will end here by quoting a poem on the Surrey landscape (sticking, as ever, to my blog's theme), from the chapter 'Rivers and Streams'. I was briefly tempted to create my own composite found poem from John's, but will spare you this further level of condensation and abstraction. You could also, I suppose, move in the opposite direction and re-imagine Parker's chapter based solely on his found texts, but the resulting descriptions would no doubt let back in that 'Surrey of the mind' we all carry around with us. 

Over stones, under alders. Under oaks, dun water.
Above, the sun. More beyond.
Dried up in summer, the drought of last summer.
Dried up in spring, and dry in summer.
Heard of streams: a bubbling melody in three bars, of moaning, loud cries, whoop and whirr.
To find the source, to trace the river to a pond, to some fish, to swimming.

This photograph was taken in August last year, when I was walking with my sons by Tillingbourne in the Surrey Hills.  Sunlight on dun water...