A Map of Some Landscapes

I recently added a Map of Blog Posts to this site, replacing the earlier ones which were were restricted in what they could show. You can see the link above if you're reading this on the web version, or just click here. The map allows you to zoom in and out and alight on a pin to see the title of the post, along with date, location, labels and a link that will take you to it. It's interesting to see the distribution of what I have written about over the years - mostly Europe, America and the Far East, very little in Africa... I should try to fill some of those blanks on the map! There is a search function that covers the information on each pin. In the example below I've entered "mountain" and, because each post relating to mountains has a 'mountains' label, these all show up - lots in China and the Alps. You can also enter the names of people where I have labels for them, e.g. Turner. One caveat with all this is that each blog post can only have one location. In my last post for example I went for Isla Perejil, but might have opted for Gozo or Dakhla. And some of my posts, on imaginary landscapes, have no location at all. 

The island of Calypso

periplum, not as land looks on a map

but as sea bord seen by men sailing.

Ezra Pound, Canto LIX 

We went to see Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey. What did I think of it? I agree with what translator Daniel Mendelsohn wrote in the New York Review of Books and I recommend reading his essay. Emily Wilson's scathing LRB review was entertaining but had me wincing from that second paragraph, where the recurrent themes he has explored in his films are brutally dismissed ("yet again... yet again"). In The Guardian I noticed a 4 star review of Richard E Grant’s Very Modern Odyssey and thought this might be fun, but I should have read more carefully before trying to watch it. He is a National Treasure of course and beyond criticism, but... I'll just say that this series, sponsored by P&O cruises, wasn't really really my thing. In what I saw of the first episode he was on Gozo, looking at Calypso's cave, a site associated with her mythical island, Ogygia, since the 4th century BCE. Christopher Nolan actually filmed at the cave on Gozo, but for the beach scenes (above) he chose a saltwater lagoon near Dakhla in the Western Sahara. The reasons why this has been so controversial are set out in a Guardian article by Mohamed Sleiman Labat.    

The Paris Review has an extract online from Daniel Mendelsohn's translation of The Odyssey Book V, describing the landscape seen by Hermes after he arrives on the island, after crossing the seas and skimming along the breakers. He finds 'the nymph of the beautiful braids' by an enormous fire and the aroma of cedar and juniper 

Drifted all over the isle while she lifted her lovely voice
In song and wove back and forth at her loom with a golden shuttle.
A luxuriant growth of trees spread out all around the cave,
Alder and black poplar and sweet-smelling cypress as well,
And the birds inside them were sleeping, their wings outstretched,
Little horned owls and hawks, as well as cormorants,
Their chattering tongues stretched out—birds who work the sea.
Round about the mouth of the hollow cave, a vine
Had been trained to climb; now it flourished, bursting with clusters of grapes.
Four springs, all in a row, flowed with the clearest water,
Their streams running side by side, then turning this way and that.
All around were velvety meadows where violets and bay grass were growing Lushly.
Even a god who chanced upon this scene
Would marvel at the sight, pleasure filling his mind.

Jan Brueghel the Elder, Odysseus and Calypso in the caves of Ogygia, 1606-9

Gozo is far from being the only contenders for Calypso's island - Greece, for example, currently favours Othonoi which has another picturesque cave that tourists can visit. Many writers since Strabo and Plutarch have pronounced on the subject and the great French Homer scholar Victor Bérard (1864-1931) decided it was Perejil, an islet off the coast of Morocco (the country now occupying Western Sahara). Perejil, owned by Spain, is near Ceuta, scene of the recent mass migrant crossings and there was nearly a conflict there in 2002 when Moroccan troops turned up. These tensions were very much there when Bérard was trying to find Ogygia. 'General Alfau, who commands the Spanish troops in the Western Rif and resides in Ceuta, had written to our consul in Gibraltar stating that he would support our search for Calypso with all the means at his disposal; thanks to him, after ten years of anxiety and doubt, I have seen all my hopes confirmed...' I read this in the four-volume account of his travels round the Mediterranean that Bérard published in 1927-1929. You can see below my photograph of the map he made of The Odyssey, and in other volumes his illustrations of Ithaca and 'Le Royaume de Calypso' - Ile Peregil. Bérard managed to overcome the fact that Perejil doesn't have the crucial four springs by noting that there were some on the mainland, just across a short stretch of water. It doesn't sound very convincing to me, but when Bérard was in the cave on Perejil he received a Homeric sign - a little owl actually fell on his head. 

Before these travels Bérard had advanced a new theory that The Odyssey is based on Phoenician trade routes, as set out in periploi, the lists of ports and navigation marks compiled by ancient sailors. 'Tout périple est un chapelet de noms propres. Notre poème est une galerie de personnages. Ce sont les noms du périple qui sont devenus les personnages du poème.' Names become people, so Calypso, for example, would have been the personification of a geographical name on a periplus. The poem represents the transformation of a static list of sites into dynamic human actions that form a story. Perhaps therefore, in one sense, The Odyssey can be seen as a kind of landscape writing. 

All this brings us back to Ezra Pound, whom I quoted at the start. Pound read Bérard in 1930 and mentioned the 'periplum' (spelling it with an 'm') in The ABC of Reading (1934). In his Cantos, the form of a reader's journey emerges from information encountered along the way, like islands in the Mediterranean.

Victor Bérard discovered that the geography of The Odyssey, grotesque when referred to a map, was minutely accurate according to the Phoenician voyagers' periploi. The image of successive discoveries breaking upon the consciousness of the voyager is one of Pound's central themes of the New Learning ... The periplum, the voyage of discovery among facts, whose tool is the ideogram, is everywhere contrasted with the conventions and artificialities of the bird's eye view afforded by the map. Forms grow out of data. They are not imposed upon data.' 

- Hugh Kenner, The Poetry of Ezra Pound (1951)

The gem of the skies in a summer season

Phoenix rising by the sun in the Aberdeen Bestiary
Source: University of Notre Dame

It has been intensely hot again this week and I was listening on the news this morning to reports of fires in the Midlands. It made me think of these lines from 'The Phoenix', a 10th century Old English poem in the Exeter Book which expands upon an older Latin text.

When the gem of the skies
in a summer season, hottest with the sun, shines across the shadows
and performs its destiny, surveying the world,
then the bird’s house becomes heated by the glowing sky. 
The herbs are warmed, the house of desire steams 
with sweet fragrance, then in flames that bird burns
through the grip of the fire amid its nest.

Of course the poem has a hopeful theme, as the fire is not destructive - the phoenix regenerates. In her fascinating book about the Anglo-Saxon year, Winters in the World, Eleanor Parker links this self-immolation and rebirth to the seasonal cycle. The word used to describe the bird's nest is solere, borrowed from the Latin solarium, which in Old English meant 'an upper chamber in a house, a room that gets lots of sun. Not many Anglo-Saxon houses had upper rooms, so the phoenix is special in having this sunny chamber all to himself, up in his tree amid the feafsceade, 'shade of the leaves.'' This sound lovely, although I'm typing this now in the boiling upper room of our house, in the heat island of London, where there is no shade from any trees.

Eleanor Parker describes 'The Phoenix' as 'the most sun-drenched poem in the corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature', with 'some of the loveliest nature writing.' Its poet 'dwells with delight on scenes of blazing sunshine, leafy glades and cooling rivers.' Line 33 includes the word lixeð, which means 'glitters', and 'seems to evoke the flickering play of light in a tree-shaded grove, a dappled sunlight that shifts with the rustling of the leaves.' This quote from her book (p152) illustrates why I liked it so much - she takes fragments of natural description, often just words, and expands them into evocative landscapes. Another example is a few pages earlier, where she is talking about 'The Rhyming Poem'. This is narrated by a king or lord in 'a succession of swiftly changing pictures,' and includes this phrase: 'Ornamented horses / bore me across the meadows on paths of joy, / beautifully hung about with long branches.' She pictures him touching those long branches as he passes through the meadows, wongas, 'open green spaces, far-spreading plains and downs - the kind of landscape where a spirited horse with a fearless rider could really let himself go.'

 

Prehistory from the Air

 

In the late 1930s comparisons were often made between new art and ancient landscapes. In British Art: Ancient Landscapes Sam Smiles cites an essay by John Piper which refers to the work of Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, who 'has landed us back in the stomach of pre-history' and Paul Nash, who 'leaves us with the bare sea-washed bones of it.' A Barbara Hepworth catalogue compared her work to menhirs and in an article about her work in Circle, the journal that promoted 'constructive art', she included photographs of Stonehenge. One of these images was taken by Carola Giedio-Wecker, who had recently written a study of contemporary sculpture featuring Stonehenge, the Table des Marchands and the stone alignments of Carnac. Perhaps the best frequently cited example of this is 'Prehistory from the Air', the article Piper wrote for the Winter 1937 edition of Axis, edited by Myfanwy Evans (his new wife). This can be read online, so I thought I'd quote from it here, beginning with his thoughts on flight and landscape art: 

Because flying has not created any new consciousness about spaces or vistas or anything else, it has simply served the new consciousness, and has been forced on in its development by it. It has grown up with it in fact, which is the only reasonable way for an invention to work. So the horizon line vanishes, from the air. It has also vanished (nearly) from painting. Instead of being the end-all of landscape, it is now there on sufferance. It is not really strange that air photography began in the '80's, and that about the '80's the horizon in landscapes (with Courbet or Cézanne) was getting much less conscious of itself—no more self-conscious than the foreground, or the background, or the middle distance, ail of which were becoming parts of the same consistent parcel. For contrast, think of Claude's skyline castles in the scenery of his wonderful natural theatre. At its simplest, the change is one from elevations to plan. The picture has tipped over backwards on to the floor, and in being raised again it has brought part of the floor with it. Picasso, Braque, Klee, Matisse have painted elevations of wineglasses, gardens and windows at Nice which have the added richness and meaning of plan-patterns.

Piper's essay is followed by a colour reproduction of a Miró painting and in the composite image above I've juxtaposed it with what he put on the previous page, two images of Silbury Hill - very different but equally interesting. The top one is from William Stukeley 1724 publication Stonehenge and Avebury. 

Stukeley, above all, wanted to record the effort and the feeling for shape of the men who built it. Size and contour are all-important. The story of the size is well told, and as to the shape to jump, run, walk, or struggle up each slope with Stukeley in his drawing is as real and as sharp an experience as to take a journey round a wineglass with Picasso. The air-photograph is flat and subtle. The effect of suddenness that the mound gives in the plain, and the sense of size that the surroundings try to contradict, is as strong as that of ail Stukeley's fold-explorations. Both these representations of Silbury Hill are beautiful—and together they give a very fair idea of this large and curious mound— but so different that it is hard to realise that each gives a reasonable account of the same monument.

Piper doesn't talk about that Miró painting, but the Spanish artist does feature in a later article in this issue of Axis, Anthony West's 'No Revolution.' In talking about abstract art he mentions an early painting done in a vary different style.

Hemingway writes about Miró's picture, The Farm,"It has in it all that you feel about Spain when you are there and ail that you feel when you are away and cannot go there." Perhaps it was possible to give this reading to the picture and to think about happy days in the sun instead of looking at the picture. Perhaps Miró thought so too, for his paintings are no longer like postcards to hold in your hand while you think about the days when you were younger. It is the design in his mind not the memory in yours which he wants to express.  

Joan Miró, The Farm, 1921-22

It is always fascinating to leaf through an old journal or magazine (if I can say 'leaf through' about an online PDF) and here it was impossible not to be drawn to a review by the artist Robert Medley of Hitler's degenerate art show in Munich. Medley found modern paintings by Klee and Kandinsky had been badly hung, without frames, and packed in with second-rate work. Meanwhile, the Approved Art show nearby was full of pictures of Hitler, all hung in a line, along with 'boys and maidens beating drums and waving banners. Gigantic sculptures of nude men striding forward, the artist taking so much care that they should not look pansy that they ceased to be men at all— symbolism had made them inhuman. Pictures telling you what a fine thing war is...' There were also more unassuming paintings, but these were monotonous. 'I had the impression of a number of artists pleased to work quietly, with their minds relieved from having to cope with modem aesthetic or social problems. ... I was pleased to leave.'

Musashi Plain

Utagawa Hiroshige, Musashi Plain, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, 1852 

I have been reading A Tale Unasked, Penguin's new Meredith McKinney translation of Lady Nijō's Towazugatari, a court and travel diary completed around 1307. After her expulsion from the palace she became an itinerant nun, travelling to famous shrines and checking out utamakura on the way. I have discussed utamakura, places important in Japanese poetry, before (see, for example, my 2008 post on Mount Fuji seen from the Beach at Tago). I enjoyed the following passage but then turned to one of the most depressing endnotes I have read recently, which I've added below in brackets. 

The eighth month had begun. A desire to wait until I could see the famous autumn scenery of Musashino had kept me here all this time, and I now decided to return that way. The temple of Asakusa was said to have a miraculous Eleven-Headed Bodhisattva Kannon which I longed to see, and I made my way towards it across a wide plain swathed in a dense growth of Musashino's famous bush clover, together with valerian, silver-grass and mugwort, all of a height that could be judged by the fact that even a man on horseback was invisible in its midst. For three days I pressed on through it all and still there was no end. Little side roads led off to the occasional inn, but the plain stretched on far and wide behind and before me as I went. The Kannon temple was on a low rise in the midst of the treeless plain, and I thought of that poem about Musashino that goes, 'as from the grassy moor / the moon emerges', for indeed this was the night of the full harvest moon. 

[The plain of Musashino, famous in poetry for its bush clover, is where Tokyo now stands]

Edo Period gold leaf folding screen showing Musashino

The transience of famous places and landscapes over the centuries is a melancholy but fascinating topic. I was reminded here of another endnote I wrote about a few years ago, explaining that Altinum, the subject of a Martial epigram, was later sacked and ruined, although its survivors' descendants would eventually found the city of Venice. Musahino doesn't sound is pleasing as Venice - it is described on Wikipedia as 'a city located in the western portion of the Tokyo Metropolis.' When was writing, Tokyo had not yet grown out of Edo, and Edo was still just the home of a samurai clan that had only recently been founded. 

I think the poem Nijō is referring to is in the Eighth Imperial Anthology, the Shinkokinshū, composed by Fujiwara no Yoshitsune. But the most famous literary reference to Musashino is in the Tales of Ise (c. 900), a book I featured here in 2019. In episode 12 a man flees with a girl and hides in a thicket on the plain. Their pursuers are about to set the grass on fire when the girl cries out 'Please don't burn / don't burn, the grasses / of the Musashi Plain. / My beloved hides here, / and I do too'. They are arrested and marched off together - we don't learn their fate. The girl's poem is probably based on a folk song and also appears in the Kokinshū anthology, although there it's set in the Plain of Kasuga, which perhaps shows how arbitrarily stories attach themselves to landscapes. There is a wonderful depiction of this Tales of Ise scene by Kajita Hanko (1870-1917), which I came across on Edward Luper's site. As you can see, a whole landscape is suggested here through one colour, leaving mere glimpses of the lit torches and figures crouching in the grass.

Kajita Hanko, Musashino, 1903

In my last post I mentioned mitate-e parody prints, so I should briefly conclude here by mentioning Musashino (c. 1788-9), a triptych by Kitagawa Utamaro. Here the couple are a young samurai and geisha, while their pursuers are fashionably-dressed ladies carrying paper lanterns. They walk through pampas grass with an exaggeratedly large moon behind them, alluding to that famous moon of poetic tradition that Lady Nijō got to see.   

A Mirror Stand - The Autumn Moon

Utagawa Hiroshige, Views of Ōmi #3: Autumn Moon At Ishiyama Temple, 1834 

Twenty years ago I wrote here about the tradition of 'Eight Views' in Chinese and Japanese art, stemming from the original Eight Views of the Hsiao and Hsiang Rivers. The adoption of this theme in Japan was helped by the fact that only two of the eight actually mention places in China. As Haruo Shirane writes in Japan and the Culture of the Four Seasons (2012), this flexibility led 'artist, poet and audience to graft their own favourite domestic and local places onto them' - Edo, Kanazawa and most famously The Eight Views of Ōmi (Ōmi hakkei), which I listed in my earlier blog post. Here I'll be focusing on one of these, the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama, for which Hiroshige designed a lovely print in 1834, where the southern end of Lake Biwa shimmers behind the hillside. 

Views of Ōmi became so well known that by the eighteenth century it was possible to parody them. Suzuki Harunobu's 1766 Zashiki Hakkei, Eight Parlour Views, were domestic versions of the eight landscapes, with the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama transformed into a Mirror Stand. The Art Institute of Chicago has a copy and you can see below how the shape of a crescent moon appears as a result of the way the mirror is held on its stand. Autumn is signified by the miscanthus grass blowing outside this lady's window. Shirane explains that this punning mitate technique 'creates a double vision, superimpopsing the exterior landscape ... onto the interior world of urban commoners in contemporary Edo'. The mirror reflects the beauty of the woman just as Lake Biwa reflects the light of the harvest moon.

Suzuki Harunobu, A Mirror Stand - The Autumn Moon, 1766

This is all very tasteful, but Suzuki Harunobu also produced erotic prints for private consumption... Again there is a version of the Autumn Moon at Ishiyama, in these Fashionable Eight Parlour Views (1769), and again the landscape has been turned into a woman and a mirror, but she is half naked and the figure behind here is a man, grasping and fondling her. The plant outside is now a flowering pink - a nadeshiko, the word for which used to mean "the woman I love" in waka poetry. The mirror no longer resembles a crescent moon; instead it is the woman herself whos body is white as she emerges from her robes like parting clouds. Shirane explains a further pun in text that Harunobu included which refers to the pedestal unit, utena. This word can also mean 'calyx' and thus, metaphorically, female genitals. I don't normally refer readers to Wikipedia but if you are interested in all this it is well worth looking at their lengthy article on the Zashiki Hakkai, analysing each one and quoting Haruo Shirane.