What the rocky mountain tells me

Mahler's hut at Steinbach

Source: Wikimedia Commons

I have often written here about writers' huts but said nothing about composer's retreats, apart from one reference to a Tomas Tranströmer poem on Grieg in his work-cottage, 'shut in with silence.'  Gustav Mahler had three composing huts: in the Salzkammergut at Steinbach, further south at Maiernigg, and in Toblach (now Dobbiaco, in Italy).  They are all in spectacular settings and can form the basis of a tourist itinerary, although it is questionable how far we can still experience the landscapes Mahler knew.  Ten years ago, visiting the hut at Steinbach which Mahler had built in 1893 to avoid noise in the inn where he was staying that summer, Alex Ross suspected that his 'unquiet ghost is no doubt upset by the fact that his idyllic lakeside retreat is surrounded by an RV site and campground, where kids squeal all day long and German rap pumps from boomboxes.'  Nevertheless, 'if you look up to the colossal rockface of the Höllengebirge, which towers hundreds of feet above the lake, you can get a sense of why Mahler found this site so inspiring.'  Ross quotes 'Bruno Walter's memoir of Mahler: "As on our way to his house I looked up to the Höllengebirge, whose sheer cliffs made a grim background to the charming landscape, he said: 'You don't need to look — I have composed all this away!" The rockface became the introductory theme of the Third Symphony, the unison chant for eight horns, which he dubbed in one sketch "What the rocky mountain tells me."'

On that trip to Steinbach in 2005 Ross was accompanied by the critic Jeremy Eichler.  Earlier this month in the Boston Globe Eichler described a return trip.  (The article's picture caption refers to 'Gustav Mahler’s conducting hut' which leads me to imagine somewhere built because his family got fed up with him waving his baton around in their holiday inn).  Eichler writes that 'the walk had changed since my last visit. In Mahler’s time, meadows covered with wildflowers led down to the lake. Later, livestock were kept here. Eventually the site was converted into a campground. On this visit, the mobile homes I had recalled at the periphery seemed to have multiplied to the point that the area had the feeling of a full-fledged camping village.'  Apparently the hut itself had been attached to camp bathrooms until its restoration in the eighties, and prior to that it had been used as a slaughterhouse.  Leaving the hut, Eichler wonders whether more great works of art 'should have their own tiny huts, physical places you could visit that symbolize their very essence. Of course someone is always fixing their generator nearby, or wanting to turn the hut into a bathroom. But maybe the impulse to seek out these places nonetheless is not naively literal-minded so much as it is part of how we make the works our own, the way we locate their cosmic expressions on a more humble map of lived experience.'

Stone Bell Mountain

A short way downriver from Jiujiang, where the the Yangtze meets Boyang Lake, there is a famous sonorous landscape called Stone Bell Mountain (Shizhong Shan).  According to the Song dynasty poet Su Shih, 'Li Po of the T'ang was the first to travel to the site, and he found a pair of rocks protruding from the lake. "I struck them and listened," he wrote. "The one to the south sounded deep and turbid, the one to the north had a high, clear pitch. After they were struck, the sounds continued to reverberate as the vibrations slowly faded." He thought that he had thus solved the matter. But I still had my doubts about this theory.'  Su found himself in the area in July 1084 and went to investigate.  Testing Li Po's explanation he found that the rocks in the lake merely gave off a dull thud.  Later that evening, he and his son took a boat out under the cliff and heard the piercing cries of falcons, followed by the cry of an old man, or was it a crane?

'I had just begun to feel uneasy and wanted to return when loud sounds were emitted on the surface of the water, booming "tseng-hung " like continuous bells or drums. The boatman was frightened. We slowly approached to investigate and found that at the foot of the mountain were grottoes and fissures in the rock. I could not tell how deep they were, but it was the small waves which entered, surged around, and crashed against each other that were causing this sound.

'As the boat returned, it passed between two mountains and was about to enter the harbor. There was a huge rock standing in the middle of the current, which could accommodate a hundred people seated. It was hollow inside, and it also had many holes in it. It swallowed and spit out the wind and water, giving off ringing sounds—"k'uan-k'an t'ang-t'a "—as the water struck it. It seemed to reply to the booming sound we had previously heard, just like a musical performance.'

Su Shi felt he had solved the mystery of the Stone Bells, but his account stimulated further enquiries, as Richard Strassberg writes in Inscribed Landscapes, from which this translation is taken.  'Among those visiting the place during the Ming and Ch'ing periods were Ch'iu Chün (1420–1495) and Lo Hung-hsien (1504–1564), who argued that the name was based on the mountain's shape, and P'eng Yü-lin (1816–1890), who discovered an underwater grotto and asserted that the mountain was hollow like a bell.'  Are people still seeking to understand the mysteries of this landscape?  I can't find anything much about Stone Bell Mountain online beyond a few tourism sites - we need a sound artist like Wang Changcun, Yan Jun, or Chris Watson to go there and investigate in the spirit of Su Shi.

Sandwalk wood

Our print of Darren Almond's Sandwalk Wood (2014)

Each day I pass on our stairs this print by the photographer Darren Almond.  It is one of his long-exposure images taken at night, which I mentioned here previously in 'Moons of the Iapetus Ocean'.  This print came with an accompanying limited edition book, To Leave a Light Impression, which includes a short essay by T. J. Demos that uses Almond's photographs to discuss denaturalised nature, hyperobjects and the anthropocene.  Fullmoon@Cerro Chaltén (2013) for example 'shows a nature estranged'; its uncanny appearance suggests the impression it must have made on Charles Darwin, who stopped in this remote landscape during his voyage on The Beagle, and the disorientating effect his work had on Victorian ideas of nature.  Our print feels, by contrast, quiet and mysterious: the dark tree's leaves are lit with a weak golden light and a silvery mist covers the field beyond the gate.  Visitors to our house have asked what the significance of this place is.  A world away from the rivers and mountains of Patagonia, it is Sandwalk Wood near Bromley, a landscape just as important to Charles Darwin, as it contained his thinking path.  His son Francis describes it in The life and letters of Charles Darwin (1887):

'My father's midday walk generally began by a call at the greenhouse, where he looked at any germinating seeds or experimental plants which required a casual examination, but he hardly ever did any serious observing at this time. Then he went on for his constitutional—either round the "Sand-walk," or outside his own grounds in the immediate neighbourhood of the house. The "Sand-walk" was a narrow strip of land 1½ acres in extent, with a gravel-walk round it. On one side of it was a broad old shaw with fair-sized oaks in it, which made a sheltered shady walk; the other side was separated from a neighbouring grass field by a low quickset hedge, over which you could look at what view there was, a quiet little valley losing itself in the upland country towards the edge of the Westerham hill, with hazel coppice and larch wood, the remnants of what was once a large wood, stretching away to the Westerham road. I have heard my father say that the charm of this simple little valley helped to make him settle at Down.

'The Sand-walk was planted by my father with a variety of trees, such as hazel, alder, lime, hornbeam, birch, privet, and dogwood, and with a long line of hollies all down the exposed side. In earlier times he took a certain number of turns every day, and used to count them by means of a heap of flints, one of which he kicked out on the path each time he passed. Of late years I think he did not keep to any fixed number of turns, but took as many as he felt strength for.'

A formed handful of earth as mountain and atmosphere

 Hon'ami Koetsu, Fujisan, 17th century

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In his book Zen Landscapes Allen S. Weiss discusses the way Japanese connoisseurs have seen natural forms in the surfaces of pottery.  Two famous examples are Fujisan and Seppo, tea bowls made by the great artistic polymath Hon'ami Koetsu (1558-1637).  On Fujisan the white glaze is said to resemble the snow on Mt. Fuji.  Seppo ('Snow Peaks') is a renowned example of kin-zukuroi (repairing with gold) in which the filled cracks resemble water flowing through melting snow.  Other pots by Koetsu include Amagumo (Rain Cloud) and Shigure (Drizzle).  Weiss observes that 'in Fujisan the pottery surface recasts a formed handful of earth as mountain and atmosphere.'  He writes about the importance of the foot of a vessel, where the unglazed clay is revealed to the drinker, a trace of the earth from which the bowl came. 'This appreciation of clay flavour is not unlike the sense of terroir in French gastronomy, signifying those site-specific characteristics of taste so often evoked in wine connoisseurship.'

There are other ways in which bowls can become a kind of landscape art.  I have mentioned here before for example the music of suikinkutsu, those reverberant vessels placed in Japanese gardens, and made a connection with Wallace Stevens' poem 'Anecdote of the Jar'.  Weiss suggests that pottery objects are subject to the same viewing conventions as other art forms in Japan, and therefore it is relevant to consider the the idea familiar from Japanese gardens of the 'borrowed view'.  He discusses a contemporary sake bowl (guinomi) by Satoshi Sato which has bamboo forms on the exterior and mountain shapes inside.  'In a greatly reduced sense, the guinomi 'landscape' may exhibit such a borrowed view every time it is examined and drunk from.  As the cup is raised, its lip serves as the 'horizon' that links the proximate scene on the front to the 'distant' landscape beyond the lake of sake within, as is the case for the cup by Sato Satoshi, where the bamboo branch forms the proximate field for viewing the distant mountains.  That the sake is transformed into a cascade as the elbow is bent and the guinomi is tilted is rarely an unwelcome effect.'

An eagle, a mountain, a ship

George Frederic Watts, Portrait of William Morris, 1870

When, in the summer of 1996, the V&A held an exhibition to mark the centenary of the death of William Morris, it seemed rather out of tune with the times - Cool Britannia, the YBAs and all that.  This was years before Jeremy Deller used the heroic figure of Morris in his Venice Biennale exhibition and then juxtaposed the output of Morris and his company with Andy Warhol and The Factory.   Making my way round that V&A exhibition, I felt rather pleased and vindicated when I spotted Brett Anderson from Suede peering into a display case just in front of me.  Perhaps Jeremy Deller was there too, unknown to me then (as The Guardian explained, he 'was of the same generation as Damien Hirst and the YBAs, went to the same parties, but never made any money'.)  Now it occurs to me that perhaps it was Jeremy Deller I saw, as he does bear a certain resemblance to Brett Anderson.  Writing this I am painfully aware that 'seeing Brett Anderson' has become what I most remember about the exhibition, despite having enjoyed it and come home with the catalogue.  I probably knew at the time that this moment was something that would unavoidably 'strengthen into memory'...

— Getting clearer now as it wears

The worn-down landscape.  Torn and bald and filled.

You know what will strengthen into memory: an eagle, a mountain, a ship.

As a place becomes somewhere you are starting to remember, it empties out and becomes more absolute.

It becomes the map.

Is it after all you who studies the map?

Lavinia Greenlaw, Questions of Travel: William Morris in Iceland

The Map: William Morris's 1871 Journey to Iceland

There is a full size version at the William Morris Archive

In her book Questions of Travel, Lavinia Greenlaw extracts particular phrases in William Morris's Icelandic Journal and uses them to formulate brief observations on the nature of journeys.  The examples above are also questions of landscape: how we regard it, how we remember it afterwards.  They were prompted by the page in which Morris describes a ride across the plain of Helgafell:

.... The mountains we look back on, toothed and jagged in an indescribable but well-remembered manner, are very noble and solemn. As we rode along the winding path here we saw a strange sight: a huge eagle quite within gunshot of us, and not caring at all for man, flew across and across our path, always followed by a raven that seemed teazing and buffeting him: this was the first eagle I had ever seen free and on the wing, and it was a glorious sight, no less; the curves of his flight, as he swept close by us, with every pen of his wings clear against the sky was something not to be forgotten. Out at sea too we saw a brigantine pitching about in what I thought must be a rough sea enough. The day has been much like yesterday throughout, and is getting clearer now as it wears.

Edward Burne Jones, William Morris in Iceland

When I picked up Questions of Travel (one of those appealing little hardbacks published by Notting Hill Editions), I recognised the title as a reference to the Elizabeth Bishop poem, but was expecting an account of a journey in the footsteps of William Morris.  I was probably thinking of Moon Country (1996) in which Simon Armitage and Glyn Maxwell travelled to Iceland in emulation of Auden and MacNiece.  However Lavinia Greenlaw says she was not on the trail of an earlier poet: 'I didn't go to Iceland because of Morris but, like him, because of my idea of the place.'  Morris, nonetheless, was very much inspired to travel by his reading - something that comes over clearly in the Iceland chapter of Fiona MacCarthy's wonderful 1994 Morris biography.  She describes him as 'certainly the first Englishman in Iceland who arrived with such a knowledge of its language and literature'.  Shortly after leaving Rejkjavik he was already noting the locations of Njáls saga and towards the end of the trip he tried out the hot-spring bath beside the house of Snorri Sturluson.  Helgafell is where the Laxdœla saga's extraordinary heroine Guðrún Ósvífursdóttir lived and was buried.  Morris also described this 'terrible place' in a letter home to his wife Janey.  His first impression was of 'a great sea of terribly inky mountains tossing about' but, he continued, 'there has been a most wonderful sunset this evening that turned them golden.'

William Morris is quoted in Letters from Iceland and mentioned in Moon Country: at one point Armitage and Maxwell add their names to a visitor's book Morris had signed.  Shortly afterwards they find a piano Auden and MacNiece had played and sit down to attempt 'the one song they both knew, 'Perfect Day' by Lou Reed.'  In 1936, Auden had complained about the sameness of Icelandic music but 'got some gramophone records of more primitive local music, including an amazing one of a farmer and two children who yell as if they were at a football match.'  Simon Armitage brought his own supply of tapes, including Talking Heads, The Fall, The Smiths and, naturally, Björk.  Lavinia Greenlaw is reticent in the introduction to Questions of Travel about her own experiences of Iceland but one might guess, based on her extensive writings about music, that she took a pretty fine selection on the iPod.  Back in 1871, William Morris had to be happy with what music he encountered on the way.  One morning a 'little maiden' played a langspil - the ancient Icelandic fiddle - for him, 'but it was sadly out of tune.'  
   

The Icelandic Journey has itself now been turned into music: a composition for chorus and orchestra, Earthly Paradise, by Ian McQueen.  Fiona MacCarthy wrote about in an article for The Guardian that also mentions Lavinia Greenlaw's then work-in-progress.  Morris's original poem 'The Earthly Paradise' 'was the work that brought him real fame. In this poem he develops one of his great themes: the ruination of the land. Morris had been watching with increasing horror the rampant industrialisation of Britain and the damage caused to the environment by uncontrolled factory production: poisoned air, polluted rivers, tracts of industrial waste. Iceland, by contrast, was purity itself, and his travels through the mountains braced him and inspired him for the years of environmental campaigning ahead.'  MacCarthy concludes her piece by wondering why it is that Morris retains his appeal to new generations of admirers.  'It has something to do with his peculiar, irascible, enchanting personality, still vivid in our age of triviality and blandness. At a time of endless half-truths and moral shilly-shallying, Morris's eccentric integrity shines out.'

Summer nights and still water

My copy of Pan: the 1983 Folio edition with wood engravings by Fredrik Matheson

Knut Hamsun described to a correspondent in his imperfect English the theme of his novel Pan (1894): “Think of the Nordland in Norway, this regions of the Lapper, the mysteries, the grand superstitions, the midnight-sun, think of J. J. Rousseau in the regions, making acquaintance with a Nordlands girl — that is my book.”^*  This 'J. J. Rousseau' figure is as strangely driven as Rousseau himself, living alone in a hut and exploring the surrounding mountains and forests whilst torturing himself over a young woman.  Looking back I see I have only mentioned Knut Hamsun's writing here once before and that was in connection with the poisoning of a dog (in his novel Mysteries) rather than in relation to landscape.  Regrettably another dog meets a similar fate in Pan but rather than dwell on that I will recommend here the novel's poetic descriptions of the Nordland landscape, as it emerges from the snows of spring into the heat of summer until eventually the sunlit nights are over and darkness returns. This for example, is the beginning of Chapter 13 (from a 1927 translation in the public domain), full of rapture but with an undercurrent of unease:

Summer nights and still water, and the woods endlessly still. No cry, no footsteps from the road. My heart seemed full as with dark wine.

Moths and night-flies came flying noiselessly in through my window, lured by the glow from the hearth and the smell of the bird I had just cooked. They dashed against the roof with a dull sound, fluttered past my ears, sending a cold shiver through me, and settled on my white powder-horn on the wall. I watched them; they sat trembling and looked at me—moths and spinners and burrowing things. Some of them looked like pansies on the wing.

I stepped outside the hut and listened. Nothing, no noise; all was asleep. The air was alight with flying insects, myriads of buzzing wings. Out at the edge of the wood were ferns and aconite, the trailing arbutus was in bloom, and I loved its tiny flowers... Thanks, my God, for every heather bloom I have ever seen; they have been like small roses on my way, and I weep for love of them... Somewhere near were wild carnations; I could not see them, but I could mark their scent.

But now, in the night hours, great white flowers have opened suddenly; their chalices are spread wide; they are breathing. And furry twilight moths slip down into their petals, making the whole plant quiver. I go from one flower to another. They are drunken flowers. I mark the stages of their intoxication.

Seascape from the 1995 Henning Carlsen film adaptation,
starring a young Sofie Gråbøl 

^* Quote from a piece on Hamsun in the New Yorker

The Hills, The Valleys, The River, The Sea

The summer's Barbara Hepworth exhibition may have been a bit underwhelming but one exhibit that caught my attention was a display of sketches for sculptures intended for Waterloo Bridge.  Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's design had incorporated four plinths but they were left empty after the bridge was completed in 1942.  When a competition was eventually held in 1947 Hepworth submitted four landscape-related designs: The Hills, The Valleys, The River, The Sea.  But the judges rejected her ideas and those of three other artists: 'the result of the competition was disappointing and we do not consider that any of the four schemes submitted can be adjudged suitable for the position that they are intended to occupy.' 

I won't add much more here because an excellent blog post on these designs has already been written by John Wyver at Illuminations.  You can also go to the Tate website for a detailed account of them by curator Chris Stephens and see the maquette and three sketches.  These images are under copyright so I can't include them here - instead I give you probably the most boring image ever embedded on this site.  My photo makes you wonder whether sculptures on this relatively small scale, attempting to project a sense of the whole landscape through which a river passes, would just have got lost among the cars and commuters.  But we cannot know as they were never made.  It is just possible that they could have caught something of the world beyond this unreal city and brought solace to all those weary people flowing over the bridge 'under the brown fog of a winter dawn'.

A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain

 James Norrie and Jan Griffier II, Panorama of Taymouth Castle and Loch Tay, c. 1733-9

I recently wrote here about Daniel Defoe's A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, focusing on his remarks about Derbyshire.  I mentioned the wealth of illustrations in the Yale Press edition and some of the colour reproductions are spectacular, a full page for example given over to one detail in the painting above, showing soft light on the distant Loch Tay.  It's a shame there aren't more because some of the book's small black and white images are equally remarkable, like Balthasar Nebot's painting of extreme topiary that looks like it has come from the imagination of Giorgio De Chirico.  As these two examples indicate, many of the artists represented in the book came from abroad, particularly the Low Countries: Johannes Kip, Herman Moll, Jan Siberechts, Peter Tillemans.  Other groupings of topographical artists might be made: antiquarians, professional painters and engravers, or artists associated with the military: Paul Sandby, Greenville Collins, John Slezer.  Slezer came over to Scotland from Holland in 1669 but was a supporter of James VII rather than William of Orange and went to prison for it.  Defoe, a great supporter of King William, was writing just after the Act of Union and subsequent uprising by James's son, the Old Pretender.  His observations on Scotland have a particular resonance today.
 

Balthasar Nebot, Garden View of Hatwell House, 1738

Defoe is not generally very expansive on matters of landscape, but here are ten miscellaneous quotes that I thought worth noting.  The final illustration below also appears in the Yale edition and shows the kinds of trading and commercial activities Defoe was really most interested in recording.

1. Essex: the effect of the marshes on the people - 'all along this county it was very frequent to meet with men that had had from five or six, to fourteen or fifteen wives; nay, and some more ... The reason, as a merry fellow told me, who said he had had about a dozen and half of wives, (tho' I found afterwards he fibb'd a little) was this; That they being bred in the marshes themselves, and season'd to the place, did pretty well with it; but that they always went up into the hilly country, or to speak their own language into the uplands for a wife: That when they took the young lasses out of the wholesome and fresh air, they were healthy, fresh and clear, and well; but when they came out of their native air into the marshes among the fogs and damps, there they presently chang'd their complexion, got an ague or two, and seldom held it above half a year, or a year at most; and then, said he, we go to the uplands again, and fetch another...'


2.  Harwich: a town paved with petrified clay - 'there is a sort of clay in the cliff, between the town and the beacon-hill adjoining, which when it falls down into the sea, where it is beaten with the waves and the weather, turns gradually into stone: but the chief reason assign'd, is from the water of a certain spring or well, which rising in the said cliff, runs down into the sea among those pieces of clay, and petrifies them as it runs ... The same spring is said to turn wood into iron: But ... I presume, that those who call the harden' d pieces of wood, which they take out of this well by the name of iron, never try'd the quality of it with the fire or hammer; if they had, perhaps they would have given some other account of it.'


3. Bagshot-Heath: a desert in Surrey -  'Those that despise Scotland, and the north part of England, for being full of wast and barren land, may take a view of this part of Surrey, and look upon it as a foil to the beauty of the rest of England ... here is a vast tract of land, some of it within seventeen or eighteen miles of the capital city; which is not only poor, but even quite steril, given up to barrenness, horrid and frightful to look on, not only good for little, but good for nothing; much of it is a sandy desert, and one may frequently be put in mind here of Arabia Deserta, where the winds raise the sands, so as to overwhelm whole caravans of travellers, cattle and people together; for in passing this heath, in a windy day, I was so far in danger of smothering with the clouds of sand, which were raised by the storm, that I cou'd neither keep it out of my mouth, nose or eyes; and when the wind was over, the sand appeared spread over the adjacent fields of the forest some miles distant, so as that it ruins the very soil.'


4. Surrey: the effect of chalk on a traveller - 'From this town of Guilford, the road to Farnham is very remarkable, for it runs along west from Guilford, upon the ridge of a high chalky hill, so narrow that the breadth of the road takes up the breadth of the hill, and the declivity begins on either hand, at the very hedge that bounds the highway, and is very steep, as well as very high; from this hill is a prospect either way, so far that 'tis surprising; and one sees to the north, or N.W. over the great black desart, call'd Bagshot-Heath, mentioned above, one way, and the other way south east into Sussex, almost to the South Downs, and west to an unbounded length, the horizon only restraining the eyes: This hill being all chalk, a traveller feels the effect of it in a hot summer's day, being scorch'd by the reflection of the sun from the chalk, so as to make the heat almost insupportable; and this I speak by my own experience.'


5. London: swallowing up the surrounding villages - 'It is the disaster of London, as to the beauty of its figure, that it is thus stretched out in buildings, just at the pleasure of every builder, or undertaker of buildings, and as the convenience of the people directs, whether for trade, or otherwise; and this has spread the face of it in a most straggling, confus'd manner, out of all shape, uncompact, and unequal ... We see several villages, formerly standing, as it were, in the country, and at a great distance, now joyn'd to the streets by continued buildings, and more making haste to meet in the like manner ... That Westminster is in a fair way to shake hands with Chelsea, as St. Gyles's is with Marybone; and Great Russel Street by Montague House, with Tottenham-Court: all this is very evident, and yet all these put together, are still to be called London: Whither will this monstrous city then extend? and where must a circumvallation or communication line of it be placed?'


6. The Fens: the ominous sound of bitterns - 'This part is indeed very properly call'd Holland, for 'tis a flat, level, and often drowned country, like Holland itself; here the very ditches are navigable, and the people pass from town to town in boats, as in Holland: Here we had the uncouth musick of the bittern, a bird formerly counted ominous and presaging, and who, as fame tells us, (but as I believe no body knows) thrusts its bill into a reed, and then gives the dull, heavy groan or sound, like a sigh, which it does so loud, that with a deep base, like the sound of a gun at a great distance, 'tis heard two or three miles, (say the people) but perhaps not quite so far.'


7. Nottingham: its vaults and cellars - 'The town of Nottingham is situated upon the steep ascent of a sandy rock; which is consequently remarkable, for that it is so soft that they easily work into it for making vaults and cellars, and yet so firm as to support the roofs of those cellars two or three under one another; the stairs into which, are all cut out of the solid, tho' crumbling rock; and we must not fail to have it be remember'd that the bountiful inhabitants generally keep these cellars well stock'd with excellent ALE; nor are they uncommunicative in bestowing it among their friends. as some in our company experienc'd to a degree not fit to be made matter of history.'


8. Yorkshire: magical springs - 'The country people told us a long story here of gipsies which visit them often in a surprising manner. We were strangely amused with their discourses at first, forming our ideas from the word, which, in ordinary import with us, signifies a sort of strolling, fortune-telling, hen-roost-robbing, pocket-picking vagabonds, called by that name. But we were soon made to understand the people, as they understood themselves here, namely, that at some certain seasons, for none knows when it will happen, several streams of water gush out of the earth with great violence, spouting up a huge heighth, being really natural jette d'eaus or fountains; that they make a great noise, and, joining together, form little rivers, and so hasten to the sea. I had not time to examine into the particulars; and as the irruption was not just then to be seen, we could say little to it: That which was most observable to us, was, that the country people have a notion that whenever those gipsies, or, as some call 'em, vipseys, break out, there will certainly ensue either famine or plague.'


9. Dumfries: a fine palace in a hideous landscape - 'We could not pass Dumfries without going out of the way upwards of a day, to see the castle of Drumlanrig, the fine palace of the Duke of Queensberry ... Drumlanrig, like Chatsworth in Darbyshire, is like a fine picture in a dirty grotto, or like an equestrian statue set up in a barn; 'tis environ'd with mountains, and that of the wildest and most hideous aspect in all the south of Scotland; as particularly that of Enterkin, the frightfullest pass, and most dangerous that I met with, between that and Penmenmuir in North Wales; but of that in its place...' 


10. Stirling: the meanders of the River Forth - 'The Governor's lady (who was the Countess Dowager of Marr, when we were there, and mother of the late exil'd Earl of Marr), had a very pretty little flower-garden, upon the body of one of the bastions, or towers of the castle, the ambrusiers, serving for a dwarf-wall round the most part of it; and they walk'd to it from her Ladyship's apartment upon a level, along the castle-wall.  As this little, but very pleasant spot, was on the north side of the castle, we had from thence a most agreeable prospect indeed over the valley and the river; as it is truly beautiful, so it is what the people of Sterling justly boast of, and, indeed seldom forget it, I mean the meanders, or reaches of the River Forth. They are so spacious, and return so near themselves, with so regular and exactly a sweep, that, I think, the like is not to be seen in Britain, if it is in Europe, especially where the river is so large also. The River Sein, indeed, between Paris and Roan, fetches a sweep something like these some miles longer, but then it is but one; whereas here are three double reaches, which make six returns together, and each of them three long Scots miles, or more in length; and as the bows are almost equal for breadth, as the reaches are for length, it makes the figure compleat. It is an admirable sight indeed.' 

Unknown painter, Broad Quay Bristol, early 18th century

A chromatic view of the Earth

In his history of ballooning, Falling Upwards, Richard Holmes mentions 'the first aerial drawings ever made from a balloon basket'.  He is referring to the engravings accompanying Airopaidia (1785) by Thomas Baldwin, an account of a flight from Chester to Warrington.  In addition to a map of the route there are three of these, each of a different kind.  The most traditional (above) shows a view of the balloon itself, heading over the the Crag of Helsbye.  But this landscape is very different from the flattened prospect Baldwin observed from above, where the 'lofty Summit was apparently reduced to a common Level with the Valley made by the River Wever, and with the adjacent Sea Marsh.  Nor could it have been distinguished by a Stranger, as an Eminence.’

The 'Specimen of Balloon Geography' below gives an idea of what Baldwin actually saw from the balloon.  Having taken a map with him, he was surprised to see how different the landscape appeared, revealing for example the ‘incredible Variety of most beautiful Curves, into which the Stream had worked the Bed of the River Wever in a Course of Time’.  Altitude and a new perspective transformed the colours of familiar landmarks: the River Dee was the ‘Colour of red lead’ and Chester, thanks to its roof slates, appeared blue.  Sunlight on pits or ponds of water gave the ground the appearance of an inverted firmament.  Distance lent clarity to the scene below and reduced the landscape to a simplified range of primary colours.  ‘This unmixed Coloration of Objects, from a vertical Situation only, to be seen without Refraction, is a new singular and pleasing Phenomenon.  A View, taken above the Level of the Clouds, may, from this Circumstance, without Impropriety, be called a CHROMATIC VIEW of the Earth: of which, the Print is an Example.’
 

The final engraving is a curious circular image, slightly reminiscent of Dante's Paradiso.  There are instructions to the reader for viewing this, which might still work if you are looking at this blog post on a mobile device.  Lay it flat on a table and view it through a small opening made by rolling a piece of paper into a tube whilst shutting the other eye.  You will then 'form a very accurate Idea of the Manner, in which the Prospect below was represented gradually in Succession, to the Aironaut; whose Sight was bounded by a Circularity of Vapour.' 

The balloonist has 360 degrees to contemplate in a state of perfect calm and soothing silence.  One can look down at the landscape or around and above at the cloudscape.  Thomas Baldwin saw these choices in terms of the Beautiful and the Sublime, well established categories by this point (Edmund Burke's book on the subject had appeared in 1757).  Early in the voyage he writes of being unable to 'withstand the Temptation of indulging his Eye with a View of the glorious and enchanting Prospect.  But the Beautiful among the Objects below was still more attractive than the Sublime among those around.’  Later though he concludes that a balloon ride offers a synthesis: ‘the BEAUTIFUL and SUBLIME were seen united, in a Manner perfectly novel and engaging.'

The abandoned city of Prypiat

Not long ago, camping on the edge of a field, a passing child saw me reading Tim Dee's Four Fields (it's cover a flat grey landscape) and pronounced "that looks boring".  If he had stopped to listen I might have explained that the Fens are a lot more interesting than they appear and furthermore that the book's other 'fields' involve drowning wildebeest, Custer's Last Stand and the aftermath of a nuclear explosion.  At Chernobyl, Tim spends five days with scientists Tim Mousseau and Anders Pape Moller and is given the task of capturing grasshoppers in a bag ('the clicks of their legs against the plastic like the ticks of the radiation meter next to them').  He describes a forest so poisoned that for a time even microbial life was destroyed, a village where uncollected scrap metal, remnants of civilisation, slowly rots, an old military airfield which had been intended as a base for the Soviet space shuttle.  The journey ends in the abandoned city of Prypiat, where trees have engulfed everything and the roads are almost all impassable...

'The asphalt surface is split as if rotten, and welters around strapping trunks.  Every two- and three-storey building has been overgrown and is deep in tree shade.  Leaf ghosts camouflage grey concrete panels, where last year's emulsified foliage has printed itself on to the walls,  This year's leaves are adjacent and ready.  In other places the concrete is veined with green deltas of moss and water runs up as well as down.  The buildings seep...' 

Postcards from Pripyat, Chernobyl by Danny Cooke

Prypiat was the U.S.S.R.'s ninth nuclear city, built in 1970 to service the workers at Chernobyl.  Its ruins are increasingly well-explored and photographed and are possibly too rich in symbolism to offer much scope for artists.  They have appeared in music videos and TV programmes (an episode of Top Gear), fictionalised in novels, movies and video games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.  It is now possible to go on tourist trips to see the dead city but restrictions on access have allowed some non-professional artists to receive attention for their work.  The Daily Telegraph published a set of photographs by 'Michael Day, 29, an air traffic controller from London' who 'visited the disaster scene with a Ukrainian government escort to photograph the ghost town'.  The drone footage in Postcards from Pripyat (above) was put together in his spare time by a photographer working for CBS.  In a crowd-funded project, Prypyat mon Amour, Alina Rudya has returned to the city her parents left in 1986 to take ghostly photographs of herself in and around what remains of their old apartment block; a book is due out next year to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary. 

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Tim Dee mentions trying to record birdsong in the Zone, but it was so quiet in September that he gave up trying.  All he could hear on playback were the buzzes and clicks of the machine.  When I read this I thought of sound artist Peter Cusack: on his Sounds from dangerous places site you can listen to recordings like 'Cuckoo and radiometer, Pripyat'.  As I wrote here back in 2009, Cusack found nature thriving at Chernobyl: 'radiation seems to have had a negligible effect. The increase in wildlife numbers and variety means that the natural sounds of springtime are particularly impressive. For me the passionate species rich dawn chorus became Chernobyl’s definitive sound'.  Tim Dee, working with the biologists, saw things very differently: 'one in ten of all birds of all species are afflicted in the Zone.'

Research continues.  Tim Mousseau was interviewed in the New York Times last year about new research on adaptation in some bird species.  He still 'dismisses the idea that the Zone is some kind of post-apocalyptic Eden.  But the latest study has given him pause, he said, because it shows the kind of adaptations that may allow some creatures — chaffinches and great tits in this case, though not barn swallows or robins — to thrive in the Zone. However, it remains to be seen whether these species are truly thriving...'  Mousseau is broadening and deepening his research around Chernobyl, but he now has to divide his time.  Since 2011 he has made more than ten trips to Fukishima.

(Note: The name of the city is spelt differently by different writers: In 'Four Fields' it is 'Prypiat'.)

Helvoetsluys

A few weeks back I got round to watching the excellent Mike Leigh film, Mr. Turner.  The clip I have embedded above shows him arriving at the Royal Academy on varnishing day and greeting various recognisable figures.  There is a warm greeting  for Sir John Soane - "As I live and breath", "My old friend!" - but a frosty one for John Constable.  There follows the oft-related incident of the red buoy.  This is how it was retold a few years ago in one of several newspaper articles on the artists' 'feud', prompted by an exhibition at the which put their their two paintings side by side again.

Back in 1832, Constable was at last exhibiting The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, 'a painting on which he had been working for almost 15 years, at the Royal Academy.  In the final days, he laboriously put his finishing touches to the busy scene in the gallery.  But Turner stole the show with a single daub of red paint.  Seeing that in comparison his serene seascape, Helvoetsluys, was a little lacking in colour, he entered the room, painted a small red buoy in the middle of his canvas - which had only taken him a few months to compose - and left without saying a word.  Constable, mortified by Turner's deft touch, remarked: "He has been here and fired a gun."'

J. M. W. Turner, Helvoetsluys, 1832

Watching these two landscape artists portrayed on screen prompted me to wonder about other possible films.  Perhaps a prequel, like The Godfather Part II, concerning Turner's younger days could be made, with another actor brought in to play him - the De Niro to Timothy Spall's Brando.  I can imagine Martin Gayford's book Constable in Love, which I recently referred to here, being successfully adapted (but Google for films about this artist and you get Carry on Constable, which suggests a rather more irreverent approach to the subject).  There are numerous other possibilities...  humour, conflict and good scenery in films about artists abroad for example - John Robert Cozens on his travels with the eccentric William Beckford, or Thomas Jones and Francis Towne encountering bandits in the hills of Italy.  A drama based on the relationship between William Blake and his acolytes The Ancients would be fascinating.  With a big SFX budget, John Martin's cinematic paintings could somehow be translated into film, and his life story was not without incident (his brother set fire to York Minster).

There was an article in Sight and Sound last year by Michael Brooke about artists on film, but very few of them could be considered landscape artists.  Perhaps their lives have been relatively undramatic.  Van Gogh is an exception, of all artists probably the most frequently portrayed.  I recall enjoying two films which came out in fairly quick succession: Vincent and Theo (1990) with Tim Roth (long before his recent turn as Sepp Blatter in that FIFA-funded movie about FIFA), and Vincent (1987) which was particularly effective because it used the artist's wonderful letters, voiced by John Hurt.  Of course Paul Gauguin, another revolutionary painter of landscape, will normally have a prominent role in films about Van Gogh - Anthony Quinn won an Oscar for portraying him in Lust for Life (1956) - but there don't seem to have been major films featuring contemporaries like Monet or Cézanne.  Notwithstanding the success of Mr. Turner, more artist biopics would I think be less welcome than more oblique takes on their art - Michael Brooke mentions unusual treatments of Munch, Hockney and Picasso.  He also refers to The Quince Tree Sun (1992), a film perhaps reminiscent of Monet's experiments or the doubts of Cézanne, as it concentrates on a painter 'as he tries – and frequently fails – to capture the effect of light reacting to the leaves and fruit of the quince tree in his garden'. 

 

Tea at Furlongs

I have not had a chance to say anything here yet about the Dulwich Picture Gallery's Eric Ravilious exhibition.  Reviewers loved it: Laura Cumming described the paintings as 'exhilarating, enthralling and outstandingly beautiful', Martin Gayford thought them 'irresistible' and Richard Dorment found them 'a joy from start to finish'.  From a landscape perspective he is fascinating, with those subtle distortions, unusual textures and patterns, curious perspectives and framing devices all combining to give the paintings their unique and hard-to-define quality.  The exhibition included the full range of his war paintings - submarine interiors, fortified beaches, aircraft in flight and remarkable visions of ships illuminated by the Arctic sun which suggest what he might have gone on to paint if he had not been on the air-sea rescue plane that disappeared off the coast of Iceland in September 1942.  It was easy to turn from these and enjoy watercolours from the 1930s of fireworks, flowers and fields.  Tea at Furlongs seemed relatively uncomplicated, with its tasty-looking spread and view of the countryside: 'beyond the garden wall the wheat is almost ready to harvest , and Beddingham Hill rises to meet a sky as yet untroubled by hostile squadrons.'  However, as James Russell goes on to say in the catalogue, the oddities of light and perspective suggest a scene that was 'designed to be remembered - not any old tea at Furlongs but the last, the tea that must be preserved against all eventualities.'

Eric Ravilious, Tea at Furlongs, 1939

At Furlongs, Ravilious was a guest of Peggy Angus, whom he had met when they were students at the Royal College of Art.  She had left London in 1933 to teach in Sussex and found a tenant farmer willing to let her rent a cottage with a spare room, next door to a ploughman who appears in some of Ravilious's paintings.   Life there, Russell writes, 'involved a good day's work, scratch meals and long evenings of music and song.  Water had to be hauled out of a well and amenities consisted of a primitive stove for cooking and an earth closet in the garden.'  Furlongs is quite a long walk from any main road but my parents went to look at it this summer and have sent me the photographs below.  Apparently the current owners are building a new wall, perhaps prompted by the increase in visitors as Ravilious's popularity continues to grow.  This cottage has an important place in British art history as the inspiration for some of Ravilious's best known work, like Train Landscape and The Wilmington Giant.  'Furlongs', he wrote, 'altered my whole outlook and way of painting, I think because the colour of the landscape was so lovely and the design so beautifully obvious...'

View of Pernambuco, Brazil

I have added a new feature to this blog - maps.  Click on one of the links above and you get a zoomable Google Map with pins connected to the 'locations' of my earlier posts (see example above).  Over the years I haven't written specifically about individual places of course, so the geotags tend to relate where relevant to the main subject of the artwork, or of one of the artworks discussed.  Some landscapes have been non-specific, ideal or imaginary so the maps do not include all my old posts.  As I write this, I have not yet finished going back through them all and adding tags - enjoyable but laborious, even if it is improving my geography.  It is throwing up a few interesting problems; I found, for example, that Anahorish, celebrated in poetry by Seamus Heaney, officially 'doesn't exist'.  There are some technical limitations to the maps (no embedded audio or video), and to the way RSS feeds work that mean I have had to split posts over several maps rather than having just one (nor can I host them here, so thanks to my friend John for putting the code on his own site).  Also, these are not really designed for small mobile devices, although they do work on my iPad.

Frans Post, View of Pernambuco, Brazil, ca. 1637-44

For me it has been interesting seeing where I have and haven't written about - very little on South America for example.  Googling Brazil and landscape art I see that that, apart from the renowned landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx, you tend to get references to a seventeenth century Dutchman, Frans Post.  He is an interesting artist.  The familiar view of colonial painters is that they were conditioned by European attitudes and painting conventions, excluding as much as they included, producing views that resemble the Roman Campagna with added palm trees.  Whilst Post was in Brazil, he managed to make it resemble the Netherlands with low horizons and grey skies, but he also included details taken directly from nature.  Once he was back, colour flooded in and his compositions became more idealised, whilst the figures (often slaves) were relegated to mere details.  In 1648 he painted the landscape elements of a Biblical scene, the Sacrifice of Manoah, giving it a Brazilian setting, complete with armadillo and iguana.  According to Seymour Slive, in his survey of Dutch Painting 1600-1800, 'the rather naive quality of Post's pictures has earned him the title of the 'Douanier Rousseau' of the seventeenth century'.

Falling Upwards

Our balloon ride over the Garrotxa

Whilst in Spain last month we took to the air in a balloon.  I also read Richard Holmes' entertaining history of nineteenth century ballooning, Falling Upwards, which included some details that reminded me of our flight over the volcanic landscape of Garrotxa.  Holmes describes an ascent made by the leading Victorian balloonist Charles Green, accompanied by a wealthy MP and an Irish musician, Monck Mason, who wrote the trip up as Aeronautica (1838).  They set off in the Royal Vauxhall from London on a November afternoon in 1836 and by dusk they were over the Channel and tucking into ‘a huge meal of cold meats and wine’.  I smiled on reading this as it was exactly what we were given to tuck into after we landed.  Whilst aloft we toasted the flight with a glass of pink cava.  Champagne drinking seems to have been de riguer on most nineteenth century balloon trips, although Monck Mason claimed that the lower pressure at altitude made it too frothy, shooting from the bottle and ‘revealing what he called its "natural tendency to flying".  Perhaps under the influence of these refreshments, the landscapes of northern France seen after dusk, with isolated points of candlelight "burning late" in the villages below, seemed infinitely romantic and mysterious.’

Above the Garrotxa we were flying over winding rivers, terracotta-tiled farm buildings and the densely wooded slopes of extinct volcanoes, but it was impossible not to register too the motorway network, ribbon developments and light industrial buildings on the outskirts of every sizable settlement.  Holmes recounts how, when the Royal Vauxhall reached the Meuse, the crew were astonished to realise that the great industrial complex visible below them was the historic city of Liège.  Its surrounding districts "appeared to blaze with innumerable fires … to the full extent of our visible horizon."  At the height we were flying we could not hear the sounds of industry below - perhaps it is relatively silent these days.  Holmes describes what the balloonists could hear as they passed over Liège: 'disembodied shouting, coughing, swearing, metallic banging and sometimes, weirdly, sharp echoing bursts of laughter.  They were being granted a unique, nightmare vision of the new industrial future, a world of ever extending ironworks, where every street was "marked out by its particular line of fires."’

The Royal Vauxhall continued into the night.  "Occasional faint flashes of lightning would for an instant illuminate the horizon ... Not a single object of terrestrial nature could anywhere be distinguished; an unfathomable abyss of 'darkness visible' seemed to encompass us on every turn." 
Holmes observes that Mason's description of night's "cold and dark embrace", like "an immense block of black marble", might have come from Edgar Allan Poe, whose story 'The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall' appeared the year before this flight, and who went on to feature Green and Monck in his newspaper hoax 'The Atlantic Balloon' in 1844.  Eventually the aeronauts recognised the Rhine but continued eastwards and by morning thought they might have reached "the barren and inhospitable Steppes of Russia".  In fact they finally landed in some north German fir trees.  Our balloon flight looked at one point like it might end in some trees too, or even on a small traffic island, but we eventually touched down smoothly on some rocky ground and once the balloon had been furled and loaded onto its trailer we set off back to enjoy our botifarra.

The Green Ray

'In America they call it the green flash. When the sun sets, in a very clear horizon, with no land mass for many hundreds of miles, and no moisture or atmospheric pressure, you have a good chance of seeing it. The slowest ray is the blue ray, which comes across as green when the sun sets in perfect atmospheric conditions. It’s the last ray as the sun recedes with the curvature of the earth.' - Tacita Dean, Bomb Magazine, 2006

Still from one of several videos of the phenomenon that have been 

uploaded to YouTube, this one by Noel Barlau

The quote above comes from a conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides, who briefly refers to the green ray in his novel Middlesex...  “They say you can’t take a picture of a green ray, but I got one. I always keep a camera in the cab in case I come across some mind-blowing shit like that. And one time I saw this green ray and I grabbed my camera and I got it.”  In the interview Eugenides asks Tacita Dean about the elusiveness of the phenomenon in her film The Green Ray.  "I think you said that you got the green ray in the film, but it never appears in any single frame. But you can see it momentarily when the film is running. Is that right?"  "Yes. The film is 24 frames a second but you can’t isolate a single frame that has it.  He goes on to ask her whether everybody sees the green ray when they see the film.  "No. That’s what’s nice about it, because otherwise the film would just be about a phenomenon. But in the end it’s more about perception and faith, I think."

From Tacita Dean's video, The Green Ray (2001)

I first heard of the green ray when Eric Rohmer's beautiful film was released in 1986.  Delphine, alone on her summer holiday and nervous of any new intimacy after a split with her boyfriend, overhears a group discussing a novel by Jules Verne, The Green Ray (1882).  One of them says that "when you see the green ray you can read your own feelings and others too."  Later she sees a beach cafe named Le Rayon Vert and at the end of the film, when she finally meets an appealing young man (they both like Dostoyevsky), she asks him to sit with her and watch the sunset over the sea.  What follows is, according to Gilbert Adair in his book about the first century of cinema, Flickers, 'the tiniest and most moving special effect in the history of cinema.'  Tacita Dean was less impressed: "it’s very heavy-handed; it’s like this huge, green thing. I mean, the real green ray makes your heart miss a beat, because you look, you look, you look. And then you see it so suddenly, and it’s gone. Somehow rapidity is part of its beauty."

From Eric Rohmer's film, The Green Ray (1986)

I have not read Verne's novel and it is hard to find any reviews that wholeheartedly recommend it - see for example the description on with hidden noise: 'as fiction it is sorely disappointing'.  In Jules Verne, Geography and Nineteenth Century Scotland, Ian B. Thompson describes it as the slightest of his three Scottish novels; however, it is informed by Verne's 'passion for sea travel and is meticulous in the nautical, meteorological and geographical detail of the journey.'  At the climax of the story the two lovers, having repeatedly failed to glimpse a green ray, miss seeing it because they only have eyes for each other.  Verne was clearly fascinated by the idea - in an impressive Annotated bibliography of mirages, green flashes, atmospheric refraction, etc., Andrew T. Young refers to an earlier mention of the green ray in Verne's novel Les Indes Noires (1877).  This is the earliest fictional reference in the bibliography, but the phenomenon was noted by other nineteenth century writers, like J. A. Froud, whose account of a voyage to South Africa describes a sunset on 'the sea calm as Torbay in stillest summer ... The disk, as it touched the horizon, was deep crimson. As the last edge of the rim disappeared there came a flash, lasting for a second, of dazzling green - the creation I suppose of my own eyes.'

I will end here with another art form, music.  Gavin Bryars has described witnessing the green ray in Southern California, but his 1991 composition refers back to the setting for Verne's novel.  'This part of Western Scotland is also the place where certain piping traditions originated. Male pipers practised in one cave on the seashore, females in another ( the "piper's cave" and the "pigeon's cave"). As they played their laments at twilight a triangulation, similar to that in the Verne story (male-ray-female) may well have occurred without the knowledge of the innocent participants, hence the sequence of simultaneous laments in the coda.'   The clip below is the first half of The Green Ray - I can't find anything to embed that includes the coda, with its laments for saxophone, cor anglais, French horn, and solo violin.  You can buy or hear the whole piece elsewhere of course, but perhaps it is appropriate to the theme that this should be left here to the imagination.

The landscape has an antique stillness

For the past week I have been immersed in the Catalan landscape described by Josep Pla in his remarkable book, The Gray Notebook.  The NYRB Classics site explains how it was written:

'In 1918, when Pla was in Barcelona studying law, the Spanish flu broke out, the university shut down, and he went home to his parents in coastal Palafrugell. Aspiring to be a writer, not a lawyer, he resolved to hone his style by keeping a journal. In it he wrote about his family, local characters, visits to cafés; the quips, quarrels, ambitions, and amours of his friends; writers he liked and writers he didn’t; and the long contemplative walks he would take in the countryside under magnificent skies. Returning to Barcelona to complete his studies, Pla kept up his diary, scrutinizing life in the big city with the same unflagging zest and humor. Pla, one of the great Catalan writers, held on to this youthful journal for close to fifty years, reworking and adding to it, until he finally published The Gray Notebook as both the first volume and the capstone of his collected works.' 

 

 Palafrugell, dawn, 21 August 2015

If you're interested in an overview there is a New York Times review; here I will of course focus on Pla's descriptions of landscape, illustrated with a couple of photographs I took.  To give you a flavour (it would be tedious to quote too much out of context), here he is on the afternoon of 7 May 1918, walking to his family's farm, admiring 'the white Pyrenees against an immense sky' and 'a swath of pink mist the colour of seashells, the mist off the sea in the gulf of Roses ...  The rain has refreshed the green of the pine groves and the fields of alfalfa.  Everything is bronzed and gleaming.  The wheat is about to shift from green to the white, golden foam of ripeness.  The small hills undulating on both sides of the landscape - parallel to the sea - are gently luminous, alive and graceful, like a sleeping, breathing nude.'

On a subsequent walk these hills are 'as firm as the breasts of an adolescent girl from these parts' - Pla was a bookish youth, too shy to form a relationship with a woman.  His friend and walking companion Joan B. Coromina advances the theory that ones interest in women 'is shaped by the suitability of the landscape in which she moves.  There are women for many landscapes, some women are right for only one, and some women for none at all.  When the fit is right, infatuation is guaranteed, automatic, inevitable.'  Later that year 'the vines are turning gold, the pinewoods wear a thick layer of dark green and the olive trees an airy silver-gray.  The stubble in the fields takes on a granulated, reddish tone.  The whole landscape could fit nicely between a pot of honey and a bottle of rum.'  However, Pla doesn't see much 'Dionysian sensuality' in all this - it is no place for 'garlands, cornucopias, and a warm Venus with a dainty head and huge buttocks strolling through a meadow surrounded by trees wreathed in mist.  Autumn here is rather serene, linear, and never harsh but somewhat languorous, inducing a vague, bitter melancholy.' 

 Pine trees, dawn, 21 August 2015

The Gray Notebook is over six hundred pages long and includes, in addition to descriptions of the countryside around Palafrugell, memorable passages on Girona in the rain and Barcelona, 'turtledove grey', laid out below him from the mountain of Montjuïc.  Re-reading some of these now I can see that they are often tinged with sadness, where for example a walk through waves of pine trees, an 'unbroken verdant sea', ends with a depressing encounter with a poor country priest (Coromina complains it "has spoiled the landscape and our stroll.  It seems incredible that such pretty countryside can contain so much wretchedness.")  I will end here though with an idyllic vision more in keeping with my holiday memories, from one of the stories Pla tells about local characters, in this case an easygoing shepherd.

'If it's hot, he lies under the soft, caressing rustle of the tall pines.  From the shade he watches the white, lathering, languid sea.  The horizon is blue and cool.  A seagull glides by flapping its wings.  The landscape has an antique stillness, at once benign and paternal.  If someone shouts, the wind carries the cry gently away.  Time passes, like a trickle of olive oil.'

The Seven Wonders of the Peak

I've been reading A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain by Daniel Defoe (3 vols, 1724-6), written whilst he was living at 'a very handsome house' just up the road from me here in Stoke Newington.  It is a very handsome edition,^* published by Yale University Press in 1991 and illustrated with 319 contemporary engravings and watercolours, which set me back me just £4.95 in the little second hand bookshop a few yards from the Daniel Defoe Pub.   There is much I might say about it here but I want to focus on Defoe's travels in the Peak District at the beginning of Volume 3, because it reveals much about his no-nonsense attitude to landscape.  The earlier volumes covering London and the South and are full of descriptions of farming, commerce and trade, thriving market towns and expanding cities.  In Derbyshire he remains more fascinated with human activity and industry than the beauties of the scenery - coal and lead mining and the operation of a throwster's mill (for silk throwing), whose owner nearly came to grief once showing some friends his impressive water wheel.^†  And when his narrative eventually gets to the spectacular natural phenomena of The Peak, he goes out of his way to downplay them.

The first 'Wonder of the Peak' he dismisses is the baths at Buxton - 'nothing at all; nor is it any thing but what is frequent in such mountainous countries as this is, in many parts of the world.'  Next, at Poole's Hole, he observes that 'the wit that has been spent upon this vault or cave in the earth, had been well enough to raise the expectation of strangers, and bring fools a great way to creep into it.'  Earlier writers had gone over the top in their praise: 'Dr. Leigh spends some time in admiring the spangled roof. Cotton and Hobbes are most ridiculously and outrageously witty upon it. Dr. Leigh calls it fret work, organ, and choir work.'  But 'were any part of the roof or arch of this vault to be seen by a clear light, there would be no more beauty on it than on the back of a chimney; for, in short, the stone is coarse, slimy, with the constant wet, dirty and dull.'  A famous spring is 'a poor thing indeed to make a wonder of'; nor is The Devil's Arse all it has been cracked up to be (I referred to this cave here before in connection with Thomas Hobbes' book in praise of The Seven Wonders).  As for Mam Tor, 'the sum of the whole wonder is this, That there is a very high hill, nay, I will add (that I may make the most of the story, and that it may appear as much like a wonder as I can) an exceeding high hill. But this in a country which is all over hills, cannot be much of a wonder, because also there are several higher hills in the Peak than that, only not just there.'

Page from The Genuine Poetical Works of Charles Cotton (1741, written 1681)

But Defoe doesn't leave the Peak District without praising two of its sights, 'one a wonder of nature, the other of art.'  The extraordinary and mysterious Elden Hole is a 'frightful chasme' whose 'opening goes directly down perpendicular into the earth, and perhaps to the center. ... What Nature meant in leaving this window open into the infernal world, if the place lies that way, we cannot tell: But it must be said, there is something of horror upon the very imagination, when one does but look into it.'  And then, by contrast, there is the Duke of Devonshire's house at Chatsworth, whose beautiful new garden required some serious landscaping.  'To make a clear vista or prospect beyond into the flat country, towards Hardwick, another seat of the same owner, the duke, to whom what others thought impossible, was not only made practicable, but easy, removed, and perfectly carried away a great mountain that stood in the way, and which interrupted the prospect.'  The result is a house and garden that delight the traveller as a haven of civilisation in a wild place (an emotion I've always associated with Tolkien's Rivendell). 

'Nothing can be more surprising of its kind, than for a stranger coming from the north, suppose from Sheffield in Yorkshire, for that is the first town of note, and wandering or labouring to pass this difficult desert country, and seeing no end of it, and almost discouraged and beaten out with the fatigue of it, (just such was our case) on a sudden the guide brings him to this precipice, where he looks down from a frightful heighth, and a comfortless, barren, and, as he thought, endless moor, into the most delightful valley, with the most pleasant garden, and most beautiful palace in the world: If contraries illustrate, and the place can admit of any illustration, it must needs add to the splendor of the situation, and to the beauty of the building, and I must say (with which I will close my short observation) if there is any wonder in Chatsworth, it is, that any man who had a genius suitable to so magnificent a design, who could lay out the plan for such a house, and had a fund to support the charge, would build it in such a place where the mountains insult the clouds, intercept the sun, and would threaten, were earthquakes frequent here, to bury the very towns, much more the house, in their ruins.'

 J. Kip after L. Knyff, Birdseye View of Chatsworth House, c. 1707

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^* A reviewer for the London Review of Books felt this edition 'breathes an odour of ‘England’s Heritage’' and questions the way it has been abridged.  Nowadays it is of course possible to read the original unabridged version online.

^† 'Keeping his eye rather upon what he pointed at with his fingers than what he stept upon with his feet, he stepp'd awry and slipt into the river.  He was so very close to the sluice which let the water out upon the wheel, and which was then pulled up, that tho' help was just at hand, there was no taking hold of him, till by the force of the water he was carried through, and pushed just under the large wheel, which was then going round at a great rate. The body being thus forc'd in between two of the plashers of the wheel, stopt the motion for a little while, till the water pushing hard to force its way, the plasher beyond him gave way and broke; upon which the wheel went again, and, like Jonah's whale, spewed him out, not upon dry land, but into that part they call the apron, and so to the mill-tail, where he was taken up, and received no hurt at all.'