The Succession of Strata

I was recently given the splendid Thames & Hudson volume STRATA: William Smith's Geological Maps, which has contributions from a range of experts and a short foreword by Robert Macfarlane. The book is a thing of beauty as you can see from the gallery on the T&H website. In addition to Smith's maps, it includes photographs of the fossil collection he amassed, which was fundamental to his understanding of geology and which he arranged on sloping shelves to represent different geological strata. When Smith got into financial trouble he was forced to sell these fossils to the British Museum but twenty years later they remained unopened in their boxes (reminding me of a similar story of indifference from a century later, when Apsley Cherry-Garrard donated to the museum an emperor penguin egg collected in the Antarctic after 'the worst journey in the world'). There is an interesting story of social class running through the book, with Smith having to earn his living from practical work in mining and land improvement and only fully appreciated by the intellectual elite at the end of his life.

From a landscape perspective the most interesting drawings are the panoramic sections that show how strata lie underground and where they emerge on the surface. The example above is on a separate bookmark / legend which comes with the book; its reverse shows the sequence of strata and their colours, ranging from London Clay to Granite, Sicnite and Gneiss. The example below (published in July 1819) shows part of Britain I am familiar with, the chalk downs near Brighton. The text underneath the image here is very practical - 'Much Chalk goes from these Hills by the Ouse Navigation to the interior of Sussex and is there used on the Land either in a crude state or burned to Lime by Wood fires for that purpose. The Sussex Clunch or Gray Chalk like that of the Surry Hills makes an excellent Lime for building in Water.' Colourists were employed for his maps but Smith himself was an enthusiastic draughtsman and STRATA includes a selection of portrait drawings of acquaintances from his sketchbooks. To quote Robert Macfarlane, Smith's great map ' now exists somewhere between artwork, dreamwork and data-set.'

 

 

Untitled (Moon Image)

 

The oceans and deserts of Vija Celmins are monochrome patterns of pencil marks and brush strokes - no landmarks, just abstract surfaces. She may have looked at particular sites but the artworks only reproduce her photographs, or photographs taken by others - landscape at two removes. Their sources are hidden in titles like Untitled (Desert) and Untitled (Ocean). Nevertheless, the patience and attention needed to make her art seems to ask questions about how closely we attend to the world and really spend time in a particular environment. Observational drawing has a long history - Briony Fer cites the examples of Dürer's Large Piece of Turf and Ruskin's advice in The Elements of Drawing in her essay in Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory (ed. Gary Garrels). But art of this kind is closer to still life than landscape. Celmins' drawings of the sea are each 'a graphic rendering of a ready-made image and not a record of the vastness of the ocean.'    

 

A page from Vija Celmins: To Fix the Image in Memory showing moon drawings from 1968-9

One sentence from another essay in this book by Russell Ferguson particularly struck me. In discussing Celmins' early paintings he suggests that 'T.V. (1964) shows an everyday object from the studio - a television set - but a very contemporary one: this is probably one of the earliest representations of a TV in painting.' If this is true it is remarkable to think that art can have ignored such an important object in people's lives for twenty years. One could also say that in the late sixties Celmins was one of the first artists to depict the landscape of the moon, although her drawings of NASA photographs are clearly at second hand, deliberately reproducing the blurring and imperfections in the source images. In this way they are quite different from the pastel drawing John Russell made nearly two centuries earlier using a telescope, which despite the vast distance was based on direct observation. 

 

John Russell,  The Face of the Moon, 1793-97

Knowing the East

Paul Claudel (1868 - 1955) joined the French Ministry for Foreign Affairs after university, where he had begun writing poetry and attending Mallarmé's 'Tuesdays', and in 1895 was made vice-consul in Shanghai, following junior postings in Boston and New York. He would spend the rest of his life as a prominent diplomat and writer, although I suspect that in England he is a lot less well known than his sister Camille (portrayed in the 1988 film Camille Claudel by Isabelle Adjani). When he arrived in the Far East he began composing prose poetry; the first one was written in Ceylon before he reached his destination in China. Some of these poems were sent home and published in outlets lke La Revue de Paris and La Revue blanche. Claudel returned in 1899 intending to become a priest, and his book Connaisance de l'Est came out in 1900. But having abandoned his religious vocation and returned to China, he supplemented this volume with a smaller group of poems written in the period up to 1905. 

No doubt Knowing the East can be read critically in terms of Orientalism and French imperialism, but I found a lot of beauty in these poems. Some titles: 'The City at Night', 'Sea Thoughts', 'The Sadness of Water', 'Noon Tide', 'Hours in the Garden', 'Libation to the Coming Day'. Things I was reminded of as I read them: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Francis Ponge, Lafdacio Hearn, Victor Segalen, Empire of Signs, Invisible Cities. This quote, from their translator James Lawler, summarises my first impressions of the book.

'With what pleasure do we savour these landscapes, this continent so far removed from our own: coconut palms, banyans, Japanese pines; the Yang-tse of 'Drifting', 'The River', 'Halt on the Canal'; Confucian, Buddhist, and Shinto temples and tombs; hermitages, suspended houses; crushing heat, night as clear as day; festivals for the dead, a festival for the rivers; wheat harvests, rice harvests; torrential rain, apocalyptic storms; cities that seem chaotic but have a concealed pattern and sense, 'flayed' Chinese gardens, the Shogun's golden ark. One may label the images picturesque but that is not the way I read them. I recall Julien Green saying of Claudel that he was a man "who had known how to live elsewhere," words I take to mean that we do not find a quest for oddness but affectionate deployment fold by fold of a reality the poet comes to know.'

In keeping with the theme of my blog, here are a few examples of how Claudel treats landscape in his poems:

• Stopping to survey the mountains that surround him, he measures with his eyes the route he will take. As he walks, he savours the slow passage of time and thinks about 'the bridge still to cross in the quiet peace of the afternoon pause, these hills to go up and down, this valley to traverse.' He already sees the rock where he will watch the sunset.  
  
• One December day, 'a dark cloud covers the entire sky and fills the mountain's irregular clefts with haze: you would think it dovetailed to the horizon.' He sweeps the quiet countryside with his hand, caressing the hyacinth plains, the tufts of black pines, and he checks with his fingers the 'details embedded in the weft and mist of this winter day - a row of trees, a village.' 
• On the vast yellow river he thinks about the nature of water. 'As the segments of a parallelogram come together and meet, so water expresses the force of a landscape reduced to its geometrical lines.' Each drop expresses this as it finds the lowest point of a given area. 'All water draws us, and certainly this river...' 
  
• He describes knocking on a small black door somewhere in Shanghai and being led through a succession of corridors to a garden. He follows a labyrinthine path until he can look down on 'the poem of the roofs'. Later he reaches 'the edge of the pond, where the stems of dead lotus flowers emerge from the still waters. The silence is deep like that of a forest crossroads in winter.'
• And in a Tokyo shop, he finds himself looking at miniature landscapes (bonkei). 'Here is the rice field in spring; in the distance, the hill fringed with trees (they are moss). Here is the sea with its archipelagos and capes; by the artifice of two stones, one black, the other red and seemingly worn and porous ... Even the iridescence of the many-coloured waters is captured by this bed of motley pebbles covered by the contents of two carafes.'
  

In the twilight there is a field

Yosa Buson, Travels Through Mountains and Fields, c. 1765
Source: Wikimedia Commons

I've been reading The Collected Haiku of Yosa Buson, translated by W. S. Merwin and Takako Lento. The collection was put together just after Buson's death in 1784. Such brief verse can evoke a landscape through metonymy but rarely makes you think immediately of landscape views like the Buson painting above, the Met's Travels Through Mountains and Fields. I did notice a general exception to this rule though and it occurs when fiels are the subject of the poem - you can't really talk about a field without evoking a landscape. There are 868 haiku in the volume so I think it is probably OK under fair use to reproduce just four here, one for each season. For spring it is a toss-up between numbers 58, 140 and 183 but I'll go for the first, which actually has a 'landscape' title, 'Looking across the Field'.

Mist in the grass

the water silent

just before sunset

This summer poem, no. 317, also has a title, 'On the Way Home from Seeing the Nunobiki Waterfall with Tairo and Kito'. Tairo and Kito were his disciples. Nunobiki Waterfall I have mentioned here before in connection with The Tales of Ise (c. 900).

Evening sun slipping behind the hills

a waterwheel is turning

in the field of ripening wheat

The autumn poem, no. 487, is again set at sunset

The mountains darken after the sun goes down

in the twilight there is a field

of silver grass

And finally, no. 742, winter

Vast dry field

out in the desolation

the sun slips into the rock

Clearly these are all variations on a theme: the field and the sunset are constants, but the atmosphere is different in each poem.

 

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Finally, a message I have to pass on from Blogger. 'Recently, the FeedBurner team released a system update announcement , that the email subscription service will be discontinued in July 2021.
After July 2021, your feed will still continue to work, but the automated emails to your subscribers will no longer be supported.' Sorry about this...

A Landscape Painter in Albania

  

 Edward Lear, The valley of the Shkumbin River
near Elbasan in central Albania, 26 September 1848 

Edward Lear's travel writing is, as you would expect, written with a sharp wit and punctuated with discriptions of landscape. The fact that he was travelling and then writing as a landscape painter gives his books a double interest for me. Journals of a Landscape Painter in Albania for example begins with a description of his equipment - only the essentials needed to travel light, in what was then still a region barely visited by English travellers. He complains a lot about his accommodation but explains that he had no choice but to stay in roadside khans - if he had tried to stay instead with the local pashas he would need to have fitted in with ceremonies and meals that would have left no time for sketching. Lear was there in the autumn of 1848 and mentions finding a German newspaper to read and being amazed at the news of revolutions across Europe. His route through what is now Albania was partly forced on him by widespread quarantine and travel restrictions (cholera, rather than Covid-19, in those days). It began in the east, after he had travelled overland from Thessalonika via Bitola and Ohrid. He then headed towards Tirana and just before reaching it wrote this description of the mountain landscape.

'How glorious, in spite of the dimming scirocco haze, was the view from the summit, as my eyes wandered over the perspective of winding valley and stream to the farthest edge of the horizon — a scene realizing the fondest fancies of artist imagination! The wide branching oak, firmly rivetted in crevices, all tangled over with fern and creepers, hung half-way down the precipices of the giant crag, while silver-white goats (which chime so picturesquely in with such landscapes as this) stood motionless as statues on the highest pinnacle, sharply defined against the clear blue sky. [...] 

It was difficult to turn away from this magnificent mountain view — from these chosen nooks and corners of a beautiful world — from sights of which no painter-soul can ever weary: even now, that fold beyond fold of wood, swelling far as the eye can reach — that vale ever parted by its serpentine river — that calm blue plain, with Tomohr in the midst, like an azure island in a boundless sea, haunt my mind's eye, and vary the present with visions of the past. With regret I turned northwards to descend to the new district of Tyrana; the town (and it is now past eleven) being still some hours distant.

 

Edward Lear: Tepeleni, Albania, c. 1848–1849

Unfortunately, as this suggests, Lear's descriptions of scenery are not all that interesting, even if they do make you want to visit Albania. You wouldn't expect anything like his nonsense verse but you might hope for a more original mode of landscape description. In an NYRB review (from which the image above is taken) of a reprint of the journal, Brad Leithauser says

'The book imparts almost no sense of Lear’s reading, the literary spirits he might have been seeking to commune or contend with during his travels. Most of the few literary references are to Byron, only because he happened to precede Lear to Albania by a couple of decades. Sentence by sentence, the book gives scant indication of a poet’s sensibility, for Lear was a slapdash prose stylist. Edward Lear in Albania often seeks to portray panoramic landscapes through words, a challenge that typically elicited from Lear sweeping and obvious adjectives: “noble,” “majestic,” “sublime.” He was especially fond of “picturesque,” which at one point appears three times in a single paragraph.'

Despite this defect, it is fascinating to read about Lear's experiences of a country that had so recently been under the rule of Ali Pasha. I'll end here with his decription of visiting Tepelenë:

'At the end of the space enclosed by the walls, and overhanging the river, is a single mosque — solitary witness of the grandeur of days past ; — and beyond that, all the space, as far as the battlement terrace looking north and west is occupied by the mass of ruin which represents Ali's ruined palace. The sun was sinking as I sat down to draw in what had been a great chamber, below one of the many crumbling walls — perhaps in the very spot where the dreaded Ali gave audience to his Frank guests in 1809 — when Childe Harold was but twenty- four years old, and the Vizir in the zenith of his power. The poet is no more ; — the host is beheaded, and his family nearly extinct ; — the palace is burned, and levelled with the ground ; — war, and change, and time have, perhaps, left but one or two living beings who, forty years back, were assembled in these gay and sumptuous halls.'^*

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^*I'm not sure what Tepelenë is like today. In 2013, Tim Neville, on the trail of Byron, described it in a travel piece for the Financial Times: 'I drove to Tepelena, where the remains of Ali Pasha’s palace stood derelict and littered with rubbish. A plaque celebrating the poet’s visit hung from the side of a wall next to a petrol station...'

the quiet island

Last year Carcanet published The Threadbare Coat: Selected Poems by Thomas A. Clark, a writer I have often referred to on this blog. There is an introduction by Matthew Welton that briefly discusses the poems' language and formal properties. He notes, for example, the repetition of words from poem to poem: 'the hills, clouds and water give us a sense of where we are in the landscape. And the mentions of nothingness, aloneness and longing, say something of what we can expect from territory of this kind.' He suggests that the 'reuse of a limited vocabulary across a range of poems feels appropriate to the landscapes that are the focus of these poems.' These places are only occasionally identified but it is clear that we are reading about the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Perhaps some of the poems are about the idea of this landscape rather than anything more specific - 'the quiet island', for example, is like a parable where the narrator finds peace but misses the melody of events, and so one morning, quietly leaves.

I could mention several of the book's landscape poem sequences but will just highlight one here. 'a walk in a water meadow' suggests that we will be given a series of ambulatory observations, but in the first stanza, a gentle mist closes in. This mist dampens sound and detaches objects from their context. The walker attends to the world in a different way: as places disclose themselves, vision is both impaired and repaired. The water meadow takes on the forms of mist: fine webs, cotton-grass and cuckoo-spit, alders wrapped in wool and skeins of mist snagged on larch. A walk in mist, he concludes, 'makes no progress / history is suspended / resolve dissolves.' History feels suspended in almost all of these poems, which offer the chance to concentrate on timeless phenomena: dusk and dawn, wind and waves, raindrops in a pool, light falling on a leaf, water flowing over roots and stones.

There is a YouTube clip where Tom introduces the book and reads 'the quiet island'. I have embedded it below and transcribed here what he says about the Highlands and Islands:

'These are landscapes of great clarity and resilience; they often have a surprising gentleness - all qualities that I want to percolate into the poetry.  But this is not where I live. I live on the east coast, above Edinburgh. So I'm always at some distance from the landscapes I write about. No doubt this distance sharpens desire. I always want to head out into the Highlands. Somehow I feel more relaxed there than anywhere else. I seem to be more responsive and resourceful than anywhere else. It's as if a whole set of cultural accretions has fallen away, or more likely, blown away. And this is one sense of The Threadbare Coat, the title of this new book from Carcanet Press. It's an image of poverty and exposure, as if there could be only the lightest membrane between you and the landscape.'

The Mummelsee, a supposedly bottomless lake

I have been looking back at some books I read before starting this blog and have never got round to mentioning. One of these is Simplicissimus, the picaresque novel by Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, written in 1668 and translated for Dedalus by Mike Mitchell. Near the end of the book, its hero Simplicius hears various tales told about 'the Mummelsee, a supposedly bottomless lake on one of the highest mountains in the neighbourhood.' (Wikipedia's entry on this Black Forest lake begins, disappointingly: 'the Mummelsee is a 17-metre-deep lake...') The stories told to Simplicius concern disappearing animals and sightings of water sprites. On one occasion, he learns, a Duke of Württemberg tried to measure the depth of the lake with a length of twine but his boat started to sink and he had to abandon the attempt. Curious about this strange place, Simplicius decides to set off to see it for himself.

When he arrives with his companion after a walk of less than six hours, the two of them polish of the food and drink they brought and then proceed with some scientific observations, drawing a map and tasting the water to see if it would explain why some trout that had been introduced on one occasion all died. They then locate a spot 'where the water, otherwise as clear as crystal, seems to be pitch black on account of its awesome depth'. Ignoring his companion's advice, Simplicius throws stones into the lake. Storm clouds begin to gather and, looking into the water, he sees creatures swimming up from the depths, bringing back the stones. One of them, the Prince of Mummelsee, comes to the surface and takes Simplicius back down with him. Eventually they reach the centre of the earth where they discuss politics, religion and geography. He doesn't spend long there before returning to the surface, but he does give a memorable short description of the way this land of the sylphs is lit by the lakes of the world.

'While I was there I observed how the sun shone on each lake in turn and sent its rays down to these awesome depths, making it as bright in this abyss as on the surface and even casting shadows. The lakes were like windows for the sylphs through which they received both light and warmth. Even if they didn't always come directly, because the sides of some lakes were twisted, they were transmitted by reflection because nature had set whole slabs of crystal, diamonds and rubies where necessary in the angles of the cliffs.'

The Mummelsee
Source: Wikimedia Commons

The magical lake of Mummelsee also appears in a poem by Eduard Mörike, who I wrote about here last month. 'The Ghosts of Mummelsee' is one of his poems later set to music by Hugo Wolf. There is a New York Festival of Song blog post on this Lied, which gives an English translation by Charles L. Cingolani. The narrator, hiding in some bushes, sees a funeral procession for the king of the lake. The ghosts walk over the water and then enter it through a sparkling gate. However, there is a twist at the end when they realise they have been watched...

How lovely the fires glow on the water! 
They flare and then turn green;
Fog moves in clusters along the shore,
The pond is turning into a sea—
Be still!
Is there something stirring out there?

In the middle a twitching—For heaven’s sake! Help!
They come back again, they are coming!
A bellowing in the reeds, a crunching in the rushes;
Make haste, take flight!
Away!
They sense trouble, they are on my tracks!

Landscapes of Detectorists

When I look back on this period of lockdown I think the 'highlight' will probably be the fortnight or so we spent as a family watching Detectorists on the BBC iPlayer. What my sons say they most appreciated was the gentle humour and escapism of it, but I suspect too there was something comforting in the idea that historical imagination and curiosity can transform a small stretch of landscape. Despite some sunny weather, this has been another weekend of staying indoors except for the short permitted exercise along familiar streets, and yet each time we walk them we see some new detail in the design of a house or the contents of a garden. Every day I pass a house with a blue plaque to the poet Louis MacNeice but I have long since taken as much interest in the houses surrounding it, wondering about the lives they have contained. The terminus of my regular walk is Canonbury Tower, an old Tudor building once owned by Thomas Cromwell which reminds you of the layers of history anywhere in London.

Last year Colin Sackett's Uniformbooks brought out a book on Detectorists in which four geographers analyse the series in terms of different ways of reading landscape, aspects of verticality, gender roles and the resonance of lost, everyday objects. It is a pleasure to read, although if you have just binge-watched the series you'll find it covering familiar ground. In some ways I was more interested in what writer Mackenzie Crook and producer Adam Tandy had to say about the making of the programmes and the ways in which they made metal detecting more televisual. I didn't realise, for example, that it is best done in autumn or winter on muddy, unattractive ploughed fields - very different from the sunny Constable-like landscapes we see in the series. Crook took up the hobby when he started writing the script and actually managed to find a piece of gold Roman jewellery, which is now in the British Museum. And it was wonderful to learn that one of the more poetic moments in Detectorists had happened to him in real life. One day, while he was out detecting on a farm in Suffolk, he 'dug down four inches to find an exquisite bronze hawking whistle.'

'I took a few minutes to unclog the mud with a piece of straw, then held it up to my lips and blew. The note that issued from the whistle was a ghost, a sound unheard for centuries, and the last person to hear that sound, that exact sound, was the person who dropped it just yards from where I was standing. And it wasn't a faint, feeble ghost either: it was an urgent, piercing shrill that echoed across the field and back through time.'

The floating islands of Lake Vadimon

In these interminable lockdown days it is easy to get sick of walking the same streets over and over again. Of course there is always Google Earth, although I always suspect I may not always be looking at wha tI think I am. I thought I would travel in the footsteps of my blog namesake, Pliny the Younger, to the small lake 'called Vadimon'. According to Wikipedia its waters have now almost evaporated - 'the lake is almost completely underground and fed by sulphurous springs that pour milky waters into it'. But is there anything really still to see? Google Maps does show a small blue circle but Google Earth doesn't seem to allow you any closer than the image above (photograph taken in 2011). I think the 'lake' is to the right of the road, somewhere in that field.  

Pliny begins his letter by observing that one doesn't have to travel far to see natural wonders, sometimes they are practically on our doorstep. It is a point always worth bearing in mind, although I think I've seen all there is to see within a short Covid-restricted walk from our home. He then describes 'one of these curiosities', a lake

'perfectly circular in form, like a wheel lying on the ground; there is not the least curve or projection of the shore, but all is regular, even and just as if it had been hollowed and cut out by the hand of art. The water is of a clear sky-blue, though with somewhat of a greenish tinge; its smell is sulphurous, and its flavour has medicinal properties, and is deemed of great efficacy in all fractures of the limbs, which it is supposed to heal. Though of but moderate extent, yet the winds have a great effect upon it, throwing it into violent agitation. No vessels are suffered to sail here, as its waters are held sacred; but several floating islands swim about it, covered with reeds and rushes, and with whatever other plants the surrounding marshy ground and the edge itself of the lake produce in greater abundance.'

Pliny then explains how these islands sometimes move in a cluster and sometimes get dispersed, seeming to race each other. Grazing sheep from the surrounding fields board the islands, seemingly oblivious to the fact they have left dry land. The lake empties into a river which,'after running a little way, sinks underground, and, if anything is thrown in, it brings it up again where the stream emerges.' He signs off the letter by saying: 'I have given you this account because I imagined it would not be less new, nor less agreeable, to you than it was to me; as I know you take the same pleasure as myself in contemplating the works of nature.'

On a Winter Morning before Sunrise

In his poem 'On a Winter Morning before Sunrise', the twenty-one year old Eduard Mörike (1804-75) wrote of his emotions on seeing the first light-as-down light of dawn: 'my soul is like crystal'. He felt his mind still as still water, opened to wonder by a ring of clear blue sky. A perfect way to start the day, certainly better than listening, as I do, to the latest grim news on the radio. The editor/translators of this poem, David Luke and Gilbert McKay, link it to 'Urach Revisited’ (1827), another 'major expression of the poet's youthful sensibility.' Bad Urach is a spa town at the foot of the Swabian Alb where Mörike studied at the evangelical seminary. His nostalgic return as a young man is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s poem on Tintern Abbey. A stream flows heedlessly past without any sorrow at the flux of time and the poet questions the landscape surrounding him:   

Here you all are, ancient and new,
Bare sunlit hills uprearing, summits made
For cloud-thrones, woods where scarcely noon breaks through,
Where balmy warmth mingles with deepest shade:
Do you still know me, who once fled to you,
Whose heavy head sweet-slumbrously was laid
Here in cool moss to hear the insects humming –
Do you know me, and shrink not at my coming?

Eduard Mörike wrote one of the stories most special to me, 'Mozart's Journey to Prague' - one I have re-read before in bleak times and found myself reaching for again recently. Although tinged with sadness, because we and the narrator know what will happen eventually to Mozart, it is a story of a brief, idyllic encounter, a moment (in the words of the translators) of 'festivity and conviviality, badinage and Lebenslust, memories of an earlier golden age of culture.' This sparkling novelle is not really about landscape although it begins with Mozart and Constanze journeying through the Moravian mountains. They then descend into a valley and stop at a village and Mozart decides to take a short walk. He enters the park of a local Count, sits down by some orange trees and, with his mind on his music, inadvertently picks one, an action which sets in train the events of the story.     

I will end this brief post on Mörike by mentioning a couple more poems on the subject of spring. In 'Frühlingsgefühle', translated as 'Intimation of Spring', violets wake and dream their time is near. It puts me in mind of the crocuses I saw on my lockdown exercise walk yesterday. 'In the Spring' find the poet lying on a hill: clouds drift, rivers flow and sunlight enter his veins. And yet he still feels a yearning, 'for what I cannot say'. It makes him wonder what memories are woven into 'this twilight of the gold-green leaves? / - The nameless days of long ago!'

7000 Oaks

Joseph Beuys, 7000 Eichen
Photograph taken in 2003, from Wikimedia Commons 

Following on from my last post I thought I would briefly mention another famous European environmental art intervention from the eighties, Joseph Beuys' 7000 Oaks (1982-87). Here's a description by the Dia Foundation, who partly sponsored it:

Joseph Beuys’s project 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks) began in 1982 at Documenta 7, the large international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. His plan called for the planting of 7,000 trees—each paired with a columnar basalt stone approximately four feet high and positioned above ground—throughout the greater city of Kassel. With major support from Dia Art Foundation, the project was carried forward under the auspices of the Free International University and took five years to complete; the last tree was planted at the opening of Documenta 8 in 1987. Beuys intended for the Kassel project to be the first stage in an ongoing scheme of tree planting that would extend throughout the world as part of a global mission to spark environmental and social change. Locally, the action was a gesture toward urban renewal.

I have never been to Kassel but it must be fascinating to wander round and see how these trees are getting on. How many of the originals are still there? It is easy to imagine that the basalt columns are no more resistant to developers and planning decisions than the living trees. There were large protests near me recently at the felling of the Happy Man Tree, a much-loved 150-year old London plane tree. It made me think back to one of the first posts I wrote for this blog, on Charlotte Mew's poems about the 'murder' of the great planes opposite her home. 

I came across an interesting essay on a blog by Andrew Bruce that gives some information on how the Joseph Beuys trees have fared. He draws on an article by Stephan Körner and Florian Bellin-Harder, 'The 7000 Eichen of Joseph Beuys – Experiences After Twenty-Five Years' (2009). Perhaps unsurprisingly, many trees had not been well cared for. They estimated that '70 replacement trees are required annually – these replacements are not true Beuys trees, the basalt column is removed upon the death of an original.' However,

There are exceptions to the poor state of the trees as reported by Körner and Bellin-Harder. Volunteer groups have carefully maintained several groups of trees. Other trees have become beloved foci of community activity. The study gives an example of a Beuys tree planted at an intersection that was closed to traffic at the behest of a citizens group just prior to Beuys’ action. The linden in this Plätzchen (little square) has been the site of ‘street festivals, baptisms, and other parties such as children’s birthdays’, children also meet there to walk to school together and play there after school. The lives of trees like this one come closer to the social relevance Beuys intended...

die wiese

herman de vries in the Steigerwald
(source: Vince de Vries, Wikimedia Commons)

The meadow planted near Eschenau in Upper Franconia by herman de vries, die wiese - one of the best known works of European land art - is no longer being maintained. According to a comment on the artist's website, 'in 2019 herman de vries decided not to intervene anymore and now the meadow will become part of the Steigerwald.' It is not surprising, because the artist is now eighty-nine, although I sometimes think artists who work out in nature must be a lot fitter than the average. There was a short interview with him in The Independent five years ago that said he was scaling back his work. 'The artist walks in the nearby forest every day, although health problems in the last year have slowed him down. He keeps a map charting his walks on the wall of his kitchen, which becomes an art work at the end of the year. He finds fallen trees: "They are nice sculptures, no? A sculpture that nature makes."'

I have been looking back at the Michael Fehr essay 'Herman's Meadow' (1992), which was reproduced in the Kastner/Wallis book Land and Environental Art (Phaidon, 1998). It was written six years after de vries and his wife Susanne began the project. I was struck by the lists of species in Fehr's descriptions of the meadow's development. Here is a quote from the essay with the lists turned into columns:

As a border, they planted a hedge composed of a variety of shrubs:

hazel
hawthorn
blackthorn
dogrose
euonymus
viburnum
rowanberry
privet

as well as a row of cultivated and semi-cultivated trees:

hazelnut
rowan
cornelian cherry
medlar

and older varieties of

apple
pear
plum

- and let it take its natural course. Late in the year, after seeding, half of the area was cut and the cuttings removed, so that the fodder meadow - overfertilised up till then with artificial fertilisers and liquid manure three times yearly - would lose some of its richness. In the following year, herman and Susanne collected seeds along embankments, paths and the edge of the forest from plants that had been resistant to the farmers' machines and liquid manure sprays and planted them in their meadow: in molehills and earth which had bcen dug up by wild boars. Consequently,

columbine
naked lady
alchemilla
scabious
pincushion flower
agrimony
angelica
avens
meadow salvia
primrose
valerian
mugwort
leonorus
yellow iris
comfrey
carnations
hops
byrony
rhinanthus and
belladonna

had a chance to spread. These were joined spontaneously by

spiraea
saxifrage
red clover
wood anemone
blue cranesbill

and runners from the aspen at the end of the forest developed shoots in the upper part of the meadow.

Rock and Brook

 

The Coat of Arms of Alland, Lower Austria

I like the way that when you look somewhere up on Wikipedia you tend to get given its coat of arms and I've noticed over time that the heraldry for particular places and regions occasionally includes landscape features. Rivers are an obvious example. Wikimedia includes a whole category 'rivers in heraldry' which range from the subtle - just wavy lines or patches of blue - to complete symbolic landscapes like the one above, for the market town of Alland in Austria. 

Although my father is a heraldry buff, I know little about it and so I will have to quote here from the International Heraldry site. They explain how landscape symbols ('charges') have been used over the years:

The oldest geological charge is the mount, typically a green hilltop rising from the lower edge of the field, providing a place for a beast, building or tree to stand. Natural mountains and boulders are not unknown, though ranges of mountains are differently shown. An example is the arms of Edinburgh, portraying Edinburgh Castle atop Castle Rock. Volcanos are shown, almost without exception, as erupting, and the eruption is generally stylised. In the 18th century, landscapes began to appear in armoury, often depicting the sites of battles. For example, Admiral Lord Nelson received a chief of augmentation containing a landscape alluding to the Battle of the Nile. 

Lord Nelson's coat of arms - note the landscape above the shield.

If you take a particular European region and look at its heraldry you will mostly see lots of lions and eagles and crosses, but there will also be a few clues to the local topography. Taking a pretty much random example, consider the state of Rhineland-Palatinate in Germany, which has twenty-four districts. River symbols representing the Rhine appear on the arms of the districts of Ahrweiler, Germersheim and Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis. A wavy white line in the arms of Mayen-Koblenz represents both the Rhine and the Moselle. The district of Südliche Weinstraße is named after the tourist wine route and has a white bar representing the route and grapes representing the wine. As this shows, such designs are not ancient, although they can incorporate older motifs - the Rhein-Pfalz-Kreis shield includes water lilies which were used in earlier Rhineland heraldry. The best one from a landscape point of view is shown below. The jug represent the ceramic industry, the green band refers to forests and the basalt columns symbolise the Westerwald's volcanic rock.    

The Coat of Arms of Westerwald District, Rhineland-Palatinate

 

If it seems reductive to think of place as mere landscape, for example by representing a complex four dimensional environment within a two-dimensional painting, then an image like this goes a stage further. Here we have an icon signifying a whole district of Germany made of just three colours and three shapes. It has to be said that modern heraldry like this can seem no more interesting than corporate branding. I am sure though that there are fascinating examples of landscape in the history of heraldry if you dig into the subject (which I've not done). I did a quick search and came up with one: Bad Griesbach in Bavaria, which has a design canting on the name of the town (Gries = rock, Bach = brook). The Heraldry Wiki includes the modern arms but also an image from a manuscript of 1599. This is rather lovely and could almost be a fragment of an early landscape painting. 

 

The Coat of Arms of Bad Griesbach im Rottal, Bavaria

Sacred mountains speak

A recent edition of The Early Music Show on Radio 3 focused on the music of Latin America and had a segment on the soundscapes of ancient meso-American and Andean cultures. Music archaeologists Matthias Stöckli and Alexander Herrera described the way musical instruments were drawn from the landscape - llama hoof drums, bone flutes, turtle shells - and used in rituals to encourage fertile crops. Sixteenth century dictionaries describe a Mayan shell horn trumpet that would promote the "greening of the fields". In the Andes, music and dance were associated with the changing seasons. They provided a way of communicating with ancestors, particularly through echoes. 

"...So the echoes of the instruments in the landscape are a way of communicating with the landscape, of making those sacred mountains speak to you. We find it in caves, we find it in spaces with rock art, which have a particular sound to them. They also have names. [One of these denoted] a place with a very special soundscape and that soundscape was made to resonate at specific times of the year with specific instruments..."

Andean musical instruments
Source: Wikimedia Commons (Andean Culture History by Wendell Clark Bennett)

Whenever I come across something like this, from a field of knowledge I know nothing about, I find myself trawling the internet for information and hoping it will lead to unfamiliar intersections between culture and landscape. You can find a lot online about the wind and percussion instruments of Latin America but what interests me is the way that the wider landscape would have featured in performance. The Met website has an article on ancient Andean music and mentions the ceremonial centre of Chavín de Huántar, where 'engraved stone slabs surrounding a sunken circular court show elaborately dressed figures walking in procession and carrying ritual objects such as spondylus shells, hallucinogenic cactus stalks, and shell trumpets.' There is website devoted to the Chavín de Huántar Archaeological Acoustics project where you can watch a short video and hear the sound of a pututu conch shell trumpet. But these shells were not taken from the local landscape, they were obtained through long-distance trade. So really this would have been the opposite of music attuned to nature: the sound of the conch shell has been a means of summoning people in many cultures (as readers of Lord of the Flies are aware) and here it would have cut across the soundscape, collapsed distance and, like Wallace Stevens' jar in Tennessee, taken dominion everywhere.

One writer I have come across with help from Google is Henry Stobart, a Reader in Music and Ethnomusicology at Royal Holloway, who has written about traditional music in Bolivia. I will quote here one interesting paragraph, pointing to the importance of landscape features. Stobart has a whole chapter on Andean sirenas in an anthology of essays, Music of the Sirens.

During feasts people may also dance for many miles across the landscape, singing and playing instruments as they go, as they make a tour of community boundaries, undertake pilgrimages, or visit particular homesteads. The lyrics of the songs they perform on such journeys may also reference a range of features of the landscape. Links between music and landscape are made especially explicit in rural discourses about sirinus or sirenas, spirit beings that are typically associated with specific places in the landscape, such as waterfalls, springs, rocks or caves. While living over several years, during the 1990s, in the rural community of Kalankira in the Macha region of Northern Potosí, I was often told that all music ultimately comes from the sirinus. And, just as music comes from these spirit beings of the landscape, it was also often played back as consuelo or “consolation” to the powers of the “animated” landscape that ensure human welfare. On many occasions I joined friends in Kalankira to play music in the landscape, focusing our attention on particular rocks, corrals or other places that were seen to ensure the welfare and reproduction of the herds, rather than on any human audience.

Beach at Low Tide

In between the first and second waves of coronavirus I managed to get to an art exhibition - the Royal Academy's Léon Spilliaert retrospective. It was a strange experience, trying to enjoy paintings while wearing a mask (steaming up my glasses) and keeping a safe distance from other people. Laura Cumming had written a preview in February which made it sound great. 'This is a vital opportunity, then, to catch sight of his dark and startling art in all its precise originality, and to understand him as more than a painter of the cold North Sea'. He certainly was a fascinating artist, but here, in keeping with the blog's focus, I will focus on his sea paintings, with quotes drawn from an essay by Anne Adriaens-Pannier and Noémie Goldman. Here is a page from the catalogue, open to show a remarkable early work, now in a private collection: Seascape with Beacons (c. 1900).

'The sea appears in his earliest works like a lightly coloured patch of life, gentle and calm, betraying an aesthetic borrowed from the Impressionists. The pastel is applied in shapeless strokes, the delicate colours creating muted harmonies sometimes brightened by tiny spots of light.'

  

Léon Spilliaert, Seascape Seen from Mariakerke, 1909

'When Spillaert wanted to enhance the intensity of the sea, he introduced a disturbing nocturnal atmosphere and put greater emphasis on the horizon, where the silhouette of the urban coastline can sometimes be made out. In this series of  'sombre seascapes' ... the water , waves, currents, clouds and light evoke constant motion, the uncertainty of life and the suffering of a tormented character...' 

 

Léon Spilliaert, Beach at Low Tide, c. 1909

'Spillaert then abandoned these broader horizons to look at something closer to hand, at the water's edge on the beach ... The narrowing of his gaze led him to simplified forms, images stripped bare. Subtly sinuous, the waves take possession of a sandbank, tracing an organic, almost abstract shape on the damp, dark beach.'

I will conclude here with three more quotes about Spilliaert's Ostende beach scenes, taken from reviews of the exhibition.

'A longing to escape – or at least to have the option – is palpable in many of Spilliaert’s land- and seascapes. In a 1908 gouache and watercolour of Ostend’s Hofstraat, a towering street leads to a lantern in the sea, an inviting will-o’-the-wisp in the murk. Spilliaert’s beaches often surge towards the ocean beyond' - Joe Lloyd

'His beachscapes depict the breakwater as an advance, an invasion, while poles, pillars, lighthouses, masts, lampposts are all ranged precariously against the relentless horizontality of the sea. The vertical is temporary – the horizontal always wins.' - Patrick McGuiness 

'With a work such as Seascape Seen from Mariakerke (1909), you peer into the layers of India ink – shade upon shade of black – as though into mist, until a stray brushstroke or a scrub-mark that reveals the paper beneath reminds you that you’re looking at a two-dimensional surface. The immediate physical sensation is a kind of retinal whiplash – but as the process is repeated in seascape after seascape it amounts at last to something more like yearning: wishing yourself into another world while unable to forget where you are.' - Samuel Reilly

The Cottage in a Cornfield

John Constable, The Cottage in a Cornfield, c. 1817-33 #cottagecore

I have often discussed here the enduring popularity of pastoral poetry and images of Arcadia. The latest manifestation of this long tradition is 'cottagecore'. An NPR article on the phenomenon explains that 'visually, cottagecore looks like this: sourdough bread starters, foraged mushrooms, open meadows, freshly picked flowers, homegrown produce, knitting, baking pies, and, yes, rustic cottages. The pastoral interpretations live on TikTok, Pinterest, and prominently on Tumblr.'  The Wikipedia article on cottagecore references Theocritus, Shakespeare, Marie Antoinette and Animal Crossing. It notes the impact of Covid-19: ^'sites such as Tumblr had a 150% increase in cottagecore posts in the 3 months from March 2020. The trend has been described by Vox as “the aesthetic where quarantine is romantic instead of terrifying”.'

How does landscape figure in cottagecore? #cottagecore posters tend to favour flowery meadows, sunlit glades, golden hayfields and sun-dappled streams. Some of their photographs look too perfect to be real. The use of filters tend to make the world look like CGI. Tellingly there are a lot of images of paths you can imagine yourself taking, to escape the confinement of lockdown and fear of the pandemic. Cottages feature occasionally but so do many other kinds of building - the phrase clearly signifies a mood rather than a type of building. Sometimes young women picture themselves in these scenes, with long hair and natural-looking clothes (the forest-loving Mori girls were a similar internet fashion in Japan).

Cottagecore is part of the larger phenomenon of Generation Z aesthetics. A 2018 Pinterest article noted that 'there are over 37 million aesthetic related boards on the platform, with Gen Z’ers searching for “aesthetic” 447% more than Millennials.' There is an Aesthetics wiki that gives a list of 'aesthetics' used by Generation Z, of which cottagecore is but one. Under C, for example, you will find Classicism and Cubism, but also Clovercore (which 'conveys ideas of nature and love with a bright and dreamy color palette'), Chaotic Academia ('an aesthetic that involves haphazard routines, messy habits, unusual or banned literature and studying with a passion') and Cloudcore ('based on the visual culture of clouds. The pictures are usually taken during sunsets when the clouds have more color in them.') 

When it comes to landscape imagery there are various aesthetic categories similar to cottagecore: naturecore, forestpunk, mosscore. The goblincore hashtag denotes abject landscape features: 'aspects of nature that most would find "ugly" or dirty, ranging from animals such as frogs and snails to materials such as moss, mud, plants, and fungi such as mushrooms.' In contrast #fairycore or #fairywave 'is an aesthetic surrounding the theme of nature, soft pastels, butterflies, magic, flowers, soft animals like bunnies, and the vibe of springtime.' You could look on all this as trivial and even comical, but who knows where culture is heading next and how these social media platforms will evolve? Perhaps a wholly new landscape aesthetic will appear. 

I think I may have first come across the term cottagecore earlier this year in connection with Taylor Swift's album 'folklore'. She has just released another record, 'evermore', to very good reviews. Announcing it on Instagram she acknowledged the element of escapism in this latest collection of songs. "We were standing on the edge of the folklorian woods and had a choice: to turn and go back or to travel further into the forest of this music. We chose to wander deeper in."

A magical rain is falling

The Book of Songs (Shijing) contains the seeds of later Chinese landscape poetry.  Its oldest poems are around three thousand years old but here I wanted to draw attention to one rare example that can be attached to a particular date, 658 BCE, when the people of Wei were forced to abandon their capital north of the Yellow River. In his translations Arthur Waley explains that they built a new capital 'in a narrow strip between Shandong and Henan. In their move they were assisted and protected by Duke Huan of Qi, who sent a gift of three hundred horses'. The poem begins by describing the building of houses, oriented according to the sun. Alongside these they planted hazels, chestnuts-trees, catalpas, Paulownias and lacquer trees, 'that we may make the zithers great and small.'  I really like the idea of prioritising musical instrument making when designing a city. The poem then briefly describes a journey to look down on what they had created. 

We climb to that wilderness

To look down at Chu,

To look upon Chu and Tang,

Upon the Jing hills and the citadel. 

We go down and inspect mulberry orchards, 

We take the omens and they are lucky, 

All of them truly good. 

 

A magical rain is falling. 

We order our grooms 

By starlight, early to, to yoke our steeds; 

We drive to the mulberry-fields and there we rest...

This anonymous poem is one of the 'Airs of the States', in this case one of the 'Airs of Yong' (a small principality later absorbed into Wei).  As you read these poems certain lines leap out which transport you to the natural world of ancient China: its fields and orchards, mountains and rivers. As an experiment I tried extracting some of these phrases from the first five states in The Book of Songs, including Yong.

  

Zhou

Climbing a high ridge

Cutting boughs that have been lopped and grown again

Plucking and gathering plantain

Water mallow growing in patches

Cloth-plant spread across the midst of the valley

Blazing flowers of a peach tree

 A 'cloth-plant' (ge)

Shao 

Gathering white aster down in the ravine

Climbing the southern hill to pluck the fern-shoots

Covering with white rushes a dead doe

The flowers of the cherry

Paths drenched in dew

Thunder on the sun-side of the southern hills

 White China aster

Bei

Building earth-works at the capital

Gazing after a swallow

Off in a boat, floating, floating far away

A gentle wind from the south

A cloudless dawn begins to break

On the hills grows a hazel-tree

Chinese hazel

 

Yong

Going to gather goosefoot

I walk in the wilderness

We drive to the mulberry-fields and there we rest

Quails bicker

Thick grows the caltrop

A magical rain is falling

 Goosefoot

Wei

Drumming and dancing in the gully

She rests where the fields begin

She threw a quince at me

Kitesfoot so fresh

Reeds and sedges tower high

The mulberry-leaves have fallen

 

Mulberry leaf

There I sat viewing the silver streams

I should have more time for the blog soon, but for now I will make do with posting a long quotation from The Compleat Angler, first published in 1653. As Marjorie Swann's introduction to the Oxford World's Classics edition explains, Izaak Walton's story of vacationing fishermen 'embodies his artistic response to trauma' - the death of his son and the national tragedy of the Civil War. The book asks how we should live and turns to the natural world for an answer. As such it reminds me of the way people have been finding solace in nature and landscape during the pandemic. In my extract below, Walton's alter ego, Piscator, has just been demonstrating chub fishing to his companion Venator, and they are about to head to an inn for supper. "Let's be going, good master," Venator says, "for I am hungry again with fishing." But Piscator isn't quite ready:  

"Nay, stay a little, good scholar. I caught my last Trout with a worm; now I will put on a minnow, and try a quarter of an hour about yonder trees for another; and, so, walk towards our lodging. Look you, scholar, thereabout we shall have a bite presently, or not at all. Have with you, Sir: o' my word I have hold of him. Oh! it is a great logger-headed Chub; come, hang him upon that willow twig, and let's be going. But turn out of the way a little, good scholar! toward yonder high honeysuckle hedge; there we'll sit and sing whilst this shower falls so gently upon the teeming earth, and gives yet a sweeter smell to the lovely flowers that adorn these verdant meadows.

"Look! under that broad beech-tree I sat down, when I was last this way a-fishing; and the birds in the adjoining grove seemed to have a friendly contention with an echo, whose dead voice seemed to live in a hollow tree near to the brow of that primrose-hill. There I sat viewing the silver streams glide silently towards their centre, the tempestuous sea; yet sometimes opposed by rugged roots and pebble-stones, which broke their waves, and turned them into foam; and sometimes I beguiled time by viewing the harmless lambs; some leaping securely in the cool shade, whilst others sported themselves in the cheerful sun; and saw others craving comfort from the swollen udders of their bleating dams. As I thus sat, these and other sights had so fully possess my soul with content, that I thought, as the poet has happily express it,

    I was for that time lifted above earth,
    And possest joys not promis'd in my birth.

"As I left this place, and entered into the next field, a second pleasure entertained me; 'twas a handsome milk-maid, that had not yet attained so much age and wisdom as to load her mind with any fears of many things that will never be, as too many men too often do; but she cast away all care, and sung like a nightingale. Her voice was good, and the ditty fitted for it; it was that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlow, now at least fifty years ago; and the milk-maid's mother sung an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh, in his younger days. They were old-fashioned poetry, but choicely good; I think much better than the strong lines that are now in fashion in this critical age. Look yonder! on my word, yonder, they both be a-milking again. I will give her the Chub, and persuade them to sing those two songs to us.

These songs, reproduced in Walton's text, are of course the famous pastoral poems 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' and 'The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd'.

Look into the cataract

I've been a bit short of time recently so here is just a brief post to share a clip from YouTube of the beginning of Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass (1976). Embedded clips like this usually disappear after a while so I am also including some still images from the film too. The Rückenfigur looking over the Bavarian Alps is the herdsman Hias, a character based on the legendary Bavarian prophet, Mühlhiasl who had Nostradamus-like visions of the future.  The second one shows clouds flowing over the mountains, a scene Herzog and his crew filmed frame-by-frame.  These mountains formed the landscape of Herzog's childhood, living until the age of twelve in a remote village which his mother had taken their family to after the house next door to theirs in Munich was bombed in an Allied raid.

After these views of the mountain landscape where the film's story is set (just after the end of the clip embedded here), there is a sequence of stranger, more dream-like images of flowing water. These are supposed to put the viewer into a kind of trance, like the villagers in the story who talk and act as if in a waking dream - Herzog got all his actors to perform under hypnosis, with the exception of Josef Bierbichler who plays Hias (for more on this, see the book Werner Herzog and the making of 'Heart of Glass'). Over the waterfall footage you hear a voice in German: "I look into the cataract... I feel an undertow... It draws me, it sucks me down..."  As this is happening, Popul Vuh's music gently plays in the background.  Herzog described the effect of concentrating intensely on this imagery.  It "gives you a lift as if the waterfall was standing still and you start to float upwards. It's a little but like the effect of staring from a bridge into a river and all of a sudden you start to float..."   

A river made of crystal water-drops

Gaṅgā, the personification of the sacred river Ganges,

early 19th century watercolour in The British Museum

Eric Newby's Slowly Down the Ganges introduced me to the fact that the river has 108 names, all of which he lists so that they form a kind of poem at the beginning of the book.  The river is also a goddess, Ganga, and these names are thus part of Hindu faith, but as I have often talked here about aspects of landscape in European religious art, it does not seem inappropriate to take them out of context here. You can find the full list in English translation online. Here are the first ten, which show the way they mix very short geographical description with snatches of mythology and descriptions of the goddess herself.

1. One who flows
2. One who is born from the lotus feet of Lord Vishnu
3. Dearest to Shiva
4. Daughter of Lord of Himalaya
5. One who flows through the mountains
6. Mother of Kartikeya
7. One who liberated 60,000 cursed sons of King Sagara
8. Meeting Saraswati at Allahabad
9. Being sweet and melodious
10. Flowing and meeting the ocean

And from the remaining 98 names, here are ten more that together form a word picture of the river.

• One who is imperishable, eternal (24)
• One who is delightful (33)
• A river made of crystal water-drops (34)
• One whose water is as good as nectar (43)
  
• As noisy as a conch-shell and drum (49)
  
• One who flows with a force (54)
• Just like the autumn moon (66)
• One who drives away all sorrows (72)
• One who is muttering (94)
• One who is light amid the darkness of ignorance (104)