Diesel river

'Down by the shoreline with my back to the land

I felt my feet sink down in the sand

Down by the harbour standing all alone

I felt my heart grow heavy as a stone...'

- The Weather Prophets, 'Almost Prayed', 1986

Earlier today I was reading about the forthcoming Shorelines Festival at Leigh-on-Sea and these lyrics came to mind, from one of my favourite singles of the eighties.  The song conveys an impression of the industrial shore in a few simple images, from the swans in the diesel river, to the cargo and cranes in the dawn light.  What with the Morrissey autobiography and Sam Knee's appealing new book about Indie fashion, A Scene In Between, Mrs Plinius and I have been feeling rather nostalgic this week.  I've not yet read Morrissey, but A Scene in Between is mostly photographs and Peter Astor can be seen in one of them wearing the spotty shirt he had on to perform 'Almost Prayed' on Whistle Test.  I still have stashed away in a wardrobe some old NME articles from that time, including an interview with the Weather Prophets from 28 March 1987.  Hopefully nobody will object to me including here a few paragraphs from this, in which Astor talks about the kind of landscapes that influenced his lyrics and the importance to him of Andrew Marvell's poem 'The Garden' ('a green thought in a green shade...')  Sadly the interviewer moves on just when this is getting interesting...

 

Traces

The Hayward Gallery's current exhibition Ana Mendieta: Traces is well worth a visit.  Her Siluetas (1973-80) were an important contribution to the development of art in the landscape and I discussed them here six years ago, contrasting her approach with Antony Gormley.  The Super-8 film I mentioned then, Yagul (Burial Pyramid) (1974) can be seen in the Hayward's show.  In Yagul, Mendieta was struck by the way ancient Mexican ruins were overgrown with nature and in one of her best-known photographs, Imagen de Yagul (1973), she lies among the old stones, covered in flowers.  A similar Ovid-like metamorphosis can be seen on the cover of the catalogue (above).  There is a charming story told by her art teacher and partner Hans Breder about the first such work, made spontaneously one day at college, when she simply took off her dress, lay down naked on the ground and asked her fellow students to cover her in grass.

From 1975 onwards Mendieta no longer felt the need to include her own body as an integral part of the work and begun to create the Siluetas, earth-body sculptures shaped by her silhouette.  Some of these resemble archaeological images of ancient tombs or tribal markings, others look at first like simple landscape photographs until you notice the small island of mud or bare patch in the grass, suggestive of the human form.  Mendieta distanced herself from Robert Smithson and what she regarded as the brutalisation of nature in large-scale earthworks. In a 1985 interview quoted in the catalogue she said, 'I would say if I have an identity with someone spiritually, and their use of nature, it would be someone like Richard Long, although I think his work is definitely very English.'

The Siluetas are undoubtedly her most impressive work but this exhibition introduced me to the variety of sculptural approaches she pursued in the early eighties.  There are David Nash-like burnt wood pieces, flat floor sculptures made by mixing earth with a binding agent, and large-scale photographs of figurative forms carved directly into limestone in her native Cuba.  She started drawing simple shapes on leaves of the 'autograph tree', clusia rosea, which children in the Caribbean used as writing paper during colonial times.  She also used leaf prints as the basis for lithographs in a book made jointly with her new husband Carl Andre (his images were based on a Roman flagstone).  It looks like a beautiful book, but impossible to view objectively without thinking of the circumstances of her death a few months later.  I left wondering how her art might have evolved by now and whether she could have developed new ways of engaging with landscape and nature.

The Riddle of the Sands

By Jove, I've been reading The Riddle of the Sands and realised it's a rather splendid landscape novel!

'For miles in every direction lay a desert of sand. To the north it touched the horizon, and was only broken by the blue dot of Neuerk Island and its lighthouse. To the east it seemed also to stretch to infinity, but the smoke of a steamer showed where it was pierced by the stream of the Elbe. To the south it ran up to the pencil-line of the Hanover shore. Only to the west was its outline broken by any vestiges of the sea it had risen from. There it was astir with crawling white filaments, knotted confusedly at one spot in the north-west, whence came a sibilant murmur like the hissing of many snakes. Desert as I call it, it was not entirely featureless. Its colour varied from light fawn, where the highest levels had dried in the wind, to brown or deep violet, where it was still wet, and slate-grey where patches of mud soiled its clean bosom. Here and there were pools of water, smitten into ripples by the impotent wind; here and there it was speckled by shells and seaweed...' 

These are the sands in which the riddle resides, a military secret that two young Englishmen, Carruthers and Davies, believe they will establish by navigating the labyrinth of partly hidden tidal channels on the Friesland coast.  Erskine Childers based The Riddle of Sands (1903) on his own experiences in 1897, sailing the Baltic and Friesian Islands.  His characters know that something is afoot and puzzle obsessively over maps like a pair of psychogeographers, attempting to read meaning into the configuration of sand banks, the width of canals, the depth of shoals and the location of coastal settlements.  Sometimes the landscape is rendered invisible by fog, and they must carefully find their way, guided only by buoys and booms, calculating how far they can get before the tide turns against them.  The map below, one of four Childers included, orientates the reader and pinpoints the sites of key incidents in the story.  But it also conveys the ambiguous nature of this zone where  sea and land are confused and a hidden topography is revealed at different times of the day.  There is even a place that could not be fixed by the Admiralty cartographers: the chart says simply 'Sands continually changing'.

'Mudscape with Figures' is the title of a review Ian Fleming wrote in The Spectator when The Riddle of the Sands was reprinted.  By this time he had published the first three James Bond novels and expresses impatience with his Edwardian predecessor's pacing and excessive attention to detail.  'The reader is quite happy to share the pillow-fantasies of the author so long as he is provided with sufficient landmarks to help him relate the author's world more or less to his own and a straining after verisimilitude with maps and diagrams should be avoided except in detective stories aimed at the off-beta mind.'  However, Fleming concludes that 'the reason why The Riddle of the Sands will always be read is due alone to its beautifully sustained atmosphere. This adds poetry, and the real mystery of wide, fog-girt silence and the lost-child crying of seagulls, to a finely written log-book of a small-boat holiday upon which the author has grafted a handful of 'extras' and two `messages'—the threat of Germany and the need for England to 'be prepared.''

Geese Pond Mountain

In one of my earliest posts here I mentioned the tradition in China of carving short poetic inscriptions into the rock at scenic places, quoting one composed by the T'ang dynasty poet and prose writer Yüan Chieh.  A thousand years later it seems to have been increasingly hard for the discerning literati to find a landscape that hadn't been turned into a text.  In 1743, Fang Pao wrote a brief account of a visit to Geese Pond Mountain (Yangdangshan), still then relatively inaccessible, emphasising his relief on finding that it retained some of its original beauty:

Among the mountains I have previously seen, such as Floating Mountain in T'ung-ch'eng, An-hui, Assistance Mountain in Nanking, and the Peak That Flew Here in Hang-chou, it is not that their cliffs and caves lack beauty, but that ignorant monks have carved many figures of Transcendents and Buddhas into them, while vulgar scholars have engraved their names and poems. Like sores, they are shocking when they come into sight. Only this mountain has completely preserved its ancient appearance up to the present. This is because it is a wall standing a thousand jen erect that cannot be climbed. And its location is isolated and distant. Those with wealth, position, or power have no reason to come here. Even if they do, they cannot linger long enough to hire workmen to erect scaffolds so as to show off by inscribing their names. So the mountain has never been humiliated by the scraping and gouging of ignorant monks and vulgar scholars.

This translation is by Richard E. Strassberg (in the publicly available Inscribed Landscapes), who notes in his introduction that Fang Pao endowed the mountain with a moral character, identifying qualities of 'antiquity, purity, dignity, and detachment in its natural formation.'  Earlier in this anthology there is another description of Geese Pond Mountain, written in the eleventh century by Shen K'uo, which gives a sense of it's elusive character: 'I observed all the peaks of Geese Pond Mountain. Each one rises sheer, is perilously steep and startling in appearance, soaring upward for a thousand feet. The magnificent cliffs and immense valleys resemble those of no other mountain, for they are all encompassed within yet another valley. When one looks at the mountain from the outside, nothing can be seen. But upon reaching this valley, there appears a forest of peaks encroaching upon the sky.' 

Qing dynasty hand scroll showing the Yandang mountain range

And the snow melted in one breath

I said in an earlier post that I might return at some point to In the Field, the book of interviews with field recordists put together by Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle of CRISAP.  Here I want to highlight the work of one of their interviewees, Hiroki Sasajima.  He makes, for example, an interesting observation in relation to, Colony, a collage of insect sounds recorded at various locations over the course of three years.  "In Japanese culture, appreciating the sounds of insects is a tradition that goes back to olden times, their sounds enjoyed as songs, as a voice or as a message from another creature ... I found some research that showed evidence that Japanese brains have learned to deal with the insect voice as a creature's voice while European and American brains apprehend insect sound as noise."  Some of these theories about the Japanese brain may be scientifically dubious but there is no doubting the special place insects like the cicada have in Japanese culture (one of Basho's most famous haiku, for example: 'In the silence of a temple, / A cicada’s voice alone / Penetrates the rocks').  Among The 100 Soundscape of Japan designated by the government in 1996 to combat noise pollution there are several that reflect this love of insects: suzumushi (bell-ringing insects) in Miyagino, cicadas at Yama-dera, tree crickets on the banks of Yodo River.



The track embedded above was recorded by Sasajima in a bamboo grove: "At night," he explains, "when the snow absorbed all the sound, the place was silent, a place of no sound.  Then, with sunrise, the temperatures heated up and the snow melted in one breath."  Much less accessible on first listening, Into the Nothings, was "recorded in the 'sea of trees' in Fuji.  The sea of trees in Fuji is famous as a mystery zone where you cannot use a compass and where once you have lost your way you will never return."  It sounds like a legend but this place is very real: iron in the volcanic soil prevents mobile phones from working and (according to an article on Tofugu) 'the tree coverage in Aokigahara is so thick that even at high noon it’s entirely possible to find places shrouded in complete darkness. It’s also mostly devoid of animals and is eerily quiet. Hearing a bird chirping in the forest is incredibly rare. The area is rocky, cold, and littered with over 200 caves for you to accidentally fall into.'   It is a notorious site for suicides (second only to the Golden Gate Bridge) and Sasajima' field recording conveys an atmosphere of claustrophobic menace.

There is a long association between caves and music (exemplified by two of my previous posts here, on Felix Mendelssohn and Akio Suzuki, visiting Scotland nearly two centuries apart).  Water drop, the clip embedded below, was recorded by Sasajima at the Nippara limestone cavern near Tokyo.  Inside, the dripping water from a stalactite reverberates inside a suikinkutsu, a vessel usually installed in Japanese gardens (as I described in an earlier post on the way sound artist Jem Finer had adapted the idea).  Reading about this place I thought of Wallace Stevens' poem 'Anecdote of the Jar', which landscape writers often quote to explain the way art can turn nature into culture ('I placed a jar in Tennessee, / And round it was, upon a hill. ... / The wilderness rose up to it, / And sprawled around, no longer wild...')  In the Nippara caves a jar has been placed in the ground to turn the natural action of rainwater into an endless piece of music, of which Sasajima's composition is no more than a drop.  And he is not the only Japanese artist to have recorded these underground soundscapes: Eisuke Yanagisawa made a whole album, Into the Cave, there and observed that 'the cave itself can be regarded as a huge suikinkutsu. Once stepping into the cave, I became a part of the natural sound sculpture, listening to it and resonating with it.'

Matlock Tor by Moonlight

Joseph Wright of Derby, Matlock Tor by Moonlight, 1777-80

The lure of landscape painting was described by Joseph Wright of Derby in a letter to the textile manufacturer and art collector John Leigh Philips: ‘I know not how it is, tho’ I am engaged in portraits and made a dead colour of a half length yesterday, I find myself continually stealing off and getting to Landscapes.’ This was in 1792, fifteen years after returning from Italy to his native county, where he could paint views like Matlock Tor by Moonlight.  Such picturesque scenery was in Thomas Gainsborough's mind when he wrote from Bath in 1768 to his friend James Unwin in Derbyshire: ‘I suppose your Country is very woody – pray have you Rocks and Waterfalls! For I am as fond of Landskip as ever.’ But like Joseph Wright he felt constrained by the demand for portrait painting: a trip to Derbyshire would be fine if only ‘the People with their damn’d Faces could but let me along a little...’  And in a similar vein the witty and rueful passage below, in a letter Gainsborough wrote to William Jackson, may resonate with any reader who feels they cannot spend enough time away from the pressures of work, out in the landscape.

‘I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease. But these fine Ladies and their Tea drinkings, Dancings, Husband huntings and such will fob me out of the last ten years, & I fear miss getting Husbands too – But we can say nothing to these things you know Jackson, we must jog and be content with the jingling of the Bells, only damn it I hate a dust, the Kicking up of a dust, and being confined in Harness to follow the track, whilst others ride in the wagon, under cover, stretching their Legs in the Straw at Ease, and gazing at Green Trees & Blue skies without half my Taste, that’s damn’d hard.’

Thomas Gainsborough, Portrait of Miss Evans, 1786-90

Nostalgia for the Light

The Atacama desert: a 'vast open book of memory' whose clear skies have allowed astronomers to look back in time to uncover the origins of the universe, whilst archaeologists excavate human remains from pre-Columbian times miraculously preserved in the arid climate.  But it is also a place where women come to search for traces of their husbands, murdered by the Pinochet regime and disposed of at unrecorded sites, whose locations must still be known to those involved.  Patricio Guzmán's acclaimed documentary Nostalgia for the Light (2010) contrasts these researches into our distant past with the difficulties in uncovering Chile's buried history.  Not far from the observatories there is an old nineteenth century mining camp, whose remoteness and cramped old huts required only the addition of barbed wire for its conversion into a concentration camp after the 1973 coup.  The film interviews an architect and former prisoner who memorised its dimensions and exact layout so that if he was released he would be able to draw and bear witness to what he had experienced there.  At another camp, a doctor with some knowledge of astronomy taught a small group of fellow prisoners about the stars.  One of them remembers how "observing the sky and the stars, marvelling at the constellations, we felt completely free."  The military put a stop to this, convinced that the prisoners might be able to escape, guided by the constellations.

The fortieth anniversary of the coup was marked last week by the Whitechapel Gallery with a showing of Compañero: Víctor Jara of Chile (1975).  This deeply affecting documentary was built around an interview with Joan Jara, who fled to England with her two young daughters after the killing of her husband.  The evening also included readings and short film clips, beginning with a sequence from Nostalgia for the Light in which leaves blowing outside an old Santiago house turn into a galaxy of dust motes.  Watching this, memories stirred in me too, from a period when my wife was interviewing victims of the dictatorship as part of the legal team trying to have Pinochet extradited to Spain or prosecuted in England.  A few years after that, work took me to Chile and I went to visit Pablo Neruda's house, La Chascona, which he designed to resemble a boat and evoke ideas of water and the sea.  As journalist Jollyon Attwooll writes, 'the house's original plot of land had streams and a waterfall that so captivated Neruda and his wife they felt compelled to buy it, and, as the house took shape, water was diverted to flow right outside the galley-like dining room'.  On the day of the coup La Chascona was raided 'and the running water that had at first so charmed Neruda was used to flood the house.'  All these years later, we still do not know whether Neruda, who died a few days later, was poisoned.  Whilst the bones of the great poet are being examined now by toxicologists, lawyers are pursuing a new case against Victor Jara's alleged killer.  His widow Joan, like the women searching the desert in Nostalgia for the Light, refuses to let the past be forgotten: “we want to shine a light on the severe human rights abuses from this era and bring those responsible to justice.”

The emptiness of fullness

'Sonata for Piano and Vacuum Cleaner' can be found towards the end of The Hall of Uselessness, the new volume of collected essays by Simon Leys, in a section entitled, 'Marginalia'.  In it, Leys tells of the revelation experienced by Glenn Gould when a maid switched on the hoover as he was trying to play the piano: the music could still be felt in his fingers and even sounded 'better' than it had without the vacuum cleaner.  Leys goes on to mention the profundity achieved by Beethoven, composing in his deafness, and Monet painting his waterlillies through eyes half blinded with cataracts.  These examples are very familiar, but perhaps less so is that of the literati painter and art historian Huang Binhong (1865-1955) who, like Monet, continued to paint in old age as his eyesight failed.  Leys writes that though Huang 'could not see the actual effects of his brushstrokes, he relied on the rhythmic sequence of the calligraphic brushwork, which he had mastered through the daily exercise of a lifetime.  For him, painting had disappeared as a visual experience, but it remained as a vital breathing of his whole being. In their fierce blackness these late landscapes of Huang Binhong are to the eye what the harsh complexity of Beethoven's quartets are to the ear.'

In a recent article on the artist David A. Ross goes further and compares the late 'black Binhongs' to the 'sheets of sound employed by John Coltrane or the feedback squalls of Jimi Hendrix.' Whilst a whole tradition of artists since the Song era used minimalist means to express 'the Daoist paradox of an infinitely full emptiness', Huang 'aimed to express not the fullness of emptiness but the emptiness of fullness and to this end evolved a style that was just the opposite of minimalist: dense, layered, self-impacted, black in the literal sense.'  Sometimes Huang would apply dozens of layers of ink.  At the end of his life he painted landscapes of Hangzhou which were more about the beauty of the brushstrokes than the reality of any particular scene.  Simon Leys likens Huang's daily practice in calligraphy to that of the guqin masters, who occasionally played 'silent zither', practicing a piece by fingering the whole composition without ever  touching the instrument's strings.  Leys concludes his text with an anecdote about Tao Yuanming, the great fifth century poet whose landscape poetry I have discussed here before.  When people asked why he carried around a stringless zither he said "I seek only the inspiration that lies within the zither.  Why should I strain myself on its strings?" 

I couldn't find non-copyright examples of Huang Binhong paintings to include here, so I have illustrated this post with details from Chinese postage stamps produced in his honour in 1996. 

A mythical whirlpool, coiling beneath the surface of the lake

Tacita Dean describes her latest film JG as an attempt to solve the mystery of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, a challenge posed by J. G. Ballard in a letter he sent her not long before his death.  Having watched it today I can report that the mystery remains and the film deepens it.  As a work of landscape art it is rewarding enough: turquoise pools, salt encrusted shorelines, shifts in scale from a beetle on the sand to a distant train passing into the grey hills.  But the film's originality and its blurring of any specific sense of time and space are achieved through the application of Dean's 'aperture gate masking process'.  This is described at the Frith Street Gallery site as analogous to a form of stenciling, allowing 'her to use different shaped masks to expose and re-expose the negative within a single film frame. This requires running the unexposed film through the camera multiple times, giving each frame the capacity to traverse time and location in ways that parallel the effects of Ballard’s fiction and Smithson’s earthwork and film. Among the masks used in JG is one that references the template and sprocket holes of a strip of 35mm Ektachrome slide film. The accidental black of the unexposed outlines of the other masks—a range of abstract and organic forms that suggest mountain horizons, planets, pools, and Smithson’s Jetty, appear to be traced by hand' (Frith Street Gallery).

Anyone who felt slightly underwhelmed by Tacita Dean's installation at Tate Modern in 2011 (Film), which explored some of these techniques, will, I think, be much more impressed with how they have been used in JG.  In a short Guardian interview with Adrian Searle you can see, for example, at 1 min 44, one of the semi-abstract compositions created through this process: a panoramic saltscape overlayed with three circular images that may be close-ups of rock particles (it is hard to judge).  There is an indefinable strangeness to some of these sequences, as if a view is being overwritten with the after-image of some other place.  Sound is used to telling effect throughout the film, as you would expect from Tacita Dean's previous work.  Back in 1997 she approached Robert Smithson's submerged land art through a soundwork, Trying to find the Spiral Jetty (not so hard these days, as she says in that interview, now that there is a road sign pointing to it).  In JG you hear lapping water, buzzing flies and slide projector clicks, occasionally interrupted by words: "If only one could rewind this spiral it would play back to us a picture of all the landscapes it has ever seen."

The film's deserts, lakes and salt formations evoke the parched, drowned and crystalline worlds of Ballards fiction.  There are explicit references to 'The Voices of Time' (which Robert Smithson had read), in which a character constructs a giant mandala in the landscape. Re-reading this story just now, the correspondences with Spiral Jetty are obvious: 'He turned the car off the road along the track leading towards the target range.  On either side of the culvert the cliff faces boomed and echoed with vast impenetrable time fields, like enormous magnets.  As he finally emerged between them on to the flat surface of the lake it seemed to Powers that he could feel the separate identity of each sand-grain and salt crystal calling to him from the surrounding hills.  He parked his car beside the mandala and walked slowly towards the concrete rim curving away into the shadows.  Above him he could see the stars, a million cosmic voices that crowded the sky from one horizon to the next, a true canopy of time...'

Tacita Dean has written at the Pew Centre for Arts & Heritage that both Spiral Jetty and 'The Voices of Time' 'have an analog heart, not just because they were made or written when spooling and reeling were the means to record and transmit images and sound, but because their spiraling is analogous to time itself.  Ballard proposed that it was a clock that berthed at Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, which, he imagined, would have brought the gift of time to the Utah desert, whereas time is counting down inside the laboratories of his own fictional world. While Smithson’s jetty spiraled downward in the artist’s imagination through layers of sedimentation and prehistory, in ancient repetition of a mythical whirlpool, coiling beneath the surface of the lake to the origins of time in the core of the earth below, the mandala in 'The Voices of Time' is its virtual mirror, kaleidoscoping upwards into cosmic integration and the tail end of time.'

Estuary

Yesterday we went down to the Isle of Dogs, where the great brick sugar warehouses on the side of West India Docks have for the last decase housed the Docklands museum.  This summer they have mounted their first exhibition of contemporary art, perhaps inspired by the excellent art programme at the National Maritime Museum (Dan Holdsworth, High Arctic, Ansel Adams).  As Ken Worpole says in his review on Caught by the River, Estuary is terrific stuff: 'there’s a real feel for the wind and the waves, and the smack of saltwater in nearly every contribution. Its success may encourage the transformation of the Docklands Museum into a major new public gallery for contemporary work about this great historical mind-altering space.'  I hope so, although there were hardly any other visitors there yesterday (in contrast to the opening night, which Ken says was 'awash with beer, champagne and oysters').  This did mean however that I was able to enjoy alone the full 18 minutes of John Smith's beautiful installation film Horizon, a really impressive piece of work commissioned by Margate Contemporary last year.

John Smith on Horizon (Five Pounds a Belgian)

As you enter the exhibition you encounter two of Jock McFadyen's panoramic views of the A13 hinterland and Michael Andrews' last completed work, Thames Painting: The Estuary (1994-5), which conveys the action of water on sand by mixing ash into diluted paint.  Other works document the course of the Thames in photographs and photogravures: the decaying seaforts, redundent industrial land ripe for urban regeneration, detritus washed up on the margins of the river, old ships sinking into the mud. You can watch William Raban's excellent Thames Film, which I described here three years ago, a fast-forward trip (Jaunt) from Southend to the Houses of Parliament by Andrew Kötting, who recently collaborated with Iain Sinclair on Swandown, and a long sequence by Nikolaj B. S. Larsen documenting the working life of the river.  Most enjoyable of all, there is footage of The Bow Gamelan Ensemble from 1985, performing 51º 29'.9"North - 0º11' East, Rainham Barges, bashing out music from makeshift instruments at the river's edge as the tide rises and night falls.  I'll end here with a clip from Youtube capturing the group members at that time (the Ensemble disbanded in 1990), talking rubbish.

Entertained with a rainbow

In an earlier post here I mentioned the chapter Edward Thomas devoted to John Aubrey in The Literary Pilgrim in England and his praise for the way Aubrey's description of places isolate telling details.  'Who but Aubrey would have noticed and entered in a book the spring after the fire of London "all the ruins were overgrown with an herb or two, but especially with a yellow flower, Ericolevis Neapolitana."' This attention to the more curious or illuminating facets of what he was writing about have made his biographical notes published posthumously as Brief Lives far more popular than many worthy but dull works by his contemporaries.  It occurred to me, browsing through a volume of these just now, that I might highlight here three of his subjects who had some connection with three of the arts of landscape: drawing, poetry and garden design.

Wenceslaus Hollar, St. Martin's Cathedral in Mainz, 1632

Wenceslaus Hollar (1607-77) was a Bohemian engraver, known now for his panoramic views of London. 'He told me,' writes Aubrey, 'that when he was a schoolboy he took a delight in drawing of maps; which drafts he kept, and they were pretty.  He was designed by his father to have been a lawyer, and was put to that profession, when his father's troubles, together with the wars, forced him to leave his country.  So that what he did for his delight and recreation only when a boy, proved to be his livelihood when a man.'  Hollar's talents were spotted by the Earl of Arundel, who engaged him as a draughtsman.  He travelled to Vienna with the Earl, 'very well clad', to 'take views, landscapes, buildings, etc remarkable in their journey, which we see now at the print shops.'  In 1637 he came with the Earl to England and 'at Arundel House, he married my lady's waiting woman, Mrs Tracy, by whom he has a daughter, that was one of the greatest beauties I have ever seen; his son by her died in the plague, an ingenious youth, who drew delicately.'

Hollar, we are told, was very shortsighted and his landscapes were done in such detail that they are 'not to be judged without a magnifying glass.'  During the Civil War he lived in Antwerp but returned in 1652.  'I remember he told me that when he first came into England (which was a serene time of peace) that the people, both poor and rich, did look cheerfully, but at his return, he found the countenances of the people all changed, melancholy, spiteful, as if bewitched.'  Hollar himself 'was a very friendly good natured man as could be, but shiftless as to the world [careless in his affairs] and died not rich.'

Wenceslaus Hollar, Landscape Face, unknown date

Sir John Denham (1615-69) is of interest here as the author of 'Cooper's Hill' (1642), the first English topographical poem.  Aubrey writes that at Oxford University, the young Denham 'would game extremely; when he had played away all his money, he would play away his father's wrought rich gold cups. ... From Trinity College he went to Lincoln's Inn, where (as Judge Wadham Windham, who was his contemporary, told me) he was as good a student as any in the house.'  Nevertheless, on one occasion 'having been merry at a tavern with his comrades, late at night, a frolic came into his head, to get a plasterer's brush and a pot of ink, and blot out all the signs between Temple Bar and Charing Cross' (they were caught - 'this I had from R. Estcott, esquire, who carried the inkpot').

Denham's play The Sophy was a huge success - the poet 'Mr Edmund Waller said then of him, that he '"broke out like the Irish Rebellion."'  His poem 'Cooper's Hill' was published after the Battle of Edgehill 'in a sort of brown paper, for then they could get no better.'  As a Royalist, Denham was not welcome during the Commonwealth but returned from abroad and eventually became Surveyor of the King's Work. 'In 1665 he married his second wife, a [Margaret] Brookes, a very beautiful young lady; Sir John was ancient and limping.  The Duke of York fell deeply in love with her, though (I have been morally assured) he never had carnal knowledge of her.  This occasioned Sir John Denham's distemper of madness ... but it pleased God that he was cured of this distemper, and wrote excellent verses, particularly on the death of Mr Abraham Cowley, afterwards.  His second lady had no child; was poisoned by the hands of the Countess of Rochester with chocolate.'

Aubrey gives us some details of Denham's physical appearance: thin hair, a slow gait, tall but 'a little incurvetting at his shoulders, not very robust.'  He 'was satirical when he had a mind to it' and 'his eye was a kind of light goose-grey, not big; but it had a strange piercingness, not as to shining and glory, but (like a Momus) when he conversed with you he looked into your very thoughts.'  He describes the delight Denham took in the landscape around his home - Camomile Hill, 'from the camomile that grows their naturally', and Prunewell Hill, 'where was a fine tuft of trees, a clear spring, and a pleasant prospect to the east.'  This house was near Cooper's Hill, 'incomparably well described by that sweet swan, Sir John Denham.'

Thomas Bushell (1594-1674) was a servant of Francis Bacon, from whom he learnt the science of metallurgy, and whose writings inspired him, after Bacon's death in 1626, to live for three years on the Isle of Lundy as a hermit.  Having married and moved to Oxfordshire, he designed for himself an extraordinary grotto with elaborate water features, including a silver ball that rose and fell on a jet of water and a sequence of fountains designed to surprise the ladies as they walked over them.  Aubrey says that it faced south 'so that when it artificially rains upon the turning of a cock [tap], you are entertained with a rainbow.  In a very little pond (no bigger than a basin) opposite to the rock, and hard by, stood (1643, August 8) a Neptune, neatly cut in wood, holding his trident in his hand, and aiming with it at a duck which perpetually turned round him, and a spaniel swimming after her.'  Bushell lived above this grotto in three rooms, one painted with Biblical stories concerning water, another with the story of Christ told in wall hangings and the third, a hermit's cell, hung in black baize.  In 1636 Bushell presented his 'Rock' to King Charles and Henrietta Maria to the accompaniment of music - Aubrey unhelpfully notes that 'I remember the student of Christ Church which sang the songs (I now forget his name)'. 

A year after the royal visit, Bushell was made King's farmer of minerals in Wales and spent the rest of his career putting Bacon's science into practise in a series of mining schemes. 'He had so delicate a way of making his projects alluring and feasible, profitable, that he drew to his baits not only rich men of no design, but also the craftiest knaves in the country ... As he had the art of running into debt, so sometimes he was attacked and thrown into prison; but he would extricate himself again strangely.'  Aubrey relates that after offending parliament or Cromwell, Bushell hid at his house in Lambeth Marsh, dating his letters as if they had been sent from overseas.  He had a room there hung all in black, with a painted skeleton and 'an emaciated dead man stretched out.  Here he had several mortifying and divine mottoes (he imitated his lord [Bacon] as much as he could) and out of his windows a very pleasant prospect.'  He was, according to Aubrey, 'a handsome proper gentleman when I saw him at his house aforesaid at Lambeth.  He was about 70, but I should not have guessed him hardly 60.  He had a perfectly healthy constitution; fresh, ruddy, face; hawk-nosed, and was temperate.'

 

Engraving showing Thomas Bushell's hermitage at Enstone,

from Robert Plot's Natural History of Oxfordshire, 1677.

(Aubrey read this and modelled his own unfinished book about Wiltshire on it)

Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness

And so, after my last two posts on Aran and the Burren, I come to Connemara, the third of Tim Robinson's ‘ABC of earth-wonders’, and the subject of his great topographical trilogy. In a review of the second volume, Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness, Robert Macfarlane describes Robinson's method.  'Each intricately structured chapter of the book begins in or at a specific Connemara place, before gyring off into history, metaphysics, politics, ecology, geology. Robinson weaves the stories and actions of smugglers, fabulists, priests, landowners, actors, farmers, fishermen, poets, herbalists, talkers, industrialists and entrepreneurs — the cast of people who comprise the alternative history of the region.'  Our brief visit to Connemara was always going to seem superficial in comparison to the depth of study and years of conversations and exploration that have gone into these books.  We came back with impressions of the landscape but a richer sense of place would have required a serious investment of time.  In the final volume, Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom, Robinson says that 'often when visitors ask me what they should see in this region I am at a loss. A curious hole in the ground? The memory of an old song about a drowning? Ultimately I have to tell them that this is a land without shortcuts.' 

At Roundstone on our way to the beach at Dog's Bay, we went down to the quay to see if we could identify Tim Robinson's house and the Folding Landscapes studio that he runs with his wife (they are described in the the first volume of Connemara).  But my young sons were keen to get on to the beach - a place of bones according to Robinson, consisting of the shards of mollusc shells and exoskeletons of foraminifera, under which there are the traces of Neolithic settlement.  There, with the sun out, a fresh breeze blowing in from the Atlantic, and children happily splashing in the surf I wondered if it was better just to lie back and put the book aside.  Towards the end of Connemara: The Last Pool of Darkness there is a poignant moment of doubt when Robinson watches some young girls swimming in the sea and envies their 'unreflecting immersion in the flux of the world'.  But there in the waves he sees a luminous detail - orange-red thong weed coiling round the jelly-fish like entities known as 'by-the-wind sailors' - and the landscape, an interlacing of history and nature, suddenly feels enhanced and enchanted.  He decides that this is a vindication of his ways.

The Connemara books are in part a memoir of Robinson's map making days in the seventies and eighties, when he first explored Aran, the Burren and Connemara, trying to establish the names for every lake and island, seeking out and pinpointing tombs and burial sites, cairns, limekilns, stone huts and ancient cooking places.  We found these maps invaluable but seductive (at one point on Inis Meáin I decided to allay complaints on a walk by suggesting we explore a nearby cave marked on his map, but soon realised my mistake, shoulder deep in brambles, with no clue as to what it looked like or whether in fact it might now be half buried or inaccessible).  In Connemara: A Little Gaelic Kingdom, Robinson talks about his particular compulsion to trace holy wells that can be found on the shore, mere puddles of rainwater, but formed by erosion of cracks in the rock to form perfect triangles that came to be seen as the work of saints, and, by Robinson, as 'paradigmatic places or nodes of being'.  These are 'the purest springs of what makes Connemara itself.'  Their three sides echo the dimensions of place that Robinson has explored in Connemara: 'the intimacy of settlement with wilderness, the persistence of the deep past, and the echoing treasure house of its language.'

These photographs of Connemara are from our holiday, August 2013

The Burren

Seamus Heaney has died and, if I may borrow some links from Arts & Letters Daily, you can read tributes everywhere: NY Times, Irish Times, Boston Globe, Telegraph, Dan Chiasson, Chronicle of Higher Ed, Poetry, Sean Brady, Daily Beast, Guardian, LA Times, Henri Cole, Boston Review...  Back in January I wrote here about the treatment of landscape in some of his poems.  One of these was  'Postscript', which describes a drive to the Flaggy Shore: 'the ocean on one side is wild / With foam and glitter, / and inland among stones / The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit / By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans.'  A fortnight ago we were on this very road, led by Heaney's poem in the hope of experiencing a landscape epiphany, although when we stopped the car (ignoring the poet's advice) it was spitting with rain and the swans looked forlorn under dark clouds, floating around on the muddy brown water.  But our few days in the Burren also yielded moments of joyous surprise, like the realisation that we had a sunlit limestone pavement all to ourselves, stretching away to the sea, a moment to 'catch the heart off guard and blow it open.'

The Burren, as Robert Macfarlane says in The Wild Places, 'rises, silver, in the north of County Clare, on the mid-west coast of Ireland.  Its name comes from the Gaelic boireann, meaning 'rocky place', and the region is so called because most of its surface is made up of smoothed limestone, intercut with bands of clay and shale.'  I think one of the reasons we went there this summer was that it has featured so often on this blog, as the subject of film, art, music and literature.  I thought therefore I would return here to those old posts, beginning with the most recent, Field Notes, on the writings of Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson.  There I mentioned The Flowering Rock, 'a new collection of poems describing the landscape of the Burren: madder and thrift, eyebright and hart's tongue living in the seams between the shattered rocks; beneath them, arterial passages where the 'wailing notes / of water and wind' create 'hollow songs / of hollow hills.''  As I write this I'm listening to 'Of the Sea' from Verse of Birds, the album that was composed in response to this landscape.

Last October, in Wild Track, I talked about Pat Collins' film Silence in which the protagonist, a field recordist, sets up his microphone at Mullaghmore (above) before moving on to locations further north.  The film recently came out on general release and has received muted praised, although Philip French, in one of his last reviews for the Observer, saw nothing in it that that would stick in his memory.  The most fatuous comment I've seen was the FT''s suggestion that you 'think of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out, then imagine it refilmed by a team of Trappist monks.'  Look instead at the BFI site, which has a Sight and Sound review by Mark Sinker and an appreciative article by Geoff Andrew. 
 

In a post about Jeremy Deller's inflatable Stonehenge last summer I mentioned that there had been some controversy over its resemblance to 'a 2010 work by Jim Ricks, the Poulnabrone Bouncy Dolmen, a twice-scale replica of the megalithic portal tomb in the Burren; but it all got sorted out amicably.  Perhaps we need more of these structures, hyperreal bouncy simulacra at every prehistoric site, leaving the actual stones to become poetic, overgrown ruins again.'  As you can see (below) we got to see the real Dolmen, albeit roped off.  Running round it proved almost as much fun as the bouncy Stonehenge, although it is easy to lose your footing among the clints and grykes (there were tears before we left).

 
There is another passing reference to this part of the world in my post Theoryscapes, describing a seminar on landscape theory that was held in 2006 at the Burren College of Art.  The focus of discussion was on culture and geography generally, rather than the specific qualities of the Burren.  However, it is relevant to distinctions between land and landscape: the participants recognised that there has been a long history of habitation here - it is not simply a starkly beautiful wilderness - and that this part of Ireland has been important in resisting British rule and preserving the language. Nevertheless the seminar leader, art writer James Elkins, detected in his colleagues an intoxication in their experience of the Burren that he ascribed to 'our not-so-secret addiction' to 'ideas of landscape articulated by the romantics, and more directly to second-, third-generation, regional, local and belated romantic Western landscape painters, filmmakers and photographers.'

Rebecca Solnit was one of the participants in that seminar, but she had visited the area previously, as described in A Book of Migrations.  On that earlier trip she couldn't fail to be struck by the Burren's strange hills, resembling topographical maps, 'eroded into ledges or sills as regular as elevation lines'.  However, she obviously had miserable weather and felt that the influence of tourism and the efforts of environmental campaigners was turning an old 'local' place into something 'almost exclusively exotic'.  In my post I quoted what she had to say about the Cliffs of Moher, just to the south of the Burren, seeing there, 'a deeper blue than my own churning gray Pacific, blue as though different dreams had been dumped into it, blue as ink.  I imagined filling a fountain pen with it and wondered what one would write with that ocean.'  This passage had slipped my mind when we visited the cliffs, but I was so struck by the colour of the Atlantic there that I took a photograph of it...

Finally, back in 2007, in The Wildness of the Gryke, I quoted a review of Robert Macfarlane's Wild Places and made a connection with Auden and his poem ‘In Praise of Limestone’ (1948).  In his chapter on the Burren, Macfarlane talks about the special qualities of its rock.  'Limestone's solubility in water means that any fault-lines in the original rock get slowly deepened by a process of soft liquid wear.  In this way, the form into which limestone grows over time is determined by its first flaws. For Auden, this was a human as well as a geological quality: he found in limestone an honesty - an acknowledgement that we are as defined by our faults as by our substance.'

All photographs from our holiday, August 2013

The wild pastimes of the cliff

 

View of Árainn Mhór from Inis Meáin

Yesterday we sat on a cliff on the Aran Island of Inis Meáin, looking out over a perfect blue sea.  It was here that J. M. Synge used to come whilst writing his book The Aran Islands - 'as I lie here hour after hour, I seem to enter into the wild pastimes of the cliff, and to become a companion of the cormorants and crows.'  Hardly anyone was around and although quiet contemplation of the Atlantic Ocean stretching away to the west was not easy with two small boys climbing about, I could see why Synge used to go to sit sheltered by the stones on what is now called Cathaoir Synge (Synge's Chair), to be alone with his thoughts.  In his book Stones of Aran: Labyrinth, Tim Robinson mentions the coincidence that both Synge and Lady Gregory first visited the islands in May 1898, when 'Aran was still unfrequented enough to afford the luxury of solitude and the excitements of anthropological pioneering.'  As she wrote later, 'I first saw Synge in the north island of Aran.  I was staying there, gathering folklore, talking to the people, and felt quite angry when I passed another outsider walking here and there, talking also to the people.  I was jealous of not being alone on the island among the fishers and sea-weed gatherers.'

  Wave-pounded cliffs in Robert Flaherty's Man of Aran (1934)

Looking across to the north island, Árainn Mhór (Inishmore), it was hard to reconcile it with my memories of the turbulent black and white seascapes Robert Flaherty shot in Man of Aran.  There are calmer moments in the film, but even they have a sense of life lived on the edge; one I'm glad my sons hadn't seen involves the Man of Aran's young boy sitting with his legs dangling over a high cliff, playing out a line of string baited with crab in order to catch fish.  He abandons all thought of this fishing when he glimpses down in the sea below a basking shark, and the film cuts to the fishermen who are already heading out in a boat, armed with a harpoon.  The ensuing scenes staged by Flaherty were anachronistic, as sharks had not been hunted in this way for fifty years when the film was made.  After toiling to bring in one shark, the men go out again, but the weather changes and the film becomes a total submersion in the aesthetics of the Sublime, with storm waves crashing over dramatically lit cliffs and the tiny figures of the mother and her son looking anxiously out to sea.  Eventually the men make it back, but the boat is smashed to pieces.  There will be more to say here inspired by our short holiday in Ireland, but I will end here with two clips from British Sea Power's 2009 soundtrack to Man of Aran: the first, 'Boy Vertiginous', accompanies the cliff-top fishing scene and the second, 'Man of Aran', works particularly well with the film's opening sequence.

The tide withdraws from around the island

Work took me to Durham yesterday and gave me the opportunity to see the Lindisfarne Gospels exhibition.  I was surprised that the curators made no use of Chris Watson's new collection of field recordings, In St Cuthbert's Time (I anticipated a small installation where you could listen whilst watching a sequence of Maggy Watson's atmospheric photographs).  However, when I went into the cathedral I saw that you could listen to it in the Holy Cross Chapel, which I found through the cloisters in a quiet area away from tourists.  Nobody was around except for an attendant standing on the grass outside.  She warned me that only the front speakers were working, so I am not sure if I experienced the intended effect.  Nevertheless, I sat for a while alone, listening to the birds and the surf breaking on the island shore... 

Then, as I emerged with thoughts of Cuthbert and the contemplative life, the peace of the place was suddenly shattered by an exaggerated cockney voice shouting "Roll up! Roll up!" and dissolving into laughter.  It was the celebrity cricketer Phil 'Tuffers' Tufnell doing a piece to camera on the fourth Ashes test that will be played shortly in Durham. Perhaps he was going to go on to make some kind of link between veneration of the 'ashes of English cricket' and the shrine of St Cuthbert, but I didn't stay to find out.

In St Cuthbert's Time is a simple idea beautifully executed.  Each track corresponds to a season and is a self contained natural soundscape, ending with the gentle but insistent ringing of a monks handbell.  Of course it is a work of imagination rather than a historical reconstruction: no attempt is made to include the sounds of the monks going about their religious observances or the craftsmen and labourers who worked on the island.  Watson has said that he incorporated the cuckoo because it is mentioned in a 7th century source but could not include the great auk, whose bones have been excavated on Lindisfarne.  No doubt some will view these recording as an idealisation of a lost time, but I would happily listen to more echoes of the past in sound art and field recordings.  Perhaps there are not many historical figures as attached to the landscape as Cuthbert, who loved the island's birds and animals and gave special protection to the Eider duck.  History is a sequence of noisy events but I can imagine listening, say, to a summer's morning in the New Forest, just before the arrival of William Rufus and his hunting party, or the sounds of Glencoe after the massacre, wind sighing off the mountains and snow dripping from the trees.

Listen to the clips I've embedded here but buy the CD too: its booklet, among other things, includes descriptions of the four tracks that read like short landscape poems.  Here is 'Winter':

The tide withdraws from around the island to a distant horizon marked by a line of breaking
                           Anser anser - Branta bernicia - Cygnus cygnus
waves and the deep tones of surf rolling into far distant sands.  Greylag geese fly over a
gathering of ducks and wading birds in the tidal margins of the freshly revealed causeway.
                          Anas penelope - Numenius arquata - Pluvialis squatarola
Brent geese and whooper swans pass between a flock of wigeon which are alarmed by a fox
stalking through the mud.  Slowly, as a the tide turns to flow, ravens assemble by their roost site
                          Vulpes vulpes - Corvus corax
over on the mainland.

Five minutes on even the nicest mountain is awfully long

 

Winds, Woods, Mountains, Lakes, Islands, Plains and Streams: each are addressed in turn in W. H. Auden's 'Bucolics' (1953).  Glyn Maxwell, writing in 1994 (the year he was a New Generation Poet) thought them 'the supreme poems of a broad and balanced education in this century'. He appreciated the way Auden managed to generalise without abstracting and simplifying.  In 'Mountains', for example, which you can hear Auden read in the embedded clip above, he asks whether he must accept that the Lake District is merely a bourgeois invention like the piano.  But the reality of the landscape cannot be reduced to this.  'I wish I stood now on a platform at Penrith', he thinks - waiting for a local train and anticipating the moment when 'you smell peat or pinewood, you hear / your first waterfalls.'  'Mountains', as Maxwell says, touches on crime, farming and archaeology, as well as the relationship between geography and psychology, but concludes with something personal and idiosyncratic: 'For an uncatlike / creature who has gone wrong, / five minutes on even the nicest mountain / is awfully long.'

Piero di Cosimo, The Forest Fire, 1505

The second clip below is 'Woods', which begins in Piero di Cosimo's primal forest, where none of the creatures 'thought the lightning-kindled bush to tame / but, flabbergasted, fled the useful flame.'  That was before civilisation had taught them 'to abhor the license of the grove.'  Nowadays it can be said that 'the trees encountered on a country stroll / reveal a lot about that country's soul.'  The poem ends with what seems like a premonition of the disease that has lately infected our woods: 'a small grove massacred to the last ash...'  And so neither woods or mountains are places Auden feels fully comfortable in; indeed none of the landscapes in the central five poems 'really get his vote', as Maxwell puts it.  'Plains' fill him with horror, 'Islands' seem a place of joyless exile and 'Lakes' are for other people ('It is unlikely I shall ever keep a swan / or build a tower on any small tombolo').  It is only in the final section, 'Streams', that Auden seems to find peace and contentment.  'It is fitting.' Maxwell concludes, 'that he ends up by water, 'the aboriginal pilgrim, / at home in all sections', timeless and free yet chained like us to the actualities of gravity and stone.'

That vast horizon, those thick clouds, that raging sea are all but a picture

The first description of a landscape photograph was written in 1760, almost eighty years before the invention of photography.  In Giphantie, Charles-François Tiphaigne de la Roche relates the experiences of a traveler in the land of Giphantia, a fertile place in the centre of Africa 'given to the elementary spirits the day before the Garden of Eden was allotted to the parent of mankind.'  After seeing various wonders he is led by the Prefect of Giphantia into a subterranean hall, 'not much adorned', but with a window opening out onto 'a sea which seemed to me to be about a quarter of a mile distant.  The air, full of clouds, transmitted only that pale light which forbodes a storm: the raging sea ran mountains high, and the shore was whitened with the foam of the billows which broke on the beach.'  Astonished to see the ocean in the center of Africa, the traveler rushes forward to put his head out of the window, but knocks his head 'against something that felt like a wall.  Stunned with the blow, and still more with so many mysteries, I drew back a few paces.'  His guide explains:  'That window, that vast horizon, those thick clouds, that raging sea are all but a picture.'  And the means by which this light painting was made can be read now as a remarkable anticipation of the photographic process:

'The elementary spirits (continued the Prefect), are not so able painters as naturalists; thou shalt judge by their way of working. Thou knowest that the rays of light, reflected from different bodies, make a picture and paint the bodies upon all polished surfaces, on the retina of the eye, for instance, on water, on glass. The elementary spirits have studied to fix these transient images: they have composed a most subtile matter, very viscous, and proper to harden and dry, by the help of which a picture is made in the twinkle of an eye. They do cover with this matter a piece of canvas, and hold it before the objects they have a mind to paint. The first effect of the canvas is that of a mirrour; there are seen upon it all the bodies far and near whose image the light can transmit. But what the glass cannot do, the canvas, by means of the viscous matter, retains the images. The mirrour shows the objects exactly; but keeps none; our canvases show them with the same exactness, and retains them all. This impression of the image is made the first instant they are received on the canvas, which is immediately carried away into some dark place; an hour after, the subtile matter dries, and you have a picture so much the more valuable, as it cannot be imitated by art nor damaged by time. We take, in their purest source, in the luminous bodies, the colours which painters extract from different materials, and which time never fails to alter. The justness of the design, the truth of the expression, the gradation of the shades, the stronger or weaker strokes, the rules of perspective, all these we leave to nature, who, with a sure and never-erring hand, draws upon our canvases, images which deceive the eye, and make reason to doubt whether, what are called real objects, are not phantoms which impose upon the sight, the hearing, the feeling, and all the senses at once.'

(anonymous English translation 1761)

The Pastel City

Robert Macfarlane recently wrote an appreciation of M. John Harrison that made me want to seek out his novel Climbers when I have more time.  It also reminded me of Harrison's Viriconium stories, set far in the future, which were being brought to a conclusion at the time I was at school and reading a lot of science fiction.  This, from The Pastel City, is the kind of strange entopic landscape I used to enjoy: 'in the water-thickets, the path wound tortuously between umber iron-bogs, albescent quicksands of aluminium and magnesium oxides, and sumps of cuprous blue or permanganate mauve fed by slow, gelid streams and fringed by silver reed and tall black glasses.  The twisted, smooth-barked boles of the trees were yellow-ochre and burnt orange; through their tightly woven foliage filtered a gloomy, tinted light.  At their roots grew great clumps of multifaceted translucent crystal like alien fungi.'

Other landscapes in these books are more recognisable, like the glacial moor that the characters traverse later in The Pastel City, a place 'of bright green moss, and coarse, olive-green grass, and delicate washed-out winter flowers discovered suddenly in the lee of low, worn drumlins - of bent thorn and withered bullace, of damp prevailing winds that searched for voices in stands of birch and pine; of skylines, wrinkled with ridges; of heather and gorse, grey cloud and weather - of sudden open stretches of white water that would swell in Spring, dwindle and vanish with the coming of Summer - mysterious waterways...' 

An interview Harrison once gave to Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction lodged in my mind; his obvious frustration with genre limitations and the difficulty of writing books that fully satisfied him seemed very honest and unusual.  I have just dug this out again to reread it.  Harrison was talking in December 1980 and the interview concludes with the wish that some 'young science fiction punks' would emerge and shake things up (six months later I was reading a striking short story in Omni called 'Johnny Mnemonic' by a writer new to me, William Gibson).  Here is how Harrison described the role of landscape writing in the two Viriconium novels he had then written.

'The landscapes of The Pastel City and A Storm of Wings are quite obviously the landscapes of upland Britain: the Peak District, the Derbyshire moors, the tops of the Lake District.  The landscapes in A Storm of Wings in particular have references to the Derbyshire moors, because on top of hills like Kinder Scout the landscape really is rotting and falling to pieces.  It's a genuine desert, drying up and blowing away on the wind every summer.  It has dreadful bogs in which you can sink without trace on a Sunday afternoon only nine miles from Sheffield.  They are the landscapes I now live in, and they obsess me.  Hilary Bailey said of many of the landscapes in A Storm of Wings that though they were bleak and awful, one had this sneaking suspicion that the author would like to go on his holidays there.  Hilary is very acute.'

Willow Mill

'For truly art is embedded in nature, and he who can extract it, has it.'

- Albrecht Dürer

Albrecht Dürer, Willow Mill, 1496-8

A view from the north bank of the River Pegnitz on the outskirts of Nuremburg

The latest LRB carries a piece on Dürer by Christopher S. Wood, who twenty years ago published possibly my favourite work of art history, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape. This new article is a review of The Early Dürer, an exhibition catalogue edited by Daniel Hess and Thomas Eser.  What he says about their self-imposed academic caution made me reflect on the freedom that blogs provide to break rules and go off on unusual tangents.  'The professional habitus of many art historians is negative, debunking, normalising,' he writes.  On Dürer's sexuality,

'the catalogue simply cuts short any inquiry by invoking a normalising historical context. A drawn profile portrait of a laughing Pirckheimer, for example, signed by Dürer, is supplemented by a Greek phrase, written in Pirckheimer’s own hand: ‘with a cock up the ass’. The exhibition catalogue approvingly cites two scholars who tried to explain this inscription either as an erudite comment on the unflattering likeness or as a parody of conventional humanist epigrams. But there is surely more to be said. The catalogue comes across as pedantic if not priggish when it dismisses other scholars’ attempts to relate the inscription to Dürer’s and Pirckheimer’s sexuality as ‘methodologically problematic’'.

Albrecht Dürer, Pond in the Woods, c. 1496

Probably depicting a view of the sandy heathland near Nuremburg

When it comes to landscape, the catalogue's contributors are 'unwilling to read Dürer’s works as directly registering his experience.'

'The watercolour landscapes, for example, have traditionally been seen as impressions of real places created on site during day trips or longer journeys. Rather, it is argued here, the landscapes were carefully contrived exempla or demonstration pieces, designed to establish their maker as an authority or to provide evidence of his travels: they functioned as tokens in a social game. According to the catalogue, we should not read the watercolours as engagements with the natural world because there is no evidence in written sources that artists in this period thought about landscape in such terms. One might well wonder why the authors don’t have more confidence in the drawings themselves as sources. The catalogue frequently strikes such notes of caution, as if there were a danger that the public might succumb to a thoughtless cult of genius.' 

Wood, on the contrary, concludes that 'Dürer’s landscape watercolours remain emblems of a new concept of artistic authorship grounded in curiosity, desire and attentiveness to the real.'

 Albrecht Dürer, Pine, 1495-7