the unimaginable touch of Time

John Constable, Cloud Study

From low to high doth dissolution climb,
And sink from high to low, along a scale
Of awful notes, whose concord shall not fail:
A musical but melancholy chime,
Which they can hear who meddle not with crime,
Nor avarice, nor over-anxious care.
Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whitened hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear
His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time.

William Wordsworth, "Mutability"


Not wishing to be caught in the traps of determinism, I cannot however avoid thinking that this persistent fascination with mutability and the impermanence of forms which pervades nearly all modern British poetry and art must be deeply rooted in the landscape and changeable climate of the archipelago. Paradoxically (or perhaps not), this rootedness may also account for the persistent will to make forms against all odds, to grasp their line(ament)s, their unfolding and dissolution in time, in the weather, in place.

I have attempted to tackle the topic in the past, in an academic context, but somehow it has cropped up again after a recent visit to an exhibition on "British Art in Sensibilty and Experience" and the subsequent irresistible urge to re-visit the work of the so-called environmental/land artists (names are so reductive!): Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, David Nash and, in particular, Andy Goldsworthy. I didn't need to search far and wide to find this illuminating passage opening one of Goldsworthy's most astounding books:

Whenever possible, I make a work every day. Each work joins the next in a line that defines the passage of my life, marking and accounting for my time and creating a momentum which gives me a strong sense of anticipation for the future. Each piece is individual, but I also see the line combined as a single work.

Time and change are connected to place. Real change is best understood by staying in one place. When I travel, I see differences rather than change. I resent travelling south in early spring in case I am away from home when I see my first tree coming into leaf. If this happens, I see the leaves, but not the growth or change. I feel similarly about the first frost or ice or snow, and the first warm day after winter. I thrive on the disruption forced by seasonal changes - a hard freeze, heavy snow, a sudden thaw, leaf fall, strong winds - which can change dramatically any working patterns that have become established in a particular season.

Not that seasons can be easily separated from one another. The smell of autumn can often be detected well before the season fully arrives, just as emerging growth can be seen in winter. For some plants, such as mosses, winter is their summer. [...]

In a previously unvisited, snowy place I have little idea of the landscape of stone, water and earth that lies below the surface. This gives me a strange perspective on the place which can sometimes be interesting. In the Arctic, for instance, I began to see the frozen sea as land which in turn made me think of the land as fluid. Usually, however, I am like an animal that needs to know where to find nourishment beneath the snow - the summer contained within winter. Being aware of the presence of one season within another and the tension and balance between seasons is also a way of understanding the layers of time that made the land.

Andy Goldsworthy, Time (Dumfriesshire, Scotland: Cameron Books, 2000), p. 7.

Maybe it is this inability - or impossibility, under the present social circumstances - to stay in one place and perceive its changes, the interweaving lines and layers of which it is made, that accounts for our anguished sense of lack of time. Our inarticulate unease at mutability. The impoverished non-places through which we constantly move, in a frenzy, lack precisely this sense of time embedded in a place. But does the lack really lie in the places themselves, or, instead, in our unskilled, desensitised perception unable to see beneath the glossy banalities of the everyday?...

Image: Andy Goldsworthy, The Neuberger Cairn.