the world is alive

A poignant reminder in this most precarious, saddest, happiest of seasons.

Poised between weariness and hope.

Longing and waiting.


In the rain.

*       *       *

Winter and Summer

All the sweetness of nature was buried in black winter's grave, and the wind sings a sad lament with its cold plaintive cry; but oh, the teeming summer will come, bringing life in its arms, and will strew rosy flowers on the face of hill and dale.

In lovely harmony the wood has put on its green mantle, and summer is on its throne, playing its string-music; the willow, whose harp hung silent when it was withered in winter, now gives forth its melody -- Hush ! Listen ! The world is alive.

--from the Welsh; Thomas Telynog Evans; 1840-65, in A Celtic Miscellany, Sel. and Trans. Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson (London: Penguin, 1971), p. 87.

the most beautiful place in all Japan... swept away

Source: http://www.pref.miyagi.jp/kankou/EN/sightseeing/Matsushima/Matsushima.htm

No matter how often it has been said, Matsushima is the most beautiful place in all Japan, and can easily hold its own against T’ung-t’ing or the Western Lake in China. The sea surges in from the southeast into a bay seven miles across, its waters brimming full like the Zhejiang River in China. There are more islands than anyone could count. Some rise up steeply, as through thrusting towards the skies; some are flat, and seem to crawl on their stomachs into the waves. Some seem piled double, or even three layers high. To the left, they appear separate; to the right, joined together. Some look as if they carried others on their backs, and some as if they held them in their arms, like a parent caring for a little child or grandchild. The pines are of the deepest green, and their branches, constantly buffeted by the winds from the sea, seem to have acquired a twisted shape quite naturally. The scene suggests the serene charm of a lovely woman’s face. Matsushima truly might have been created by Ōyamazumi [God of the Mountains] in the Great Age of the Gods. What painter or what writer could ever capture fully the wonder of this masterpiece of nature?

--Matsuo Basho, Oku no Hosomichi / The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

*       *       *

I visited it ten years ago, on a journey around the Tohoku region during which I tried to retrace some of Basho's steps as immortalised in his Oku no Hosomichi. I wasn't disappointed, and will forever cherish that emotional moment when I witnessed for the first time the landscape I had till then only read about in books.

Over these past two weeks I'd searched for news about its situation after the tsunami on March 11th, in the vague hope that it had escaped unscathed. It hasn't, heartbreakingly, as the tsunami washed over the islets in the celebrated bay.

Words fail me to convey how deeply saddened I am. Basho's famous haiku has acquired a new, dark resonance:

Ah, Matsushima!
Ah-ah Matsushima! Ah!
Matsushima! Ah!

And so I've added one more heartbreak to my list, which over these past few months has become unbearably long.

Ah, Japan...

scottish landscapes (4)

From a distance, you take them for rocks on the beach. Yet, as you slowly approach, step by step, their agitation becomes visible.

Half-curious, half-fearful, our mutual presence has to be carefully negotiated. They oblige and tolerate us - everything goes well.

Their countenance is so kind and, at the same time, so sharp and inquisitive. No wonder that Scottish, Irish and Icelandic folkore traditions are populated by their legends.

Selkies. They do question indeed the animal/human boundary. Where does it end, where does it begin...?

Brora / Brùra

Sutherland, Scottish Highlands
August 2010
(Photos by EK)

scottish landscapes (3)

Travelling from the west to the east coast is like entering a different country. The topography much less inhospitable, plainer, yet the same ballet of the weather, of light and shadow. A sense of impermanence, change - despite the stones. Everywhere.

Brora / Brùra
Sutherland, Scottish Highlands
August 2010

scottish landscapes (2)

Today on this shingle shelf
I understand this pensive reluctance so well
This not discommendable obstinacy,
These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling,
These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be
Injured by iconoclasts and quacks . . .

Hugh MacDiarmid, from 'On a Raised Beach'.

Northwest Highlands
Scotland
August 2010

scottish landscapes (1)

The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song.
But whether any man's are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird's can be,
That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer
Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,
Though through them no man can see,
No man nor anything more recently born than themselves
And that is everything else on Earth.

Hugh MacDiarmid, from 'On a Raised Beach'.

There are many kinds of revelation. But the most powerful is the vision which transcends the mental boundary between life and non-life, and Scotland is a place where this sort of revelation often approaches. Staring into a Scottish landscape, I have often asked myself why - in spite of all appearances - bracken, rocks, man and sea are at some level one. Sometimes this secret seems about to open, like a light moving briefly behind a closed door. In writing about birds and stones whose 'inward gates' are open, MacDiarmid came as near as one can to finding the answer.

Neal Ascherson, from Stone Voices: In Search for Scotland (London: Granta, 2002), p. 26.

This summer, once again, I too went in search for Scotland, its birds, bracken, sea - and especially the rocks. The stones.

There is something about the Scottish landscape, in its barrenness and inhospitality, in its constant play between light and shadow, that deeply touches the heart. Your perception of time undergoes a radical change: 'a lesson in the unimaginable forces and lapses of time which have gone to shape the world', as Ascherson magisterially puts it.

You feel closer to the beginning and ending of things, part of the lichen which tenaciously holds to the less exposed crevices and surfaces of the land. Precarious, barely surviving under the harsh weather, the ruthless geology.

There is nowhere else I would like to live. Yet, I couldn't possibly live there.

It lives only in the imagination, my landscape of dreams.

Lake Torridon / Loch Thoirbheartan
West Coast, Northwest Highlands
Scotland
August 2010

feeling life in every limb

All of us, I believe, carry about in our heads places and landscapes we shall never forget because we have experienced such intensity of life there: places where, like the child that 'feels its life in every limb' in Wordsworth's poem 'We are Seven', our eyes have opened wider, and all our senses have somehow heightened. By way of returning the compliment, we accord these places that have given us such joy a special place in our memories and imaginations. They live on in us, wherever we may be, however far away from them.

Roger Deakin, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, p. 242.

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.

highly recommended

Manufactured Landscapes - a feature documentary by Jennifer Baichwal (2006, Canada, 90 mins.)

... a feature length documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Burtynsky makes large-scale photographs of ‘manufactured landscapes’ – quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines, dams. He photographs civilization’s materials and debris, but in a way people describe as “stunning” or “beautiful,” and so raises all kinds of questions about ethics and aesthetics without trying to easily answer them.The film follows Burtynsky to China as he travels the country photographing the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. Sites such as the Three Gorges Dam, which is bigger by 50% than any other dam in the world and displaced over a million people, factory floors over a kilometre long, and the breathtaking scale of Shanghai’s urban renewal are subjects for his lens and our motion picture camera.Shot in Super-16mm film, Manufactured Landscapes extends the narrative streams of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our profound impact on the planet and witness both the epicentres of industrial endeavour and the dumping grounds of its waste. What makes the photographs so powerful is his refusal in them to be didactic. We are all implicated here, they tell us: there are no easy answers. The film continues this approach of presenting complexity, without trying to reach simplistic judgements or reductive resolutions. In the process, it tries to shift our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it.

Text and image taken from Edward Burtynsky's website. More info on the film available here.

Click here for trailer (QuickTime required).

Review by John Harkness, Now / September 7 - 13, 2006

The director of Let It Come Down: The Life Of Paul Bowles and The True Meaning Of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia follows photographer Edward Burtynsky to China, where he continues his artistic investigation of the large-scale industrial despoliation of nature. There's an irony inherent in Burtynsky's work. On the one hand, he documents ecological devastation. On the other, the terrific photographer finds beauty in these landscapes and is drawn to their striking colours or intriguing compositional angles.
One of the things Baichwal does in the film is give us a look at what China's industrial revolution means, and its scale is staggering. The monumental opening dolly shot through a modern factory space has an almost Godard-like grandeur.

More reviews available here.

Currently on show at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.