The Dark Mountain Blog

A Space for Stories

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Do you remember any storytelling sessions from your childhood?

I had posed my long-standing favourite question once more. This time to Saw John Aung Thong, a person from the Karen community living in a village in Mayabunder in Middle Andaman.

There were so many, he answered. During the harvest time we would all sleep in the lower part of our house and have long storytelling sessions way into the night. Our house was like any other traditional Karen house, a bamboo hut on stilts with its lower part set aside for storing grains.

What John said may seem simple enough but it made me realise that I had gotten so caught up with exploring the content of folk stories, that I had given little time to think about the pivotal role played by the site of the exchange. But taking a cue from his observation, I started noticing the connection of space with stories.

For the aan-kath (riddle sessions) of Munsiari in the Himalayas, the kitchen with its central hearth (locally known as raun) was a space for people to gather during snowbound winters for long-winding sessions of guessing-games of local riddles, some hilarious, some educative, and many both. For the Diné tribe of North America, there is sacred significance in holding storytelling sessions in winter in hogan, their traditional circular dwellings with a central fire. Amongst the Guna Yala people of Panama, the sacred history and legends are sung by Saila, the spiritual and political leader, in a special meeting house (onmaked nega).

On a closer look, it becomes clear that many customary forms of storytelling have also had a customary setting. The settings vary. While some require a rooted, bound place for a story, others require more open space. It doesnt have to be a constructed shelter and could be the canopy of a banyan tree, the top of a mountain, the bank of a river.

I once heard Pascal Gbenou from Benin talk about how a tree in their area was known as the ‘chatting tree’ because people would go there for gossiping. The logic was that since it was in the open you had a 360 degree view around you. It was not considered appropriate to ever gossip in an enclosed place for you would never know who is there on the other side of the wall! That made me think about how in my own hometown in Punjab, people spread out cots in an open courtyard in summer and exchanged stories.

The storytelling can sometimes overflow further into the landscapes, as is seen in the songlines of Aboriginal tribes running through the length and breadth of Australia, inextricably linking space with story. These are pathways stretching across the land or the sky that, according to indigenous Australians, were followed by different creator beings at the beginning of time. There are traditional songs that are sung by indigenous people as they travel through these routes, the words and rhythm of which vividly bring the landscape of the route to life.

Can we then really talk about traditions of storytelling and their relevance while ignoring their linkages with the settings in which these arose, took shape and bloomed? What happens when the banyan tree is sawed down? When the kitchen loses its circular setting with the central hearth, and is instead implanted with shelves that force the people preparing the food to turn their back to the rest? When the lower floor of a Karen house on stilts becomes a space filled with rooms instead? When a sacred rock is mined? Or when the Australian landscape of dreaming spirits becomes obstructed by humongous technological structures that may be hideous but more important for progress.

We are losing these spaces which allowed the stories to flow and it is hard to tease out the reasons. Did we lose the space for the stories because we didnt find them relevant enough, or was the loss of stories merely a collateral damage when that space was colonised for other priorities? It is like a chicken-egg paradox. But whichever came first, somewhere along the march of progress, a little by choice, a little by circumstance, we have managed to end up in place that has left little space for stories.

So what happens now? In an age obsessed with recording and broadcasting thoughts and life-events on a minute-to-minute basis and in our tendency to look for one-size-fits-all solutions, the documenting of folklore may seem like a tempting route to take. But for stories that have forever flowed through a different channel, putting these down in ink may end up turning them into dry museum pieces rather than living, flowing entities.

I have little knowledge of the latest architectural trends, and I know that we are at the brink of loss of old spaces, old stories. But perhaps it is still not too late. Perhaps as the need for stories is rekindled, there will also be a rethinking of spaces, rethinking of the design of houses, community spaces, towns and entire landscapes. Perhaps we will be able to save ourselves, coming back from the brink, with a mix of the old and the new.

Shiba Desor is a member of Kalpavriksh, an environmental group based in Pune. She is also a member of a small women’s collective called Maati, based in Munsiari, Uttarakhand. She is part environmental researcher, part organiser of gatherings, part food-writer. She has co-authored a children’s book on food called Something To Chew On.

Image: David Bradley, White Earth Ojibwe Storyteller, 1980s
By Peabody Essex Museum – Own work, CC BY 3.0

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Numens, ghosts and fugitives: on being buried in the landscape

I found the place dark and deeply rural; it was extremely beautiful and often inexplicable. People did not seem so much to live there as to be holed up.
– Paul Theroux

In the early 1970s Theroux moved to Britain after living abroad for years in Malawi, Uganda and Singapore. He spent the first few months over winter in a rented house on the northeastern edge of the Marshwood Vale in Dorset.

I don’t really know why he pitched up here, of all places, except that, perhaps, it called to him. The house at Bowood gave Theroux the inspiration and setting for an early novel, The Black House, a ghost story. It tells how a retired anthropologist returns to England after years of study in Africa and rents a house in Dorset. At the start of the book he gives a talk to the locals and shows them various items he has collected. One of them, a figurine, goes missing. Things get nastier from there. Over-arching it all is the brooding sense of a dark, rainy, gale-lashed winter. It’s a terrific portrait of this part of the Dorset countryside and how it can oppress, test and expel people. And how it can bind you to it in a harsh, sometimes scary way; something very far from the lifestyle dreams of summer holidaymakers.

Theroux said of Dorset: ‘Everything I had expected to find in Africa I found on the edge of the Marshwood Vale. I was fascinated but I was also a little frightened. These are the emotions that produce fiction.’

Theroux wasn’t the first writer to be ensnared by the weirdness of the Vale. It’s always been a remote, obscure place, cut off from the larger world of human activity. It took two years for news of the Battle of Trafalgar to seep through to the scattered farmsteads. It’s very wet, and in winter, the deep clay made the roads impassable (the roads still flood). People nicknamed it ‘Old Bottom’ and called those who lived there ‘stick-in-the-muds’ – as they were, literally. It was also very poor. For two years at the end of the 18th century William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy lived at Racedown Lodge overlooking the Marshwood Vale. They walked all over the area – Wordsworth favoured the Iron Age hillfort at Pilsdon Pen – and they were appalled by the poverty they saw. The hunger and want changed Wordsworth’s perspective and inspired much of the social commentary in his early poems. ‘The Ruined Cottage’ where ‘nettles rot and adders sun themselves’ is one of these. It speaks of ‘poverty and grief’ in:

A time of trouble; shoals of artisans
Were from their daily labour turned away
To hang for bread on parish charity,

The Wordsworths themselves were poor and had to grow most of their own food. During the hard winter of 1797, William wrote to a friend: ‘I have lately been living on air and the essence of carrots, turnips and other esculent vegetables not excluding parsnips, the produce of my garden.’

Towards the end of the Wordsworths’ second spring at Racedown, Samuel Taylor Coleridge arrived, leaping over the field stile at the bottom of the garden, having walked all the way from West Somerset. He stayed three weeks, entranced both William and Dorothy, and persuaded them to join him on the Quantocks. It was, as they say, the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

But Coleridge wasn’t the only reason the Wordsworths left Dorset. They went there in the first place because they were offered the house free of charge. It was owned by John Pinney, son of John Praetor Pinney, an affluent Bristol merchant and member of the Bristol West Indies Trading Company. The Pinneys were slave owners who had grown rich from their sugar plantations on the Caribbean island of Nevis. Young John was idealistic – Wordsworth met him originally through his circle of radical friends. It’s thought that when hardboiled John Snr. found out the house was being let for nothing, he ordered that Wordsworth should pay rent, or leave.

Praetor Pinney’s decision might also have been influenced by angry complaints from some of his farming tenants. They claimed that Wordsworth was a wizard who had been casting spells on their cattle. Wordsworth generally composed and refined his poems by reciting them aloud while walking. Every day he and Dorothy took long walks of two hours or more across the surrounding countryside. As they walked, William muttered poetry in his strong northwest accent, pausing now and again to survey the view through a pocket telescope. The local, southwest folk couldn’t understand what he was saying, and because of the incantatory rhythms and the fact he kept pointing a strange, possibly magical instrument at their cows, they concluded he was bewitching them.

This interpretation of Wordsworth’s behaviour was logical since the locals themselves used charms on their cattle. As late as the mid-20th century, many of the older farmers still used ‘charmers’ to cure warts, ‘red water’ and adder bites. I heard about this from the farmer who now owns Racedown Farm, opposite the house where Wordsworth lived. In the 1950s and 60s his father was a vet in the Vale. He often came up against folk remedies. Sometimes the farmers called the vet when a cow was ill, and sometimes they went to the charmer. When telephones first came to the Vale, they proved very good for the charmers’ business. Several farmers had phones installed not because those solitary men wanted to chat to anyone – whom would they speak to and about what? – but so that the charmer could talk directly to the cows without the bother of a visit. On more than one occasion the vet turned up to a farm to find a cow in the kitchen with the phone speaker held to its ear so that the charmer could whisper the magic words direct.

We might laugh at this. But who can say that in some ways those sibilant charms and Wordsworth’s muttered poems were not magical incantations? The Anglo-Saxon root of the word ‘spell’ means ‘speech’ or ‘story’. Wordsworth was accused of putting a spell on the land as he walked, but what if the opposite were the case – that the land put a spell on him, which he expressed in the lines he composed as he walked?

It was a story – a spell – that brought me to West Dorset.

A long time ago, when I was a student, I came across a thriller called Rogue Male. Oh how we all laughed at the title: Rogue Male. It became an in-joke – we called an unfortunate friend ‘rogue sausage’ because of his many girlfriends. We built a story around it. That’s how stories work – they flow into us and create new stories. It was a while before I actually read the book itself – and then I was amazed. It was so gripping, so taut, and it seemed to me to be about more than it appeared. There was something totemic in it about the countryside, about the landscape. Time passed and I forgot; the story became buried in my mind. Then I moved to West Dorset, an area I didn’t know at all, and ended up in Powerstock, where some of the scenes are set. Much later I found out that Powerstock was where the author, Geoffrey Household, had lived. With a slow sense of waking up I realised where I was, and it was like a dream soaking into reality.

Rogue Male isn’t a joke. It was the first of a whole genre of tightly plotted action thrillers, before James Bond, before Len Deighton. It tells how an unnamed anti-hero tries and fails to assassinate a Hitler-like figure. He survives an attempt to kill him and flees for his life. There’s a nerve-twisting hunt on the London Underground, which prompts the hero to ‘disappear’. He chooses Dorset; literally burying himself in the landscape. He digs a den in an ancient hedgebank, or holloway, overlooking the Marshwood Vale and holes up, hoping to evade capture. He goes feral and lives as a beast, relying on cunning and instinct to save him from death.

Published in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War, the novel can be seen as an allegory for beleaguered Britain, retreating into its island fastness and ultimately defeating the foreign enemy with a combination of toughness and intelligence. Nearly 80 years later, there are other ways to read his story (apart from the Brexit analogy). Psychologically, the anti-hero is seriously repressed, even by the standards of the time. He sublimates all his emotions and sensations, refusing to give in under torture. In doing so, of course, he reveals to the reader how damaged he is, and how his emotional state has forced him to take refuge in a deliberately ‘uncivilised’ mode of being. In this sense, his retreat into the landscape in search of safety and salvation from the horrors of the modern world follows the same path as neo-romantic artists of the 30s and 40s. I’m thinking of Paul Nash, John Piper, Graham Sutherland and Eric Ravilious. In their paintings the landscape is a state of mind. It has a definite sense of place, a sense of the numinous about it.

Numinous. Comes from ‘numen’.

A numen is the spirit or divine power presiding over a thing or place. It’s a Latin word but it embodies a concept deeply embedded in prehistory, before Ancient Rome or Greece existed. Here in Britain we once had many wayside shrines to the small, local gods, symbols of the vivifying numen. They were part of the genius loci, the spirit of the place.

I think we all have a sense of numen. It’s not the same as religious belief. You could regard it as quite a straightforward thing; a reaction that comes from attuning ourselves to the natural world. It might be what we feel when we a faced with the strong perception that there is a real, living reality outside of ourselves, and that we are a small part of it.

Numen is also used by anthropologists to denote the idea of magical power residing in a totemic object: an object like the African figurine that goes missing from the anthropologist’s collection in The Black House. But the Vale, like all nuministic places, has no need of fictional objects and imported ghost stories. It has its own historic totems.

For hundreds of years the old house at Bettiscombe Manor belonged to the slave-trading Pinneys, Wordsworth’s hosts. According to legend, when plantation founder Azariah Pinney retired, he brought back some slaves with him to England. One of them was old, and he fell sick in the cold, damp air of the Vale. During his last hours this slave made Azariah promise that when he died, his body would be shipped back to his family in the Caribbean so he could rest in peace. If Azariah broke his promise, the slave vowed he would never leave him or his family alone. He then died and Azariah promptly bundled him into a pauper’s grave in the churchyard nearby. For the next three nights the manor house was disturbed by unearthly screams. On the fourth night, when all the Dorset servants were on the brink of leaving, Azariah gave in and opened the grave. He found the skull, miraculously picked clean, and took it into the house, whereupon the screaming stopped.

It’s true there is a human skull in Bettiscombe Manor. In the 1960s, the then owner, Michael Pinney, had it formally examined by an archaeologist from the British Museum. He concluded that it was very much older than the 18th century, probably in fact Iron Age, and most likely that of a woman. The skull has a smooth, brown patina of limestone, possibly the result of spending centuries underwater in a spring. Further investigation by Michael Pinney into the slave story revealed that it wasn’t a piece of old Dorset legend at all, but a tale made up in the 1830s by his ancestor, Anna Maria Pinney. She wrote it soon after the bill to abolish slavery in the British Empire was passed. Seen in this light, the story becomes a figuring forth of the buried guilt of her family.

Some places invite responses from the deepest part of the unconscious mind. Dig down through the strata of fiction and history and layers of story and spell will appear.

If stories are, literally, spells, then what are ghosts? I’ll say straight away that wondering whether ghosts exist rather misses the point. Coleridge summed it up when he said: ‘A lady once asked me whether I believed in ghosts and apparitions. I answered with truth and simplicity: “No, madam! I have seen far too many myself.”

There’s a distinction to be drawn between ghosts and spirits. Ghosts, supposedly, are apparitions of dead mortals, be they people, animals, or dead people taking the shape of animals – headless highwaymen on headless horses, legendary black dogs or murdered queens. Or they inhabit objects – like the Screaming Skull. They are trapped between worlds, craving release.

With personality comes human character and history. Each ghost trails its story; its his-story or her-story, without which it would mean nothing, and therefore be nothing. The fear of a ghost story resides in the telling of that story – the gradual, creepy uncovering of buried and forgotten truth. In M.R. James’ classic ghost stories the trigger is often the unearthing of an actual buried object – a whistle say or a crown – which then releases retribution. It’s significant that the objects are historic and that they are buried in the ground. We are back with the anthropological meaning of numen as a sacred object of special power, and the notion of burial in the landscape. Psychologically, we’re back in the Vale, where people, as Theroux wrote, ‘don’t so much live as hole up’.

Spirits, however, are immortal, insubstantial entities, which may not ever have been alive in the same solid sense as the beings who became ghosts. They belong where they are found. In other words, spirits are emanations of place, whereas ghosts are personifications of history.

On the wooded hill at the back of Bettiscombe Manor there is a massive, tilted standing stone set on a peculiar hump with a natural spring bubbling out below. It’s called the Wishing Stone and is said to slide down the hill on Midsummer’s Eve, to return the following morning. It’s not on a public right of way and few people know about it. Michael Pinney was convinced that it was a sacred spot. Sometimes I go there and sit on the wooden bench next to it. The stone points out across the Vale as if it is beaming some kind of invisible ray over the land. Perhaps it is.

Sara Hudston is a writer and editor living in rural West Dorset in an old house with tarpaulins on the roof. Occasional newts in the downstairs bathroom. Guardian Country Diarist.

Images
First: ‘A View from Marshwood’ by Derek Harper (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons
Second: ‘Byway on County Boundary – the Holloway gets even deeper’ by Chris Reynolds (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons

Paul Theroux quoted in The Sunday Times, ‘A haunting story in the Wessex Hills’, winter 1986/7

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The Marked Ones

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The housing development was called Las Marcadas – The Marked. It sat in a flat plain, firm and abutting against the low hills to the northwest. A nondescript beige sign announced the cul-de-sac entrance in large fonts, overshadowing the smaller National Monument placard pointing north. I parked my rental car and checked my watch.

I was in Albuquerque killing time until my afternoon flight. I don’t know if you’ve even been there but on a late winter’s Sunday there are a million better places to be. The baked brown/grey streets are mostly devoid of life and the air smells of windy sadness. I had asked the hotel clerk how far I could drive away from any of this and still make my 5:00 flight. He suggested Petroglyphs National Monument. OK. That was the plan then.

The drive up to the park headquarters took me through streets of shuttered ‘Big! Lots!’ stores and drooping attempts at suburban gardens. It was all near deserted, save grim-faced pickup drivers and shambling woozy alcoholics, swaying still from the night before. I turned on the radio and sang along to Spanish advertising jingles.

When I pulled up, the ranger was jarringly helpful. Full of caffeine and shimmering dental veneers. I gave him my flight time and asked what I could do in the time I had. He launched into a cavalcade of the myriad tourist possibilities this little corner of New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, offered. He showed me the very many local postcards on display, each with a ‘beautiful view to send the folks at home.’ He was friendly and kind but I was grumpy and already deeply soured of humanity by 10am. I forced a smile and picked a trail at random. Piedras Marcadas. Located in a ‘lightly travelled’ part of the park twenty miles to the northeast.

And now here I was. Mindful of the ‘please secure your possessions/this is an urban park’ warnings, I pulled my coat over my travel bags and locked the car.

The trail skirted Las Marcadas to the north, allowing a glimpse into half-hearted xeriscape backyards and yellow plastic toys strewn as afterthoughts on concrete patios. A large dog was baying in the distance. Wind-dried Walmart bags were tangled in the sage brambles. I hiked up the sandy wash of a path, nodding at passing teen joggers, and headed to the foothills. I could see tracks of jackrabbits and coyote, sharp and recent, in the loosely packed dust. I looked down and kept walking.

It was not long before I saw marks. There – on the high rock to the right – was a handprint. Above was a spiral and what seemed to be a spaceman. A curious looking bird and a snake straight as a wizard’s staff.

The marks were chock-a-block and were tumbled down the hills. There were hundreds cascading down the slopes. Not in obvious places though. Climbing was required.

There is a body-memory delight in clambering up a rocky hill. In scaling boulders looking for petroglyphs. Time becomes fluid and then just slips out of its everyday parameters. I forgot everything else and focused on the ground and rock faces in front of me. But as I scrambled over the land I noticed other marks as well. The graffiti left by modern travelers. Some was of the ‘Trevor loves Mary’ or the ‘Jesus is my saviour’ type. But most was far more subtle. A scratched antelope, like the older running ungulate to the side, only this one just a few years old. A star-scape, fine grained as if pecked by a screwdriver. A man-ghost.

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Unlike the scribbled names of passing vandals, these other marks blended in with the landscape. From a distance, last year’s man with a spear could be a centuries-old shaman. These cuts and scrapes left the carver anonymous – his or her own memory of the work as the only testament to their presence. All tracks of their lives here, in suburban New Mexico and three blocks from the nearest Starbucks, erased from view. Instead, what was etched into the so very black surface was more of a longing than of any specific figure. Not an antelope but rather a conduit. A pull to belong to an older community of the land. Back when it was an untamed and unpaved place. Back when it was a place beyond the illusion of modern control and containment.

Vandalism is a scourge throughout our American wild land. Petroglyph National Monument, from all accounts, fares worse than most places. Possibly due to its urban setting alone. Just a few years back someone plastered gold spray paint graffiti inside a sacred cave several miles away in Boca Negro Arroyo. The selfishness and narcissism of these acts is rightly condemned. But what is this other graffiti? This ancestral mimicry? Is it something else? Rather than a shout that ‘I exist – Look at me now,’ it is more of a diminishment. A shrinking of the carvers themselves into the curve of historical time. A dissolution of their present self in exchange for a more primitive connection. A cry for belonging.

It’s a horrible thing too of course. A willful obliteration of the irreplaceable sacred. A violent intrusion into what should remain mythos. Yet a melancholy wind, a grey miasma, surrounds this destruction. It is the same sort of pathos that names a burnt-tan and repetitive housing development Las Marcadas. And maybe it is the same sadness that pulled me out from downtown that Sunday morning to stare at 500-year-old pecks and scratches as well.

A couple from Minnesota walked by. They were seeing the National Parks on a retirement dream trip, and we commiserated about the vandalism. Our words were full of ‘What a shame’ and ‘How could they?’ But my heart wasn’t fully in it. For really, who would not want, in their heart of hearts, to leave the paved and banal American Dream for the wide vistas from half a millennia ago? With less sense of the sacred, and less fear of looming arrest too, would I do the same? No I wouldn’t. But how can I really judge? The same longing resides within me as well.

I was out of time in this place. We all were. The tourists from Minnesota and the vandals from last season as well. I caught my flight and awoke the next morning in the rain-splattered green valleys of my Northwest home, thinking I’d been in a dream for those few hours. I looked at my photos to make sure the memory was real and then filed them away.

Now, over a year later, I’ve forgotten much of that trip. Forgotten the tourist shops of Santa Fe and the recommended posole and tamal cafes. Only the question really remains. Were these vandals seeking something more than defacement? Were they seeking a dissolution of their concrete, paycheck on Friday lives into the surrounding land? And aren’t I seeking that as well?

Over the years, Kim Schnuelle has spent time as a horse trainer, palaeontology student, marine biologist, coroner’s assistant, parolee educator, family law attorney, and occasional poet. She lives in the northwest corner of the United States with her husband and their Texas stray hound Chucho. Although Kim seeks out undeveloped places wherever she goes, she remains unconditionally and head over heels in love with our wild western lands. 

 

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The Writing of Mountain Calls

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It has Zen. It has motorcycles. It has talking mountains. I don’t know how else to introduce my environmental novel Mountain Calls, apart that is from its subtitle: ‘A philosophical eco travel romance murder mystery.’ The point about anything environmental or ecological is that it has to haul in everything to be anything. As John Muir says: ‘Tug on anything at all and you’ll find it connected to everything else in the universe.’ For me, this sense of everything being connected to everything else is a religious or spiritual feeling, and there lies the problem. nature writing in its recent Western incarnation is determinedly secular, non-spiritual, non-religious. It is an exciting blend of science and aesthetics. But, in my opinion, it does not know how to take the insight of the great ecologists – that everything is indeed connected to everything – and apply that with any subtlety.

The connection that really mattered to me in writing Mountain Calls is with the last peak in the Austrian Alps, a mountain called the Rax. I regularly visit family in Vienna and on one particular trip in winter I longed for some snow, quite absent that time in the Austrian capital. My cousin suggested a day-trip to the Rax, an outing that led to profound changes in my life and outlook. That is because at the end of the day, looking back up at the peak from the valley below, the Rax spoke to me.

I had taken a double-decker electric train – a engineering marvel of the German-speaking world – to a village close to the mountain, and then a bus to the lower station of the thousand-metre cable car. In the lounge and car park at the bottom of the mountain, temperatures hovering just above freezing, I fell into conversation with two Protestants intent on converting the Catholic majority of Austria to Protestantism. I have adventures like that. We continued our discussion as the steel-and-Perspex cabin bumped and swayed its way to the top, temperatures there at around minus nine Celsius. We further continued our theological debate as we walked across the plateau from the cable-car station cum guesthouse to another guesthouse some miles away, a place frequented by Sigmund Freud on his summer holidays and the site of one of his major psychoanalytical insights. (I think it was to do with one of the waitresses.) On the way back, in intense discussion over the status and nature of disembodied spirits, we got lost in a blizzard and only realized our mistake in time before darkness descended. I bought them bean soup at the cable car station and in return they gave me a lift along the valley. At my request they dropped me off a mile or so before the train station, leaving me with the distinct impression they were glad to get rid of me. My theology was not to their taste.

I walked perhaps a half mile, conscious of the peak of the Rax lit up by the sunset behind me and looming ever larger as I walked away from it, clearly some kind of optical illusion. Then it spoke to me.

We are anxious about what your kind are doing to our world.

I did not hear it as English words, but was forced by the intensity of the experience to record it in this way. The sense was clear. There was an anxiety. And it was about what humans are doing. And that this world is shared between the human and the non-human.

For four years this experience lay in the background of my busy life as a university lecturer. I knew I had to go back, and that I had to write up the next trip as a novel, a travelogue of a journey into the unknown. I had to converse with the mountain again and I had no idea what would come of it. To prepare myself for the longer exposure to its snowstorms and blizzards – I felt that winter wildness was essential to this process – I had formulated a question to put to the Rax. I think I grew up with a sense of the land as situated, as the great eco-philosopher Arne Naess puts it. When you place a Cartesian grid over the land, build grid-like buildings, and live with the Lego-like modernism of contemporary interiors that sense of being situated through a living thing like a forest, or a mountain or a river is lost. To live the more deeply connected life that nature demands of us means to have a consciousness that roams over the entire planet, encountering all of its situated peoples and asking of them: what are you doing to our world? The grid is at one end of a spectrum occupied at the other by war, all of which hurts and disrespects nature. Our bombing leaves small-scale ecological disasters in its wake, all part of the mosaic of the large-scale ecological disaster whose first face to us is of catastrophic species loss. So, with all this in mind I had a question for the mountain, a way of focussing our conversation, though I knew well enough that no preparation I could make would be adequate for the coming encounter.

My journey to Austria for that second winter-time visit to the Rax began with the human activity of the London Underground, Luton Airport, and then the incredible view of the planet from the EasyJet 737-700, not that different really in its impact from ‘Earthrise’, taken by astronaut William Anders in 1968 during the Apollo 8 mission. Comparing that image of the planet with the deeply poignant account by Julian of Norwich of seeing the world as a hazelnut in her palm, fragile, vulnerable, sustained only by the love of God, I wondered what would sustain us now, transported by the luminosity of the view. The clouds that mostly obscure the land below had a lacunarity, a rhythm, and density that varied from vermicelli, to can-end spurted shaving cream, to cake icing. The piles of cloud-stuff were punched, twisted, blurred, re-focused, scattered and drawn together; heaped and roped – topologies and geographies of the temporal, just like the limestone-granite of the Alps but on a different timescale and plane. Like the membrane of an egg-sac the cloud-cover stretched brilliantly under the shimmering blue – what would sustain the globe beneath it? For humanity has now so disrupted the biosphere that its very future is in doubt.

This time it was minus fifteen Celcius on the mountain. Over just three days I walked in hired snow-shoes in wildly varying weather, pretty much alone, as the busy season for the Rax is in summer when the wild-flower meadows of the plateau soothe and bewitch visitors and present few dangers, as long as you do not wander near cliff-edges. In a blizzard you have to be more careful, but at the same time it gave me the right conditions. The snowstorms obliterate everything human. I was protected only by my winter clothing and my wits; otherwise I was still, silent, available. I did not expect anything specific. My earlier years pursuing various meditation practices had taught me that. You make yourself available, as Henry Thoreau did at Walden Pond, and wait for ‘it’ – as he called it – to happen. You walk and make yourself available for grace, undemanding, uncomplaining. So I flomped around on snow-shoes, the sharp cold air in my lungs and the dramatic skies above me, alternately opening to brilliant sunshine and closing in to cocoon me in soft grey swirling silence, alone, available.

Nothing happened. Of course. I knew better than that. But in the guest-house in the valley below on the last night I lay in an overheated bedroom, melting snow dripping from the big red pines outside my window, and, yes, I heard again from the Rax. It was faint. I tested it, because we have to be clear about one thing: the human imagination would always like to rush ahead and arrive at the desired outcome. It doesn’t like to wait. But I tested what I heard by eliminating all that could possibly be my desire and my imagination and I got something I didn’t like at all.

The next day I walked in the valley, along a river made blue-green by cobalt minerals from the Rax. I thought that its looming presence would clarify for me what it was saying. The mountain was snow-peaked but maroon-tinged by the early spring buds of deciduous trees on the lower slopes; its presence never left my consciousness as I walked under it. I watched a chaffinch as the day warmed; I sat on a park bench by the little Victorian railway line that would have taken Freud and his family from their hotel in the valley to the cable car, and was baffled by the flight of a large insect, or was it a small bird? It was neither, it was a bat. At midday? That is the point of being in nature. It always surprises.

The mountain had spoken to me that night. The first impact of it was an incredible benignity. It took months to wear off after I returned to my family and university life in London. It is a sense of peace with others, an expansiveness that is a direct parallel to what the mountain seems to be: a nurturing presence. Mountain minerals run through our fields, give nutrients to plants and animals and sustain all of life; in the oceans too the limestone and granite residues feed the brilliant quicksilver ballets of predation in the green light of its depths. The mountain is not concerned over the sufferings and deaths of individuals. That is what makes the it non-human, but in the non-human of the mountain and in all of the non-human life that depends on it I am made human. Indeed if I wanted to say one thing in my novel it is this: that the non-human makes us human, and if we imperil the non-human we imperil ourselves. But the message I did not want to hear from the mountain on that second trip was that its anxiety had been replaced by another sentiment.

It is not at all certain that we are going to avoid environmental catastrophe. It is already upon us with the mass extinctions of the Anthropocene. But it is ‘anthropos’ – man – that the mountain has adjusted its understanding of, and so made me think differently about what it is to be human. It has taught me this: that we are the unique animal, the special animal, one that can recapitulate all of nature within us. And so the mountain loves us uniquely, specially. Yes, in a dim and now largely discredited way Ernst Haeckel suggested that ‘ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny’ meaning that the human recapitulates animal forms in the womb. But the mountain meant it at a far deeper level than Haeckel could imagine, in an animist or shamanic way perhaps. Does not the shaman, on donning a fox-fur mask, do so to recapitulate that animal, to experience the manner-of-being-in-the-world of that animal? What is more, we are the only animal that can fully recapitulate all the other creatures within us, all of nature within us, and that is our role.

It is not our role to save nature. We have to do what we can of course, but what really matters is that as individuals we go to nature, find it within us, and preserve the Earth inside our souls. The Buddha taught that everything is impermanent. We cannot know the timescale over which the Earth shall come and go. Hopefully we can collectively avert disaster. But merely avoiding polystyrene coffee cups, turning down the central heating, buying electric cars, wearing second-hand clothing, living in an earth-build or whatever we actively do to halt catastrophe, is neither enough – probably – nor where the only effort should lie. It should also lie in profound communication with nature in the smallest ways, observing a robin on the window-sill, a London plane tree towering over choking congestion, the world as reflected in the eyes of an interlocutor, whether friend, family or strangers in a blizzard on a mountain. One can do it looking up at the sky, working on an allotment, or walking by a city canal with its cormorants and herons and the other few birds remaining to us. It lies in putting oneself in the way of nature.

So I walked that day, under the mountain, sustained indirectly by its mineral sustenance, only a few alimentary processes removed from those of the bat which ate the insects, the flying minerals hatched directly in the blue-green waters that flowed from the mountain’s snow-fed springs. I danced in synchronicity with the bat as I attempted to keep its gorgeous orange-brown fur, ears and nose framed in my binoculars. I had to give up the choreography of alignment as the bat flew into the bushes but I continued to dance inside, to a music that was the gift of the mountain above me. And I knew I would return to its upper slopes yet again, another year, to put myself in the way of its winter moods, when the non-human would take me yet deeper into the human.

Mike King was Reader at London Metropolitan University, now retired and working as an independent multi-disciplinary scholar. He has published over sixty papers, book chapters, film and book reviews, and six books in religion, film studies and economics as well as three novels. He is a Quaker, grows vegetables and likes to walk in fields, mountains, woodland and riverbanks.

 

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Psalter, For Now

Situk_aerial_2
The snow had finally given way and the river – coursing through Alaska’s lesser known temperate rainforests – ran high. Up ahead a hummingbird elevated and descended repeatedly amidst church-bell blueberry blossoms, boring its needle bill in and out. Unmindful of my approach, it sucked its nectar with aplomb while the spruce overhead bled what was left of the morning rain into mosses and witch-finger devil’s club.

Brown bears wear the trail smooth all summer and fall, seeking sockeye, pinks, and cohos, and fishermen wear it further in pursuit of the same. The hummingbird, a rufous, let me get within feet then raised out of the bushes, flying to the snow-beaten salmonberry stalks lining the other bank. The bird bounded from one stem to the next, looking for starry pink blossoms that hadn’t quite bloomed. Giving up, it lifted above the twisting alders before buzzing upstream, and I pressed toward the first of several sun-friendly willow brakes that hopscotched the danker conifer realms.

Bear droppings lay along the last of the spruce-shaded trail. Dark and fibrous, they reflected the vegetable-rich diet of spring, and looking down on one, I noticed a wolf, too, had been here. Four torqued tubes of moose and beaver hair, vole fur and bone fragment crisscrossed one another in a fresh bear print, while the canine’s own deep pads had left tracks in the mud where the first willow clearing began.

By late spring, moose cows range thick along this watershed. Willow growth is lush in the soggy ground and the big animals come here to drop calves, nursing them as best they can on milk and buds. Losses, though, are high. Wolves and bears have their own young to fret, and a thousand generations of knowledge, along with ever keener noses, lead both species to these same broken meadows to sniff out the humid musk of moose placenta and track the easy, weakened feast at its source. I looked up. Five ravens – myth-makers to the native Tlingits, as well as the land’s carrion eaters – were perched high in a cottonwood, watching. They, too, knew what played out in this country.

Pulling a water bottle and energy bar from my pack, I listened to a fox sparrow whistle deep in the willows while a ruby-crowned kinglet warbled atop the spruce wall across the meadow. After swallowing half the bar, I raised the bottle to drink.

We’re new to this, all of us. Whether banished from Eden or evolved from hunting and gathering is irrelevant. Either way, we’re a collective eye-blink from integration. There was a time when I wouldn’t have fussed much over sparrows or hummingbirds. There was a time when I wouldn’t have been alone, but in a band, right here, tight-knit and stitched by kinship. It’s no energy bar that would’ve sustained me, but knowledge, the same knowledge as the wolves and bears. My clansmen and I inhale, deep, through the nose, scenting words, sentences, orisons. Another breath. There it is, sticky and fresh. We fan out. She’s lying down, worn, licking her slick and floundering calf in birthy grasses. The bears are out here, too, and the wolf pack, but we find her first. A couple of quick yips by the discoverer and the rest come running – barefoot, hungry, strong. The mother tries to rise but can’t. She’s speared and the calf clubbed. Some members cut the animals up while others spread out in the brush, crouching, protecting. We’re grateful, and express so in some old, abandoned way. Divinity, I imagine, meant something else then.

I put the pack back on. A pair of orange-crowned warblers, competitors, had joined the kinglet and sparrow in song. Upstream, over the spruce tops, the sun caught the snow on distant peaks.

I enjoyed this, I knew, all of it, and was comfortable, even deeply moved, in these places – forest, desert, anywhere – but didn’t belong. None of us do. That world is gone, the language lost, and as I looked off the bank into swollen waters I wondered if I hadn’t burned up most of my life decoyed by a defunct god.


***


It’s hardly new, this sheared linkage. Unsettled by technology, people persistently look rearward, lamenting the lifestyles steadily bleached by whatever gizmo of the day is in their hands, from chariot whips to iPhones. Each mechanised leap forward breaks away equal shares of terrain behind us, and we mourn. Today, blitzed by the digital age and the innovative flood wrought first by steam then internal combustion, we tend to mark such crippling nostalgia from people like Henry Thoreau or the Romantics, for whom the source – nature and our fundamental indivisibility from it was grossly jeopardised by the Industrial Age.

Like humanity itself, though, the practice has no definitive origin. Socrates feared writing would wreck the human mind, and millennia before, unrecorded, it can be assumed the yoke and scythe roiled the human soul as much as today’s pixels and touchscreens. Even fire-on-demand likely spawned regret.

Standing on the river bank, I tried to put the current malaise of myself and so many nature-charged people in that context, but couldn’t help seeing this long lineage as a wave, one generated nearly at the start that is just now compiling to break. Even standing within it, we appear so decoupled from our quintessence – that original seamlessness in nature – that both our and its existences seem just that, separate entities.

We say it so often. However slick, however comfortable, our modern lives may be, they’ve leached away our vital interior. We know something critical is gone, and I knew it too by the river, but watching dark water move over stone, now a varied thrush hop from moss to limb then back again, then half a salmon skeleton – ribs cuddled around a nest of alder-snagged flood debris – I wasn’t sure that I or anyone else really understood what was gone, only that it was.

A jet flew overhead, descending into the village a few miles away, one of two daily flights in and out. Turning, I headed for the truck, knowing I yearned for something I couldn’t define while being dependent on things I wished I wasn’t, an ambivalence that had far greater potency than expected.


***


Born lucky, I’d always been a happy sort, well-grounded and largely immune to the depressive fogs that hamper so many I know, particularly in what we’ve increasingly accepted as the Anthropocene. Unable to shake the detachment I’d felt on the river that day, then, was something new, and as the weeks gave way to the short summer it became a concern.

My job with the state fish and game department kept me constantly in the woods, often alone, monitoring salmon spawning grounds. Normally I felt at ease there, as close to myself and the world as could be hoped, within fingers’ reach of that coquettish god I’d chased since childhood. Now, though, sloshing in streams shaded by spruce, listening to birdsong while watching the first salmon stage their fertility rites, I felt alien, alone, like a deer scratching ash in a burnt timberscape. Scratch enough, though, and revival comes, though when and of what I couldn’t know.

As so often happens, nothing dramatic did it. I didn’t climb a breath-taking peak nor repair to a remote lake for a healing hermitage. I simply moved through the same woods I always had, where the birds and the trees and the fish had lost what for me had been their lifelong enchantment. In a moment, though, during the sockeye run, in the normality of my job, it all returned.


***

Sockeye_
The stream
is named for the fish I meant to count, and if you’re looking for split-second majesty Sockeye Creek isn’t much to see. The land is flat and tree-shrouded. No Half Dome rises here. No Grand Canyon sinks nor Old Faithful spews nor Bering Glacier churns. No god on the half-shell. In a few spots I could jump across it, and for most of its length it runs no more than five yards wide. You have to walk this place, sitting from time to time, watching. Do it enough, learn it by years and seasons, and the old questions seep through like mist.

Floods had left generations of spruce trunks tangled in jams and crisscrossing the current along its length, and I worked my way up, over, and under the slip-throughs and catwalks that I always had, clicking fish off on the little device we called a tally-whacker. With no sockeye in a normally reliable pool, I cut across the bare gravel hemming it, noting a shred of rapidly drying milt – torn, buff-white, marred with a spider-burst of rotting blood – stuck to the stones, a lone vestige that the mink and jays hadn’t scavenged from a bear kill.

Coming to a large windthrow, I straddled one leg on each side and laid the rifle carried for bear protection on decaying wood. Tiny mushrooms, filaments of them with dew-drop heads, black in the stem and orange at the tip, were clustered in front of the gun. I had no idea what they were called, only that above the gurgling waters their delicacy of form belied a rapine for what the old tree still retained. For all its elegance, life’s every cell is complicit in a feral symbiosis, and if I was taken by the mushrooms’ frail splendor, it wasn’t lost on me that their wormy mycelia had been devouring this tree long before it toppled.

A sockeye finned in the pool above, then another. Still sitting, I ran a hand across my head, pressing sweat. July. Birdsong declines, but a fox sparrow husked a few notes from the salmonberries across the creek, lacking the lustful declaration of a few weeks before, while below, caddis larvae moved about the stream bottom inside the makeshift pebble tubes meant for self-protection, their bent, mechanical legs dragging them forward. Downstream, a grey, unimposing dipper dropped off a rock to enter the water. Emerging, it gained another stone, extracted a caddis from its dwelling, then swallowed. Nature seems so peaceful at times that we believe it to be so, and I wondered if joy wasn’t life’s only say, the rebellion against all that we – from people to buntings to tadpoles to stoneflies – don’t see, and may never comprehend.

Standing, I resumed the count, clicking off sockeyes. Some stretches were clean, not many fish and not many blow-downs, while others were choked with both. I came to the drowned forest where the channel had shifted some time ago, inundating trees in one line of wood while leaving the old route dry. The mountains, miles away, are visible here. The creek bed opens the forest in such a manner that a gravelled, timberless draw can be seen between two ridges. The slopes face south, and every year the same melt pattern lingers in the shadiest joint they share, one vertical line intersected by a shorter near the top. This cross clings through mid-July, and I looked upon it. Pure white save round the edges where the earth’s heat and burning sun ate the snow away, a run-off channel below it ran turgid, carrying flecks of mountain downslope. Standing there, in the jostled creek bed, with the peaks deliquescing in the distance, you can rightfully amend the old haiku: Though the capital may fall, the mountains and rivers remain. At least for a time.

When I reached the sickle-shaped pond where the count would end, I stepped out of the dark woods to enjoy the sunshine. The forest beyond the pond gives way to muskeg, a spongy, mossy morass. I stood at the water’s edge while the creek whispered behind me. A few tree swallows coursed above the water, nipping the surface. The sun had triggered a hatch, and midges found their way from water to air. All along the short beach bleached salmon relics, translucent, lay scattered among gray broken stone. Gill plates and ribs, a few jaw lines. Sockeye, pink, and coho. The valley of dry bones.

Squatting, I laid the rifle down then bowled my hands, splashing my face. Across the pond a tribe of monkshood grew from the sedge, their purple, downward frailty veiling the poison inside. A salmonberry stalk drooped nearby, weighted by a dozen fruits hung over the water. Rosy on top, green-revolving-to-red on bottom, the pimpled berries absorbed the sun, tempting bears, birds, and people. It starts with plant life, all of it, while plant life starts with that unfathomably far-off solar fission, and I realised that this was probably as close as I’d come. In all that searching, in all that god-crazed, purpose-crazed hounding that had slow-cooked most of my life, I wasn’t sure if I’d found anything at all, only doubting if we’ve ever really improved on truths we knew from the beginning, that the sun breeds maggots in a dead dog after all.

Piercing and persistent, a familiar sound cut the air. I stood. Not many birdsongs are unwelcome, but the monotone screech of a lesser yellowlegs is one of them. They stand atop dying evergreens alongside wetlands, scourging all comers with their well-developed alarum. This one, though, was hurt. Large for a shorebird, they’re otherwise unremarkable, with a needle bill, plump body, and stilted legs. Such a one now circled the patch of marsh that led from pond to muskeg. Normally their legs stick straight behind, but here an appendage dangled below in sad inutility. Stammering its protests downward in atonal succession, the bird ascended with each circumference, as if it could out-wing its fate, but it was no matter. It looked to the grass below, circling the circle of its own demise.

The swallows just then were as pleased with their lot as the shorebird was agitated by its own. Many more had gathered to revel in the reap of midge-life. They twittered about, arcing and slicing, intercepting the insects’ uncertain careers. Rise and descent, rise and descent, filling themselves with food. You understand joy when you see it, and as the swallows continued snapping midges from the air I sensed it as well, rising up to the burning blue, a stiff challenge to whatever indifference glowered upon them.


***

‘There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.’ Shakespeare gave that to Hamlet, and it’s become increasingly accepted since that we’re the divinity he implied. Maybe that was intended. Regardless, we seem to have as little control over how our ends are shaped now than if there is indeed outside agency.

As both master and slave, then, we press on, currently bound to destroy much of the world in which we developed all the old gods and all the old ways, the fossilised fragments of which so many of us seek. Watching the swallows, though, and witnessing the yellowlegs feather out the last of itself high above them, I gave myself over to the present. The future, I finally understood, can’t be known, and the past, enticing and instructional as it may be, is no oracle. The present, however, offers joy, our sedition, and the opportunity to marvel what’s at hand.

I’d moved to Alaska from New England, where settlers colonised Plymouth nearly four centuries before. The land there is changing, at least some of it. Commercial cranberry farms, operating for two centuries, are giving way to cheaper operations out west. In a few places, Plymouth included, people are restoring the bogs to their natural state. Excavating 200 years of human-piled sand, they weren’t sure how to re-vegetate the newly relieved wetlands. They didn’t have to. Dormant seeds sprouted from the peat, weaving their reeds, mosses, and grasses as if the English had never showed. Two hundred years of dark, a season of sun, then revival.

I’d lament the loss of life, I knew, the vanished species and all the rest, but seeds, it seems, have patience. How the devolution of modernity will play out is unknown, but everything dormant within us and without us will, eventually, germinate, giving rise to new gods and new ways, however shaped by the old. We’re not the wise ape, but we are the storytelling one, and will find, as we always have, fresh myths to sustain us. In the meantime I had the present, and birds and insects and fish with their own ways and myths before me.

 

Mike Freeman lived in Alaska for many years.  This essay is adapted from the memoir Neither Mountain Nor River: Fathers, Sons, and an Unsettled Faith.

Photographs by Nate Catterson.

 

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A Wild Compliance

563_mawooshen-bear

I’ve got maps spread out
all over the kitchen floor

headwaters splintering into deltas
whose braids are hollowing
my spirit of its untruths
the snow blowing down my collar
the rain leaking in through my boots
the river depositing silt into my hair
whittled down to sap
I’m letting the light in

however it wants to get in

Out in the darkness of the frozen lake

there are fish suspended
in the top six inches of ice
who will hold the dreams
of last summer’s water
through the winter,
and then pass them along
in the spring when the ice melts

and water again begins to flow

The part of me that is Watercress

Wolverine, Lark Sparrow and Bluestem
has been waking
in the middle of the night
near the fork of a creek
at the foot of a hill
and cannot return to sleep without asking,
how far away are we
and what must we do
to collectively imagine
a liberated future;
where the way we live
does not compromise life
where watersheds are not choked
where human beings
are not wage slaves
and our value system
is based in generosity

not accumulation?

These questions howl through me

like rivers and runaway witches
my life the voice to ask them with
my heart the tool shaping

the resilience and renewal they reveal

As the tamarack bogs never refuse a Moose

my resistance is an act of love
and my questions come not in judgment
but in service of life, as an invitation
to hear all that is silent in the river
all that clings with the burrs and sunset
to the Coyote’s tail
that does not require one to
comply with an economy
willing to sacrifice the braids of our ecosystem
Red Fox, Monarch, Hawk,
White Bark Pine, Salmon,
Bears Ears, Lake Superior,
Kawishiwi, Menomonee, or Yellow Dog
for a deluded version of wealth
that enriches supremacy,
fear, complacency, and disconnect,
but instead complies with
the entangled lives of
Box Turtles and thunderstorms
ancient forests and the joy of

Earths’ wild reciprocity.

Ben Weaver is a songwriter and poet who travels primarily by bicycle working to strengthen relationships between the water, land and the communities he visits.  His most recent record is called Sees Like a River.  You can learn more here: benweaver.net

Image by Jonathan Levitt jonathanlevitt.com

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Singing stories, telling tales

Indian_Kathakar_Storyteller_1913
Once upon a time, in the mountains of the Himalayas, when an old man was about to die, he beckoned his son to come closer. As the son drew near, the old man whispered, ‘son, I have only one piece of advice for you, sweeten your madua before you eat it’. Soonafter the man passed away, leaving the son slightly confused with his last message. Trying to follow the instructions, the son tried to eat madua with different sweet additions like gud, honey and sugar. Years went by and the son forgot about his father’s curious message. One day he went to the forest to collect firewood. He worked hard and by the time his chores were over, it was evening and he was very tired and hungry. He realised that he had brought along a few stale madua rotis tied in a cloth. With relief and gratitude, he opened the cloth and started eating the rotis. He was stunned. For never had madua tasted sweeter, taking him back to the words of his dying father. Now he finally understood what the old man had been trying to tell him. To really be able to taste the sweetness in your food, you need to be really hungry. To be really hungry, you need to have really worked.

Hirma Devi Sumtiyal, who is known to many in the village Sarmoli in Munsiari as Thul-Aam or ‘Elder mother’, told me this story. But she had not made it up. She had heard it during one of the countless Aan Katha sessions. Aan Katha sessions, where often the elders teased and challenged the younger people with riddles and puzzle-stories, would start in the evening on snowy winter days and continue late into the night. Or they used to. In the present age of ubiquitous televisions and smart-phones, families and societies have found other ways of entertaining and educating themselves.

All corners of India reverbrate with different forms of storytelling, orally passing tales from one generation to another from time immemorial. There is a richness in their diversity of form (which may be songs, couplets, riddles or long prose) and content (romantic, funny, sad, practical, simply amusing, adventurous or even propagandist). In my own homeland of Punjab, my mother recollects summer nights of storytelling by her parents and grandparents, which was done only when the children promised to give a hungaara i.e. say ‘hmmm’ at regular intervals to indicate that they are listening.

Stories have always had an important place in human history. According to Yuval Noah Harari, author of the book Sapiens, ‘Any large scale human cooperation – whether a modern state, a medieval church, an ancient city or an archaic tribe – is rooted in common myths that exist only in people’s collective imagination’. According to Harari religion, nationalism, and even belief in justice and human rights, are all on account of our ability to believe in fiction. Following his logic, it seems that in some ways wars, invasions, conversions, even political elections, are actually about a clash of stories – who can weave the most captivating, enthralling, bewitching tale that would make us want to believe in them.

In the meetha madua story that I began with, the food will be tastier if you have worked, making work as a reward unto itself. In that way, stories reflect how we rationalise life to ourselves. Stories can also reflect our value systems. In another mountain village, in Ladakh, I was told that people feel obliged to welcome wayfarers into their house and offer them shelter for the night. ‘Hospitality is a way of life. If a person is too possesive about their house, they will become a tortoise in their next life. Because a tortoise carries its house upon its back,’ said Tsering Angmo of Gangles village.

Stories can reveal to us connections. For instance, in the creation story of Santals, an indigenous people of India, the Earth rests on a tortoise. Oceans apart, in the North American story of Anishinaabeg, a turtle volunteers to have the Earth placed on its back. Such similarities could indicate either common origins of the tribe, or commonalities in the historic incidences that were recorded in form of story. In fact, there are many who assert that myths are a method of storing memories. It is said that Aboriginal Australian storytelling records sea-level rise taking place between 7,000 and 18,000 years ago. That story was passed orally to the present over 300 generations of people.

Stories can also be just about wit and pleasure. For instance the paradoxical one-lined story that grandmothers in villages of Maharashtra tell their grandchildren mischieviously when they are nagging them for a story – ‘Once upon a time, there was an old lady who died when she was a child’.

But it seems like in our present times, we are losing systems that wove and passed on these stories, and even the tongues that held them. In the last five decades, over 220 languages have gone extinct from India. In Australia more than 100 Aboriginal languages have died since white settlement and 75% of the remaining are critically endangered. I know that many people would say that it is an acceptable loss, an inevitable part of ‘evolution’.

But in our hearts surely we understand enough about ecology to realise the flaw in that argument. For isn’t there a link between the forces endangering wildlife and our environment, and the forces threatening our diversity of cultures and languages? At the root of both is perhaps our rush towards economic growth and development, fast transforming and redefining our ‘needs’, social networks, landscapes, and livelihoods. Our coping mechanism to this unprecedented pace of change has been to take refuge in homogenity and conformity, to let our folk stories echo in their own silences. In a kitchen colonised with wheat and rice, in an evening now colonised with television’s blaring noises, what happens to the likes of Hirma Devi, holding on to not just the aan kathas but also her small cloth bags filled with madua and old spices?

Imagine stories that have survived for centuries being lost in a generation or two. In many communities, what we retain at present is just the left-over warmth of embers of a flame already spent. Just fragments of stories, strings of words, holding fading memories slowly ebbing away to oblivion as bridges of communication between one generation and the next burn off to ground. It is a spiral of losses, losses of not just words, phrases, stories, languages but losses of ways of being, ways of thinking, ways of expressing, ways of knowing, ways of making sense of the world. In a world where there is no space left for diversity, we will be stripped of our most elemental tools. Will we be able to feel whole as persons, or will our sense of incompleteness intensify, taking with us everywhere we go a nagging feeling at the back of our mind that we are part of an incomplete jigsaw, that we are witnesses to an unfinished sky? Or perhaps, we will return from this juncture of loss, our need for stories and our need for diversity getting the better of us. Perhaps we will pick up what remains of the old and refashion it to make new stories for our time, taking once more the effort to look up, look around, look within, and converse. If someone was to study us a hundred or a thousand years from now, what would they say were the defining myths of this century? How are our stories evolving? What are our beliefs?

I am not romanticising the idea of stories. I know that like most other mediums, stories can be used by the powerful against the weak, to perpetuate victimisation. Yet the capacity of evil does not make the medium and the entirety of its content evil. I feel that in a land of diversity of cultures and landscapes, there is much wisdom and truth for us to learn from these oral mediums that were localised yet widespread, captivating imaginations and inspiring the passing on of strings of words over hundreds of generations. Getting a deeper understanding of our possible pasts may help us think of different, perhaps even better, possibilities for a future.

Shiba Desor is a member of Kalpavriksh, an environmental group based in Pune. She is also a member of a small women’s collective called Maati, based in Munsiari, Uttarakhand. She is part environmental researcher, part organiser of gatherings, part food-writer. She has co-authored a children’s book on food called Something To Chew On.

Image: Indian Kathakar Storyteller 1913, Wikimedia Commons.

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In the Clearing

From February to December 2017, the grounds of Compton Verney Art Gallery hosted a collaborative artwork by Alex Hartley and Tom James (who published part of his Future Manual here two years ago). Inspired by the utopian communities of the 1960s, the Clearing is a geodesic dome constructed from reclaimed materials on the shore of a lake, and occupied year-round by a succession of ‘caretakers’ – an evolving experiment in reskilling and living off grid, ‘a reconstruction of the future as it might be.’ For nine months this space hosted workshops on making fire, growing food, baking bread, keeping chickens, brewing mead, navigating by the stars, and how to die. I spent a week as caretaker there at the start of October.

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The day before I come to the Clearing I’m in a car crash. I’m sitting in a traffic jam when another car slams into mine, stoving in my rear bumper and giving my friend whiplash. For almost four hours the following morning – which I wanted to spend packing supplies for my week off grid – I’m on the phone to insurance companies and filling in online forms. My car’s a write-off, apparently. I try telling them it’s fine apart from a dented rear end, but they want to take it away for scrap. They say it’s not worth fixing.

The timing’s perfect, actually. It’s a great example of the stupid culture the Clearing was built to move beyond. This experiment is an insurance policy – or part of one, at least – against the larger, longer crash that awaits us all, when the whiplash will be global.

I arrive six hours later than planned, my car written-off but roadworthy – it should be a contradiction in terms – arriving at Compton Verney just ahead of darkness. Amber is leaning on the gate. She’s lit the woodburning stove and put the chickens to bed. The structure is beautifully simple, containing only what it needs, but enriched by twenty-seven weeks of the things that people have offered to it: small repairs and beautifications, improvements, adornments, ornaments, artworks, tools, implements, paintings, books, sculptures. Someone has whittled an oar out of wood. Someone else has built arms for a chair that didn’t have them. There’s a jar of homemade elderberry syrup and a single chicken’s egg. There’s a feather quill and ink made from charcoal. It smells of woodsmoke, sawdust, wax. As soon as I step inside the dome I feel myself, very slowly, starting to breathe out.

Amber tells me what I need to know and then leaves me to work out the rest for myself. I pull up a chair and sit outside, on the deck over the lake, and let my buzzing urban mind catch up with my body.

There are things to do. Many things – small things, but important. I must feed the stove. I must make my bed. I must light candles. I must cook. I must order my supplies. I must see what books are on the shelf. I must make an inventory of the foodstuffs others have left. A busy evening lies ahead, filled with necessary tasks, but it’s a different species of busyness from this morning’s work. Instead of quoting my policy reference number for the sixteenth time, I must boil some water for food. Instead of being put on hold, I must put myself on hold.

The borders of the lake turn dark. Bats flicker in the sky. The water is extremely still. There is nothing blacker than the blackness of yew trees at night.


***

I wake to a clear autumn day and a slick of brown oak leaves has covered the outside decking. The chickens whitter curiously at my new face peering through the wire. Released from the coop, they rush forth to scratch around their world. By the time I’ve returned from fetching water they are far down the shore, exploring the offerings of the night. I boil water in the Kelly kettle and when it bubbles over, popping the cork lid from its mouth, they rush back in a state of high excitement. Four eggs are waiting for me in the snugness of the coop.

‘Thanks,’ I say. ‘Don’t peck that, it’s hot.’ ‘Don’t go in there, that’s my house.’ Less than one day here, I’m already talking to the chickens.

I eat their eggs by the lake and gaze across at the grand stone mansion on the facing shore. The house and the dome seem to stare at each other, one through tall imposing windows and one through triangular plastic panes, as if they are sizing each other up. The house seems very far away, a symbol from another world, absurdly obsolete. Glass and steel skyscrapers will appear like that some day. When you look with certain eyes, they already do.

After an hour of sitting and watching, I’m seized by a sudden frenzy of small reorganisations. The dome, filled with seven months of leavings from past caretakers, suddenly feels cluttered, confused. I have a desire to simplify, to make the space my own. I move the oak leaves off the table. I sweep away carefully placed acorns. I clear a space on the shelf to line up the books I’ve brought. I put my tomatoes in a bowl. I wipe away old cobwebs. When I’ve finished, the changes I’ve made would be meaningless to anyone else, but they mean a lot to me.

Being here, I’m starting to see, is not a passive experience. It’s an active engagement with place, a negotiation of the point where I end and the dome begins. Already, when this work is done, that point feels clearer.

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Wood is the afternoon’s job. First I carry the big unseasoned logs from the pile under the yew and chop them into smaller logs. Then I chop those into smaller logs. Then I stack those in the shed and move the seasoned ones to the dome, tessellated behind the stove, and split some sticks for kindling. The air smells sweet with chopping. It’s a steady procession of wood getting smaller and smaller in size from one position to the next, whose ultimate and inevitable destination is the fire. Then it will get smaller still, ending up as nothing.

‘Prometheus stole fire from the gods,’ says an old lady casually when she comes to look around. But stealing fire is the easy part. Keeping it fed is harder.

***

There seems no rhythm to the day. It is oddly jointed. Rather than doing one thing at a time I seem to be doing many things, constantly interrupting one task in order to start another. I sit down intending to write and find myself in the vegetable patch, wondering where the chickens are. I start to boil water for coffee and realise I’m cutting wood again, or sweeping dead leaves from the door, or standing up reading a book in the centre of the room. I chop half an onion for a meal but before I chop the other half I go for a walk around the lake to see what the Clearing looks like from the other side.

It looks like exactly the kind of place I’d want to walk around the lake to explore if I were standing here not knowing what it was. It looks like an improbable dream. On the way back I find watercress, and pick some for my meal.

I can’t find the chickens at dusk, and search anxiously through the grounds. Then I remember what Amber said – they will put themselves to bed – and that’s exactly what they’ve done. They are perched trustfully in their coop, waiting for me to close the door so they will be safe from the black of night. I shut them in, then go to the dome to do the same thing to myself.

***

The morning brings waves to the lake. The water is black-grey. Wind rushes through the trees in long rhythmic blasts, a deeper noise in the oaks and sharper in the willows. The chickens haven’t laid any eggs and I notice the straw in their coop is filthy, so once they are out pecking around I sweep it out for the compost. I take a large amount of pleasure in laying a bed of new, clean straw, scattered with dry leaves, imagining the pleasure they will have when it is cosy. Half an hour later I return and two eggs have been laid.

The wind gives trouble to the stove. Its vacuum suffocates the fire and drags smoke back down the flue to burst in thick puffs through the vent, filling the inside of the dome with a grey, choking cloud. The smoke alarms start to blare. I shut them off but they start again. I fan the flames in the grate but the wind extinguishes them once more, driving another gritty cloud into the room. I can hardly see the walls. Eventually the fire takes and equilibrium is restored – the chimney drawing as it should and the smoke-demon expelled. The grey cloud slowly dissipates, turning blue in the light and wafting out the door.

My clothes and hair reek of smoke. My eyes are red and itchy. A visitor comes to look around. ‘It smells like the Iron Age in here,’ he says approvingly.

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The smoke is gone by the time that Caroline comes to join me here. The dome’s population doubles. Now I’m in Amber’s role of showing her where everything is, how everything works, what everything does, why everything is here. It gives me a sense of proprietorship but also one of letting go, a gratifying push and pull between owning and sharing.

Despite the clouds and threat of rain we build a fire and cook thick slabs of marrow on the grill. Food tastes better here. The chickens are magnetised. They take clumsy leaps at the flames to peck the sizzling vegetable until we banish them to their pen. They appear unbothered. Later, when the rain hasn’t come, we sit on the deck and watch the light leaching from the sky. Caroline finds a fishing rod made from a willow branch, baits its hook with chorizo and casts out the line. No fish bite. We are glad of this. A heron skims the water.

***

Our world has shrunk quickly here. Even crossing the woods to the car park comes as an unpleasant shock – getting into my car and driving half an hour on motorways feels positively insane. After roundabouts and ring roads I find myself in a suburban cul-de-sac in Coventry, a displaced hermit reeking of rain and stale woodsmoke. I am here to visit my granddad’s girlfriend in her old people’s home. She turned ninety-six this year. My hands are the colour of bark. My hair smells like a bonfire. Kitty doesn’t seem to mind. She reminisces about my granddad with tears in her eyes and flirts with me outrageously. Occasionally she calls me Steve. Three hours later I leave, dazed from the overheated room, having consumed quantities of biscuits and weak cups of tea, and have the reassuring sense that I am returning home. On the drive I suddenly realise I should have taken Kitty too. An afternoon surrounded by trees and chickens and the rush of wind would have been better for her soul. It would have lodged in her memory like a peculiar dream.

Under the reddening sky, Caroline is fishing. She has swapped chorizo for worms. Still the fish don’t bite.

When darkness falls the dome becomes a hemisphere of candlelight. Fields of stars are visible in the blackness through the panes. I hope that if I reach ninety-six I’m somewhere like this, not somewhere like that. If not, at least the world allows me to be here now.

***

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It’s all still a very long way from a sustainable future, of course. Our drinking water doesn’t come from the lake but from the taps in the gleaming facilities next to the visitors’ centre. The lake is full of Weil’s disease, and health and safety came down on that like they came down on the compost toilet and the coracle someone built, now sadly decommissioned. Half our food comes from packets and tins. We’ve picked a handful of tomatoes and runner beans from the vegetable patch, but that harvest’s over now. We’ve failed to catch a single fish (perhaps we willed ourselves to fail). We’ve cooked over embers in the cob oven, on the woodburning stove and in the drizzling dark over an open fire, but we’ve also brought a mini gas stove, which is definitely cheating. There’s a solar panel to charge a phone, and wifi drifts intermittently from the mansion over the lake. Occasionally a visitor likes to remind us of these shortcomings: ‘You wouldn’t have that in the apocalypse, would you?’ ‘You’d be lucky to find yourselves here when the world falls apart, with loads of firewood and a lake all to yourselves.’

It’s true. We would. But that isn’t the point. The Clearing isn’t an arrival, but one point on the dimly glimpsed and obstacle-strewn descent ahead – not a perfected vision of the future, but a place with a slightly clearer view. It’s a negotiation between the world as it is and the world as it might be – an attempt to articulate something we may not have the language for yet. It’s the start of the story, and that’s enough for now.

Our last night. Caroline carves a chess set from a willow pole. I hammer in splints of wood to fix the axe-head that came loose in this afternoon’s round of chopping. After dark we walk in silence on the grey path through the black trees, wondering if we will see a badger. We see three. They are only a stone’s throw from the Clearing, huddled with their noses together as if they are making a secret pact. As we approach they merge with the darkness and are gone.

To find out more about the Clearing (its past and its future), see here.

Nick Hunt is author of Where the Wild Winds Are, which describes a series of walks following Europe’s winds, and Walking the Woods and the Water, which tells the story of a walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. He works as online editor for Dark Mountain. nickhuntscrutiny.com

 

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One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night

To mark the release of our latest book, Dark Mountain: Issue 12 (SANCTUM), we will be holding a launch with a difference – a day of workshops with the book’s editors, followed by an evening of shared food, drink, live music and performance.

It all takes place this Saturday – 9 December 2017, 1pm to 10.30pm – at the beautiful Dartington Hall in Devon, UK. You can book tickets for the event here.

Today on the blog Steve Wheeler, one of the book‘s editors, plunges into the question of ritual: how to ‘bring participants out of their heads and into that other space in which more interesting things can happen.’

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Detail from SANCTUM incipit by Thomas Keyes

There was a moment, during the performance of Liminal at Dark Mountain’s Uncivilisation festival in 2011, that I knew we had stumbled upon something of power.


‘Performance’ is the wrong word. Liminal was a promenade experience (the first devised by long-time Dark Mountaineer Dougie Strang, who has since convened remarkable ceremonies, testaments and spectacles in Devon, Glasgow, Edinburgh and, most recently, on an island on the River Thames). A crowd of people walked together in the dark under the black branches of the trees, and encountered the strange, the off-kilter, and the unexpected: a group of figures moved mechanically, repetitively, while intoning fragments of proverb and folk-rhyme; a naked figure lay in a pit surrounded by animal bones; a dark, antlered shape snorted in the bushes, the dark and the woods keeping us from catching more of it than quick, partial glimpses.

It was this last that let me know there was something worth pursuing here. Even knowing that it was part of a performance, the darkness lent power to the figure in the bushes. Without a clear sightline, it could not be pinned down by the conscious mind, not reduced to the comfortable categories we like the objects of our perceptions to inhabit. Old evolutionary patterns awoke in people’s hearts – fear, alertness, confrontation, and a sudden sense of the surrounding dark as a thing of weight, a blanket of unknowing that fundamentally altered our relationship to the world around us.

It is easy to understand such things intellectually, and not to be changed by them, but the actual experience is one of transfiguration – of the world around us, and of our own sense of self. To be in a wood with a large beast snorting in the undergrowth only feet away, with every sensory faculty reaching out into the darkness, is in many ways the opposite of what we experience in the day-world of our civilised lives. It is to be taken out of the artificial aquarium of our heads and to be flung out into the living world.

Other experiences followed. In 2012, the strange figures of the Mearcstapa roamed the festival site and road leading to it, emerging from the treeline and disappearing again, pushing against the boundaries of the normal. Such things are not always to everyone’s tastes, of course. In his not-entirely-glowing review of the festival that year for Aeon magazine, Ed Lake reported his horrified text to his wife at home: Directed to the car park by someone literally in a Wicker Man mask’.

In 2013, I (‘head shaved smooth and wearing a kimono’, as the New York Times memorably described me) literally strode round a burning wicker tree as flares firing off at the four points of the compass, and told the story of our gathering:


And the trees welcomed the people
Blown here on the far winds of the storm
From North, from South, from East, from West,
From foxhole and culvert,
From dogleg and ragwort,
For four seasons of the Earth,
To stand in this burning moment,
Here, on this spinning ball,
Here, on this scrap of chalk,
Here, in this ragged grove,
Here, by these tangled dreams.
May the burning of the old be the rebirth of the new.

I can claim no credit for the remarkable, and very strange, spontaneous events that followed, continuing into the small hours. I led a workshop the next day, and an older gentleman remarked that he had somehow, uncharacteristically, lost his watch during the night, as if in a symbolic manifestation of his stepping outside the ‘clock-time’ of everyday reality. Even stranger, he said, was that he found it right next to him in the tent when he woke up the next morning.

At times we have referred to these events as ‘rituals’. The word entices some people and alienates others. Many recognise that ritual was a form of cultural and social technology that served particular, and vital, purposes for human societies, and that its absence from our own is just one more factor in the dysfunctionality of our way of life. But others associate the word with the realm of religion, and all the entanglements of hierarchy, misogyny, superstition, deception and coercion that are undeniably bound up with that realm.

In the past, I have talked about ‘playing’ with the language and form of ritual; clearly, we could not go back to experiencing ritual as it was within the framework of a shared religious sensibility (nor would we want to, some would say), so perhaps we would need to adopt a more anarchic, combinatorial sensibility to explore it. I did not mean, however, that we should treat ritual simply as raw material for an aesthetic game – something by which to produce an artistic ‘spectacle’, but not to engage with in any deeper, more visceral sense. By requiring our communal presence, our physical engagement with movement, sound, speech, and matter, ritual is something that takes us out of our heads and reinstates us in the world. To play with such a powerful technology is necessarily to be playing with fire.

The invocation I spoke around that fire four years ago was not intended to be ‘mere’ poetry; but nor was I pretending to spiritual knowledge – that my words would invoke some specific, hidden, super-material force – I did not have. I spoke, simply, from that place between; from intuition; from a faith that a sincere heart, channelled by an artful mind, can sometimes make Something Happen.

This is, after all, what invocation means – it is to treat the world outside our heads as if it might be equally meaningful as the contents of our own psyche; as if it might have something to say back to us. The philosophers and metaphysicians can keep themselves busy arguing the precise ontological status of the world’s reply; but, as with any relationship, it is often more valuable simply to listen to what is being said.

This might serve, too, as a rough definition of ‘the sacred’ amongst this ragged band we call Dark Mountain, with all our disparate beliefs and perspectives: to attend to the sacred is to believe that there is something meaningful outside the machinations of our own minds; that the world may be greater than our understanding of it; it is to believe that, with a bit of luck, there might still be a chance for Something to Happen.

Editing, writing in and, now, presenting to the world Dark Mountain: Issue 12 (SANCTUM) has been, in a way, my coming-out as one of these beings. I admit it: I think the reality we are immersed in, and from which we are so often separated from by our thoughts and abstractions, might really be real. Not only do I think Something might Happen, I think it is already Happening right now.

When the time came to hold a physical gathering of people to launch this book, it was clear that we would need to do things a little differently. Dark Mountain book launches have always played somewhat ‘outside the box’, but we wanted to take this a little further. So we have arranged a launch this Saturday with a few differences.

Rather than simply holding an evening event – a brief window of exposure with little time to connect – we decided to take a whole day, running a workshop on art, the sacred and ecology for those who wanted to explore these issues collaboratively and in greater depth. SANCTUM’s lead artist and Art Editor, Thomas Keyes, will be joining me on to lead a hands-on afternoon of discussion, nature connection and collective creation.

We did not want our launch to take place somewhere without poetry or character, so we booked the ancient timbered space of the Upper Gatehouse at Dartington Hall in Devon. In the same way, we did not want our launch to be separated entirely from the outside world, that open realm of darkness, wind and life that moved something in me during the experience of Liminal. So we will be hosting a promenade experience of our own at 6pm, using the beautiful grounds of Dartington Hall as a setting for something that will, hopefully, help to bring participants out of their heads and into that other space in which more interesting things can happen.

After this, it would not seem right to ask people to simply sit indoors passively while passages from the book are read out at them. So we have a programme unlike anything we’ve done before – music and interactive theatrical performance mixing with readings and conversation. And, making a virtue from a necessity – as so many of our contributors are based elsewhere in the world – we will have audio and video from contributors interspersed with the live event.

Alas, I still cannot pretend to have magic powers. We cannot claim that our programme next Saturday will teach you the deep secrets of being, give you a transcendent experience of the divine, or awaken you to the timeless peace underlying all things. But to make a whole book about the sacred, to ask a group of people to join together in its creation, giving freely of their time and art, is itself a kind of ritual act. And to gather together to celebrate its existence, to join sincere hearts to mindful craft, to share food and music and words together is a ritual of another sort. We hope those of you who can join us on Saturday will do so.

Steve Wheeler is one of the editors of Dark Mountain: Issue 12 (SANCTUM).

DM12_PPC_1Join us for the official launch of Dark Mountain: Issue 12 (SANCTUM) at Dartington Hall on 9 December 2017. Expect an afternoon of workshops and an evening of wildness. Places are limited, so make sure to book your ticket

You can order a copy of Issue 12 from our online shop for £18.99 – or for a special rate of  £9.99, if you take out a subscription to future issues of Dark Mountain.

 

 

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Malaise Traps

Remembrance Day for Lost Species, held on the 30th November each year, is an occasion to honour and mourn the countless thousands of species driven to extinction by human activity. To mark this year’s theme – Lost & Disappearing Pollinators  author and beekeeper Helen Jukes writes of this year’s devastating news of insect decline, of the wonder of honeybee hives, and of the need to widen our vision by paying closer attention to small things.

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Type honeybee into Google, and a drop-down menu appears with a list of suggested search terms. I add a ‘c’ and it throws up honeybee collection or collapse; add a ‘d’, and it’s declines or decorations for your home. I work my way through the alphabet; ‘l’ is unequivocal. Honeybee losses 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014.

Some days I can’t tell if honeybees are coming or going. In a sense, they’re everywhere – collecting on our shelves, decorating our homes. In the supermarket this week I passed bee-themed mugs, place mats, bath towels and lunchboxes – not to mention the honey (I LOVE bees, the girl at the checkout told me, when I told her I was a beekeeper. She showed me her bee earrings and a bee-shaped pendant. I really love them, she said, tucking the necklace back inside her shirt collar). And yet, elsewhere, out there, where the real bees live, we’re told there are losses and declines and last month I heard a new word, insectageddon.

That came from an article about a study in Germany, among the first of its kind. Between 1989 and 2016, 1,500 insect samples were collected across 63 sites – a total haul of over 50kg, and several million flying creatures. The results are disturbing: a 76% drop in numbers, over 27 years.

Since the paper was published, more scientists have stepped forward to suggest the findings are likely to reflect a pattern occurring across Europe and beyond.

We’ve heard already about losses to honeybee, butterfly and bumblebee populations; these findings dramatically extend the scale. Around one third of our global food supply is dependent upon honeybees and other pollinating species – if flying insects were to disappear, not only would we lose individual species; our landscapes, our ecologies, our diets and so even the stuff of our own bodies, would also be radically changed.

It’s one thing to read headlines like these; another to absorb them. The words are big. They’re dramatic, they’re catastrophic. I imagine they’re probably driving the appetite for honeybee mugs and bath towels – loss can make us grabby. Yet when I look out of the window, it is not catastrophe, not ageddon, that I see.

A few years ago, when I was living in Oxford and about to become keeper to a colony of bees, this was something I’d been struggling with. I’d read about honeybee losses in the papers. It sounded bad, but it felt remote; I wondered what would happen if I stepped to one side of the newspaper headlines and got to know a colony firsthand. Would I sense a slippage, a thinning? And would I, in my slim end terrace with a weedy garden out back and a work/life balance tipping dangerously towards collapse, find a way of sustaining the bees in my care – of keeping them?

I bought a suit. I got a colony. I was suddenly more involved in another creature than I had been for years. I tended them, fretted over them. I hefted pieces of hive and beekeeping equipment. It was both a love and a labour.

My garden was bordered by a crumbling wall, a hedge and a high fence; standing inside it, I couldn’t see very far at all. I could see the sky. I could see a warehouse roof, our neighbours’ house, the tops of the trees lining the allotments. I could hear the traffic on the road outside, and the man who shouted as he walked. I wasn’t mindful of much of this; I was busy focusing on the hive. I had to become very attentive to what was happening inside it; to watch for slight shifts in the activity of the colony that might signal disease or pests or a drop in available forage. I wanted to get to know their rhythms, understand their processes (these were different, I realised, on different days – a colony is as changeable as the weather).

Up close like this, I learned a little about the landscape. A little about how bees make sense of the world, how they perceive it. And, by watching their journeys, by looking for what they were bringing back, I learned something about what they were finding out there, beyond the fence; about what their world was composed of. Honeybees collect pollen for feeding young and nectar for making honey; they temporarily ingest the nectar when they carry it back to the hive, and stick the pollen to their knees. A few months in, a friend showed me how to tell the source of these pollen nubs by their colour, and so make a fairly reasoned guess as to where the bees had flown. Deep yellow might be dogwood; soft green was probably meadowsweet. I felt like a detective, sifting for clues. Except that, for the most part, the clues were in a language I didn’t speak.

A honeybee colony is like nothing else. It froths and boils and quivers and shakes; it murmurs and thrums and whines. Lifting the lid of a hive and taking a look inside can be a disorienting experience – the bees are so foreign, so far from your familiar, they can make you feel completely lost; they can also turn you around, and inside out – they can rearrange how you see. They rearranged and reorientated me.

I’m writing this on a wooden stool, in the window of a small cafe. They have baklava and free wifi. I can look out and see a road and a row of houses; I can look out and see the silvery rim of a stand of beeches, a heap of ivy hanging over a wooden fence, two kids in jeans with mud on their knees kicking a punctured football at a wall. For the last half hour, I haven’t actually looked out of this window at all; I’ve been reading about that German study, the one that prompted calls of an insectageddon.

Today I am interested not so much in the findings, but the method. I have been learning (as the football bounced off the window of a passing car, and the car stopped, and the boys made a run for it,) about malaise traps. A malaise trap is like a tent on stilts, pitched at one end and made of netting. Inside the pitched roof there’s a funnel leading to a collecting cylinder with a quantity of ethanol inside, a killing agent. The other end of the tent is wide open; when insects fly in, they head up through the funnel and get trapped in the collecting cylinder. The basic design was invented in 1934 by René Malaise, hence the name. It was the sole means of sampling in the German study.

Over the past 27 years, between the months of March and October, malaise traps were placed in 63 nature reserves across west Germany. The cylinders were emptied and their contents weighed every few days. The work was done not by scientists but amateur entomologists, who visited and monitored the traps and made detailed recordings of the weather. They had strict instructions. The samples were weighed (with minute accuracy, since the creatures were featherlight); the weights later combined and compared. Leaving a trap open for a prolonged period can be harmful to local insect populations, so those used in the study tended to be moved from one year to the next, and for this reason the pattern that emerges reflects not the individual stories of specific sites, but something more like an accretion; a collecting up and laying out through time of umpteen temporary and scrupulously recorded views.

I wonder about those amateur entomologists who emptied the collecting cylinders, who tramped down to the tents each week. Did they have a sense, as they tipped the alcohol-soaked specimens onto the weighing scales, of the extent of the pattern unfolding? Did they sense disaster? Or was the change was too small, too slight to notice week-to-week?

Nature reserves exist with the sole purpose of preserving ecosystem functions and biodiversity, so to find such a sharp decline in resident species is alarming. The researchers studied the findings; they factored in changes to land use and the weather. Neither could account for the declines, which occurred throughout the growing season, and irrespective of habitat type. Large scale factors must be involved, they reasoned – but such factors lie beyond the scope of their investigations.

A nature reserve is a protected space but it is also a form of island, and recording only the environmental changes inside the parks will never give a complete picture because islands don’t exist in isolation. Almost every reserve included in the study was surrounded by agricultural land, which over the last half century has undergone a process of rapid intensification. Farmland has very little to offer for any wild creature, Professor Dave Goulson, one of the researchers, is quoted as saying. With the loss of field margins, increased pesticide use and year-round tillage, vast tracts of land [are now] inhospitable to most forms of life. It is possible that insects were flying beyond the perimeter of the reserves to find their foraging and nesting habitats had disappeared; or that chemicals present in the wider landscape were directly harming them.

There is an urgent need to uncover the causes of this decline, the researchers conclude. And so call upon all of usscientists, amateur entomologists, beekeepers, supermarket cashiers, and people sitting in cafe windows – to join in the work of uncovering. To come close enough to see the detail, to pay attention to small things with the express aim of extending our range of vision, of better reading and making sense of the whole. Such a task will involve getting lost, giving up some of our go-to means of understanding the world, and drawing connections in places we hadn’t before. It will be a love and a labour. And it can start right now.

RDLS_logo-copyRemembrance Day for Lost Species, held on 30th November each year, is a chance to explore the stories of species, cultures, lifeways and habitats driven extinct by unjust power structures and exploitation, past and ongoing. It emphasises that these losses are rooted in violent, racist and discriminatory economic and political practices. It provides an opportunity for people to renew commitments to all that remains, and supports the development of creative and practical tools of resistance.

In light of the recent sharp declines in the populations of pollinators, on whose vital environmental contribution so many species (including humans) rely, the theme of Lost & Disappearing Pollinators is offered this year as inspiration. These are animals which move pollen from the male to the female part of a flower, thus fertilising it. Well-known pollinators include bees, butterflies and moths. Certain birds and mammals are also important pollinators, notably bats, hummingbirds and many other animals. Some pollinators, such as the small Mauritian flying fox, are already extinct at human hands, with swathes of others being critically endangered or feared lost, e.g. Franklin’s bumblebee.

Participate in Remembrance Day for Lost Species by joining  or holding  any kind of memorial to lost species or ways of life. This could take the form of an art project, a procession, lighting a candle, planting a tree, or any kind of action you like. Collaboration and inclusivity are at the heart of this initiative, so any offering is welcomed. Please share your plans with us here.

See lostspeciesday.org, or @lostspeciesday on Twitter, or Remembrance Day for Lost Species, 30th November for more information.

Helen Jukes is a writer, beekeeper, and writing tutor. Her first book, A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings, is due out in July 2018 with Scribner. helenjukes.com @helen__jukes

 

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