Working for a poetics of place

While shopping in Hexham in preparation for the Bank Holiday, I bought a book in Eland’s ’Poetry of Place’ series, Highlands and Islands (2012), edited by Mary Miers. I picked it up because of my ongoing desire to reorient my work in relation to evoking place. I’m trying to combine elements of the relatively ‘prose-oriented’ approach of my former deep mapping work with a small-scale approach that’s closer to the visual ‘poetics’ I associate with the best painting. (In addition to paintings I’ve long admired – particularly by Paula Rego, Ken Kiff and R. B. Kitaj’s early work – I’ve also been looking very carefully again at the work of Prunella Clough, Helen Frankenthaler, Peter Lanyon, and various others).

This project is not, of course, simply about starting to make painted constructions that try to evoke place. It seems to me to require, among other things, adopting a degree of critical solicitude towards reflecting on the complex of family and social circumstances that lie behind my own preoccupation with the Scottish Highlands and Islands. That preoccupation, which has brought with it an abiding concern with upland farming communities throughout the United Kingdom, is central to my work as a visual maker and a writer. Such complexities and their implications seem to me inseparable from considerations of place and so must be addressed if one wishes to distinguish between work that engages with landscape and work that tries to evoke a sense of place.

That thought is prompted by my reading Highlands and Islands. Scanning through the book I found Kathleen Raine’s Message to Gavin (1969), a reminder of both the doomed relationship between the poet (Kathleen Raine) and the novelist (Gavin Maxwell) and of my own contact with them both in late childhood and early adolescence. (A visit with my parents to Camusfeàrna, as Maxwell called his Sandaig cottage, made a very powerful impression on me, as much because of the difficulty of finding that beautiful place, and the size of his two dogs when we did, as with meeting the author of Ring of Bright Water. Among other encounters with Kathleen Raine, her withering dismissal, delivered in her tiny Chelsea flat, of my adolescent preference for Rothko paintings over those of Bacon, is equally memorable).

There is much like about Highlands and Islands. It contains, for example, unexpected work I did not know. This includes a poem by T. S. Eliot – Rannoch, by Glencoe –  which illuminates a place I know, both from childhood journeys and a memorable trip with my two sons, and is part of an ongoing conversation with friends. I also find the book helpful in terms of thinking about reorienting my own work, particularly the way in which each poem is contextualised. This contextualisation serves to remind me of all the different ways in which a poem is grounded in, grows out of, and interacts with, lives that unfold in all the weave of richness and complexity that makes up place. Not just the way in which Hugh MacDiarmid’s A Little White Rose counterpoints his thinking with that of W. B. Yeats, and is taken up by Alex Salmond, but the whole politics of landownership. And so the ways in which these interact with the presuppositions of class, entitlement and attitudes to relationships to the inter-woven-ness of personal, social and environmental realities.

A good deal to think about then.

‘Greening’ the Borders: a personal meander through questions of agriculture, woods and wetlands

 

Borders mixed woodland

 

Introduction

Around mid-summer I spent some time visiting various mosses and other wetlands in the English / Scottish Borders. These included Ford Moss, a lowland raised mire to the south-west of Berwick-upon-Tweed; the three Whitlaw Mosses just east of Selkirk; and the Gordon Feuars Moss, a wet wood, just outside the village of Gordon.

This last is a very particular place, the remnant of a large floodplain mire dominated by a low tangle of birch and willow growing over a variety of fen and bog peatland habitats. It appeared entirely un-managed and, as such, made me think it might be some of the last “natural” remaining native woodland in Britain. However, on looking at a large-scale map later, I found that there are drains marked as running through two sections of the reserve: Gordon Moss Nature Reserve itself and the neighbouring strip known as Minister’s Bog. However a third area, Laird’s Bog, appears to be undrained, suggesting that there has been only minimum human intervention in the area in the past. That was certainly my impression ‘on the ground’.

What interests me is not, however, whether or not such a place is in some sense “pristine’, but how it fits into the shifting politics of land ‘improvement’ and environmental concern that is now starting to shape the Borders landscape.

 

Marker on the edge of Gordon Fears Moss.

 

In the ‘Laird’s Bog’ wet woodland at Gordon Feuars Moss

Wildness

A 2006 report – “A Borders Wetland Vison” – compiled for the Scottish Borders Council – tells me there are eleven distinct types of wetland in the region – blanket bog, lowland raised bog, fens or flushes, reed beds, coastal and floodplain grazing marsh, wet woodland, lowland meadows, upland hay meadows, purple moor-grass (Molinia), rush pasture, and lochs. All of these are environmentally important. (Peatlands, for example, reduce global climate change by acting as carbon sinks that capture and store carbon from the atmosphere. Twenty percent of the world’s terrestrial carbon is captured and stored in peatlands located in the northern hemisphere). I have two related reservations about this report’s neat definitions, however. The first is that surely one of the important qualities of wetlands is psycho-social rather than environmental as that term is usually understood – their quiet ‘wildness’ in Don McKay’s sense of that word. That is, their capacity “to elude the mind’s appropriations” (2001 p.21), even those provided by scientific organisations like environmental research consultancies. My second, related, reservation is that, in practice and perhaps somewhat ironically, it’s precisely human intervention that so often makes a nonsense of any such neat distinctions. (Wet woodland, precisely because it occurs as small areas of wood or localised patches in larger woods on floodplains, as successional habitat on fens, mires and bogs, along streams and hill-side flushes, and in peaty hollows, many of which border on cultivated agricultural or other land, often combines elements of many other ecosystems).

Repairing the old sheep fank on the Carter Burn near the entrance to Burns in the Wauchope Forest area.

Sign marking the entrance to the Burns.

The image of an old sheep fans above is located in what was once an area of upland hay meadow.  It may originally have been bounded by wet woodland similar to that at Gordon Fears Moss and subject to regular flooding. The fank, however, is a product of the move towards land enclosure and the introduction of large-scale sheep farming. Then, beginning in the 1920s, sheep farming in this area was increasingly replaced by forestry, particularly the monoculture of Sitka spruce that now dominates the Wauchope Forest. Over the last eighteen years, I’ve watched this remnant of old upland hay meadow being further transformed; overrun by a mixture of bracken, reeds, and the beginnings of what may become a ribbon of deciduous wet woodland. While this process of change will continue one way or another, how it will fit into the wider pattern of future Borders land use is an open question.

The Midstream Collective

The Midstream Collective (left to right: CB, IB & MM)

I took the journeys indicated above because I wanted to get a sense of these wetland places ‘on the ground’ and to collect images. I was working towards a celebration of wetlands with my friends Christine Baeumler (an Associate Professor of Art at the University of Minnesota) and Mary Modeen (an Associate Dean at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design at the University of Dundee) for presentation at a conference in September. These are my partners in the Midstream Collective, which we set up some years back to ‘badge’ the collaborative work we wanted to do together.

As so often happens when I visit new places, the explorations with one end in view have set me thinking about another – land use on the Borders, both past and present – which in turn provoked this essay.

Ford Moss and its woodland

                                                                             

Ford Moss Nature Reserve sign

Ford Moss from the south-east

The Ford Moss Nature Reserve, wedged between a mix of farm land and old forestry plantation, is a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) that sits in the hollow of a hill overlooking the Till Valley and the Cheviots. The Moss extends over about one hundred and fifty acres and is classified as a lowland raised mire. That’s to say its ecology is underpinned by a deep peat layer laid down by the rotting of vegetation over many thousands of years. The moss has become dryer over the last 250 years, but retains echoes of its older landscape form, which is undergoing ‘renovation’. The nature reserve includes old mixed woodland that’s adjacent to the moss and contains both mature Scots Pine and Oak.

I was unable to walk into the moss itself, which is fenced to keep people away from its “soft and treacherous surface”. Instead, I (largely) followed the circular two-mile path around its edge. The wildlife, particularly the birds, were present from the start, as indicated by the variety and volume of bird song, most noticeably of thrushes, blackbirds and skylarks. The persistent call of a buzzard hunting high over the moss accompanied me for much of the second half of my walk. I also had the luck to encounter a Roe doe at close quarters.

Broken snail shell – evidence of a thrush’s activity?

A buzzard calling high over the moss

Roe doe caught unawares

As I started walking around the moss, it struck me that the mature Scots Pine and Oak woodland bordering its southern side and situated on an incline, echoed descriptions of woodland I’ve read and thought about a good deal in the past.

Mature woodland on the slope to the south side of Ford Moss

This is the old woodland of the Jed Forest that had once covered an area of land called the Wauchope Forest, now largely taken over by commercial forestry. That area that interests me sits north and west of the Carter Bar pass on the Scottish side of the Cheviot Hills. (This is well down the Border to the south-west of Ford Moss in the old Middle March). The area I’m particularly attached to consists of three parallel low ridges with the Carter and Black Burn running between them into the Jed Water.

What came to my mind was that the woodland at Ford Moss was almost certainly of the same type that persisted, probably with relatively little change, from around the time of the end of the Roman occupation to some point in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, when the Lowlands were ‘improved’. (Jennifer Owen, in her magisterial Wildlife of a Garden: A Thirty-Year Study, suggests that by 400 AD. only 30% of England was wooded, although the percentage would have been considerably higher in the Borders). I regularly visit this area between Carter Bar and the former parish of Southdean when I’m in the Borders and have done so for almost twenty years now.

The politics of land use

The remains of Tamshiel Rig, photographed c. 2002. Fifteen years later this site, if it still exists at all, is completely inaccessible due to the density of the Sitka planting. 

I stopped in Jedburgh on my way from Ford Moss to visit the land around Tamshiel Rig – a medieval shieling built on the site of what was once one of the best-preserved Iron Ages farms in Britain (until it was plowed up for forestry). While I was there I bought a copy of Peter Aitchison and Andrew Cassell’s The Lowland Clearances: Scotland’s Silent Revolution 1760-1830 (Tuckwell Press, 2012).  Like so much historical research into social conditions in rural Scotland, it’s a stark reminder of how issues of social justice, ownership, and land use are intimately linked, of the complexity of those links, and of how the language of ‘progress’ has been used to justify the imposition of ‘top-down’ changes that have had long-standing consequences. (The authors reckon that the ‘improvement’ of Lowland agriculture traumatised, displaced, or otherwise disrupted, the lives of almost one third of the population. These were for the most part cotters, the poorest members of Borders society. In this context, it’s important to know that even today more than half of Scotland is still owned by less that 500 people, a situation with enormous socio-environmental consequences.

Two views reported in the book are relevant to my visit to the former parish of Southdean, where the population has been steadily declining year on year. The first is that of an establishment orthodoxy that views the enclosures and the improvements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as a mark of unqualified progress. For that orthodoxy, the creation of “big new farms in place of common grazing” not only “completely altered the landscape of Scotland”, it ushered in the new, scientific agriculture essential to Scotland entering the modern industrial age (p. 72).

The second view is that of the historian Dr James Hunter. Hunter is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of the Highlands and Islands, was the first Director of its Centre for History, and the author of thirteen books about the Highlands and Islands and that region’s diaspora. He was the first director of the Scottish Crofters Union, now the Scottish Crofting Federation and is a former chairman of Highlands and Islands Enterprise. Unsurprisingly then, he contrasts the “empty deserted glens” central to large-scale Lowland sheep farming and “kept going solely by vast, enormous subsidies from Europe”, with “the unimproved parts of Scotland … the crofting counties”, where “you see a much more viable society”. (p. 148) He also suggests that the people who resisted the ‘improvements’, where, from the perspective of our present eco-social situation, those with the better, more sensible, more economically and environmentally viable vision of the Scottish landscape than the “few subsidy junkies” who now dominate “rural Scotland where improvement was given full reign” (ibid).

Lindean loch information board.

Lindean loch.

The historical link between the loss of wetlands and ‘improvements’ of various kinds is neatly illustrated by what’s known of Linden reservoir or loch, located just east of Selkirk. Prior to the eighteenth century, this would have been the lowest, and possibly most extensive, of what are now collectively known as the Whitlaw Mosses. (The remaining three are ‘Murder’, ‘Beanrig’ and ‘Blackpool’ Moss).

Whitlow moss, looking west towards Lindean Loch

Whitlaw Moss.

Although the loch looks ‘natural’ enough today, it is in fact the product of two major human interventions. As a standing body of water, it’s largely the result of the extensive extraction of lime rich marl (a form of clay), dug by hand during the eighteenth century. Marl that was then used as fertiliser locally to improve the grass necessary for intensive grazing. Then, in the twentieth century, the loch was dammed to provide a public water supply for nearby villages, a situation that continued into the nineteen seventies. Now notable for its lime-rich water and soil, and for the six hundred and more plant and animal species apparently found in and around it, the loch was designated an SSSI in 1977.

Rethinking woods and wetlands – Kielder, Wauchope and other commercial Borders forests

Clear-felled area of hillside north of Kielder

 

Clear-felled area at Burns in the Wauchope forest

Given my long-standing interest in the area just north west of Carter Bar, someone familiar with the area would probably expect me to visit the Border Mires, the name given to a collection of peat bog sites in, and adjacent to, Kielder Forest in Northumberland, rather than the mosses I in fact visited. After all this area was, until planting began in the 1920s, predominantly open moorland and mire, with remnants of native upland woodland – some of it wet – along stream sides and in isolated craggy areas. Now it’s the largest man-made forest in Europe, with three-quarters of its six hundred and fifty square kilometres covered by commercial forestry, of which seventy-five percent is Sitka spruce. Like all such forests, it is a depressingly monotonous and oppressive environment that, typically, sustains very little in the way of wildlife and provides little employment.

There are, however, fifty-eight separate peat bog sites within the overall forest area. These are in remote locations and largely made up of deep lenses of peat located in larger areas of blanket bog. They can be up to fifteen meters deep in places and are almost all dependent on rainfall to maintain their water-balance. Taken together, they store more water than the Kielder reservoir itself, the largest artificial lake in the United Kingdom, which holds forty-four billion gallons, figure that reminds me forcibly of the importance of peat bog in the retention and general management of water, particularly in relation to flooding.

Kielder Water reservoir.

My problem with trying to visit the Border Mires sites is that, not only are they almost all in very remote areas, but they are also designated SSSIs and require permission to visit them. Given the contingencies of our family situation and of factors like the weather, this simply isn’t practical for me. So, over the years I’ve spent time in the area of Scotland just over the border from Kielder in places I would call ‘wet edge lands’. That is, places that historically have been radically reconfigured by climate change, then by human enclosure and, later again, by the forestry practices used to create the current forest monoculture.

 

The Black Burn, it’s banks damaged by industrial scale clear-felling, is now producing marsh-like areas along its upper length. These are frequently flooded and almost always remain waterlogged. 

Roadside drainage ditch running into Carter Burn (2017).

The management of water in this area is now wholly determined by the needs of the forestry industry, in particular the quick and effective extraction of large volumes of timber. Crude roads built for this reason often disrupt the natural flow of water and, as a result, have a substantive impact on the two burns.  The new drainage ditch pictured above now above runs directly into Carter Burn, and over time will almost certainly impact on its course and water quality. If it speeds up lateral erosion it may undermine the bank that separates the burn from the nearby pool and, in doing so, substantially change the course of the burn.

 

A standing pool, perhaps originally created by the silting up of an old flood meander in the Carter Burn, also shows some evidence of having been dammed at some point, perhaps to provide water in connection with the nearby fank shown earlier.

 

The Carter Burn valley

The images above are indicative of the area in which I go to walk, look, listen, and remember; that is to find ways into the numerous processes that produced, and are still producing, this landscape.

What’s to remember here? Many things, but in particular the continuous processes of both sedimented and sudden change. Before it was ploughed up and obliterated to plant forestry, there were the extensive and perhaps best preserved archaeological remains of an early Iron Age farm anywhere in Britain located just above Black Burn. For some three hundred or so years either side of the start of the Christian era, there is evidence that a milder climate made it possible to grow a primitive form of barley here.  Later, in the medieval period, a bothy or sheiling called Tamshiel Rig was built near the site of the Iron Age farm. This provided shelter for those who tended the cattle that grazed here on the rich upland grasses each summer, part of a local agriculture based on transhumance. And to the east of the Rig, if local names are anything to go by, herds of swine once foraged for acorns in the oak woods and wallowed in the high mires above.

Why remember all this?

Because it tells us that present forms of land use are neither ‘natural’ nor inevitable. They are determined by the concerns of landowners and, as James Hunter indicates, there are always alternatives. That alternatives to the early modern culture of ‘improvement’ are now once again on the political agenda is clear from the Scottish Green Party’s policies.

 

A Borders cow and her calf (2017)

A Borders pig (2013)

Relevant Scottish Green Party policies: an indicative summary

 The Scottish Green Party’s manifesto commits it to working to ensure that Scotland’s land benefits the many and not the few, and that to establishing transparency as to exactly who owns Scotland. It also argues for a radical programme of land reform to transform the social, economic and environmental prospects for communities across Scotland. To achieve this, it is committed to supporting such proposals as providing agricultural tenants with a right to buy their farms in appropriate circumstances, and to ensuring that public subsidy is directed at those in most need of it and to support the expansion of new sustainable forestry. All of which goes against the grain of the modern culture of ‘improvement’.

The Party is also committed to increasing local community control over public land and to working towards greater democratic control of the National Forest Estate and of property currently administered by the Crown Estate Commissioners. It is similarly committed to promoting community agriculture, involving a step change in making land available for smallholdings, with a shift away from high-input agribusiness to low-carbon, organic farming.

This dovetails into  its proposal to support farming that provides public benefits, including rural jobs, water management, biodiversity, carbon sequestration, and shorter food chains. It aims to foster links between communities, local farmers and food co-operatives. It also recognises the need to support new farmers from non-farming backgrounds in getting access to the land and finding opportunities to build experience in environmentally and economically sustainable farming. It is committed to supporting large scale ecological restoration projects of native flora and fauna, including the continued restoration of internationally- important peatlands. Again, these policies largely go against the grain of the modern culture of ‘improvement’.

In principle at least, all these policies point to what could be a radical transformation of the Borders region, its agriculture, woodlands and wetlands.

A ‘wild’ speculation

So, what might an alternative Borders landscape look like? What, over and above Green policy, is needed to shift the Borders back to reflect something of the ‘unimproved’ landscape values that James Hunter identifies with a contemporary crofting culture, for example that of the Sleat peninsula of the Isle of Skye? The policies of the Green Party, if put into practice, would open the way for the establishment of a hybrid between traditional small-scale subsistence agriculture, alternative sustainable forestry practices, and the contemporary possibilities of tourism and other forms of income such as I’ve seen at first hand on Mull. However, the implementation of Green Party policies would require a radical political shift that would be resisted tooth and nail by those who own or are dependent on the big Borders estates. This suggests that there is little or no realistic possibility at present of reversing the depopulation of the Borders or of breaking the stranglehold of ‘subsidy junkies’; not just the owners of big farm estates and heavily subsidized grouse moors, but the many absentee landowners whose return on investment in commercial forestry depends on subsidy. However, we do not know what the impact of Brexit will be on the subsidy culture.

If I was asked to identify a point of leverage that might nonetheless help to move this process on, I would argue for the ‘re-wilding’ of the vast forestry monoculture of Kielder forest and points north of the Border. By this I do not mean aping a few wealthy individuals to import beavers or wolves onto their private estates. My sense of re-wilding owes more, as already suggested, to Don McKay’s understanding. Not, then, the re-introduction of a single large mammal but, as a start, small-scale human projects designed to reestablish areas of mixed forest, mire and moorland in the vast monocultural hinterlands of commercial Sitka spruce cultivation. Not, however, as stand-alone projects, but as part of a wider eco-tourism and cultural/environmental education initiative build in consultation with local people, particularly those young people anxious to remain and earn a living from the land.

The artist and environmental activist Cathy Fitzgerald has ably demonstrated, through her Hollywood Project, that it is both ecologically desirable and practically possible for an individual to learn how to gradually convert commercial forest monoculture to fully sustainable mixed woodland. What is needed is, above all, opportunity and a desire for environmental change. Given a multi-stranded approach that, for example, seeks to go beneath and beyond the macho reiving-related culture so heavily promoted across the Borders, it should be possible to start to construct a multi-stranded and locally grounded basis – looking both back to a ‘pre-improvement’ agricultural past and forward to new, technologically-enabled possibilities, a basis equivalent to James Hunter’s vision of renewal on Skye.

 

 

 

 

 

‘After’ academic knowledge: towards other understandings?

Three academic observations to start with, all taken from Poul Holm et al’s Humanities for the Environment—A Manifesto for Research and Action (Humanities 2015, 4, 977–992). They note that: “while empires may collapse, [including, in this context, those of academic institutions] humans do not, and have managed successfully to reorganize themselves in extremely adverse times” (p. 984). The second draws on Helga Nowotny’s view that the current move to: “socially robust knowledge includes employing multiple, even contradictory, perspectives” (ibid. 985). Finally, the article’s authors observe: “We want to emphasize the capacity of the humanities to move beyond models of research that locate the formation of knowledge exclusively within the academy” (p. 986). These three indicative observations will serve to frame the context for what follows here.

Some of the people I most admire, people who struggle to do the real work of tertiary education (rather than passively conforming to the priorities of Academia plc), recognise that the dominant disciplinary realpolitik that covers the economics of education has long been an anachronism. These people are working hard to find ways to teach what now needs teaching; in particularly an ecosophically inclusive thinking that listens and is critically solicitous towards other understandings and towards the world at large.

One way in which they have done this is by moving away from the presuppositions and assumptions of the disciplinarity mentalité, creating enlarged fields of multi-disciplinary study oriented by collectively substantive and common concerns. So, we now have, for example, Memory Studies, Landscape Studies, Geo-Humanities, Digital Humanities, and Eco-Humanities. Given the recuperative ‘neo-colonialist’ practices of disciplinary empire-building, and the concomitant proliferation of ‘inter-‘, ‘trans-‘, ‘post-‘, and other neo-disciplinary formulations, I remain agnostic about many of the claims made on behalf of these expanded fields by those who head them up. What I am convinced of, however, is that a growing number of people who work for universities are using these new categories as portals through which to enter conversations that go beyond the academic and, in doing so, contest the assumption that academic disciplines are the prime locus of knowledge production and understanding. People who now act on the assumption that it is the openness, the skills, goodwill, knowledge and understanding embodied by individuals, not the authority bestowed by the official categories that institutions use to divide and rule, that are now central to creating knowledges and educational experience that’s fit for purpose.

This does not mean, of course, that the work such people do as academics is somehow secondary to their individual characteristics. Rather it means that we need to see their academic work as just one part of the wider polyverse that constellates them as both an individual and a semi-porous cluster of psycho-social relationships. And, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the same can be said of those who work as artists.

I want to suggest that the struggle for us all, now, is to resist the normative conditions that flow from the internalisation of a monolithic notion of ‘life-as’ some form of professional specialist, for example ‘Academic’ or ‘Artist’. That is, a unitary belief in a ‘life-as’ as authorized by a disciplinary education, one taken as the means to a job organising, legislating for, administering, and generally intervening in, the intellectual, cultural, or practical conditions of others’ understandings and/or lifeworlds. A ‘life-as’ underwritten by the administrative mindscape of the dominant culture of management, whether in relation to business, public services, the media, the creative industries, or the academy.

If we accept that socially robust knowledge requires that we employ “multiple, even contradictory, perspectives”, then we need to begin by acknowledging that we are each a polyverse, and then acting accordingly. This means acting not as a monolithic entity categorised as ‘Academic’ or ‘Artist’, but as a plural and dynamic constellated self that works as, for example: a teacher, an academic researcher, a writer, an activist, an artist – not to mention all those forms of work that flow from being one’s parents’ child, a partner, a citizen, a parent, a neighbour, a family member, and so on.

We badly need to recognise that we are all, in reality, just such constellated selves.

Some years ago, when I had a residency at NUI Galway, I had the good fortune to meet Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin,  an Irish ethnomusicologist, author, musician and historian who is hugely knowledge about Irish music, diaspora, cultural and memory. The inaugural holder of The Johnson Chair in Québec and Canadian Irish Studies at Concordia University, Montréal, Quebec, Gearóid is a fourth generation Clare concertina player, a former member of The Kilfenora Céilí Band, and a five-time All Ireland Champion musician, someone who has performed and recorded with both many noted Irish fiddlers and the French Canadian fiddle master Pierre Schryer. Equally important, however, is that he is an open, intellectually enquiring, enthusiastic and generous conversationalist, someone who was happy to talk to, offer advice to, and practically help, a chance-met English teacher / artist / researcher with an interest in Irish socially-engaged arts practices but almost no knowledge of Gearóid’s own many areas of expertise.

The approach to our work I’m arguing for here, as I have done in more detail elsewhere (see my ‘“Incorrigibly plural”? Rural Lifeworlds Between Concept and Experience’ Canadian Journal of Irish Studies Vol. 38, Nos. 1+2 (2014).
Special issue, “Text and Beyond Text: New Visual, Material, and Spatial Perspectives in Irish Studies” pp. 260-275), is informed by a sociological argument that differentiate between two distinct ways of experiencing lifeworlds. In the first, lifeworlds are experienced as given, framed by prior understandings of roles, expectations and rewards that produce a ‘life-as’ an academic, an artist, a farmer, a housewife, a postmaster, and so on. In the second case, they are experienced as a (relatively) open project: multi-stranded, dynamic, as ‘being-as-becoming’ in which skills and understandings flow from productive tensions between different embodied perspectives .” This distinction is, of course, never absolute, but might be seen as approximating one made by the philosopher of place Edward S. Casey. Casey differentiates between a position, taken as “as posit of an established culture,” and our experiencing of place which, notwithstanding its normally settled appearance, he characterizes as “an essay in experimental living within a changing culture.” These parallel understandings can indicate a spectrum across which lifeworlds are experienced, from the given or positioned — whether assumed as such by individuals themselves or imposed upon them by powerful others— which constitutes a ‘life-as’, through to a becoming that requires continual negotiation as to how we are placed in relation to a world always in process. Our experience will, in fact, show us that we fluctuate back and forth between these two poles. If the first position is best described as a given and unitary position, the second is dynamic, experimental, and plural: as located in a “polyverse”—a term borrowed from the late theologian Roger Corless, both a Benedictine oblate and a Gelugpa Buddhist, who uses it to articulate his experience of the richness of both these spiritual lifeworlds without denying the irreconcilable differences between them. Which returns us once again to Helga Nowotny and the view that the current move to socially robust knowledge requires the ability to include multiple, even contradictory, perspectives.

The ebb and flow of our lived experience back and forth across a fluidly constellated lifeworld or polyverse is rarely acknowledged because it raises a host of questions that cut across the normative assumptions our culture has inherited from the monotheistic traditions of the Religions of the Book; difficult questions about identity and self-consistency that open us to increased levels of paradox and cognitive dissonance. However, if we deny the lifeworld as polyverse, with its corresponding sense of plurality and internal difference, we will have to live with the negative social consequences that follow from that denial. These include substantive restrictions on our capacity to deal with change, with the complex, even wicked, problems typical of our age and, centrally, on our ability to accept the plurality and difference of others – in particular, others whose skills and forms of lived understanding do not sit well with particular conceptions of a unitary ‘life-as’. Nevertheless, as I began by observing, many people increasingly experience their lifeworld as a polyverse—whether they do so tacitly or explicitly—and are both managing the resulting cognitive dissonances and welcoming the new understandings that result from abandoning the unitary world of the professional ‘life-as’ Artist, Academic, or whatever.

Practicing the GeoHumanities: some thoughts.

I spent yesterday in London at the invitation of Professor Harriet Hawkins, a geographer and art historian, who works in The Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities. She had invited Jen Harvie (QMUL), Neal White (Westminster University) and myself to act as a panel for a GeoHumanities in practice event – Practicing the GeoHumanities: the practice-based thesis and beyond – intended for doctoral students, potential doctoral students, ‘early stage’ and other post-doctoral researchers. (The event was made possible through Harriet’s seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm and by support from The Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities, AHRC Creating Earth Futures project, and AHRC TECHNE doctoral Training Centre).

Harriet took the portmanteau term ‘GeoHumanities’ as naming an increasingly common intersection of the practice and scholarship of the arts and humanities with geographical scholarship and practice, focused around such topics as environment, landscape, place, identity, and mobility. As she rightly notes, a growing amount of such work is being done through practice-based or practice-led PhDs, a good proportion of which are based in Geography departments. The practices involved are various and include creative writing, poetry, visual and socially engaged arts practices, creative curation, and so on. The day workshop provided us, that is those working on practice-led or practice-based PhDs on geographical topics and those with congruent interests, with the opportunity to think and speak together around the various challenges and benefits of these ways of working.

My impression was that those who attended the day gained a good deal of useful support and information from the opportunity this event offered. However, rather than discuss the specifics of the day, difficult to do in brief, I want to draw attention to some general points that strike me as significant at this juncture. (That is, given what is now my almost eighteen years involved in the praxis of practice based/led research).

  • On the evidence of this event, supervisors and doctoral students now have a much more sophisticated understanding of the experimental possibilities – both formal and intellectual – of the practice-based or practice-led PhD. Also of the regulatory issues and disciplinary realpolitik that frame and, all-too-often, still limit those possibilities.
  • Closely aligned to this is a much greater involvement (and again I am largely going on the evidence of this event), in working in the ultimately political ‘spaces-between’ academic and professional knowledge production and ‘extra-academic’, ‘extra-professional’, ‘vernacular’, or ‘subaltern’ forms of understanding and practice. This might be characterized theoretically in terms of Guattari’s concern with transversality and an ethico-aesthetics, although I suspect that to do so would lead all too quickly to sterile debate on the slippery slopes of High Theory, rather than to the kinds of psycho-social and environmental engagements in evidence yesterday.
  • It still seems to me significant that, as I would have predicted, almost all those attending the event were women. I think this was also significant in relation to the day’s total absence of theory-based gamesmanship. There may be any number of reasons for this, of course, but I am increasingly inclined to see both facts as relating to the emergence of a new mentalité. (This is related, but not reducible to, the effects of Feminism. If I were to try and set out in detail my own reasoning about this, I’d need to go back to an old essay: The Conversational Weave (another place) – see http://www.iainbiggs.co.uk/text-the-conversational-weave-another-place/), and to a recent book chapter – ‘Re-Visioning “North” as an ecosophical context for creative practices’ in Timo Jokela & Glen Coutts (eds) Relate North: Culture, Community, and Communication 2017, Rovaniemi, Lapland University Press – as starting points).
  • I am not sure whether the following observation may involve a degree of projection, but it seemed to me that, underlying the whole event, there was a commitment, mostly tacit but sometimes explicit, to radical pedagogy in the spirit of Paulo Freire. A spirit that was manifest in many of the projects themselves but also, perhaps less noticeably, in discussions around supervision. Within any academic context this is itself significant, since any concern with pedagogy is normally treated as, at best, marginal when research is the topic of academic conversation.
  • The issue of language and writing, present in many of the presentations and conversations in relation, for example, to questions of acknowledging polyvocality, the articulation of experience, and the limits of disciplinarity, needs further discussion. Those of us who have practices that don’t privilege the analytical over the narrative, imaginal or poetic, are haunted, and often harried, by the conventions and presuppositions of analytical academic discourse as the authoritative mode of thinking. This situation requires some very careful and radical work if we are to understand the problems it brings. I will simply indicate one aspect of those problem here.

In an article entitled Stepping from the wreckage: Geography, pragmatism and anti-representational theory – Geoforum 39 (2008) 1600–1612 – Owain Jones (Professor of Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University) offers a highly sophisticated philosophical account, based on non-representational theory in geography, which sets out to articulate:

The dissatisfaction … with the ongoing trajectories of enlightenment/modern aspirations of progress towards truth through the elimination of doubt and the application of reason, language and power in the dividing, sorting, representing and fixing of the world.

Jones’ aim here is to support and develop the move to “theory and research as creative action” in geography. But there is an inherent paradox. These theories set out to repudiate the epistemological error Jones identifies by, among other things, engaging “with the techniques and presentational forms of the creative arts”. However, their authority as geography theory remains almost wholly unrelated to the types of authoritative evocation manifest through arts practices. Instead it depends on using philosophy (the “queen of the sciences”) to re-conceptualize – that is finally to re-divide, re-sort, and re-represent – previous discursive positions within the ongoing competitive discourses of academic geography. Its exponents may quite properly write of ‘escaping the wreckage’ of the logocratic order but, in practice, they are simply perpetuating that order. Should they genuinely adopt forms of articulating understanding based on evocations that employ the techniques and presentational forms of the creative arts, their authority, status, and perhaps even their employment, as High Theorists of contemporary Geography would almost certainly be in jeopardy. They do not (and perhaps cannot risk) doing  in practice what they speak about philosophically.

This may seem an unfair criticism, given the inevitable location of “non-“, “anti-“ or “more than” representational Geographies within the necessary limits of academic discourse and the realpolitik that sustains it. Unfair unless, that is, we start to look at other models that offer genuine alternatives to this kind of writing. The title of Donna J. Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene already indicates an important difference in language and orientation from Jones’ article. While Jones wants to step away from the wreckage – the standard academic move to gain the necessary distance on which analytical critique is dependent; Haraway wants to stay with, remain immersed in, the trouble. Jones cites philosophy, or the philosophically-underwritten position of other geographers, to authorize his thesis. By contrast, Haraway cites her direct engagement in or with an eclectic mix of science studies, anthropology, political theory, storytelling and specific arts practices, to authorize hers.

So in her book, we find a vibrant polyvocal exchange, a wild and inclusive conversation in which her own experience and involvement speaks with Isabelle Stingers’ thinking and Baila Goldenthal’s painting Cat’s Cradle/Sring Theory; where Ursula Le Guin’s notion of science fiction speaks with Hannah Arendt’s political vision; and The PigronBlog team’s project and a “Bee Orchid” cartoon by xkcd speak with Bruno Latour’s anthropology. Here there is no Art (capital A) and no Authoritative Academic Discourse (capitals A, A and D), assumed as exclusive positions, one set over or against another. In short, Haraway’s writing evokes a ‘walking in practice’ of what Jones can only identify in terms of a philosophical position within a conventional discourse; one that is authoritative only in so far as it remains firmly within a set of  presuppositions inseparable from the realpolitik of the academic status quo.

I would suggest, then, that if the new terminology of Geo- or Eco-Humanities is to mean anything, and if there are to be practice-led or practice-based doctoral projects by people who can develop that meaning into forms of lived praxis, then we need to continue to act on the conversations that Harriet initiated yesterday.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

    

A tangled convergence: notes on work in progress

As part of the long process of ‘moving myself on’ from an active practical engagement in deep mapping, I am trying to clarify the alignments between my ‘academic’ thinking over the last few years and what I might now do in the studio.

Primarily, of course, this process requires looking at and thinking about different types of painting. In the case of recent Indian painters, often with the help of clues drawn from Ocavio Paz. Oddly, his two texts on Marcel Duchamp – The Castle of Purity and Water Writes Always in Plural – have been very helpful in this respect, serving both to illuminate and counterbalance to my current interest in the work of Arpita Singh, Gulammohammed Sheikh, and others. I’ve found Paz’s highly perceptive reading of Duchamp’s ‘anti-retinal’ approach helps me to link back to, and rethink, the work of the narrative painters I felt close to as a student and into my early teaching career. I find Paz’s sense of Duchamp’s supposed atheism, informed by his own studies of Indian thought, particularly helpful. Paz suggests that to speak of Duchamp’s ‘atheism’ is only appropriate if we insist of thinking “in the context of the Judeo-Christian monotheistic concept of God” particularly significant. Just as I do Gulammohammed Sheikh’s ‘secular’ referencing of a whole constellation of spiritual figures from different traditions in his City, Kaavad and Other Works.       

I have also been reading Timothy Hyman’s 2003 book Sienese Painting: The Art of a City-Republic (1278-1477), which is dedicated to a writer and a painter. The painter is Gulammohammed Sheikh, whose work I referred to in my last post. Hyman concludes the book by stressing the importance of Sienese painting to what might be called ‘postmodern narrative painting’, illustrated by the work of three painters of the generation that proceeded my own: Bhupen Khakhar, R. B. Kitaj, and Ken Kiff. It is not difficult for anyone familiar with these artists, or with Sheikh’s Returning Home After a Long Absence to see why this is link to Sienese painting is wholly appropriate. These artists are, to borrow Hyman’s words, preoccupied with the visual language of “an urban vernacular”. But there’s something else there, particularly in the synergies between later Sienese painting and Ken Kiff’s work, that Hyman passes over.

My own preoccupation at present is not with the work of the Lorenzetti brothers, Sassetta (much as I love his work), and so on, but with a work by the Master of the Osservanza, his hallucinatory St Anthony Tempter by a Demon in the Shape of a Woman (c. 1440). It’s here I see a telling proximity with Ken Kiff’s long-standing dialogue with Jungian thought.

In this context, I have just finished a ‘secular’ reworking of the Master of the Osservanza (in the Indian style), which provisionally be called: An Old Man Surprised by His Anima.

 

 

‘Essaying’ to ‘poetics’? Thoughts on Gulammohammed Sheikh and Octavio Paz.

A little while back I reached a difficult point in my relationship to deep mapping. I had either to abandon it as a practice based on  ‘essaying’ (see my “The Southdown Project – essaying site as memory work, 2012) or rethink it from the ground up. Deep mapping belongs to a field of action and possibility I can no longer properly engage with because of an inexorable shift in my own situation – a shift bound up with the increased complexities of my family life and (once again) with my own uncertain health. However, while these circumstances effectively prevent me engaging with deep mapping as essaying, they don’t preclude maintaining certain orientations and attitudes of mind related to it. Nor from refiguring these in the context of a return to a small-scale studio practice. Return is actually the wrong word.  I’ve never entirely left the world of small-scale making I entered as an art student. Rather, until recently I saw this making work as located on the periphery of the larger conversational or relational field of my work as a constellated self that included teaching, researcher, and various kinds of making. That perception has had to change.

My intuitive response to what was something of a personal crisis was simply to go back into my studio and make something, working from memory and whatever reading my concerns pointed me to at the time. (I described some aspects of this process in my last post). But of course intuition, no matter how helpful in the short term, needs feeding, reflection and consolidation if the work it starts to animate is to flourish. It’s something of this process that I want to reflect on here.

Since I wrote that last post, I’ve begun to look for a basis for a new praxis that, while still aligned with certain central aspects of deep mapping as I understand it, moves from the inclusive process of ‘essaying’ and towards the more contained process of a ‘poetics’. I’m finding the work of two men helpful in this; the painter, poet, educationalist, and art critic Gulammohammed Sheikh (b. 1937) and of the poet, diplomat, writer and publisher Octavio Paz (1914-1998). Although my turning to these two men’s work was serendipitous and based on vague recollection of their work, there are relevant historical links between them. One is that Gulammohammed Sheikh was a member of Group 1890, a short-lived but influential collective of Indian artists formed in 1962. Paz, at that time the Mexican ambassador to India, wrote a catalogue essay: Surrounded by Infinity, for their first and last show in 1963 in New Delhi. My intuition, and at this stage its no more than that, is that they share an underlying poetics. On the basis of my reading of Paz and Karin Zitzewitz’s detailed discussion of Sheikh’s 2011 exhibition City, Kaavad and Other Works, I am hoping that going deeper into these two men’s work may open up a way for me to rethink my approach to deep mapping. (I won’t attempt to paraphrase Zitzewitz’s article, which also contains excellent reproductions. Anyone interested should read it in full).  I will, however, quote her concluding paragraph as indicative of why I take Sheikh’s work exhibited in 2011 as being so relevant to deep mapping. She writes:

“Sheikh’s vision of cultural multiplicity contains a reconfirmed commitment to complexity, defined in art historical, cultural, religious and temporal terms. In his work, complexity has an absolute aesthetic value, but I would like to suggest that complexity can also be seen as Sheikh’s principal political strategy. Or, perhaps it is clearer to say that complexity is the strategic mode by which Sheikh questions the discursive basis for political speech. For Sheikh’s main claim is that the cultural flexibility found in a pre-secular historical moment can provide a counterpoint to the fixed identities mobilized by modern politics”. (Zitzewitz, Karin. “Past Futures of Old Media: Gulammohammed Sheikh’s Kaavad: Traveling Shrine: Home.” CSSAAME Borderlines, 11 March 2016. p. 17).

The second link between Sheik and Paz is something they share with deep mapping, an intuition also central to Surrealism. Michael Shanks has claimed that deep mapping is about creating a “forced juxtaposition of evidences that have no intrinsic connection” – a process of “metamorphosis or decomposition”. For anyone with some knowledge of Surrealism, this notion of ‘forced juxtaposition’ evokes the image of “the chance meeting on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing machine”. It’s easy to misunderstand the point of this image, to see it simply as an invitation to novel fantasies rather than as a purposeful metamorphosis or decomposition of the dominant epistemological frameworks that prevent us from thinking and feeling otherwise. Charles Tomlinson introduces the Selected Poems (Penguin 1979) by reminding us of Paz’s version of this need to think and feel otherwise.  Namely that: “Poetry is the other voice”. It is: “Not the voice of history or of anti-history, but the voice which, in history, is always saying something different”. This is, of course, also the voice of the unconscious as it percolates through testimonial imagination.

It’s clear from his later writing that Paz’s deep engagement with India was transformative. Returning to his engagement has taken me back to my own fascination with Indian art, something that really first developed when I studied with Philip Rawson at the Royal College of Art. (Rawson, an authority on Tantric art, encouraged me to read the aesthetics of the Kashmiri Tantric philosopher and mystic Abhinavagupta (c. 950 – 1016 AD) and, significantly, it was Paz who was responsible for the first exhibition of Tantric art in Europe, held at the Le Point Cardinal gallery in Paris in 1970). My fascination with Indian miniature painting, Tantric art and with the work of the 1890 Group artists later came to intersect with my interest in place and land. The reasons for this are difficult to explain, at least in the space of a short blog. Something of what lies behind them is indicated by something Greta Kapur writes, providing this is read from an agnostic position where the term ‘God’ evokes a sense of incomprehensible complexity recognised and honoured as that which, if we attend to it, allows us to question the dominant discursive basis of historical power. Kaput writes:

“For nature in Indian painting is not remotely majestic, as it is often in European or even Chinese painting; it is expressly sympathetic to human feeling: nature often serves as a composite metaphor for human emotion, especially the erotic emotion. Landscapes in the miniatures are, moreover, in the best sense ornamental – for to perceive the earth as so richly adorned is to give praise to God”. (‘Modern Painting Since 1935’ in The Arts of India Phaidon 1981 p. 209)

As Kapur points out in the same essay, there is a profound empathy between attitudes in Indian culture regarding the unconscious and Surrealism (with which Paz was closely associated through his friendship with André Breton). So it’s in the particular, agnostic context of late Surrealism that I read Kapur’s statement above. While she suggests the playful Surrealism of Paul Klee as closest to the spirit of the Indian Group 1890, my own current thinking is that my own way into this potent convergence requires attending to Surrealists like Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo. Not because I think I can learn anything particularly helpful from their art work, in which I have only an uneasy and rather queasy interest, but because of what ultimately grounds that work – their highly unorthodox understanding of the nature of the self, of our relationship to the animal, to ‘magical thinking’, and so to reality itself. Which, of course, takes me back to my last post and to Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think.

So I now find myself trying to adsorb something of Paz’s understanding of the role of the poet. At present I am particularly attracted to the conclusion his poem Sunday on Elefanta and, in turn, am trying to evoke something of this in my own work. In that poem, he writes:

Y yo,

Nada les pedimos, nada

Que sea del otro mundo:

Solo

La luz sobre el mar,

La luz descalza sobre el mar y la tierra dormidos.

 

(Which Michael Edwards translates as:

And I,

Ask you nothing, nothing

From the other world:

Only

Light on the sea,

Light barefoot on the sea and the land asleep.)

 

 

 

 

Bird Brained? Notes on work in progress.

I sometimes worry about my being ‘bird-brained’. By which I mean unfocused in my reading of both texts and other people’s art work. Unfocused in the sense that ‘my’ thinking moves me across different fields and areas of interest somewhat in the same way a small bird might flit from seed source to seed source or, like a swallow, hunt insects on the wing by darting here and there. What reassures me somewhat is that, like these birds, this apparently erratic activity is driven by a desire to feed.

So while it’s true that my attention seems, at least on the surface, to flit randomly from one field or idea to another, this way and that, there is I believe some sort of pattern being played out in this process.

These thoughts are prompted by the fact that I have been immersed in an extended bout of reading, one that has recently taken me, for reasons I can only half-identify, from Claude Lecouteux’s Witches, Werwolves and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages to Eduardo Kohn’s How Forests Think which, although I’ve only just finished it, I’ve now started to re-read in tandem with Kaja Silverman’s extraordinary Flesh of My Flesh (which I picked up on because Kohn quotes it). I suspect that what each of these texts does, each in its own very different way, is encourage me to ask fundamental questions about our presuppositions as to what constitutes ‘an individual’. So, somewhere behind this birdbrained flitting, there is I think a half-formulated desire to open myself out more fully to the multi-natural, multi-cultural polyverse I’ve been trying to engage with intellectually.

This sense of ‘opening out’ has already had a practical impact, sending me back to making object/images.

The fragment below, made up of map elements, is based on two aspects of my childhood that involve my father: a recurrent nightmare on one hand and his identification with the west of Scotland and, more specifically, with Skye, on the other. Half-way through working on the original piece from which this fragment is taken,  I remembered the Marshall Islands stick charts that I used to include in talks on deep mapping because they so immediately represent a mapping ‘read’ through the hand as much as through the eye (or so I like to imagine).

In the context of my first ‘mapping’ this remembrance became linked to Kohn’s discussion of the value the people of Avila place on multi-perspectivalism (which I found resonated with my own concern with the polyverse) and, retrospectively, with Silverman’s discussion of translation, something I’ve been pondering in an art context for a while as part and parcel of conversation as an art. Anyway, the result of this process of intuition, reflection, and digestion appears below. That the occasion that this double mapping responds to is, primarily, my childhood nightmare of a recurrent meeting with an enormous wolf (see The Prelude to Between Carterhaugh and Tamshiel Rig: a borderline episode pp. 16-17) seems to me ultimately less important than the desire to bring together two distinct ways of accounting for an event in a specific place, a double mapping.

When I came across the original image of the whispering girl now reworked and adapted and included on the left hand side of this piece, it immediately resonated very powerfully with me. I now sense that it acts as a vivid analogy for the figure of the Fylgja discussed in Lecouteux’s book; that she resonates with my response to Silverman’s discussion of Rilke’s dead sister as an Eurydice figure, and that all this ‘unspeakable’ convergence of different resonances appears to have been taken up through the making process in the wing-like form of the piece above.

The danger of writing about this is that it could appear that what I am making is dependent on, or seeks to illustrate, what I’ve been reading. That’s not how I see it. What animated my reading Lecouteux in the first place was a gut feeling that, while there is for me great value in Guattari’s notion of ecosophy, what is neglected in my relationship to it – and I suspect this is not just a personal issue – is attention to it’s relationship to making in terms of the ecology of the personal, psychic, dimension. That’s to say, we may be unable to think the social and the environment differently until we can think our multiple selves differently. This thought is, it seems to me, implicit in Kohn’s call (after Ghassan Hage) for “an ‘alter-politics’ – a politics that grows not from opposition to or critique of our current systems” (the basis of so much ‘alternative’ activity in the arts and academia), but rather “one that grows from attention to another way of being, one … that involves other kinds of living beings” (p.14). And, if both Silverman and Kohn (supported by James Hillman) are correct, ‘living beings’ here also includes the dead, understood in the context of Richard Kearney’s conception of testimonial imagination.

Intellectually speaking, I am rather out of my depth here, simply feeling my way intuitively on the basis of the liveliness of an inner response to texts containing ideas I only half understand, and even that half imperfectly. So the making I find myself doing is an attempt to both ‘ground’ and ‘map’ the movement of an powerful intuition, using my own experience, in dream or otherwise, as a route into the living space these books are opening up for me. Another form of ‘deep mapping’, maybe?

Deep Mapping and the importance of ‘listening to the dead’

Introduction

Since 1999, when I began concerning myself with what I would come to know as deep mapping, I have been vexed by the question of what role, if any, the first of Felix Guattari’s three ecologies – namely the ecology of the ‘self’ – should play in such work. That question has been deepened by the work of two recent doctoral projects that I helped to supervise: Dr. Ciara Healy-Musson’s Thin Place: An Alternative Approach to Curatorial Practice (2015) and Dr. Davina Kirkpatrick’s Grief and Loss; Living with the Presence of Absence. A Practice-based Study of Personal Grief Narratives and Participatory Projects (2016). Both, in my view, point up the inadequacy of current conceptions of the relationship between ‘self’, society, environment and the past by focusing on different aspects of our relationship to the dead.

In December 2016, I gave a presentation at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference in Southampton entitled: ‘Hearing’ heritage: The Kirkyard of St Mary’s of the Lowes, in which I explored the possible relationship between two traditional ‘supernatural’ ballads and that abandoned Kirkyard. It is probably fair to say that it got a mixed reception. No doubt my failure to time the presentation accurately did not help but, more critically, one emphatic commentator insisted that it is simply academically inappropriate to ‘speculate’ where there is no verifiable historical record (e.g. written documentation) to support that speculation. In short, I was told that ballads can only be taken to be suggestive of a mentalité once they have been written down.

Although I don’t accept that assumption, believing with Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan that “ballads can contain factual truths not found in the often scanty records, and can contain certain emotional truths, the attitudes and reactions of the ballad-sing folk to the world around them” (Scottish Fairy Belief 2001: p. 5), I found this critique of my speculations dispiriting. (It was delivered with all the assurance of one delivering a scientific truth). What follows, however, is a reworking of that original presentation that simply ignores that ‘scientistic’ assumption. It is also made in the light of my subsequent reading of three texts: James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani’s Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book (2013), Claude Lecouteux’s Witches, Werewolves and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages (1992, translated into English 2003) and Richard Firth Green’s Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (2016) and attempts to address, in a limited way, the issue of the importance for those engaged in deep mapping and related activity of ‘listening to the dead’.

 

 

The updated presentation

In Archaeological Narratives and Other Ways of Telling, Mark Pluciennik argues that a more democratic approach to narrative might offer fresh opportunities to reflect on the roles and possibilities of both narrative and non‐narrative writings of archaeology. I’d want to extend his argument by linking it to Gemma Corradi Fiumara’s call that we return to a listening that attempts to recover the neglected and perhaps deeper roots of thinking. Also to the geographer Karen Till’s argument that acknowledging the historic ‘wounds’ associated with particular sites enables the memory-work needed to create healthy places, citizens and states. This, along with listening to two old Borders ballads, frames my thinking about how the The Kirkyard of St Mary’s of the Lowes might be narrated so as to evoke something of its complexities and paradoxes.

Prof. Arthur Watson – an artist, teacher, author, and the twenty-first President of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture (RSA) – has participated as a singer in the oral tradition of the Scottish Traveler community since he was fifteen. Within this oral tradition old ballads like Tam Lin have been passed down from singer to singer for many hundreds of years. Professor Watson sees that oral tradition as supported by notions of memory and authority that are the antithesis of academic thinking, in my view entirely correctly. I mention this because much of my work connected to deep or narrative mapping over almost twenty years has happened in the creative space between those two notions of what is to be taken as ‘authoritative’.

The Kirkyard of St Mary’s of the Lowes overlooks St Mary’s loch in the Scottish Borders and is situated just off the A708 between Selkirk and Moffat. It sits in the valley of the Yarrow and Ettrick Waters, a location central to a variety of ballads extending from pre-16th century ballads like Tam Lin, through to late Seventeenth Century ballads like The Battle of Philiphaugh. In short, the kirkyard in question is situated in both a physical landscape and a highly charged vernacular songscape.

This site is currently the object of two quite distinct public narratives. The first is the on-line archeological account given by the Borders Archeology Company. Although the author is careful to make it clear that his account is provisional, it tacitly evokes the objective authority of ‘fact’ as underwritten by the academic disciplines of history, archeology and etymology. This narrative begins by citing archival evidence for the existence of the now-vanished chapel in 13th century documents and works its way back in time, citing both archeological and etymological evidence to support its provisional findings. This narrative proposes that the kirk, abandoned in 1640, once stood near an earlier ‘kil’ or cell occupied by a hermit. The name ‘Lowes’ derives from the Cumbric term for a lake. Since the site was also originally located in the Cumbric diocese of Glasgow, the implication is that the cell was Cumbric in origin and may have been established as early as the 6th century. Archeological material in the surrounding landscape also suggests that the site may have had some pre-Christian significance.

 

 

A second narrative, provided by the Etterick and Jarrow Community and Development Company, is found at the site itself. Its wording meets the needs of a Borders heritage industry catering to those people, frequently Americans, visiting the Borders in search of their roots. Archaeology doesn’t feature here. The information board is one of a set distributed around a circular walk that starts and ends at the statue of James Hogg at the head of the loch. The board presents the site as: “a peaceful and ancient place of worship”, encouraging us to “rest awhile and let its magic work on you”. It then invokes two major heritage tropes – Scots nationalism and radical Protestant dissent. In the first case by positing a link between the site and William Wallace, in the second by drawing attention to the annual Blanket Preaching in commemoration of the Covenanters held on the site. This second reference also authenticates the site as one of enacted remembrance. A further reference to a tragic romance connected to the Douglas family – still major regional landowners today – adds local colour. I’ll come back to this reference later.

What interests me is, however, absent from both these narratives.

 As already mentioned, this site is situated within a songscape dominated by what are called the “supernatural” ballads, versions of which first enter the written record in the late 14th century. These are old, layered and fractured sung narratives that contain both explicitly Christian and non-Christian folk material. I’m particularly interested in the traces of the non-Christian medieval lifeworld, because they resonate with current theorizations of ‘a sensible materialism’ and of ecological concerns by thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour. I see these traces as a basis for work with testimonial imagination that might bridge a neglected aspect of the history of the psyche, current high theory, and an emergent attitude present in contemporary popular culture. Something of this emergent attitude is implicit in two verses from the song Resurrection, by the American singer Rita Hosking.

I’ll have no rebirth but I will be in the bark of trees and the breath of air

I’ll not be in a church, but in the cells of leaves and maybe I’ll see you there.

Significantly, Hosking relates her work to the tradition of Appalachian ‘mountain music’ which, among other sources, draws on the old Borders ballads.

The valley in which St. Mary’s kirkyard sits is haunted by two ballads in particular – Dowie Dens of Yarrow and Tam Lin. Before Hogg became the public figure commemorated here, he was the shepherd grandchild of Will O’Phaup, reputedly the last man in Scotland to converse with the fairies. Which is only to say that, as a child he internalized a heterodox ontology, radically at odds with the strict monotheism of Calvinism. The land-owning and professional classes memorialised at St. Mary’s kirkyard had adopted Calvinism a century before Hogg’s birth. But some of the rural laboring class resisted Calvinism, preserving a now banned oral tradition of ballads populated by transgressive women, revenants, prophetic dreamers, and uncanny figures like Thomas the Rhymer, taken by its Queen into fairyland. 

I need to clarify something at this point. There is a physical location known as “Tam Lin’s Well” in Carterhaugh Wood on the Etterick, down-stream from St Mary’s loch. Sir Walter Scott indicated, and numerous people still believe, that this is where Janet, Jennet or Lady Margaret met Tam Lin – the young grandson of the Earl of Roxbrugh who’d been abducted by the Queen of Elfland. I’ve no interest in such literalism, but neither do I see the content of the old ballads as picturesque nonsense. I hear these songs as echoing a vernacular lifeworld regarded by the Christian authorities as heretical, marginal, foolish, or otherwise unacceptable; a life-world that, in consequence, is largely absent from both the historical and archeological record. Aspects of that lifeworld are now being recovered by scholars like Emma Wilby, who analysis and contextualize material common to both the supernatural ballads and testimony given by individuals accused of witchcraft, and by students of medieval literature like Claude Lecouteux and Richard Firth Green.

The information board at the kirkyard refers to events narrated in a ballad called The Douglas Tragedy. This tells the story of the elopement of Lady Margaret Douglas, during which her lover kills her father and seven brothers, only to be mortally wounded himself. Margaret then dies of grief. The suggestion is that the lovers may have been buried in St. Mary’s kirkyard. An older ballad, the Dowie Dens of Yarrow, has a broadly similar plot but differs in being both framed and fractured by the devise of a prophetic dream. In this dream a mother and daughter learn that the daughter’s lover – a plowboy – has fought with nine local gentlemen for the right to marry her. The plowboy kills three of these men, three withdraw, and he badly wounds three more. At which point he’s stabbed from behind by the girl’s brother.

The significant qualities distinguish this ballad from The Douglas Tragedy. Characters accurately foresee a future event, class appears to be substituted for generational conflict over inheritance, and the landscape itself is treaded as a participant in the narrative. To what degree this is the case depends on how carefully the original collectors of this ballad listened to what was being sung. If what was hear was the words ‘dowie dens of Yarrow’, this is best rendered in English as ‘dismal narrow wooded valleys’. However, if what in fact was sung were the words ‘downie dens of Yarrow’, the reference is to fairy hills (Henderson & Cowan 2001: p. 9), a reading that would be supported by the remains of pre-historical remains in the area. This would suggest that, rather than the plowboy lover who has defeated nine men being treacherously killed because he comes from the wrong class, that the girl’s brother stabs him from behind because he suspects that the plowboy’s prowess comes from an uncanny source. In short, that he is either a fairy warrior or, like Tam Lin, a mortal associated with the fairies. (Of course, this second possibility does not exclude the issue of class). Both the attributes of ‘dowie’ and ‘downie’ to the landscape are consistent with a mentalité vividly represented by the opening lines of the anonymous C8th Irish ballad, Donal Og. These translate as:

It is late last night the dog was speaking of you  

The snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh

 It is you are the lonely bird throughout the woods

And that you may be without a mate until you find me.

However, if we hear ‘downie’ rather than ‘dowie’, then the ballad is firmly located in a liminal landscape in which the boundaries between the day and night world of dream, the human and uncanny worlds, are acknowledged to be porous.

I want to suggest that, in addition to offering an alternative context for narrating this site, the supernatural ballads also point up an alternative approach to narrative. I’ll now elaborate on this suggestion.

While Dowie (or Downie) Dens of Yarrow and Tam Lin clearly have a beginning, middle and end, they also give a powerful sense of being embedded within an oral tradition in which the strict linear sequence of past, present and future is disrupted by magic or prophesy. From this point of view The Douglas Tragedy and Dowie (or Downie) Dens of Yarrow reflect competing worldviews. Attempts by illustrators to visualize a supernatural ballad like Tam Lin by using a single visual style are always problematic because they are visually ‘monovocal’ in the sense that illustrators conventionally maintain stylistic consistency to evoke a sense of affective or conceptual unity. But the ballads themselves don’t employ a single narrative perspective, voice or affective register.

Instead they deploy a weave of several, sometimes mutually antagonistic, perspectives. In Tam Lin we can hear the Christian orthodoxy of the landowning class rubbing up against the beliefs of a quasi-pagan peasant culture. We hear exchanges between gendered and socially differentiated voices – human and non-human – that warn, defy, expose, mock, promise, and threaten from within a polyverse rather than a universe. This polyvocality unsettles linear narratives that are further unsettled by the fact that a ballad often share lines, or even whole verses, with others, suggesting their embeddedness within a larger mesh of stories. And then, of course, each ballad exists in multiple variations.

All these characteristics allow singers to inflect the meaning of the version they’re singing by hinting at variations that resonate in the listener’s memory. Consequently, the song’s meaning, like that of our own narrative identity, is kept open to question and contestation. Arguably, then, our experience of hearing such a ballad is creatively tensioned between an unstable linear narrative woven from multiple voices and a matrix of other – perhaps antagonistic – variations situated within the space of a larger songscape.

An alternative narrative mapping of the kirkyard of St Mary’s of the Lowes might amplify the provisional archeological information. Through listening to and referencing Tam Lin it might evoke the longevity of elements of a quasi-pagan life-world in the region and to its relationship to Cumbic or Welsh Christian theology. The Dowie (or Downie) Dens of Yarrow raises questions about the relationship between class, land ownership, multiple worlds. It might point us both to the suppression of the tripartite nature of the ‘self’ or ‘soul’ suppressed by the medieval church, and to a dubious history of Scottish nationalism personified by William Wallace. Wallace’s surname derived from the Old English “wullish”, meaning “foreigner” or “Welshman”. Where his family economic migrants from Wales or members of a Cumbric-speaking ethnic minority in Strathclyde? In either case, what does this say about the construction of a Scottish nationalism that takes him as a central figure? (There is a further possibility attached to this Welsh connection, which persisted through the speaking of Welsh in areas of the lowlands as late as the twelfth century. As Henderson and Cowan point out, this means that it is “just possible” that Southern Scots learned of the Welsh tale of Elixir’s journey into fairyland from such people and that it served as one source for Thomas Rhymer’s own journey).

The Covenanter history celebrated at the annual Blanket Preaching sits uncomfortably with the consequences of Sir David Lesly’s 1645 victory at Philiphaugh, on the bank of Ettrick Water. The Ballad of Philiphaugh which celebrates that victory makes no reference to the murder of fifty Irish Royalists who surrendered on being promised safe quarter. Nor to the killing of three hundred camp followers – mainly women and children – who were then thrown into a mass grave. Given that it was his army’s Covenanter ministers who encouraged Sir David Lesly to authorize these sectarian murders, local Covenanter history sits somewhat uneasily with the characterization of St. Mary’s kirkyard as a “peaceful and ancient place of worship”.

 

 

Conclusion

In referencing ballads to suggest possibilities for re-narrating or re-mapping this isolated Borders site, I’ve evoking multiple voices of the dead so as to thicken and contest any simply ‘factual’ account – whether archaeological (scientific) or touristic (popular). Roger Strand argues that we need to set aside the increasingly toxic culture authorised by “merely fact-minded sciences”; an authority that, he suggests, privileges the views of “merely fact-minded people” at the expense of values that contribute to “a genuine humanity”. Following Mark Pluciennik, I am suggesting that to evoke a genuinely democratic and humanitarian relationship to an archaeological (or indeed any other) site, we need to interweave multiple stories and images that invite individuals to listen out for and relish the evocation of our multiple heritages and conflicting interpretations. That can only happen if we are willing to both hear and ponder the voices and beliefs of the dead, including and perhaps particularly those ancestors who held very different views of what constituted the ‘self’, society and the environment to those that dominate our current culture.

Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017)

There are four books on one of my shelves written or co-authored by Zygmunt Bauman, an internationally significant sociologist who died at the age of ninety-one on January 9th. As his obituary in today’s Guardian makes very clear, Bauman was a man with a passionate concern to promote the ethics and values necessary to “a socially progressive Europe”. This was, no doubt, in part the fruit of his own experience as someone who, at different times, had been victimised by both the Nazis and the Communists. All these books continue to be valuable to me (if that was not the case, they wouldn’t have survived the rigorous culling of my books that’s necessary each time we move house). But it’s perhaps the Introduction to Intimations of Postmodernity (1992), and its first essay – ‘Legislators and Interpreters: Culture as the ideology of intellectuals” – that I’ve returned to most often. The other three texts Postmodern Ethics (1993), On Education, written with Riccardo Mazzeo (2012), and Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity, written with Leonidas Donskis (2013), have all been valuable, but less central to forming my thinking.

There is a second, far less direct, reason why Zygmunt Bauman has been important to me. One of his three daughters, Lydia, is a landscape painter and, in 1997, the feminist art historian Griselda Pollock wrote: ‘The Poetic Image in the Field of the Uncanny’  about her work, the preface to an exhibition catalogue of Landscapes at the National Gallery of Contemporary Art, Warsaw, Poland. A version of this was later published in the catalogue to the first LAND2 exhibition and reproduced on the LAND2 web site. In addition to the valuable insights into aspects of landscape painting this essay offers, Pollock closes by citing a “revealing insight” from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, (1958/1964 p. 4):

The poetic image is not an echo of the past. On the contrary: through the brilliance of an image, the distant past resounds with echoes, reverberates, and it is hard to know at what depth these echoes will reverberate and die away.

The resonances of this essay’s conclusion stayed with me, and were later to encourage me to follow a line of thinking that would finally become clear only when I read the Irish philosopher Richard Kearney on ‘testimonial imagination’, which I now understand to be the central animating force for ‘open’ deep mapping. So, both directly and indirectly, I owe Zygmunt Bauman a profound debt of gratitude.

The undervalued third: reflections on enacting ecosophy through ‘deep’ or ‘narrative’ mappings

It’s worried me for a while now that, although there’s some understanding of the interaction of the social and environmental ecologies among those who might claim to be working ‘ecosophically’ in this area of ‘mappings, there seems little or no understanding of the necessary psychic challenges involved. This might seem odd, given where Guattari was coming from, namely psychology, but then the last thing most artists or academics are concerned with is reflecting on the psychic processes in which they’re caught up.

Sometimes I do things that I don’t understand at the time, things that seem extreme and out of character. When this happens, it can take quite a while for an understanding to emerge of what, in the moment, was experienced as an overwhelming need to act decisively without being entirely clear as to why. Recently an example of this, combined with attending the recent Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference, has pushed me to confront the fact that, in a culture of possessive individualism, it’s only through accepting a major change in self-understanding that any genuinely creative ecosophical praxis can appear. Until that happens it’s all-too-often the case that a sophisticated rhetoric manages to mask the fact that supposedly ‘radical’ individuals are in actuality ‘sheep in wolves’ clothing’. (That is, despite their self-presentation, they continue to enact at the level of psychic ecology the given roles or stereotypes engendered by possessive individualism, to manifest ‘life as’ an Artist, an Academic, etc.).

I’ve tried to think through this issue in various ways, most obviously by developing the notion of the spectrum of positions between the individual oriented by a monolithic sense of self (‘life as’), that’s animated by the desire to be ‘best of breed’ – the radical Artist, Professor, or whatever –  and what my friend Pauline O’Connell once referred to as the position of ‘compound cur’. But as the poet, artist and mytho-archaeologist Erin Kavanagh has led me to see, that spectrum is both too static and too simplistic. She writes in an email that:

“The problem to my mind with ‘compound curring’ is that one becomes a ‘bestest mongrel’ very quickly. It’s the whole ‘interdisciplinary practice becoming disciplined’ dilemma isn’t it. By doing it well we both show how ridiculous these boundaries are and simultaneously create more. It’s a conceptual ouroboros. I’ve found thus far that I have to be ‘good enough’ to hold my own in everybody’s fields in order to be taken seriously, so for me it’s a little more like being a Collie who shows, trials, does flyball / obedience / agility and will still play with the kids at home afterwards. On the plus side, we don’t get bored!”

Erin’s image of the ‘good enough’ Collie is an effective visualisation of what I’ve seen as ‘self as polyverse’ but, even as it clarifies my concerns, taken in conjunction with her recent presentation at the 2016 TAG conference, it also points up something I have failed to draw out sufficiently in the past. This is that ‘compound curring’ as I understand it is also centrally linked to testimonial imagination (seen as a vital counterweight to the ‘best of breed’ emphasis on generating novelty, difference, progress, a new or utopian vision, and so on). All of this has been thrown into high relief as I’ve read James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani’s book: Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book’. (It’s not wholly insignificant, perhaps, that Deleuze and Guattari’s A thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia declares that Jung is profounder than Freud). The link here is with Shamdasani’s insistence that Jung breaks with the linear, the monomyth, insisting instead on “a serpentine path” that draws on the encyclopedic knowledge of a great storyteller, on “a plurality of myths, a plurality of templates” (pp. 88-90). This is, then, precisely not the personal or exclusive work epitomized by the figure of the Modernist artist or the lone scholar, each of whom is so anxious to guard the uniqueness of an individual creation. Instead it’s the work of testimonial imagination or, in Sonu Shamdasani’s terms, a “taking up the tasks left by the dead” so that the “present is then animated by the past” (p. 85). This is, then, quite the opposite of the (ultimately Modernist) desire to escape or overthrow the past. Rather it depends on a surrendering to porosity, to what, to borrow from Donna Haraway, I’d call a ‘staying with the trouble’, by letting it flow in all its variation and complexity through our own lives.

All of which is particularly relevant to my own concerns. Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung’s Red Book sheds considerable light on my fascination with the old Borders ballads as an imaginal playing out of one of our deepest psychic tensions, the “the conflict between the ancient and the modern, between the pagan and the Christian” (p. 58), seen not as belief systems but as modes of being or mentalities. What is important is not, in the last analysis,  the historical veracity of the claims I’ve made for those ballads as quasi-pagan, as retaining traces of  a once pervasive  animist mentality. It’s understanding my own willingness to stay with an act of testimonial imagination with regard to those ballads; to listen for the dead who still speak to us through them.