Wild scraps

I've been thinking and writing a bit lately about the development of my relationship with landscape since childhood. The following post consists of related scraps I sent in to the project Lone Women in Flashes of Wilderness, a new work being created by a most interesting writer Clare Archibald (clarearchibald.wordpress.com).

 Mont St-Michel de Brasparts

My instinct for wild landscape and unbridled thought has always been at odds with a persistent childhood fear of the dark and an allied, equally instinctive concern for personal safety. I have always envied men their freedom of movement and the resulting luxury of unfettered reflection.

Early childhood encounters of wild brought the raw open landscape of the Brecon Beacons into my mental prospect, an eye-opening contrast to the manicured over-farmed environment where I lived. The (apparent) emptiness had a siren call for me, the lure of expanse and a powerful sense of freedom from physical restriction.

This has evolved over a life-time into deep-rooted emotional connection to heaths and moors, where wide views equate with security and my mind can fly out over the heather into unrelieved space. Solitude is essential to my true self and draws the stronger connection with nature that I need for replenishment. I like that no-one knows where I am and that my immediate relationship is only within the scope of my footsteps.  This to me is wild: immunity from control, an intimacy with my surroundings that frees mind and body. Here I can meet my inner wildness, sprawl or soar.

By contrast, in the forest where I now live I feel at a basic level of instinct uneasy with the shifting perspectives, narrow sightlines and plethora of tiny movements. You never know if you are alone. My body subconsciously acknowledges the potential for danger, and holds back other process. Phrases and words for my work come to me among the trees, boulders and hilly streams, but ideas and what I call long thoughts are elusive.

Perhaps I have cultivated my own wildness on a physical scale: the balance would shift in extreme landscapes of mountains and deserts where humans can only be outsiders and interlopers. Savage wilderness is a degree beyond wild and here the proportions scare me. Except for the sky, that ultimate wilderness, my black moor, lit by firefly stars, untouchable and beyond intimacy.

Monts d'Arrée

Landscape Writing

The Mirror of Landscape begins with a semi-diary entry for December 30th, describing a moor-land walk. I follow the same route today through a changed world. Squelching is replaced by crackling as the land is finally frozen after weeks of fairly constant rain. I cannot resist that satisfying snap of ice beneath my boot, although soon regret this childish over-enthusiasm as I sink deep into the earth and have to wrench my leg out of the reluctant bog.

The muted winter sun is a novelty, brightening what has been lost in mizzle for so long. Sounds are sharper, no longer muffled by the wet air or hurled away by the buffeting winds. Where the moor runs right down into the reservoir below me, the oatmeal expanse of grasses is transformed into a shallow beach of lemon sand. On the same gorse plants sit rusty stems of old woody growth and fresh deep green points newly alert. The long, unmarked body of a dead snake lies lightly coiled, mostly upside down, on the broad rutted path. It must have been lured out of a warm lair by the deceptive sunlight into an unwelcoming chill. On the bottom of a tiny footprint pond, its lifeless pen-nib head moves gracefully in time with the trickling current above, as run-off water is carried into the lower bank.

As I’m looking at everything, so familiar and yet so constantly fluctuating, I’m thinking about writing and expressing what’s around me, and then wonder if this is inevitable. Is it possible to remain within the landscape without anticipating the warmer hours in the study capturing the experience on paper? Does that degree of separation forcibly introduce a note of manipulation or make the temptation of enhancement irresistible? Is the original experience in the head or of the body?

I see I have written ‘muted sun’ when on the spot it was simply ‘pale.' So can I be true to the land and to my own criteria, or is this a meaningless distinction? I know it bothers me a lot.