The natural prayer of the soul
Chasing feelings in the landscape; and paying attention to this, the given world
I don’t know about you, but given a good run of sunny days I’m liable to come over a bit ‘Oh! To be in England’ at this time of year. All the uprush, the sticky lushness, the sheer green energy of it all goes to my head, it makes me dizzy and heartstruck, leaves me slack-jawed and grinning. I almost can’t handle it. It’s almost too much.
I spent the first week of May in Brighton, looking after my dear old dog, Scout. I was worried I’d miss out on a whole week of May-feeling, but the slopes of Whitehawk Hill were clothed in cow parsley and loud with whitethroats and blackcaps. In the middle of the week I got the train to Lewes and walked back to Brighton over the high, chalky Downs, following an old ridgeway called Juggs Road for much of the route. Skylarks sang overhead and in the hedges the elders were coming into flower. Scout would have loved it a couple of years ago, but she can’t manage those kind of distances now.
Back in Suffolk our village swifts had returned: six of them, as there have been each summer I’ve lived here, wheeling and screaming overhead. And with them, at last, some proper spring weather, sending everything in my garden burgeoning outwards and upwards and pulling the wheat and barley out of the warm, damp earth, towards the blue skies and the sun.
I got the train to meet a friend just over the border in Norfolk; he’d spotted some promising-looking green lanes on a map he thought we could explore. We set out along an overgrown track thick with tall grass beginning to sketch out its various seed-heads, walking single-file at first between waist-high nettles and goosegrass and the pink punctuation marks of red campion.
Some people go on walks to climb hills, experience views or visit landmarks; some to cover a certain number of miles. Many nature-lovers I know go to find a particular species, and certainly, at this time of year I often set out hoping to hear a cuckoo or a nightingale. But for me, walks are mostly about chasing a set of very particular feelings, ones I couldn’t put into words – or at least, no better or fewer words than I have managed to set out in my novels, which are all, at heart, attempts to show people how I feel about a particular place, in a particular time.
May and early June almost anywhere give easy rise in me to an overwhelming sense of biophilia that you may well share: a love for the world’s fertility and abundance that can’t (and shouldn’t) be quelled by foreknowledge of loss. Then there’s another feeling – harder to catch hold of, and with a slightly more melancholy valence – connected to dusk. There’s one I chase in summer and rarely come near to that I think might stem from a fragment of memory from early childhood, when my parents took me to someone’s house on a hot day where a garden party was taking place – I remember strawberries – and beyond the garden, ripe cornfields stretched into the far distance. The relation of village houses to one another – their position on a lane or beside a ditch or stream, the way they sit within a landscape – can cause me intense anemoia (a recent coinage, meaning nostalgia for a time or place one has never known). And then there’s a further set of feelings generated by old agricultural buildings. I’m not from farming stock and neither did I grow up in a rural area, so why this should be I can’t say – yet there it is, part of my emotional landscape, old farms no less redolent and powerful for me for their meaning not being fully understood.
The farm we came to was on a marsh: flat, low-lying land, once a fen, now drained by a network of dykes. It was a loose collection of buildings made largely of soft red brick and black timber at a variety of times and in differing styles: cowsheds, barns, stables, what might have been a piggery, and round grain silos. On the approach the right-of-way we were following took us over a cattle grid where a modern steel gate, propped open, was merely the latest iteration of many dozens of gates at that spot; a huge flint hagstone, the largest I’ve ever seen, still kept watch over the threshold. Beyond it a herd of young steers crowded to the barbed wire, afire with curiosity about the two strangers walking up the lane on what was surely an otherwise uneventful day.
The water in the narrow dyke beyond the gate was fringed with rushes and reflected the sky above. In its shallows, near a twisted oak, hung a jack pike perhaps seven or eight inches long, and something about the pike and the young cattle unlocked a hit of pure feeling for me. It was to do with the cattle’s long boredom and brief interest in us in relation to the secrecy and self-sufficiency of the predatory fish. How long had pike haunted those waterways, how long had beef cattle grazed that grass? It mattered somehow that we had stumbled into triangulation with these creatures rather than sought them out, their lives only glimpsed, as they glimpsed ours, before all of us – steers, pike, people – continued with our day. The moment impressed itself on me powerfully, but I can say no more about it than that.
The farm itself was wonderful: ramshackle, half-derelict, its buildings perfectly fitted to uses some of which I could guess at, but others of which were obscure. Not a soul was about, but in a shadowy cartshed dozens of rooks’ carcasses1 were nailed to the walls and this too I took pleasure from, which perhaps will surprise you: they were part of the place, part of something, like the cruel pike, which is utterly separate from me and which has been going on in this spot for hundreds of years. As I always do I took photos of the rooks and the lovely old buildings, knowing that it’s like trying to photograph an apparition. The camera captures only the facts, which mean very little. They’re not where the feeling lives at all.
Later, sitting with a G&T in my friend’s garden watching the shadows lengthen on the marshes, listening to a cuckoo call as a mayfly danced in a shaft of late sun up and down, up and down, I sank into a contentment as deep as a calf in thick grass. The mystery of the pike and the rooks and the old farm buildings and why they should resonate at such a pitch needn’t be solved; it’s enough to have experienced these things, and to know that they will shine out again, one day, on the page.
News
The novel I’ve been wrestling with for the last couple of years is at last with my agent. Thank you for your patience while I buffed it up, ready to be sent out. I don’t know how I feel about having hit this milestone; this has been such a strange one to work on, and I don’t feel anywhere close to a sense of triumph, or even relief.
What emerged from my conversations with my agent was how differently it presented itself to her mind. Hearing her talk about it was the beginning of the long process of disengagement everyone who makes things for others goes through, during which the thing you’ve created is finally externalised and your inner experience of it is overlaid for good or ill with the way it is received by the world. One day, long after it is (hopefully) published, I might even understand what it is that I’ve made.
My Nature Notebook in The Times for April was about verges and roadsides and how rich with life they can be; it also discussed the strange plant phenomena known as fasciation, and described what happens when animals make mistakes. I really enjoy writing these pieces, as well as the shorter, twice-weekly ‘nature notes’, and I’m happy to see that these are now being published to my contributor page along with the longer essays.
Homecoming, my guided nature journal due out in November, now has an Amazon page, but you should pre-order it from your local bookshop instead. Amazon don’t pay their taxes, quite apart from anything else.
Finally, speaking of upcoming books, Kate Bradbury’s new one, One Garden Against The World, is out on June 6th, and it’s wonderful: passionate, funny and inspiring. Again and again Kate has written things or said things to me that have changed the way I’ve thought, and she does it again in this book. When I finished it I had a clear sense of what custodianship of nature really looked like, and more importantly, a knowledge that any efforts I might make, however small, could prove pivotal. You and I really can keep species going in our local areas, and thus help populations survive and link up after droughts or floods – and maybe build their numbers back one day.
The next part of the newsletter is about attention and attentiveness, something the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche called ‘the natural prayer of the soul’.
Thank you for reading Witness Marks. If you enjoyed it please do hit the ‘Like’ button at the foot of the page; it helps more people find it, and hopefully subscribe.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Witness Marks by Melissa Harrison to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.