Landmarks (18 page)

In certain regions of the far north, where the dust content of the atmosphere is close to zero, light is able to move unscattered through the air. In such places, under such conditions, faraway objects can often appear uncannily close at hand to the observer. The lichen patterns on a boulder can be seen from a hundred yards; cormorants on a sea-stack seem within reach of touch. Distance enables miracles of scrutiny; remoteness is a medium of clarification.

I am, and have been for as long as I know, north-minded: drawn to high latitudes and high altitudes, and drawn also to those writers and artists for whom northerliness is a mode of perception as well as a geographical position: Matsuo Bashō’s
Narrow Road to the Deep North
(1689); Philip Pullman’s
Northern Lights
(1995), with its armoured bears and cold that bites to the bones; Farley Mowat’s
Never Cry Wolf
(1963); Ezra Pound’s translations of classical Chinese frontier poems; the boreal phases of Eric Ravilious’s art; the maps and type-works of Alec Finlay; the fiction of the Hebridean sailor and storyteller Ian Stephen; Margaret Atwood’s explorations of
‘the malevolent north’
; W. H. Auden’s poems of jetties, night-sailings and the
simmer-dim
… Most powerfully, though, and for years now, I have been drawn to the northern prose of Barry Lopez, which I first met in 1997, the year I turned twenty-one.

That summer I spent several weeks in north-west Canada,
climbing in the Rockies and hiking the wilderness trails of the Pacific coast. I was alone for long periods of time, with many hours to kill in tents, so I got through a lot of books. Whenever I came back to cities between trips, I would head for the nearest bookstore to restock. I was browsing shelves in Vancouver when I found a copy of Lopez’s
Arctic Dreams
. There were good reasons not to buy it. One: I had never heard of Lopez. Two: the book’s subtitle – ‘Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape’ – struck me as Mills & Boony. Three: it was expensive for my budget. Four, and above all: it was
heavy
– almost 500 pages long and printed on thick paper. Because I had to carry everything I read, I’d taken to assessing my books according to a pemmican logic: maximum intellectual calorie content per ounce.

But for some now-forgotten reason I disregarded these objections, bought the book, and read it while I walked the Pacific Rim path on the east coast of Vancouver Island, camping on surf-crashed beaches, and suspending my food from trees in compliance with the bear-safety code. I read it then, and it amazed me. I read it again, lost my copy somewhere near Banff, bought another copy, gave it to my father as a present, borrowed it back off him and read it again, and again, and again. I still have that copy (with a red-ink inscription from me to my father, dated 18 August 1997): the spine is cracked, the uppers ripped, the margins dense with annotations, and the pages are held together with Sellotape, now brown.

Arctic Dreams
changed the course of my life: it showed me how to write. Its combination of natural science, anthropology, cultural history, philosophy, reportage and lyrical observation revealed that non-fiction could be as experimental in form and beautiful in its language as any novel. Its gyres from the phenomenal to the
philosophical proved to me that first-hand experience could be related to broader questions of place-consciousness. And the other lesson that it taught me – though it would take me longer to understand it – was that while writing about landscape often begins in the aesthetic, it must always tend to the ethical. Lopez’s intense attentiveness was, I came later to realize, a form of moral gaze, born of his belief that if we attend more closely to something then we are less likely to act selfishly towards it. To exercise a care of attention towards a place – as towards a person – is to achieve a sympathetic intimacy with it. His prose – priestly, intense, grace-noted – is driven by the belief that
‘it is possible to live wisely on the land, and to live well’
, and by a conviction that the real achievement of place-writing might be to help incorporate nature into the moral realm of human community.

Before writing
Arctic Dreams
, Lopez had travelled for several years in the Canadian north. He passed through the diverse territories of the region: the orange-and-ochre badlands of Melville Island; the deep-cut canyons of the Hood River; Baffin Bay, where big bergs jostle slowly; and Pingok Island in the Beaufort Sea, where the tides are so slight that one can
‘stand toe-to at the water’s edge
, and, if one has the patience, see it gain only the heels of one’s boots in six hours’. His sustained contact with these places brought him to a subtle understanding of the region. It also produced his austerely particular style as a writer. The Arctic, Lopez observes early on, has
‘the classic lines
of a desert landscape: spare, balanced, extended, and quiet’ (one notes with admiration the adjectival balance – short-long-long-short – of that second clause). The same is true of Lopez’s prose. Of all the great modern landscape writers, his style seems most purely to enact the terrain it describes.

When he began to write about the Arctic, Lopez was faced with the challenge of making language grip a landscape that is both huge and
‘monotonic
’. How was he to depict a realm of immensities and repetitions: ‘unrelieved stretches of snow and ice’ and ‘plains of open water’? How was he to bring this stark and enigmatic landscape within reach of words, without trivializing or compromising it? Northern regions possess surfaces – stone, light, snow, ice, bright air – to which words will not easily cleave.

What Lopez understood was that detail anchors perception in a context of vastness. It is perhaps the defining habit of his style to make sudden shifts between the panoramic and the specific. Again and again, he evokes the reach and clarity of an Arctic vista – and then zooms in on the
‘chitinous shell
of an insect’ lodged in a tuffet of grass, a glinting tracery of ‘broken spider-webs’, or ‘the bones of a lemming’ whose form resembles that of the ‘strand of staghorn lichen next to them’. The effect for the reader of these abrupt perspectival jumps is exhilarating – as though Lopez has gripped you by the shoulder and pressed his binoculars to your eyes.

So many great northern artists and writers are, like Lopez, distinguished by what Robert Lowell called
‘the grace of accuracy’
. Thinking across their work, it becomes possible to deduce a shared metaphysics of northerliness: an exactness of sight; lyricism as a function of precision; an attraction to the crystalline image; shivers of longing, aurora-bursts of vision, and elegies of twilight. In the northern writers and artists to whose work I consistently return, the north represents not a retreat to an imagined distance, but rather a means of seeing more clearly and thinking more lucidly. Looking from afar – from present to past, from exile to homeland, from island back at mainland, mountain-top down at lowland – results not
in vision’s diffusion but in its sharpening; not in memory’s dispersal but in its plenishment.

~

Lopez has long been vital to my understanding of the Arctic north. Vital to my understanding of the north of my own country has been the work of Nan Shepherd, and also that of the essayist and poet Peter Davidson. Davidson lives in what he calls a
‘removed and exceptional part of Scotland’
: the wedge of land bounded to its south by the mountains of the Cairngorms, to its north by the waters of the Moray Firth, and that stretches eastwards to meet the North Sea between Peterhead and Aberdeen. A few miles from his house in the town of Turriff rises the five-toothed peak of Bennachie, on the slopes of which Agricola’s auxiliaries fought and defeated the Caledonians – the northernmost Roman action undertaken during the centuries of occupation. Further west are the Ruthven Barracks, that lonely outpost – a Camp Bastion of its day – built by Hanoverian soldiers after the Jacobean rising of 1715. Davidson’s latitude is a frontier latitude, then: around and beyond him issue the true ‘northlands’, whose cultures and landscapes have inspired his poetry, essays, scholarship and dreams for more than thirty years.

This is an ‘exceptional part’ of Scotland in that it has excepted itself from many of the conventions of British history and geography. Beaker inhumation is thought to have been practised there for two centuries longer than anywhere else in Europe. Catholicism thrived and was fomented there after the Reformation; loyalty to the House of Stuart persisted after the Revolution of 1688. It is a dissident region: not renegade, exactly, but fond of being able to mind its own business.

Like the landscapes out of which they chiefly arise, Davidson’s poems and essays –
The Idea of North
(2005),
The Palace of Oblivion
(2008) and
Distance and Memory
(2013) – are bound together by a tight web of qualities (reticence, allusiveness, unshowiness); by a repertoire of moods (elegiac, desirous); by a cluster of tropes (shadows, gleams, light and its gradations, ice, cusps, thresholds); and by a palette of colours (the green-gold of summer, the silver-blues of winter, the bronzes of autumn). Davidson writes in a northern vernacular, exactly responsive to its regions, in which the specifics of terrain and weather are internalized as a kind of grammar. It is a style fine in its granulation, subtle in its shadings – and tinged throughout with a gentle melancholy.

Davidson, like Lopez, practises an acute attentiveness to the shifts and flux of landscape. He is observant – both in the devotional sense of regular habits adhered to, and the phenological sense of recording natural details. Paragraph after paragraph of his prose about the northlands glint with details born of long acquaintance and repeated seeing: in May there is
‘a pencil-stripe of light
beyond the pine trees on the northern horizon, the reflection of the brightness over Sutherland, relentless daylight over Norway’; a June evening brings
‘green silence
’; on October afternoons ‘bright kingdoms … open in the Cairngorms’; soon afterwards ‘brilliant depths of frost and the returning cold’ signal winter’s ascent. Such observations seem at first like jottings, but on examination turn out to be images of intricate faceting, as in this single-sentence description of a lake:
‘A little stone jetty
in still water: water like pewter, extraordinary water.’ The extreme stillness of the sentence is in part a function of its verblessness, but is due also to the reflection of water within itself (‘water: water’), an effect doubled again as the word
pewter
catches and supplely returns – with a ripple – the word
water
.

The artist Eric Ravilious
‘noticed everything
’, Davidson writes. The same might be said of him. Ravilious saw ‘the gradations of rust and soot on a tar-engine put away for the winter’. Davidson notices the
‘[f]ine gradations
’ that:

mark this turn of the year to spring: the glass of the lake rising a little with the snow melt; steel drifts of ice on water like mercury. The first wood-anemones on the scrubbed table which runs the length of the room.

The ‘rising’ ‘glass’ of the lake suggests first a thermometric change, the temperature-creep of the coming spring; but it is also – and foremost – ‘glass’ as water-surface, rising in level as the snow-melt joins the winter water. ‘Mercury’ draws us back into the thermometer, but is at once an image of the ice’s hard silver gleam. The intricacy of language here is a version of the intricacy of the handover of winter to spring – overlapped and shifting. Such careful slivering-out – the ability to discriminate without finicking – is one of the signatures of Davidson’s style and sensibility. It results in a lyricism as delicate in its structures as an ash-frail. He is, like Lopez, a connoisseur of degrees; but like Lopez he also acknowledges those aspects of landscape that refuse such slivering-out – those infinitely subdivisible increments of change, such that one cannot say when a day becomes dark, only that it is so.

~

One August I visited Davidson at his high-halled, white-walled, hunkered-down house in a wooded fold of valley near the Aberdonian town of Turriff. After we had eaten, he took me up to a
south-facing room that was thick with summer light, and there he opened the two pale-blue doors of a large wooden cabinet that stood against the back wall. It was, he explained, a cabinet of curiosities of his own devising, in homage to the great
Wunderkammern
or ‘wonder-rooms’ of the Renaissance and the Baroque, in which examples of natural history (
naturalia
), precious artefacts (
arteficialia
), scientific instruments (
scientifica
), findings from distant realms (
exotica
) and items of inexplicable origin and form (
mirabilia
) were gathered and displayed.

He reached into the cabinet and retrieved object after object, explaining to me the skein of stories that each drew behind it. For the individual compartments of the cabinet held remarkable things, among them a little dog modelled in unfired clay, Babylonian in origin; a sixteenth-century armourer’s trial piece of a long face framed by a helmet in the form of a wolf’s head with open jaws; an engraved brass box of seventeenth-century Low Countries manufacture, which once held one of the straws on which fell drops of the blood of the Jesuit Henry Garnet, executed in London on 3 May 1606, bloodstains which were said to have formed a likeness of his face; a slice of marble from a quarry near Bristol, in which the veinery had, by geological chance, formed into a perfect facsimile of a sad Victorian landscape of misty ploughlands at evening; and the oval case of an original Claude glass, the small, blackened pocket mirror designed to reproduce in its reflection of any landscape the softened tones and single focal point characteristic of the art of Claude Lorrain.

As the day dimmed, Peter spoke of these objects with a loving care and a sadness. His preoccupation with the
Wunderkammer
was, I saw that afternoon, temperamental as well as art-historical, and indeed his essays and poems often themselves resemble these
curatorial cabinets – rich with discrete images but shot through with sadness (for the fragment always grieves for its whole).