On Arcadia

Hotfoot from viewing new documentary film Arcadia, some initial thoughts on what seems quite a zeitgeist-y piece of work for those in the landscape/ place bubble.

Directed by Paul Wright, the film is constructed from digitised footage in the BFI National Archive inter-cut with fictional excerpts from cinema and television.* An 'old-weird-Britain mash-up' of imagery swirling around the last hundred years that hangs on the directors wish to explore 'how we connect with the land around us and with each other'. Adrian Utley of Portishead and Goldfrapp's Will Gregory provide the soundtrack, pulsing audio-cue's amongst the visual montage, recalling British Sea Power's work for From the Sea to the Land Beyond. Here and there the spectral folk voice of Anne Briggs melts and distorts into the mix.

The narrative, such as it is, rests on a journey through the seasons; but this is a loose story, and all the better for it. A lack of intruding commentary also gives the footage space to tell a story, gifting the watcher's imagination permission to roam. Paul Wright has explained how atmospheres, ideas and themes for each 'season' underscored the search through the deep and rich archive sources, though the aim was often to seek out material 'that you wouldn't expect to be in a film about the British countryside.' This cut-up approach reflects the director's desire to create sensory experiences through image and sound rather than a straight-forward linear narrative progression. As such, comparisons have been made with Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi films scored by Philip Glass. Common ground can also be found with the Robinson films of Patrick Keiller. Political or politicised questions of society's relationship with the land and nature, of identity, of class are surfaced but this is no polemic, it is left to the viewer to piece together their own interpretation. A point to return to.

Arcadia has been positioned as a 'folk horror' artifact, part of a fecund wyrd Britain arcania that has come out of the long shadows to be part of the contemporary landscape vibe. Although the film has deliberately avoided using some of the more obvious and over-exposed reference points such as The Wicker Man, the folk horror genre is certainly well-represented through haunting imagery of bodies rising from the grave in Requiem for a Village and the like. Also present are snatches of the frankly strange folk rituals on display in a highly-recommended previous BFI crate-digging exercise, Here's a Health to the Barley Mow.   

As for my own feelings on viewing the film, an initial reaction was that it was following a rather hackneyed trope of contrasting modern dystopian imagery with a seemingly idyllic past, but as the temporal contrasts progressed and mingled a more nuanced and muddied picture emerged. All to the good. This is what history shows us. Processes and patterns of change - in life, society, the landscape - are complex, contradictory and unexpected, hard to pin down, especially when you are in the moment. Humanity may well be experiencing a long fall, unable now to stop a self-inflicted wrecking ball from wiping out civilisations and eco-systems. This may be already happening; we know we can do better. But we can't really know what the future holds: what great and terrible prospects and unforeseen technologies and events will come to pass. 

Many of the visions of sunlit unchanging rurality that front-load the film are pure mid-twentieth century propaganda. Much of it would surely have looked archaic (though perhaps reassuring) to contemporary viewers. Yes, those children playing cricket on the village green look innocently happy, but kids were still dying of TB and suffering from rickets; the coming welfare state desperately needed. The countryside looks ravishing and immutable, but it always does in sun-bleached black and white. Captured on these early reels was a receding world. The farm labourers were already a dying breed and, in truth, their forebears had suffered untold ructions and dislocations over centuries past. Things had been so stable and orderly in the Victorian English village that many could not wait to defect to the foul, teeming rising cities of wages and freedom or endure harsh journeys to the unknown potential of the colonies (or had no other choice).   

The juxtapose of old and new tempts another thought: that folk rituals, hippy happenings, raves, music festivals and other raged communions with nature all share a common wealth through the ages; psychic (or psychedelic) portals out of normality. Echoes of a Merrie England always on the margins, dangerous and under threat. The past may be gone but it can punch through time, revived or repurposed into something new but familiar, even if we don't realise it. That's how history rolls. Same old wyrd magic, same old shite.  

Many a paradox here, but then the English vision of arcadia was always conflicted. As Adam Nicholson has chronicled, Renaissance England 'dreamed of a lost world, an ideal and unapproachable realm of bliss and beauty'; a seeking of 'the perfect interfolding of the human and the natural' as perceived in Classical pastorals. Nicholson characterises this movement as at once a search for the simpler Golden Age of ancient Sicily and Greek Arcadia - a longing underpinning many subsequent counter-cultures - whilst also being inherently conservative and elitist, raging against the forces of modernity: 'a dream of nature' though one exclusive to a rich squirarchy, heavily mediated and manipulated. A forgotten idealism which flowered but was then crushed by a brutal civil war. 

The visceral sonic and visual representations crackling through this film aptly show how the search for Arcadia has always been mixed-up, conflicted and probably doomed. 

An afterword on the recent Twitter squall on the Paul Kingsnorth's essay written to accompany the release of Arcadia. The piece, criticised for pandering to re-emerging 'blood and soil' nationalism, seems to have disappeared from the web, but a couple of Twitter responses to it and the author's 'open letter' reply posted on his website can be seen below. My own initial take was that, having previously admired Paul's non-conformism (and writing), these are dangerous Brexit-cult times in which to express sentiments that could be interpreted as mystical English exceptionalism. This may be a bit alarmist (Hell, Gareth Southgate may even come riding over the hill to show us a new more-inclusive path to Eden!). Anyway, have a read of both sides of the story and see what you think ...

I wrote this for @NewHumanist before I saw Kingsnorth's latest essay, but it pretty much says what I want to say about it. Nature writing and fascist greenwash. Get stuck in. https://t.co/AyLIKRVa75

— Richard Smyth (@RSmythFreelance) June 20, 2018

After Kingsnorth's recent piece, which seemed to follow a deeply disturbing "blood and soil" narrative, it may be apt for me to retweet my Deep England articlehttps://t.co/hZaX2oJVO2

— Paul Watson (@lazcorp) June 20, 2018

Paul Kingsnorth's response to the Twitter squall re his essay on the new Arcadia film: https://t.co/TkC4kpoXkR

— Eddie Procter (@Landscapism) June 21, 2018

 * The archive films which are utilised are listed on the Arcadia website.  

Digging the English landscape of radicalism and rebellion

"The power had been completely placed in the hands of the Norman nobility ... and it had been used with no moderate hand." Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott.

This was at one time to be a lengthy treatise on the noble tradition of English radicalism and rebellion woven into the history of the landscape in times past and still abroad. However, energy feeling diminished and lacklustre in the wake of the election result, it has become more of a modest poultice to salve the wounded progressive heart; a sketch of rememberings and reminders.

A wake indeed. In the afterword to his visceral story of doomed English resistance to the brutal annexation by William, Duke of Normandy (or rather Guillaume le Batard), The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth laments that "The Norman invasion and occupation of England was probably the most catastrophic single event in this nation's history. It brought slaughter, famine, scorched-earth warfare, slavery and widespread land confiscation to the English population, along with a new ruling class who had, in many cases, little but contempt for their new subjects". And at times like these, as the Bullingdon Club cements its neo-Norman hold on the levers of power and influence, does it not feel as though we have been waking up to groundhog day ever since? Held in a constant state of arrested development by the descendants (both real and in spirit) of William's blood-soaked and avarice-filled retinue. Even now, we are unable to free ourselves from the Norman yoke; fighting amongst ourselves, bitterness endemic, hope shrinking. Farage and the UKippers as rebellion? What a fucking joke.

But there is a counterpoint to all this defeatism; to the passive-reactionary Little Englander 'musn't grumble' mind-set (and away from the heady but combustible mix of Scottish progressiveness and nationalism). Thankfully England, as a temporal, geographical and imaginative entity, is as awash with ragged energy and free-thinking as it is held back by a veneer of respectable timidity and dothing of its cap to those Norman shadow-walkers. Rebels with a cause, pioneers of social justice and artists with a conscience abound throughout history.

So harness the radical spirit of Englishness ...

Green men, wild men of the woods, silvitica,

Hereward the Wake,

Wat Tyler and the Peasant's Revolt,        Jack Cade,              John Dee,

The New Model Army,             Gerard Winstanley,

Tolpuddle Martyrs,      The Quakers,        Thomas Paine,           The Diggers,
          
                       John Clare,                      The Chartists,           

    William Cobbett,                                                       Charles Dickens,

William Blake and Jerusalem,

     William Morris,        Bertrand Russell,          The Independent Labour Party,

Aleister Crowley,                           Emily Pankhurst and the Suffragettes,

Trades Union Congress,              Peter Warlock,                        George Orwell,

                              The Kinder Scout Trespass,

Clement Attlee and 1945,       National Parks,                       CND,

E.P. Thompson,             Eric Hobsbawm,

            Lindsay Anderson,      Ken Loach,           Alan Clarke, 
                 
 David Rudkin,

     Billy Bragg,        Mark Thomas,                                 

Julian Cope,             

Colin Ward,                         Benjamin Zephaniah,  

The Poll Tax Riots,

                       
 'Rooster' Byron,    

                    Caroline Lucas,                  Common Ground,

         The Dark Mountain Project,                             Jeremy Deller,

PJ Harvey,          Owen Jones,

         (Who knows, maybe even) Russell 'don't vote' Brand ... 

This spirit, this genius rebellio, is esoteric, not always progressive; it waxes and wanes in the popular consciousness, but it's always there under the surface, ready to spring. In the words of David Horspool in his survey of The English Rebel: "Above all, English rebellion isn't exceptional. It is what has happened in this country for at least a thousand years, and we can safely predict that it will carry on happening." 

Where is the (human) life of the fields?

After a two month lay-off due to a ruptured Achilles tendon I am glad to be back out roaming again. A day of late autumnal brilliance led me to a favourite place, the hidden combes below the hamlet of Cold Ashton: a becalmed swathe of deep England happy in its steeply contoured obscurity. I’ve been afoot here for a decade, at least twice a year. Absorbing the solitary serenity it occurred to me that I could hardly recall ever meeting or even seeing another human being on these numerous wanderings, once away from the road. To be in a long settled and wrought landscape, a stone’s throw from Bath and Bristol, in a densely populated country and have the place to yourself – acres of splendid isolation - is a curious thing. There is much to gain from wandering alone – time to think, away from the clamouring noise of everyday life – but this got me wondering existential thoughts about the very idea of my lone occupation of such places.

How we, the neo-landless masses, interact with landscapes outside of the narrowly prescribed to and fro of our immediate living, working, leisure and travel environments is something to ponder whilst out on an unshackled walk: even the most lowly cottager of pre-urban society would most likely covet our home comforts but be at a loss to understand how little of the land around us we actually have a stake in through common rights and custom. Such thoughts bring land ownership and legal rights of access into sharp relief, as well as the artificial lines that are often drawn between the rural and the urban. These themes are at the heart of two recent media articles: Prince Charles' comments in Country Life berating the loss of connection between urban dwellers and rural life (apparently unencumbered by the irony of a beneficiary of enormous inherited wealth and estates admonishing the descendants of those driven off the land by poverty or coercion for their lack of understanding of the countryside); and Simon Jenkins' article on threats to the rural landscape as he comes to the end of his term as Chair of the National Trust. In their different ways both seek to reinforce the view that the countryside needs more 'protection' from development and change. This is in many ways an admirable sentiment, as is Jenkins' view, mirroring a current campaign by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England, that the pressures on the housing market should be primarily met by developing brownfield and derelict sites in urban areas. 

However, in seeking to preserve the rural landscape in idealised form there is a danger that it becomes an ossified version of itself; notwithstanding the fact that efforts to defend and conserve landscapes in this way, through designation, campaigning, management schemes and so on, necessarily have to focus on those deemed to be of most value, thereby leaving swathes of less heralded countryside at the mercy of intensified agri-business and mission creep urban infrastructure. The binary problem of a concentrated but spreading urban population, culturally adrift from its high status (and high cost) rural hinterland can only be exacerbated if this is our only response to developers and businesses who see the countryside in terms of pound signs. 

Curiously, one of the more optimistic sounding conservation movements of the moment, rewilding, may only add to this problem if followed to its logical extremes (and the rhetoric of some of its advocates seems to be worryingly fundamentalist in tone, with vague exhortations to 'control' human population and immigration). There is certainly significant scope for returning parts of the landscape to a more self-willed natural state - thereby enabling flora and fauna to reestablish a less anthropocene dominated ecological balance. Though rewilding surely has its place, it should be remembered that, in Asa Briggs words "...nature and culture - the latter a word derived from the land - are inextricably entangled in Britain as a whole" and if human engagement with the environment was even more highly concentrated in the urban (and suburban) realm to enable the wild to reassert itself elsewhere then the landscape - and our relationship with it - would be all the poorer.

As the images from my recent walk shown here illustrate, much of the rural landscape is remarkably depopulated, like a Hardy-esque scene 'swept by a spectral hand'. This is at odds with the received wisdom of a crowded, densely populated island where it is no longer possible to find space or tranquillity. In fact in pre-modern societies, though the total population was much smaller than today (cities of any significant size having yet to develop) it was more evenly dispersed, with hundreds of residents in even the most remote parish or township; the shouting and unruly swains, shepherds, woodsmen, maids and gypsies of John Clare's poetry-social commentary. Even in Richard Jefferies time, the late nineteenth century, as he traces the course of a spring-born brook through 'the life of the fields' in Wild Life in a Southern County the wildlife and natural history that he observes are in the context of a highly peopled environment - in field, wood, farmstead, hamlet and village. This pattern of settlement, allied to the fact that the majority of the population were engaged in working the land in some way, meant that today's rural backwaters were much busier places. To give an example, on my three mile route along the hushed valleys around Cold Ashton there can be seen grassed over terraced strip lynchets indicating medieval land under the plough, the ruins of a mill and its silted up pond, woodland intensively managed as coppice until recent times, an abandoned farmstead and numerous tracks and holloways that are now verdant footpaths or overgrown but would have been well used thoroughfares. This pattern could be replicated on a similar short walk in pretty much any part of the British Isles (and would in fact be magnified in many upland areas, often haunted by the memories of even more dramatic abandonment and desertion from prehistoric times through to the early modern period). 

Does this matter? Is it simply an inevitable consequence of processes steadily advancing ever since the first furnaces of the Industrial Revolution were stoked? 

      

I think, to misuse Rachel Carson's famous phrase, these silent fields do matter. At the conclusion of his treatise on the relationship between the rural and the urban in English literature, The Country & the City, Raymond Williams shines a light on the powerful pressures exerted by capitalism leading to "a simultaneous crisis of overcrowded cities and a depopulating countryside". This remains the nub of the problem; how it can be challenged is the conundrum. Of course I am not advocating a developer's charter to concrete over the countryside, far from it. But perhaps if the concept of 'localism' is to be more than hollow sloganeering then it could be a bulwark to provide room for people, including those from the town looking to renew their links with the land but lacking the City salary or pension to purchase a hobby farm, to re-establish a foothold in the furlong, the coppice, the hillside trod. This means enabling people to build livelihoods, homes and communities in a rural setting, from the bottom up; sometimes this might make, for instance, the Cotswolds look a little scruffier (and upset the coach-bound countryside voyeurs), sometimes it might not work or be unsightly, but what's the alternative? Disconnected populations corralled into brownfield site ghettos whilst the wolf roams a returning wildwood unhindered, in earshot yet far away; and farm managers tend their spreadsheets, a robotic workforce tilling the land. 

If we are to move beyond the long-running position of stasis in the relationship between the wider population and the physical environment in which they live, if G.K. Chesterton's "people of England, that have never spoken yet" (as proxy for people everywhere) are to be awoken from their deep coma of complacency, fatalism and inertia and move beyond reductive visions of the country versus the city, then we could make a start by telling our social history like it really was: the landscape as much a setting for radical transformations as apolitical continuity and conservative evolution. The real story of why and how people left the land, how common land rights and responsibilities operated (and their limitations), how enclosure revolutionised the landscape and "in taking the commons away from the poor, made them strangers in their own land" (as outlined in E.P. Thompson's Customs in Common), and so forth. This is not about looking backwards - yearning for a golden age that never existed. To quote Thompson again "We shall not ever return to pre-capitalist human nature, yet a reminder of its alternative needs, expectations and codes may renew our sense of our nature's range of possibilities".

So, can I glimpse a possible future in which I would be able to wander these valleys and pass by numerous small communities, their endeavours part of the daily rhythm of a landscape in which they had a stake, freed from wage slave dislocation from their surroundings? Would these green images be enhanced by peopled colour? Wonder at the beauty to be found in the countryside untempered by the melancholy thought that I am merely observing the relics of human activity and there is no one here to enjoy it but me. Perhaps this sounds a little too like Thomas More's Utopian Republic; the idealised pastoral socialism of William Morris in his novel News From Nowhere. Well I'm a dreamer, and maybe that's no bad thing. What thoughts a walk in quiet country can provoke.

References

Briggs, A. 1987. A Social History of England. Penguin.

Clare, J, 1990. Selected Poems. Penguin.

Hardy, T, 1998. Nobody Comes in Everyman's Poetry: Thomas Hardy. Everyman.

Jefferies, R, 2011. Wild Life in a Southern Country. Little Toller.

More, T, 2003. Utopia. Penguin.

Morris, W, 1993. News from Nowhere and Other Writings. Penguin.

Thompson, EP, 1993. Customs in Common. Penguin.

Williams, R, 2011. The Country & the City. Spokesman.

The New English Landscape: A Review

This is a longer version of a review that was written for the Caught By The River web site.

This is a view from the west of a book about the far east of England. Although a relatively short work, The New English Landscape, a combination of Ken Worpole’s words and Jason Orton’s photographs, covers much ground as it sets out “… to meld together historic, aesthetic and ecological elements around the issues of habitat, landscape and sense of place which have been in play in Britain since the Second World War”.

Worpole makes it clear from the start that the “new English landscape” of the title is an “imaginative construct”. This is not an attempt to comprehensively chronicle post-war developments in the English landscape as a whole; the methodology here is a focus on a particular genius loci rather than the more conventional magisterial sweep of, for instance, W.G. Hoskins’ The Making of the English Landscape or, more recently, Trevor Rowley’s The English Landscape in the Twentieth Century. The canvass for this exploration is very specifically the “bastard countryside” of the estuary indented, marsh rich and semi-industrial Essex coastline – a liminal wonderland at once on the doorstep of, but also estranged from, the Great Wen of London. This is the territory explored in The Joy Of Essex, Jonathan Meades idiosyncratic filmic tour of the county.

As a western dwelling, midlands raised and northern souled reader I cannot help noticing that Essex, and the wider East Anglian region are not exactly under-represented in the current well-spring of nature and landscape writing. At times it seems that Norfolk’s Waveney valley and environs – stalked by dragoons of Macfarlane’s, Deakins, Mabey’s and Cocker’s – is the lone player in town; challenged only by the psychogeographically-minded flaneurs, striding in Iain Sinclair’s mighty slip-stream across the edgeland’s of London, with the military-industrial marshes of Essex on their mind. But, in many ways, this is the book’s over-arching thesis: that the centre of gravity of ideas, art and writing on ecology and landscape has moved eastwards to envelop not just a previously neglected region, but changing perceptions of what constitutes places worthy of comment and study.

Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene

"I thought of walks in the English countryside, where people start shouting at you as soon as you stray from the footpath".  

A statement by George Monbiot from his thought-provoking new work Feral that, like the book as a whole and the concept - rewilding - that it advocates, both resonates and slightly infuriates at the same time. 

'Rewilding' is certainly trending in environmental circles at the moment. However, its not so much the prospect of the return of the wolf, lynx, beaver and other predators and large herbivores to the uplands and wilder parts of the British Isles and Europe that is in my thoughts (though I do have some practical and intellectual problems with this idea that may be explored at another time). The above quote struck a chord with me because it also hints at a more basic, anthropocene concern when considering the future of landscapes and ecosystems; namely, perhaps before we rush headlong into facilitating the theoretical 're-introduction' of the straight-tusked elephant that roamed European forests and plains 40,000 years ago, we should address the more fundamental concern of land ownership, access and control. 

To be fair to Monbiot, rewilding is a useful and imaginative stalking horse for stimulating debate on this issue and future direction in the wider policy fields of agriculture, conservation, energy, housing, transport and land-use. My own ruminations on the bizarre situation that we in these islands find ourselves - an increasing population, in many ways more autonomous than ever before, excluded from living and working (or even visiting) the larger part of the land mass on which we dwell - have cooked up a righteous soup of thoughts around community food production, noble, peaceful trespass and the hidden history of the tyranny of enclosure. How can it be right that '...nearly half the country is owned by 40,000 land millionaires, or 0.06 per cent of the population, while most of us spend half our working lives paying off the debt on a patch of land barely large enough to accommodate a dwelling and a washing line' (Simon Fairlie)?

A number of recent readings and 'Twitter-leads' have helped to stimulate this well-spring. The most striking being Gerry Conley's blog post on The right to roam land and shore, 'but for the sky, no fences facing', which eruditely brings together many of the touch-stones of this subject: Norman land grabbing, eighteenth and nineteenth century Parliamentary Inclosure, John Clare, the Diggers of St George's Hill, the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass, Marion Shoard, Right to Roam legislation, corporate land ownership and the creeping privatisation of public space. These themes have also been essayed in articles by Peter Lazenby and, again, George Monbiot. 

The Diggers, a radical group of proto-socialists who occupied St George's Hill in Surrey in 1649 are fascinatingly chronicled in the 1975 film, Winstanley. In many ways, this doomed five month attempt to establish the concept of the 'Common Treasury' of the land for all, ruthlessly quashed by the reassertion of the primacy of private capital and ownership, occured during a pivotal period in history for the English landscape and society; a course was being set for the processes of enclosure and 'improvement' of the land, of successive agricultural, industrial and post-industrial revolutions that sculptured the environments and socio-economic realities of subsequent generations, and still resonate today: 'Winstanley had a dream of a wonderful, gentler, more just and happy world; a dream that came again to other people in succeeding centuries, but for whose realisation we are still waiting' (David Gardiner).  

The arc of this story is well rehearsed, and well written, ground that I am not going to retread. Instead, I am leaving the path, plunging into the undergrowth; exploring the concepts of access, private ownership and enclosure, and maybe rewilding of the self, head on and with the 'muddy boots' of empiricism. Taking, in Richard Mabey's words, '...the opportunity to experience it (nature) face to face, with its qualities of wildness and renewal intact'. So, rather than using an Ordnance Survey map to pleasingly link up the anarchic network of dashed lines indicating public rights of way, hill tracks and unmetalled lanes, I have devised a mildly subversive circuit through hill and dale that studiously avoids legally prescribed routeways: a Trespass Way. 

Wild utopian trilogy

Three books are occupying my thoughts at the moment; linked by their combination of a contemporary critique of the harsh realities of late nineteenth century capitalism and industrialization with a vision of a back to nature future, albeit with varying viewpoints on what a post-'civilisation' world could hold in store for humanity.

William Morris' News From Nowhere and Other Writings (1890) is full of hope and zeal for a more egalitarian future of rustic utopia. After London or Wild England  by Richard Jefferies (1885) is a much more ambiguous chronicle of the relapse of society into the barbarism of nature. The precursor to, and influence on, both books is also the least well-known, Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), an escape to a ficticious and flawed New World demi-paradise.

So here are some choice extracts from all three*, mixed together in a pleasing if not altogether coherent, and sometimes contradictory, soup: a wild utopian trilogy.

"What is that thought that is come into one's head as one turns around in the shadow of the roadside elm? A countryside worth fighting for, if that were necessary, worth taking trouble to defend its peace.

The old men say their fathers told them that soon after the fields were left to themselves a change began to be visible. It became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike.

From an elevation there was nothing visible but forest and marsh. On the level ground and the plains the view was limited to a short distance, because of the thickets and the saplings which had now become young trees. The downs only were still partially open, yet it was not convenient to walk upon them except in the tracks of animals, because of the long grass which, being no more regularly grazed upon by sheep, as was once the case, grew thick and tangled. Furze, too, and heath covered the slopes, and in places vast quantities of fern. There had always been copses of fir and beech and nut-tree covers, and these increased and spread, while bramble, briar, and hawthorn extended around them.

 It was a monotonous life, but it was very healthy and one does not much mind anything when one is well.  The country was the grandest that can be imagined.  How often have I sat on the mountain side and watched the waving downs, with the two white specks of huts in the distance, and the little square of garden behind them; the paddock with a patch of bright green oats above the huts, and the yards and wool-sheds down on the flat below; all seen as through the wrong end of a telescope, so clear and brilliant was the air, or as upon a colossal model or map spread out beneath me.  Beyond the downs was a plain, going down to a river of great size, on the farther side of which there were other high mountains, with the winter’s snow still not quite melted; up the river, which ran winding in many streams over a bed some two miles broad, I looked upon the second great chain, and could see a narrow gorge where the river retired and was lost.  I knew that there was a range still farther back; but except from one place near the very top of my own mountain, no part of it was visible: from this point, however, I saw, whenever there were no clouds, a single snow-clad peak, many miles away, and I should think about as high as any mountain in the world.  Never shall I forget the utter loneliness of the prospect—only the little far-away homestead giving sign of human handiwork;—the vastness of mountain and plain, of river and sky; the marvellous atmospheric effects—sometimes black mountains against a white sky, and then again, after cold weather, white mountains against a black sky—sometimes seen through breaks and swirls of cloud—and sometimes, which was best of all, I went up my mountain in a fog, and then got above the mist; going higher and higher, I would look down upon a sea of whiteness, through which would be thrust innumerable mountain tops that looked like islands.

At first it is supposed that those who remained behind existed upon the grain in the warehouses, and what they would thresh by the flail from the crops left neglected in the fields. But as the provisions in the warehouses were consumed or spoiled, they hunted the animals, lately tame and as yet half wild. As these grew less in number, and difficult to overtake, they set to work again to till the ground, and cleared away small portions of the earth, encumbered already with brambles and thistles. Some grew corn and some took charge of sheep. Thus, in time, places far apart from each other were settled, and towns were built; towns, indeed, we call them to distinguish them from the champaign, but they are not worthy of the name in comparison with the mighty cities of old time. 

Under the elm tree these things puzzle me, and again my thoughts return to the bold men of that very countryside who, coming back from Ashdown field, scored that White Horse to look down for ever on the valley of the Thames; and I thought it likely that they had this much in common with the starlings and the bleak, that there was more equality among them than we are used to now, and that there would have been more models amongst them for Woden than one would be like to find in the Thames-side meadows.   

Turn the page, I say. The hay-field is a pretty sight this month seen under the elm, as the work goes forward on the other side of the way opposite the bean-field, till you look at the hay-makers closely. Suppose the haymakers were friends working for friends on land which was theirs, as many as were needed, with leisure and hope ahead of them instead of hopeless toil and anxiety, need their useful labour for themselves and their neighbours cripple and disfigure them and knock them out of shape of men fit to represent the Gods and Heroes? If under such conditions a new Ashdown had to be fought (against capitalist robbers this time), the new White Horse would look down on the home of men as wise as the starlings, in their equality, and so perhaps as happy."  

 *Albeit, the Morris contributions are from his contemporaneous essay Under an Elm-tree, or Thoughts in the Countryside rather than News From Nowhere itself.

Bibliography

Butler, Samual, 2006. Erewhon. London: Penguin.

Jefferies, Richard, 1980. After London. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morris, William, 1993. News From Nowhere and Other Stories. London: Penguin.   

A scrap of a memory - Arcadian dreaming

"Let me love the country, the rivers running through the valleys, the streams and woodlands - happy though unknown. Give me broad fields and sweeping rivers, lofty mountain ranges in distant lands, cold precipitous valleys, where I may lie beneath the enormous darkness of the branches." (Georgics, Virgil)

One of the cognitive artifacts of my early childhood - a scrap of a memory - that occasionally returns to the forefront of my consciousness, is of leafing through an old book on Classical mythology in the bedroom of my great aunt and uncles Post Office, overlooking the village green in Market Stainton, Lincolnshire. I remember nothing of the words, but the illustrations of Greek and Roman gods and goddesses were imprinted, faintly but tenaciously, on my mind. And, maybe through wishful thinking false memory, the heroic scenes occupying the pages were played out across equally epic Arcadian landscapes. This, anyway, is the vision that has stuck with me.

'Dream of Arcadia', Thomas Cole

My knowledge of Classical history and myth is shamingly sketchy, and I've always been somewhat envious of those who can authoritatively reference antiquity in prose and speech. However, and always striving to be a good polymath, from the springboard of the 'Lincolnshire book' memory I have a clear aesthetic vision of the Ancient Greco-Roman world, albeit an amalgam of the re-imaginings of successive waves of Western civilisation from the Renaissance onwards, given a Technicolor sheen through watching too many Hollywood 'sword-and-sandal' epics. This visualisation of places and times unvisited is emphatically Arcadian, populated by the spirits of Faunus, Silvanus and Pan, 'god of the wild countryside'.

 

It is only recently that I have come to think of the inevitable reality that this blissful rurality and Pythagorean harmony is a construct of the mind. And largely the mind of the Roman poet Virgil. As Adam Nicolson explains,

"The Greeks had two kinds of primitivism: the soft version of the Golden Age, often set in Sicily, where there was plenty and happiness and none of the vices of modernity; and the harder kind, often found in the harsh Greek province of Arcadia in the Peloponnese, a tough, wild mountain country, where there were no comforts and none of the sweetness of groves and purling brooks, but whose shepherds were admirably virtuous and honest and comforted themselves in their primitive lives with their songs and their pipes....Virgil fused these two realms." 

  

A holiday in Sicily a few years ago (during which the photographs in this post were taken) enabled temporary immersion in the relics and ghosts of this landscape; the modern topography providing a convincing facimile. This imagery has been given more recent succor by dipping into a battered 1957 copy of Gilbert Highet's Poets in a Landscape, a scholarly but fascinating account of the places Roman poets, including Virgil, described and lived in (ex libris: Wheaton College Library, Wheaton, Illinois). 

And so, my vision of Arcadia - Virgil's "distant realms of nature" - lives on, by way of Lincolnshire, Sicily and Illinois. Perhaps powered by a yearning to be "...a fugitive from civilisation, the figure who recovers a kind of spiritual integrity and wisdom by immersion in the natural setting." (Malcolm Andrews).

Select Bibliography 

Andrews, Malcolm, 1999. Landscape and Western Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Anon, 1952. Everyman's Atlas of Ancient and Classical Geography. London: Dent.

Highet, Gilbert, 1957. Poets in a Landscape. New York: Alfred Knopf.

March, Jenny, 2008. The Penguin Book of Classical Myths. London: Penguin

Nicolson, Adam, 2008. Arcadia: The dream of perfection in Renaissance England. London: Harper Collins. 

Rushby, Kevin, 2006. Paradise: A history of the idea that rules the world. London: Robinson.

Some Landscapes blog entry on Virgil's Georgics http://some-landscapes.blogspot.co.uk/2006/01/early-morning.html

Virgil Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil

News from Nowhere

William Morris

News from Nowhere by William Morris (1890) is one of my 'on the go' books that I dip in and out of. The combination of the first signs of early Spring and hearing yet another politician banging on about austerity for the umpteenth time leads me back to one of its central tenants: a shift from a system based on capitalism and spurious ideas of trickle down wealth creation to an egalitarian pastoral society of common ownership.

Yes, its written from a late nineteenth century perspective when idealistic socialism could still be seen as fresh and progressive; yes, its unashamedly and unfashionably Utopian; and, yes, it has jarring elements that make it very much 'of its time' (patronising attitude to women still very much in place) .