The Sun that Shone on Eden (still shines upon us here)

JOURNAL ENTRY

 27^th May, Saturday

“Late afternoon sun slants into
The tobacco-coloured waters.
Fifteen or more carp weightless
Among the cow pastures of weed-drift.

With a flick of a tail, they all glide as one
In a lithe piscine murmuration
Look! They’ve formed the shape of a starling
Flying in a tobacco-coloured sky!

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

It's been a beautifully still evening. The mirrored water only broken by fish swirl and the chevron paths cut by ducks. It's been an evening of soft light and gnat dance. And now the stillness of night is slowly descending. The sky is a polished lacquer bowl of blues that fade to a yellow in the west. A quarter moon rides high westwards above the paper silhouette of the feathery ash.

This is the NB Erica narrowcasting into the dark to you wherever you are. 

It's lovely to see you and I was hoping you would drop by. The kettle is on, so, take a seat and let's sit here a while in the quietness of this late springtime night. Welcome aboard. 

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

Each day the sun climbs higher – reaching out to the northern quarters, but will never reach them. Warm dry days has meant that we have been able to progress with the de-rusting and painting. Nearly one side of the boat has been completed with a couple of coats of red-oxide undercoat. It only needs a few layers of top coat and we’re done on that side and the stern. I have to say that, for painting, the weather has been wonderful. Dry and warm, but not too hot. We’ve had a fair bit of wind that has also kept things nicely cool.

I mentioned last week about the hawthorn blossom and the amazing amount we have had of it. The towpath, in places, has looked as if it were bordered by huge snow-drifts. However, I have been noticing that many people on social media have also been commenting on it – so it is neither my imagination nor something purely local. The blossom is now beginning to turn pinky white and brown, giving the hedgerows that impression that they have just been washed in rosé wine – or that the pinks of sunset have arrived early.

It has also been an amazing time for bat watching. The calm, still, evenings have been busy with the flick and twist of pipistrelle – as the sun begins to sink, first to arrive are one or two noctule bats - looking like shadows left by dark swallows flying the dusky air. Then come the rollercoastering pipistrelles. Flitting like sparks from a black bonfire in the gloaming. Standing at the duck hatch, they dip low then pull up to just clear the boats.

I am pretty sure now that the two swans here are not nesting this year. However, they both seem fine and healthy and come to call, rattling on the hull beside the duck hatch to announce their arrival. We have purposely never fed them from the duck hatch and when we have fed them always done it from the stern. Donna is not keen on the way they can lean in through the duck hatch. I can see her point, while it is quite funny to be grabbed by the arm or have your waist nipped by a demanding beak as you pass by, it can be a bit annoying when it is continuous. I am pretty sure that they couldn’t get in through the hatch, but Donna is right, we don’t want to find out the hard way. The prospect of marshalling a disoriented and probably grumpy swan up the steps and out through the narrow bow doors is not something either of us would relish.

Just a quick not to say that I am really sorry for the lack of sound behind the ‘Tuesday AM’ segment last week. It was there. However, a technical blip – for which I am entirely responsible – meant that it was deleted post-editing. That part of the editing is quite labour intensive, and I thought I found a quicker way to do it – but clearly it didn’t work and deleted the sound file in the process! So, apologies, I keep with the old system.

[MUSIC]

TUESDAY MORNING, 5.30AM

It’s quiet here today. I am later, much later and so have hit that quiet spot you get at this time of year around the middle of the day. When the skies and trees and hedgerows fall silent for a while. It’s not surprising. These are the long days. Today, daylight lasts for well over sixteen hours. Longer if you count the long twilights. That about an hour and twenty minutes longer than at the beginning of May. So, when the sun hits her apex, a silence slowly falls. Siesta time. All there is, is the lazy hum and quiet thrip of insects, and the horses on the hill. Sometimes, a boat goes past. But, like the churned waters it leaves behind, the quietness soon resumes. And the warmth. And the feeling of rest. I’m never really sure whether souls have toes or not. It was something regrettably omitted from my education. I expect it has been pondered at some point in history, but whether or not they do (or even if souls exist), this is the sort of day that your soul can have a good long stretch and wiggle its toes in the sunshine.

The rushes are growing so tall. The new growth is now taller than me; spearing up into the syrupy stickiness of a late May sky. Mare’s tail clouds, like torn angel wings, disclosing ice-cold tearing rip-tides of wind that right now whip across our stratosphere. But here, there’s only playful gusts that rustle through the rushes beside us and make the tall grasses dance.

I love the grasses here, rushing waves of them, that turn this field of tussock and hollow into shallow seas of green. All year I have been fixated with them. I need to learn more about them. Each time I come, I keep thinking, ‘I must bring along my Keble Martin.’ But, so far, each time I forget. Perhaps, this year, will be the year of grasses for me.

One of the horses is calling across the canal to another on the other side. After a while another from this field, a smaller light brown pony, canters up to her. They stand on the hill crest, looking down towards me. Every so often, the taller piebald, twists her nose and neighs.

High under angels’ wings, a buzzard spirals; a black speck wheeling within far greater wheels. The mallard pair are on the alert.   

If you lay down, just here, it’s as if the horizon is fringed with living tassels. Memories of picture books and story times pour into my head. Cicely Mary Barker, Alison Uttley, When We Were Young, Pencils at Play, Brendon Chase. And a hundred and more times that I lay, as a lad, on my back in the tall grass looking up to the sky above me. All before a different world, with different values and priorities beckoned towards me. At least Adam and Eve were cast out of Eden. I willingly walked out of mine. And when I heard its gates clang shut behind me, it was too late.

Or maybe, just maybe, there’s a touch of Eden everywhere, and the sun that shone on Eden still shines upon us here.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

WALKING THROUGH POETRY

Let us go for a walk along the canal now that Maytime is here. To where the bull rush grows tall and the jewel begemmed grasses reach down to the waters below. Let us go down to where the path runs deep between thick walls of green and to where the king cups grow. Let us find a place where the bees hum to the finches’ call, and where the air is sweet with hawthorn’s wine.

Come with me, and I will show you something wonderful.

For this is the time of year that you can see it the clearest, although, once seen, you will never miss it or forget it. For this is the time of feast after the long days of hunger. When the alder’s shade is gentle and the sweep of willow a joy. Tread carefully, don’t rush, for you have slipped from one world into another – a world for which you are truly born. That is why, even in its strangeness, you recognise it. Why even though this feels like a temporary respite, you know deep down, that this is where you really belong. For there is a welcome here. A welcome home. An acceptance for which you do not have to strive. A sense of being and belonging that requires no qualification or explanation. Just to be here, is enough. ‘Do not fear the universe’ the peoples of the frozen north tell ‘For she is gentle and will nurture you if you let her.’ The remembering of that, as if in a long-forgotten dream, changes everything. For look! The pole star trees are still there – one sundered apart by the storm winds and, like us, bears its scars. But still, they stand – and the convocation on the hilltop. They too say, ‘Look how this land accepts so easily your footfall. The path knows that you are home.’

And that is why I want to share this special thing with you.

Look around you, what do you see?

Probably all the things you would expect to see on a canal towpath in the West Midlands on a warm day in May, striped with sunshine and cloud; as piebald as the magpie and the horses on the hill. But that is the first wonder. The expected, the ordinary, the familiar. The things we that we would expect to see – all here, all in their amazing detailed glory. The hard earthen path tunnelling between banks of foliage. Dandelion clocks full of expectancy, tall proud kingcups, buttercup yellow, rising above the greens on leggy stems – almost ungainly – nodding in the breeze. Cow parsley, purple bumblebees of vetch, hugging mats of cleavers, sorrels that taste sharp of rhubarb and lemon, cerise flashes of herb robert, speedwell blues, mountainous hogweed, dropwort, nettle, dock…

And within them, the movement of tiny lives, scurrying, busy about their place in this world of greens and colour and dampness.      

The quick flit of orange tip butterflies – dancing, light toed - across an ocean spray of cow parsley. The canal, where once there was ice and the bite of hoar frost, carries slowly swirling bouquets of hawthorn blossom – white, cream, pink, brown. Fish dab at them from beneath.

But there is something much more here – something that sings to you of home. Of your belonging and your connectedness to, even, this one particular place. Its poetry.

Cow Parsley, Queen Anne’s Lace, Lady’s Lace, Lady’s Needlework, Mayweed, Moon White. It’s closeness in appearance to the lethal hemlock, derived other sets of names; Dead-man’s Flourish, Devil’s Oatmeal, Mother’s Dead, Rat’s Bane. Local variant names that root this plant with in the communities as deeply as within the soil.

The cleavers that so thickly carpet the ground has a rich history of local names. Some prosaic; Scratch-weed, catch-grass, cling-rascal, grip-grass, stickers, stickle back, sticky buttons, gentleman’s tormentors. Others indicating use; goose-grass (our hens used to love it), gull-grass. Goose-weed, turkey’s food; while others warning of their danger; bleedy tongues, blood-tongue, tongue-bleeder, still others evocative of connections now lost; Harris’s Bullets, Jack-in-the-hedge, Lizzy-in-the-hedge, Robin-run-up-the-dyke, Willy-run-the-hedge; Who-stole-the-donkey. Some jokey; Mothers-in-Law, Cackey Monkeys. Some poignantly romantic; Clinging sweethearts, hug-me-closer, lover’s kisses, Lover’s knots.

These are names, but they are more than names. The locate not just the plant, but also the using of the name within the locality – creating a relationship with the land that stretches beyond the now and the simple naming of a plant.

Each time I see a dock – or even more, if I mention the name ‘dock’, I am immediately transported back to my childhood, and the little greenway, shadowed by huge chestnut trees, that we used to use to go to the infant school, and me with my legs blotched and red with stings from the stinging nettles – I seem to remember that this was always the case. And Mum, patiently, hunting for a dock leaf for me to press its green-coolness against my burning legs. ‘Wherever there are stingers,’ Mum would say, ‘There are docks to take their sting away.’ It was good advice, and it has stayed with me. This idea that the landscape may contain harm and threat, but will also contain healing and remedy. I didn’t know then, it is only recently when reading accounts by indigenous writers from all over the globe, that it is very ancient wisdom. ‘The plant people,’ the Anishinaabe Indians of the Great Plains, say, ‘are your friends. Whatever your ailments, they will provide a remedy. Look to them and look after them.’ But it is no different from the old wisdoms that we once lived to – until they were demonised and made pariah. Nevertheless, this knowledge – but more importantly, this relationship with the fields and woods, waysides and hedgerows, continued to be passed down – more carefully, more secretly – from mother to daughter. But what the witch pyres could never accomplish, mockery did. Healing in the plants? What crass superstitious nonsense. But it is coming back. An acknowledgement of what has been lost – knowledge, yes. But fortunately, we still have old manuscripts, ancient sources that breathe in their often-codified form their learning to us - although not as opaque and codified as scientific taxonomies and equations. And, like Mum, this old lore, still lived on. Knowledge, even if partial, is recoverable. What is harder to restore is the closely connected relationship between person and landscape from which this knowledge arose. But that too is coming back. A re-awakening that, for all our sense of nomadism, we are in fact home and a home that can provide for us - if we just allow it to.

And that is what these names help us to do – to rediscover these very local connections that link us not just to the plant as an object but to the way in which they were socially located within the human lives of those older communities. AND ALSO – and this important – restoring our own past relationships with them. I cannot be the only person who, on spotting tangled drifts of cleavers or goosegrass on some scrubby backlot, am not taken back to childhood, chasing around the playground with handfuls of it, playing – literal – tag with my friends. The sense of accomplishment when I got a strand to stick to Southy’s back because he could run as quick as lightning and could dodge and jink more fleetly than a hare. Or later, gathering armfuls from the hedge at the bottom of our garden to the delighted cluckings of Beatrice, Mrs Peabody and the fearful Hettie. 

Or what about, flicking plantain missiles in the playful wars of summers past, when we were allowed on the field for lunchtime play? Or working out which blades of grass made the best whistle-kazoo, or threading daisies and wondering where the red has come from, or plucking the petals until only the gold showed – ‘she loves me, she loves me not.’ Or ‘buttercup, buttercup’ holding a buttercup under your friend’s chin to see if they like butter?

“Sedges have edges, rushes are round, but grasses have nodes that go down to the ground.”

But these memories don’t need to go back far – I cannot see a hazelnut tree when it is heavy with fruit, without being taken to the Welsh Marches where one golden early autumn afternoon, a few years ago, when Donna and I picked bagfuls to later make into hazelnut loaf.

These connections are important and help to root (or re-root) us within our landscapes. Small piton-like flags hammered into our consciousness that helps us to navigate our world. They act as maps for our lives as good as any GPS system. The names, the encounters, the memories, they all combine to chart your path and provide markers for your journeys ahead. There’s a poetry here.

This week, I attended the virtual conversation that was organised by the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics. The speakers were two Welsh scientists, one a geomorphologist and the other an ecologist, who were also both established poets; Hywell Griffiths and Elinor Gwynn. It was a fascinating and inspiring conversation that left me with a lot of things to think through. However, it was a particular comment that Elinor made that struck home immediately. She articulated something that had been percolating in my mind for a fair while.

One of Elinor’s poetry projects – for Elinor the boundaries between poetry and art, words and visual imagery, are increasingly being pushed. But one of the things she is involved with is preserving words and names. She noted how many of the traditional Welsh poets rooted their poems firmly within their landscape, naming not just the main landmarks, but the individual fields. It was something I tried to explore a few years ago, but it was difficult. Although some of the local farmers knew of a couple of the field names, most of those I spoke to were unsure. I went to some of the county archives, but even there, the old field names were simply no longer recorded and even the older maps omitted most. Elinor, is having greater success and her work is also extending into the sea – the names given by the fishing communities for the different areas off the coast of South Wales. As with farming, these old names are dying out – their old usefulness no longer needed. Areas of sea and fishing grounds can be more accurately identified by GPS. Elinor, is amassing a database of sorts, of the names before they are lost altogether.   

Elinor showed us her researches in the form of a poem-map. The names themselves – enriched and patinaed as they are – are poetry enough, Elinor observed. Each name partly descriptive, partly capturing some past event or association, embeds itself within the soil and is redolent with the past – closing the gap between speaker and the journey of this landscape. 

The English translation of Wales’ longest place name is: ‘St Mary's Church in the hollow of the white hazel near the rapid whirlpool of Llandysilio of the red cave’. And yes, it was created as a gimmick to pull in tourists and strike a claim for fame. But its component parts are undeniably genuine. The village of ‘St Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel’, the nearby hamlet bearing the name of ‘the church of St Tysilio of the red cave’, and incorporation of ‘rapid whirlpool that lay between them - who can deny that that is not, in its own way, poetry.

Again, there is this sense of a people embedded within the land – their lives wrapped up in its geology and community. Song-lines that help us to navigate our landscapes. I am conscious of the problematic nature of this concept of song lines, but it has a power that, even if the initial evidence for them is suspect, they map easily onto an indigenous cosmology (and I use indigenous freely and non-specifically here). Listening to Elinor’s explanation of her art and poetry put me in mind of Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places. It is an ethnographic study on the concept of geography and place within the American Apache nation. It is fascinating and remarkable. Showing how place names work to embed a history within the topographical landscape that remains alive and current with each generation. People and geography are enmeshed as one. The land talking about the past, encouraging, warning, reproving. The land and the people merge into one.       

We, in the post-industrial west have moved too far away from the land to experience that connection anymore, but there are roots. Your individual roots – the names, the memories – they all connect you back. It might be small beginnings, but they are there – as mine are there. Will I ever be able to look at an oak tree again without remembering the grandmother loved by badgers, or the twin polestars and the devastating day one fell and the lessons it later taught me?

Yes, it is from such soil and mud does a poetry grow that roots us back into the soil of our home.

I promised you that I was going to show you something wonderful, didn’t I? Listen. Here beside the canal on a late May-time day, surrounded by all the familiar things that you would expect to see. See? Today, you walk through poetry.  

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful, peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG