by Nan Shepherd
For Shepherd, then, the body is at risk in the mountains – but it is also the site of reward, a fabulous sensorium. More than this: it is an auxiliary to the intellect. In the mountains, she writes, a life of the senses is lived so purely that ‘the body may be said to think’. This is her book’s most radical proposition. Radical because, as a philosophical position, it was cutting-edge. In the same years that Shepherd was writing The Living Mountain, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing his influential theories of the body-subject, as first laid out in his The Phenomenology of Perception (1945). Merleau-Ponty was at the time working as a professional philosopher in Paris with all the institutional support and vocational confidence that such a position brings. He had been trained as one of the French philosophical elite, studying alongside Sartre, de Beauvoir and Simone Weil at the École Normale Supérieure, where he passed the aggregation in philosophy in 1930. Shepherd was a teacher in an Aberdeen tertiary college, but her philosophical conclusions concerning colour-perception, touch and embodied knowledge now read as arrestingly similar to those of Merleau-Ponty.
For Merleau-Ponty, post-Cartesian philosophy had cleaved a false divide between the body and the mind. Throughout his career he argued for the foundational role that sensory perception plays in our understanding of the world as well in as our reception of it. He argued that knowledge is ‘felt’: that our bodies think and know in ways which precede cognition (the processing of experience by our minds). Consciousness, the human body and the phenomenal world are therefore inextricably intertwined or ‘engaged’. The body ‘incarnates’ our subjectivity and we are thus, Merleau-Ponty proposed, ‘embedded’ in the ‘flesh’ of the world. He described this embodied experience as ‘knowledge in the hands’; our body ‘grips’ the world for us and is ‘our general medium for having a world’. And the world itself is therefore not the unchanging object presented by the natural sciences, but instead endlessly relational. It is made manifest only by presenting itself to a variety of views, and our perception of it is made possible by our bodies and their sensory-motor functions. We are co-natural with the world and it with us, but we only ever see it partially.
You’ll already be able to hear the affinities between Merleau-Ponty’s thought and Shepherd’s, as well as between their dictions. On the mountain, she writes, moments occur at which ‘something moves between me and it. Place and mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both are altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.’ ‘The body is not . . . negligible, but paramount,’ she elsewhere declares, in a passage that could have come straight from Phenomenology of Perception. ‘Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body’:
The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them. The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers . . . the scratchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind – nothing that I can touch or that touches me but has its own identity for the hand as much as for the eye.
Shepherd’s belief in bodily thinking gives The Living Mountain a contemporary relevance. More and more of us live more and more separately from contact with nature. We have come increasingly to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and ideologies we absorb. We are literally losing touch, becoming disembodied, more than in any previous historical period. Shepherd saw this process starting over sixty years ago, and her book is both a mourning and a warning. One should use ‘the whole of one’s body to instruct the spirit’, she wrote decisively to Gunn. ‘This is the innocence we have lost,’ she says, ‘living in one sense at a time to live all the way through.’ Her book is a hymn to ‘living all the way through’: to touching, tasting, smelling and hearing the world. If you manage this, then you might walk ‘out of the body and into the mountain’, such that you become, briefly, ‘a stone . . . the soil of the earth’. And at that point then, well, then ‘one has been in’. ‘That is all’, writes Shepherd, and that ‘all’ should be heard not diminutively, apologetically, but expansively, vastly.
Shepherd kept walking ‘into’ the Cairngorms until late in her long life. In her final months, however, harrowed by old age, she was confined to a nursing home near Banchory. She began to suffer illusions, ‘confusions’, mis-spellings. She hallucinated that the whole ward had been moved out to a wood in Drumoak: ‘I can see the wood – I played in it as a child.’ She began to see Grampian place-names blazoned in ‘large capital letters’ in a glowing arc across the ‘dark and silent’ room in which she slept. Even in this troubled state, Shepherd was still thinking hard about the nature of perception and about how to represent perception in language. ‘It took old age to show me that time is a mode of experiencing,’ she wrote to her friend, the Scottish artist Barbara Balmer, ‘but how to convey such inwardness?’ Reading true literature, she reflected, ‘it’s as though you are standing experiencing and suddenly the work is there, bursting out of its own ripeness . . . life has exploded, stick and rich and smelling oh so good. And . . . that makes the ordinary world magical – that reverberates/illuminates.’ This ‘illumination’ of the ordinary world was, of course, what Shepherd’s own work achieved, though it would never have occurred to her to acknowledge her own exceptional power as a writer.
So the living mountain of Shepherd’s title ‘lives’ because of our ‘outgoing address’ towards it. For her as for Merleau-Ponty, matter is ‘impregnated with mind’, and the world exists in a continuous ‘active mood . . . the grammar of now, / The present tense’. Certain kinds of attention serve to ‘widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being’. Shepherd knows, of course, that this is largely delusory: that granite does not think, that corries do not sense our entry into ‘their’ space, and that rivers do not quench our thirst with pleasure or with resentment. She must not be mistaken for preaching either a superstitious animism or a lazy anthropomorphism (‘I do not ascribe sentience to the mountain’). She offers, rather, a rigorous humanism, born of a phenomenology that – astonishingly – she mostly deduced by walking rather than developed by reading.
For Shepherd, the body thinks best when the mind stops, when it is ‘uncoupled’ from the body. She writes exquisitely of those moments on the mountain when one is ‘not bedeviled by thought’. ‘They come to me most often,’ she says, ‘waking out of outdoor sleep, gazing tranced at the running of water and listening to its song.’ But the best way of all to uncouple the mind is to walk: ‘After hours of steady walking, with the long rhythm of motion sustained until motion is felt, not merely known by the brain, as the “still centre” of being . . . [you] walk the flesh transparent.’ ‘On the mountain’, she says in the book’s closing sentences, ‘for an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstasy . . . I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. That is the final grace accorded from the mountain.’ This is Shepherd’s revised version of Descartes’ cogito. I walk therefore I am. The rhythm of the pedestrian, the iamb of the ‘I am’, the beat of the placed and lifted foot.
The more I read The Living Mountain, the more it gives to me. I have read it perhaps a dozen times now, and each time I re-approach it as Shepherd re-approaches the mountain; not expecting to exhaust it of its meaning, rather to be surprised by its fresh yields. New ways of seeing emerge, or at least I find myself shown how to look again from different angles. This book is tutelary, but it is not the expression of any system or program, spiritual or religious. There is no manifesto here, no message or neat take-home moral. As on the mountain, so in the book: the knowledge it offers arrives slantwise, from unexpected directions and quarters, and apparently limitlessly. It is a book that grows with the knowing. ‘However often I walk on them,’ writes Shepherd of the Cairngorms, ‘these hills hold astonishment for me .
. . There is no getting accustomed to them.’ However often I read The Living Mountain, it holds astonishment for me; there is no getting accustomed to it.
Cambridge–Cairngorms–Cambridge, 2011
Notes
The spelling of Scottish toponyms is a vexed business: the names of Cairngorm places given in this introduction are consistent with Nan Shepherd’s usages in The Living Mountain. Warm thanks are due for various kinds of help in the writing of this introduction to Barbara Balmer, Janice Galloway, Naomi Geraghty, Grace Jackson, Hayden Lorimer, George Mackie and Roderick Watson. I am grateful to the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland and to Dairmid Gunn for permission to quote from unpublished letters. I have not supplied specific page references when quoting from The Living Mountain, so all unreferenced quotations should be assumed to have their origins in the book. Other sources for quoted material are given below.
‘heaven-appointed task of trying’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
‘all movement, legs and arms’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Barbara Balmer, 15 January 1981, private collection.
‘library-cormorant’: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Letters, Vol I, 1785–1800, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), p. 156.
‘Poetry . . . in intensest being’ through to ‘burning heart of life’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 14 March 1930, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
‘whole nature . . . suddenly leaped into life’ through to ‘the only kind of thing that comes out of me’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
‘I’ve gone dumb’ through to ‘making a noise’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
‘Dear Nan, You don’t need me to tell you’ through to ‘facts in your world’: letter from Neil Gunn to Nan Shepherd, 30 October 1945, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
‘difficult, perhaps’ through to ‘hill & country lovers’: ibid.
‘the too too flattering ejaculations’ through to ‘towards the praiser’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 14 March 1930, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
‘Parochialism is universal’ through to ‘as much as a man can fully experience’: Patrick Kavanagh, ‘The Parish and the Universe’, in Collected Pruse [sic] (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1967), pp. 281–83.
‘irradiate the common?’ through to ‘make something universal’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, 2 April 1931, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
‘Beech bud-sheaths . . .’: ‘The Colour of Deeside’, Nan Shepherd, The Deeside Field, 8 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1937), pp. 8–12; 9.
‘like clear deeps of air’: Nan Shepherd, ‘The Hill Burns’, loose poem, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
‘substance’ through to ‘an inner light unveiled’: ‘The Colour of Deeside’, Nan Shepherd, The Deeside Field, 8 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1937), pp. 9–10.
‘going out . . . was really going in’: John Muir, journal entry, in John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir, ed. L.M. Wolfe (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1938), p. 427.
‘gullible eyes’: ‘The Colour of Deeside’, Nan Shepherd, The Deeside Field, 8 (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1937), p. 11.
‘That’s the way to see the world’: Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990), p. 106.
‘incarnates’ through to ‘our general medium for having a world’: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962), passim, but see especially pp. 144–46.
‘the whole of one’s body to instruct the spirit’: letter from Nan Shepherd to Neil Gunn, May 1940, MS 26900, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
‘I can see the wood – I played in it as a child’ through to ‘that reverberates/illuminates’: letters from Nan Shepherd to Barbara Balmer, 15 January and 2 February 1981, private collection.
‘active mood . . . the grammar of now’: Nan Shepherd, ‘Achiltibuie’, loose poem, Deposit 209, Box 19, Folder 7, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh.
ONE
The Plateau
Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: one never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.
The Cairngorm Mountains are a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered and scooped by frost, glaciers and the strength of running water. Their physiognomy is in the geography books—so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4000 feet—but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.
The plateau is the true summit of these mountains; they must be seen as a single mountain, and the individual tops, Ben MacDhui, Braeriach and the rest, though sundered from one another by fissures and deep descents, are no more than eddies on the plateau surface. One does not look upward to spectacular peaks but downward from the peaks to spectacular chasms. The plateau itself is not spectacular. It is bare and very stony, and since there is nothing higher than itself (except for the tip of Ben Nevis) nearer than Norway, it is savaged by the wind. Snow covers it for half the year and sometimes, for as long as a month at a time, it is in cloud. Its growth is moss and lichen and sedge, and in June the clumps of Silene—moss campion—flower in brilliant pink. Dotterel and ptarmigan nest upon it, and springs ooze from its rock. By continental measurement its height is nothing much—around 4000 feet—but for an island it is well enough, and if the winds have unhindered range, so has the eye. It is island weather too, with no continent to steady it, and the place has as many aspects as there are gradations in the light.
Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity. So on a clear day one looks without any sense of strain from Morven in Caithness to the Lammermuirs, and out past Ben Nevis to Morar. At midsummer, I have had to be persuaded I was not seeing further even than that. I could have sworn I saw a shape, distinct and blue, very clear and small, further off than any hill the chart recorded. The chart was against me, my companions were against me, I never saw it again. On a day like that, height goes to one’s head. Perhaps it was the lost Atlantis focused for a moment out of time.
The streams that fall over the edges of the plateau are clear—Avon indeed has become a by-word for clarity: gazing into its depths, one loses all sense of time, like the monk in the old story who listened to the blackbird.
Water of A’n, ye tin sae clear,
’Twad beguile a man of a hundred year.
Its waters are white, of a clearness so absolute that there is no image for them. Naked birches in April, lighted after heavy rain by the sun, might suggest their brilliance. Yet this is too sensational. The whiteness of these waters is simple. They are elemental transparency. Like roundness, or silence, their quality is natural, but is found s
o seldom in its absolute state that when we do so find it we are astonished.
The young Dee, as it flows out of the Garbh Choire and joins the water from the Lairig Pools, has the same astounding transparency. Water so clear cannot be imagined, but must be seen. One must go back, and back again, to look at it, for in the interval memory refuses to recreate its brightness. This is one of the reasons why the high plateau where these streams begin, the streams themselves, their cataracts and rocky beds, the corries, the whole wild enchantment, like a work of art is perpetually new when one returns to it. The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.
So back one climbs, to the sources. Here the life of the rivers begins—Dee and Avon, the Derry, the Beinnie and the Allt Druie. In these pure and terrible streams the rain, cloud and snow of the high Cairngorms are drained away. They rise from the granite, sun themselves a little on the unsheltered plateau and drop through air to their valleys. Or they cut their way out under wreaths of snow, escaping in a tumult. Or hang in tangles of ice on the rock faces. One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey to the sources is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable. There are awakened also in oneself by the contact elementals that are as unpredictable as wind or snow.
