Landmarks
Page 3
One of the most influential ethnographic works concerning landscape and language is Keith Basso’s Wisdom Sits in Places (1996), an investigation into the extreme situatedness of thought in the Apache people of Western Arizona. Basso spent a decade living and working alongside the Apache inhabitants of a town called Cibecue. He became especially interested in the interconnections of story, place-name, historical sense and the ethical relationships of person to person and person to place. Early in the book, Basso despatches what he calls the ‘widely accepted’ fallacy in anthropology that place-names operate only as referents. To the Apache, place-names do refer, indispensably, but they are used and valued for other reasons as well: aesthetically, ethically, musically. The Apache understand how powerfully language constructs the human relation to place, and as such they possess, Basso writes, ‘a modest capacity for wonder and delight at the large tasks that small words can be made to perform’. In their imagination geography and history are consubstantial. Placeless events are inconceivable, in that everything that happens must happen somewhere.
Basso writes of the ‘bold, visual, evocative’ imagery of Apache place-names, which hold ‘ear and eye jointly enthralled’:
Tséé Dotł’zh Ténaahijaahá, which translates as Green Rocks Side by Side Jut Down Into Water (designating a group of mossy boulders on the bank of a stream)
Tséé Ditł’ige Naaditiné, which translates as Trail Extends Across Scorched Rocks (designating a crossing at the bottom of a canyon).
Like their Gaelic counterparts, these place-names are distinctive for their descriptive precision. They often imply the position from which a place is being viewed – an optimal or actual vantage point – such that when the name is spoken, it ‘requires that one imagine it as if standing or sitting at a particular spot’. Basso records that this ‘precision’ is a quality openly appreciated by their Apache users, in that it invites and permits imaginative journeying within a known landscape. At one point, labouring on a fence-building project with two cowboys from Cibecue, he listens to one of the men reciting lists of place-names to himself as he strings and then tightens barbed wire between posts. When Basso asks him why he is doing so, the cowboy answers, ‘I like to. I ride that way in my mind.’
In both Lewis and Arizona, language is used not only to navigate but also to charm the land. Words act as compass; place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it.
III
In Which Language Is Lost
The extraordinary language of the Outer Hebrides is currently being lost. Gaelic itself is in danger of withering on the tongue: the total number of native speakers in the Scottish Gàidhealtachd is now around 58,000. Of those who do still speak Gaelic, many are understandably less interested in the intricacies of toponymy, or the exactitudes of which the language is capable with regard to landscape. Tim Robinson – the great writer, mathematician and deep-mapper of the Irish Atlantic seaboard – notes how with each generation in the west of Ireland ‘some of the place-names are forgotten or becoming incomprehensible’. Often in the Outer Hebrides I have been told that younger generations are losing a literacy of the land. Cox remarks that the previously ‘important role’ of place-names and ‘natural’ language in the Carloway culture has ‘recently’ been sharply diminished. In 2006 Finlay observed that as people’s ‘working relationship with the moorland [of Lewis] has changed, [so] the keen sense of conservation that went with it has atrophied, as has the language which accompanied that sense’.
What is occurring in Gaelic is, broadly, occurring in English too – and in scores of other languages and dialects. The nuances observed by specialized vocabularies are evaporating from common usage, burnt off by capital, apathy and urbanization. The terrain beyond the city fringe has become progressively more understood in terms of large generic units (‘field’, ‘hill’, ‘valley’, ‘wood’). It has become a blandscape. We are blasé about place, in the sense that Georg Simmel used that word in his 1903 essay ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ – meaning indifferent to the distinction between things.
It is not, on the whole, that natural phenomena and entities themselves are disappearing; rather that there are fewer people able to name them, and that once they go unnamed they go to some degree unseen. Language deficit leads to attention deficit. As we further deplete our ability to name, describe and figure particular aspects of our places, our competence for understanding and imagining possible relationships with non-human nature is correspondingly depleted. The ethno-linguist K. David Harrison bleakly declares that language death means the loss of ‘long-cultivated knowledge that has guided human–environment interaction for millennia … accumulated wisdom and observations of generations of people about the natural world, plants, animals, weather, soil. The loss [is] incalculable, the knowledge mostly unrecoverable.’ Or as Tim Dee neatly puts it, ‘Without a name made in our mouths, an animal or a place struggles to find purchase in our minds or our hearts.’
IV
In Which Enchantment Is Practised
In 1917 the sociologist and philosopher Max Weber named ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung) as the distinctive injury of modernity. He defined disenchantment as ‘the knowledge or belief that … there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation’. For Weber, disenchantment was a function of the rise of rationalism, which demanded the extirpation of dissenting knowledge-kinds in favour of a single master-principle. It found its expressions not just in human behaviour and policy – including the general impulse to control nature – but also in emotional response. Weber noted the widespread reduction of ‘wonder’ (for him the hallmark of enchantment, and in which state we are comfortable with not-knowing) and the corresponding expansion of ‘will’ (for him the hallmark of disenchantment, and in which state we are avid for authority). In modernity, mastery usurped mystery.
Our language for nature is now such that the things around us do not talk back to us in ways that they might. As we have enhanced our power to determine nature, so we have rendered it less able to converse with us. We find it hard to imagine nature outside a use-value framework. We have become experts in analysing what nature can do for us, but lack a language to evoke what it can do to us. The former is important; the latter is vital. Martin Heidegger identified a version of this trend in 1954, observing that the rise of technology and the technological imagination had converted what he called ‘the whole universe of beings’ into an undifferentiated ‘standing reserve’ (Bestand) of energy, available for any use to which humans choose to put it. The rise of ‘standing reserve’ as a concept has bequeathed to us an inadequate and unsatisfying relationship with the natural world, and with ourselves too, because we have to encounter ourselves and our thoughts as mysteries before we encounter them as service providers. We require things to have their own lives if they are to enrich ours. But allegory as a mode has settled inside us, and thrived: fungibility has replaced particularity.
This is not to suggest that we need adopt either a literal animism or a systematic superstition; only that by instrumentalizing nature, linguistically and operationally, we have largely stunned the earth out of wonder. Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment, for language does not just register experience, it produces it. The contours and colours of words are inseparable from the feelings we create in relation to situations, to others and to places. Language carries a formative as well as an informative impulse – the power known to theorists as ‘illocutionary’ or ‘illative’. Certain kinds of language can restore a measure of wonder to our relations with nature. Others might offer modest tools for modest place-making. Others still might free objects at least momentarily from their role as standing reserve. As Barry Lopez urges: ‘One must wait for the moment when the thing – the hill, the tarn, the lunette, the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada – ceases to be a thing and becomes some
thing that knows we are there.’
Between 2002 and 2006 a group of researchers compiled a place-dictionary called Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape. Their ambition was to retrieve, define and organize nearly 1,000 terms and words for specific aspects of US topography. Its ethical presumption was that having such a language to hand is vital for two reasons: because it allows us to speak clearly about such places, and because it encourages the kinds of allegiance and intimacy with one’s places that might also go by the name of love, and out of which might arise care and good sense. Inspired by Lopez, the research team located their terms, defined them, and illustrated them with usages from American literature, science and art. The result – as with Finlay’s glossary – is a kind of sustained prose-poem, exquisite in its precision and its metaphors.
For Home Ground does not so much define as evoke; or rather it defines through evocation. ‘That rivers and streams seldom flow naturally in straight lines is a gift of beauty; otherwise we would not have canyons that bear the shape of moving water,’ begins the entry for gooseneck, meaning those ‘deeply entrenched river meanders … so tight in succession that their bows nearly meet one another’. Shinnery is ‘a type of low brush thicket … difficult or impossible to cross on foot or horseback … taking its name from the shin oak (Quercus havardii)’. Cowbelly describes super-soft river mud:
[I]t is along the banks of slow-moving creeks, where the current slackens completely, that the very finest particles of sediment settle out of the water … at the boundary where water becomes silt, the bottom is so plush that the sinking foot of the barefoot wader barely registers the new medium, only a second change of temperature.
What a finely particular definition for a finely particular phenomenon! Thus this dictionary proceeds, lyrically renewing a language of place. The aim of Home Ground, wrote Lopez in his Introduction, was ‘to recall and to explore [such] language … because we believed in an acquaintance with it, that using it to say more clearly and precisely what we mean, would bring us a certain kind of relief [and] would draw us closer to … landscapes’. This is the language, he concluded, that ‘keeps us from slipping off into abstract space’.
It is true that once a landscape goes undescribed and therefore unregarded, it becomes more vulnerable to unwise use or improper action. This is what happened to the Lewisian moor in 2004.
V
In Which Songlines Are Sung
In November of that year the engineering company AMEC, in conjunction with British Energy, filed an application to build a vast wind farm on the Brindled Moor. The proposed farm – which would have been Europe’s largest – consisted of 234 wind turbines, each of them 140 metres high (more than twice the height of Nelson’s Column) and with a blade-span of more than 80 metres (longer than a Boeing 747 measured nose-to-tail). Each turbine would be sunk into a foundation of 700 cubic metres of concrete. The generated energy was to be ducted off the island and down to the centres of need by 210 pylons, each 26 metres high, joined by overhead lines. To service the turbines and pylons, 104 miles of roads would be built, as well as nine electrical substations. Five new rock quarries would be opened, and four concrete-batching plants established. In total, around 5 million cubic metres of rock and 2.5 million cubic metres of peat would be excavated and displaced. By AMEC’s own account in their initial application, ‘the effect on the landscape resource, character and perception [of Lewis would be] major and long-term’. AMEC’s application began a three-and-a-half-year battle over the nature and the future of the moor. It was fought between the majority of Lewisians (around 80 per cent of the island’s inhabitants expressed opposition to the plans), and AMEC together with its local supporters – for whom the wind farm meant jobs and money on an island long troubled by emigration and low employment.
The crux of the debate concerned the perceived nature and worth of the moor itself, and the language that was used – and available – to describe it. It was in the interests of AMEC to characterize the moor as a wasteland, a terra nullius. The metaphors used to describe the moor by those in favour of the plans repeatedly implied barrenness. One pro-farm local councillor dismissed the island’s interior as ‘a wilderness’, suggesting a space both empty of life and hostile in its asperities (wilderness in the old American-Puritan sense of the word, then, or that implied by the desert ‘wilderness of Zin’ through which the Israelites wander in Exodus). If the pro-farm lobby charged the moor with an affective power, it was the capacity to depress and oppress the mind. The journalist Ian Jack, arguing in support of AMEC’s application in 2006, described it as ‘a vast, dead place: dark brown moors and black lochs under a grey sky, all swept by a chill wet wind’. Jack’s comment, like those of the two people I overheard on the plane, has precedents in earlier modern encounters with moors: Daniel Defoe, for instance, who in 1725 rode over the ling moors above Chatsworth in Derbyshire, and found them ‘abominable’, ‘a waste and a howling wilderness’. It recalls the many nineteenth-century white settler accounts of the Australian desert interior as a ‘hideous blank’: ‘everywhere the same dreadful, dreary, dismal desert’, lamented the Argus newspaper of Melbourne in an 1858 editorial against the ‘interior’. And it anticipated James Carnegy-Arbuthnott, the estate owner in Angus who notoriously argued in 2013 that it is right that few people own most of the land in Scotland because ‘so much [of it] is unproductive wilderness’.
The American geographer Yi Fu Tuan proposes that ‘it is precisely what is invisible in the land that makes what is merely empty space to one person, a place to another’. The task that faced the Lewisians, when the conflict with AMEC began, was to find ways of expressing the moor’s ‘invisible’ content: the use-histories, imaginative shapes, natural forms and cultural visions it had inspired, and the ways it had been written into language and memory. They needed to create an account of the moor as ‘home ground’ – and for that they needed to renew its place-language. ‘Those who wish to explain to politicians and others why landscape should be nurtured and made safe for all living things face a daunting task where the necessary concepts and vocabulary are not to hand,’ wrote Finlay in a public essay; ‘it is therefore difficult to make a case for conservation without sounding either wet or extreme.’
Beginning in early 2005, the islanders began to devise ways of making that case by re-enchanting the moor. They started both to salvage and to create accounts – narrative, lexical, poetic, painterly, photographic, historical, cartographical – which, taken in sum or interleaved, might restore both particularity and mystery to the moor, and thus counter the vision of it as a ‘vast, dead place’. Among the most memorable moor-works to emerge out of this period of resistance was one made by Anne Campbell and her collaborator, Jon MacLeod. It was a booklet entitled A-mach an Gleann, which translates as ‘A Known Wilderness’. Anne’s family had lived in the township of Bragar for generations, and she and MacLeod wanted to evoke a sense of the moor as a wild place, but also to demonstrate its long-term enmeshment with human culture. They became interested in the criss-crossing paths and tracks – both human and animal – that existed on the moor, each of which they saw as a storyline of a kind.
So they began to map their own moor-walks, recording paths taken and events that occurred or were observed along the way. On 27 June 2005, for instance, they walked between ‘An Talamh Briste, Na Feadanan Gorma, Gleann Shuainagadail, and Loch an Òis’ and saw in these places ‘drifts of sparkling bog-cotton’, ‘scarlet damselflies’, ‘a long wind, carrying bird-calls’. They ‘crossed a greenshank territory’ and ‘disturbed a hind in long grass’, before ‘stopping at a shieling where an eagle had preened’. MacLeod delved further back, making speculative reconstructions of the memory maps of ‘the people who traversed this landscape before and after the peat grew, naming features to navigate their way around, or to commemorate stories’ and events. In these ways, Campbell and MacLeod began to create their own repertoire of songlines – ancient and new – for the moor.
Another group of islanders gathered poems and folk songs concerning the moor, mostly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including Padraig Campbell’s ‘The Skylark’ and Derick Thomson’s ‘The Side of the Hill’ and ‘The Moor’. These were texts written on the moor in both senses, and they testified to its subtlety. Meanwhile, Finlay and Anne began to compile their Peat Glossary. In their wish to record the particularities of the moor, they shared an ethic if not a tone with Hugh MacDiarmid’s angry poem rebuking a ‘fool’ who has dismissed Scotland as ‘small’. ‘Scotland small? Our multiform, our infinite Scotland small?’ cries MacDiarmid furiously. ‘Only as a patch of hillside may be a cliché corner / To a fool who cries “Nothing but heather!” ’ Taking that patch of hillside as his metonym for Scotland, MacDiarmid’s poem ‘gazes’ hard at it, singling out this and that for our attention. He finds in moorland ‘not only heather’ but also blueberries (green, scarlet, blue), bog myrtle (sage green), tormentil (golden), milkworts (‘blue as summer skies’) flourishing on the patches that sheep have grazed bare, down in the unworked peat hags, sphagnum mosses (yellow, green and pink), sundew and butterwort, nodding harebells that ‘vie in their colour’ with the butterflies that alight on them, and stunted rowan saplings with their ‘harsh dry leaves’. ‘ “Nothing but heather!” ’ the poem mocks sharply at its close; ‘How marvellously descriptive! And incomplete!’
‘What is required,’ wrote Finlay in a public appeal to save the Brindled Moor, ‘is a new nomenclature of landscape and how we relate to it, so that conservation becomes a natural form of human awareness, and so that it ceases to be under-written and under-appreciated and thus readily vulnerable to desecration.’ ‘What is needed,’ he concluded superbly, ‘is a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook.’ He and his fellow islanders worked to produce some version of that phrasebook for Lewis.