Granta 133
Page 17
The hearth is quite obviously the most sacred, numinous place in the house. It lies at its centre, and it is the only part of the house that opens to the skies. Everything in the house points towards it, and everyone is drawn towards its warmth and comfort and above all, fascination. It has a life of its own, it demands to be fed.
Thought I heard something ‘ticking’ by the desk facing the moat. It is a beetle – small, brown, long-bodied, that seems caught in a spider’s web and is ‘ticking’ with periodic convulsions so that it uncoils like a spring with a ‘click’. I also notice a much longer beetle-hole in the beam. Could it be deathwatch? Not sure it is: it’s the right size, but doesn’t look quite right in colour and is a little too long and thin. Rotten pollard willow tops are deathwatch habitat and they’re often brought into the house on firewood. I observe the beetle in a jam jar. I will let it go on a rotten willow in the morning. Half the firewood I bring in to store in the hearth is probably infested with bulbs. I hate the word ‘inglenook’ – too folksy.
All sorts of things wander in and out of this house. Newts appear late at night, strolling across my study carpet. They seem to know where they’re going, and just disappear again if I leave them alone. Sometimes I pick them up and leave them in a flower bed. Toads turn up too, and there’s one in residence just outside the door, fooled by the escaping heat into thinking it’s spring, and croaking gently all evening. There must be all kinds of cracks and corners creatures can wriggle through, and anyway, the doors stand open most of the summer and autumn, and on sunny days in winter when the wood stove sometimes overheats my study.
The trustful way a moth or dragonfly will cling to your hand, or walk about on it.
There are respectable precedents for spending time observing insects. Nabokov spent years chasing blue butterflies or peering at them through his microscope. It didn’t stop him writing. Insects live closer to the land than we do – and the moon and stars too, as far as I can see – responding to nuances in the weather or the lunar calendar, or just a molecule or two of each other’s pheromones on the night air, with fanatical fervour.
Our Suffolk common just outside this window, and the four meadows and their hedgerows have been buzzing with insects all spring and summer. Even now, in November, the butterflies keep waking up inside the house and flapping at the window, trailing spiders’ webs like bits of torn dress. And ichneumon flies drone loudly round the room as soon as the wood-stove cranks up the temperature past seventy, emerging from the crevices and peg holes in the beams they spent hours sampling on the wing a month or two ago, like divers looking for eels.
A spider’s web follows the same plan as a tree trunk. I have counted fifty-nine concentric threads on the spider’s web stretched across my windows and measured its diameter as seven inches, although it is more oval than round.
Dolomedes (fimbriatus) carries echoes of Archimedes – also associated in my mind with water, through the famous bath in which he is supposed to have discovered his laws of displacement. The spider relies on another of the laws of physics: surface tension, and the power of the meniscus to buoy up its eight legs spread out across the surface. There’s something wise and ancient about spiders too: the feeling that there is a considerable intelligence at work as they watch you.
Entering a wood is to enter an element as different as the sea. The subterranean world of the wood floor, sometimes silent, sometimes noisy with chainsaws and work, full of song, people, clattering axes, human work and the crackling of fire.
The stump of my grandfather’s arm where his hand had been amputated looked exactly the same as a tree looks when it heals after a limb has been sawn off. The bark grows together around and over the wound, and it flows towards the centre and meets like water. Grandpa reacted the same way as a tree to the trauma of amputation: he grew up faster and he grew in stature and strength. Plus: he put his roots down deeper. His arm, sans hand, looked like a cigar stub.
Winter
One of my greatest pleasures in life is to turn my compost heap. There’s a touch of archaeology about it as you peel off successive layers of half-rotted weeds, and something of the quiet satisfaction of counting banknotes. I have my own gang of tiny alchemists, millions of them, all busy turning the dross of old banana skins, potato peel and grass cuttings into the golden, delicious fragrance that will feast this year’s salad crop and increase the roses. In winter, you might be stoking a fire, so much steam billows out of the heap, and you can warm your frozen fingers in it. As a vegetable power station, the compost heap is a shanty town for the occasional rat or mouse family, or anything else that likes to keep warm and sheltered. Other people get slow-worms or snakes, but I haven’t been so lucky, although I did get a fat, orange-bottomed bumblebee this summer, nesting in the cliff face left by my spade where I quarried.
‘Vicious’ is the word that springs to mind to describe blackthorn. Call me a masochist or perverse, but I still love these sea urchins of our hedgerows, spiny foot soldiers that will prick you like a wasp or puncture a tractor tyre swifter than a thought. The entire bush is armoured with batteries of hypodermic syringes.
Whenever I’ve wanted to express what I feel about a particular wood or tree, I have simply gone out and begun some hard physical work with that species, and the wood has never failed to speak to me, to give up its secrets as if they had been withheld to all but the supplicant willing to devote an hour or two of hard labour and expend some effort, even sustain some pain, in the pursuit of the truth about that particular tree. You have to commune with the wood, and to do that you have to work.
Sometimes when I wake up, I see a window or a wall, and wonder, ‘Where am I, whose house is this? Which country am I in? Is this a hotel or the bedroom of a friend? A lover?’
Then slowly I remember I am in my own house, and it is just another bedroom. I sleep around, you see, moving from one bedroom to the other, alternating vacant bedrooms or visiting the satellite dens in the fields.
Outside my windows, I hear industrious tapping, like a gardener at work. Is he banging home a fencing post, or mending a gate? It sounds like hammering, and is the vigorous percussion of a thrush’s beak and a snail. This thrush is constantly at work at certain particular anvils around the house. One by the pile of peg tiles next to the ash arch, one by the woodshed close to a young walnut tree.
The first thing I see in my window when I wake up is woods. Twelve in one, sixteen in the other – subdivisions of the window. Each frames trees, a lattice of branches, and beyond, a Suffolk sky. Sun just beginning to show from the clouds.
Ash trees kissing and plaiting (maples too) like lovers on the sides of Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. ‘For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!’ A frozen kiss. The embrace of ivy lianas in the ash leaves an impression, a dent, in the bark. The word is ‘ingrained’.
The meandering of a river and the sinuous curving branches of an old coppiced ash are one and the same. They express and map the constant fluctuations in the forces in the world. If an ash tree grows first this way and then that, it is responding to changing conditions of light around it.
I remember studying the leaf and the details of the stomata, cutting delicate sections of leaf with a barber’s cut-throat razor, honed on a leather strop at the front of the laboratory classroom. The wonder of stomata. The central political act which our whole future hinges on is that of the exchange of carbon dioxide into and out of the atmosphere, and the release of that element D.H. Lawrence pondered, the very essence of our continued survival: oxygen.
To see each tree as an oxygen factory, and as a trap and reservoir of carbon. So that the best way we can possibly contain and immobilise carbon is to lock it into a tree and utilise that tree as timber and make from it something of lasting beauty.
CONTRIBUTORS
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Ann Beattie’s books include the story collections What Was Mine, Follies and The New Yorker Stories, the novel Chilly Scenes of Winter and the novella WalksWith Men. Her
most recent collection, The State We’re In: Maine Stories, was published by Simon & Schuster in the US and is forthcoming from Granta Books in the UK.
Roger Deakin was a writer, filmmaker and broadcaster, and the author of Waterlog and Wildwood. A collection of extracts from his notebooks and journals were published as Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, edited by Terence Blacker and Alison Hastie.
Rebecca Giggs writes about ecology and the environmental imagination, animals, landscape, politics and memory. Her essays and stories have appeared in Best Australian ScienceWriting, Best Australian Stories, Aeon, Griffith Review and Meanjin. She teaches at Macquarie University in Sydney. Her first book is forthcoming from Scribe.
Kathleen Jamie is a poet and essayist. Her books include the essay collections Findings and Sightlines and the poetry collections The Overhaul and The Bonniest Companie, which will be published this autumn. She is Chair of Poetry at Stirling University and lives with her family in Fife.
Noelle Kocot is the author of seven books, including the forthcoming Phantom Pains of Madness. She has received numerous honours for her work. She is Poet Laureate of Pemberton, NJ, and teaches writing in New York.
Barry Lopez is the author of fourteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including Arctic Dreams, for which he received the 1986 National Book Award.
Robert Macfarlane’s books include Mountains of the Mind, TheWild Places, The Old Ways and, most recently, Landmarks. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and Roger Deakin’s literary executor.
Maureen N. McLane is the author of three poetry collections and of My Poets, a hybrid work of memoir and criticism. Her next book of poems, Mz N: the serial, comes out in May 2016.
Ben Marcus is the editor of New American Stories, published by Vintage in the US and Granta Books in the UK. His most recent books include the novel The Flame Alphabet and the story collection Leaving the Sea.
Ange Mlinko is the author of Marvelous Things Overheard. She is Poetry Editor of the Nation and teaches at the University of Florida.
Andrew Motion was the UK’s Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009 and his new collection, Peace Talks, is forthcoming by Faber & Faber. He is a Homewood Professor of the Arts at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Baltimore.
Adam Nicolson is the author of several books about history, writing and the environment, including Sea Room, Power and Glory and Gentry. His most recent book is The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters.
Audrey Niffenegger is a writer and visual artist based in Chicago and London. Her books include The Time Traveler’sWife, Raven Girl and Her Fearful Symmetry. She recently edited and illustrated a collection of ghost stories, Ghostly. She has been collecting slightly damaged taxidermy since 1986.
Gus Palmer is a social documentary photographer. He is currently working on a long-term project documenting migration routes into Europe.
Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in London. He is the environment consultant for New Scientist. His books include The Landgrabbers, Confessions of an Eco Sinner and The New Wild.
Helge Skodvin is a Norwegian photographer. His solo show, A Moveable Beast, will be presented at the University Museum of Bergen. His first book, 240 Landscapes, will be published later this year.
David Szalay was one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists in 2013. He is the author of the novels London and the South-East, The Innocent and Spring. He lives in Budapest.
Deb Olin Unferth is the author of the story collection Minor Robberies, the novel Vacation and the memoir Revolution. Her work has been published in the NewYork Times, Harper’s, the Paris Review and Granta.
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About the Cover
Stanley Donwood is the pen name of Dan Rickwood, an English artist who has collaborated extensively with Radiohead and whose work has featured on all the band’s albums. But to associate Donwood exclusively with Radiohead is to do him – and the breadth and scope of his artistic range – a disservice. In addition to his partnership with Radiohead, Donwood has created artwork for the covers of J.G. Ballard novels and for the Glastonbury festival. He has written and illustrated a number of books and exhibited his work around the world, most recently in Sydney, where a major retrospective was staged in May 2015.
Hurt Hill is taken from a series that was exhibited under the title Far Away is Close at Hand in Images of Elsewhere. Other pictures had titles like Soken Fen, Nether and Winterfold; all culled from Ordnance Survey maps. I’d become interested in what I loosely termed ‘the Northern European imagination’ and the formulation of fevered myths, legends and folk tales of the dark forests in which we spent so many aeons of ancestral time.
I took myself off to the woods, the fragments of the great forests that once spread over our continent. As dusk creeps through the trees it’s easy – very easy – to imagine every ghoul, sprite, elf or pixie that has ever haunted the Northern European mind. Our love of nature, and of all things natural, intensified with industrialisation and the depletion of what we now call ‘natural resources’. But it’s difficult to feel that love when you are lost as night is falling, walking faster and faster through the forest. My loudest thoughts passing through my mind as I stumbled around in the dark were: ‘What’s that? What’s that? What was that?’
Stanley Donwood
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