Walls and Hills. Animism: Jamie McPhie reads Norman Nicholson and Tom Gauld draws time.

More from the afternoon at the Cottage..Jamie reads Norman Nicholson's poem 'Wall."

https://vimeo.com/369031762

Here's a quote from Jamie's paper, 'Nature Matters: Diffracting a Keystone Concept of Environmental Education Research' from 2018 

'Rather like Andy Goldsworthy’s Taking a Wall for a Walk or Paul Klee’s Taking a Line for a Walk, Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson’s (1977) poem Wall emphasises the animacy of what are normally considered inanimate objects in the landscape, illuminating how ‘[a] wall walks slowly’ and ‘[i]s always on the move.’ 

Nicholson had a keen eye for movement and saw the Cumbrian landscape in ways that the Romantic poets, such as Wordsworth and Coleridge seemed to omit. 

For Nicholson’s artistic working class gaze, the landscape of the Lake District wasn’t merely a romanticised scenic nature for an elite clientele: ‘It is futile to assess such country in terms of views. […] it measures the landscape from the borders of an imaginary picture-frame; it reduces like to a post-card’, as for him ‘it is also the man-made screes beside the quarries; and whitewash on the Copper Mines Hostel, a stone playing ducks & drakes on Levers-Water, making the black tarn throw up waves like a magicians’ steel rings’ (Nicholson, 1977, pp. 33-34). We might call this more mobile landscape, landsceppan (Ingold, 2011), landscaping (Wylie, 2007), environing or just life' (Mcphie & Clarke, 2018).

Nicholson invites us to step outside our reading of time as a measure of our own development; in the world he describes  things move slowly,  to us imperceptibly. What we do with the stone  in making the wall   is incidental; what seems a profound and decisive action is a micro-incremental episode in the life of the stone. It is making its own way. 

On my wall is a strip by Tom Gauld, cut from the Guardian.  Tom has kindly granted permission to show it, and you can see more of his work here..  www.tomgauld.com

In "The Hills" two rounded grassy mounds  share what is to them a moment. One is about to draw attention to something on the others head, but in the time it takes the hill to point it out, the Thing has gone. The Thing is a castle; in frame 1 it is a single tower under a flag; in frame 2 other buildings surround it and in the final frame it is reduced to ruins. The action is described in 3 frames, but what goes on between the frames is just as important. In the space between the frames are centuries of activity. In the time it takes to resolve the conversation, generations of us of have come and gone and the castle has been deserted and sacked. The voices of the hills themselves would be, to us, an decipherable low, glacial rumble.  Those birds in the 3rd frame are the descendants of the ones in the 1st.

Imagine the three preceding frames....and the three after. 

The active memory of land  is composed of  frames like these.  Somewhere is stored an account of the space between the frames, when grass grew under shadows that crept from blade to blade, and bent and straightened under nothing but rain and sun.