Today, on my own at Ty Jarman, since early this morning I
have been struggling with a very familiar enemy - nervous tension. I am with difficulty putting together a new
book. It was the writing process which set it off, this crawling sensation in
my stomach which comes so suddenly and lasts so long. I was trying to express
the frustration that one of my characters feels at memories which he is not
sure are real, and that triggered feelings of frustration with my current
situation - spending too much on things which I could have done without; lack of a clear direction for my efforts,
purpose, work, and so on.
There have been periods during the day when it receded, and
I've worked hard and achieved a fair bit, but now, half a bottle of red wine
down, a frugal meal of cauliflower cheese and a few new potatoes dug from those
I planted in the cold frame; strong coffee and dark chocolate with hazel nuts;
now, still tense but emotional, I am reduced to tears by marks on paper. It's
Gavin Maxwell, the "Ring of Bright Water Trilogy". I've just finished
this recent compilation 40 years after I read the original books and only a few
weeks after a recent visit to Sandaig, opposite the Isle of Skye and the place
he called Camusfearna. He, more than any other writer I know, understands the
transcending power of deep contact with the natural world. Unlike most modern
humans he sees no conflict between his love of the animals who have given him
their absolute trust, and his instincts as a hunter. In the true chase there is
a bond between predator and prey. They have evolved together and we, as the top
predators can, if we are lucky, experience both joy at the escape of the prey
and triumph at a successful kill.
There is one particularly memorable passage towards the end
of "Raven Seek Thy Brother" when, beset by a host of terrible
problems, mostly of his own creation, he escapes to a day of deer stalking:
"The days that I spent on the hill, in worse weather
conditions than it is easy to visualize, gave to me a feeling of complete and
utter release; of a unity with nature that I had long lacked at
Camusfearna."
He hears suddenly thought the mist and rain the call of a
stag in rut - "wild and elemental…it begins low and throaty like a bull's
roar, then hollows out to a higher, dying cadence that seems to hold at the
same time challenge, despair and frustration. I stirred to that desolate music
as I stirred to the whip of wind and rain….with the cold so bitter I was conscious
of my own shivering, I felt an actual buoyancy, an uplift of spirit. This was
my world, the cradle of my species, shared with the wild creatures."
This is like my best moments bird watching, but it is hard
in our world of mass prosperity to escape in this way. In our pursuit of
material comforts we have tamed the wilderness. To feed our ever-growing
numbers we manipulate nature and create deserts of mono-culture where only a
few hardy species can survive. Then we find we long for the teeming natural
world we are so busy destroying and we use great chunks of the wealth this
destruction has brought us to re-create a semblance of what we have lost. In
these Nature Reserves no expense is spared to re-model the land to entice back
those creatures we have banished. To enable us "hunt" for them we
control our access to them and watch them from hides which do not frighten
them. In the best of these reserves, nature is laid out before us and we can
get a distant taste of that elemental wilderness. We can hunt them with our
clusters of binoculars, telescopes and cameras which our destruction of nature
has made affordable. With the power of cheap Chinese optics we can capture that
sense of proximity which Maxwell so eloquently describes.
I think he would have enjoyed the irony. It was his very
personal accounts of his life at the outer edges of civilization and his moving
rapport with the otters who shared it with him that made him prosperous, and it
was that prosperity which he used to add more and more complications of
buildings, power lines, boats, trucks, cars and communications in a race to
keep ahead of the many conflicting needs of his animals and his staff. All this
to the extent that he destroyed the elemental simplicity of the place.
What pleased me so much on my brief pilgrimage to Sandaig
was to see that nature had returned. A few telegraph poles lay slowly rotting
on the ground. The house and all its ugly extensions had long gone - and nature
has come back: a shingle beach with ringed plovers nesting, a rough grass
foreshore with at its centre a stone marking the place where the house had been
and where Maxwell's ashes lie. There is an old boarded up cottage, a waterfall
in the trees, and out towards the water a little string of islands placed there
just to look right. I was alone there
except for the birds who knew no other world and who were living their lives as
they always had.
I'm also reading George Orwell's "Down and out in Paris
and London". Like Maxwell, Orwell (Eric Blair) had been educated in the
tradition of the British upper classes, but found himself drawn to the outer
edges. Maxwell was a true aristocrat but
Blair's family had declined to the status of aspiring bourgeoisie. Both felt alienation
from their backgrounds; Maxwell as a closet homosexual obsessed with animals
and nature, Orwell as a true radical, scornful of traditional politics. I don't
suppose they ever met, and doubt whether they would have felt much in common,
but from this distance I can see several parallels. Here is Orwell:
"It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at
knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of
going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and
you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety."
They both write about their own lives; Maxwell in an
intensely personal way, Orwell with always a slightly humorous detachment: two
great thinkers looking unflinchingly at the world around them and using their
knowledge of language to make those worlds intensely real to me here, reading
their books 50 years later.
They were both (and so am I) searching for the
"special" those times and places when we are lifted out of our
ordinary lives and feel an intense contact with reality. Music can do this. I
used to sit, or more usually stand, through an hour of music which I enjoyed at
an ordinary level just for a few minutes when it took off and I felt a great
leap of joy. A whole 3 day festival could be justified by a handful of such
moments. If I could bring back Orwell and Maxwell to keep me company in front
of the main stage I think Maxwell would hate it, but Orwell would record his
impressions of it with interest.
