Skip to main content

The Old Ways



Robert Macfarlane is one of the people who has helped both revive and reinvent nature writing in the new century. If John Muir in the nineteenth walked out into the 'pristine' wilderness (though not always as pristine as he thought or wrote, having a tendency to airbrush indigenous people out), Macfarlane is as concerned with the nature that has been brought into being by our interactions. This is, no doubt, partly in recognition that virtually nowhere in this anthropocene age can we find the 'pristine' and if we are to find a renewed love for and in nature, we will have to see with and through the markings of our own hands and feet. Thus, we may find ourselves as likely in a suburb as a forest or on a well trod, marked footpath as making our own tracks in 'untouched' space.

Feet are the principal focus of 'The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot' where Macfarlane goes on a series of journeys, mostly on foot, to explore pathways, often encountering people who, in one form or another, are seeking to recreate 'pilgrimage' (if primarily in secular form). They do this in recognition that though we step into landscape, landscape does and can step into us, shaping us anew, making us more familiar to ourselves.

I was considering this today as I walked too quickly up the hill behind my house, out for a Sunday morning walk, and found myself wondering why do I do this, knowing that on one recent occasion ascending Montsegur in the Languedoc, I almost knocked myself out? Why can I not adjust my pace from my usual flat out pace on the flat? Why do I think time is at a premium when it is not? Relax, ponder, be more ponderous.

It is, also, a truism that walking stimulates thought, something about allowing the brain to fall into neutral as pace follows pace follows pace that allows the more than conscious to deliver compelling image and thought. Today I caught an image on the hop of why it may be that greater individuation of selves (and consequent separation) is required to ultimately find a deeper unity of self (as I continued to think about Gebser's speculations on the development, over time, of our consciousness or the structuring that consciousness takes at different periods of human history). I was reminded that most great philosophers were great walkers - whether the regularity of Kant's peregrination through urban Koenigsberg or Nietzsche's Alpine hikes - and here the different landscapes might playfully be seen to be reflected in the differing patterns of thought. Kant is on the level, pedestrian, Nietzsche soars.

Macfarlane takes us to many different locations and helps us think through the implications of walking both for the landscape and for ourselves. So, for example, he walks with a Palestinian friend on the West Bank where with the colonisation by Israeli military and settler, every way has become potentially contested, every step a political act of memory and communal assertion. Or finds himself at the base of Minya Konka in the Central Asian mountains poised between the sacred way of circumnavigation (as this is a Buddhist holy site) and the modern way of tempting (and highly testing) vertical ascent as a mountaineer. He settles for the latter, imagining, rightly or wrongly, this as a sign of maturing, discriminating age. He walks and talks with artists who are slowly either shaping a landscape anew, creating their own sacralising story or shaping art as memory of paths taken lifting the walking finds into new fields of constructed memory (as a Spanish artist creates 'books' of his walks from found objects symbolically rearranged).

It is a beautiful book of overlapping reflections on walking and being walked into; and, of the myriad ways, practical, psychological and spiritual, we make meaning as we pace, here and there.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more