On Wildernesses

Travel

Quick Summary: Some Kenya-nostalgia, some thoughts about what the wild offers, and gems from ‘Is a River Alive’ which I’ve really enjoyed.

I am in London, thinking of a long slow paddle under the stars of Watamu. We have taken a dhow, an old shipping boat out on the Kenyan coast and the water is ink-black and smooth. We move slowly, sedately, the water rippling but never lapping - never broken - and there is the heart-stopping combination of black water and stars.

I don’t know if it is from the same instinct that makes us see faces in tree trunks, but as I sit looking up from that long slow boat, I swear I can see the stars connected, see the lines that joins each part of the constellations together. The beauty, the stillness and slowness of it all, combined with the residues of a mushroom-buzz has led this group of strangers to feel intimate, anchored together against the expanse of the water, listening to the slow brush of paddle on reed. Driving back on a shared motorbike we speak about the vanishing of vastness, the feeling of smallness that comes beneath a full sky.

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I am in London, and we have a mouse in the dishwasher, and as I reach a single, gingerish hand towards the handle, I am reminded that I once shared a room with nine bats, looking up at the small eyes winking, catching slivers of the moon, listening to the rustle above my mosquito net, and wondering if a falling bat had enough force to tear through it. I think of the ridiculousness of myself now, this gingerly opening door, when I know the seconds to count to check a hippo is far enough away in a dam that I will swim in.

I am missing the competence of the wild, the chance to do something brave, and the knowledge that it gives you of being the sort of person who can do something brave - who can swim where you know there are crocodiles, who can hear a lion roar knowing there is just air and a centimetre of fabric between you and the sounds source. I miss climbing up on vines and rockfaces, trusting your weight, hauling yourself up and jumping down, sitting with legs over ledges. Counting the metres to a buffalo to know if you can make it to a car if it decides to charge.

It is not so much the risk I miss, as the other traits that surround it - the competence, and the trust too - trust in people who have grown up in the wild, who know when an elephant is worth being wary of, or that the crocodile-water is okay, who can show you what plants to eat and how. The chance to trust in the competence of others, and to feel it growing in yourself, the sense of averted danger - Emily and I stepping out, chancing a run to our tent, only to be greeted with a low, unseen growl, our relief and the sense of closeness after.

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Victoria Park, last weekend, a turn on the rowboats. A heron, grey-silver, sculptural, moving intermittently like a street statue - just enough to get attention, to show off one angle or another. Turning the corner, and a moorhen nest, mother with the grey, dragon-ey moorhen feet, child like a tiny volcano, head tufted red blending into an acid yellow, black feathers below, phoenix-like.

Pairs of electric dragonflies, a duckling, water to fight just enough against - enough to feel a little better.

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I’ve just finished Robert MacFarlane’s ‘Is A River Alive?’, and it was brilliant! Interesting, novel, well-paced and beautiful with an honesty about the rapture and the expansiveness of incredible, awe-striking scenes that was accurate without being trite.

I loved parts of the language - a description of Cosmo as ‘all corkscrews and curlicues, a cosmic-comic Puck’; ‘winter-struck’; a startled wood-pigeon that ‘flaps away like dropped crockery’; swallows sat ‘like musical notes on the staves of telephone wires’; terns that ‘scissor past us, all knife-points and origami-folds’; kayaks ‘wrinkling the smoothness’ of water.

Then a lot of new and interesting ideas to steal. The adjective Vividus - Latin root of vivid - spirited, lively, full of life. A grammar of animacy - language that can fully encompass and describe life and living. Kairos - the right and opportune moment to act decisively - seems apposite and useful. Inscendence - the opposite of transcendence - the desire to move in, inwards, to be consumed not rise above, and the idea of ‘finding yourself falling in love outwards’.

Last, the images - more than I can write. I noticed that there’s an element of time or history in many of my favourites. Sleeping sperm whales, walked across in still water, heads pointing out - MacFarlane imagines what it would be to paddle through this still, sleeping Stonehenge, or to chart the language of whales over centuries, read a record of changing currents, climate, epochs. He describes a shifting tides of trees as disease or fire ravages one species and others grow to take their place, the rapid dynamism of a growing forest if only one chooses the right scale. The image of billions of pieces of golden pollen on a vast lake.

It was lovely, and it made me think of wonder and wildness, which is not a bad Thursday evening. Wishing all well.

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Misc notes.

Thoughts I had:

• what in nature shouldn’t be studied, if studying leads to a mindset of subservience. There’s an exceptionalism even in the book (well but I can go see/ observe/ partake in the Inuit rituals even though that means pollution - but in Chennai, the people who do so are wrong). What should be left unstudied? How could you know something shouldn’t be

• moments of proper beauty have a logic, a deliverance to them - a sense that of course this beauty is happening now, because it is what was needed, and what is right

• there’s a paternalism in macfarlane’s ideas of rivers having rights - humans smoke and do things that are bad for them, who can speak to the river? do I worry about the over-extension of concepts here?

Things to read:

• H2O and the waters of forgetfulness

• Grammar of Animacy

• La Naturaleza no es muda

• I want to read more about Eridaunus, constellation and myth + katabasis - the descent into an underworld

• The Willows Algernon Blackwood

• The images of pollution - the image of the Don River in Toronto catching fire, a river burning; Lake Ontario being so polluted you could develop photographic film inside it; the Three Gorges dam being vast enough to slow the rotation of the earth.