En-chant the Land
Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks
Hamish Hamilton, 400pp, £20.00, ISBN 9780241146538
reviewed by Jennifer Upton
‘Before you become a writer,’ says Robert Macfarlane in Landmarks, ‘you must first become a reader.’ Macfarlane is an attentive, empathetic reader of texts and landscapes. These dual literacies inform each other in Landmarks, creating a book that invites its own readers to be enriched by its language and turn their gaze outwards, to the grammar of the natural world. The book is a record of Macfarlane’s ‘pupillage, if the word may be allowed to carry its senses both of “tuition” and (in that ocular flicker) of “gaining vision”’: ‘thus the book is filled with noticers and noticings.’
Some of the ‘noticers’ who populate Landmarks are the writers who enabled Macfarlane’s literary pupillage. Each chapter weaves itself through the work of other writers. Macfarlane keeps step with Nan Shepherd, who in The Living Mountain wrote about walking the Cairngorm Mountains. He follows Roger Deakin’s water routes through Britain, as recorded in Waterlog, and watches JA Baker as he watched birds in the fields and coasts of Essex. With Richard Skelton he hears the plaintive music of northern moors and Barry Lopez is his gateway to the arctic wilderness of northern Canada. Richard Jefferies is Macfarlane’s literary field guide to England’s city edgelands, just as Jacquetta Hawkes made stones speak through her hybrid writing on the geological history of Britain. The final chapters trace John Muir’s journeys in the woodlands of the United States and conclude with a chapter on the ‘Childish’, the unique sensibility of children towards place: ‘a wild compound of dream, spell and substance.’
Placed amongst these chapters are the glossaries of words from across the British Isles: words gleaned from writers and artists, slang, agricultural usage, geological terms, local dialects and languages. The words are corralled by themes that roughly correspond to the preceding chapters. Thus we find out that haze-fire is the ‘luminous morning mist through which the dawn sun is shining’ after the introductory chapter on the peatlands of Lewis, Scotland, and discover the beautifully evocative term for thawing, ungive, after reading about the snowy Cairngorms. At the same time, the segmented glossaries cumulatively create something more than a useful compendium of lost words. They converse with the chapters and are a call to know and see the natural world in a different way.
It is typical of Macfarlane’s style to crack open the meanings of words and inhabit them in the fullest sense. ‘Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words.’ He describes the comparisons in JA Barkers’ writing as ‘“far-fetched” in two senses: elaborate in their analogies, but also serving to fetch-from-far – to bring near the distant world of the birds’. The poet Peter Davidson is ‘observant – both in the devotional sense of regular habits adhered to, and the phonological sense of recording natural details.’ This lyrical slippage consistently reminds readers that it matters how we use our words and that drawing out the meaning of words also draws out new perceptions. In Macfarlane’s writing, people do not just bestow meaning on the land, but the land bestows meaning on us. Places like Lewis and Arizona see movements in which ‘place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it’. The chapters centre on the questions of ‘how we landmark, and how we are landmarked.’ Macfarlane thus seeks to reclaim the relational nature of the vocabulary we use to describe landscape.
For we are relational creatures, and seek to name that which we know. Articulation enables a type of knowing, and knowing enables a type of intimacy and, yes, a form of love. What is needed is a language that reflects and opens up the affective space for an active allegiance to landscape. Macfarlane cites Wendell Berry, who says that ‘to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.’ And the need to know, love and defend landscape is urgent. If we lose the lexis of landscape, we lose the means to converse with it and to hear what it says. The ethical purpose of Landmarks is clear. At a moment in which we have ‘largely stunned the earth out of wonder,’ seeing nature as functional and submissive to the idols of efficiency and production, literature can open up the imaginative capacity to discover it anew.
The invigorating purpose of precision is not the pedant’s ‘tyranny of the nominal,’ Macfarlane points out. His desire is not to name, own and demystify the world. He perceives ‘no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not-knowing.’ And, as he points out, ‘there are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo – or to which silence is by far the best response.’ ‘Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, “Wow.”’ A sense of knowing is always limited, always holding the possibility of surprise, of being made unknown. Increasing precision can be achieved in the midst of this instability. This is the very wonder required for landscape to be re-enchanted.
Macfarlane’s prose is infused with an affinity for illuminating paradoxes, creating an ever-expanding and ever-focusing koanlike vision. It is a sensibility which pervades the work of some of his favourite writers of place: Nan Shepherd, for whom the Cairngorm massif offered ‘glimpses into its “being”’ even as it ‘exceeded human comprehension’, or Richard Skelton’s Landings, which holds ‘completion [as its] futile ideal’ and is seeped with sorrow ‘sprung from the knowledge that no place can be fully mapped, and that the dead can never return to us.’ The glossaries in Landmarks are a trace of the ideal ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’ (a term Macfarlane borrows from Finlay MacLeod) which ‘would comprehend the whole world.’ This unwritable book would form a ‘glossary of enchantment for the whole earth’ and ‘encourage responsible place-making’. The glossaries in Landmarks have an incantatory feel to them, as if by attending to them one might indeed sing a new type of world into being, and start to hear the world in a new way.
If Landmarks is filled with the writers who taught Macfarlane to write, those seers who helped him to see, it is also a fractal of literary influences in which their keen vision and lyrical precision is reiterated as he writes about them. Take Macfarlane’s description of influential ‘north-minded’ writers, including Barry Lopez and Peter Davidson. Through their work ‘it becomes possible to deduce a shared metaphysics of northerliness: an exactness of sight; lyricism as a function of precision; an attraction to the crystalline image; shivers of longing, aurora-bursts of vision, and elegies of twilight.’ In Lopez’s writing, ‘distance enables miracles of scrutiny; remoteness is a medium of clarification.’ This is writing which shows Macfarlane to be a virtuosic reader, evoking in tone the blazing iciness and beauty of very landscape-inspired literature he loves.
At the start of Landmarks, Macfarlane says that the chapters ‘explore how reading can change minds, revise behaviour and shape perception.’ They succeed, with generous particularity. But more than that, Macfarlane presents a book that can, in turn, shift its readers’ senses of place and spur them on to encounter their world afresh. It is a cycle we can choose to participate in. The blank pages of the final glossary in Landmarks wait for the future words each reader will make, words that are yet to grow, to bubble to the surface, to zigzag down a gusty breeze. The empty pages are also a nod to that which will always remain just out of reach. We can embrace this not-knowing even as we pursue a language that embraces the nuance and particularity of being in the world, and holding that world inside of ourselves.
Some of the ‘noticers’ who populate Landmarks are the writers who enabled Macfarlane’s literary pupillage. Each chapter weaves itself through the work of other writers. Macfarlane keeps step with Nan Shepherd, who in The Living Mountain wrote about walking the Cairngorm Mountains. He follows Roger Deakin’s water routes through Britain, as recorded in Waterlog, and watches JA Baker as he watched birds in the fields and coasts of Essex. With Richard Skelton he hears the plaintive music of northern moors and Barry Lopez is his gateway to the arctic wilderness of northern Canada. Richard Jefferies is Macfarlane’s literary field guide to England’s city edgelands, just as Jacquetta Hawkes made stones speak through her hybrid writing on the geological history of Britain. The final chapters trace John Muir’s journeys in the woodlands of the United States and conclude with a chapter on the ‘Childish’, the unique sensibility of children towards place: ‘a wild compound of dream, spell and substance.’
Placed amongst these chapters are the glossaries of words from across the British Isles: words gleaned from writers and artists, slang, agricultural usage, geological terms, local dialects and languages. The words are corralled by themes that roughly correspond to the preceding chapters. Thus we find out that haze-fire is the ‘luminous morning mist through which the dawn sun is shining’ after the introductory chapter on the peatlands of Lewis, Scotland, and discover the beautifully evocative term for thawing, ungive, after reading about the snowy Cairngorms. At the same time, the segmented glossaries cumulatively create something more than a useful compendium of lost words. They converse with the chapters and are a call to know and see the natural world in a different way.
It is typical of Macfarlane’s style to crack open the meanings of words and inhabit them in the fullest sense. ‘Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words.’ He describes the comparisons in JA Barkers’ writing as ‘“far-fetched” in two senses: elaborate in their analogies, but also serving to fetch-from-far – to bring near the distant world of the birds’. The poet Peter Davidson is ‘observant – both in the devotional sense of regular habits adhered to, and the phonological sense of recording natural details.’ This lyrical slippage consistently reminds readers that it matters how we use our words and that drawing out the meaning of words also draws out new perceptions. In Macfarlane’s writing, people do not just bestow meaning on the land, but the land bestows meaning on us. Places like Lewis and Arizona see movements in which ‘place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it’. The chapters centre on the questions of ‘how we landmark, and how we are landmarked.’ Macfarlane thus seeks to reclaim the relational nature of the vocabulary we use to describe landscape.
For we are relational creatures, and seek to name that which we know. Articulation enables a type of knowing, and knowing enables a type of intimacy and, yes, a form of love. What is needed is a language that reflects and opens up the affective space for an active allegiance to landscape. Macfarlane cites Wendell Berry, who says that ‘to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.’ And the need to know, love and defend landscape is urgent. If we lose the lexis of landscape, we lose the means to converse with it and to hear what it says. The ethical purpose of Landmarks is clear. At a moment in which we have ‘largely stunned the earth out of wonder,’ seeing nature as functional and submissive to the idols of efficiency and production, literature can open up the imaginative capacity to discover it anew.
The invigorating purpose of precision is not the pedant’s ‘tyranny of the nominal,’ Macfarlane points out. His desire is not to name, own and demystify the world. He perceives ‘no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not-knowing.’ And, as he points out, ‘there are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo – or to which silence is by far the best response.’ ‘Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, “Wow.”’ A sense of knowing is always limited, always holding the possibility of surprise, of being made unknown. Increasing precision can be achieved in the midst of this instability. This is the very wonder required for landscape to be re-enchanted.
Macfarlane’s prose is infused with an affinity for illuminating paradoxes, creating an ever-expanding and ever-focusing koanlike vision. It is a sensibility which pervades the work of some of his favourite writers of place: Nan Shepherd, for whom the Cairngorm massif offered ‘glimpses into its “being”’ even as it ‘exceeded human comprehension’, or Richard Skelton’s Landings, which holds ‘completion [as its] futile ideal’ and is seeped with sorrow ‘sprung from the knowledge that no place can be fully mapped, and that the dead can never return to us.’ The glossaries in Landmarks are a trace of the ideal ‘Counter-Desecration Phrasebook’ (a term Macfarlane borrows from Finlay MacLeod) which ‘would comprehend the whole world.’ This unwritable book would form a ‘glossary of enchantment for the whole earth’ and ‘encourage responsible place-making’. The glossaries in Landmarks have an incantatory feel to them, as if by attending to them one might indeed sing a new type of world into being, and start to hear the world in a new way.
If Landmarks is filled with the writers who taught Macfarlane to write, those seers who helped him to see, it is also a fractal of literary influences in which their keen vision and lyrical precision is reiterated as he writes about them. Take Macfarlane’s description of influential ‘north-minded’ writers, including Barry Lopez and Peter Davidson. Through their work ‘it becomes possible to deduce a shared metaphysics of northerliness: an exactness of sight; lyricism as a function of precision; an attraction to the crystalline image; shivers of longing, aurora-bursts of vision, and elegies of twilight.’ In Lopez’s writing, ‘distance enables miracles of scrutiny; remoteness is a medium of clarification.’ This is writing which shows Macfarlane to be a virtuosic reader, evoking in tone the blazing iciness and beauty of very landscape-inspired literature he loves.
At the start of Landmarks, Macfarlane says that the chapters ‘explore how reading can change minds, revise behaviour and shape perception.’ They succeed, with generous particularity. But more than that, Macfarlane presents a book that can, in turn, shift its readers’ senses of place and spur them on to encounter their world afresh. It is a cycle we can choose to participate in. The blank pages of the final glossary in Landmarks wait for the future words each reader will make, words that are yet to grow, to bubble to the surface, to zigzag down a gusty breeze. The empty pages are also a nod to that which will always remain just out of reach. We can embrace this not-knowing even as we pursue a language that embraces the nuance and particularity of being in the world, and holding that world inside of ourselves.