ness

Robert Macfarlane

Stanley Donwood (illustrator)

Hamish Hamilton

Harmondsworth, 2018

ISBN: 978-0-241-39656-8

Here Macfarlane writes and Donwood illustrates. The illustrations capture in black and white (cross-hatch) the dynamism of an environment surging on - an altered and limited human presence marks the view. Donwood is an author in his own right and has worked with Macfarlane before on Holloway (2012). He is most famous for his visual collaborations on the albums of Radiohead. His collaboration here with Macfarlane is seamless. It adds to the evocative dimensions of this small volume.

The writing is technically prose but comes with deep poetic intensity. This slides the book into the genre of nature poetry, but if so, this is a unique take on this kind of writing. Its forms are shockingly original and compelling. The confusion of strange images and unlikely personalities bleeds into a worldview that is beautiful in its human-less-ness. The work has a plot that pits these personalities against natural forces, such as Ness, but in doing this, the plot questions what personality, personification, and character could and should be when our species ceases to fully exist.

Although a rare fictional exploration by the author, ness plugs seamlessly into what I would call ‘Macfarlanism.’ Though the author might not appreciate such a term, there is a spirituality that appends to this man’s work despite the hefty scholarly approach he brings to his non-fiction. It started in 2003 with the publication of Mountains of the Mind. This was scholarship in pursuit of the author’s (and the West’s) fascination with mountains and the climbing of them. This book traced those watershed moments in the recent history of ideas where we see a 5000-year-old planet (as Biblically proposed) transmute through the development of geological studies into something vastly older. The human reaction to this change is telling. Where mountains had just seemed to be the left over material from a recent creation event, suddenly to Westerners they became evidence of the long, tumultuous struggle by geothermal forces to surge forth under great pressure and then abide for millions of years. Mountains of the Mind was followed by Wild Places (2007) and The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2013). These established Macfarlane as a man capable of unveiling those depths of connection to environment and place that few of us had hitherto fully conceptualised. In one way he uses all the high arts of Modernity to ask us to un-Modernise ourselves when it comes to assessing our ownership and exploitation attitudes to environment and place. In this unveiling, Macfarlane has always appreciated the potency of both good scholarship and the rich heritage of words.

His Landmarks (2015) revels in the language we have for nature and despairs that it is being lost to us – a sentiment that he turned into a nation-wide movement in the U.K. after the editors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary started dropping words such as ‘acorn’ and ‘wren’ because of a lack of use of these words by children. After all this, Macfarlane begins an apotheosis of sorts – becoming the most compelling nature writer of our age with multiple outputs and collaborations spilling forth – it is in this way that we end up with Macfarlanism. This term may at first seem depreciatory, but I use it here to refer to a number of phenomena that swirl about this writer. At its heart Macfarlanism is scholarly and considered, it is crafty and evocative, it looks back to aspects of pre-Industrial Britain and celebrates other approaches and conceptualisations of site and place. In the end it reasonably asks its readers to transform their world view, to convert to a new consideration of where we stand. There is a mysticism here, but it is not written for environmental cosmonauts, rather it inhabits a middle ground that has ensured Macfarlane himself is much more widely read than many of his fellow nature writers. The quintessence of this ‘movement’ can be found in his exceptionally well-researched introduction to Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. I would call this the exact heart of Macfarlanism. Shepherd’s book, which has had a deep effect on me and those I have shared it with, was written in 1940. Taking (bad) advice from her literary friend, Sheperd then hid it in a drawer until 1977. Macfarlane promotes a new edition of Shepherd’s work (there is also a short BBC documentary by him about it and her) by framing this author as a soul who is simply at one with the Cairngorms – that Scottish mountain range that Shepherd spent her life exploring. She stands in Macfarlane’s eyes as both the ancestor of, and the great example for, the new nature-human relationship he wishes to be developed amongst us. I might suggest in this review that ness is worth reading. It is, but The Living Mountain (and Macfarlane’s preface) is even more worthy of our attention.

Then to ness: this extended poem in prose form is, as one would expect, alive with the words of nature. It is still delightful and revealing to find here a vocabulary of the natural world that is both inside us and somehow also new – we know the words Macfarlane uses and yet, it seems, it has been a long time since we have read them. This adds to the pleasure of consuming this book – and its argument, which is encoded in its plot.

The plot rests on the dramatic tension that is established between natural force and personified intent. There is a human presence here – an idealised set of persons conspire – an Armourer, a Botanist, an Engineer and others. They plan a test detonation. They sing a ‘firing song’ to prepare the bomb. They work in the Green Chapel where a missile lay in wait. There are other human things about – we read of domes, laboratories, and also of old fishing nets and other human detritus. Human existence is inferred here, but it is a ghostly inference. Against these traces, a He, a She, and a They join the plot. We know them through their accumulation of natural attributes,

They are stone-deaf & sea-eyed & their claim is the deep calm of deep time, the cold calm of cold time, & their closeness is as old as rock & ocean & their motion as ancient as wave & shore & their rhythm is that of growth & erosion & you could not say of them that they are several or single & they have flint in their being & they send stones through time to foretell their seeing & their speech is shingle.

& they have the patience of granite & the ardour of lava & the speed of starlight. (p.59)

But it is the process of movement that is key here, and the poet returns regularly to the force of Drift who takes on its own glorious existence…

Drift is the wood out of which humans were first carved. Drift dislikes being made to represent anything, because Drift disapproves strongly of symbolism, allegory & indeed all systems of fungibility which devalue the glittering particularity of all that Drift makes. Drift is matter plus motion & that is the end of it.

Listening to Drift is one of the most beautiful sounds in the world, as beautiful as listening to your child breathe in the darkness.

Drift is an avocet skull writhing with maggots. Drift is a Colgate-Palmolive Teeth-Whitening Toothpaste tube, no top. Drift is a seal corpse with a zither-rig jaw & off-planet fur. Drift is kelp & bladderwrack. Drift is long-line hooks & seine net. Drift is jerrycan & doll’s head, & Drift is beached sperm whale, sheer-sided as a battleship, downwind of which you cannot stand, leaking red into the rocks, watching the world grey out through one tiny upwards eye. (p.19)

The poetry here comes in the repetition and the evocative listing of things elemental to each scene described. The ampersand is used throughout the work to build these elements into emotive images. The ampersand is both a symbolic reminder of the dependency of things on other things and serves, in its own way, and if we take this prose as poetry then the ampersand becomes a pause point and the line break of this verse. In this passage we see the whale as a battleship, but the drama here is in the dying of the beast, the concept of “battleship” merely a ghostly comparison that will also drift away. This fading away of the human is emphasised by noting what is left here of civilization. Amidst the seaweed and animal corpses – the cycle of life – we find disconnected traces: the doll’s head, the jerry can, the fishing line. But most important of all (for its taxonomy is so lengthily described) is the topless tube of toothpaste, brand-name given, and specific function recorded. The durability of these human traces amounts to another force, another character present here. In one way a human audience is addressed – we are told that Drift is like listening to your sleeping child – but it is also clear that Drift has its own world of meaning beyond not only symbolism and allegory, but well beyond the human and how we ordered the world – it is its own order and it will prevail despite us. Throughout this small book, Macfarlane is seeking to discover how non-human agents can tell this story. It is in this quest for non-human ‘personas’ that ness pushes us into consideration of an apocalyptic post-humanness.

To further understand what is taking place, we should consider the term ‘Ness’. Retained in elements of place names, in Middle English the word stood for a promontory, cape, or headland. It refers to that which juts out, is prominent or leads. Ness has some redolence of the truncation of a woman’s name (Vanessa?), so it has a warmth to it, but as a suffix traces out the essence of a phenomenon – putting human ‘ness’ up against natural ‘ness.’ This poem thus asks us to consider deep qualities, and essences – the biggest consideration being: ‘should human essence remain essential to the planet?’ This makes ness an intense little rumination on existence. Indeed, the book opens by asking the reader to quieten themselves and listen instead to Ness:

Listen. Listen now. Listen to Ness.

Ness speaks. Ness speaks gull, speaks wave, speaks bracken & lapwing, speaks bullet, ruin, gale, deception.

Ness speaks pagoda, transmission, reception, Ness speaks pure mercury, utmost secret, swift current, rapid-fire… (p.5)

As a new move for Macfarlane, this fictional rendering brings potent imagery and a range of emotions that are ghostly, sad, and confronting to the reader. From the perspective of modern poetry, ness shows very little concern with a (human) persona’s perception of the natural world – rather it seeks to voice nature directly. It is a voice that is foreboding and relentless, but one that remains more noble than any human perception. Thus as poetry ness is novel and exciting and if it has poetic antecedents I can only think of Hughes’ Crow or much more distantly Neruda’s Odas elementales. As nature writing, ness opens a whole new speculative realm for Macfarlane and a new field for his dexterity with language. At this level, ness is welcome. If nothing else, it adds a fascinating new dimension to the ongoing development of Macfarlanism but in a close reading, it opens up much about where nature poetry may go.