Landmarks (4 page)

‘What is required
,’ wrote Finlay in a public appeal to save the Brindled Moor, ‘is a new nomenclature of landscape and how we relate to it, so that conservation becomes a natural form of human awareness, and so that it ceases to be under-written and under-appreciated and thus readily vulnerable to desecration.’ ‘What is needed,’ he concluded superbly, ‘is a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook.’ He and his fellow islanders worked to produce some version of that phrasebook for Lewis.

After three and a half years the Scottish Executive ruled on
AMEC’s proposal. Taking into consideration the protective designations that the moor possessed (including a UN Ramsar designation) and the protests against the development (including 10,924 letters of objection) it decided to reject the wind-farm application.

The moor was saved.

We need now, urgently, a Counter-Desecration Phrasebook that would comprehend the world – a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen. A work of words that would encourage responsible place-making, that would keep us from slipping off into abstract space, and keep us from all that would follow such a slip. The glossaries contained here in
Landmarks
do not constitute this unwriteable phrasebook – but perhaps they might offer a sight of the edge of the shadow of its impossible existence.

Such a phrasebook, as I imagine it – as thought-experiment, as baroque fantasia – would stand not as a competitor to scientific knowledge and ecological analysis, but as their supplement and ally. We need to know how nature proceeds, of course, but we need also to keep wonder alive in our descriptions of it: to provide celebrations of not-quite-knowing, of mystification, of excess. Barry Lopez again:
‘something emotive abides in the land
, and … it can be recognized and evoked even if it cannot be thoroughly plumbed’. This ‘something’ is ‘inaccessible to the analytic researcher, and invisible to the ironist’.

Like Lopez, I am drawn to this idea of a valuable superfluity in nature: a content to landscape that exceeds the propositional and that fails to show up on the usual radar sweeps – but which may be expressible, or at least gesturable towards, in certain kinds of language. I relish the etymology of our word
thing
– that sturdy term of designation, that robust everyday indicator of the empirical – whereby in Old English
thynge
does not only designate a material object, but can also denote
‘a narrative not fully known
’, or indicate ‘the unknowability of larger chains of events’.

As I imagine it, futilely, this phrasebook would be rich with language that is, as the poet Marianne Moore put it in an exceptional essay of 1944 entitled ‘Feeling and Precision’,
‘galvanized against inertia
’, where that ‘galvanized’ carries its sense of flowing current, of energy received by contact, of circuitry completed. For Moore, precision of language was crucial to this galvanism. ‘Precision,’ she wrote – in a phrase with which I could not be in more agreement – ‘is a thing of the imagination’ and produces ‘writing of maximum force’. ‘Precision’ here should not be taken as cognate with scientific language. No, precision for Moore is a form of testimony different in kind to rational understanding. It involves not probing for answers, but watching and waiting. And precision, for Moore, is best enabled by metaphor: another reminder that metaphor is not merely something that adorns thought but is, substantively, thought itself. Writers must be, Moore concludes finely, ‘as clear as our natural reticence allows us to be’, where ‘reticence’ mutely reminds us of its etymology from the Latin
tacere
, ‘to be silent, to keep silent’. I recall Charles Simic:
‘For knowledge, add; for wisdom, take away.’

This phrasebook would help us to understand that there are places and things which make our thinking possible, and leave our thinking
changed.
In this respect it would inhabit
what linguistics calls the ‘middle voice’: that grammatical diathesis which – by hovering between the active and the passive – can infuse inanimate objects with sentience and so evoke a sense of reciprocal perception between human and non-human. It would possess the unfeasible alertness of Jorge Luis Borges’s character Ireneo Funes, who develops perfect recall after a riding accident.
‘John Locke, in the seventeenth century
, postulated (and rejected) an impossible language in which each individual thing, each stone, each bird and each branch, would have its own name,’ wrote Borges there; ‘Funes once projected an analogous language, but discarded it because it seemed too general to him, too ambiguous. In fact, Funes remembered not only every leaf of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it …’

This phrasebook would find ways of outflanking the cost-benefit framework within which we do so much of our thinking about nature. Again and again when we are brought short by natural events – the helix of a raptor’s ascent on a thermal; a flock of knots shoaling over an east-coast estuary; the shadows of cumulus clouds moving across Lewisian moorland on a sunny day – the astonishment we feel concerns a gift freely given, a natural potlatch. During such encounters, we briefly return to a pre-economical state in which things can be
‘tendered
’, as Adam Potkay puts it, ‘that is, treated with tenderness – because of the generosity of their self-giving, as if alterity were itself pure gift’.

Above all, then, this phrasebook would speak the language of tact and of tenderness. The Canadian poet Jan Zwicky writes of the importance of
‘having language to hand’
in our dealings with the natural world. There is a quiet reminder in her phrase of the
relationship between tactfulness and tactility, between touch and ethics. As the
Oxford English Dictionary
defines it:

Tact
: 1
(a).
The sense of touch, the act of touching or handling. 1
(b)
A keen faculty of perception or discrimination likened to the sense of touch. 2
(b)
Musicologically, a stroke in beating time which ‘directs the equalitie of the measure’ (John Downland, writing in 1609, translating Andreas Ornithoparcus).

Tact as due attention
, as tenderness of encounter, as rightful tactility. Tactful language, then, would be language which sings (is lyric), which touches (is born of contact with the lived and felt world), which touches us (affects) and which keeps time – recommending thereby an equality of measure and a keen faculty of perception.