Today the golden plover are back; it means it’s autumn. Cows in the misty meadows in the sunrise aren’t enough to tell me, I have to see birds move. The clouds of martins over these houses have busted their hawsers and gone and the golden plover are back. Today was a day I couldn’t work. It’s hard to admit it, you’re supposed to put in a solid nine to five each day and the to do list is always immense. It’s just hard to be a large mammal in a world that keeps telling you that you are an ant. Might as well come out about that.
I went out walking over the empty fields, and over the motorway, into the elm wood and then I came back. Stepping down from the bridge I see that the pigeons circling over the ploughed field are not pigeons at all. Their wings are clean-cut, their beats precise – taut as carbon fibre. Their flock is V-shaped, or rather it’s an inwardly-branching V like a simple cladogram. However, it is not like a goose skein; goose skeins trail but this flock wheels. And as it wheels it crunches together at the front, a knot of birds like a fist to punch through to a new horizon. But it doesn’t punch through anywhere, it wheels again. That’s the other thing that shows they are not pigeons, beyond the clipped beats and the skeining – they cannot, cannot make up their mind.
They swing wide over the empty earth and race towards me and I shout – I have to – and then they’re up. Nothing to do with me, it’s the continuation of their arc; seems they’re not staying. I think there are two kinds of desolation these days: the distant tundra that elicits fear for what’s melting beneath it and this ploughed field, far deader than the Arctic, which elicits guilt. Golden plovers are poets of desolation, perfectly crafted and moving in squadrons but this place doesn’t have what they want. The empty earth on the right has been harrowed already but the empty earth on the left still lies tumbled in great, evicted, fossilizing heaves. It must be a boulderfield to the plovers. They wheel and rise on the force which I see as heat haze, up into the total September blue. As they turn their white breasts to the sun they twinkle, simple as that: their wings beat across them and they twinkle like fairylights, or like a flung handful of child’s glitter in the sky. And then they’re out of the range of my vision, a falcon could see them but I can’t. All I can see is a single airliner, high and white, co-opted back into the sick economy on a flightline that doesn’t bother with England.
So. I did nothing worthwhile all afternoon.
I had a link to a video but somehow I lost it. It was of the magnificent Dr Martin Shaw unpacking a fierce little book of his called ‘Courting the wild twin’. In the interview, he quotes a philosopher hero of his who I’d never heard of: Gaston Bachelard. Here’s the phrase from Bachelard: “The world seeks to be admired by you.” Google it and you’ll find Martin Shaw. Apparently it’s not what the world at large takes from Bachelard’s work. Apparently Bachelard was a philosopher both of science and of poetics. Apparently that is possible, or at least is was.
Martin Shaw also mentions an idea I’d heard from Joseph Campbell about different kinds of love. How the love of the troubadours, which they called ‘Amor’ was different both from Christian love and from Erotic love. Eros and Caritas are impersonal, Campbell says, they just spill out across everything indiscriminately. Amor is discriminate, it praises particular things, a particular woman, a particular planet, a bird.
Anxiety is the enemy of praise. Guilt is the enemy of praise. “The guilty care only for themselves”. There is no room for praise on the to do list. Or, at least not on mine. I suppose if I were a vicar… But that is responsible praise and that’s not what I mean.
Over Thanet and Holland, over Alps and Carpathians, over Lesbos where the camps are, over the desmesnes of murderers with sour faces and the burnt lands and the melting lands and the borders that shine and the borders that crumble and the steppes whose herds have been hoovered up and lost, and the Himalaya whose bones surge as their wigs slip and over all the TV screens in all the bars in all the towns in all Eurasia, there’s a forest whose teeth are not all drawn and possibly, hopefully, a beast still in it which I have never seen but which I have designs on. And when I think of her my mouth is empty. I have nothing to say.
Far and Few 