Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art [1st ed.] 978-3-030-18759-0;978-3-030-18760-6

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xii
‘Our Land’: An Introduction (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 1-17
Keeping the Paths Beaten: Robert Macfarlane, Linda Cracknell and Stuart McAdam’s Hodological Scotland (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 19-46
Land Made by Walking: Andrew Greig, Thomas A. Clark, Hamish Fulton, or, the Art of Passing Through (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 47-73
Spacings: Gerry Loose and Kathleen Jamie’s Interspecies Relationalities (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 75-97
Into the Fold: Kathleen Jamie’s and John Burnside’s Oikopoetics (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 99-120
Things of Space: Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds and Alec Finlay’s Company of Mountains, or, Materialising as Re-siting (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 121-148
Soundmarks and Ecotones: Ensounding Scotland (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 149-166
Filming Space: Transenunciation as Re-production. Susan Kemp’s Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson and Roseanne Watt’s Quoys (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 167-184
The Hyperzone: Is There a Space on This Screen? (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 185-199
Conclusion (Camille Manfredi)....Pages 201-211
Back Matter ....Pages 213-217

Citation preview

GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art Camille Manfredi

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies Series Editor Robert T. Tally Jr. Texas State University San Marcos, TX, USA

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism, broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography, cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocritical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15002

Camille Manfredi

Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art

Camille Manfredi University of Nantes Nantes Cedex 1, France

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies ISBN 978-3-030-18759-0    ISBN 978-3-030-18760-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geography, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism, or the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or to transform contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. Reflecting upon the representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reorient literary criticism, history, and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a book series presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry. In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical transformation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory, and urban studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too facile distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates what Edward Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of important research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain v

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identifiable and well-known places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the otherworldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy, science fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs, and other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially problematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical traditions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and mapping in literature and in the world. The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series are to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investigation, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modernist literature, while a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern technology, transportation, and telecommunications has only enhanced the sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves, but of the experience of place and of displacement, while exploring the interrelations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is diverse and far reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation, particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholarship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to open up new spaces for critical inquiry. San Marcos, TX, USA

Robert T. Tally Jr.

Acknowledgements

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Marie-Odile Hédon, Alan Riach, Bernard Sellin, Liliane Louvel, Jean Berton and Hélène Machinal for their enthusiastic encouragement and constructive recommendations on this project. A particular debt of gratitude is owed to the University of Brest and the research centre Héritages et Constructions dans le Texte et l’Image, especially to Alain Kerhervé and Catherine Conan without whom the project would not have been possible. Thanks also to Elizabeth Mullen, Anne Hellegouarc’h-Bryce and François Gavillon for their kindness and willingness to give their time so generously. My special thanks are extended to the artists who responded so graciously to my varied queries and kindly granted me permission to reproduce copyright material in these pages; to my dear friends Lesley Roberts, Brian Henderson, Rob Gibson and Paol Keineg; to the editorial team of Palgrave Macmillan, in particular Rachel Jacobe and Allie Troyanos; and finally to all the poets, dancers, singers, farmers and activists who keep reminding me that one should not talk about poetry while trampling wildflowers.

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Contents

1 ‘Our Land’: An Introduction  1 2 Keeping the Paths Beaten: Robert Macfarlane, Linda Cracknell and Stuart McAdam’s Hodological Scotland 19 3 Land Made by Walking: Andrew Greig, Thomas A. Clark, Hamish Fulton, or, the Art of Passing Through 47 4 Spacings: Gerry Loose and Kathleen Jamie’s Interspecies Relationalities 75 5 Into the Fold: Kathleen Jamie’s and John Burnside’s Oikopoetics 99 6 Things of Space: Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds and Alec Finlay’s Company of Mountains, or, Materialising as Re-siting121 7 Soundmarks and Ecotones: Ensounding Scotland149

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CONTENTS

8 Filming Space: Transenunciation as Re-production. Susan Kemp’s Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson and Roseanne Watt’s Quoys167 9 The Hyperzone: Is There a Space on This Screen?185 10 Conclusion201 Index

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List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 6.1 Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 6.4 Fig. 6.5 Fig. 6.6 Fig. 6.7 Fig. 7.1

Andrew Greig 2010, At the Loch of the Green Corrie. (Copyright Quercus, reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office) 22 Linda Cracknell 2014, ‘The Return of Hoof Beats’, Doubling Back, p. 163. (Copyright Linda Cracknell) 24 Hanna Tuulikki 2014, Isle of Canna. (Copyright Hanna Tuulikki)26 Thomas A. Clark, with Eiji Watanabe, 2013, An Lochan Uaine. (Copyright the artists) 58 Andy Goldsworthy, 2002, Bolton Pinfold and Cone. (Photograph Camille Manfredi) 123 Andy Goldsworthy 2004, The Byre, Striding Arches. (Photograph Camille Manfredi) 127 Alec Finlay 2003–, Letterboxing and Circle Poems. (Copyright Alec Finlay) 131 Alec Finlay 2010, ‘Glamaig’ (Skye), A Company of Mountains. (Photograph Emma Nicolson. Copyright Alec Finlay) 135 Alec Finlay 2013, ‘Dùn Caan’ (Raasay), A Company of Mountains. (Copyright Alec Finlay) 138 Alec Finlay 2012, word-mntn (Beinn na h-Eaglaise). (Copyright Alec Finlay) 140 Alec Finlay 2014, a-ga: on mountains. (Photograph Luke Allan. Copyright Alec Finlay) 140 Hanna Tuulikki 2013, Voice of the Bird, pen and ink on paper, ‘Night-­Flight to the Burrow’. (Copyright Hanna Tuulikki) 157

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 7.2 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2 Fig. 8.3

Hanna Tuulikki 2013, Voice of the Bird, pen and ink on paper, ‘Night-­Flight to the Burrow’. (Copyright Hanna Tuulikki)157 Susan Kemp 2014, still image from Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson, 1:08:09. (Copyright Susan Kemp)171 Susan Kemp 2014, still image from Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson, 03:05. (Copyright Susan Kemp)173 Roseanne Watt 2015, still image from Quoys, Unst, 01:55. (Copyright Roseanne Watt) 177

CHAPTER 1

‘Our Land’: An Introduction

On 2 September 2015, ahead of the debate on the new Land Reform Bill, a group of Our Land campaigners gathered on the steps of the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Their message to the Members of the Scottish Parliament (MSPs) was clear and concise: ‘Be Brave’. Over the past few years, members of the Our Land campaign and of more formal organisations such as Community Land Scotland, which, since its inception in 2010, has been committed to promoting community land purchase and supporting land reform, have repeatedly urged the Scottish government to take strong action and break with the land ownership system that has barely been reformed since the mid-sixteenth century and that has 432 landowners (comprising Scottish lairds, ‘sheikhs, oligarchs and mining magnates’) account for half of all Scotland’s privately owned land.1 There are few issues as fundamental and volatile as that of land ownership and open access, particularly when set against the backdrop of Scotland’s recent political and cultural re-examination, be it before or after the Scottish independence referendum. An exercise in participatory democracy, the issue has been on the agenda for over two decades. Scotland has seen increasingly pressing demands for a fairer redistribution of land, a remarkable increase in community buyouts since the 2003 Land Reform Act, and the commercial success and widespread media coverage of publications such as Andy Wightman’s Who Owns Scotland (1996) and The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got It (2010), and the Isle of Eigg Trust Founder © The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_1

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Alastair McIntosh’s Soil and Soul: People versus Corporate Power (2001). It should come as no surprise that both these authors, along with other renowned land reform campaigners including the journalist Lesley Riddoch and the prominent historian Jim Hunter, were either founders or active supporters of the Our Land campaign. Wightman argues in his blog that land certainly ‘matters’, but so do words and rhetorical modulations, especially in a context where the territorial issues in Scotland have become so sensitive. The ‘Be Brave’ injunction carries a less than oblique reference to Disney’s 2012 computer-animated film Brave and to the epic movie Braveheart, which, however much it was derided for its historical inaccuracies, earned Scotland millions in tourist revenue and triggered a worldwide interest in Scotland’s history and natural heritage. As for ‘our land’, the expression abounds in the rhetoric of land reformers and open-access land campaigners in the UK: see, for instance, Marion Shoard’s 1987 book This Land is Our Land, or the founding of the land rights campaign The Land is Ours by George Monbiot in 1995. In devolved Scotland, the possessive adjective has also flourished in the rhetoric of pro-independence campaigners and in government publications, the media and public art.2 The debate over the redistribution of Scottish land does not just take place amid a political and economic struggle over territory, land use, wildlife management and agricultural tenancy. It has also forced MSPs, lobbyists, campaigners and members of the general public to consider spatial and selfrepresentation issues, starting with the very semantics and glossary of land classification. Beyond the ‘their land/our land’ dialectic, one example that is particularly enlightening is Rob Gibson’s suggestion, when he was Scottish National Party (SNP) MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross and parliamentary convener of the Rural Affairs, Climate Change and Environment committee, that ‘the core areas of wild land and outstanding natural beauty’ mapped out by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) in 2013 should instead be labelled ‘Clearances country’. This reclassification would make them potentially available not just for resettlement and community re-empowerment but also for the provision of renewable energy through wind power in the Highlands. The proposed shift in perception from ahistorical, apolitical and featureless ‘wild lands’ to that of a political entity (a ‘country’) exemplifies the need for a comprehensive rethink and reappraisal of the geography, of the way it is perceived and, more specifically, of the translation of Scottish history into landscape. In his closing address to the Community Land Scotland annual conference on 22 May 2015, Gibson continued to refer to

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these areas as ‘the ­abnormal landscape of the shooting estates and sheep clearances of the past 200 years’. Likewise, Magnus Jamieson argued in the June 2017 issue of the online magazine Bella Caledonia that ‘[l]and cleared by the rich is not wild, it is hoarded. Ancient, empty farmland is not wild, it is neglected’.3 Clearly, the use of adjectives such as ‘wild’, ‘natural’ and ‘beautiful’ versus ‘abnormal’, ‘cleared’, ‘hoarded’ and ‘neglected’—with these last three terms suggesting human intervention—indicates that land too is in the eye of the beholder. The much-contested territory of Scotland’s ‘Core Areas of Wild Land’ have thus sparked heated debate among those in favour of ecological restoration, conservation, rewilding or repopulation. However, the debate is long-standing, and the question of whether or not the preservation of Scotland’s landscapes (including in the areas that were forcibly cleared of their inhabitants during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) should prevail over land use practicalities has been a matter of concern for decades. Ever since the early 1940s and the bitter ‘Hydro’ debates, it has been argued that the different perceptions of landscape—and of landscape amenity—in Scotland are directly related to an outsider versus insider experience. In other words, that Scotland’s ‘outstanding natural beauty’ and so-called ‘wilderness’ are only the by-products of an industry that has removed the Highlands from social change and technical innovations in order to turn ‘Natural Scotland’ into a pastoral theme park fantasy for nature-loving visitors—much to the satisfaction of the tourist industry and the successive Scottish governments.4 The cult of the romantic Highlands is still going strong both within and outside Scotland, and the theory remains easily verified. When the Scottish Government declared 2013 as the ‘Year of Natural Scotland’ and entrusted the organisation of all related events to SNH, the official discourse reinforced the notion that Scotland was and remains ‘an invigorating natural playground’.5 There is virtually no mention of the Clearances in SNH’s promotional rhetoric. In his introduction to the Scottish Land Festival of 2015, Director of Common Weal Robin McAlpine argued for ‘nationalised land for national use’ and called for a reimagining and a re-viewing of Scotland as a whole: Scotland could be a growing, making, building, doing and living country, not just a shopping, drinking, working, sleeping one. But we’ll never be that if we view the land on which we stand as something alien to us, something owned by someone who wants us to stay away. I’m tired of the endless braying sound of the super-privileged complaining that any form of justice for

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the people of a nation is a ‘Mugabe-style land grab’. The only land grab I can see is the colonisation of the land of our imagination, a land in which Scotland could rebuild itself using its soil and its space as a resource for a better life for its people and a better world for us all.6

Of course the terms ‘nationalised’, ‘national’ and ‘colonisation’, when used barely a year after the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, were meant to be provocative; yet there remains the idea that the people of today’s Scotland are still deprived of the ability to ‘view’, ‘see’ and imagine ‘their’ land, and most importantly to imagine themselves as part of it. Historians and intellectuals have likewise endeavoured to break away from pastoral landscape representations to restore the idea that the vast expanses of Scottish land are ultimately, as argued by Fiona Mackenzie, ‘places of possibility’ (Mackenzie 2013), a land to reclaim—McAlpine might say ‘decolonise’—through imagination first. This book is committed to looking at how Scotland-based artists work at doing exactly that: rethinking and reimagining the land by reviewing its discursive and aesthetic construct in the broad context of early twenty-­first-­ century Scotland. It seeks to find out if and how the specificities of devolved Scotland—its historical, territorial and political issues, among which the lasting impact of the Clearances, the devolution, the Land Reforms, the referendum on Scottish independence—may shape the way the artists represent themselves and their social group in that space or land, whether through words, actions or pictures. In particular, it enquires into who—or what—the first-person singular can encompass, and how it intersects with the postcolonial stance or, conversely, how it departs from it. To do so, this book looks at how artists undercut the discourses that have supported the myth of a ‘wild’ or ‘Natural’ Scotland and, in either case, the dream of primeval vacancy and imagery of emptiness that have become Scotland’s trademarks. The fact that ‘Natural Scotland’, as it is extensively advertised by the Scottish Tourist Board, resulted from the forcible removal of its inhabitants will certainly have a considerable impact on the artists’ responses to their physical world and the way they interact with it. In the early twentyfirst century and in the light of Scotland’s political circumstances, any form of sanctification of a Scottish ‘wilderness’ would appear anachronistic, and any signs of wilful cultural amnesia would seem oddly out of tune. This book will use a number of terms that characterise the artists’ approach to the—or ‘their’—land. Most of these artists come up with their own, idiosyncratic definition of what it is that they are seeing, walk-

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ing through, listening to or interacting with. Three words, however, will return: ‘wilderness’, ‘nature’ and ‘land’. In this volume the term ‘wilderness’ can be taken to refer to the part of the world which remains untouched, as in the Romantic idea of the wild as that which resists being assimilated into human concepts. ‘The wilderness’ will be distinguished from ‘nature’ following Greg Garrard’s definitions of the wilderness as ‘a place apart from, and opposed to human culture’ and ‘uncontaminated by civilisation’ (Garrard 2004, pp. 59–60) on the one hand, and of nature as incorporating human dimensions, as having been shaped and produced by human practice on the other. That the terms ‘wild’ and ‘natural’ often seem interchangeable when applied to Scotland is a good indicator of the cultural amnesia mentioned above. ‘Land’ is meant to refer to a small plot where a family or group of people live and work; most interestingly, ‘land’ designates an enclosed space, one with set boundaries, and, as it connotes ancestral and familial ownership, it allows the use of the possessive adjective, whereas ‘nature’ and ‘the wilderness’ do not. As regards the term ‘landscape’, I shall draw from John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s argument that, although a landscape is ‘a synthetic space, a man-made system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land’, [n]o group creates a landscape, of course. What it sets out to do is to create a community, and the landscape as its visible manifestation is simply the by-­ product of people working and living, sometimes coming together, sometimes staying apart, but always recognizing their interdependence. (Jackson 1984, p. 12)

I will shortly return to these terms and others, such as ‘space’, ‘place’ and ‘site’, and investigate which of these is being imagined and produced by the artists and artworks discussed in this book. Yet something that pertains to the specific context of Scotland is missing. This ‘something’ might cognate with the Gaelic term Dùthchas, which Robert Archibald Armstrong defined in his 1825 Gaelic Dictionary as a ‘hereditary right; prescriptive right by which a farm descended from father to son; native country; hereditary temper or blood; birth-place’. The adjectival form, dùthchanach, is translated into ‘natal; national; natural to one’s family’. When considered literally, the words ‘blood’, ‘hereditary’, ‘national’ and ‘natural’ could then quite easily open up a Pandora’s box of cultural ­exceptionalism, and there is a risk that the insistent use of the possessive form in ‘our land’ will for some bear too much resemblance to the mechanisms of ethnoregionalism. As Anthony D. Smith argued in 1998,

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[l]and is indeed vital to ethnic separatists, but not simply for its economic and political uses. They are equally interested in its cultural and historical dimensions; what they need is a ‘usable past’ and a ‘rooted culture’. Ethnic nationalists are not interested in any land; they only desire the land of their putative ancestors and the sacred places where their heroes and sages walked, fought and taught. It is a historic or ancestral ‘homeland’ that they desire, one which they believe to be exclusively ‘theirs’ by virtue of links with events and personages of earlier generations of ‘their’ people. In other words, the territory in question must be made into an ‘ethnoscape’, a poetic landscape that is an extension and expression of the character of the ethnic community and which is celebrated as such in verse and song. (Smith 1998, p. 63)

This book contends that the ‘our land’ rhetoric need not be conflated into a single concept of territorial reductionism or identity foreclosure. It offers to investigate the ways by which the concept of ‘our land’ can be conceived of as inclusive rather than exclusive and as rooted in something that departs from sheer ethnic separatism. Could there exist a form of prospective, forward-pointing Dùthchas that would encompass the awareness of one’s origins and the drive for a common goal, both of which would be expressed through the parameters of Scottish history, geography and cultural production? The answer may well lie in the word ‘home’, which, as Alan Riach writes, brings into play both geographical location and intellectual apprehension. It is not only place but also the expression of the people, the representation of the people, in relation to this place and to each other. (Riach 2005, p. 244)

The ‘home’ that is the focus of this investigation is not the kind that promises foetal reunification with the motherland, nor is it restricted to the ethnic component. Rather, ‘home’ will appear over the following pages in the form of Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Open’, which will be subject to further analysis in the light of Edward Said’s much-cited rethinking of geography in the postcolonial context: Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and ­interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings. (Said 1993, p. 7)

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‘Ideas, forms, images and imaginings’: in this examination of the interaction of landscape aesthetics and strategies of spatial representation in Scotland’s twenty-first-century literature and arts, I choose to focus on the works of nature writers, poets, performers and visual artists who address space and engage actively as well as imaginatively with the land. The aim is to find out the kind of Scotland—or the kinds of Scotlands—that they imagine themselves as being present to, as they revisit and represent it to themselves and to the world. By examining how these artists ‘re/view, re/ form, re/search, re/use, re/create, re/act’7 the ‘natural’ lands of Scotland, this book explores the ongoing reinvention of a territory-bound identity that dwells both on an inclusive sense of place and on a complex renegotiation with the time and space of the nation through physical and poetical intervention. This reinvention does not occur ex nihilo: actors in the buoyant Scottish art scene of recent decades are largely indebted to the geographies of belonging and affective landscapes they have inherited from the works of their literary forbears, including Nan Shepherd, Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, George Mackay Brown, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Iain Crichton Smith, Sorley MacLean, Norman MacCaig (‘Who Owns this Landscape? Has owning anything to do with love?’, from ‘A Man in Assynt’), Edwin Morgan and Neil Gunn, not to mention Walter Scott, Duncan Ban Macintyre and Robert Burns.8 I reiterate the verb ‘indebted to’ here as opposed to ‘constrained by’: rather than some ready-made or uniform sense of place, the works discussed will present a number of proposals and cultural constructs that allow readers, viewers and actors to inhabit the void, to repossess Robert Crombie Saunders’ ‘empty glen’, to reconcile Meg Bateman’s ‘Two Views’ of Elgol and to write, read, sing and dance themselves back into Hugh MacDiarmid’s ‘glen of silence’. Rethinking and imaginatively reclaiming the land in post-devolution Scotland means reconciling past and present representations of territoriality, as well as questioning the origin, destination and therefore propriety of that territory—our land, their land, everybody’s or nobody’s land. This analysis builds on the works of T.C.  Smout (Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern Ireland since 1600 [2000]), Carl MacDougall (Writing Scotland: How Scotland’s Writers Shaped the Nation [2004]), Alexander Moffat, Alan Riach, Linda MacDonald-Lewis and Ruth Nicol (Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland [2008]; Landmarks: Poets, Portraits and

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Landscapes of Modern Scotland [2017]), Monika Szuba (Boundless Scotland: Space in Contemporary Scottish Fiction [2015]) and Louisa Gairn (Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature [2008]). Since the turn of the century, there has been increased academic interest in the representations and misrepresentations of Scotland in the arts, as evidenced in the great many conferences, festivals and trans-disciplinary symposiums that have focused on the narratives of the land and the poetics of space in Scotland.9 No review of the literature in this particular field would be complete without reference to the contributions of the many environmentally-aware Scottish journalists, naturalists, environmentalists and practitioners, including conservationist John Lister-Kaye, nature writer Jim Crumley, and journalists Lesley Riddoch, Auslan Cramb and Cameron McNeish, to name but a few. Further signs of a notable environmentalisation of the artistic and academic approach to land, space and place in past and present Scotland include the foundation in the mid-1980s of the Department of Environmental Art at Glasgow School of Art under the leadership of David Harding, the launch of the curatorial platform Ecoartscotland in 2010 and its annual eponymous journal edited by Chris Fremantle in 2011, and the creation by writer and mythologist Sharon Blackie in 2012 of Earthlines, a magazine for ‘grounded, wilder writing’, subtitled The Culture of Nature, which was initially based in Lewis but relocated to Donegal before folding in March 2017. What most of these events and publications reveal is that the legitimate concern with national identity that took centre stage in the 1980s and 1990s is now complemented—although certainly not superseded—by matters of political and environmental impact. Since Scotland is neither sealed off from nor indifferent to the rest of the world, one must look beyond the local debate on land use in Scotland to also consider the interwoven social, political, economic and environmental issues that affect and inform the way the arts contribute to the global and pressing concern for environmental sustainability. The representation of space, place and nature in Scotland must therefore be considered within the broader frame of reference of both today’s increasing preoccupation with environmental issues and sustainable land management and the powerful political and cognitive processes of globalisation and internationalisation, all of which urge towards a nuanced approach to the postcolonial perspective. While indicative of the spatial turn addressed by a number of philosophers, literary scholars and art and social historians since the 1970s, the artistic practices discussed in this book will also need to be approached from the standpoints of geo- and

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ecocriticism.10 Therefore, the commentary offered is supported by critical approaches which favour, in the words of Sten Pultz Moslund, ‘an embodied topopoetic mode of reading’, that is, ‘the production—or the poiesis or presencing—of place in literature through the enduring interconnections between place, language and bodily sensations’ (Moslund 2011, p.  30). The discussion also builds on the works of the post-deconstruction geocritics Bertrand Westphal (Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces, 2007), Eric Prieto (Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place, 2011) and Robert T. Tally and Christine M. Battista (Ecocriticism and Geocriticism: Overlapping Territories in Environmental and Literary Studies, 2016). In his Ecological Aesthetics: artful tactics for humans, nature, and politics (2018), Nathaniel Stern makes repeated references to the great Marxist and post-Marxist thinkers of the dialectics between aesthetics and politics Michel De Certeau, Jean-­Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. This book will be equally indebted to their approaches, as to that of Marxist philosopher Henri Lefebvre in his influential 1974 Situationist book, The Production of Space. Returning to Scotland and to Lefebvre’s initial assumption that ‘in nature, time is apprehended within space’ (Lefebvre 1974, p.  95), this book contends that by producing space, the artists who work within the context of devolved Scotland also work at producing new modes of apprehending time and History. By ‘History’ here I mean the past, present and, perhaps most importantly, future of the group. When Scottish artists look at nature, what they see is not so much ‘Natural Scotland’ but a terrain, or even a wasteland (albeit a scenic one) that was shaped by historical forces and political will. Tempting as it might be to project the image of a romantically unscathed, ‘wild’ and hence pre-colonial, pre-historical, pre-­ lapsarian and pre-human Scotland, the area will be perceived instead as a history in progress, which has largely been informed by a collective will from the mid-twentieth century onwards to resist and review colonial perspective. Particular attention will thus be paid to the complex mechanisms of the de- and re-aestheticisation, disinvention and reinvention of nature through an analysis of artistic practices that both celebrate and work against the erosion of signs. What the artists discussed below reclaim and repossess is a potential forum for debate, citizen participation and the collective reinvention of a self-image and discourse that would be ­simultaneously consistent with Scotland’s political and territorial agenda and the global environmental issues of the early twenty-first century.

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Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art focuses on works that are indicative of social, aesthetic and technical practices that reveal the ongoing development, within the Scottish literary and art scene, of new and updated systems of symbolic production that are rooted in the time and space of the group, of that imagined and imaginary first-person plural of ‘our land’. Each chapter is supported by two or more case studies and close examinations of the works of emerging and established Scotland-­ based artists who all have in common a keen interest in the experience of the land and demonstrate a heuristic approach to it. The works selected, whether they pertain to nonfiction, poetry, film or the performing arts, while mainly produced by Scottish artists, will not be limited to Scottish authorship: the experience of non-Scots living and working in Scotland will also be considered with a view to examining the creative tactics that these artists deploy to elicit new conceptions of the natural areas of Scotland while responding to today’s cultural, political and environmental challenges. Likewise, this book does not focus solely on the works of artists who campaigned for Scottish independence. Rather, its scope is determined by three main criteria. First, the artworks—some textual, some non-textual, some mainstream, some experimental—that are examined must result from the artists’ bodily presence and interaction with the outdoors, for their experience of the land to be first-hand, and at least as sensuous as intellectual. Second, the artworks must be spatially-oriented and site-specific, as defined by the Korean-American curator and art historian Miwon Kwon in One Place After Another: Site Specific Art and Locational Identity. Also termed ‘site-determined, site-oriented, site-­ referenced, site-conscious, site-responsive, site-related’ or in some measure ‘contextual’, site-specific art entails practices that ‘incorporat[e] the physical conditions of a particular location as integral to the production, presentation, and reception of art’ (Kwon 2002, p. 1). Finally, a further criterion for selection is for the works discussed to be econarratives, environmental or ‘environmentally-oriented’ artworks, as defined by Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination: 1. The nonhuman environment is present not merely as a framing device but as a presence that begins to suggest that human history is implicated in natural history […] 2. The human interest is not understood to be the only legitimate interest […]

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3. Human accountability to the environment is part of the text’s ethical orientation […] 4. Some sense of the environment as a process rather than as a constant or a given is at least implicit in the text. (Buell 1995, p. 11) In order to demonstrate how someone who ‘go[es] to the mountains as an artist’ (Fulton 2010, p. 30) alone nevertheless succeeds in embracing and extolling the social nature of the land they roam, the following chapters will explore the production of space by focusing on the traces that the artists collect, make and leave in their wake. Among these artists are Linda Cracknell, Hamish Fulton, Andy Goldsworthy, Kathleen Jamie, Gerry Loose, Alec Finlay, Roseanne Watt and Hanna Tuulikki. These traces will be rich in their diversity: verbal or non-verbal; backward- or forward-­ pointing; ephemeral or permanent; conventional (logbooks, nonfiction) or not so conventional (photo-textual apparatuses, filmpoems, site-specific performances); and material (the dissemination of artworks in the territory) or digital (the dissemination of cultural products, practices and ideas via new technologies and social media). By looking at both verbal and non-verbal productions of space, I will reflect on how individuals, groups of individuals and the institutions that support them endeavour to relocate the Scottish subject through the reterritorialisation of a distinct voice and corporeity woven into the space (Land Texts, texts on site, poetry paths) and time (textual and mnemonic installations and performances) of the imagined community. As narrow as the field of twenty-first-century Scottish site-specific outdoor art and literature may seem, it is impossible to keep pace with the dizzying variety of artistic practices, artworks and publications that have come to my knowledge these past few years, and with the changing landscape of technology and the new communication paths and tools that the remarkable vigour of today’s Scottish art and literary scene brings with it. Readers will inevitably find omissions, but may in compensation find new and worthwhile insights into creative, poetic, aesthetic and social ways of producing space.11 Each of the following chapters considers specific modes of production of new, updated place-based identities in a context that makes it increasingly difficult to define Scottish culture by its connection to the wild and ahistorical landscape of its romantically fantasised past. This book c­ ontends that a new sense of place is currently in the making in Scotland and that it is rooted in:

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1. spatial and cultural practices—see, for instance, Fulton’s peripatetic investigation of place or ‘walking as knowing as making’, which will be viewed within the frame of the spatial turn12; 2. referential identification by toponymic spatialisation (the use of place names) and the dissemination of verbovisual, photo-textual, phototypographic and iconotextual (Louvel 2011) apparatuses that might prove indicative of the material turn; 3. intersemiotic and intermedial transfers (Eilitta et  al. 2012) that imply alternative sensorial regimes (other than the scriptural and the graphic) and which are consistent with a third, epistemological turn. Chapters 2 and 3 focus on how site-specific practices in the Scottish context denote not just an artistic genre but, to borrow Kwon’s words again, ‘a problem-idea, [a] peculiar cipher of art and spatial politics’ (Kwon 2002, p.  2). They look at the works of artists, among whom Robert Macfarlane, Linda Cracknell, Stuart McAdam, Andrew Greig, Thomas A.  Clark and Hamish Fulton, who tread the vernacular land system of rural Scotland by walking and retracing its ancient roads, paths, trails and drove routes with a view to engaging or ‘reconnecting’ with the cultural, literary, historical, and hence also political, landscape. However diverse their practices might be, it soon appears that the allegedly pristine areas of Scotland, far from being considered inert or empty, are already narratives of some past (but what past?) that should be retrieved, read and interpreted in the land. While challenging the premise that periegetic writers must step out of their comfort zone and travel long distances to walk and write themselves into a new territory and another world, both chapters return to the confluence of sensuous experiences of place and bodily presence to view these practices as part of a poetics of transience that places ways—directions, intents—at the core of space-production. Chapters 4 and 5 shift the emphasis away from the artists as passers-by to the nonhuman mediators that inhabit the land as ‘diplomats’ between worlds. They examine a selection of works by Gerry Loose, Kathleen Jamie and John Burnside that address the shifting borders between the human and the nonhuman communities and move away from the pure aesthetic experience standpoint to question the ‘wildness’ of nature in light of Scotland’s national myths and symbols. By proving sensitive to the social, gregarious characteristics of the nonhuman animals they come in contact with, Loose, Jamie and Burnside are then able to acknowledge the presence of another social order which exists alongside theirs, as well as the possibility that the

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two find a common ground—possibly, even, a ‘home’—in the space in-­ between. Chapter 6 then considers the way the installation of signs such as works of Land Art and concrete, situated poems in the landscape contributes to the production of creative interfaces between two defined spaces, thus enabling the artists, their readers and viewers to emplace themselves not on the margin of but in the centre of things. Chapters 7 and 8 endeavour to identify the spatial peculiarities offered by sound and film by examining the multiple transmedial and intermedial strategies which the site-specific performers and filmmakers Susan Philipsz, Hanna Tuulikki, Susan Kemp and Roseanne Watt implement to produce immersive, affective spaces that reinvent the Scottish Dasein through the simultaneous celebration and antiromantic desecration of Scotland’s natural-cultural heritage. Chapter 9 turns to the digital domain and the remediation of space through screens and websites. It offers to view the artists’ online practices and use of new technologies as creative interplays between tradition and innovation, between old and new patterns of perception of the space thus re-presented, in the in-between of materiality and virtuality. Most importantly, it suggests that these new textualities and new spatialities strive to produce alternative public and social spaces for environmental and civic awareness on both global and local scales.13 In his introduction to Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place, Eric Prieto provides an enlightening definition for a concept which will be recurring in this book: The term entre-deux [or in-between] designates the many different kinds of sites that fall between the established categories that shape our expectations of what a place should be and that often tend, therefore, to be misunderstood, maligned, or simply ignored. Such places, because they deviate from established norms, are all too often thought of in terms of what they lack or what is wrong with them—as defective variants of more-established, better-­ understood places. (Prieto 2011, p. 1)

In many ways, this is the starting point of this book: a ‘conceptual purgatory’ (p. 2), a land that is perceived as being wrong, depreciated and disused. The chapters that follow attempt to retrace the steps by which some are trying to make it right and welcoming again, and how through cautious rediscovery, creative reclamation and remediation, one may rethink it into a productive and inclusive in-between.

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Notes 1. George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2 July 2013, quoted by James Hunter, Peter Peacock, Andy Wightman and Michael Foxley in ‘432:50—Towards a comprehensive land reform agenda for Scotland. A briefing paper for the House of Commons Scottish Affairs Committee’ (2013), p.  6.https:// www.parliament.uk/documents/commons-committees/scottishaffairs/432-Land-Reform-Paper.pdf. Accessed 9 January 2019. 2. ‘Getting the best from our land—A land use strategy for Scotland’, presented before Parliament in March 2011; ‘This Land is Our Land’, the fourth episode of a series of historical documentaries produced by the Open University in 2009 as part of Neil Oliver’s ‘A History of Scotland’ series, produced by Richard Downes; the documentary titled Nar Lamhan Fhin / In Our Own Hands, aired on BBC Alba on 13 August 2018. At the SNP conference in Aberdeen on 9 June 2018, Heather Anderson, SNP Councillor for Tweeddale West, gave a speech on land ownership in which she argued that ‘Land has been somebody else’s business for a long time’, and that one of the challenges ahead is to restore the long-lost ‘connection between our land and us’ through what she called ‘stewardship’, not ‘ownership’ of land. Kathleen Jamie’s commissioned poem ‘Here Lies Our Land’ is now displayed on the rotunda monument at the Battle of Bannockburn site. 3. Magnus Jamieson, ‘The Bones of a Nation’, in Bella Caledonia, 29 June 2017, http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2017/06/29/the-bones-of-a-nation. Accessed 9 January 2019. This article features Murray Robertson’s digital pigment print map of those same Core Areas of Wild Land, titled Core Areas of Wild Land II—Prìomh Sgìrean na Talmhainn Fiadhaich II, which he developed during a visual arts residency on the Isle of Skye in 2015. 4. See Gold and Gold, 1995. 5. See the official gateway to the Scotland.org website: http://www.scotland.org/whats-on/year-of-natural-scotland/about-the-year-of-naturalscotland/ (my emphasis). Accessed 9 January 2019. 6. http://www.scottishlandactionmovement.org/s/Our-Land-Info-Packw-cover.pdf, website now expired. 7. The six chapter headings in Andrew Brown (2014) Art & Ecology Now (London: Thames and Hudson). 8. See Alan Riach’s article ‘Not Burns—Duncan Ban MacIntyre and his Gaelic manifesto for land reform’ (Riach 2016). 9. ‘The Lie of the Land: Scottish Landscape and Culture’ international conference, at the University of Stirling in 2006; the ‘Imagining Natural Scotland’ conference, in St Andrews in 2013; also in 2013, ‘The Environment and the (Post)Human in Scotland. Representing Nature and

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the Living’ international conference of Besançon, whose proceedings were later published under the title Environmental and ecological readings: Nature, human and posthuman dimensions in Scottish literature and arts (XVIII-XXI c) (Laplace 2015); the ‘Place and Space in Scottish Literature and Culture’ conference of 2015  in Sopot; the third international St Magnus conference, titled ‘Visualising the North’, held in Orkney in April 2016; the trans-disciplinary conference titled ‘Expressing the Earth’ conference on the Isle of Seil in June 2017; the ‘Creative Archipelagos. Explorations of Islands in Scottish Literature and Culture’ international conference that was held in Skye in June 2018; the biennial Environmental Art Festival Scotland, launched in 2013; Glasgow’s Ecocultures Festival of Environmental Research, Policy and Practice of October 2015; ‘Traversing the Field: An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Walking and Thinking in Scottish Landscapes’, at the University of Dundee in April 2016; the ‘Geopoetics Highland Stravaig’, in Abriachan on 16 May 2018; and ‘Wild Women. Whose land is it anyway?’ subtitled ‘A day exploring women’s connection to the land’, held in Aberfeldy on 16 June 2018. 10. On the dialogue between the two approaches, see Prieto 2016. 11. There are many gifted artists whose influence not just on contemporary Scottish arts but on the very perception of the Scottish landscape is undeniable, including Ian Stephen, Valerie Gillies, Jackie Kay, Meg Bateman, Angus Peter Campbell, Maiolios Caimbeul, Aonghas MacNeacail, Robin Robertson, Katie Paterson, Gill Russell and Will Maclean. 12. ‘Walking as knowing as making’ was the title of an exhibition and ‘protracted symposium’ held in the spring of 2005 at the University of Illinois, with Hamish Fulton participating as a keynote speaker. 13. In Ecological Aesthetics. Artful Tactics for Humans, Nature, and Politics Nathaniel Stern contends that ‘[t]he virtual is not yet, but still present as a force. It is the potential of what might become. And of course what might be impacts what is, just as much as what is impacts what might be—a very present force, despite its orientation toward the future’ (Stern 2018, p. 11).

References Brown, Andrew. 2014. Art & Ecology Now. London: Thames and Hudson. Buell, Lawrence. [1995] 1996. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Eilitta, Leena, Liliane Louvel, and Sabine Kim, eds. 2012. Intermedial Arts: Disrupting, Remembering and Transforming Media. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Fulton, Hamish. 2010. Mountain Time Human Time. Milano: Charta.

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Gairn, Louisa. 2008. Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Garrard, Greg. 2004. Ecocriticism. Abingdon: Routledge. Gold, John R., and Margaret M.  Gold. 1995. Imagining Scotland: Tradition, Representation and Promotion of Scottish Tourism since 1750. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. 1984. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jamieson, Magnus. 2017. The Bones of a Nation. Bella Caledonia, June 29. http://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2017/06/29/the-bones-of-a-nation/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Laplace, Philippe, ed. 2015. Environmental and Ecological Readings: Nature, Human and Posthuman Dimensions in Scottish Literature and Arts (XVIII-­ XXI c). Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté. Lefebvre, Henri. [1974] 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-­ Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Louvel, Liliane. 2011. Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs. Trans. Laurence Petit. Farnham: Ashgate. MacDougall, Carl. 2004. Writing Scotland: How Scotland’s Writers Shaped the Nation. Edinburgh: Polygon. Mackenzie, A. Fiona D. 2013. Places of Possibility: Property, Nature and Community Land Ownership. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. McIntosh, Alastair. [2001] 2004. Soil and Soul: People Versus Corporate Power. London: Aurum Press. Moffat, Alexander, Alan Riach, and Linda MacDonald-Lewis. 2008. Arts of Resistance: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland. Edinburgh: Luath Press. Moffat, Alexander, Ruth Nicol, and Alan Riach. 2017. Landmarks: Poets, Portraits and Landscapes of Modern Scotland. Glasgow: Soapbox Design and Print. Moslund, Sten Pultz. 2011. The Presencing of Place in Literature: Toward an Embodied Topopoetic Mode of Reading. In Geocritical Explorations: Space, Place and Mapping in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr., 29–43. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Prieto, Eric. 2011. Literature, Geography, and the Postmodern Poetics of Place. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. Geocriticism Meets Ecocriticism: Bertrand Westphal and Environmental Thinking. In Ecocriticism and Geocriticism. Overlapping Territories and Spatial Literary Studies, ed. Robert T. Tally Jr. and Christine M. Battista, 19–35. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Riach, Alan. 2005. Representing Scotland in Literature, Popular Culture and Iconography. The Masks of the Modern Nation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2016. Not Burns – Duncan Ban MacIntyre and His Gaelic Manifesto for Land Reform. The National, February 5. http://www.thenational.scot/culture/not-burns-duncan-ban-macintyre-and-his-gaelic-manifesto-for-landreform.13296. Accessed 16 Mar 2018. Said, Edward. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf. Shoard, Marion. [1987] 1997. This Land is Our Land. The Struggle for Britain’s Countryside. London: Gaia Books. Smith, Anthony D. 1998. Nationalism and Modernism. A Critical Survey of Recent Theories of Nations and Nationalism. London/New York: Routledge. Smout, Thomas Christopher. 2000. Nature Contested: Environmental History in Scotland and Northern Ireland since 1600. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stern, Nathaniel. 2018. Ecological Aesthetics: Artful Tactics for Humans, Nature, and Politics. Hanover: Dartmouth College Press. Szuba, Monika. 2015. Boundless Scotland: Space in Contemporary Scottish Fiction. Gdansk: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Gdańskiego. Tally, Robert T.Jr., and Christine M.  Battista, eds. 2016. Ecocriticism and Geocriticism. Overlapping Territories and Spatial Literary Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Westphal, Bertrand. [2007] 2011. Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces. Trans. Robert T. Tally Jr. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wightman, Andy. 1996. Who Owns Scotland? Edinburgh: Canongate. ———. 2010. The Poor Had No Lawyers: Who Owns Scotland and How They Got It. Edinburgh: Birlinn.

Websites Scottish Community Alliance. http://www.scottishcommunityalliance.org.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. The Land is Ours. http://tlio.org.uk/scottish-land-action-movement. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Wightman, Andy. http://www.andywightman.com. Accessed 16 March 2019.

CHAPTER 2

Keeping the Paths Beaten: Robert Macfarlane, Linda Cracknell and Stuart McAdam’s Hodological Scotland

‘Scotland small?’ The BBC unwittingly added a fresh tone to Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem when it launched its new 3D weather map on 16 May 2005. Many in Scotland and elsewhere were quite baffled by the graphics and their slanting, distorted view of the UK.  Angled from a southerly perspective with an inflated south and shrunken north, the view knocked most of the Western and Northern Isles off the map and made Scotland look much smaller than the third of the total UK land mass that it actually covers. The SNP was quick to demand that this ‘daft’ map be rethought to show Scotland ‘as it is’ (an intriguing formulation in itself), while the Scottish daily forecast kept promoting a flood of alternative graphics, this time angled from the north: an eye for an eye, or a map for a map. Meanwhile, a BBC spokesman urged viewers not to think that Scotland appeared smaller but rather that ‘the bottom part of the map’ looked larger before adding that ‘it will take a little time for audiences to get used to it’.1 The weather map feud now seems more a cause for laughter than outrage, with, for instance, Robert Sproul-Cran’s interpretation of the 3D globe bias in his facetiously titled article ‘Honey I Shrunk the Country’ published on 17 February 2014 in Bella Caledonia and James The term ‘hodology’ or ‘odology’, meaning literally ‘the study of pathways’, was reintroduced by John Brinckerhoff Jackson in his 1984 monograph Discovering the Vernacular Landspace. © The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_2

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Robertson’s priceless take on the BBC News At Ten programme in his Oulipian, tongue-in-cheek 365-word poem ‘The News Where You Are’. The BBC weather map was in some ways symptomatic of Said’s ‘struggle over geography’ and of the dynamics of spatial relationships between (to use the broadcaster’s official discourse) Scotland—named, bordered, dwarfed and less readable—and ‘the bottom part of the map’—nameless, borderless, inflated and more readable. The 3D globe map exemplifies a geonarrative and geopolitical production of space that relies on what structuralist semiotics describes as myths, that is, systems that serve the ideological aims of the dominant class. The theory must have struck a powerful chord with the many supporters of Scotland’s independence who were watching the BBC weather forecast that night. Because the perception of space is rooted in the intrinsic dichotomy between the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, the least one can expect of a national map is for it to rely on a consensual representation of that dichotomy. The BBC weather map disrupted the tripartite relationship between space, self and other, thus hindering successful deciphering of the visual code by a section of its receivers. Stuart Hall contends that the communication process is a symbolic exchange whose completion is contingent upon the ideology of a culture at a particular point in time through the accepted interpretation of connotative (here, televisual) signs. Hall refers to these as ‘maps of meaning’ or ‘fragments of ideology’ (Hall 1980, p.  134). The mapping of a space occupied by a community is therefore of major ideological and political significance because it serves to iconise and, in Hall’s terms, ‘naturalise’ (p. 132) the perception the members of said community have of the social-spatial community to which they belong. There is, however, little chance that the BBC’s visual encoding of the space occupied by Scotland and its creative use of cartographic scale will ever be subject to that process—that ‘getting used to it’—at least in ‘the upper part of the map’. With Hall’s ‘naturalisation’ in mind and in line with Yi-Fu Tuan’s concept of ‘enduring spaces’, this chapter focuses on place-inspired texts and sited or site-specific artworks as verbal and non-verbal reactions elicited by wilful, physical encounters with an environment that is lived in and trodden upon before it is imagined, materialised and shared, and where the prerequisite for the production of space is that the artist and space-thinker must be in place, or emplaced first. It endorses the geocritical perspective in its approach to contemporary Scottish ‘spatial stories’, to use Michel De Certeau’s famous phrase (De Certeau 1984, p.  115), with a view to

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e­ xamining the processes by which imaginary and poetic/poietic geographies are being elaborated in order to make Scotland socially, politically and aesthetically meaningful as a space. The new geographical paradigm that emerged in the late twentieth century out of deconstructionism and postmodernism is characterised by its theoretical pluralism and, in particular, by its interest in the poetics of interaction between literature and space(s), that is, in ‘spatial stories’. Geography is now thought of as combining spatial referentiality and textuality, with the latter encompassing both fiction and nonfiction. Contemporary geographers and geocritics such as Jacques Lévy and Bertrand Westphal contend that space and geography are to be approached as discourses and hence as cognitive constructs divided into ‘genres’ that can be either verbal or non-verbal, sequential or non-sequential, and that pertain to distinct identifiable operations and communication strategies ranging from the interpretative to the argumentative or reconstructive (Lévy 1999, p. 187). As such, each map participates in the production of spaces and the communities that inhabit (meaning write or read) them. The experience of space is at once kinaesthetic (space is primarily lived in) and visual. The visual component of the perception of space together with the spatial iconography that is produced out of this perception is key to the way one thinks and represents one’s individual and collective being in the material and social world. The map is a trope, a visual metaphor and a means of trans-port (De Certeau 1984, p. 115); it constructs the places, territories, networks and trajectories that delineate a community and define its relationship with other organised neighbouring communities. The cartographic discourse communicates connections, disconnections, sociocognitive strategies and spatial myths and therefore also produces memory and identity.2 Hand-drawn sketch maps and creative maps are therefore unsurprisingly common in regional literatures, as they allow their authors to reground and reroot their communities by rewriting their relationship to the local and the spatial through new imaginary space allocations. Among the many maps that feature in the paratextual apparatuses of contemporary Scottish poets, nature writers and artists, I will retain three. Each exemplifies the cartographic and spatial stance it takes as regards the mapping of Scotland: the Ordnance Survey Map of Assynt in Andrew Greig’s At the Loch of the Green Corrie (2010), Linda Cracknell’s manuscript map of the drove from Newtonmore to Kirkmichael in Doubling Back (2014) and Hanna Tuulikki’s 2014  map of the Isle of Canna. At first, these maps appear to be interpretative in nature. They are tightly framed and consequently non-competitive since each writer, poet

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or artist focuses on one identifiable piece of land—one place—that they inhabit or where they are or were, at some point in their lives, located. In the paratext of At the Loch of the Green Corrie, Greig circles the area in which the somewhat ironically unmapped and misnamed Green Corrie may—or may not—be found, as he is about to go in search of the lochan at the enigmatic behest of a dying, wizard-like Norman MacCaig (Fig. 2.1):

Fig. 2.1  Andrew Greig 2010, At the Loch of the Green Corrie. (Copyright Quercus, reproduced with the permission of the Controller of Her Majesty’s Stationery Office)

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I should like you to fish for me at the Loch of the Green Corrie,’ MacCaig concludes over our last dram. ‘Only it’s not called that. But if you go to Lochinver and ask for a man called Norman MacAskill, if he likes you he may tell you where it is. If you catch trout, I shall be delighted. And if you fail, then looking down from a place in which I do not believe, I shall be most amused. (Greig 2010, p. 3)

Greig’s scribbled-over Ordnance Survey map points to what increasingly looks like a negative treasure island with the circle marking the location of hidden underwater treasure, a place that is essentially designed not to be found: a dis-location, a utopia. Greig circles and locates the invisible site of a prospective memory, one to be shared beyond the grave with his late mentor after the quest is completed. A running spatial metaphor identifies this site as just another kind of location, namely poetry: Of course, it takes years to discover where ‘your own’ [poetry] is located. And if you ever do, it’s probably time to go fish another, higher and more problematic, lochan. (Greig 2010, p. 33)

The cartographic material is therefore intended to map not actual, factual space, places or sites but rather a sense of place that is grounded in the impalpable and the unlocatable. At a time when smartphones and GPS locators are tending to make portable maps obsolete, it is somehow only fair that those maps that remain, the hand-drawn ones, the scribbled-over ones, should iconise something that is other than, or more than spatial, as the antiquated manuscript maps from Linda Cracknell’s 2014 collection of walking tales Doubling Back demonstrate. These maps are to be read both as accidental records of a moment in time and as translations of personal, kinaesthetic experiences into visual materials. The iconography of motion takes precedence over any geometrical accuracy or meticulous representation of distance or scale. As a preamble to ‘The Return of Hoof Beats’, the ‘Newtonmore to Kirkmichael’ map features a 14-page story of Cracknell’s pony ride along an ancient drove road. Cracknell’s idiosyncratic use of directional arrows and hoof marks points away from the purely cartographic towards the art of storytelling, with the map functioning as an introduction to the ensuing narrative sequence and Cracknell reflecting on a journey that she sees as a displacement as much through time as through space (Fig. 2.2).

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Fig. 2.2  Linda Cracknell 2014, ‘The Return of Hoof Beats’, Doubling Back, p. 163. (Copyright Linda Cracknell) Our modest body of people and animals moving as one across an ancient-­ feeling landscape in Scotland was an ‘unnecessary’ journey but felt connected to a stream of time and legacy of working journeys with animals. I’d envisaged it being a bit like a medieval pilgrimage; a flock of us grouping and regrouping as we moved, stories told along the way, and more created. (Cracknell 2014, p. 166)

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The operative word here is ‘connected’, in both the spatial and emotional senses of the word. In Cracknell’s mind, re-enacting the drove is as much a narratological as a spatial process, and walking (or riding, in this case) and storytelling are perceived as cognate activities. By mapping her journey from one point to the next, Cracknell is really mapping narration in its topokinetic nature: space engenders language as much as language engenders space. In Lines, A Brief History, Tim Ingold writes: When, drawing a sketch map for a friend, I take my line for a walk, I retrace in gesture the walk that I made in the countryside and that was originally traced out as a trail along the ground. Telling the story of the journey as I draw, I weave a narrative thread that wanders from topic to topic, just as in my walk I wandered from place to place. (Ingold 2007, p. 87)

This interest in the mapping of language is also illustrated by Hanna Tuulikki’s Gaelic place-names map of Canna. The  large-scale map was hand-drawn by the artist and composer as part of her project Air falbh leis na h-eòin // Away with the Birds, a series of sited performances and field recordings that took place on the small Hebridian island in late August 2014, to be examined in Chap. 7. Now housed in the Canna community hall, the map aims at furthering and bringing to completion the work of the Gaelic scholars, field collectors and folklorists Alexander Nicolson, Ian MacKinnon and John Lorne Campbell, who walked the island collecting and cataloguing Canna’s Gaelic place names. Tuulikki’s map picks up where Campbell left off, continuing and translating (carrying over) the work of the walker-historian in a transtemporal, transmedial visual reiteration of a scientific, intellectual and experiential attempt at recording the past in verbal format. Titled Isle of Canna, it is both an artistic ideation of space and a visual representation of knowledge. It is the accomplishment of a method (a way) that allows knowledge to become visible and through which one can retrieve not only what has been lost (in this case place names) but also, as seen above, old spatial practices, voices, ‘insight’ and that unfathomable, almost esoteric sense of ‘connection’ (Fig. 2.3). All three of these geopoetic maps investigate and phenomenalise different approaches to the space of Scotland through conceptual, analytical or emotional approaches to the way in which that space is imagined by the individual, group of individuals or communities that inhabit it or move across it at some point in time. The idea and experience of space are thus tied not only to perception and physicality but also to the memory of an

Fig. 2.3  Hanna Tuulikki 2014, Isle of Canna. (Copyright Hanna Tuulikki)

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intimacy with that space that is laden with emotional intensity and symbolic meaning. In Barthesian terms, these maps are the fragmentary imprints of ‘what has been’ (Barthes 1957). What they make visible is the absence—the vanished presence—of something that used to be there and can still be conjured by either verbal or non-verbal constructs. The way space is experienced and conceptualised necessarily contends with the dualism of presence-absence. Whether space is conceived of as the dimensions within which all things exist or as the unfilled area between objects or figures as it is defined in the realm of the visual arts, it exists in the concatenation of both what is present and what is not or no longer, in other words, of spatial and temporal considerations. Maybe there can be no experience of space except for in that ‘Thirdspace’ where, to quote Edward Soja, ‘everything comes together’: […] subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious, the disciplined and the transdisciplinary, everyday life and unending history. (Soja 1996, pp. 56–7)

Largely inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space and Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, Soja’s ‘trialectices of spatiality-­ historicality-­ sociability’ (p.  57) proves particularly enlightening when examining the protean, multiform idea of nature and the paradox of enchantment through disenchantment that characterises, as this book conjectures, Scottish contemporary nature writing and, beyond literature, Scottish art dealing with the experience of nature in today’s Scotland. Regardless of the areas they explore and/or live in, the artists focused on in this book are all sooner or later faced with the difficulty of identifying the kind of terrain they tread, ideate and create from. All of them acknowledge the historicity of a Scotland whose parks, reserves and wildlife areas are ‘synthetic’ human-made spaces and monuments to a past that remains highly traumatic, that of the Clearances.3 With a few rare exceptions, when they venture out of doors, they do not walk into some pristine ahistorical wilderness. Rather, they enter an ecological variant of Soja’s Thirdspace, where the forces of history coexist with nonhuman (geological, elemental, zoological) elements that somehow defy that very history. In his 2002 guide to nature writing, the American ecocritic Don Scheese was careful to differentiate the ‘hard’ from the ‘soft pastoral’. According to the critic,

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the ‘hard pastoral’ aestheticises ‘terrain with little or no historic evidence of human manipulation [that] constitutes wilderness’ whereas the ‘soft pastoral’ celebrates a more managed version of nature, which, like Scheese, we might call ‘wildness’ (Scheese 2002, pp. 7–8). Scottish nature writers and visual artists will often, however reluctantly, reject the former in favour of the latter when faced with an environment that proves ‘so empty, so beautiful. So wrong’ (Greig 2010, p. 178). Their aesthetic appreciation of landscape and their effective, practical engagement with their historical, social and ecological milieus operate within the cultural context of ‘the strong ecological turn of thought in Scottish culture’, which, Robert Crawford notes, dates back to the 1930s and the works of the first Scottish literary Renaissance movement writers, more specifically Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Neil Gunn, George Mackay Brown, Naomi Mitchison, Sorley MacLean and Nan Shepherd: Where nineteenth-century Scotland was the terrain of the sublime, much of twentieth-century Scotland became through its writers the landscape of the ecological. Literary artists sought to investigate how people, creatures, crops and landscape might co-exist in balance. (Crawford 2007, p. 563)

To Crawford, the same concerns are still perceptible in the works of contemporary poets such as John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie and himself, although the list will appear surprisingly short to some. While it can hardly be denied that there is indeed a continuity between twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Scottish nature writing and ecopoetry, the poiesis of wildness and nature in Scotland has nevertheless undergone notable change since the beginning of the current century. This change has been due to factors related to British politics (specifically, with the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, the prospect of restoring locational identity) and the development not only of new technologies and the ensuing proliferation of digital environments (notwithstanding its counterpart, the resistance and resilience of material ones) but also of alternative mindscapes and ecospiritual and emotionally charged approaches to the wildness of nature. ‘Topophiliac’ (Tuan 1974) or ‘biophiliac’ (Wilson 1984) stances are constantly fuelled by the social, political, cultural and philosophical context in which the geo-, topo- or biophiles live and work. This background informs and transforms the ways one may ‘connect’ with a natural world, where one’s perception fluctuates between the permanent and the impermanent, the tamed and the untamed and the disconnected from and reconnected with the human world.

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In their introduction to Postcolonial Ecologies, Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley contended that postcolonial spatial imagination can be foregrounded geographically, environmentally, genealogically, historically and phenomenologically (DeLoughrey and Hanley 2011, p.  4). However, if the production or reproduction of space in Scotland is rooted in the experiential, that is, in the being here, walking here and creating here, another parallel can be drawn between the current, remarkable proliferation of works that speak of the writers’ and artists’ immediate localities and what may appear to be a departure from the postcolonial paradigm. Dealing with sites and places is one means of rejecting the concept of a homogeneous Scotland, and the view  that its terrain has been evenly shaped by historical and social forces operating all over the land in exactly the same way. Scottish nature writing and site-specific art are significantly devoid of synecdochal representations of the nation, with the artists choosing to focus not on territorial issues (‘territory’ being defined here as a homogeneous, functional and socially appropriated political construct) but rather on the smaller spatial units of ‘place’ and ‘site’, which are no less complex, collective or identifiable. These exist through their symbolic and historical properties, but they can on occasion be stripped of their social function, transformed from meeting to hiding places and considered ‘private’ or, as with MacCaig and Greig’s poetical lochan, as one’s ‘own’. Place and its later subdivisions into sites are characterised by the fact that they preclude the perception of distance. As such, they are the only spatial units that allow the imagining of centrality, rootedness, continuity and security: in other words, everything that contributes to turning space into the legible and familiar environment that we like to call our ‘home’ (not to ignore the added proprietary slant that the word suggests). The in situ narratives and artistic practices that are the focus of this book configure and reconfigure not just place but the artists’ sense of place (their Dùthchas), their place attachment and place dependence: their ‘locational identity’, which Miwon Kwon loosely defines as ‘a cultural valorization of places as the locus of authentic experience and coherent sense of historical and personal identity’ (Kwon 2002, p. 52). This definition needs clarification in the Scottish context, especially when it comes to notions such as ‘cultural valorization’, authenticity and coherence.4 See, for instance, how, in his foreword to A Wilder Vein, Robert Macfarlane argues that the renewed interest in nature writing from Scottish writers derives from a sense of loss and ‘delocation’, which he likens to a form of solastalgia, a reminiscence of Michel De Certeau’s assertion that ‘to walk is to lack a

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place’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 103). Macfarlane continues: ‘writers return to the idea that cognition is site-specific, or motion-sensitive: that we think differently in different landscapes’ (in Cracknell 2009, ix). He thus questions the potentially conflicting notions of ‘returning’ and ‘difference’, as well as the mechanisms of repetition and change that are so dramatically at work in contemporary Scottish nature writing and arts. What does ‘returning’ entail? What does one ‘return’ from, and where to? In the years leading up to the referendum on Scottish independence, institutions, non-governmental organisations and artists demonstrated a keen interest in Scotland’s landscapes and more specifically in access legislation. The remapping of Scotland through the research and promotion of its old routes has generated a significant number of projects aimed at, in the words of Heritage Paths, ‘revitalising Scotland’s historic paths for the future’. In 2010, with the financial support of ScotWays and SNH, Heritage Paths launched a three-year project to identify, reclaim and reopen the pathways that once structured the social landscape of Scotland, namely the pilgrimage routes, the trading, shieling5 and miners’ paths and the Roman, military, drove, coffin and turnpike roads, which were all later shared with the general public by means of interpretive signs, topo-guides, online learning resources and strategic and interactive maps. The following pages focus on the ways in which ‘Natural Scotland’ is retrodden, reclaimed and re-presented in a series of wayfaring narratives, waybooks and hodologic and loco-descriptive poems, performances and artworks that have also endeavoured to remap Scotland since the beginning of the twenty-first century, starting with the work of an English-born travel-­ writer, Robert Macfarlane.6 The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012) is the third volume of a bestselling trilogy, which also comprised Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination and The Wild Places, published in 2003 and 2007, respectively. Five of the sixteen essays in this third volume are devoted to Macfarlane’s journeys on foot and by sea, retracing the ‘old ways’, routes and paths of the Outer Hebrides (‘Water—South’, ‘Water—North’, ‘Peat’ and ‘Gneiss’) and the Cairngorms (‘Granite’). The tone differs quite dramatically from that of The Wild Places, a book that earned Macfarlane the unenviable title of ‘lone enraptured male’ in Kathleen Jamie’s 2008 review of the book. In that same review, Jamie identifies two persistent features of nature writing. There is, on the one hand, the idea that nature is necessarily vacant and, on the other, that it can only offer itself to the solitary male who communes with it through feats of physical endurance and mental

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toughness. The construction of barrenness that Jamie most interestingly describes as ‘colonial’ does indeed entail the erasure of human history and of the former inhabitants of a place that is conveniently trodden upon as terra incognita, a place that can only be ‘discovered’ by he who proves worthy of it. It is hard to say whether Jamie’s reservations hit home with Macfarlane, but it is clear at least that in The Old Ways he took great care to ensure his readers are aware of what he refers to, somewhat apologetically, as his ‘conversion’. He thus presents himself as ‘pushing when young for the summits of mountains, longing to get into unmapped and unexplored territory, but now happier on the beaten track, following the footsteps of other’ (Macfarlane 2012, p. 280). In The Old Ways Macfarlane is no longer a conqueror of the uncharted. He reverts to being a humble ‘pilgrim’ and—he chooses the word carefully—a ‘trespasser’ (xi). Written in ‘commemoration and recollection’ (p. 185) of the old cairned shieling and work paths, of the seaways and coffin trails that once ran across the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, The Old Ways marks a drastic change in Macfarlane’s approach. He presents horizontal rather than vertical journeys and a ‘consensual’ (p.  17) rather than oppositional experience of place that is, most significantly, social rather than private. By placing himself under the guidance of local passeurs (namely the poet and artist Ian Stephen, the natural historian and novelist Finlay MacLeod and the archaeologist and cartographer Anne Campbell), Macfarlane displays a strong personal interest in the words of the land, in ‘acts of verbal landscaping’ and in signs of habitation through which the memory-walker can ‘take reading of the land’ (p.  194; 133). During his ritual walk in the Cairngorms in memory of his grandfather, Macfarlane repeatedly invokes The Living Mountain and Nan Shepherd, whose ontology of presence he is happy to embrace, as are many of his fellow British nature writers.7 Macfarlane quotes Kenneth White, Thomas A.  Clark and George Eliot and nods to Neil Gunn, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Borrow, Matsuo Basho, William Wordsworth and many other walker-writers, ‘dawdlers, dreamers, striders, guides, pilgrims, wanderers, stravaigers, trespassers, cartographers’ whom he has either read or met along the way (p. 32). The Old Ways thus offers itself as a mnemonic, territorial and intellectual investigation (or mapping) of place along the multiple narrative paths and ‘ghost-lines’ (p. 21) that constitute its architecture. See Rebecca Solnit’s interpretation of rewalking as pilgrimage:

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A path is a prior interpretation of the best way to traverse a landscape, and to follow a route is to accept an interpretation, or to stalk your predecessors on it as scholars and trackers and pilgrims do. To walk the same way is to reiterate something deep; to move through the same space the same way is a means of becoming the same person, thinking the same thoughts. It’s a form of spatial theater, but also spiritual theater, since one is emulating saints and gods in the hope of coming closer to them oneself, not just impersonating them for others. It’s this that makes pilgrimage, with its emphasis on repetition and imitation, distinct amid all the modes of walking. (Solnit 2000, p. 68)

In The Old Ways, this spatial and spiritual theatre is also endowed with a sensorial and kinetic dimension. Macfarlane literally conjures the past to bring it back to life so that his readers can immerse themselves in it: Listen now. Listen to the singing of the guga men on the bare rock of Sula Sgeir, hunched in a stone bothy on that little island far out in the North Atlantic, on an August morning nearly sixty years ago. […] The singing begins. First comes the leader, his voice low and rich, incanting the verses of the day in Gaelic – ‘ach is e en gràdh as mo dhuibh so’, ‘and the greatest of these is charity’  – his voice dipping then rising at the end of each verse. (Macfarlane 2012, pp. 119–20)

Place in The Old Ways is ethnographic, and Macfarlane’s journey narratives are chronotopic in the sense that they systematically interweave space, time and narrativity.8 Haunted by its former inhabitants and those who have travelled across it in the past, place is where a form of co-presence between self and other and between self and an earlier self can be achieved. Although Macfarlane depicts this co-presence as being ‘spectral’ and ‘uncanny’ (p. 284), it is more likely to be associated with a sense of ‘consolation’ (p.  198; 305), implying that what lies in nature is not to be gained but to be reclaimed. Scottish nature writing is not exempt from the topos of nature bringing regeneration, solace and resilience to self and even possibly to the group, as I will argue. In Findings, Kathleen Jamie explains that she walks into nature to ‘recuperate in a place where […] language doesn’t join up’ (Jamie 2005, p. 164). Could there then be a correlation between this disjoining of language and the ‘consolation’ or ‘recuperation’ that can be found in the outdoors? Macfarlane’s occasional lapses into an agrammatical logbook style (‘the sea: graphite, lightly choppy, white-stippled’, Macfarlane 2012,

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p. 100) and self-correction (‘incorrect–’, p. 142) may indeed suggest that when confronted with elemental nature, language undergoes a form of dislocation and disornamentation that urges the author to revert to the purely referential. This disjunction can only be resolved through the spatialisation of the mind and a series of topomental metaphors, including Macfarlane’s declaration of intent: ‘this is a book […] about walking as a reconnoitre inwards’ (xi). The point is therefore to tread space in order to produce thought, as the author readily acknowledges in his tribute to Edward Thomas’ ‘topographies of self’ (p. 26). Walking and writing are part of a process of self-inspection, which, taking into account the military sense of ‘reconnoitre’, allows a form of self-reconquest and self-­ repossession. Hints of masculinity also resurface in Macfarlane’s analogy between writing and the energetic, repetitive, directional moves of the human-animal body across space: As the pen rises from the page between words, so the walker’s feet rise and fall between paces, and as the deer continues to run as it bounds from the earth, and the dolphin continues to swim even as it leaps again and again from the sea, so writing and wayfaring are continuous activities, a running stitch, a persistence of the same seam or stream. (p. 105)

Despite the excerpt’s comparative overkill and possibly self-indulgent choice of glamorous totemic animals, the parallel that Macfarlane draws between the scriptural line, complete with its blanks and gaps, and the motion of the body through space is particularly effective here. It provides us with a compelling image of what Solnit termed the ‘conversation’ and ‘align[ment] of the mind, the body and the world’ that is considered one of the psychological correlatives of walking and more generally of all outdoor physical activities (Solnit 2000, p. 5). Macfarlane’s outward horizontal walks are therefore coupled with inward vertical travels, allowing the writer to re-attune himself within a landscape of the mind where he can write-walk-leap-run effortlessly alongside the wild other. This physical, sensory and psychological rewilding occurs at the intersection of two spatial planes. One is the actual space of walking and remembering, where the sedimentation of history is experienced through the many old paths that connect places, stories and people with the palimpsestual land, telling its history and calling to be deciphered. The other is the space of being, of persistence in disruption and of continuity in discontinuity, where the human can be restored to the balance of nature and the body clicked back

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into its animal perfection. Walking-writing or, in the case of The Old Ways, rewalking-rewriting appears then as a means of recovering not just one’s sense of place but one’s sense of becoming, that is, one’s sense of direction. Another contributor to the new literature of place in Scotland and fellow member of this new Scottish peripatetic school of thinking is Linda Cracknell. In 2009, she edited A Wilder Vein, an anthology of contemporary British nature writing, comprising essays and short stories by Scotland-­ based writers Gerry Loose, Michelle Cotter, Mandy Haggith, Jane Alexander, Alison Grant, Lesley Harrison, Sara Maitland, Margaret Elphinstone and Andrew Greig, with a foreword by Robert Macfarlane. In 2014, she published a nonfiction work, Doubling Back: Ten Paths Trodden in Memory, which was adapted by BBC Radio 4 in 2018. Like Macfarlane in The Old Ways, in this volume she offers to ‘retrea[d] former ways first with feet and then with words’ (Cracknell 2014, p. 215), whether these paths were originally walked by herself or by others, including the writers Thomas Hardy (‘The Opening Door’, in Cornwall) and Jessie Kesson (‘Dancing, Kicking up her Legs’, near Abriachan), the walking artist Hamish Fulton (‘Stairway to Heaven?’, in Spain) and Cracknell’s own father (‘Outlasting our Tracks’, in Switzerland). In ‘Outlasting our Tracks’, which exemplifies the author’s sense of loss and her desire not to ‘walk it off’ but rather to walk it in, Cracknell explores what she calls ‘mental’ and ‘emotional geograph[ies]’ (p. 185; 191) during a series of journeys of self-exploration and self-healing. Here again, the tectonics of place align with the author’s emotional state through the construction of a psychomorphic topography founded on the ambivalent power of the line (the Great Glen Fault in this case) to connect and divide: This rift also delineates the half of Scotland I chose, and the other half that my ex-partner, Neil, chose. The lochs deepened and schisms grated further apart once we were entrenched on either side. We hadn’t lost touch since the final division seven years before, but we’d avoided each other’s ­immediate territory, and that avoidance of an area where I’d once spent a lot of time, left something not quite resolved for me in my emotional geography. This time, on foot, on a route that led directly between my door and his, it began to seem a subconscious plot, as if the walk was a line of stitching to repair a rip. (p. 191)

The textile analogy which is also present in the collection’s title suggests that there is something almost surgical about the act of walking-­ writing.9 The pervasive idea that walking the line delivers a potential for

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reconciliation is also a motif, with the added notion that in Doubling Back this reconciliation occurs both in the author’s personal life and in her experience of community. Cracknell’s solid or dotted ‘artful’ and ‘desire’ (p. 55; 26) lines are drawn across, between and through spaces in deliberate acts of resistance to estrangement and oblivion. These lines reclaim a journey, a space and a place-related identity whose texture has frayed over time and whose hem needs to be resewn/rewalked for this identity to be regrounded. Cracknell’s lines curve round and thus contain specific loci within the perimeter of purposeful circuits aimed at ‘re-learn[ing]’ the land and ‘reclaiming our own stories through a physical act’ based on repetition (p. 240; 159): I walked in increasing circles and offshoots from my centre – circles which moved me towards orientation, recognition, familiarity and finally a sense of ‘owning’ the place, or perhaps it owning me. (p. 31)10

In Cracknell’s circular walks, the object of the search—here a sense of mutual belonging between self and ‘places occurring both in physical and inner landscapes’ (p. 159)—is hardly ever only related to the perception of centrality. In Doubling Back ‘home’ or Dùthchas is not conflated with any particular dwelling, family, idealised place of origin or point of destination. Instead, Cracknell describes it as a conjunction of forces that are centrifugal and centripetal as in the excerpt above, and vertical and gravitational when Cracknell’s walks take place in familiar settings, that is, from and around the ‘home’ she has made for herself in Aberfeldy. The final essay in the collection recalls Cracknell’s ritual circuit around ‘The Birks’ and her comforting encounters with its regular users. Home is neither just the quintessential space of refuge nor the house that Cracknell sketches at the bottom of her map. Home has become the path itself and the circular walk from house to house, creating mutual recognition, kinship and a sense of weight that contrasts sharply with Macfarlane’s airborne metaphor of the walker-writer as a bounding deer and leaping dolphin: By keeping the paths beaten, our feet earn the right to be here. We recognise each other as those who beat the bounds with a quotidian rhythm. We’re like a ‘hefted’ flock of sheep with a mental map of their territory, a memory that apparently lasts at least three generations. We’re not contained by fences and perimeters, but share alliance to the path. (pp. 240–241)

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Added to the symbolic potency of the image of the flock of sheep, the metaphor of the walker as keeper of the path and as pounding the territory thus delineated into existence is particularly arresting, especially when it comes with the idea that, with each step they take, the walkers curve another, deeper groove in the collective memory of the community they belong to. The walker-weaver becomes a sculptor, the sculptor a historian and Dùthchas a path: ‘With each turn of the circle, the walk revises itself; the archive deepens’ (p. 248). As in Macfarlane’s The Old Ways, Cracknell’s active physical as well as intellectual production of a sociomental topography is also directional, but with a difference. Under Cracknell’s pen, the walker-writer is seen to be plodding inward rather than outward or homeward. In the process, that walker-writer undergoes a form of renunciation of self that eventually empowers not the walking subject but place itself. Cracknell’s essays are thus characterised by their sharp attention to the material aspect of place and to the plasticity of matter and its effect on the dissolution of the frontiers between subject and object, inside and outside and feeling and knowing. Cracknell’s retreading of past trails is to be read as a literal descent into the material rather than as ecstatic journeys or means of achieving spiritual elevation. In Doubling Back, the sense of depth is a prerequisite for the sense of place, as evidenced by the recurrent motif of the imprint and Cracknell’s taste for vertical metaphors. Walking is about ‘raising’ ‘buried’ memories and ‘delving into the deep litter of memory’ (p. 178; 15; 158). Time becomes visible in the ‘layering’ and the ‘palimpsest of footfall’ (p. 158) that turns the path into a signifying system of its own— here, a text for the walkers to decipher and write over; there, a soft, plastic surface for bodies to depress and onto which one can ‘wear [one’s] own path of personal meaning’ (p.  123). In Cracknell’s three-dimensional approach to space, the experience of time is embedded in a physical, ­sensuous experience of place that implies physical contact and the grounding of one’s body into the land. Walking is thus never merely a physical and horizontal process, just as spatial marks are never just physical and horizontal. The practice of rewalking intertwines the interpretation and transformation of the world, the reading and writing or, in this case, engraving of the land. The aim in Doubling Back is to participate in this worldwide poetics of trace both by making sense of the place that is travelled through and by leaving ‘new’ signs behind for others to unearth and interpret.11 The process of walking is therefore not just mediated by the sedimented signs encountered along

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the way, it is also the mediation of these signs by gestural practice and engagement into action. Only in this way can individuals inscribe themselves in a spatiotemporal continuum—another chronotope—that manifests itself in the sensuous here and now of the walk and in the syncretic temporality of the objectual traces and operators of spatiality (footprints, hoofprints, ruins) that sign the presence-absence of the past. When walking through Clearance areas, Cracknell experiences ‘the sense at times of a haunted, abandoned landscape’ (p.  177), but as she passes the ruins of long-abandoned summer shelters in Skye: Passing sheilings reduced to tumbled stone and still surrounded by an oasis of green in the high glens, I sometimes fancy I glimpse faces from the corner of an eye, or catch the murmur of voices – curious at a traveller passing. But they didn’t discomfort me as the relics left from the deliberate clearance of people from the Highlands do, perhaps because sheilings were always intended to be temporary. (p. 208)

There are no empty spaces. Those that were forcefully emptied—or ‘cleared’—are permeated by the sense of the unheimlich that Cracknell experiences when she comes across the ruins of sedentary settlements. The seasonal dwellings of the shielings, on the other hand, remain somewhat inhabited, re-awakened even, by those who walk by. Cracknell’s quiet acceptance of the ghosts of previous travellers suggests a sense of cross-­ temporal mutual recognition between different peripatetic groups who have repeatedly walked the same trails across the same landscape over time. In Doubling Back, this companionship between wayfarers is tied in with the figure of the benevolent nomadic observer and guide. The latter is successively embodied in the ghosts of long-departed herdswomen and drovers, in an elderly hiker in whom Cracknell recognises a future version of herself (‘I thought of this woman as my cailliche, and I no longer felt afraid’, p. 206) and in nonhuman others and fellow-travellers who share the same corporal, transient knowledge of the place: Deer helped me on this walk, where the way was soft and the paths laid by streaming cattle had been lost. Their subtle communal tracks led to crossing points on burns and found the harder ground on the sides of valleys. The animals showed themselves in a leap across my path, a roar filtered through mist on a hillside, a head turning over a shoulder before it galloped away. (pp. 189–190)

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If the experience of place in Doubling Back is decidedly and primarily sensuous, it also draws on an ethnography of nomadism in Scotland that manages to eschew the dichotomies of past and present, presence and absence, self and other and human and nonhuman. Episodes of interspecific transmission of knowledge are recurrent in Scottish nature writing, with animals playing a crucial part in what Louisa Gairn identifies as the ‘bodily eco-poetics’ of place (Gairn 2008, p. 186). The elusive presence-­ absence of animals contributes as much to the construction of place as to the construction of time, whether this is long, short or syncretic ‘mountain’ time (Fulton 2010). Cracknell’s shifting, multi-layered sense of place provides us with a good example of what walker-writers, poets and artists seek while engaging with nature and with what might best be described as genius loci, namely alternative perceptions of time, a sense of direction and intent, a sense of full presence to the world through the perception of depth, weight and matter (φύσις, the stuff or ‘fabric’ of nature), a sense that one is both reclaiming the land and being reclaimed by it and a sense of companionship and the protection that ensues. In July 2016, Linda Cracknell tutored a creative writing course titled ‘Jessie Kesson: Words in the Landscape’ at Moniack Mhor Creative Writing Centre, near Beauly. This ‘place-inspired’ workshop replicated the project that was at the core of Doubling Back, as it included a walk through the landscape of Abriachan and ‘tracing the footsteps of Jessie Kesson’ and was followed by a writing session.12 Numerous similar projects have been launched in recent years alongside the proliferation all across Britain of walking-reading groups and artist walks. These are conceived as dynamic alternatives to artist talks and aim at providing the general public or paying audience with information not just about the artists themselves but also about the cultural history, natural history, politics and ‘feel’ of the ­landscape being walked through. Walking or rather rewalking ‘in the footsteps of’ or ‘in the shadow of’ appears to be an increasingly popular activity in Scotland. Many poets and artists have invited others to join them on literary trips inspired by the writing of fellow authors who either inhabited a particular place or demonstrated a particular sensibility to it.13 During the autumn and winter of 2013–2014, as part of the Hielan’ Ways project, London-based walking artist, performer and producer Simone Kenyon led a group of walkers along the former trading routes of the North East of Scotland ‘in the footsteps of Nan Shepherd’s sensibility’. Also in 2013, Scottish poets Ken Cockburn and Alec Finlay travelled ‘in fellowship with’ Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, encountering local poets along the

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way, while creatively revisiting, reinterpreting and re-enacting the two authors’ 1773 journey to the Hebrides. Although private in its actual accomplishment, the project, which was aptly titled Out of Books, led to the creation of an illustrated guide, interactive map and e-journal, which are fully accessible online in the form of travel narratives, poems and photographs (sometimes of the poems written on site and other site-specific photo-textual apparatuses).14 In 2010, Finlay and Cockburn set out on a journey through Scotland that was to be a modern-day and Scotland-­ based actualisation of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North. The result was a collaborative interactive audio and visual word-map of Scotland and a book-length poem, which was published in print in 2014 and is also available, albeit in its abridged version, as an audio poem to be downloaded free of charge on iTunes. In 2012, Finlay also published a series of photographs of poem-labels, viewpoints and mesostics of every place named in Sorley MacLean’s poem ‘Hallaig’ on a dedicated blog commissioned by ATLAS Arts. All four projects aimed to capture what Michel De Certeau terms ‘the presences of diverse absences’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 108) that linger in specific spaces (or twin-spaces, in The Road North) and the complex structuring of ‘a chain of spatializing processes’ (p. 120) that acknowledge past experiences and representations of places and their actual, physical and creative potential. Retreading the paths walked by others, particularly writers, thus combines two different activities, namely rewriting (with its ambiguous sacralisation-­ desecration of past literary works) and a museographic approach to place akin to that of the guided tours of artists’ workshops or writers’ houses. However, this museographic approach dwells on motion-­ related spaces rather than stable places, which raises the question of whether ‘home’, or Dùthchas, is a place, a space, a feeling, a set of practices and/or an active state of being in the world. Here again, ‘home’ is no longer a house but rather a path, a process, a trajectory—three words that might very well define the Scotland that Cracknell in particular had in mind. Finally, such projects reconfigure the outdoors as simultaneously private (nature as the writer’s ‘home’ decor) and public (nature as a scene of artistic creation, production, dissemination and enjoyment) in a way that is bound to echo with issues of community engagement, creative activism and social sustainability. Of particular interest is another rewalking project commissioned by Deveron Arts and launched during the Huntly Room to Roam Festival of August 2013. Titled Lines Lost, it took groups of walkers along the former

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Portsoy to Huntly railway line in a series of return journeys led by Glasgow-­ based walking artist Stuart McAdam and English mountaineer Simon Yates. Lines Lost was designed as a peripatetic act of creative reclamation, a collaborative performance aimed at exploring the transport legacy of the North of Scotland by retracing some of the branch line routes that were cut following the 1963 Beeching Report, which caused the mass closure of railways and loss of many local services in the area. By walking the former track again and again, McAdam and Yates hoped to ‘reawaken a route that had been subsumed into the landscape – like remains of ghostly traces of the line that once linked communities’, as stated on the project’s website. The discarded rail cars and dismantled tracks that the walkers came across therefore constituted a line of spectral landmarks and industrial ruins that exuded a form of technological sublime, as was captured in the photographs displayed on the related website, video and guidebook.15 In his 2008 essay ‘Walking Through Ruins’, Tim Edensor explains how ruins offer ‘aesthetic, somatic and historical experiences’ (Edensor 2008, p. 123, my emphasis) and how walking through them can ‘provide us with a critical awareness with which to interrogate the over-smooth, regulated fabric of much urban and suburban space  – and perhaps manicured forms of nature as well’ (pp. 138–139). In Lines Lost, however, the deregularisation and defamiliarisation of space by the physical remains of past activities must be mitigated. The walk remains informed and constrained by the straight line that prevents improvisation and any extended performative possibilities.16 The point was therefore not to roam or stravaig, not to deregulate the walkers’ experience of a space that had been overgrown and reclaimed by nature since the 1960s, but rather to reregulate it through bodily action. In Lines Lost, this bodily action was further constrained because, in a material metaphor of the ‘life line of outlying communities’ they sought to retrace, McAdam and Yates were roped up as they walked. McAdam and members of the local communities conducted their journeys on foot in the spirit of re-enactment and pilgrimage. These journeys were also part of a research initiative prompting reflection on the past and present perceptions of the environment, as well as on the way communities relate to the much broader political forces that shape their social and phenomenological experience of space. The protocol of walking together thus contributes to recreating a community of perception whose members are encouraged to question their own narrative of space by engaging in creative actions that in turn release counter-narratives of the space (re-)

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travelled through. Issues of land access, land use and land ownership are quick to resurface. In this, let us come back to De Certeau’s theory on the production of space: if it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements. […] The walker transforms each spatial signifier into something else. (De Certeau 1984, p. 98)

The same could be said of many similar projects, including ‘Walking with old maps’, curated by Prof. David Munro during the 2015 edition of the Environmental Art Festival Scotland, and Gill Russell’s Lorg-Coise: Footprints, a mapping project combining existing and imagined paths (‘invitations, not prescriptions’), which was started during the walking artist’s residency with Deveron Arts and later published in book form (Russell 2014). The fact that both Lines Lost and Lorg-Coise resulted in publications that combined narrative texts and maps tells of the mutually constitutive relationship between the embodied and subjective experiences of space—in other words, between the walked part and the narrated or mediated part of the projects, the latter being diffracted into a horizontal, ‘pedestrian enunciation’ and vertical, cartographic production of space. As De Certeau contends in The Practice of Everyday Life, each path is a statement and ‘walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects; etc., the trajectories it “speaks”’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 99).17

Notes 1. ‘New BBC weather map causes storm’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ uk_news/scotland/4556025.stm. Accessed 9 January 2019. 2. ‘Maps give us reality, a reality that exceeds our vision, our reach, the span of our days, a reality we achieve no other way. We are always mapping the invisible or the unattainable or the erasable, the future or the past, the whatever-­is-­not-here-present-to-our-senses-now and, through the gift that the map gives us, transmuting into everything it is not…into the real ’ (Wood 1993, pp. 4–5).

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3. The term ‘synthetic’ is borrowed from John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s definition of ‘landscape’: ‘a landscape is not a natural feature of the environment but a synthetic space, a manmade system of spaces superimposed on the face of the land, functioning and evolving not according to natural laws but to serve a community—for the collective character of a landscape is one thing that all generations and all points of view have agreed upon. A landscape is thus a space created to speed up or slow down the process of nature’ (Jackson 1984, p. 8). 4. Kwon further expands on Hal Foster’s ethnographic approach to art and to the artists’ ability to ‘reoccupy lost cultural spaces and propose historical counter-memories’ (Foster 1995, in Kwon 2002, p. 138). 5. Sheilings, also spelt ‘shielings’, date back to the transhumance system of agriculture. The term denotes the seasonal upland dwellings of Highland shepherds. Sheilings were abandoned after the land was converted to sheep-­runs in the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. 6. See also Alistair Moffat,  The Hidden Ways: Scotland’s Forgotten Roads (2017). On the concept of wayfaring, see Tim Ingold, specifically Lines. A Brief History (2007) and Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (2011). ‘The knowledge [people] acquire, I argue, is integrated not up the levels of a classification but along paths of movement, and people grow into it by following trails through a meshwork. I call this trail-­following wayfaring, and conclude that it is through wayfaring and not transmission that knowledge is carried on’ (Ingold 2011, p.  143). ‘Wayfarers, however, are not failed or reluctant occupants but successful inhabitants. They may indeed be widely travelled, moving from place to place—often over considerable distances—and contributing through these movements to the ongoing formation of each of the places through which they pass. Wayfaring, in short, is neither placeless nor place-bound but place-making’ (Ingold 2007, p. 101). 7. The BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Living Mountain’ (Thursday 31 July 2014) was a recording in situ of Macfarlane’s trip to and across the Cairngorms ‘in search of and inspired by’ Nan Shepherd. It is now available online: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03mfndd. Accessed 9 January 2019. The Living Mountain was also the subject of Macfarlane’s BBC 4 film documentary ‘The Living Mountain: A Cairngorms Journey’, broadcast on Thursday 22 September 2016. In the summer of 2018, Simone Kenyon announced a forthcoming site-specific performance inspired by The Living Mountain, with music by Hanna Tuulikki. 8. The terms ‘chronotope’ and ‘spatial-temporal frame’ come from Bakhtin. They initially denoted ‘the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships’ (Bakhtin 1975, p.  84). I will refer more specifically to the development of the concept into ‘micro-chronotopes’ and to Deleuze and Guattari’s mapping of the ‘rhizomatic multiplicities’ of relationships between territoriality, temporality and identity (Deleuze and Guattari 1980, p. 33).

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9. On the analogy between scripting and weaving, see Tim Ingold’s Lines: A Brief history, specifically the chapter titled ‘From threads to traces: knotting, weaving, brocade, text’ (Ingold 2007, pp. 61–71). 10. See, also, Cracknell’s text titled ‘Walking in Circles’, part of a series of contributions to the Walkhighlands online magazine: http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/news/walking-in-circles/0014325. Accessed 9 January 2019. 11. See De Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life: ‘Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities. […] space is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon many different conventions, situated as the act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations caused by successive contexts’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 117). 12. http://www.moniackmhor.org.uk/events. Accessed 9 January 2019. Prior to this, in August 2015, Cracknell, along with poet Valerie Gillies and naturalist John Lister-Kaye, tutored a five-day residential course titled ‘Words and outdoor worlds; Place, Worlds and Words’. During this course, the authors and participants became practitioners of natural spaces. They explored the surroundings of Moniack Mor on foot, wrote poems and narrative texts, drew maps and were encouraged to rename the places they had just travelled through. 13. See Mike Russell (1998) In Waiting: Travels in the Shadow of Edwin Muir (Castle Douglas: Neil Wilson Publishing). 14. http://www.out-of-books.com. Accessed 9 January 2019. The book was published by Duration Press in 2017. 15. http://www.deveron-arts.com/stuart-mcadam, https://vimeo.com/726 71616. Accessed 9 January 2019. Stuart McAdam (2015) Lines Lost: Huntly–Portsoy. A guide to the former Banff, Portsoy and Strathisla Railway (Huntly: Deveron Arts). 16. ‘The industrial ruin, then, presents us with a defamiliarized space in which modes of passage are improvisatory, uninformed by conventions, continually disrupted and expressive. Instead of a self-contained bodily comportment, with fixed stride, steady gait and minimal gestures which limit interaction with the environment, objects and other people, the body is inadvertently coaxed into a more flamboyant and expressive style, awakening that lie beyond those to which it has become habituated. Both the material characteristics of the ruin and the absence of forms of surveillance and social pressures permit ways of walking that foster an extension of bodily experience and expression by contrast to the largely constrained disposition of the urban pedestrian’ (Edensor 2008, pp. 129–130).

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17. ‘The modalities of pedestrian enunciation which a plane representation on a map brings out could be analyzed. They include the kinds of relationship this enunciation entertains with particular paths (or “statements”) by according them a truth value (“alethic” modalities of the necessary, the impossible, the possible, or the contingent), an epistemological value (“epistemic” modalities of the certain, the excluded, the plausible, or the questionable) or finally an ethical or legal value (“deontic” modalities of the obligatory, the forbidden, the permitted, or the optional). Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses, respects, etc., the trajectories it “speaks”’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 99).

References Bakhtin, Mikhail Mikhailovich. [1975] 1982. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barthes, Roland. [1957] 1972. Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Jonathan Cape. Cracknell, Linda, ed. 2009. A Wilder Vein. Ullapool: Two Ravens Press. ———. 2014. Doubling Back. Ten Paths Trodden in Memory. Glasgow: Freight Books. ———. 2016. Walking in Circles. Walkhighlands. https://www.walkhighlands. co.uk/news/walking-in-circles/0014325/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Crawford, Robert. 2007. Scotland’s Books. The Penguin History of Scottish Literature. London: Penguin. De Certeau, Michel. [1984] 2011. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. [1980] 2005. A Thousand Plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George B. Hanley, eds. 2011. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edensor, Tim. 2008. Walking Through Ruins. In Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot, ed. Tim Ingold and Jo Lee Vergunst, 123–142. Aldershot: Ashgate. Fulton, Hamish. 2010. Mountain Time Human Time. Milano: Charta. Gairn, Louisa. 2008. Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Greig, Andrew. [2010] 2011. At the Loch of the Green Corrie. London: Quercus.

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Hall, Stuart. 1980. “Encoding/decoding”. In Culture, Media, Language, eds. Stuart Hall, Dorothy Hobson, Andrew Lowe, and Paul Willis, 128–138. New York: Routledge. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Lines. A Brief History. London/New York: Routledge. ———. 2011. Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London/New York: Routledge. Jackson, John Brinckerhoff. 1984. Discovering the Vernacular Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jamie, Kathleen. 2005. Findings. London: Sort of Books. ———. 2008. A Lone Enraptured Male. Review of The Wild Places, by Robert Macfarlane. London Review of Books 30 (5): 25–27, 6 March 2008. https:// www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n05/kathleen-jamie/a-lone-enraptured-male. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Lévy, Jacques. 1999. Le Tournant géographique. Penser l’espace pour lire le monde. Paris: Belin. Macfarlane, Robert. 2007. The Wild Places. London: Granta Books. ———. [2012] 2013. The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. London: Penguin. McAdam, Stuart. 2015. Lines Lost. https://www.deveron-projects.com/stuart-­ mcadam/. Accessed 16 March 2019. Russell, Gill. 2014. Lorg-Coise. Huntly: Deveron Arts. Russell, Mike. 1998. In Waiting. Travels in the Shadow of Edwin Muir. Castle Douglas: Neil Wilson Publishing. Scheese, Don. 2002. Nature Writing. The Pastoral Impulse in America. New York: Routledge. Soja, Edward. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-­ Imagined Places. Malden: Blackwell. Solnit, Rebecca. [2000] 2001. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New  York/ London: Penguin. Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1974. Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values. New York: Columbia University Press. Tuulikki, Hanna. 2014. Map: Isle of Canna. https://www.hannatuulikki.org/ portfolio/map-isle-of-canna/. Accessed 16 March 2019. Wilson, Edward O. 1984. Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wood, Denis. 1993. The Power of Maps. London: Routledge.

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Websites Cockburn, Ken and Alec Finlay. Out of Books. http://www.out-of-books.com/. Accessed 16 March 2019. Deveron Projects. https://www.deveron-projects.com/home/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Finlay, Alec and Ken Cockburn. The Road North. http://www.theroadnorth. co.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Heritage Paths. http://www.heritagepaths.co.uk/project.php. Accessed 16 March 2019. Russell, Gill. Lorg-Coise / Foot-Print. http://lorg-coise.blogspot.com/. Accessed 16 March 2019.

CHAPTER 3

Land Made by Walking: Andrew Greig, Thomas A. Clark, Hamish Fulton, or, the Art of Passing Through

Andrew Greig introduces himself as a climber, fisherman and ‘poet of the outdoors’. He published The Return of John Macnab in 1996, a modern-­ day rewriting of John Buchan’s 1925 novel John Macnab. This fictional poacher and local hero figure has been repeatedly revived since the 1970s, whether in TV series or in literature. See, for instance, the publication by Chaplin Books of James Christie’s novel The Legend of John Macnab (2015). The plot of The Return of John Macnab is similar to that of Buchan’s original novel. Three male friends (although in Greig’s version the group welcomes a fourth, female member) take up the challenge initiated by Buchan’s composite hero to poach a salmon, shoot a brace of grouse and stalk a deer from three different estates in Scotland. Greig admits that his 1996 novel relies first and foremost on ‘a fantasy’, namely that of ‘resurrecting a legendary poaching wager’ (Greig 1996, p. 18). While the novel is an obvious homage to John Buchan, it also pays tribute to other Scottish writers, especially Neil Gunn, whose Atom of Delight and Highland River are freely woven into the fabric of the text by means of indirect quotations. Not completely unrelated to this is the fact that The Return of John Macnab also allows the author to reflect on the sensitive issue of land ownership and on the potential for civil disobedience to provide what Greig terms ‘healing’ (p. 189), ‘reconditioning’ (p. 57), ‘reconstruction’ and ‘reanimation’ (p. 119). The ‘fully-owned subsidiary of Disneyworld’ and the ‘economic, social and environmental’—yet ­ ‘bonnie’—‘disaster’ (p.  142) that the © The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_3

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Highlands stand for is blamed on the landowners or, in the words of Murray, Greig’s quick-tempered Glaswegian protagonist, on ‘the rich bastards who ow[n] what should never be owned’ (p. 49). These landowners are also berated for their attempts to criminalise land access and create exclusion zones. It is therefore no surprise that the novel should commend the actions taken by the Right to Roamers, the Ramblers’ Associations and a number of other access groups who, on occasion, make an appearance as the four protagonists’ fortuitous helpers. Greig therefore draws a parallel between poaching, by essence a transgressive spatial practice, and rewriting. Rewriting is frequently conceived of as a literary violation of the space–time continuum because it asserts the ‘coterminous existence of past and present in the creative act’ (Letissier 2009, p. 5) and transpositions the original text from one imaginary ‘place’ to another. Rewriting is clearly viewed as a kinetic process not just in The Return of John Macnab but also and perhaps even more effectively in Greig’s nonfiction work and ‘book of homages’ titled At the Loch of the Green Corrie (Greig 2010, p. 143), which was written in memoriam of Norman MacCaig (1910–1996). The book is also dedicated to the late climber Mal Duff (1953–1997) who taught the author to cast and whom Greig calls his ‘own AK MacLeod’, after MacCaig’s belated friend and fishing partner (p. 96). At the Loch of the Green Corrie is thus a means of re-experiencing ‘the gaping loss’ (p. 302) that the poet felt when MacLeod died in 1976 and which permeates the whole narrative of Greig’s repeated fishing expeditions to Assynt and returns to the uncharted loch. It contains many echoes of The Return of John Macnab. Three friends honour the memory of three dead men, while Greig takes up MacCaig’s posthumous wager to catch trout for him and AK MacLeod at some ‘Loch of the Green Corrie’. Again, in typical Macnab style, as Greig and his two friends are about to fill in the requested form and pay the legal fishing fees, the narrator argues: It’s not the money, more the principle. The history of the Scottish Highlands doesn’t make for deep respect of land ownership. There is no Gaelic word for poaching. […] We look at each other. ‘Sod this.’ (pp. 36–38)

While some rules are meant to be broken, others are scrupulously complied with. Asking Norman MacAskill for directions—for ‘permission’ (p. 34)—to the lochan takes on the form of a rite of aggregation, which endows MacCaig’s favourite place with an unmistakeable sense of the

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sacred. A symbol for unconscious healing and creative potential, the lochan becomes the centre of all things where one can feel the shared spaciousness that is so painfully missing elsewhere and recover or ‘retrieve’ both the memory of the departed friend and the voice that had been subdued by grief. Added to this almost fish-like ‘gaping loss’ that is surfacing as if waiting for the right fly to alight on the water, the verb ‘retrieve’ makes Greig’s metapoetic ‘fishing enunciation’ strategies, as De Certeau might have said, particularly effective: ‘[s]imile and metaphor are creative lies, lures to catch the mind’s fish by’ (p. 45); ‘I have to trust that trout, like ourselves, rise to metaphor’ (p. 97); and the long-awaited epiphany, [l]ight on water, cloud reflection and sunlight broken on the water. I am beginning to sense the depth of this fluid body, feel the weight of the corrie. Where we are, where this is, gradually become clear. This place is absorbing us. As its lures sink, we are perhaps as much fished as fishing. (p. 113)

In this particular excerpt, place is diffracted into ‘where we are’ and ‘where this is’, while the frontiers dissolve between subject and object, body and environment and experiential and metaphysical forms of emotion. This dissolution is complemented in At the Loch of the Green Corrie by the recurrent motifs of the mouth (fishing and writing as convocation) and of the line. First, there is the line of the text that ‘casts’ (when it projects the narrator into his future without MacCaig) and then ‘retrieves’ (when it summons memories). Then there is the route that Norman MacAskill pencils on Greig’s map, which, by a strange twist of fate, suggests the casting of a fishing line and the presenting of the fly just above the water’s surface. As in most of Greig’s works, there is hardly any trace of transcendentalism in At the Loch of the Green Corrie: Greig does not walk into Assynt as an escapist in search of release or emotional anaesthesia but rather with a view to being caught in a reciprocal, perceptive, imaginative and empathetic relationship with nature. There, healing means being ‘reconnected’ to one’s ‘earthbound’ self (p.  94 and p.  86, my emphasis). Just as with walking in Linda Cracknell’s Doubling Back, fishing MacCaig’s lochan in At the Loch of the Green Corrie ‘put[s] us in our place’ (p. 210), ‘embodied, now, in this place’ (p. 85). Most importantly of all, it allows us to experience that sense of depth, weight and (I quote Greig) reciprocal ‘absorption’ that seems to condition the imaginative repossession of space at work in today’s Scottish nature writing. As Greig welcomes being ‘riddled with

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Assynt’ (p. 176), like the fish with the hovering lure, the fly fisherman sits in wait in the landscape for the punctum saliens—the ‘sting, speck, cut, hole’, ‘that accident which pricks me’ (Barthes 1980, p. 25)—that will get him not just ‘riddled with’ but quite literally hooked on Assynt. There are several references to this systematically vertical and deliberately animalised punctum in At the Loch of the Green Corrie. The most recurrent metaphor is that of the trout rising to the surface, but even puncta are parts of a food chain and the revelation can also take the winged form of the peregrine falcon, the airborne fisher-stravaiger. See, for instance, Greig’s tribute to Nan Shepherd: No one has written about what it is to be in the mountains, in one’s body, as well as Nan Shepherd. The Living Mountain makes my skin prickle, my mind buzz. […] The product of years of stravaiging around in the Cairngorms, that long essay understands and conveys better than anyone the absolute physicality, the immanence of the transcendence that abruptly swoops and plucks you in its hooked talons out of the ordinary and carries you not away from this world but into the beating, unsayable heart of it. Like MacCaig, she was a wonderful noticer, the kind of noticing that opens a crack into the centre of things. (p. 94)

If this crack signals a sudden, violent rupture in the experience of place, Greig is careful to distance himself from the Romantic and Kantian sublime, which, he argues, lies elsewhere, in the far distance or at the tops of the highest peaks. At the Loch of the Green Corrie is infused with that other, local yet ravishing and predatory, sublime that seizes you ‘not away […] but into’. Never actually called ‘the sublime’, it is rather referred to as a ‘dynamic’, a ‘draught of pure being’, in MacCaig’s own words (p. 282), or ‘a function of the noticing eye, the opening heart, the balancing mind’ (p. 267). Most forms of transcendence that we will encounter in the works selected for discussion here will also prove devoid of any divine and dispossessing dimensions—significantly so. They will instead occur on a human (often also animal) scale, which will revolve around the puzzling notion of Scotland and its practitioners (walkers, poachers, fishermen, poets and so on) being and feeling ‘the right size’, 1 because the symbiotic reciprocity between humans and nature can apparently only be articulated in a country that is blessed with the ‘right’ proportions. This i­ ntermediation between the human and the nonhuman cannot, Greig contends, be

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achieved in the too-easily-discovered ‘domestic’ Lake District, Welsh Hills or Peak District or in the ‘awesome, astounding, possibly sublime’ (unfathomable and therefore unlovable) Himalayas (pp. 208–209). Scotland, as it happens, is neither too big nor too small and neither too picturesque nor too sublime. As such, it projects the mind into a state that is not one of gentle reverie or awe but rather of ‘love’: We agreed we love our country’s hills in part for being the right size. Big enough to make significant demands, yet small enough to walk over, to know and feel connected to. There is no mountain in Scotland you cannot walk up and back down in a day, though that day might be long and the hill can be fatal. There is no lochan or burn or top or bealach or corrie here that does not have a name, a story, that does not live in someone’s memory. […] love implies some possible knowledge. […] Suilven, Cul Mor, Canisp, Quinag, Glas Bheinn, are just the size to possess us. They rise above the human, without being entirely beyond us. (pp. 208–209)

Many of the writers and artists discussed in this book are preoccupied with giving the world they inhabit its ‘fair’, ‘true size and value’, a point that is acknowledged by Greig in MacCaig’s poetry: ‘MacCaig hated bombast and exaggeration, but he did not want to shrink the world’ (p. 267). This skill, it appears, is to be acquired through a form of mental stravaiging, that is, the practice of walking (active and somatic, as opposed to transcendental) meditation as a means to enhanced consciousness.2 Nan Shepherd’s ‘journey into Being’ continued well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Visualize the body the size of the room now. Drifting out through the walls, the size of the hotel. How light that would be. Now the size of the town, hovering over it like a fine mist, the wind blowing through the pores as the body drifts without harm through the streetlamps and hilltops, expanded so much now it covers the whole Spey Valley, the whole Cairngorms, the whole beloved country, the body so huge and light and empty it’s very nearly nothing but never quite nothing for there’s a centre somewhere that holds you together, so nearly nothing but not quite. (Greig 1996, p. 115)

As with Cracknell’s sudden insight that the pilgrim ‘owns’ the place as much as they are ‘owned’ by it (Cracknell 2014, p. 31), the subject, provided they are a good ‘noticer’ and measurer of things, ceases to be a stranger in or conqueror of nature and is (re)placed at the centre of a rela-

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tion of mutual relevance between the human and the nonhuman. This is further evidenced by Greig’s extended repertoire of interdependence and his repeated references to fishing and being fished (Greig 2010, p. 113), to absorbing the place and being absorbed by it (p. 268; 113) as ‘receiver and transmitter, actor and audience, wide open in this world’ (p. 176). At the Loch of the Green Corrie revolves around the idea that knowing the place also effectively means being known by it. As such, the book complies with Lawrence Buell’s definition of the environmental text while also anticipating all future references to the immediate and dynamic reciprocity between the human and the nonhuman or natural worlds.3 Although Merleau-Ponty’s genealogy of perception may also come to mind here, there appears to be no other knowledge beyond that of the co-belonging of the human and the world and no further reward than the absolute truth that is reached through the dilation of the subject’s self-awareness and subsequently gained holistic view of nature. Another point worth noting is that for the pilgrim, walker-writer, fisher-­ writer or natural philosopher to achieve this separate kind of consciousness and—the reader will forgive the all-too-convenient metaphor—to tense the line between themselves and the world, they first need to feel this line go slack. It has become apparent that Scottish writers and artists who engage with nature are anxious to reject romantic projections of Scotland and to demythologise cultural, tourist-board perceptions of Scotland as a pastoral, unspoilt, rugged landscape. In this individual and collective hermeneutic rediscovery of Scotland in the here and now, situational narratives and first-hand experiences of space address the interaction of nature and culture and acknowledge the signs that contribute to founding an unromantic, place-based individual and collective identity. In most of these individual and collaborative projects, the experience of loss (the death of a parent, friend or mentor, the arbitrary disappearance of a physical link between communities) is what triggers a journey that will change and reconfigure the subject’s relationship to space, renew their sense of dwelling and, eventually, bring greater awareness of their social and political discontent. Considering walking as a mode of art practice also begs the question of how the ‘absolute truth’ encountered and experienced in nature is transmitted and of how that truth can be reflected in, and can reflect on, the material world and those who inhabit it. As argued by Thomas A. Clark in Distance and Proximity,

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[o]f the many ways through a landscape, we can choose, on each occasion, only one, and the project of the walk will be to remain responsive, adequate, to the consequences of the choice we have made, to confirm the chosen way rather than refuse the others. (Clark 2000, p. 20)

By celebrating the inspirational value and revelatory power of the landscape, the responsive writers and visual and performing artists commend the presence of humans as co-authors of the spaces and places that in turn help them reshape how they feel and think about them. To engage in a fluent dialogue with place (to be both ‘receiver’ and ‘transmitter’, says Greig) is to discover our ability to ascertain our bodily presence in space, to sense where we are—through motion and changes of focal point—and to channel our experience of spaciousness into ‘adequate’ art-forms. Thomas A. Clark was born in Greenock in 1944. In a 1993 interview, he dated his interest in the short, concrete form back to his encounter with Ian Hamilton Finlay, who introduced him to the notion of a poem ‘as a thing made […] instead of a spontaneous outpouring’.4 A renowned poet, Clark is also a co-director of Cairn Gallery in Nailsworth, a founder in 1973 of the small press publisher Moschatel Press and an artist who specialises in permanent and temporary site-specific installations. Clark’s verbal and non-verbal art is characterised by its strict compliance with the ethic of minimal material and linguistic intervention, as evidenced by the following verse, from ‘Jouissance’: In small things, delight is intense. (Clark 2000, p. 43)

A poet of the outdoors, Clark is known for his inclination towards the short form and the elliptic mode. His much celebrated 1987 prose-poem ‘In Praise of Walking’ consists of a series of aphoristic statements that both consecrate (through their pithiness) and debunk (through their sheer plurality) the possibility of absolute discursivity. While each verse-aphorism claims to circumscribe and delineate one aspect of the essential truth, the wholeness or univocity of the essential truth is immediately denied by the very proliferation of these aphorisms and subsequent—albeit necessary— inconclusiveness of the form. Clark’s reluctance to conclude verbally mirrors his rejection of material intrusion into the environment and signals his belief that all forms of knowledge are but relative and provisional when confronted with the deep time and resilience of nature. See, for instance, how in The Hundred Thousand Places he relates to those same shielings in which Greig and Cracknell felt the spectral presence of Scotland’s nomadic past (Clark 2009, page unnumbered):

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stretching inland blackland and moorland grassland and acid heath a dark country of heather and moor grass of deer grass and moss around the ruined sheep folds and shielings green islands of sweet vernal grass bent grass and fescue rescue wilderness

Here the disappearance of the seeing subject is coupled with the reverse motion of the land itself. The poet does not move but witnesses the slow, smooth, resilient advance of nature, which ‘stretches’ and ‘bends’ around the stiff relics of a bygone age.5 There will therefore be no ‘stillness of the foetal death’ in Clark’s poetry but rather a jouissance which is achieved by walking away from the social and cultural structures of signification that prevent us from reaching what exists, in the poet’s terms, ‘outside ourselves’ (‘In Praise of Walking’, Clark 2000, p. 15). Discarding this burden—this ‘baggage’, as Clark calls it—means we must ‘refuse all the coercion, violence, property, triviality’, ‘convictions, directions, [and] opinions’ and ‘dislocate’ self-interest (p.15; 17; 18) in order to perform this out-placing of the self, this ecstasy. As a result, any form of the sublime that might permeate Clark’s poetry is the sublimity of that other, liminal or ‘third-’ space, nested in those lonely, small, nameless objects and landmarks, those ‘natural halting places’ (p. 19) that appeal to the heart (that ravish it) rather than the mind. See, for instance, in ‘Riasg Buidhe’: The grand landscapes impress us with their weight and scale but it is the anonymous places, a hidden glen or a stretch of water without a name, that steal the heart. (p. 98)

The dichotomy between the impressed mind and the stolen heart mirrors that which exists between pleasure and jouissance. It is further spelt out in Clark’s recurrent opposition of the concepts of motion and stasis and of displacement-dispersion and return, as in ‘Of Shade and Shadow’ and ‘Tobar Na Cailleach’:

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There is a time to go out, to be dispersed in light, and a time to return again, faculty by faculty, to rest one’s weight. (p. 52) This brief contact with another element is enough to separate you from yourself and to return you to yourself again. (p. 88)

Clark demonstrates an interest in the actual spatial process. In ‘In Praise of Walking’, he says that ‘walking is a mobile form of waiting’ (p.  16), when it is not, purely and simply, an invitation to ‘sit still’ (‘Riasg Buidhe’, p. 101). He chooses to focus on a practice that equates sensing to being, a form of ontological hodology. The ‘return’ he refers to here is indeed first and foremost a mental and meditative doubling back and re-entry into the self, relieved of spatial, social, cultural and existential considerations. In ‘The Blue of Flax’ and ‘Tobar Na Cailleach’, In a moment, at a glance, you are taken out of your own care. (p. 69) Where you are, who you are: for a moment these questions are shocked into silence. (p. 87)

Clark’s ‘moment’ of ‘shock’ differs from the Kantian sublime inasmuch as it does not arise from the sudden experience of fear and horror but from attention, openness and a willing surrender to the sensuous world. It is the laying open of the self, an acceptance of ‘the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss’ (Barthes 1973, p. 7). Clark’s quiet sublime is neither dispossessing nor beyond speech; instead, it is redemptive (‘a call to order’, ‘Riasg Buidhe’, p. 100) and ‘recuperative’. ‘At a glance’, we recover not just our senses and sense of self but also our ‘place in the conversation of water, hills and air’ (‘Tobar Na Cailleach’, p. 90), a conversation that allows what Clark terms ‘the banished words’ (‘kindness, gentleness, innocence, shade’, ‘Of Shade and Shadow’, p. 55) to return and which renews, in a telling concatenation of verbs, ‘everything we habitually recognise and dismiss’ (‘A Walk by Moonlight’, p. 79). Clark’s dream of a return to natura naturans thus rests on the assumption that the precognitive harmony between humans and nature can be restored by accepting that the latter is both a physical space and a psychic agency and, as Clark writes in The Hundred Thousand Places, by walk[ing] out into space as to an appointment

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The walker must therefore make themselves available to the immediacy of natural phenomena by suspending (re)cognition, expectation and judgement, that is, in Clark’s choice of words, by ‘glancing’ rather than looking and by preferring shade to light and ‘practice’ to ‘theology’. I quote, from ‘Of Shade and Shadow’: As there is a theology of light, so there is a practice of shadows, a poverty of intention, a duplicating and neutralising of forms, a waiting that renounces every path. (p. 52)

Clark’s poetry therefore calls for a virtuous renunciation of all preconceived notions, intentionality and interpretative paths with a view to allowing linguistic signs, images, sounds and movements to mingle. By refusing to walk-write towards a specific goal, one can read the walk as a statement that does not need to state anything and nature’s ways—‘the ripples on the beach and the veins in the rock on the mountain’ (‘Riasg Buidhe’, p. 97)—as signatures without intent.6 It is easy to see the parallel between Clark’s micro-experiences of the paradigmatic landscape and the form of his poetry. Clark’s minimalist poetry, his Japanese haiku and his collections of aphorisms chronicle the unexceptional while relying on the verbal-spatial principles of juxtaposition, disconnection and disjuncture that prevent both the poet and the reader from claiming either proficiency or expertise. Rather than knowledge per se, what is sought is a coming to or walking to  knowledge, an acquaintance. Likewise, if the aphorism is a walk translated into words, the text must be as mobile as the experience that inspired it. See, for instance, Clark’s praise of prepositions in ‘Jouissance’: Over the fields, through the woods, by the stream: the prepositions may work a greater range of abilities and susceptibilities than the more conspicuous verbs and nouns. (Clark 2000, p. 44)

If the text is to mimic the experience of spatial transience, it must also be as ‘egalitarian and democratic’ (‘In Praise of Walking’, p. 19) as walking Scotland’s fields, mountains and glens should be. The very form of the poem thus contributes to turning land and nature into an open, social space in which the reader is guided not to specific landmarks and places but to immersive sensory, visual and tactile experiences rooted in the here and now of the walk—or, rather, of the wait. From this perspective, we

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may view Clark’s recurrent use of the second-person pronoun and modal auxiliaries ‘will’ and ‘can’ as another device that bolsters the democratisation of the sensuous experiences of space and place. The epithet ‘sensuous’ here encompasses kinetic and olfactory as well as visual experiences, as in the following selection of verses from ‘Jouissance’, ‘A Walk by Moonlight’ and ‘Tobar Na Cailleach’: If you take the path through the barley, the beards of the barley will caress your bare arms. (p. 43) You will find a clear path through the beech wood, scented with the leaves of wild garlic and lit by the wild garlic flowers. (p. 77) You can splash your face with water and then lift it to the breeze. (p. 88)

Clark’s addresses to the reader are not suggestions, invitations or promises. Rather, they hint at possibilities and opportunities for an enhanced form of being and inhabiting space. This enhanced being is achieved through the restriction of movement and, by a mirror effect, through the naming and telling of things as they are, that is, by eschewing the natural detail and shifts of meaning that might hinder the depth and clarity of the poet’s and reader’s perception.7 Clark’s writing thus succeeds in remaining non-proprietary and unfixed, as open-ended as the kinetic space it engages with. The same can be said of the interplay between Clark’s texts and their accompanying visual materials, from Olwen Shore’s suggestive texture photographs in Distance and Proximity to Eiji Watanabe’s model lochan, which was displayed alongside Clark’s minimalist poetry at the An Lochan Uaine exhibition (Nagoya, Japan) in August 2013 (Fig. 3.1). Clark’s process of sampling and condensing the space is reminiscent of Gaston Bachelard’s poetics of scale and philosophy of the imagination. See, for instance, his dialectics of miniaturisation and possession and his notion of ‘the dynamic virtues of miniature thinking’: The cleverer I am at miniaturizing the world, the better I possess it. But in doing this, it must be understood that values become condensed and enriched in miniature. [...] One must go beyond logic in order to experience what is large in what is small. (Bachelard 1958, p. 150)

The question of the modes—tanka, aphorisms, photographic captures, miniature environments—of transposing the experiential (the ‘large’) into

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Fig. 3.1  Thomas A.  Clark, with Eiji Watanabe, 2013, An Lochan Uaine (The verses inked on opposing walls read: ‘coming in the morning/to the green lochan/and sitting for a while/by the water’; ‘coming in the evening/to the green lochan/and sitting for a while/by the water’). (Copyright the artists)

the aesthetic (the ‘small’) leads on to the work of Hamish Fulton, or more specifically to his Cairngorm walks and the resulting verbal and ­photo-­textual pieces of Wild Life: Walks in the Cairngorms (2000) and Mountain Time Human Time (2010). Both these publications include visual and textual material inspired by Fulton’s walks and repeat walks in the mountain ranges of the Scottish Highlands from 1975 (‘A Walk from the Summit of Ben Nevis to the Summit of Ben Macdui by way of Loch Ericht Scotland 18 19 20 21 June 1975’) to 2010 (‘A 21 Day Walk 20 Nights Camping from Huntly Square to Glenmore Lodge The Cairngorms Region of Scotland 18 April-8 May 2010’). Born in London in 1946, Fulton is frequently associated with his friend and fellow walking artist Richard Long,8 whose first ‘walking sculpture’, LINE MADE BY WALKING (1967), is still considered one of the most significant contributions to the cultural turnaround and artistic environment of the 1960s, the vanguard of British Land Art. Like Long, Fulton

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specialises in what Henry David Thoreau coined ‘the art of walking’. From a simple act of locomotion from A to B (or, in the case of Long’s line, from A to B to A to B, and so on), walking becomes a mode of artistic practice and medium per se through which the performance and earth-­ artist can experience transience and make art out of the conversation between their body and the land. However, Long’s and Fulton’s artistic practices differ in many ways, with Fulton insisting on strict compliance with the ethics of Leave No Trace and prioritising the concept over the aesthetic object. Fulton maintains that the walk is the work and that any resulting semiotic object (including footprints) is but a distant echo of it. He does so using aphoristic form and the modal as, for example, in ‘an object cannot compete with an experience’ (Fulton 2001) and ‘an art work cannot convey the experience of a walk’ (Fulton 2000, p. 199). In essence, Fulton’s art can be considered conceptualist insofar as it claims objectlessness and moves away (in its practice at least) from the commercial production of art objects, avoiding galleries and museums to set itself in the wild, natural landscape. A comparison with Situationist and Dada walking tours may be tempting, although the parallel with Guy Debord’s concept of dérive proves partly relevant only to Fulton’s choreographed group walks. See, for instance, the ‘Slowalk’ project of May 2010: SLOWALK 28 PEOPLE WALKING A DISTANCE OF THREE METERS SIDE BY SIDE IN SILENCE FOR THE DURATION OF ONE HOUR AVIEMORE SKI CAR PARK CAIRNGORMS SCOTLAND 9 MAY 2010. (Fulton 2010, p. 43)9

As for his individual journeys into the mountain areas of Scotland, Fulton walks with a sense of meaning. His purpose is not to specifically construe a psychogeographic knowledge of the space he traverses but rather to experience personal transformation through a heightened perception of the environment and a contemplative, non-interventionist immersion into nature.10 While the idea that the simple act of placing one foot in front of the other makes art indeed reflect the Situationists’ stance, one shall beware of hasty categorisations. Perhaps, as Fulton himself suggests, his ‘mountain art’ is best defined not by what it is but by what it is not:

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I am a contemporary artist, not a mountaineer. […] I employ words but I’m not a writer. […] I do not ‘provide the relief of worldless art’. My art starts with an experience, not a material, I’m not a ‘land artist’ (Fulton 2010, p. 31) I am an artist who walks, not a walker who makes art. […] I’m not a landscape artist. (p. 39)

Just as he is adamant that his ‘mountain art’ is ‘NOT LAND ART’, Fulton is also keen on widening the gap between his walking practice (‘the constant’, Fulton 2000, p. 197) and his artistic production (‘the variant’), that is, between the  artwork and its partial echo. If René Magritte’s Treachery of Images perhaps comes to mind here, it should be noted that the treachery in Fulton’s art lies not in the verbal or iconic signs that he produces after the walk but in their very production. Before I move on to Fulton’s walk-texts and photographs and the complex, intermedial processes that are at the core of his verbovisual production and remediation of space, I first want to focus on the Cairngorm walks as autonomous artworks and to examine what they tell us about the artist’s affective, spiritual and possibly political experiences of his domestic geography through a repeated engagement with the same landscape.  Again, the point is to return, but where to or, more accurately, what to? One look at Fulton’s literary influences is enough to understand his awareness of and concern with environmental and ecological issues. In the many conferences he has given over the years, as well as in Mountain Time Human Time, he invokes the legacy of Gary Snyder, Thoreau, Wallace Stegner, Aldo Leopold, Roderick Nash, the Deep Ecologist and ecosopher Arne Naess and Jay Griffiths. He also cites a number of Scottish naturalists and environmental writers such as Nan Shepherd, Gavin Maxwell, Jim Crumley and Seton Gordon. Fulton’s interest in conservation is also imbued with a strong spiritual dimension. Like Snyder, Shepherd and many of the authors and artists mentioned in this book, Fulton is drawn to Zen Buddhism and particularly to its doctrine of the impermanence of self, or ‘self as process’ (Naess 2008, p. 197). His engagement with nature is explicitly linked to the practices of walking and seated meditation with a view to cultivating mindfulness, embodied awareness of the environment and wakeful presence to the world. Although the Cairngorms might allow for more comfortable expeditions than the mountains of Tibet or Mount Everest, Fulton’s walks in the Scottish mountains are deliberately non-practical. He rejects all available commodities

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and prefers to ‘rough it’ in the outdoors. His ascetic walks combine the act of peregrination with the art of suspending verbal and symbolic thinking for the duration of the walk. Hints of such thought-free mediation, also known as the ‘Royal Path’ or ‘Raja Yoga’, are frequent in Fulton’s fragmentary transcriptions of his walks, which significantly he prefers to call ‘mental sculptures’. He mentions ‘no thoughts counting 3535 paces’ (Fulton 2000, p. 39), ‘no talking for seven days’ (p. 38) and references to the ‘healing powers of the outdoor experience’ (p. 199). His sojourns in the Scottish outdoors, whether for five, seven, twenty-one days or more, are all directed at an elevation of thought that must be attained through immediate, physical contact with the land. Jay Griffiths calls this ‘the act of wild walking’ and considers it to be a means of recovering ‘the first and primal gift’, ‘the open-hearted, wide-minded freedom we are born to’ and, with obvious mystical, animistic undertones, ‘the ultimate reciprocal breath’. See, for instance, how she relates to Fulton’s practice of walking (and her own, for that matter) in Mountain Time Human Time: […] the act of wild walking carries a message. The messenger is the message, and the message he or she delivers is the message of slow, deep metamorphosis by which landscape is inwritten into the human being. […] This is the ultimate reciprocal breath, in and out, as light as air, as free as wind, as clear as water, a gift-exchange as easy as light through glass, where what is finally achieved is transparency. Reckless, lovely transparency, where everything passes and the passeur and the pass are translucent to each other, a transparency as perfect and as simple as water and air and wind. (Griffiths, in Fulton 2010, p. 17)

The operative word here is ‘transparency’. In Fulton’s approach to nature, the sacredness of walking and its holistic potential lie entirely in the volitional conflation of the intellectual (via the studious, empirical and investigative probing of the naturalist), the experiential (the focus on the physical involvement of the walker and their vulnerability while exposed to the elements, that is, the work as a physical act) and the ecospiritual (the intensification of vision through ritualistic practices of the natural space and meditative receptiveness to the landscape).11 ‘I walk on the land to be woven into nature’, says Fulton (in Kastner and Wallis 1998, p. 243), but this ‘weaving’, this inwriting, does not just come out of sheer motility. However quasi-mystical or ‘magic’ the walk may be, no dispossession of the self, no Hegelian so ist, is either required or expected. Rather, it

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involves an increased form of phenomenological attentiveness to the world that calls for exertion, endurance, discipline and intent. Fulton’s 2005 exhibition title ‘Walking as knowing as making’12 should therefore be interpreted as fitting with the conceptualist theory that sees perceptual experience as awareness and awareness as knowledge. This turns the space Fulton walks through into a bodyscape, a mindscape and a workshop— all at once. What Fulton’s walks are about, what they seek to initiate, is therefore a trialogue between body, mind and matter that rests on the principle that for the artist to know their Umwelt, in other words, for them to place themselves in the world, the body must be as active and kinetic as nature itself. Another way of looking at this is through the prism of phenomenological reduction (Hatley 2003) and epoché, a suspension of judgement that is particularly relevant as regards Fulton’s ‘no thoughts’ and ‘no talking’ projects. But how can this ‘knowing’ translate not just into ‘making’ but into ‘making known’? How can the walker’s body’s sensitivity to the world be transposed into an art object other than the walk itself (something else)?13 How can the experience be re-placed out of the ‘space as practised place’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 117) it originated from (somewhere else)? With these questions in mind, let us consider the following two recurring programmatic aphorisms from Fulton: A walk has a life of its own and does not need to be materialised into an artwork. An artwork may be purchased but a walk cannot be sold.

The idea that the Situationist artist does not ‘need’ to produce material objects will come as no surprise. Equally unsurprising is the suggestion that the artefact—the avatar of the actual experience—is a source of income (‘purchase, sell’) and that it therefore operates within an entirely different realm of necessity, namely that which is imposed upon the artist by the art market. These two credos have appeared repeatedly throughout the years in the form of walk-texts, billboards and wall-texts. They also feature very prominently on Fulton’s website. I will begin with the latter and thus, it appears, from the end of Fulton’s artistic process. If we accept that the walk is the artwork and that the resulting art object is but a by-product of this work, then the website that showcases these objects is to be thought of as a by-product of the by-products, as yet

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another spatial and metaphorical step away from the original and—in essence as much as by strategic intent—unsharable experience. There is much to say about the creativity of such contemporary artists’ personal websites. These are often designed or curated by the artists themselves to function as mini-retrospectives and selective online portfolios. In most cases, they contain contact information and shopping cart services to ensure maximum commercial effectiveness. However, some, like Fulton’s, do not. His website was designed by Andy Goulds under Fulton’s supervision to serve as an immersive rather than a commercial experience, that is, as a means of producing another space, liminal or parallel to the original one. The opening page thus displays (as does the ‘information’ link) the above-mentioned credos along with others (‘there are no words in nature’, ‘my art is a symbolic gesture of respect for nature’). They appear and disappear at the discretion of a randomised website animation with hover and sound effects as the visitor clicks on untitled but numbered artworks to the sound of the artist’s (?) footsteps and birdsong. In this particular case, the website as artwork is trying hard to compete with the experience, ruled as it is by the principles of change, motion and impermanence in a form of visual reminder of the Buddhist doctrine of Mujō. All texts and artworks that appear online are copyright-protected and therefore impossible to actualise on paper, just as the experience of the walk is (in Fulton’s mind) impossible to translate into art objects. In the final chapter of this book, I will reflect more extensively on Scottish site-specific artists’ modes of production of spaces, which, however digital (or perhaps precisely because they are digital), strive to remain outdoor experiential spaces. This already begs questions about the key concepts of site-specific art and what appear in Fulton’s website as the cornerstones of his physical experience of space and his related artistic production, namely the acceptance and implementation (in the sense of mise en oeuvre) of the principles of constraint and resistance. Fulton says little about the emotional release and/or physical discomfort that he experiences during the walk. With the exception of a few low-­ key diary entries (‘packed up in snowfall, up to top Ben Avon, but did not continue—descended in a white out’, Fulton 2010, p. 70), these remain inarticulate in his writing. Likewise, Fulton never expands on the great, indifferent power of nature. It is only ever suggested through the serial photographs of trees and rocks taken at up to ten-year intervals during the artist’s repeat walks (pp. 18–29) or in his words of transcendental wisdom, such as ‘the rocks are alive in their homeland’, as in The Crow Speaks

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(1986–1991). This particular photo-text contrasts sharply with Fulton’s early panoramic or wide-angled black and white landscape photographs, such as Arkle Sutherland (1976), in which he endorsed the aesthetic of the Romantic sublime and captured the moral landscape with a full appreciation of its awe-inspiring potential. In The Crow Speaks, however, this sublime is pointedly deflated by his superimposition of written information aimed at indexing the walk (providing factual but minimal information about its duration, location and date) and his neutralisation of the depth of field and erection of a verbal screen in the manner of a glass wall between the viewer (Barthes would say ‘the spectator’) and the scene as experienced and captured by the photographer (‘the operator’). If ‘the rocks are alive in their homeland’ as the photo-text reads, this homeland is clearly not ours. The space Fulton offers or rather refuses us entry to in his artwork is decidedly other and will always remain so. If the expressive photograph is ‘a certificate of presence’ (Barthes 1980, p. 87), the indexing text signs our absence in a world that belongs solely to the rocks and crows and which was only glimpsed by the artist for a moment and then irrevocably lost immediately after it was recorded. However, Fulton’s resistance to art’s objectification of nature (most specifically through the Sublime, pastoral aestheticism and Land Art) is also, in some oblique way, a token of his environmental commitment. Just as he refuses to comply with any reductive aesthetic paradigm in his artistic production, his very practice of space eschews anything that might contribute to the human commodification of nature, whether this encroachment turns out to be factual or merely symbolic. During his 2010 project ‘21 Days in the Cairngorms’, which took him from Huntly to Glenmore Lodge, Fulton was careful to shun carparks, bothies and four-wheel drive tracks, in other words, all the practicalities of modern life that he deems to be ‘incorrect’ and disrespectful of the ecological and aesthetic integrity of the space he travels through.14 In much the same way, one does not expect any form of empathy with—or symbolic projection into—the nonhuman in Fulton’s photo-texts or essays. Birds fly past and deer run off within a realm that the artist does not attempt to physically, affectively or cognitively break into. All of Fulton’s art (as experience then object) is designed to be ecologically and ethically mindful. Fulton does not displace or remove anything, nor does he leave anything behind, and this includes mental constructs.15 It is therefore only logical that he should also deny his artworks the status of transitional objects.

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The price I pay for not mimicking nature, is that I provide written (or spoken) information about my walks. This information is always in word form, but as we struggle through a Cairngorm blizzard—there are no words in nature. The work of art (walk-texts) contradicts the reality of nature: ‘life’s lists’ set against a broad sweep of hills. (Fulton 2000, p. 191)

If the words serve to ‘contradict’—that is, defamiliarise—the space of experience (to be dissociated then from that other space that is phenomenalised by the art object), the artist needs to find the means to communicate this experience to their audience from elsewhere, outside of verbal or representational information, however unsatisfying this communication may be. The dialogue between experiential and artefactual spaces ultimately only takes place when the artist resorts to numbers, those ready-­ mades that, contrary to words, ‘already exist in the world’ (Fulton 2010, p. 50). Dates and numbers abound in Fulton’s walk-texts, gallery installations and essays. They determine the duration of the walks, the words that the artist uses to report on these walks, the form, layout and syntactical spacing of the walk-texts (haiku, word grids) and even the very paratext and titles of Fulton’s artist’s books: My title for this publication is MOUNTAIN TIME HUMAN TIME. These four words are constructed with 21 letters—21 letters for a 21-day walk. ‘THINKING LIKE A MOUNTAIN’ is also assembled with 21 letters…as is PRESERVATION OF THE WILD and DRINKING FROM MOUNTAINS. (p. 50)

Something in this non-representational and almost Duchampian revelation through numbers, layout and colours of the other-than-human world clearly verges on the epiphanic. To ‘think like a mountain’, one  might need to renounce words, photographs and even matter and think in numbers instead. The numerical coding and sequencing of Fulton’s art provides the viewers with what may well be the most convincing example of his production of another in-between which expands both outside and beyond the traversed field produced by the walking itself and the static space of the gallery and the book. An alternate way to conceive Fulton’s experiential, numerical, verbal, iconic, typographical and even digital investigations and subsequent productions of space is therefore in terms of motility and staticity. Fulton’s art, particularly his ‘mental sculptures’, challenges the conception that

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these two concepts are utterly opposed and eternally irreconcilable. Traces of the original experience of peregrination are mainly communicated through the scriptural and through the manipulation of sequential numbers (indicative, too, of a form of motion through time and space), prepositions (‘from, to, via’) and lists of place names, which are a verbal mapping of some sort, recalling the legs of the journey. However, aside from his mental sculptures, Fulton’s material hardly ever connotes movement despite being offered as secondary physical evidence of the walk. He photographs his camp, his backpack laid in the middle of the footpath, his walking sticks by the side of the track, himself sitting or leaning with his back against a rock, feathers and twigs fallen to the ground (‘the twigs were replaced where they were found’, Fulton 2000, p. 103), the outline of his cooking pot (‘tentart’, Fulton 2010, p. 73) and so on. All of these introduce an element not of spatial process but of repose and inaction. Such inaction differs from that required in the practice of meditation and suggests another form of being in the world, an in-betweenness thought to pertain to the journeying dweller. Fulton never openly empathises with (or, in Aldo Leopold’s preferred terms, ‘thinks like’) the boulder, the tree or the leaping deer, nor does he attempt to blur the lines between himself as a walking artist and the nonhuman world. His experience of space will and indeed must remain liminal. All that Fulton’s art really strives for is a way to temporarily inhabit not the centre but the margins of the natural world. He aims to find a new place each day where he can, in Thomas A. Clark’s words, ‘rest his weight’, a transient locus where he can negotiate a complementary rather than exclusionary relationship between place and motility and between presence and absence. In other words, he seeks the outdoor, wall-less versions of Basho’s inns, designed to serve, as contended by Edward Casey, as transitory halting place[s] of the ambulatory journeyer whose ongoing motion assures that no place, not even the place of destination, will be a scene of complete arrest. (Casey 1993, p.  282, quoted in Hatley 2003, p. 210)

With regard to Fulton’s art, the artist, who first has to ‘earn the right to be here’ (Cracknell 2014, p. 240), then walks in nature with the silent promise that they will not attempt to occupy or conquer it, that they will not stay. In so doing, they acknowledge the fact that nature is neither hostile and unyielding nor hospitable, and that it can only accommodate

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the presence—and, perhaps more importantly still, the art—of the human for a necessarily short while. What this tells us about the space Fulton produces by travelling through it is that it is in essence unrepresentable except through the encoding of spatial process and the photographic souvenirs of the places of transience, places of repose (the tent as portable sheiling) and temporary dwellings that the artist frequented along the way. These only eschew the ‘non-places’ description because of the significance that the artist endows them with and which in turn endows these places with a potential for social interaction—or at least the kind of social interaction that can take place when dis-placed and also dis-timed into the gallery, the book or the conference hall where and when, in Marc Augé’s terms, the gaze can be reversed.16 My art is about specific places and particular events that are not present in the gallery. The given information is minimal. My hope is that the viewer will create a feeling, an impression in his or her own mind based on whatever my art can provide. The artwork also operates a bit like a noticeboard, as it were, gazing back out at the world. (Fulton et al. 2002, p. 108)

In Fulton’s walking art then, the production of liminal spaces occurs through a variant of Henri Lefebvre’s and Edward Soja’s dialectically linked triad of lived, conceived and perceived spatiality (Soja 1996, p. 71). The latter might, in Fulton’s case, best be described as the interrelation between the following three agents: the practising, spacious body as ‘place of existence’ (Nancy 1992, p.  16), the objectified landscape (the intermedial artwork as ‘noticeboard’) and the spectator’s gaze at the ­ object (their ability to be attentive, to be a ‘noticer’).17 The spatial practices that Chaps. 2 and 3 have examined reveal a wide range of approaches to space and place, from Robert Macfarlane’s pilgrimages, Linda Cracknell’s repeat walks and Andrew Greig’s mourning walks to Thomas A.  Clark’s inward voyages and Hamish Fulton’s aspirational routes and ‘foraging’ expeditions in the Cairngorms (Griffith, in Fulton 2010, p. 16). Yet all of these approaches demonstrate the common desire of the essayists, nature writers, poets and artists to return to the land and self-relocate in a ‘space of emplacement’ (Foucault 1967), which is here defined and bounded by the conflicting dynamics of displacement and replacement. Three features in particular characterise the locational identities which these texts and artworks aim at reclaiming.

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The first is the belief in the possibility of reconnecting with the land through the practice of transience and the experience of liminality. All these artists acknowledge that they can only occupy the space they traverse as passers-by and, as Margaret Elphinstone puts it, ‘on borrowed time’ (in Cracknell 2009, p. 199). Indeed, the act has more to do with ‘borrowing’ place than taking place. The direct, albeit temporary, experience of transient modes of existence precludes the appropriation and long-term occupation of the natural space while enforcing the idea that in order to think this space (or to think like it through a holistic approach to the environment), one has to remain on its margins, both present and absent, inside and outside its perimeter. While ‘such places […] were never meant for human beings’ (p.  199), this does not imply that one should conceive of them as outside of humanity’s control. ‘WILD = living independently of humans—wild does not exist’ (Fulton 2010, p. 14). There will therefore be no contradiction in the assumption that it is precisely through the experience of one’s  own disconnection from nature that one finds the ‘consolation’ one was looking for. Gerry Loose thus speaks of the ‘exuberance [that] rises from the knowledge that [they are] not needed’ (Loose 2015, p.  91), and Margaret Elphinstone talks about the ‘joy’ of ‘separation’: The very fact I’ve wanted to climb these hills, and needed to write about them, is a measure of my separation from them. Maybe that’s all my accounts do—express the depth of my separation. There should be sorrow in that, but the project has nearly always been one of great joy—a sense of getting back to a place that had been forgotten. (Elphinstone, in Cracknell 2009, p. 195)

The second feature common to these experiential and simultaneously imaginative approaches to the land is the interrelation between the ‘great joy’ felt in the experience of nature and a sense of the imminent or ongoing disappearance not just of the ecology of the landscape but also of the cultural and social environments that this landscape helped construct. Although the walker-writers and walking artists are careful to resist museumising the outdoors or lapsing into paralysing solastalgia, their relationship to place is nevertheless permeated with a sense of loss and dispossession that is particularly palpable when they encounter the ruins of drystone

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walls, shielings or disused railway lines, in other words, structures that are indicative not so much of residential history as of older forms of transience and long-gone relational geographies. The tone can at times turn elegiac when dealing with the great trauma of the Clearances, particularly when these are viewed as both a social and an environmental crisis. See, for instance, how, in the words of John Lister-Kaye, the whole landscape of Aigas echoes ‘the mournful story of a broken people woefully departing their impoverished native land’ (Lister-Kaye 2003, p. 173). Even so, what the writers lament is the disappearance of the modes of sharing space that used to form and maintain the communal identity and social territoriality (or Dùthchas) of Scotland’s semi-natural areas, mountains and moorlands. With a few notable exceptions such as herman de vries’ in memory of the scottish forests (2007) where the artist lists the names of the lost woodlands of Scotland in the form of a funeral record, what is lost and missed is not ‘wild Scotland’ but rather the pre-Clearances Scotland that offered points of contact between communities and between the human and nonhuman (other-than-human, more-than-human) worlds. The point is therefore to construct new symbolic and cultural landscapes that restore the social meaning of place through what James Hatley, referring to Fulton’s art, calls ‘not the imagination of the landscape but its performance, better, its undergoing’ (Hatley 2003, p. 208). Finally, and as a direct consequence of this yearning for contact, these works and practices are animated by a general concern surrounding the process of transmitting this ‘undergoing’ that is first experienced on site by the practitioner and then re-experienced and shared in its re-telling, re-presentation and objectification in verbal or non-verbal forms. Because the space that is being (re)produced is designed to be transient and communal (‘our land’ and common ground), it is crucial that the emotional dimension of the practitioner’s experience is transmitted or distributed (dealt out) to the reader or spectator through the aesthetic experience and sensations recreated by the subsequent book or artwork. Not only will the book or artwork therefore reverse the reader’s or spectator’s gaze, it will also refine it. It will collapse the distance of representation and ‘transform the passive audience of spectators […] into its opposite: the active body of a community enacting its living principle’ (Rancière 2008, p. 5). The artists therefore pay particular attention to the topological, topographical, historical, cultural and environmental features and the specifiable site-­ conditions and parameters of the spaces they re-visit, re-search and re-­ experience, while attempting to capture these points of contact between

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the human and the natural worlds with as much immediacy as language, matter and image will allow. Those who ‘undergo’ and ‘enact’ the landscape trace new paths between the near and the far, the now and the then, the self and the other and between the impermanence and intangibility of the original spatial experience on the one hand and the permanence and objectification at work in the necessarily deceptive representation of the experience on the other. By walking/working the concepts of trace, archive and evocation, they are also forging new relations between art and space that are aimed at relocating their readers and audience at the core of an experience designed to be aesthetic, personal and communal—as well as environmentally, ethically and even, albeit indirectly, politically conscious, most specifically as regards the ownership and distribution of land in yesterday’s and today’s Scotland. The modes of implementing this new spatial-relational paradigm through the intercession of nonhuman and/or material transitional bodies are examined in the following chapters. The latter also interrogate the points of contact and separation and connection and disconnection between the immateriality of the spatial experience and the textuality, physicality and plasticity of the ensuing art production.

Notes 1. ‘Human into the non-human, with sweat our connection to the world, we felt ourselves the right size’ (Greig 2010, p. 210). 2. Simone Kenyon likened this practice to the Feldenkrais method during her workshop ‘Walking out of the body and into the Mountain: Dancing, Mountaineering and Embodied Ways of Knowing’, University of Dundee, 30 April 2016. On Greig’s engagement with Buddhism, see Simon Dentith, ‘Harnessing Plurality: Andrew Greig and Modernism’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.) (2007) The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), pp.  184– 193, p. 189. 3. As theorised by Michel Serres in The Natural Contract (Serres 1990). 4. http://www.oxfordpoetry.co.uk/interviews.php?int=vii3_thomasaclark. Accessed 9 January 2019. 5. ‘When the people are gone, and the house is a ruin, for long afterwards there may flourish a garden of daffodils’ (‘Riasg Buidhe’, 1987, Clark 2000, p. 104). 6. ‘The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement’ (‘In Praise of Walking’, Clark 2000, p. 19).

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7. As Tim Ingold argues in Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, ‘to tell, in short, is not to represent the world but to trace a path through it that others can follow’ (Ingold 2011, p. 162). 8. Hamish Fulton co-authored a volume on Long’s walking art: Anne Seymour and Hamish Fulton (1991) Richard Long: Walking in Circles (New York: George Braziller). 9. The use of the metrical system is arbitrary, as was the duration of the walk and the distance to be covered by the walkers, all in silence. 10. See Fulton’s essay ‘Into a Walk into Nature’, in Kastner 1998, pp. 242–245. 11. ‘I think walking is sacred. It is sacred because it binds land, mind, and body. Humans bind with nature in the activity of walking’ (Fulton, in Grande 2004, p. 135). 12. ‘Hamish Fulton: Walking as knowing as making’ University of Illinois, 5 March to 31 July 2005. 13. See Nick Kaye on site-specifics: ‘After the “substantive” notion of site, such site-specific work might even assert a “proper” relationship with its location, claiming an “original and fixed position” associated with what it is. […] To move the site-specific work is to re-place it, to make it something else’ (Kaye 2000, pp. 1–2). 14. Interview ‘21 Days in the Cairngorms—Hamish Fulton’, https://vimeo. com/12406073. Accessed 9 January 2019. 15. ‘I only “use” commercial materials. I don’t “use” found natural objects taken directly from the landscape. This is merely a symbolic gesture, so as not to receive money from something formed entirely by nature. Finally, when I’m in a “wild” area like the Cairngorms I can see so graphically the impact of my presence—so I attempt to “LEAVE NO TRACE” (which is scientifically impossible). This means making sure the ground where my tent was looks “natural” again. Not making fires with dead wood, or building cairns (“cairn-bashing”)’ (Fulton 2000, pp. 201–202). 16. ‘Space, as frequentation of places rather than a place, stems in effect from a double movement: the traveller’s movement, of course, but also a parallel movement of the landscapes which he catches only in partial glimpses, a series of “snapshots” piled hurriedly into his memory and, literally, recomposed in the account he gives of them, the sequencing of slides in the commentary he imposes on his entourage when he returns. Travel […] constructs a fictional relationship between gaze and landscape. And while we use the word “space” to describe the frequentation of places which specifically defines the journey, we should still remember that there are spaces in which the individual feels himself to be a spectator without paying much attention to the spectacle. As if the position of the spectator were the essence of the spectacle, as if basically the spectator in the position of a

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spectator were his own spectacle. A lot of tourism leaflets suggest this deflection, this reversal of the gaze, by offering the would-be traveller advance images of curious or contemplative faces, solitary or in groups, gazing across infinite oceans, scanning ranges of snow-capped mountains or wondrous urban skylines: his own image in a word, his anticipated image, which speaks only about him but carries another name (Tahiti, Alpe d’Huez, New  York). The traveller’s space may thus be the archetype of non-place’ (Augé 1992, pp. 85–86). 17. The exact nature, symbolism and cultural significance of this object, the means by which the spectator and the object—or mediator—can notice each other, and what this entails as far as space production is concerned will be examined in Chaps. 4, 5 and 6.

References Augé, Marc. [1992] 2000. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Trans. John Howe. London/New York: Verso. Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1994. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Barthes, Roland. [1973] 1975. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang. ———. [1980] 1982. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Casey, Edward S. [1993] 2009. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. New Haven: Indiana University Press. Clark, Thomas A. 2000. Distance and Proximity. Edinburgh: Canongate. ———. 2009. The Hundred Thousand Places. Manchester: Carcanet. Cracknell, Linda, ed. 2009. A Wilder Vein. Ullapool: Two Ravens Press. ———. 2014. Doubling Back. Ten Paths Trodden in Memory. Glasgow: Freight Books. De Certeau, Michel. [1984] 2011. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. de vries, herman. 2007. in memory of the scottish forests. Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche: Centre des Livres d’Artistes. Dentith, Simon. 2007. Harnessing Plurality: Andrew Greig and Modernism. In The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature, ed. Berthold Schoene, 184–193. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Elphinstone, Margaret. 2009. Walking the Edges. In A Wilder Vein, ed. Linda Cracknell, 195–217. Ullapool: Two Ravens Press. Foucault, Michel. [1967] 1997. Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. In Rethinking Architecture: A Reader in Cultural Theory, ed. Neil Leach, 329–336. New York: Routledge.

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Fulton, Hamish. 2000. Wild Life. Walks in the Cairngorms. Edinburgh: Polygon. ———. 2001. An Object Cannot Compete with an Experience. Norwich: Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts. ———. 2010. Mountain Time Human Time. Milano: Charta. Fulton, Hamish, Ben Tufnell, and Andrew Wilson, eds. 2002. Hamish Fulton: Walking Journey. London: Tate. Grande, John K. 2004. Art Nature Dialogues. Interviews with Environmental Artists. Albany: State University of New York Press. Greig, Andrew. 1996. The Return of John Macnab. London: Faber and Faber. ———. [2010] 2011. At the Loch of the Green Corrie. London: Quercus. Hatley, James D. 2003. Taking Phenomenology for a Walk: The Artworks of Hamish Fulton. In Lived Images: Mediations in Experience, Life-World and I-hood, ed. Matti Itkonen and Gary Backhaus, 194–216. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä Press. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London/New York: Routledge. Kastner, Jeffrey, and Brian Wallis. 1998. Land and Environmental Art. London: Phaidon. Kaye, Nick. 2000. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation. London/New York: Routledge. Letissier, Georges, ed. 2009. Rewriting/Reprising: Plural Intertextualities. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Lister-Kaye, John. [2003] 2004. Song of the Rolling Earth: A Highland Odyssey. London: Abacus. Loose, Gerry. 2015. An Oakwoods Almanac. Exeter: Shearsman. Naess, Arne. [2008] 2016. Ecology of Wisdom. London: Penguin Classics. Nancy, Jean-Luc. [1992] 2008. Corpus. Trans. Richard A.  Rand. New  York: Fordham University Press. Rancière, Jacques. [2008] 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London/New York: Verso. Schoene, Berthold, ed. 2007. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Serres, Michel. [1990] 1995. The Natural Contract. Trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Seymour, Anne, and Hamish Fulton. 1991. Richard Long: Walking in Circles. New York: George Braziller. Soja, Edward W. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-­ Imagined Places. Malden: Blackwell.

CHAPTER 4

Spacings: Gerry Loose and Kathleen Jamie’s Interspecies Relationalities

As they ‘undergo’ the landscape, the artists, passers-by, trespassers or interlopers continually reconstruct, reimagine and reposition themselves within each encountered location. Chapters 2 and 3 showed that in order to perceive space and place as well as themselves within them, the artists must first physically experience a form of situational yet transient emplacement that is quite literally performed in the relationship between their bodies and the environment they traverse. This relationship implies contact and encounters with the beings, forms, elements and things that inhabit that space or, as Hamish Fulton terms it, their ‘homeland’. It also implies that a conversation takes place, that gazes meet and that visual, perhaps even tactile, exchanges occur in that space of transience where all, human and nonhuman, move along their own multiple transecting paths. Accounting for a journey into the outdoors therefore means recreating, verbally or otherwise, interspecific relationalities between the human and nonhuman bodies, matter and shifting energies that traverse or inhabit that space. This chapter reflects on the opening up and closing down of the distance of representation, that is, the ‘spacing’ between the elements or inhabitants of the environment and the writer’s body in Gerry Loose and Kathleen Jamie’s nonfiction and poetry, with a view to investigating the treatment and composition of those allegedly ‘suspended’ moments when the experience of place is enriched by vivid encounters with nonhuman © The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_4

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creatures and inanimate matter. It does so in the light of Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of the Open and of the caesura between the human and the nonhuman animal by questioning the very notion of ‘empty’ space, a notion that appears just as questionable as that of ‘suspended’ time. Indeed each of these encounters is inscribed in both space and time, in that charged and intense moment, possibly of grace, that is produced by a sudden encounter with the other. Scottish writers and artists who work on location often deliberately refrain from lapsing into a dispossessing Kantian or Romantic sublime that would prevent the mind and body from ‘align[ing]’ with the world (Solnit 2000, p. 5). To them, encountering and experiencing nature must aim at a physical and mental regrounding, a form of oneness or entanglement with the world, which can only be achieved through moments of controlled enrapture (without wishing to be oxymoronic in any way). Whereas the sublime violently transports and ravishes the mind before it no less violently returns it to its normal state, what is experienced, represented or presentified in the works under scrutiny is neither a departure nor a return but rather a quiet awakening and enhanced perceptiveness to the surrounding space, that is, to each thing that allows that space to come into existence. While walking to or around the ‘sacred’, potentially abstract, object of devotion, the practitioners of both walking meditation and circumambulation aim at acquiring insight, in other words, a deep understanding of the space they are passing through. In the present case, this space is ‘sacred’ in the Durkheimian sense of the word, that is, it is ‘set apart’ and in some way assessed as ‘forbidden’ (Durkheim 1912, p. 44). In order to know, understand, enter, be acquainted with and possibly even empathise with this sacred, non(other-than, more-than)human, forbidden space, one  must therefore seek to cognitively and affectively overcome the distance of separation by relying on transitional objects and beings, intercessors or passeurs. In French, passeur means someone who covertly takes, carries or transports people or goods from one place to another: a border crosser. The term can thus equally apply to World War I servicemen who carried letters and parcels behind the lines, to the much more sinister people smugglers who transport migrants illegally across borders and even to the ferryman of Hades. The focus here, however, will be on the word as used in passeurs de sable. These passeurs sieve the river beds to separate clay and silt from the sand or pan the gravel for golden nuggets like gold diggers

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and other treasure hunters. In the present case, one expects this reward to be contact, connection and subsequently reunion with what one has been separated from, without ignoring all the cultural and political dimensions as well as the postcolonial stance that this may imply in twenty-first-­ century, devolved Scotland. I shall begin by examining the accounts of privileged and unexpected encounters with nonhuman animal mediators who intercede between the beholder and the nonhuman world in fleeting face-to-face moments of sensory intimacy and intense symbiosis. This chapter focuses on Gerry Loose and Kathleen Jamie’s zoopoetics and explores the poiesis of yet another fluid line across spaces and spheres.1 It analyses how these moments and points of contact—of being-with—create an interface and relational zone between the human and nonhuman realms, as well as an opening through which art is made to spread through the other time and space of the nonhuman world. Finally, it investigates how this interface can disrupt the conventional representation of the land and transform travelling narratives and expressions of transient spatialities into political gestures, or tokens of a possible future reconciliation not just of humans with nature but of the Scots with ‘their’ land. In Song of the Rolling Earth, John Lister-Kaye writes: ‘I have to write about the wren because it will out, like the truth’ (Lister-Kaye 2003, p. 221). Like Song of the Rolling Earth, many texts that are based on the meticulous observation of the natural world are intrinsically intergeneric, poised as they are between the work of art and the work of natural science and natural history. As such, they may be read as compositions concerned both with the revelation of beauty and, in Lister-Kaye’s words, with some romantic ‘outing’ of the ‘truth’ that is distilled in interspecific (including human) ecological and behavioural relationships and their habitats. Recent publications such as Jim Crumley’s Encounters in the Wild series (2015) and Helen Macdonald’s best-selling book H is for Hawk (2014) testify that there is currently an increasing interest within the field of British environmental nonfiction in the breadth and variety of British fauna, and perhaps more importantly in the significance of animals in today’s social, economic and cultural context. In Scotland, the animals that roam the land, hunt the seas or swirl in the skies all do so within a context that is informed by a certain re-evaluation of the impact of history, particularly Scottish ‘colonial’ history, on the wildlife and on the way it interacts with the locals (the terms ‘wildlife’ and ‘locals’ are of course eminently questionable).

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A good opening example of this is the Ardnamurchan poet Gerry Loose’s anticipation of the spread of the Bluetongue virus to deer and sheep (‘the other controversial mammals’) and, through some rebound effect, to humans. Loose opens his second entry to An Oakwoods Almanac with a dependable and empirically supported introduction to the virus and to the life cycle of its main host, ‘the little fly, meanbh-chuileag, Culicoides impunctatus’. This focus on natural history quickly gives way to subtle political overtones as Loose weaves comments on Scotland’s past and prospective history into an otherwise seemingly unbiased and scientific approach to the phenomenon. Humans—some more than others—act parasitically, he contends: Another sort of clearing of the land, again with financial subtexts, may soon afflict people here. The advent (coming with the wind) of the bluetongue midge, neither amiable nor at all literary may take up where unscrupulous landlords left off. […] The commonwealth of martins and the interlocking communities of deer, human and midges ebb and flow. With the midges and the martins, the motor-homes move at their stately pace along the single track roads, southing, overwintering, perhaps, with bluetongue midges. […] As they depart, the other caravan dwellers return—the travellers are back in Glen Tarbert—a glen of winter deer. The travellers were here long before the holidaying motor home-owners; before the feudal-minded industrialists who bought sporting estates in the late nineteenth century. […] People cleared for sheep; sheep cleared for deer; conceivably deer and sheep both giving way to a virus; travellers yielding to tourists. Depopulation continues. (Loose 2015, pp. 12–13)2

A self-declared ‘slow-moving nomad, poet, writer and land artist’,3 Loose is the author of a number of critically acclaimed prose works and collections of poems, including most recently Eitgal (2001), Ten Seasons: Explorations in Botanics (with photographer Morven Gregor, 2007), Printed on Water: New and Selected Poems (2007), That Person Himself (2009), The Deer Path to My Door (2009), Fault Line (2014) and An Oakwoods Almanac (also with Morven Gregor, 2015). An Oakwoods Almanac consists of two consecutive celebrations of the Scottish and Finnish woodlands of Sunart and Saari. An almanac will be objective in tone and objectual in content, as it is usually intended as a reference source and exhaustive compendium of knowledge, facts and figures in a particular field of study, science or occupational area. It will offer statistical data, weather forecasts and rural ephemera (such as advice on planting and har-

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vesting dates, schedules of high and low tides, navigating tips and records of religious feasts). All of this information will be arranged alphabetically, topically or chronologically according to the manual’s intended use. An Oakwoods Almanac is of the chronological kind. In his Sunart entries dated from September 2007 to June 2008, Loose interweaves first-person observations of the natural world with poems (his own and others’), shipping news, fish prices, boat names (a tribute to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Boat Names and Numbers series), a list of the ‘nine intoxicating things’ (Loose 2015, p. 60) he saw on a special day at Loch Sunart, comments on the then recently elected Scottish government, psalm excerpts and Morven Gregor’s monochrome photographs. While the book’s underlying principle is that natural history begins in the field through direct experience of the ecosystem and observation of the wild creatures in their native habitats, Loose never intended his journal to be a mere record of the time he spent in seclusion. An Oakwoods Almanac incorporates a polyphony of voices, including those of the locals Loose encountered during his daily walks, radio news reporters, Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva, Highland poet Sorley MacLean, Polish author Wislawa Szymborska, American imagist William Carlos Williams, composer John Cage and Japanese poets and fellow ‘chronicler[s] of the overlooked’ Kusano Shinpei and Ozaki Hosai (p.  25). Loose describes his writing project as simply ‘having a clear-out’: I have too many words. What’s written here is spontaneous, I’ve nothing to lose but the words. It may be a broadcloth journal, from cutout bits from poems; the poems are the holes in the cloth from which they’ve been cut. Like the Jain image of the released spirit, a negative, since they’re not yet written. In the surrounding material are many repetitions in the pattern, like speech. What goes down here is only words. (p. 23)

His reference to the Jainist principle of the liberation of the soul from karmic bondage through insight, contemplation of ‘the truth’ and respect for all living matter will not go unnoticed. Although Loose’s approach to nature can hardly be called animistic, it is nevertheless characterised by a distinctively holistic worldview and the inclusion of spiritual concerns for the kind of knowledge that scientific enquiry alone cannot provide, for knowledge that cannot be weighed or measured but which might permeate through the ‘holes’ of poetry. Loose’s Almanac is indeed grounded in the idea that we, the author(s) and readers, are all part of a community

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that is both local and global, political and apolitical and material and spiritual. In this community, all elements and beings reciprocate one another in ways that cannot be grasped through science or words alone but through a poetic combination of scientific knowledge, field practice and a syncretic belief system that fuses Gaelic mythology, Christianity and Celtic and Buddhist symbolisms in a finely spun form of ethnographic bricolage reminiscent of Levi-Strauss’ theory of the savage mind. In this sense, it can be argued that An Oakwoods Almanac falls within the scope of the emerging ethno-scientific and ethno-ecological field of Traditional Ecological Knowledge or spiritual ecology, as it was theorised by Fikret Berkes in Sacred Ecology (1999).4 The spiritual path is a narrow one to tread, and Gerry Loose is always careful not to over-symbolise or over-politicise the reality of his encounters with nonhuman creatures lest it subvert the intended mind-liberating purposelessness of his daily walks. His entry dated 25 February 2008 exemplifies the strategic restraint that infuses his writing. It also shows his deliberate, even disciplined, rejection of all kinds of oneiristic transport, Romantic anthropocentric pathetic fallacies and metaphorisation of the nonhuman other, in other words, all that Emile Durkheim castigated as ‘hallucinatory representations’ and ‘hollow phantasmagoria[s]’ (Durkheim 1912, pp. 65–66)—chimeras or, to use Loose’s preferred term, ‘unicorns’. The two-page entry is structured logically. Loose starts off with the ‘why’ of the text: a white red-deer stag has been sighted in the West Highlands. Loose proceeds to briefly explain in popularised scientific terms what leucism is and how it differs from albinism.5 ‘For me, that’s enough’, he then writes, as if aware that more than genetic considerations is expected from him. This ‘more’ comes in the form of two sets of remarks: first, on the sacred nature that Celtic mythology endows the white stag with (namely that of a seer and messenger from the otherworld) and, second, on the shooting of deer in the Highlands. Loose clearly and in equal measure considers both mythology and hunting to be instruments of human commodification—or ‘parasitism’—of the land. A third one might even be nature writing. Indeed, Loose concludes with a most heartfelt ‘I’d prefer not to’ his own plea for unobtrusive sensibility and humility before nature. I quote at length: I have no purpose, other than to observe the poetry of clouds and winds; to cheer the dance of gnats and moths, to listen intently to the musical compositions of wrens and herring gulls. There’s no point to caressing the moss as

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I go, to saluting the ancient oaks; no point to commiserating with the birch on the loss of its limb. But I do it all anyway. It’s for no reason I study for half an hour the spider spinning a filament across my path, then walking round it. I have nothing in mind when I see the rising and wheeling of herons over Garbh Eilean and count them to be, today, nineteen in number. The woodlands are full, if not of purpose, then of clarity and movement. Each creature here has enough intent for me as well. Exuberance rises from the knowledge that I am not needed. The woodlands are as liberating of egotism as of ideas and objectives. I have no need to follow unicorns. (Loose 2015, p. 91)

While refusing to consider the nonhuman inhabitants of the land as ‘resources’, ‘opportunities’ or, at the other end of the spectrum, ‘purveyors of secrets’ (Abram 1997, p. 14), Loose exposes his writing project, his phenomenological method and, generally speaking, his ethics of being through a perceptive (‘see, listen, observe’), active (‘go, caress’), cognitive (‘study, count’) and affective (‘cheer, salute, commiserate’) approach to the world. Despite the omnipresence of the first-person singular, his professed act is one of self-effacement (‘I am not needed, I have no purpose’), suspension of intent—a clearing out of the mind—and surrender to reality. Loose’s mental musings in Ardnamurchan thus inscribe his prose work in the tradition of nature writing as was established by Henry David Thoreau and, perhaps more specifically here, Annie Dillard, a tradition that combines a metaphysical rambling, meticulous watchfulness and natural survey of the here and now. Closer to home, we also hear echoes of Nan Shepherd in Loose’s acknowledgement of the self-sufficiency of nature and in his subsequent questioning of his own ability to be at one with the nonhuman world. The human and the nonhuman never actually meet in Loose’s Almanac. At best, they cross paths like the transients they are, each following their own mute trajectory and exchanging brief, stolen glances across the divide. See, for instance, the opening poem of Loose’s collection Fault Line (2014) in which the ‘glassed in’ persona glimpses a lone hind wandering the land. Note in particular how all potential romantic undertones are nipped in the bud by references to bunkers and to the nearby, infamous home of Trident nuclear weapons (Loose 2014, p. 5): … the white hind has scented me though I’m glassed in standard class

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on the halted train through Glen Douglas she follows my gaze over her shoulder to hillside bunkers trots downwind in the direction of the sea’s drifting foam specks Faslane ….

Because man and animal occupy separate spaces, the deer is prevented from serving as a proxy, mirror or substitute. It is ‘flesh’, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty meant it, as the founding difference that, in this case, allows man and animal to manifest themselves to each other thanks to the glass pane, that other ‘fault line’ that keeps them apart.6 An object that is not an object and even, as Loose suggests in An Oakwoods Almanac, an event that is not an event (Loose 2015, p. 39), the hind is truly here, ‘the other side of man’, to borrow from Merleau-Ponty’s famous last working note to The Visible and the Invisible (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p.  274). Loose’s encounters with the deer are thus really successful when their eyes do not meet, when there is no mutual recognition and the lines do not quite intersect, when ‘the dark necked stag owns it all’ (Loose 2015, p. 39, my emphasis). This last quote comes from a short entry dated 13 November 2007 in An Oakwoods Almanac in which the narrator tells of one such encounter. As he catches sight of a stag ‘ambling across the bay’, the narrator decides to move up the hill to ‘cut him off’ in the hope that the stag will end up walking to him rather than the other way round. This somewhat hubristic attempt at a face-to-face encounter fails, and the narrator returns later that day to find hoofprints in the sand. Although arguably uneventful, the entry is in many ways paradigmatic of Loose’s approach to the nonhuman. First of all, the narrator expresses no disappointment when the deer does not show up; he is here, ‘the stag’s away’, and that could very well be ‘enough’. The modes of representation of that non-event are, however, worth commenting on. In the opening paragraph, the stag ambles into being as a hypotypical after-image or even a verbal photograph or verbal painting since the reader is made to visualise

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a scene that is compellingly reminiscent of the one presented in Edwin Landseer’s famous 1842 oil painting The Sanctuary. ‘Pausing only to scratch’, the stag is captured by the walker’s eye in one of these dilated moments of vacillation between motion and stasis, of intense immobility or, as Jean-­Luc Nancy contends in The Ground of the Image, at the very instant when the world is ‘laid out’, when the landscape ‘absorbs and dissolves all presences into itself’ (Nancy 2003, p. 58): A landscape is always the suspension of a passage, and this passage occurs as a separation, an emptying out of the scene or of being: not even a passage from one point to another or from one moment to another, but the step [le pas] of the opening itself. This step is the immobilization in which forward movement is grasped as a basis or a ‘footing,’ a span of the hand, the marking out of a measure according to which a world can be laid out. The walker stops, and his step becomes that of a compass, the angle and amplitude of a disposition of space, on whose step—at whose threshold, at whose point of access—a gaze presents itself as a gaze. (Nancy 2003, pp. 61–62)

The second paragraph of Loose’s 13 November entry shows the narrator stepping over such a threshold, entering the canvas and bending over a still life sculpted in the sand of the already vanishing signs of the stag’s presence-absence. It is precisely through this mise en abyme of two embedded absences that the narrator, when he finally looks up, takes his place (and the stag’s) within the landscape and emplaces himself: Just as the outlines of heron, stag and fish prints are softening in the moisture retained in the sand’s striations, so are the lower slopes of watercut hills of rock around the bay blurring into cloud; the peak of Ben Resipole rising into sun. The stag’s away. (Loose 2015, p. 39)

In this particular piece, the emplacing is tied to the vanishing of the hoofprints and to Loose’s ensuing acknowledgement that the stag exists in a plane that is different from the one he lives in. The stag had to leave this space or, more appropriately, this landscape vacant for the narrator to occupy it, and for animal’s Umgebung to turn into man’s Umwelt.7 The cryptic question that opens Loose’s entry—‘is a stag an event?’—thus finds its answer in the idea that the nonhuman other can indeed be a locus-­ maker and a passeur of the here and now but that the condition for this to happen is that we let it be not just ‘other’ but, essentially, ‘away’. This is also what Giorgio Agamben suggests in his concluding section of The Open:

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Insofar as the animal knows neither beings nor nonbeings, neither open nor closed, it is outside of being; it is outside in an exteriority more external than any open, and inside in an intimacy more internal than any closedness. To let the animal be would then mean: to let it be outside of being. The zone of nonknowledge—or of a-knowledge—that is at issue here is beyond both knowing and not knowing, beyond both disconcealing and concealing, beyond both being and the nothing. But what is thus left to be outside of being is not thereby negated or taken away; it is not, for this reason, inexistent. It is an existing, real thing that has gone beyond the difference between being and beings. (Agamben 2002, pp. 91–92)

However, in Scottish literature, iconography and lore, the deer is so laden with emblematic significance that letting it be entails much more than one might expect. An iconic creature of the overlapping worlds, the deer has all too frequently been allegorised, most specifically in the English visual arts of the nineteenth century, as the quintessential Scottish genius loci, the monarch of a synecdochal glen, the epitome of a largely fantasised Scottish wild and some heraldic keeper of the nation’s pride. By restoring the deer to its original animality, by working at its deaestheticisation and deromanticisation, the poets of the Scottish Renaissance sought to relieve the over-allegorised animal of its exogenous symbolical burden in order to allow its leaps to be ‘unpredictable’ and the world it inhabits to be ‘wild’ again.8 ‘Wild’ here means stripped of the egocentric and anthropocentric mental, verbal and pictorial systems of representation that turned the allegorical deer into a utilitarian fiction of itself, an empty shell in the ‘cloudy systems, metaphysics of an empty country’. There is necessarily going to be a different approach taken when it comes to examining environmental writing, a genre characterised by its increasingly conservationist, preservationist and, above all, ecocentric strain. From this perspective, the deer’s symbolical status has shifted from that of the monarch of a mist-shrouded, presumably unscathed Scotland and the embodiment of a certain myth of the wild to that of an interloper and destroyer of the very wilderness it epitomised for so long. With the recent requalification of the silka and fallow deer as invasive species and the growing concern for the dramatic environmental consequences of their over-breeding and, for some, insufficient culling, the once majestic deer has earned itself some fairly bad press over the past few years, particularly in the context of the debate on land use and land ownership. In the Scottish government’s official discourse on what is often referred to as ‘the

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deer problem’, the list of the deer’s crimes seems to get longer by the day. They cross-breed and over-graze, and they are said to inhibit natural regeneration of scrub and woodland, to cause serious damage to native habitats, to disrupt vegetation on peaty soils, to encourage soil erosion, to contribute to greenhouse gas emissions and thus to climate change, and so on. Now a figure of the degeneration of Scottish wildlife—in Jim Crumley’s words, ‘the stunted shadow of [its] old deep forest forebears’ (Crumley 1991, p. 78)—the stag, it seems, is king no more. Furthermore, demoted to a symbol of the sporting estates, unfair land distribution and the brutal economics of the deer-forest regime, the deer is now too close to us, too ‘controversial’, says Loose, to serve as an effective mediator. Although the sight of deer on the high hills still has the capacity to leave the environmental writer in awe of the wildlife around them, a sense of mutual recrimination hangs in the gazes that humans and nonhuman animals now exchange. In Crumley’s account of his wanderings in the Caledonian pinewoods of the Cairngorms, the narrator startles a herd of hinds and stags to their feet: It was an unashamedly exciting spectacle, the stuff of the Scottish Highlands’ unquenchable tourist appeal. It is also killing landscapes like these. The handsome culprits paused to stand again and throw long antlered gazes back across the hill at my accusation. (Crumley 1991, p. 50)

Signs that the deer’s magic is gone also abound in contemporary Scottish nature poetry. Take, for instance, the less than awe-inspiring mutual ‘civil regard’ between the persona and the deer in Kathleen Jamie’s ‘The Stags’ (Jamie 2012, p. 16) and the persona’s need to place herself ‘in a waking dream’ to lend magic to the encounter through conscious anthropomorphism and literary allusions in her poem ‘The Hinds’ to be discussed below. Personified and folkloricised, the deer is anything but let be, and it seems the ‘impenetrable minds of the wildest of wildlife’ (Crumley 1991, p. 66) are to be found elsewhere, in even more ‘other’ and most importantly less fantasised nonhuman life forms, during encounters of the radically other kind. Of all the contemporary Scottish eco-poets, Kathleen Jamie is probably the one who engages most empirically with the nonhuman realm and whose verse and prose question most directly the relationships and conversations one can establish with it. With a view to examining the processes of human–nonhuman mediation through natural observation and

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the poetic gaze as well as the interplay of distance and proximity in Jamie’s evocations of wild creatures, I shall focus on three of her most recent ­publications: The Tree House (2004), The Overhaul (2012) and The Bonniest Companie (2015). Jamie’s concern for the collapsing of the distance between humans and nature and between world and the word is best expressed in her much-quoted author’s statement, in which she insists that she is writing not ‘about’ but ‘towards’ the natural world.9 The idea that her poetry and environmental writing operate in a forward motion is particularly relevant to the phenomenal approach favoured here. It also entails an investigation of the formal poetic devices used, to quote from Scott Knickerbocker’s Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language, ‘to enact, rather than merely represent, the immediate, embodied experience of nonhuman nature’ (Knickerbocker 2012, p.  17). In order to interrogate these devices, and with the piece by Gerry Loose discussed above in mind, I first want to consider Jamie’s poem ‘The Glass-­ Hulled Boat’ from The Tree House, in which her persona, like Loose’s in his Faslane poem, is made to experience the dual transience which appears to characterise most rewarding encounters with the nonhuman other (Jamie 2004, p. 21): First come the jelly-fish: mauve-fringed, luminous bowls like lost internal organs, pulsing and slow. …

Although Jamie claims to write ‘toward’ the natural world, the trochaic attack of the poem suggests that the jellyfish are the ones who move toward, who ‘come’ to the persona, who offer themselves to her gaze as if parading to subject themselves to the personifying devices that ensue. The reader is made to picture the persona in her own ‘bowl’, that aquarium-­like hull that places her in the position of the observed observer, or objectified subject. This ‘first come the jelly-fish’ line thus poises itself against the subsequent scientific terminology (‘organs, uterine, bladderwrack’), which pertains to naturalistic observation. The poem also gently sways and pulses between detached objectivity and figurative subjectivity or indeed, as Thomas Crawford contends, between science and lyricism in a perfect example of what Paul Volsik calls Jamie’s ‘neo-lyrical attentiveness to the radically other’ (Volsik 2007, p. 1).10 The conflicting forces of action and reaction,

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of motion and stasis, are, once more, of the essence. The jellyfish ‘come’, ‘pulse’, ‘swa[y] sideways and back/like half-forgotten ancestors’ and ‘spin out’, but it is through the perception of a mutual enclosed standstill—a ‘stalling’—midway through the poem that the encounter really occurs. This encounter is strategically framed by references to, first, the no-longerhuman (with the disturbing image of ‘luminous bowls/like lost internal organs’ free-floating in fluid) and, second, the not-quite-human-­ yet (‘vaguely uterine jelly-fish/— whom I almost envy’). This puts persona and animal on two opposed spatial, temporal and ontological trajectories. The point of contact therefore lies in the ‘almost’ of line 17, that is, in the failure of absolute identification with the other and in the not-quite epiphanic pause when the persona and the jellyfish meet in the ‘maudlin’ of the inbetween. By ‘the in-between’ I mean the interstitial space between two radically different becomings, spheres of existence or, in Jamie’s carefully chosen word, ‘home[s]’, which, hermetic as they are, brush against each other and ‘almost’ touch—this phrase comes in handy—in the space of a moment. I quote from Brian Massumi’s Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation: It is meaningless to interrogate the relation of the human and the nonhuman if the nonhuman is only a construct of human culture, or inertness. The concepts of nature and culture need serious reworking, in a way that expresses the irreducible alterity of the nonhuman in and through its active connection to the human and vice versa. Let matter be matter, brains be brains, and jellyfish be jellyfish, and culture be nature, in irreducible alterity and infinite connection. (Massumi 2002, p. 39)

Kathleen Jamie’s poetry is often based on the unobtrusive observation of nonhuman animals interacting spontaneously with and within their natural habitats. Although she is careful to remain undetected when on site, she allows herself to abandon clinical analyses and undermines her initial posture of detachment to evolve towards more intersubjective modes of representation. While the naturalistic approach tends to maintain a safe emotional distance between the observer and the observed, it does not completely rule out biophilic reactions in the resulting poem, which might occasionally verge on the sublime or on a certain experience of profane grace.11 The ‘almost’ and the ‘toward’ thrive in her depictions of those moments when the persona watches the nonhuman other as it is sensing its own space, when she can ‘almost’ feel it herself and ‘almost

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envy’ its particular way of being in the world, but ultimately she does not. The poem that comes to mind here is Jamie’s ‘Basking Shark’, also from The Tree House. Inspired by Norman MacCaig’s 1967 poem of the same title, Jamie’s ‘Basking Shark’ may be read as another case of rewalking-­ rewriting, of re-encountering even. This time, unlike ‘The Glass-Hulled Boat’, the persona comes first (‘I came to the cliff-edge’). The creature below is already there, had maybe always been there, being cradled back and forth by the waves. It is ‘berthed’ in the same way that the persona and the jellyfish were ‘stalled’, caught ‘resting’ in the pulsating rhythms of the heaving sea, which are echoed by the swaying motion of the shark’s tail fin and by Jamie’s artful, mesmeric use of enjambment (Jamie 2004, pp. 23–24): … I gripped sweet rock—but it was only resting, berthed as though drawn by the cliff’s peculiar backwash, precisely that its oreheavy body and head— the tail fin measuring back, forth, like a haunted door— could come to sense the absolute limits of its realm. …

Even more than in the shark itself, Jamie finds grace in the mechanical, intermittent motion between the open and the closed (with the sharp, striking image of the ‘haunted door’) and between the continuity and discontinuity of empathetic perception. The moment is ‘almost’ sublime and the persona ‘almost’ ravished by the scene. See, for instance, how the enjambment ‘I gripped/sweet rock’ suggests sudden verticality and how this is immediately undermined by the persona being pulled back into horizontal safety (‘—but’). The world will not be turned upside down. The persona will not become shark, nor the shark the persona. Here is the kind of magic that only the space-time of the text can work, if it will. Like ‘The Glass-Hulled Boat’, ‘Basking Shark’ is very much a poem about impetus and restraint both at the discursive and meta-discursive levels. It is through motion that the shark configures its own world below. It is also

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through motion (that back-and-forth movement away from and towards the other, but never actually reaching it) that the poem succeeds in doing what the human mind and body are incapable of doing, that is, thinking, sensing and even breathing like a shark by measuring ‘the absolute limits’ of the verbal realm. By refusing to let itself be aestheticised, the shark retains its itness all along and even resists reification, as testified by that impossible metaphor of the living, floating anvil (Jamie 2004, p. 24): … While it hung, steady as an anvil but for the fins’ corrective rippling—dull, dark and buoyed like a heart that goes on living through a long grief what could we do but watch? …

While Jamie allows the creature to inhabit its world and lets its gill-­ pumping, tail-swaying mode of being contaminate the text, she is always careful to leave a dizzy space of latency between the human and the nonhuman where they can tentatively adjust to each other’s spatial awareness. A lesson in ecopoetic humility—‘in learning how to wait patiently for the marvellous to swim into view’ (Falconer 2015, p.  1)—‘Basking Shark’ thus helps measure the immense12 yet somewhat homely distance-as-space within which the human and the nonhuman, or the persona and the shark, can embrace the experiential fracture that keeps them apart while at the same time allowing them to coexist just ‘outside of being’.13 They also coexist just outside of dwelling because this space of the neither/nor, this space of the ‘toward’ and the ‘almost’, is where the persona can experience a form of existential and ontological transience in that precise moment of naturalistic (weighing down rather than uplifting) sublime, when the observer is made to ‘bear’ the weight of the other’s body until she ‘mercifully’ returns to her own senses … and to silence: … the shark—not ready yet to re-enter the ocean travel there, peaceable and dumb—

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waited, and was watched; till it all became unbearable, whereupon the wind in its mercy breathed again and far below the surface glittered, and broke up. (p. 24)

This creaturely sublime, which is one of reintegration into the space of in-betweenness, is experienced through empathic symbiosis with the other. Jamie’s sense of reverence for the nonhuman other and most importantly for its ability to keep its ultimate distance and maintain what Scott Knickerbocker terms the ‘chiastic relationship of simultaneous difference and inseparability’ (Knickerbocker 2012, p. 4) permeates most of her sea poetry. In pieces such as ‘The Whale-watcher’ and ‘White-sided Dolphins’ (also from The Tree House), Jamie continues to explore the separateness and interrelatedness of the human and nonhuman realms. She ponders the way these are woven together in the other’s spatial existence, in the side-­ to-­side or up-and-down motion of the mammal’s body, ‘like stitches sewn in a rent/almost beyond repair’ (‘The Whale-watcher’, Jamie 2004, p. 25). In The Tree House as in many of Jamie’s collections, the ‘almost’ thus becomes a healing, communal space of its own, a Lebenswelt. There are times, however, when the persona is tempted outside the space of the ‘almost’, when she indulges in a form of reverie that collapses the distance and subsumes the in-between to images generated through dream and fantasy. In Jamie’s poem ‘The Whales’ from The Overhaul, the persona dreams the impossible dream (note the anaphoric ‘if I could’) of diving ‘far under the ocean,/away from these merfolk’ in order to teach herself to hear ‘what the whale-fish hear’. As Alexandra Campbell suggests in her approach to Jamie’s ‘ecological ethics of listening’ (Campbell 2017, p. 7),14 the desired object is anything but merely aesthetic, and the point was never to delight in the anthropomorphic whale song. By aspiring to intercept the sound waves used by the whales to echolocate themselves, the persona is unwittingly dreaming of an alternate means of placing herself in the world (that also vaguely uterine ‘green and ventricular’ cave of verses 7 and 8). This in itself constitutes a breach of the other’s territorial integrity, an intrusion into its personal space and a violation of the agreement of the ‘almost’. The dream was doomed from the start, and it does not take long before the door to the other side slams shut (Jamie 2012, p. 46):

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… But oh my love, tell me you’d swim by, tell me you’d look out for me, down there it’s impossible to breathe—

This is also a possible ecocritical interpretation of ‘The Hinds’ from The Bonniest Companie, a collection that is quite literally haunted by the beguiling shapeshifters that have escaped from the medieval Scottish ballad Tam Lin. In this poem, the persona comes across a herd of hinds as she is ‘walking in a waking dream’. As she watches them tread their own ground ‘at their ease; alive/to lands held on long lease/in their animal minds’ and—the why and how—stag-free, the hinds suddenly turn round and meet her gaze (Jamie 2015, p. 25): … filing through a breach in a never-mended dyke, the herd flowed up over heather-slopes to scree where they stopped, and turned to stare, the foremost with a queenly air as though to say: Aren’t we the bonniest companie? Come to me, you’ll be happy, but never go home.

The hinds are therefore not so much enticing the persona to dream-­ walk into the otherworld as to step out of the phenomenally unified interstitial space where the world’s energy (termed ‘the world’s mind’ in the poem ‘Pipistrelles’)15 and no doubt also ‘home’ are to be found. Interestingly the real, natural magic of the encounter and the sense of grace further evoked by the sound effects that echo the fluid motion of the herd across space are gone as soon as the fictional, black magic kicks in. The fabric tears with the conjunctive border crosser ‘as though’ and the inclusion of the fourth space of the otherworld that threatens to engulf both poet and animals. The tear widens further when the context—also a space—of the original quote is imported into that of the poem like a disruptive force. The meticulously counted ‘nineteen deer’ of line 2 suddenly morph into an escort, a ‘companie’. From light-footed passers-by, the hinds become passeurs, only in another place, another time and another text, but these are perhaps the exact same thing.

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Written in the months preceding the referendum on Scottish independence, the poem easily lends itself to a more contextual and gendered interpretation, and we might ourselves be seduced into seeing in Jamie’s anthropomorphic ‘queenly’ spinners a figure of pre-independent Scotland, eschewing the romantic, contentious, Anglocentric or, according to poet Carol Rumens, ‘antlered images of nationhood’ inherited from the nineteenth century.16 Here is Scotland ‘at ease’ on its own, however neglected the land might be (note the ‘never-mended dyke’). It is a land ‘held on a long lease’, a lease that is about to be redrafted, for better or for worse. But if the enchantress is indeed tempting the persona and the reader to grab the one-way ticket to independence, how then are they to re-­interpret that most ambiguous ‘home’ of the closing line? Maybe this is Jamie’s incentive to either redefine the contours of ‘home’ or effectively give up on the word itself and leave behind that former Scotland, which, once lost, can never be retrieved. Of all the poems from The Bonniest Companie, it is ‘The Hinds’ that has attracted the most critical attention, for reasons that are not difficult to understand. It is at once a nature poem and a political piece. It is a poem about gender, land use and open and closed borders. As Alan Riach argues in his approach to Jamie’s poetics of transience and personal and geographical localities, the land, just like the body and the nation, is ‘a wild place of contesting forces’ (Riach 2015, pp. 21 and 30). These forces are most perceptible in ‘The Hinds’, which tells of more thresholds and haunted doors swinging to and fro between different (real, imaginary, human, nonhuman, other-, inner, outer, past, present, future) worlds, but also between different (narrative, lyrical, fabulist) poetic genres. It also tells of the possibility that one might live in all of them and that the poet might write simultaneously in all of them, even if for just one ‘unbearable’ split second, or the time it takes to look a hind in the eyes.

Notes 1. As defined by Aaron Moe in Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry: ‘Zoopoetics is the process of discovering innovative breakthroughs in form through an attentiveness to another species’ bodily poiesis’ (Moe 2014, p. 10). Moe borrowed the term ‘zoopoetics’ from the series of conferences titled The Animal that Therefore I Am, which were given in Cerisy by Jacques Derrida in 1997. The full text of L’Animal que Donc Je suis was first published posthumously in 2006.

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2. See also, in the Saari section of An Oakwoods Almanac, Loose’s remarks on environmental justice: ‘Poor people do not own what are now called resources. In Europe, aristocrats once owned vast tracts of forest; some still do. Multinational companies now control the world’s resources where once aristocrats did; the effect is the same, often the owners and controllers are the same too. A discussion of trees is not complete without a discussion of land and land ownership and hence the control of resources. It’s also part of a larger discussion of the way the world is regarded by the ever greedy Homo sapiens […] Our relationship is at best symbiotic, but we act parasitically. The climax of parasitism—say mistletoe in an oak—is the stifling of the host, to the detriment of both’ (Loose 2015, pp. 111–112). 3. As stated in his online biographical note: ‘Born in 1948, I have lived in England, Ireland, Spain, Morocco (briefly) and now Scotland. A slow-­ moving nomad, I am a poet, writer and land artist who works primarily with subjects from the natural world, as well as the world of geopolitics. I also design and make gardens. My poetry is as likely to appear in these (and ungardened landscapes) as on the page’. http://www.gerryloose.com. Accessed 9 January 2019. 4. See Fikret Berke’s three-point analytical definition of Traditional Ecological Knowledge: ‘The study of traditional ecological knowledge begins with the study of species identifications and classification (ethnobiology) and proceeds to considerations of peoples’ understandings of ecological processes and their relationships with the environment (human ecology). Implied in the concept is a component of local and empirical knowledge of species and other environmental phenomena. There is also a component of practice in the way people carry out their agriculture, hunting and fishing, and other livelihood activities. Further, there is a component of belief in peoples’ perceptions of their role within ecosystems and how they interact with natural processes’ (Berkes 1999, pp. 5–6). 5. ‘Leucism is a reduction of all types of skin pigmentation, resulting in a white skin or coat, unlike albinism, which is a reduction of melanin only. Leucistic animals have normally pigmented eyes. Leucism is also seen in the irregular patches on other animals—the hides of some cattle, where localized hypopigmentation gives the pied effect in differing patterns of Friesian herds, for example’ (Loose 2015, p. 90). 6. ‘When we speak of the flesh of the visible, we do not mean to do anthropology, to describe a world covered over with all our own projections, leaving aside what it can be under the human mask. Rather, we mean that carnal being, as a being of depths, of several leaves or several faces, a being in latency, and a presentation of a certain absence, is a prototype of Being, of which our body, the sensible sentient, is a very remarkable variant, but

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whose constitutive paradox already lies in every visible’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964, p. 136). 7. These two concepts are borrowed from Giorgio Agamben’s influential analysis of the works of German biosemiotician Jakob von Uexküll: ‘Too often, he affirms, we imagine that the relations a certain animal subject has to the things in its environment take place in the same space and in the same time as those which bind us to the objects in our human world. This illusion rests on the belief in a single world in which all living beings are situated. Uexküll shows that such a unitary world does not exist, just as a space and a time that are equal for all living things do not exist. […] Uexküll begins by carefully distinguishing the Umgebung, the objective space in which we see a living being moving, from the Umwelt, the environment-world that is constituted by a more or less broad series of elements that he calls “carriers of significance” (Bedeutungsträger) or of “marks” (Merkmalträger), which are the only things that interest the animal. In reality, the Umgebung is our own Umwelt, to which Uexküll does not attribute any particular privilege and which, as such, can also vary according to the point of view from which we observe it’ (Agamben 2002, pp. 40–41). Also on Uexküll’s Umwelt, see Ingold (2000, pp. 173–178). 8. From Iain Crichton Smith’s poem ‘Deer on the High Hills—a Meditation’. 9. ‘My poetry would be a dead thing if it couldn’t retain its liquidity, couldn’t change shape or direction. However, two things have been constant over the years: a rigour, and a concern for musicality. I like to think that both come from two different Scottish traditions. I couldn’t even say what I write “about”, because I distrust the relationship expressed by the word “about”. I’d rather say that I write “toward”. Or perhaps “within”. At the moment, I’m writing a lot “toward” the natural world. In the past I’ve had to address “issues” in my work, of gender and national and personal identity, just in order to clear space. “Do you consider yourself a woman writer or a Scottish writer?” is a question I can no longer answer politely. Just last week, in a tiny magazine, I read a description of my work which delighted me. It said “Kathleen Jamie: somewhere between the Presbyterian and the Tao”.’ https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/kathleen-jamie. Accessed 9 January 2019. The magazine in question is Etudes Anglaises, see Volsik (2007). 10. The poem ‘contains some moments in the diction that could be called “scientific”—the phrase “internal organs”, the word “uterine” and perhaps the word “trajectory”—but these have become part of the mode of lyricism. The word “uterine” no longer sounds as if it must be exiled from lyric possibilities. We can still hear it as scientific, but when this oddly blurring yet precisely phrased poem speak of—and even to—“you lone,/ vaguely uterine jellyfish//—whom I almost envy”, the tone carries both

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strangeness and fondness. The word “uterine” is being absorbed into mainstream lyric tradition’ (Crawford 2012, p. 74). 11. Edward Wilson defines biophilia as the ‘inborn affinity human beings have for other forms of life, an affiliation evoked, according to circumstances, by pleasure, or a sense of security, or awe, or even fascination blended with revulsion’ (Wilson 1984, p. 360). 12. See Gaston Bachelard’s concept of ‘immensity’: ‘It would seem, then, that it is through their “immensity” that these two kinds of space-the space of intimacy and world space-blend. […] This coexistence of things in a space to which we add consciousness of our own existence, is a very concrete thing. Leibnitz’s theme of space as a place inhabited by coexistants has found its poet in Rilke. In this coexistentialism every object invested with intimate space becomes the center of all space. For each object, distance is the present, the horizon exists as much as the center’ (Bachelard 1958, p. 203). 13. I am much indebted to Paul Volsik’s analysis: ‘What seems to be the most important aspect of this poem—the disturbing but central encounter which is at the heart of much eco-poetry […], the proximity/distance with something that is radically “other”—is written into the text in the “cliffedge” not only as the place of the encounter (the “I”‘s with the rarely seen basking shark, the basking shark with something that is beyond its “realm”), but also in the excellent use of enjambment (absolute/limits etc) or that moment of hesitation, that sense of limit, where the reader (like the spectator and the shark) is caught in a “peculiar backwash,” a fundamental “back/forth” between creature in the world and human being, between previous line and following line, between land and sea. The poem, at its most intimate, becomes a “haunting door” to a space beyond and a door through which something that is “beyond” comes to us in a manifestation that is of the order of a revelation rooted in the particularity of the world’ (Volsik 2007, p. 352). 14. See also Faith Lawrence’s contribution entitled ‘A Poetics of Listening’, in Rachel Falconer (ed.) (2015) Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on her Work, pp. 10–20. 15. ‘What we noticed were pipistrelles: /cinder-like, friable, flickering/the place hained by trees/till the air seemed to quicken//and the bats were a single/edgy intelligence, testing their idea/for a new form/which unfolded and cohered//before our eyes. The world’s/mind is such interstices;/cells charging with light of day– /is that what they were telling us?’ (Jamie 2004, p. 30) 16. ‘In its supple energy, the poem might be a riposte to those stiff and gloomy oil-paintings with their antlered images of nationhood, and ­frequently bearing the title, “Stag at Bay”.’ Carol Rumens, ‘The Hinds’ by Kathleen Jamie, The Guardian, 5 October 2015.

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References Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-­ than-­Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Agamben, Giorgio. [2002] 2004. The Open. Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Redwood: Stanford University Press. Bachelard, Gaston. [1958] 1994. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Berkes, Fikret. [1999] 2012. Sacred Ecology. New York: Routledge. Campbell, Alexandra. 2017. Sound Waves: ‘Blue Ecology’ in the Poetry of Robin Robertson and Kathleen Jamie. Etudes Ecossaises 19, Scotland and the Sea. http:// journals.openedition.org/etudesecossaises/1199. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Crawford, Robert. 2012. Poetry, Science and the Contemporary University. In Science in Modern Poetry: New Directions, ed. John Holmes, 67–84. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Crumley, Jim. 1991. A High and Lonely Place. The Sanctuary and Plight of the Cairngorms. London: Jonathan Cape. Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen Fields. New York: Free Press. Falconer, Rachel, ed. 2015. Kathleen Jamie. Essays and Poems on Her Work. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. London/New York: Routledge. Jamie, Kathleen. 2004. The Tree House. London: Picador. ———. 2012. The Overhaul. London: Picador. ———. 2015. The Bonniest Companie. London: Picador. Knickerbocker, Scott. 2012. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Lister-Kaye, John. [2003] 2004. Song of the Rolling Earth: A Highland Odyssey. London: Abacus. Loose, Gerry. 2014. Fault Line. Glasgow: Vagabond Voices. ———. 2015. An Oakwoods Almanac. Exeter: Shearsman. Massumi, Brian. 2002. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. [1964] 1968. The Visible and the Invisible. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Moe, Aaron M. 2014. Zoopoetics: Animals and the Making of Poetry. Plymouth: Lexington Books.

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Nancy, Jean-Luc. [2003] 2005. The Ground of the Image. Trans. Jeff Fort. New York: Fordham University Press. Riach, Alan. 2015. Mr and Mrs Scotland Are Taking a Vacation in the Autonomous Region. In Kathleen Jamie. Essays and Poems on Her Work, ed. Rachel Falconer, 21–31. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rumens, Carol. 2015. “The Hinds” by Kathleen Jamie. The Guardian, October 5. Solnit, Rebecca. [2000] 2001. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New  York/ London: Penguin. Volsik, Paul. 2007. ‘Somewhere between the Presbyterian and the Tao’ (Kathleen Jamie): Contemporary Scottish Poetry. Etudes Anglaises Volume 60/3, Poésie Contemporaine (1985–2007): Grande-Bretagne et Irlande, 346–360. https://www. cairn.info/revue-etudes-anglaises-2007-3-page-346.htm. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Wilson, Edward O. 1984. Biophilia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 5

Into the Fold: Kathleen Jamie’s and John Burnside’s Oikopoetics

Drawing upon the previous discussion on the matrix of connections and experiences of transience that are constitutive of a sense of place and belonging, this chapter examines ecopoetic discourses that focus on the idea of ‘home’ and the observer’s acceptance of stasis. It does so with the image of rootedness in mind, starting from Kathleen Jamie’s wishing tree and its ironic rejection of human-made conceits (Jamie 2004, p. 3)1: I stand neither in the wilderness nor fairyland but in the green fold of a green hill the tilt from one parish into another. …

Consistent with the tree’s redefinition of its home—where it ‘stands’— as pertaining to the oblique and the unstable, Jamie’s nonhuman others are often viewed as fellow inhabitants of a ‘sheltering niche’ (in ‘The Falcon’, p. 40) which is located at the edge of the world or, rather, in its fold. As Chap. 4 has demonstrated, the nonhuman animal is not staged as an animus, an allegorical avatar or a totem in Jamie’s poetry and nonfiction. At most, it plays the part of an unwitting mediator and social operator © The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_5

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of interactional experience. It is social in the sense that its being here and now—its being watched or listened to—turns the fold between its world and the human realm into a living home, an integrative oikos where all sentient beings might interrelate and where humans might advance towards a more implicated relationship to the natural world. ‘The birds live at the edge of my life. That’s okay. I like the sense that the margins of my life are semi-permeable’, says Jamie (Jamie 2005, p. 29). Such encounters with the nonhuman other thus participate in an ‘oikopoetics’ (Selvamony et  al. 2007) which requires a spatial-ontological mapping of the point of contact between human and nonhumans—but also material things—as fellowdwellers and fellow-transients of the liminal space of the ‘neither…nor’ and the ‘almost’. Jamie’s works thus attune her readers to forms of interrelatedness that call for a rethinking of the notion of territoriality while also collapsing the dichotomy between roaming and dwelling and, concomitantly, between self and other, subject and object and the sacred and the profane. This chapter looks at the ecopoetics of the liminal in the works of Kathleen Jamie and offers to compare it with the work of another Scottish nature poet, John Burnside. In his recent publication Les Diplomates (2016), the French philosopher Baptiste Morizot expands on the concept of diplomacy to define a new, albeit clearly Spinoza-inspired, paradigmatic relationship between biotic communities. Rather than ‘mutualism’, Morizot calls this mode of interaction hosted in the interface between the human and the nonhuman worlds ‘negotiation’, a term he borrows from Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2012) and which further testifies to the increasingly porous borders between the emerging field of animal studies and the philosophical, geopolitical and ecocritical views on the Other. Although apparently different in style, approach and object (Les Diplomates focuses on the concerns raised by the reintroduction of wolves in the French countryside, whereas there are no wolves in Scotland—yet),2 Morizot’s monograph and Jamie’s poetry and prose are strikingly similar as regards the part assigned to the nonhuman animal in the mutually beneficial folding of both worlds into one. Like Morizot’s wolves, the falcons, swallows, dolphins and whales Jamie writes about are territorial and often migratory. They are dwellers, wanderers and ‘peregrines’ of the space around them, of a ‘home range’, as it is called in ethology, which is bounded and partly constructed through the transmission of sound and sophisticated call systems, that is, through the animals’ ability to soundscape their surroundings—in ways that might be compared with the poet’s wordscaping of his or her immediate

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environment. Since diplomatic practices imply the adoption by all parties of a consensual language, Jamie proves particularly cautious  about using pathetic fallacy, whether in an anthropocentric or animocentric way. Whenever the nonhuman animal is personified, the cursor between the human and the nonhuman is moved in order to instil a sense of oddity that almost debunks the power of language to effectively and dependably account for the nonhuman and, perhaps even more importantly, for the non-verbal experience of its encounter. A good example of such figurative diplomacy lies in Jamie’s accounts of her repeated sightings of killer whales in Sightlines. Despite the apex predator’s unquestionable potential for the articulation of the sublime, Jamie is careful to remain within the bounds of the human–nonhuman animal verbal territory and to never stray too far from the common yet unstable ground where the two semantic fields of naturalistic observation and human sociability overlap. In the chapter titled ‘The Gannetry’, Jamie tells of her experience of birdwatching on the national nature reserve and bird sanctuary of the small, uninhabited island of Noss in Shetland. Alongside her own observations and those of renowned naturalist and ornithologist Tim Dee on the social structure of the seabird’s colony, Jamie makes consistent use of metaphors and similes that urge her readers to picture the gannets as dwellers of a ‘tenement’, installed ‘tier above tier’, ‘crammed together in a domestic order that looked like chaos’ and shouting ‘constant greetings, and constant disputes’ (Jamie 2012, p. 81; 74). The gannets are successively depicted as boisterous members of the working class, ‘aristocratic dynastic families’ and ‘lone patrician poet[s] frowning over [their] papers’. This all changes when the painting is unexpectedly struck out by what Jamie first describes as ‘a quick vertical line’ (p. 79; 81; 82) which immediately suspends the pathetic fallacy that had gradually taken hold of the narration up until that point. As soon as the killer whale’s dorsal fin slices through the world, the text also draws its own line, running between two distinct verbal spaces. Above the water surface, there is the realm of the visible, which the all-seeing binoculared voyeur can attempt to make sense of and possibly even keep on personifying. Below is the kingdom of the invisible and the unfigurable, where the creature can no longer be anthropomorphised, not even as a king or invisible god. Just like the killer whale itself, the text moves back and forth and up and down between figurative interpretation and factual observation. In Sightlines, the chapters titled ‘The Gannetry’ and ‘On Rona’ both narrate encounters with killer whales that are characterised by two main features. The first is

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an alternation between personifying figures of sociability (the whales as ‘holding council’, the ‘congregation’ of seals, p.  196) and a form of uncanny pathetic fallacy that does not just collapse speciesist dichotomies but also blurs the lines between the animate and the inanimate, between the human, the nonhuman animal and the post-human and between the part, the whole, the familiar and the strange.3 See, for instance, the disturbingly personifying synecdoche of ‘that male, six-foot, film-star fin’ ‘as tall as a man’ (p. 89; 83), which conjures images of those infamous whale-­ riding shows that have earned SeaWorld and other such theme parks much negative publicity over the past few years. The second most salient feature of Jamie’s killer-whale narratives is her insistent references to the fallibility of sense perception: the whales might just be ‘a mirage’ or ‘a trick of the light’ (p. 83), as the creatures ‘flash through’ (p. 199) only to dissolve in ‘a broad band of glare far too bright for our human eyes’ (p. 85; 198).4 Like the peregrines in Findings, the whales also ‘flicke[r] at the edge of one’s senses, […] at the edge of existence itself’ (Jamie 2005, p. 47). They ‘reveal only as much of themselves as [is] necessary’ (Jamie 2012, p. 84), as if to remind the observer of the essential inaptitude of human senses and language to account not just for the intrinsic discontinuity of perception but also for that ‘sudden unexpected[ness]’ (p.  89) which is their instinctive mode of being. Jamie is twice enticed to call such encounters ‘oddit[ies]’ or ‘private miracle[s]’ (p. 83; 86), but she soon acknowledges that ‘that this was a resident group, following a regular beat around the islands; they were not a rare occurrence’ (p.  86). As soon as the killer whales disappear under the surface of the sea, there is nothing to be seen, and therefore nothing to be said: ‘and that was that’ (p. 85; 200). It is precisely in this twice indefinite, tautological ‘that was that’ that the mysteriously conjunctive separation of the human and the nonhuman is revealed, as Giorgio Agamben puts it, ‘at the centre of the Open’.5 In Jamie’s Sightlines, however, this undisconcealedness is conditioned upon the impossibility of the reciprocal and conversational gaze that proved, in ‘The Hinds’ from The Bonniest Companie, to be an open sesame into the otherworld. Note how the killer whales in the excerpt below, because they are ‘another kind of vision’ (Jamie 2012, p. 89), call for another kind of seeing, or rather of non-seeing: The waves still washed vaguely up against the rocks, and just at the place where water met rock the four killer whales aligned themselves one behind the other, and it seemed to me already, even in my excitement, that there

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was something peculiar about how I was seeing them. Four killer whales in front of my eyes—big, big animals—but something about the play of their black-and-white livery was confounding. It was the white patch behind their eye: it seemed to deflect the gaze, the way a mirror or amulet deflects the evil eye. (p. 197)

The Open never remains so for long. As Jamie, ‘in an act of consummate communication to [her] human kind, steps backs into language’, she soon reverts to using reifying and personifying devices in order to convey the elusive alchemy of the moment.6 The whale becomes a master of illusion as its distinctive colour pattern turns into a ‘conjuror’s garb: a moment’s bewilderment, a sleight of hand’, ‘a wave of magic wand’ (p. 199; 202). The encounter with the creature therefore occurs not so much in the non-knowledge and the ‘letting be’ of the Open but in the ‘letting see’ or ‘letting imagine’ of the fold, where the observer can experience epiphanic flashes of recognition (‘I know you’, p.  201) and self-­ recognition through a sense of mutual emplacement in the world: Acid burn at my sternum, taste of blood, tussocky earth and sky flashing, and my heart pounding; suddenly I was reminded mine was an animal body, all muscle and nerve—and so were they, the killer whales, surging animal bodies, in their black and whites, outclassing us utterly. (p. 199)

What the killer whale offers its observer is a means of being in the world that ‘redefines our conception of separate coexistence with the wild in terms of diplomatic cohabitation’ (Morizot 2016, p. 89). Morizot’s concept of diplomacy is again particularly relevant here as regards the defusing of all conflicts of interest between the observer as potential prey and the observed as potential predator. Would Jamie have dealt with the whales in this way—would she have also ‘acquired presence’ (Jamie 2012, p. 83)—if the whales had killed before her eyes, if there had been blood? Another potent and pivotal figure of the negotiator, diplomat and inhabitant of the fold in Jamie’s works is winged and feathered. Perfectly poised between two worlds like the swallow of The Tree House perched ‘at an angle/exact as a raised latch’ (‘The Swallows’ Nest’, Jamie 2004, p. 16), birds abound in the Open of Jamie’s poetry and nonfiction. Raptors often demonstrate the same combination of release and restraint that characterises the killer whales’ hunting tactics in Sightlines, urging Jamie to the same cautious pathetic fallacy as remarked upon earlier. In Findings,

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hunting peregrines are thus ‘linked with the heightened tension, almost, of flamenco dancers’ (Jamie 2005, p. 33) in a falsely timid analogy that is a metaphor of a metaphor, a figurative transport of the flight and seasonal migration of the iconic raptors. With the same ‘ethos of respect’ (Mackay 2015, p.  86) and ecopoetic intent to ‘not appropriate the Open as an instrument of mastery and knowledge’ (Agamben 2002, p. 90), Jamie lets her birds remain within the bounds of ‘the only world’ (‘Flight of Birds’, Jamie 2004, p. 39) and the falcon of the eponymous poem ‘ascend/almost out of the world’ (p. 40, my emphasis); likewise, her poetry shall remain within the bounds of the human language. See, for instance, how she renounces mimesis in ‘The Dipper’ and takes a step backward to let the bird, in its absolute sentience, inhabit and sing a world that is its alone (Jamie 2004, p. 49): … It lit on a damp rock, and, as water swept stupidly on, wrung from its own throat supple, undammable song. It isn’t mine to give. I can’t coax this bird to my hand that knows the depth of the river yet sings of it on land.

As in this piece where the encounter with the dipper allows the persona not to assimilate the animal world to the human one but rather to measure and diplomatically respect the distance that keeps them apart, nature writing is likely to circumvent the metaphorical impositions that see the human inhabit the nonhuman realm or the nonhuman inhabit the human realm. Likewise, eco-writers and poets are often weary of the form of immersive poiesis that makes the text attune to the nonhuman animal’s specific mode of being in the world. It is therefore not uncommon for such poems to rely on the binary opposition of flight and fall, of airbound and earthbound creatures, to explore those other regions of the fold, namely the dualisms of now and then, of dwelling and departure, of hope and despair and of enchantment and disenchantment. At this point, I would like to turn to John Burnside’s collection All One Breath and more specifically to his ‘Peregrines’ (Burnside 2014, p. 67):

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Soon they will kill the falcons that breed in the quarry, (it’s only a matter of time: raptors need space and, in these parts, space equals money); but now, for a season, they fly low over the fields and the thin paths that run to the woods at Gillingshill, … …, the village below us empty and grey as the vault where its money sleeps, and the moment so close to sweet, while we stand and wait for the flicker of sky in our bones that is almost flight.

The context and the locale of this poem are well worth commenting on. The Gillingshill Reservoir was artificially created during the Victorian era to supply the East Neuk of Fife. It became surplus to requirements after the Loch Lomond and River Earn water supply schemes were brought to completion and was subsequently decommissioned and reclassified as a nature reserve in 1996. Burnside’s peregrines thus fly over a most paradigmatic cultural landscape. Going from wild to inhabited, from inhabited to drowned and finally from managed to rewilded, the reservoir questions the (ir)reversibility of man’s active imprint upon nature. While relying on a series of binary oppositions of life (‘breed’, ‘children’) and death (‘kill’, ‘empty and grey’, ‘silent’), motion (‘fly’, ‘turn’, ‘run’) and stasis (‘stop’, ‘pause’, ‘sleep’, ‘wait’), flight and fall and innocence and guilt, Burnside delivers two essential yet apparently opposing messages. The first subsumes the temporal and spatial experience of nature to the chastening statement implied by the two bracketed lines. If indeed the raptors are doomed because they are unprofitable, the first-person plural of the poem can now only connect with nature on borrowed time and ‘mortgaged’ land. ‘We’ are then torn between the appalled recognition that the earth belongs to others (the greedy ‘they’ of the opening verse) and the Dickinsonian ‘feathered’ hope that this very earth can still somehow, some day, be reclaimed. The second truth, enunciated at the end of the poem, follows on from the first and is once more contained in the decidedly viral ‘almost’ of the final verse. To the environmental anxiety (‘it’s only a matter of time’) that casts its shadow over the opening tercet, Burnside opposes the need to believe in our capacity to reactivate the Icarus myth and

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rethink our inhabitation of space through dynamic interspecific empathy, that is, through a creaturely mode of being in the world that is conditioned upon the recognition of the vulnerability, exposure and finitude of both the human and the nonhuman, thus enabling them both to finally inhabit the same realm.7 At the very end of the poem, the perspective is suddenly reversed. The focus moves from birds recolonising empty human-made spaces to humans attempting to imaginatively re-inhabit the open space of the nonhuman. While the wilderness is most likely irremediably lost to man,8 one might find comfort in reading that the dream remains of some instinctive if not atavistic synesthetic, metamorphic, bone-deep connection with the world: that ‘flicker of sky in our bones’ that can, however, only be achieved through metaphor, that is, through another form of relocation. Burnside’s post-Romantic observation and, perhaps most importantly, his observance of limitations—the ultimate one being enunciative, hence the ‘almost’ of the concluding verse—can therefore go hand in wing with the poetic act of dreaming and writing oneself towards the world. The point is not to achieve an impossible connection but simply to strive for it. Burnside then renounces the ornithophany that ‘we’ (or ‘they’?) are no longer worthy of and commits instead to a form of anthropophany to be performed through intense poetic and bodily presence to the world and through wilful surrender to what the eco-phenomenologist David Abram famously termed ‘the spell of the sensuous’ (Abram 1997).9 Then and only then can the enclosed, human-made place (‘the quarry’) and constructed, pastoral landscape (‘the thin paths that run to the woods/at Gillingshill’) of the opening tercets transform—or unfold—into the open, conceptual and free space of the ‘sky’. Jamie’s and Burnside’s ‘patterns of relationality’ (Haraway 2007, p. 17) are characterised by their investigation and subsequent production of alternative landscapes, milieus and, ultimately, homes that would undercut the familiar argument that humans are alienated from nature. Their poetry is haunted by the awareness of an increasingly imminent ecocatastrophe, that ‘we’ve humiliated living creatures’ (‘Flight of Birds’, Jamie 2004, p.  39) and that ‘we’re doing damage’ (Jamie 2005, p.  24) by cracking open the mystery of the world. In Burnside’s poem titled ‘Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012’ (Burnside 2014, pp. 52–53): … We’ve been going at this for years: a steady delete

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of anything that tells us what we are, a long distaste for the blood warmth and bloom of the creaturely: local fauna and words for colour, all the shapes of ritual and lust surrendered where they fell, beneath a fog of smut and grime and counting-house …

Although permeated with the knowledge that the earth has already been irretrievably affected—or even ‘deleted’—by human action and materialism, Burnside’s poems are marked by a conspicuous reluctance to constrain themselves to eschatological narratives, eco-jeremiads or prophecies of doom. In ‘At the Entering of the New Year (Homage to Thomas Hardy)’, he writes: … and if what we insist on calling fate seems inexplicable or cruel it’s only because we lack the imagination to wish for what it brings, to brighten it with something more inventive than dismay. …. (p. 22)

What Burnside offers is a reversal of perspective and a forceful ‘confidence of the end’10—the dream, as contended above, that the sky might still metonymically ‘flicker’ in our bones. Far from reverting to some idyllic pastoral or rural fantasy that is not and has never been ‘home’, Burnside and Jamie choose to celebrate those fleeting moments when the objects and creatures that surround us, whether human or nonhuman, dead or alive, remind us that we can still find some beauty and truth in the world. The first example that comes to mind is Burnside’s acclaimed poem ‘History’ from The Light Trap, which was written in the aftermath of 9/11. Here, as the persona takes his son to the West Sands of St Andrews to fly kites ‘with the news in [his] mind, and the muffled dread of what

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may come’, he finds solace by ‘kneel[ing] down in the sand/with Lucas/ gathering shells/and pebbles/finding evidence of life in all this driftwork’. The second is Jamie’s own memory of the evening of 9/11, when she was asked if she wanted to cancel a long-planned poetry reading: ‘It’s poetry’s job, isn’t it, to keep making sense of the world in language, to keep the negotiation going? We can’t relinquish that’ (Jamie 2005, p. 177). Both texts convey the urgency of ‘making sense’ and ‘finding life’ in the midst of a crisis through figures of parents and poets as negotiators and, with the heartrending image it compels, as rescue workers digging through the rubble for surviving creatures, words and shapes. It might indeed be ‘poetry’s job’ to warn us against despair and admonish us to a form of stoic engagement with the world that would enable us to view crisis and hope simultaneously through the eyes of the poet-surveyor, there again, in the tilt from one world to another. A powerful image of such tenacity can be found in Jamie’s short poem ‘Landfall’, particularly in the significant, self-explanatory omission of the question mark at the end of its last verse (Jamie 2004, p. 15): … When we walk at the coast and notice, above the sea, a single ragged swallow veering towards the earthand blossom-scented breeze, can we allow ourselves to fail.

The verb ‘notice’ is recurrent in Jamie’s poetry and nonfiction. A synonym for ‘endurance’, ‘hope’ and even ‘prayer’—‘isn’t that a kind of prayer? The care and maintenance of the web of our noticing, the paying heed?’ (Jamie 2005, p. 109)—the act of noticing is the foundation of what Louisa Gairn calls Jamie’s ‘theory of the “sacred”’ and ‘belief in attentiveness as an ecopoetical ideal’ (Gairn 2008, p.  158; 160). However, this relentless noticing can also be regarded as a ‘job’ and as the poet’s function in the Pongian sense of the word. In other words, it might be the artist’s duty (rather than creed) to repair and attend to the world as it comes to them, piece by piece—or as Jamie puts it, cobweb after cobweb, speckled bird after speckled bird. From this perspective, Jamie’s ‘paying heed’ is of a sensual rather than a spiritual nature, as it is precisely through the suspension of all beliefs and the surrendering to her senses that she can

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weave and maintain her ‘web of noticing’ (the poet as ever-watchful spider) and thus inhabit the world as a sentient and finite creature. Likewise, others noticers will often dwell at length on their visual and tactile encounters with the nonhuman intercessor, whether a living animal (apex predator, common blackbird or farmed salmon), an overlooked conker (‘here’s true riches’, says Gerry Loose after Basho)11 or shells and pebbles buried in the sand. Jamie’s and Burnside’s encounters with the nonhuman are marked by the two poets’ interest in the furtive and the seldom seen. There is something of the diplomat too in each little thing that belongs to ‘the intimate unknown’ (Jamie 2005, p. 141), coexists and coevolves with the human in their immediate surroundings, right down to the folds of their very bodies, ‘our own intimate, inner natural world’ (Jamie 2012, p. 24). Jamie thus devotes some of her most aestheticising pages to the observation of organic matter in the Surgeons’ Hall Museum of Edinburgh (in Findings) and in Dundee’s Ninewells Hospital (in Sightlines). Shortly after her mother’s death, Jamie visits the pathology labs in the hospital, at a time when she is both dissatisfied with the way environmentalists are defining nature (‘it’s not all primroses and otters […] not dolphins arching clear from the water’, Jamie 2012, p. 24) and determined to find out ‘what’s going on’ behind the curtain in the parts of the world that ‘we’re just not seeing’ (p. 37). In this case, paying heed requires the use of a microscope, the guidance of a professional and an open mind. The nonhuman is never far away, whether in the recognition that it is ‘amazing how much like animals we are’ (p. 28) or in the sharp eyesight of the histologist: ‘It was astonishing, a map of the familiar; it was our local river, as seen by a hawk’ (p. 30). Just as Walt Whitman saw the world in a grain of sand, Jamie beholds Fife—her ‘home’—in a cancerous liver cell, dissected colon or sliced up kidney, complete with ‘grazing’ bacteria: What vistas I’d seen. River deltas and marshes, peninsulas and atolls. The unseen landscapes within. […] ‘There!’ said Frank. ‘Isn’t that a pastoral scene? They’re grazing!’ […] ‘Grazing’ was the word. Although the landscape was bright blue—a stain called Giemas, it was an image you might find in a Sunday-night wildlife documentary. Pastoral, but wild, too. So close to home, but people had landed on the moon before these things were discovered, free in the wilderness of our stomachs. (pp. 34–5)

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Despite Jamie’s personal circumstances at the time of writing, there is no sense here of parasitism or despair at the finitude of man. On the contrary, Jamie marvels at these natural ‘landscapes within’ which eschew the debates on the pastoral, the wild and the wilderness and, as a direct consequence, allow the observer to replace herself in a great profane chain of being. This in turn collapses the dichotomies of the human and the nonhuman, the inner and the outer (‘The outer world also had flown open like a door’, p. 37), life and death, and the beautiful and the ugly: Many of the specimens are beautiful. One of the earliest is what looks like bracket fungus, but it is actually a fine slice of kidney into which the preservator has introduced mercury. Silver threads of mercury fan through the tissue, illustrating blood vessels. It is quite lovely; one could wear it as a brooch. You think ‘bracket fungus’ and the tiny veins around an ectopic kidney are identical to dried lichen. There are bezoars—hard masses of indigestible material like hair or straw, which people have swallowed, and which over time have mixed with mucus and moulded to the shape of the stomach, so when removed they resemble peaches or birds’ nests. (Jamie 2005, pp. 140–41)

The specimens exhibited in the Surgeons’ Hall also act diplomatically insofar as they bring about a consensual mode of being in the world: they enable the observer to reconcile herself with a natural world that, all things considered, is neither pastoral nor wild but purely and simply functional— again, a lifeworld, a Lenbenswelt. Contrary to the romantic idea that nature is by essence external, Jamie’s oikopoetics is grounded in the domestic, the immediate: the skin, the bone and the body. The same goes for the animal remains that Jamie and Burnside encounter during their walks, from the dead bird whose chest cavity had been burst open by carrion crows in Findings (Jamie 2005, p. 112) to the dead coyote and dead sheep of Burnside’s ‘Instructions for a Sky Burial’—a poem that answers Jamie’s own ‘Sky-burial’, published 20 years before in The Queen of Sheba (Jamie 1994, pp.  44–45). Through a subtly elegiac tone and the memento mori that inhabits the descriptive passages on empty eye sockets and rotting entrails, Burnside turns allegedly unpoetical material into another space of ontological transience, where the sense of exclusion (human/nonhuman, self/other, alive/dead, etc.) is converted into its very opposite, that is, a feeling of inclusion in the world and a ‘drawing in’ of the mind into matter (Burnside 2014, p. 54).

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… It’s hard to walk away from such a find; there is something about a dead thing out in the open that draws us in, a kind of gravity both intimate and fateful, and I went back several times to stand there, in the queasy sway of it, flesh of its flesh, so it seemed, yet powerless to wish it back to life …

The end of the poem urges the persona’s relatives to dispose of his ‘unwashed and naked’ corpse in the outdoors for animals to scavenge, disassemble, digest and recycle, in keeping with the Zoroastrian and Buddhist traditions of excarnation. In Tibet, this particular funeral practice is called Jhator, which means ‘giving alms to the birds’. There is, too, a sense of emplacement in this transmigration of the self into matter (‘but something more will live again/as fodder’) and dwelling place (‘birds gathering the hair/to line their nests’) as the persona’s body slowly turns into some other being’s simultaneously terrestrial and aireal oikos: ‘something like a song,/but taking shape, implacably itself,/new breath and vision, gathered from the quiet’. Burnside may well provide the perfect definition of Dasein in his closing poem ‘Choir’ (Burnside 2014, p. 82): … Like it or not, most everything runs on as choir: all one; the living and the dead: first catch, then canon; fugal; all one breath.

In Burnside’s view, life is secretly yet essentially contrapuntal: it is the collusion and interplay of everything and nothing, of permanence and impermanence and by extension of dwelling and transience. This concept manifests itself in a number of zooarcheologist pieces (rightfully termed ‘tableaux morts’ on the cover flap of All One Breath) that focus on the discovery of earthly remains, rotting carcasses, deserted shells or dried up snakeskins.12 There is a clear parallel here with Jamie’s essays on bones in Sightlines, such as ‘The Woman in the Field’ (the memory of the summer of 1979, spent on an archaeological dig in Perthshire), ‘The Hvalsalen’ (the account of her visit to the Whale Hall at the Bergen Natural History Museum) and ‘Voyager, Chief’ (a reflection on Whitby’s and Edinburgh’s whale bone

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archs). Defleshed bones, like discarded skins and exoskeletons, turn out to be potent metaphors for the ephemeral occupation of space by all things and beings. There is also the severed head of a plastic doll found on a beach on Ceann Iar (‘The doll still had tufts of hair, and if you tilted her she blinked her eyes in surprise’, Jamie 2005, p. 60), which the narrator would have gladly laid on her desk next to its nonhuman, non-artefactual twin (‘the gannet’s beak […] a tiny bit of feather still clinging to the bone, p. 69). The doll’s head therefore serves as some postmodern vanitas and a reminder that if all living creatures are one breath, one flesh and one bone, this civilisation may well rather be all plastic. But such findings do not just provide accidental moments of reverse epiphany. As Gairn highlights in her analysis of The Tree House in Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature, Jamie’s fascination with objets trouvés is all part of the reproduction of alternative homes: hence her unselective inventories of keepsakes and her almost compulsive collection of skulls and bones (see her own personal ‘museum of birds’ bones’ in ‘The Ice Queen of Ararat’). These ‘primordial dwelling places’ as Gairn calls them (Gairn 2008, p. 177) shall be reclaimed not so much in the Open but in the microcosmic containers and intimate spaces of a cave, nest or entrapped world of a sedimentary stone (‘The Brooch’, Jamie 2004, p.  46), possibly even in the hungry mouths of Burnside’s scavenging ants. Objects thus also become potential oikoi, from the casket-like inflorescences of bluebells (‘Reliquary’, p. 37) to the mirror of a puddle, which, by some wonderful, genial trick of the imagination, enables Jamie to picture herself as home to the world: … What is it to lie so level with the world, to encourage the eyefor-the-main-chance black-headed gulls, goal-posts, willows, purple-bellied clouds to inhabit us, briefly upside down? (p. 47)

Another recurrent home in Jamie’s poems and essays is located on desert and abandoned islands. In Sightlines and Findings, there are two different kinds of desert(ed) islands. First, there is the uninhabited island of

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Ceann Iar with its great potential for wilderness but which, littered with waste washed up by the tide, has turned into ‘a deathly place’ (Jamie 2005, p. 60); second, the once-inhabited island of Ceann Ear, the largest of the Monach Isles. Of these deserted islands, Jamie writes: These are the rarities in human history, the places from which we’ve retreated. These once-inhabited places play a different air to the uninhabited; they suggest the lost past, the lost Eden, not the Utopia to come. (Jamie 2005, p. 63)

Although Ceann Ear was abandoned in the 1940s, Jamie insists that there is more life here than on the truly desert island: the seabirds need somebody’s crumbling old ruins to build their sheltered nests in. Because they are paramount symbols of the inevitability of loss and decay and the persistence of the past and communal history in the present, Jamie’s ruins are most frequently presented as a sign that communities have been able to shed their skins and ‘move on’, through a zoomorphic analogy that likens exile to just another life cycle. In Sightlines and her essay titled ‘Three Ways of Looking at St Kilda’, Jamie considers the ruined buildings: They didn’t sing of a lost idyll, those cold empty doors. If the cottages spoke at all, it was to say—Look, they made their decision. They quit. They moved on. (Jamie 2012, pp. 161–162)

‘Three Ways of Looking at St Kilda’ provides many such examples of deliberate breaks from the romantic images of haunted ruins and of melancholic tombs for some much-mourned past. Jamie methodically ­ debunks the myth of the remote desert island—‘remote from what? London?’ (p. 143)—by listing all the fallacies traditionally associated with St Kilda (‘a modern myth’, ‘the fabled island’, ‘a fantasy’, ‘the Holy Grail, the edge of the world’, ‘the last adventure’). Jamie also gets off both the narrow pastoral path and the wide ‘highway of romance laid down by Ossian and Walter Scott’ (p. 133) by punctuating her narrative with trivial details about her not-so initiatory journey to the island. She then systematically confronts the dream of the unscathed, mist-shrouded island with the anticlimactic, practical and most uncomfortable reality of her trip: It should have been thrilling, except by then I was throwing up into an orange plastic bucket. (p. 139)

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Wild, remote, famous, oft-imagined St Kilda, so theatrically abandoned… Did you get up there? Yup, but not for long. In fact, I’ve spent longer standing at bus stops. (p. 142)

Contemporary nature writing often addresses the antinomy between the pastoral ideal (what ‘it should have been’) and the sometimes very unromantic reality of experience and of the world outside the text. In the words of Terry Gifford, the aim is to ‘find a voice that does not lose sight of authentic connectedness with nature, in the process of exposing the language of the idyll’ (Gifford 1995, p. 55). The writers must promise not to interfere with the natural, linguistic and even imaginary habitats that they traverse. This implies emancipating the narrative from any all-too convenient pre-existing pastoral and romantic tropes, unless they are furtive or apologetic, as in this caustically ironic aside from Findings: ‘the surging sea, the wind, the cliffs’ bulk against the night-sky were (forgive me) sublime’ (Jamie 2005, p. 26). The will to ‘expose the language of the idyll’ is made very clear at the beginning of Jamie’s St Kildan essay. Anybody who travels to the island with the notion that what they will find there has to do with the Sublime or the Wilderness is bound to return home bitterly disappointed. Set your hopes too high, and the island will inevitably ‘elude’ you, Jamie cautions (Jamie 2012, p. 145). St Kilda bears ‘a complete expression in stone of a unique way of life’ (p. 146) that is subject to interpretation, but in order for this interpretation to maintain some ‘authentic’ connection with the ruins and what they tell of the past, the things that will make their way into the text are exactly that, things: the material traces that are named, observed, measured, recorded and collected with a view to bidding farewell to a long-gone past (‘giving each of these little buildings the last rites’, p. 157) and working against loss, with deliberate emphasis on the verb ‘work’.13 Jamie’s interest in the conservation of local historic buildings and past ‘homes’ also shows in Findings and her essay titled ‘Darkness and Light’, which tells of her visit to the Neolithic chamber cairn of Mae Howes in Orkney. The narrative starts off as some sort of modern eco-quest for the real, northern, most of all unmetaphorical—hence ‘natural’—darkness, the perfect figure of the wilderness of all beginnings and all futures: ‘the darkness through which might shine the Beacon of Hope’ (Jamie 2005, p. 3).14 This call for adventure is immediately followed by the first obstacles, namely the moon’s light pollution on the Orkney and Shetland ferry,

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the warning lights of cruise ships and North Sea oil platforms and, on a lighter note, the constant playing of Paul McCartney’s Christmas hits. The essay goes on to relate a series of on-site rites of passage, which include buying a ticket from one ‘Alan, an Englishman in Historic Scotland tartan trousers’ (p. 11) and walking to the tomb ‘in that stooped position just a moment too long’ (p. 13) before finally reaching the centre of the cairn. The unmistakable northern Temple of Doom air of the vault is enforced by the anaphoric structure of the passage and the sudden shift from first to second person: ‘you enter, you brush, you walk, you stand…’ until finally ‘you are admitted into a solemn place which is not a heart at all, or even a womb, but a cranium’ (p. 13). The image is potent: ‘You’ no longer think the place into existence but are thought into existence by it. It is precisely out of this large-scale vanitas symbol and de- then re-metaphorised darkness that the memento mori eventually turns into a memento vivere, as the narrator welcomes the thought of another kind of light, preternatural and comforting, sent from and along another fold. This time it is temporal, between past and present, between the old and the new year: For five thousand years we have used darkness as the metaphor for our mortality. We were at the mercy of merciless death, which is darkness. When we died, they sent a beam of midwinter light in among our bones. What a tender, potent gesture. (p. 24)

The narrator will no longer be on site for the winter solstice. Neither will she see the beam of light shining onto the back wall of the tomb, as the early Orcadians had planned it to. The epiphany will come from elsewhere, that is, from the recognition of the continuity—the unbroken line—that persists between past and present and which is phenomenalised in the material (stones, roofs, beds) as well as immaterial (gestures, light, darkness) objects that, at this very moment, surround and even contain her. As she watches the surveyors working their laser contraptions, she remarks upon the gestural echo between Neolithic and twenty-first-­ century technologies: ‘here were skilled people passing light over these same stones, still making measurements by light and time. That thought pleased me’ (p. 24). Earlier on, she had pondered on the exact meaning of the word ‘technology’, likening it to art and eventually to drama, while borrowing the words of a local writer, George Mackay Brown.15 Literature too becomes a contraption that allows ‘the bending of a natural phenomenon to a human end’—with this end being a sense of belonging, of being

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‘at home’. The reader must then read backwards to find the actual reward of the quest, which is brought to the visitor (‘you’, us) by the perfect alignment of the stones of the cairn or the ruins of the nearby Neolithic village of Skara Brae: There, you can marvel at the domestic normality, that late Stone Age people had beds and cupboards and neighbours and beads. You can feel both their presence, their day-to-day lives, and their utter absence. It’s a good place to go. It re-calibrates your sense of time. (p. 11)

The same sense of domestic normality permeates Jamie’s exchanges with the surveyors who work on site, commissioned there by Historic Scotland. Cautious to account for every detail of the encounter, just as the surveyors are to measure every crevice of the cairn, Jamie enumerates each elaborate implement they use to create a 3D image of the interior of the tomb—that is, to re-produce this particular space—from laser scanner and stereo-camera to photogrammetre, pulse-Doppler radar and light metre. The light metre attracts particular attention due to its ability to measure space through motion, that is, through the time it takes for light to echo back to its source. As the narrator bends over the contraption and reflects on the ‘cool, dry, applied skill’ (p. 13) required both to build the cairn and to survey it, the parallel is easily drawn with the act of preserving and sharing the memory of her visit via the text—‘if it all goes to hell on a handcart, we have the data, we can build a replica’ (p. 25)—in other words, via a verbal image captured a posteriori, a delayed echo of the original experience: the static image of a journey.16 The writer-surveyor thus becomes a creator of form-trajectories, a kinematical tracer of paths between objects, signs and places; a finder of ‘evidence of life’ and collector not so much of things but of ways of looking—an attention to places and things that prompts the inventive ‘brightening’ of the present moment to enable us to read, seize and sense, like the basking shark of Jamie’s poem, ‘the absolute limits of [our] realm’. Perhaps this is exactly what the idea of home is about.

Notes 1. See, in Lynn Davidson’s essay entitled ‘Repetition, Return and the Negotiation of Place in The Tree House’: ‘The ideas of wilderness, with its implications of an unknown, unpeopled land, and fairyland, with its ephemeral almost-people in magical almost-places, are called to account by

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the wishing tree, who has suffered from both conceits. The poem, however, utilises another such conceit—the pathetic fallacy—to reveal the impulses behind this anthropomorphism. The tree uses its ‘voice’ to reflect back the projection onto it of human longing and wishing’ (Davidson 2015, p. 94). 2. On the issue of predator-reintroduction programmes in contemporary Scottish fiction, see Sarah Hall’s bestselling novel The Wolf Border (2015) and Mandy Haggith’s The Last Bear (2008) and Bear Witness (2013). See also Jamie’s reference to the reintroduction of wolves and redefinition of ‘nature’ in Findings: ‘Sometimes you hear this land described as “natural” or “wild”—“wilderness” even—and though there are tracts of Scotland north and west of here, where few people live, “wilderness” seems an affront to those many generations who took their living on that land. Whether their departure was forced or whether that way of life just fell into abeyance, they left such subtle marks. And what’s natural? We’re having to replant the forests we cleared, there’s even talk of reintroducing that natural predator, the wolf’ (Jamie 2005, p. 126). 3. See, in Chap. 4 of this book, the image of the floating anvil in Jamie’s poem ‘Basking Shark’. In a similar vein, the killer whales are frequently described in explicitly mechanised and de-animalising terms: ‘Then, with these four animals below us, we heard them blow—all synchronised, a sound low, regular and industrial, like a Victorian machine’ (Jamie 2012, p. 197); ‘we could hear, coming up from below, like a steam pump in a basement, that thrilling whomp, whomp’ (p.  198); ‘the three of us, like spectators at a grand prix’ (p. 199). 4. Jamie often refers to the limitations of the human senses and to their potential for deception. For instance, after suggesting in the heat of the moment that the whale was smelling her surroundings: ‘Cetaceans can’t smell. Not like a dog can. With what would they smell? They may have been only twenty yards away but they inhabited a different sensory world— I’d just made that bit up, out of my own humanness’ (p. 202). 5. From the concluding pages of The Open: ‘To render inoperative the machine that governs our conception of man will therefore mean no longer to seek new—more effective or more authentic—articulations, but rather to show the central emptiness, the hiatus that—within man—separates man and animal, and to risk ourselves in this emptiness: the suspension of the suspension, Shabbat of both animal and man’ (Agamben 2002, p. 92). 6. In Findings, Jamie pays homage to John Alec Baker’s 1966 novel The Peregrine: ‘This is the paradox: here is a person who would annihilate himself and renounce his fellows, who would enter into the world of birds and woods and sky, but then in an act of consummate communication to his human kind, step back into language and write a book still spoken of forty years on’ (Jamie 2005, p. 43).

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7. The term ‘creaturely’ is borrowed from Anat Pick’s 2011 monograph Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press). See also Pieter Vermeulen and Virginia Richter (2015) ‘Introduction: Creaturely Constellations’, European Journal of English Studies, 19:1, pp. 1–9, p. 3: ‘Because the sense of precariousness and vulnerability, which is condensed in the notions of creatureliness and exposure, applies to animals as well as to humans, these different life forms come to inhabit the same ethical realm. Pick’s preference for the adjectival (“creaturely”) over the nominal form (“creature”) is no coincidence: it points to the fact that creatureliness does not pertain to discrete and fully individuated beings, but instead names a condition of being exposed that cuts across the boundaries of the individual’. The term is also used by Burnside himself in Black Cat Bone (Burnside 2011, p. 41) and his essay ‘The hyena is my favourite—my totem—animal’ in The Guardian, 20 January 2012, in which he defines the Creaturely as ‘the wild, the soulful animality of live being’. 8. In Jamie’s Findings: ‘They say the day is coming—it may already be here— when there will be no wild creatures. That is, when no species on the planet will be able to further itself without reference of negotiation with us. When our intention or restraint will be a factor in their continued existence. Every creature: salmon, sand martins, seals, flies. What does it matter?’ (Jamie 2005, p. 79). 9. ‘My finite bodily presence alone is what enables me to freely engage the things around me, to choose to affiliate with certain persons or places, to insinuate myself into other lives. Far from restricting my access to things and to the world, the body is my very means of entering ont relation with all things’ (Abram 1997, p.  47). The influence of Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of the ‘body-subject’ and collective ‘flesh’ is especially obvious in The Spell of the Sensuous. 10. From Frank Kermode’s notion of peripeteia, Kermode 1967, p. 18. 11. ‘The conker is small and is probably one overlooked by everyone else; not that many children pass this way. Adults don’t bother. Conkers have the rich sheen of polished furniture. They glow in the afternoon sun. They’re wealth with no work on my part, and I’m always reminded of Basho giving the horse chestnuts of Kiso as presents to city folk. […] Basho is saying, with his simple gift, the very obvious: here’s true riches’ (Loose 2015, p. 14). 12. See Eugenio Montale’s poem ‘Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro’, which serves as the epigraph to Burnside’s poem ‘Discard’ (Burnside 2014, p. 50): ‘Perhaps one morning walking in dry glassy air,/I will turn, I will see the miracle complete:/nothingness at my shoulder, the void behind/me, with a drunkard’s terror. /Then, as on a screen, trees houses

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hills/will advance swiftly in familiar illusion,/But it will be too late; and I will return, silently,/to men who do not look back, with my secret’. 13. ‘So were the working days. Amassing cleitfuls of data, recording against loss’ (Jamie 2012, p. 160). 14. ‘We couldn’t see the real dark for the metaphorical dark. Because of the metaphorical dark, the death dark, we were constantly concerned to banish the natural dark’ (Jamie 2005, p. 10). 15. ‘The tomb-builders had constructed their cairn to admit a single beam of solstice light: it was the bending of a natural phenomenon to a human end, somewhere between technology and art. But not art either: drama. “Nowhere”, said George Mackay Brown, “is the drama of dark and light played out more starkly than in the north.” A very ancient drama, going back to the Neolithic. Were they the first people, I wondered, to articulate this metaphor of light and dark, of life and death…’ (p. 23). 16. Page 1 of ‘Darkness and Light’ is faced with a black-and-white photograph by Scottish photographer Alex Morrice. The low-angle shot is centred on the cloudy sky to mirror the dichotomy that is the focus of Jamie’s essay.

References Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-­ than-­Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Agamben, Giorgio. [2002] 2004. The Open. Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Redwood: Stanford University Press. Burnside, John. 2011. Black Cat Bone. London: Jonathan Cape. ———. 2012. The Hyena Is My Favourite—My Totem—Animal. The Guardian, January 20. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/20/authorauthor-john-burnside. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. ———. 2014. All One Breath. London: Jonathan Cape. Davidson, Lynn. 2015. Repetition, Return and the Negotiation of Place in The Tree House. In Kathleen Jamie. Essays and Poems on Her Work, ed. Rachel Falconer, 93–99. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gairn, Louisa. 2008. Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Gifford, Terry. 1995. Green Voices. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Haraway, Donna. 2007. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jamie, Kathleen. 1994. The Queen of Sheba. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe. ———. 2004. The Tree House. London: Picador. ———. 2005. Findings. London: Sort of Books. ———. 2012. Sightlines. London: Sort of Books.

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Kermode, Frank. [1967] 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. New York: Oxford University Press. Latour, Bruno. [2012] 2013. An Inquiry into Modes of Being: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loose, Gerry. 2015. An Oakwoods Almanac. Exeter: Shearsman. Mackay, Peter. 2015. The Tilt from One Parish to Another’: The Tree House and Findings. In Kathleen Jamie. Essays and Poems on Her Work, ed. Rachel Falconer, 84–92. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Morizot, Baptiste. 2016. Les Diplomates, cohabiter avec les loups sur une nouvelle carte du vivant. Marseille: Wildproject. Pick, Anat. 2011. Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film. New York: Columbia University Press. Selvamony, Nirmal, Nirmaldasan, and K.  Alex Rayson, eds. 2007. Essays in Ecocriticism. New Delhi: OSLE India and Sarup and Sons. Vermeulen, Pieter, and Virginia Richter. 2015. Introduction: Creaturely Constellations. European Journal of English Studies 19 (1): 1–9.

CHAPTER 6

Things of Space: Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds and Alec Finlay’s Company of Mountains, or, Materialising as Re-siting

In Postproduction, Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, Nicolas Bourriaud contends that […] the contemporary work of art does not position itself as the termination point of the ‘creative process’ (a ‘finished product’ to be contemplated) but as a site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities. We tinker with production, we surf on a network of signs, we insert our forms on existing lines. (Bourriaud 2002, p. 19)

In what Bourriaud terms a ‘culture of activity’ aimed at recycling signs and producing cultural pathways, regrounding and rehistoricising powers of matter emerge as a new mode of producing, receiving and meditating on space and place, with matter serving as a means of reviving social and spatial practices. The past few decades have seen exciting developments within the field of site-specific sculptural art in Britain; they have also shed light on the part played by artists in the production of the structural and conceptual significance of the landscape. South of the border, Antony Gormley’s monumental steel sculpture Angel of the North was erected on the site of a disused pithead near Gateshead to celebrate the region’s mining history and, according to the artist, to ‘resist our post-industrial amnesia’ and express the transition from the industrial to the information age.1 Commissioned by Gateshead Council and completed in 1998 despite numerous lively controversies, the Angel now stands as a major iconic © The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_6

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landmark for north-east England. It inspired Serena de la Hey’s Willow Man in Somerset (2000), Jaume Plensa’s Dream in Sutton (2009) and Mark Wallinger’s White Horse in Kent, which is currently stalled for lack of funding. In all these projects, the relationship between the piece and the place where it stands is critical. Strategically placed to overlook the motorways that lead into the counties and regions that have commissioned them, these sculptures are designed to serve as gateways and symbolic border-crossers from one territory, one social history and concomitantly one collective memory (or amnesia, says Gormley) to the next. Born of the place and, in equal measure, of memory, self-image (the way a community represents itself and how it wants to be presented to others) and perceptions of collective identity and geographical and social transience, these projects are bound to foster heated debate. The public monumental art projects in Scotland are no exception, as exemplified by the controversy that erupted over Andy Scott’s massive equine sculpture The Kelpies (2013), erected near the M9 motorway next to a new extension to the Forth and Clyde Canal—a threshold, again. Other similar projects include Cecil Balmond and Charles Jencks’ Star of Caledonia, which is currently under development and is to be located near Gretna as a marker of the England–Scotland border, and Jencks’ Crawick Multiverse, located in Dumfries and Galloway. Initially commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch, the 55-acre park opened in June 2015 on a former opencast coal mine that was depolluted and reused to create walkways, sequential abstract landforms and esoteric earthworks that function as metaphors exploring theories of the universe. Another is (or was) titled The Scottish World Project and is currently stalled due to the liquidation of Scottish Coal and parent firm Scottish Resources Group in 2013. The privately funded multimillion-­ pound project, which is to be located near Kelty in Fife beside the M90 motorway on the site of St Ninians Opencast Mine, aims at creating a public park featuring artificial cliffs and lochs as well as four great mounds designed to celebrate the heritage and culture of the Scottish diaspora. Like most similar projects, The Scottish World attracted adverse criticism when it was made public, some of it from Friends of the Earth Scotland, with the charity campaigning for the restoration of the ‘natural’ landscape of St Ninians. But there again, what does ‘natural’ mean (is it ‘pre-­ industrial’, ‘pre-Union’, ‘pre-human’ or something else entirely?). Perhaps most importantly, when can one (and who?) call a Scottish landscape ‘natural’?

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A project by Penpont-based land artist Andy Goldsworthy is particularly arresting in terms of the ways Goldsworthy tackles some of the issues raised by landscape restoration art and reclamation art. Among these issues is whether a chosen site should be defined as ‘natural’ or ‘historic’ landscape. Another is the question of what part memory plays in the restoration of the ‘historic landscape’ and in the rewriting of the narrative of the land. But which memories is the artist to choose from, which history is worth restoring (and which is not?) and which narrative is to be rewritten over another? Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds project was initiated in 1996, when Cumbria County Council commissioned the artist to restore and create environmentally responsive drystone pinfolds and sheepfolds in the Cumbrian landscape as a celebration of the county’s farming heritage. As of today, 46 folds out of the 100 that were originally planned have been completed. They can be found in various stages of production and dissolution along the old drove routes that were used until the mid-nineteenth century to take flocks and herds from Scotland to the industrial centres of Yorkshire and Lancashire (Fig. 6.1). Despite being located south of the Scotland–England border, there are several obvious reasons why this project is relevant to the purpose of this book. First, Goldsworthy’s sheepfolds are an original, cross-border sculptural response to the meditation on transience and stasis, presence and absence and self and other that is at work in the nonfiction literature, art or poetry of Scotland-based walker-writers and walking artists such as Linda Cracknell, Kathleen Jamie and Hamish Fulton, to name but a few. The project offers to rematerialise a common land use and social operational practices (walking, migratory herding and walling) through the restoration and creation of journey markers and functionally transient spaces in the highly symbolical forms of the enclosure, the wall, the threshold

Fig. 6.1  Andy Goldsworthy,  2002, Bolton Pinfold and Cone. (Photograph Camille Manfredi)

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and the gate.2 A metaphor for open and closed spaces, Goldsworthy’s folds also metonymise the concurrent processes of ruination and productive activity by calling attention to the impoverishment of the British pastoral landscape in the wake of the development of rail transport, of the industrial revolution and of the more recent foot and mouth epizootic— to which the artist himself somewhat ironically fell victim in 2001 when all access to agricultural land was prohibited.3 Although the folds are theoretically designed to be functional for immediate or delayed usage as shelters for sheep and cattle, they mostly stand as memorials to Cumbria’s building and cultural heritage. The folds are therefore above all to be considered symbolic architectural gestures and sculptural installations partaking in a form of vernacular, pastoral yet productive landscape representation and reproduction. By choosing to work on the traditional vernacular and, to some, obsolete architecture of the pen, Goldsworthy urges the visitors to reflect on the evolving modes of extraction and inhabitation of space from the functional to the symbolic. These are not antithetical: the symbol works against the loss of legibility of the communal space and in this sense performs its objective. At the same time, the Sheepfolds project interrogates the organic embeddedness of the rural dwelling in the wider landscape. This ‘fragment of agro-pastoral space’, in which Henri Lefebvre sees ‘the cradle of absolute space’, marks the presence-absence of a community to ‘its’ land at a particular point in time.4 However, this very presence-absence is bound to be recontextualised into a culture and tense politics of place, which will be interpreted differently depending on whether the visitor views it from a British, English or Scottish standpoint. The folds therefore function as both tokens and relics of the common agrarian history of England and Scotland; they epitomise a protean, metaphorical and affective relationship to place and past. Because the project’s 100 folds aim at retracing one specific spatial-­ symbolic system and form of sociability in Scotland’s and Britain’s history, they move away from landscape architecture and towards a means of actively and creatively representing the land as an aesthetic and mnemonic construct. It is worth noting that, in parallel to the sheepfolds, Goldsworthy also created a series of ephemeral works amidst the ruins of five folds located along the route that Coleridge walked around the Lake District. The project as a whole therefore falls under the denomination of a hodological apparatus that fuses not only the experiential with the artistic and the memorial but also a culture of the moment with a culture of

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memory—with the latter perfectly metaphorised by Goldsworthy’s photographic series of melting snow and ice sculptures, twig, wool or feather installations and dry shadows (Goldsworthy 2015). The artwork produced out of memory therefore becomes an objet trouvé in itself, subject to the same process of appearance-disappearance and remembrance-oblivion that inspired it. This is also true of the serial form of the sheepfolds, which encode the territory through their well-thought-out dispersion across it and endow it with social, collaborative (the folds were completed by a team of local quarrymen and drystone wallers), temporal and spatial dimensions. The hodology that is at the core of the project relies on a form of two-way— because also prospective—palimpsest, mainly due to the fact that Goldsworthy’s restored drystone folds are intended to be semi-permanent only and as such are themselves ruins in the making. Through the dissemination of folds and cairns along the drove routes, Goldsworthy thus aimed at reproducing a ritual landscape and spatial order, but was careful to eschew all reference to the sacred: the landmarks fell into ruin once, and will do so again. Consistent with Gilles Tiberghien’s Sartrean definition of hodological knowledge as the prospective opening-up of the original space before us (Tiberghien 2004, p. 12), Goldsworthy’s art proves more interested in the notions of spatial-temporal progress and dissemination than in the actual material manifestation of the path or, in this specific case, of the drove routes that have irretrievably fallen into disuse. There is, in this sense, much more to Goldsworthy’s sheepfolds than just an attempt at memorialising the agrarian and residential history of the county. The project will not stop with the now unlikely completion of the remaining folds, nor will this socially constructed spatiality disintegrate with the falling of the last stone of the last standing wall. The very denomination of the work as a ‘project’ with its implied concern for duration and virtuality (for future or projected possibilities) calls for further examination. I borrow from Johnnie Gratton and Michael Sheringham’s definition: The ‘end- product’ may so strongly condone the energies of process that it figures itself as one more stage in the process. In many projects, the element of process is supplied by a strong investigative impulse reflecting concerns of a sociological or anthropological nature. In line with the ‘ethnographic turn’ described by Hal Foster […], such projects offer instances of site-­ specific, or more broadly site-sensitive, cultural research that regularly shift

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our attention from art to life, from the aesthetic to the extra-aesthetic, and from the personal to the collective (in short, from the grand récit [grand narrative] constituted by the modernist project of art to a more localised and more provocative art of the project). At the same time, in line with the figure of the ‘participant-observer’ propounded by contemporary ethnography, the writer or artist engaged in a project tends not simply to abandon the register of the personal, but rather to envisage the very practice of the project as blurring any neat distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, experience and experiment. (Gratton and Sheringham 2005, p. 2)

The description of the project as a series of procedures or ‘investigative impulses’ and of the end-product as a ‘lure’—as mere record of the way in which the project was conducted—seems particularly fitting in terms of examining the conflations not just of the experiential and the operational but also of hodological and vernacular knowledge that are at work in Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds. Rhizomatic, collaborative and cross-medial, the project juxtaposes objectual processes and artworks, each launching a new project and producing more interrelated space(s) out of the previous ones. In some of his folds, for instance, Goldsworthy has placed one of his signature cone-shaped cairns—also called ‘cones’, ‘pine sculptures’, ‘guardians’, ‘sentinels’, ‘seeds’ and even ‘houses’—to map and figure both geometrically and organically a form of collective occupation of space that is once more transient and therefore, at least in intent, time-limited.5 These cairns are repeated in almost every location that the artist has worked in—as are his ‘rain shadows’, the land artist’s revisitation of the memento mori through his own ephemeral recumbent effigy. They trace Goldsworthy’s journey northwards, from Cheshire where he was born to Yorkshire, Lancashire, Cumbria and finally to Penpont, Dumfriesshire where he now lives. As the markers to his life path and personal narrative, just as the folds are the markers of the drovers’ journey, these cairns partake in the inditiary paradigm that characterises Goldsworthy’s practice: ‘like the cairns that define paths in the mountains and fells of Britain, the cones have become journey markers to my travels—leaving a trail’.6 A similar endeavour can be found in the serial form of the arches that Goldsworthy constructed, dismantled and reconstructed as part of the Sheepfolds project. Titled The Arch Journey, this project-within-a-project consisted in ‘taking a small red sandstone arch for a walk’7 southwards to 22 different locations, half of which corresponded to then derelict (now restored) sheepfolds along the drove route from Crawick in Dumfriesshire

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Fig. 6.2  Andy Goldsworthy 2004, The Byre, Striding Arches. (Photograph Camille Manfredi)

to Kirkby Lonsdale in Cumbria. The Arch Journey then led to another project titled Striding Arches (2002–2005) that saw Goldsworthy erecting four self-supporting arches in the vicinity of Moniaive in Dumfriesshire. Three of them are situated on hilltops at Cairnhead, and one leaps out of the gable end of a disused byre, which is easily accessed by a forest road  (Fig. 6.2). The surrounding arches of Colt Hill, Bail Hill and Benbrack are meant to function as triangulation pillars, since each of them is visible from the other two, although barely so from the valley floor. The artist explicitly requested that these should not be signposted, that they should be discovered only by the users of the Southern Upland Way or those who deliberately and gradually wear their own network of footpaths to the hilltop over the years. A combination of form, matter, location and process, the Striding Arches stand as complex sculptural responses to the multiple perceptions of space, place, site and landscape in the context of contemporary Scotland. The arches phenomenalise the tension between motion and stasis, at the same time as they solidify the metaphorical space delimitated by the rise and springing line of the stonework and shape the space of an absence that is both open and enclosed between the origin and the destination of the shape in motion.8 Goldsworthy’s arches were commissioned to celebrate the travels of the Scots forced to emigrate to Canada, the United States and New Zealand where Goldsworthy went on to create similar artworks. The arches therefore metaphorise the dialectics of inhabitation and migration, sedentarism and nomadism and continuity and discontinuity, all mirrored in the specifics of their construction, including the fact that the arches are freestanding, that is, meant to support their own weight until they no longer can. They too will eventually crumble.

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Goldsworthy uses stones that he either finds on site or which he has had quarried and cut into shape by local craftsmen and then shipped, trucked or airlifted to location.9 This very displacing of matter inspired Gerry Loose’s short poem ‘the artist/brought his own stones/to this stony field’ (Loose 2014, p. 13), with Loose hinting at the redundancy of an art-form and interventionist gesture, whether a sculpture or poetry, that consists in bringing allogeneous matter and no less allogeneous words to a place that needs neither to exist as place and to land that needs neither to exist as land.10 These are only transformed—possibly, to some, corrupted—into landscape by their aestheticisation and concomitant patrimonalisation. It is interesting, however, to note that if the installation of matter does alter and therefore displace the immediate surrounding space, the project as a whole is careful to provide options for its replacement, whether in the empty space underneath the arch rises, in the sightlines between the arches themselves or in the hollow space of future visitors’ footprints. Because location implies process, the three hilltops of Cairnhead were selected by Goldsworthy on the express condition that each would be seen from the other two. While the actual, material arches are made of stone, the Striding Arches are made of space and in-betweenness, as the artist confirms: ‘What I am working is the space, the line, the stuff that is intangible, the atmosphere of the work, the feel of it, the bits in between. That for me is the work’.11 Through repetition of the form and gesture, the Arches therefore stress the ongoing tensions between matter, space and time while reconfiguring new modes and narratives of collective belonging for visitors, hikers or passers-by to interrogate and thus update on the way. Perhaps this is the work, the constant, interrogative, on-site updating of their hodological knowledge of a so-called ‘natural’ space that both is and is not made public by the sculpture trail and the aposiopesis it performs. Through the juxtaposition and scansion of natural and historical elements, the Striding Arches thus question the ability of memory, art and nature to coexist in the same space and to initiate a form of permaculturality where the aesthetic object moves beyond the decorative or the animatory to produce new means of inhabitation of the collective, ‘common’ space, ground and time. The installation of art in the landscape therefore partakes in a social gesture that turns the visitors’ presence on site into yet another construct to be enacted and performed, not so much through contemplation but through what Jacques Rancière’s famously called ‘emancipation’, in other words, through ‘the blurring of the boundary between those who act and

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those who look; between individuals and members of a collective body’ (Rancière 2008, p. 19). By taking sculpture out of the museums, maps out of the atlases and poetry out of the books, the artists who choose to work in the outdoors produce not just objects but also movements and collective processes of non-intrusive reinhabitation of the spaces in which the artworks are placed. These spaces are often classed as ‘natural’ despite their being endowed with strong historical and social significance. Rather than being simply aestheticised, this space is retrieved, extracted out of some external res extensa and then redefined as an extension of a collective body that is born out of its interaction (or multiple interactions) with the aesthetic, heuristic and cognitive work-object. The work-object then becomes a social operator that can be read and appropriated as yet another material intercessor into yet another shared space of in-betweenness, where alternative readings of the world are made possible through the mediation that the artwork ensures between body, mind and matter. The Striding Arches project attracted a number of proposals by other artists. Among them was letter carver Pip Hall who proceeded to carve the place names given to Cairnhead and its grazing sites over the centuries on river stones, stone dykes and sandstone slabs laid around The Byre. She also engraved in stone the Scots words used by locals in the heyday of small farm agriculture, along with the names of some of the international volunteers who contributed to the project when it was launched in 2002. Hall’s lettercarving thus aims at paying tribute to past and present forms of sociability that have emerged and continue to emerge from the shared experience of the place and its combined natural and human histories. The installation of words in the landscape through on-site permanent, ephemeral or movable typographic sculptures has proved a particularly popular practice over the past decades, as testified by the increasing number of objects appearing simultaneously in the fields of literature and the visual arts and of artists engaging in a sustained dialogue and cross-­ fertilisation between text, art and site. I will, for now, choose to examine these neo-parietal, petroglyphic, logographic, lexiconographic, verbovisual and verbo-visual-sculptural practices as instances of textuality in the expanded field and to view them as direct or indirect developments of the modernist and postmodernist art schools and movements such as Bauhaus, Supports/Surfaces, Imagism, Fluxus, concrete poetry, conceptual, performance and installation art and the more recent, computer-aided art, action poetry and projection art. Stemming from decades of artistic experimentation with new media and new art-forms and inspired by the verbovisual

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artworks of Magritte, Robert Smithson, Carl André, Jenny Holzer12 or, closer to home, Edwin Morgan’s pattern poetry, George Mackay Brown’s runic poems and Ian Hamilton Finlay’s avant-garde(ning) epigraphs, the displacing of words from verbal to visual realms and from page to site offers fascinating opportunities not just to observe the emergence of space as a writing surface but also to explore the shifting frontiers between literature, visual art and the material environment. Edinburgh-based poet Alec Finlay is one of those artists who interrogate the materiality and immateriality of the artwork in its relation to space—the spatialisation of text, or textualisation of space—and time, with semi-permanent or ephemeral artworks probing the visual, material and textual compounds of memory. These will be discussed in the context of the material turn and the long-standing arguments over the utility of dualistic categories of mind versus matter, culture versus materiality and the objectual versus the imaginary—categories that have been collapsed since Bachelard’s 1942 Water and Dreams, Bruno Latour’s approach to proliferating hybrids in We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and Tim Ingold’s recent theory on abstract materiality (Ingold 2007). In 2005, Alec Finlay brought his own contribution to the Striding Arches community art project by installing, in collaboration with fellow-­ artist Alexander Maris, a series of eight letterboxes along the course traced by the river of Dalwhat Water. Titled The Hill of Streams from the Gaelic monadh-abh (Moniaive), the artwork comprises the letterboxes themselves, the rubber stamps and ink pads they contain, a map, a series of postcards, photographs, a blog and audio- and video-poems made available online via Finlay’s blog.13 The letterboxes are concealed at the confluences of Dalwhat Water. The visitors are invited to stop at every burn to collect the eight disseminated circle poems and to impress the stamps wherever they can, for example, on the side of the wooden box, a sheet of paper, the map they might be carrying or, if nothing else, on their own skin before they move on to the next box while, in the process, taking a poem for a walk. The work relies almost entirely on the confusion between text, matter and surface and on the blurring of the traditional aesthetic categories of subject matter, medium and context. Each stamp provides a mirror image of one verse of a renga poem, which is to be recomposed a posteriori. The very ways through which matter can acquire meaning are subject to so many conditions that it is most unlikely that the visitors will be able to either physically or intellectually approach the whole piece anywhere but through

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its digitised online version. First, they need to find the map contained in the first box, which is located by The Byre; this was stolen soon after it was installed, replaced and then stolen again. Then, and only through sheer luck or obstinacy, if they do manage to find all the other boxes (most of them have been weathered away to almost nothing or flooded over the years), these still have to contain not just the stamps but also fresh ink pads. Ironically, the visitors would first need to have read Finlay’s blog—and thus the renga, which advises you to bring ink—before engaging in the walk. ‘The poems are hidden so that they can be found’, says Finlay (Fig. 6.3). This raises two points. The first concerns the depth of situated poetry (or poésie en plein air, as Finlay terms it) that anticipates the presence of the visitors in the landscape and urges them to anticipate it too. As such, it doubles back on language, time and even space itself and creates another in-between in which the text and the natural world inter-animate each other, whether they are able to occur in the same physical realm or not. The material and the virtual are thus no longer separate, since Finlay’s ‘take-away poems’ constantly elude the utilitarian apparatus that was to host them in the first place.14 The second point concerns the fact that the disappearance or dematerialisation of the object that carries the text is strategic and part and parcel of the initial project. Alec Finlay makes no

Fig. 6.3  Alec Finlay 2003–, Letterboxing and Circle Poems. (Copyright Alec Finlay)

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secret of his distrust of large-scale, ‘immodest’ permanent art installations, and, not unlike Goldsworthy, he is more than ready to sacrifice the art to the work and the object (which he calls ‘poetry’) to the project (‘signalling, networking, siting’): ‘Some poems will sink, others will be stolen—such is the fate of all poetry’, he contends.15 What remains is the possibility of an immersive experience of nature that is mediated not by the poem-object but by its presence-absence, by the ‘letting be’ of nature as the writer and eraser rather than as the canvas and by the capacity of art to engage domestic audiences in the shared processes of the production of social space. Just as each stamp is one link in the renga poem, each project is one link in a communal chain (‘renga goes beyond poetry: it is an art of communalism’) that the artist starts weaving upstream in the necessary dialogue with the institutions that either commission the work or manage the chosen site.16 ‘More and more contemporary poetry requires planning permission’, says Finlay in a circle-poem, which unobtrusively raises the issue of private versus public space, of ‘their land’ versus ‘ours’, not to mention of the poet’s and reader’s freedom to roam either in space or in imagination. This same issue must be addressed downstream. When Finlay disseminates his poems on site, he turns this very portion of the territory into what he calls, after Paul Celan, a ‘language-scape’ and suggests that walking and reading are aesthetic, cognitive and social practices: to walk is to claim the right to go, to reinhabit the landscape.17 To walk from one poem (from one passing place) to the next is to reinvent local and communal territoriality in a sociocultural context that, as with Goldsworthy’s arches, is marked by the memory of the Clearances and the absence of those who were forced to leave. Each piece of the project is therefore visual, material and immaterial, designed to initiate social action through a new perception of active—that is, spectatorial and participatory—citizenship. This too is reminiscent not just of the Rancièrian concept of the ‘emancipated spectator’ but of the rebellion and disobedience that were at the core of Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, the creative garden where Alec Finlay grew up and where he no doubt learned that the accepted order of things is made or designed to be physically, intellectually, socially and relentlessly questioned.18 The communal component of Finlay’s projects is made especially clear in there were our own there were the others, a record of the series of silent walks in Southern England and Wales that were commissioned to Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn by the National Trust to commemorate the outbreak of World War I.  Here again, as in the following quote from

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Finlay’s ‘Prelude’ and Cockburn’s ‘The Venues’, walking is about remembering, witnessing and—the word is chosen with care—‘founding’: The installations—sandbags, anthology, and lecterns—were leavings, traces of the walk, the silence, the shared awareness of conflict and its effects: […] we are reminded that the act of witness can itself be witnessed, even if only to record that we read a certain poem in a certain place on a certain day, as an act of remembrance. (Finlay 2014a, p. 8) One afternoon we were a group of men walking in silence through a forest, sheltered from the sunlight, conscious of birdsong and of every sound we made—the sudden crack of a twig underfoot. This is how a civilisation is founded, or an insurrection begun. (Cockburn, in Finlay 2014a, p. 26)

Here, silence turns into formless anoptic poetry, into pure poiesis. The project does not lie in the object but around, before and after it (note the double meaning of Finlay’s italicised ‘leavings’), thus displacing the focus from the artist’s own production of space to the operational and relational production of production. In Henri Lefebvre’s words: From the start of an activity so oriented towards an objective, spatial elements—the body, limbs, eyes—are mobilized, including both materials (stone, wood, bone, leather…) and materiel (tools, arms, language, instructions and agendas). Relations based on an order to be followed—that is to say, on simultaneity and synchronicity — thus set up, by means of intellectual activity, between the component elements of the action undertaken on the physical plane. All productive activity is defined less by invariable or constant factors than by the incessant to-and-fro between temporality (succession, concatenation) and spatiality (simultaneity, synchronicity). This form is inseparable from orientation towards a goal—and thus also from functionality (the end and meaning of the action, the energy utilized for the satisfaction of a ‘need’) and from the structure set in motion (know-how, skills, gestures and co-operation in work, etc.). […] The rationality of space, according to this analysis, […] is itself the origin and source—not distantly but immediately, or rather inherently—of the rationality of activity. (Lefebvre 1974, pp. 71–72)

What makes Alec Finlay’s artistic practices particularly interesting is his inclusive approach to social and environmental art. He uses these as vehicles to produce shared political spaciousness, not as matter or discourse but as an activity that enacts the freedom of movement, thought and

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consciousness of both artist (poet) and viewer (reader) while steering clear of anything that might fetishise or systematise space or the artwork itself. The key to the sustained elusiveness of the object is therefore its constant cross-­cultural and cross-medial decentring and the capacity of poetry to be where and what one never expects it to be, whether this is in the non-­ traditional form of the haiku, renga or poem-label or in the (non-)encounter with the object that bears the text. Lefebvre’s ‘incessant to-and-fro’ between temporality and spatiality finds its parallel in the same vacillation between the here and the there, the close and the far, the familiar and the unfamiliar and the in situ of experiential space and the ex situ or in vitro of the material trace left behind by this experience. Something occurs in the conversation between these, that is, between what Robert Smithson famously termed ‘site’ and ‘non-site’, that pertains to a form of active (representing and non-represented, signifying and not signified) literary spatiality. The artwork as apparatus (from apparare, to make ready) or project thus relies on the mutual activation and metaphorisation of space and language through the visual, material and even tactile resources of the text: language is indeed, as Michel Foucault demonstrated, ‘a thing of space’.19 In order to find out how this mutual activation of space and language operates, I now turn to Finlay’s interrelated poem-labels word-mntn and conspectus series, as part of his Company of Mountains collaborative project.20 Largely inspired by the visual poetry of Francis Ponge and John Cage, Finlay is a keen explorer of the many possibilities of visual and written forms of expression as well as a firm believer in the ability, as exposed by Ponge, of the ‘semantic thickness of words’ to restore and replenish the ‘material thickness of things’ (Ponge 1933, p. 176). I offer to approach Finlay’s poem-labels as tools for negotiating full (that is, pragmatic and sustainable) contact between words, place and matter. Composed in situ and mostly on small botanic labels, the short poems and literary ephemera are left by the poet along the way as traces of his passage or that of his collaborator as ‘gifts’, he says, to the place they honour. Contrary to Goldsworthy, Finlay chooses to renounce all extraneous material in order ‘to let the thing be itself, be its own name’—to presentify it—in order to honour the place and to establish the most direct possible relationship with it.21 In a clear reminder of Paracelsius’ and then Giorgio Agamben’s paradigm of the signature of all things, Finlay argues that the sole truth of the place is its name. The place name is indeed the only signature born of and borne by the work, with Finlay taking the greatest care to erase his

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own signature and quite literally cover up his tracks. Supposed to be left behind on the site of its production, the ephemeral poem-label is photographed by whoever hung or laid it there, and then the photograph is posted on a dedicated online archive. Because Finlay’s health prevents him from walking long distances (he also maps his ‘failed walks’ in an attempt at raising awareness of issues of access and disability), he sometimes entrusts his calligrammic poem-labels to a friend or fellow-poet: the ultimate trace or ‘leaving’ is often allogeneous. Consequently, the quality of the ensuing photograph is contingent upon the photographer’s equipment, chosen aperture, depth of field and composition skills, thus ­reinforcing both the evidential force of the amateur quality of the photographs and the intrinsic elusive nature of the artwork—provided there even was an artwork in the first place. Because part of the collaborative poem is gestural and non-verbal, the actual artwork may once again lie mostly in the notion of circulation and the indexical rather than representational endeavour, that is, in the process of the collective ritualistic archiving and ‘re-siting’ (Gratton and Sheringham 2005, p. 2) of the place names. The photographic records of Finlay’s fleeting installations therefore point at a heuristic undertaking that is grounded in the absence of any distinction between language and art and the search for an unmediated relationship with place (Fig. 6.4). Fig. 6.4  Alec Finlay 2010, ‘Glamaig’ (Skye), A Company of Mountains. (Photograph Emma Nicolson. Copyright Alec Finlay)

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Once installed, planted or grafted on site, the poem-label in its ‘intense immobility’ (Barthes 1980, p. 49) turns into an exhibition text as it decentres the gaze towards the actual work of nature, in this case that mountain in the distance, which needs honouring because it has been dishonoured, that is, renamed, even trivialised and fetishised into mass-produced postcards—Buachaille Etive Mor is a good case in point. Conceived out of field as non-site, the text aligns itself with the site, moves in situ, a thing amongst things, matter within matter until it ‘makes sense’—and place— again. In Finlay’s ‘Alignment’: now the manmade landmarks make sense, the Rùm Cuillin finding their proper relation to the grey digit if Annait, stiff & smooth among buttercups; no longer a stone, it’s become a topographical gnomon.

Furthermore, the original Gaelic name, which is usually followed by its literal translation, aims at restoring the emotional geography of the place through these ‘stolen expressions of existence’ that Gerry Loose refers to in Fault Line (Loose 2014, p. 72): Stolen expressions of existence there’s one whose name is lost Tharsuinn the crosswise hill & Auchengaich Chaorach hill of the fank Maol an Feidh bleak hill of the deer the dappled hill Creag Madaigh little crag of the fox & the lookout hill of the sheiling …

Here, to name the place is to re-mark it, re-empower it and summon it back into existence in an act that is one of penance and resistance to the disappearance of a culture. Hugh MacDiarmid’s poem ‘Scotland’22 comes to mind, as do Kathleen Jamie’s tribute to St Kildan place names—‘every rock, every feature […] had a name’ (Jamie 2012, p.  157), Hanna Tuulikki’s Gaelic map of Canna, herman de vries’ in memory of the scottish

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forests,23 Rody Gorman’s litany of Gaelic place names in ‘Leadan’ and Andrew Greig’s acknowledgement of the power of words to ‘resurrect’ the land (Greig 2010, p. 210). The word-mntn, says Finlay, is also a means of emplacing himself, ‘a way to sketch an alignment in the landscape and, by returning the name and translation to their home patch, understand better where I am’.24 Theorised at length by Foucault in his 1971 Archaeology of Knowledge, the power of naming things and the genealogy of the (place) name is widely endorsed by Scottish nature-poets. Through metonymy and allied with the cultural charge of Gaelic and the Scots, Scottish toponymic poetry and art strives to untame rather than tame the profusion of things and release the positive energy and ipseity of the mountain through language. In this landscape that is uncorrupted by language except for its name and tag, the poet, simultaneously elegist and resurrectionist, articulates the simplest message there can be: this place calls itself ‘…’. The poem therefore oscillates between the sacred (the name as invocation) and the secular value of the word, while also signing a form of local, regional (or national) resistance to the ongoing erosion of a place embedded in its culture and of a culture embedded in its place. Beyond the ideal of a reciprocal production of place by poem and poem by place and of the mutual inclusion of text in world and world in text, I retain the idea of word-as-sculpture-as-place as yet another social operator that would enable the productive and transformative conversation between human and site. However, here again, naming the place, invoking the past and present use of the landscape, requires effective presence and a reflection on space in space. This is further explored in Finlay’s ongoing cooperative journeying or, as he terms it, his ‘Bashoing’ and ginko, his ‘walking-to-be-composing-poetry’.25 As part of the Company of Mountains project and following a commission from the Skye-based charity ATLAS, Finlay designed a series of 14 phenomenological toponymic poems between 2011 and 2013 in the form of conspectus viewpoints and poetic maps of the Isle of Skye. Another rewriting-rewalking endeavour, this project draws on a methodology of experimental fieldwork and itinerant writing. It is furthermore noticeably inspired by Alfred Wainwright’s diagrams and pictorial guides to the Lakeland Fells. The project led to the conception of a series of concrete, circle and functional poems—‘poem[s] of seeing, for use, in situ’—designed to serve as verbovisual triangulation pillars, 360° landscape viewpoints and typographic interpretations of both the artist’s and the user’s presence and viewing from the mountain or hilltops. Finlay once more relies on place names to re-present the landscape

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as (necessarily subjectively) noticed from the viewpoint in a circumbular walk and gaze.26 The names of the surrounding hills are therefore arranged in a circle around the empty spot that marks the presence-absence of the noticer (hillwalker and/or reader), with a view to phenomenologically accounting for their perception of the environment or, and the term is particularly appropriate here, the milieu. The use of darker fonts signals the peaks of the surrounding mountains, while on other occasions (Finlay 2014b), font colours are made to match those of the rocks and the seasonal vegetation, thus transforming the typographic poem into an impressionist form of landscape verbal painting that can be read along the three reading models of the palindromic, the concentric and the vertical (Fig. 6.5). When he plays with font, colours, letter placements and spaces between words, the concrete minimalist poet turns the map into a Pongian objeu where Cartesian and linear constraints are overridden and verbal matters left free to expand, rise and overlap. The small void at the centre of the Fig. 6.5  Alec Finlay 2013, ‘Dùn Caan’ (Raasay), A Company of Mountains. (Copyright Alec Finlay)

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conspectus nods to Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception and notion of the body, simultaneously gazing and being gazed upon, ‘hold[ing] things in a circle around itself’, as exposed in ‘The Eye and Mind’—a text that exerts a decisive influence over Finlay’s practices. I must therefore add a third mode and form of spatial production to the desired process of ‘alignment’ of Chap. 2 and the figure of the ‘fold’ of Chap. 5. This third mode is one in which the line—or maybe simply space itself—curls back upon itself and, most significantly, around the body of the walker, visitor and artist. Crucial both to the notion of presentification and to the mapping and collapsing of the distance between oneself and the objects of the milieu (the nonhuman but also material other), this holding of things in a circle—a home, perhaps—is key to a much-desired, far-­ reaching dehiscence into the interplay of interiority and exteriority, subjectivity and objectivity, the sensible and the factual and the objectual and the conceptual. The concept of médiance developed by Augustin Berque thus proves particularly enlightening as regards Finlay’s determination to presentify rather than represent, that is, to render the presence-absence of the object-place named ‘Scotland’ in an aesthetic form that can accommodate its intuition (both the elements of place and the idea of space) and the phenomenological (even walkable and inhabitable) object in its milieu.27 There are therefore in Finlay’s art three mutually dependent experimental protocols that all pertain to the achievement of presentification: stylisation of form, displacement-emplacement of matter and installation-inscription of the body in situ. As for the first two, Finlay’s stylised wooden word-mntns allow the artist to close the loop. Matter to matter, the calligramme rematerialises into small-scale woodblock engravings. Exhibited in 2014 under the title a-ga at the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh,28 Finlay’s quirky models of Scottish mountains collapse the arbitrary dichotomy between words and matter by displacing both of them (Figs. 6.6 and 6.7). The text remains, only it has been disassembled. In the same way, if matter is replaced at the centre of the artwork, it now sends us back not to the stone the mountain is made of but to the trees that used to grow on it and which are no longer there (Finlay 2014b, p. 23): Your name sees inBetween where Woods have been

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Fig. 6.6  Alec Finlay 2012, word-mntn (Beinn na h-Eaglaise). (Copyright Alec Finlay)

Fig. 6.7  Alec Finlay 2014, a-ga: on mountains. (Photograph Luke Allan. Copyright Alec Finlay)

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Although Henri Michaux suggested in 1979 that in order to ‘seize’ the world we must translate it and uproot it, the artist chooses instead to translate and uproot himself, to inscribe himself into the world rather than the other way round. The text therefore becomes a mere pretext to the artist’s, writer’s or poet’s self-emplacing, as shown by that other element of Finlay’s poetic apparatus, the hut. As part of Creative Scotland’s Year of Natural Scotland in 2013, Finlay helped conceive what is now known as Sweeney’s Bothy on the Isle of Eigg, a remote artist’s residency space, designed to host contemporary artists and writers and provide them with the ideal (‘hutopian’, says Finlay) place to create, write or rest, in the style of Thoreau, Basho or Bachelard.29 The hut is ‘ideal’ because it is ­ecologically and technologically sustainable, notwithstanding the fact that it seeks to offer a social model based on collaborative endeavours, from the initial architectural project to the subsequent building, maintenance and occupancy of the bothy. Finlay also designed a number of temporary and permanent renga platforms in Northern England and Scotland for anyone to sit on and engage with their surroundings and to read and write renga together. In his introduction to Shared Writing, Finlay states that the renga platform is ‘like a stage and a temporary dwelling’ (Finlay 2005, p. 9) and quotes Octavio Paz’s own definition of renga: a poem which effaces itself as it is written, a path which is wiped out and has no desire to lead anywhere. Nothing awaits us at its end; there is no end any more than there is a beginning: all is movement.30

A dwelling which is not a dwelling, a path which is not walked on, the platform, like the hut, is a pretty effective means for the poets to hold the world in a circle around themselves, while also shedding light on another founding principle of Finlay’s art, the ‘constant interplay between poetic thought and hammer and nails’.31 The artists and visitors no longer place themselves in front of their subject; they install themselves in its midst, albeit transiently. The point is to become the milieu of their milieu, dehiscent, fully available to the sensations, affects and images that might arise out of the desired reciprocal relationship or sensory-cultural intimacy between the mind and the environment. This ideal relationship rests on what French philosopher Jean-Jacques Wunenburger describes as the ‘suspension of the distance of spectacularisation’, although Wunenburger cautions against forms of self-dispossession and pathogenic regression that he deems incompatible with the very purpose of artistic expression.32 This

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begs questions as to the means by which this site-specific production of the space of Scotland is to be mediated or transmediated, in other words, how this ‘art of communalism’ (Finlay 2005, p. 9) can be shared beyond the community of artists who experienced such intimacy with their surroundings on site, as will be examined in Chaps. 8 and 9.

Notes 1. http://www.antonygormley.com/projects/item-view/id/211#p0. Accessed 9 January 2019. 2. See also Will Maclean and Marian Leven’s public work of art titled ‘An Sùileachan’ (the Crofters Memorial Cairn) at Reef, Uig, completed in 2013. The work was commissioned by the people of the Bhaltos Community in Uig to commemorate the nineteenth-century Lewis Land Clearances, the twentieth-century land raids made by the Reef Raiders and the Scottish Land Reforms. It consists of a series of stone walled walkways and circular folds engraved with the names of the land raiders and left open in order to metaphorise access to land and landscape. 3. Goldsworthy’s restored Red Gill washfold in the Howgills Fells bears the marks of the artist’s own temporary exclusion from the site, with one of the fold’s corners being left unfinished, ‘an allusion to the experience of being excluded from the land’ (Goldsworthy 2007, p. 137). 4. ‘The cradle of absolute space—its origin, if we are to use that term—is a fragment of agro-pastoral space, a set of places named and exploited by peasants, or by nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists. A moment comes when, through the actions of masters or conquerors, a part of this space is assigned a new role, and henceforward appears as transcendent, as sacred (i.e. inhabited by divine forces), as magical and cosmic. The paradox here however is that it continues to be perceived as part of nature. Much more than that, its mystery and its sacred (or cursed) character are attributed to the forces of nature, even though it is the exercise of political power therein which has in fact wrenched the area from its natural context, and even though its new meaning is entirely predicated on that action’ (Lefebvre 1974, p. 234). 5. The term ‘sentinels’ is used in reference to the three cairns that Goldsworthy erected in the vicinity of Digne-Les-Bains, Haute-Provence, in 1999 as part of the Refuges d’Art project. Some are drystone cairns, some are cemented into more permanent sculptures—a feature that is difficult to comment on as most of the cones were commissioned and therefore depended on the commissioners’ acceptance or conversely rejection of the principle of ephemeral art.

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6. ‘Like the cairns that define paths in the mountains and fells of Britain, the cones have become journey markers to my travels—leaving a trail. Some made in ice or branches remain as memories, others still stand in America, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Scotland, France and England. There is however, another journey that is for me possibly more important than travelling, which is the journey and exploration into the form itself. What may appear as repetition is in fact a deepening awareness of the richness and variation contained within the form. Sometimes differences can only be seen and understood through repetition. I learn something new with each cone. When I stop learning I will stop making them.’ http://www.sheepfoldscumbria.co.uk/html/news/news02b.htm. Accessed 9 January 2019. 7. See Goldsworthy’s 1990 iconic sculpture ‘Taking a wall for a walk’, which is now literally crumbling to pieces in Grizedale Forest. 8. On issues of enclosure and openness in Scottish outdoor sculpture, see also Doug Cocker’s Beneath the Screaming Eagle (1985). 9. See, for instance, the arches that were commissioned by Alan Gibbs, which now stand on the shore of Gibbs’ Farm sculpture park in New Zealand. The arches were built with stone specially quarried in Lead Hills, Scotland, close to the place of origin of the art collector’s forebears. Similarly, Goldsworthy’s American and Canadian arches were built using Dumfriesshire sandstone that was shipped to its destination as a reminder of the ballast carried by timber ships on their journey back to North America. See Andy Goldsworthy, http://www.stridingarches.com/striding.html 10. It is useful here to recall one of herman de vries’ ‘10 theses’: ‘art in nature is totally superfluous art can add nothing of significance to nature the statements of nature are perfect’. herman de vries 1999, ‘vegetation and art. 10 theses’, in Trans’plant. Living Vegetation in Contemporary Art (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag) pp. 130–131. 11. Andy Goldsworthy, http://www.stridingarches.com/striding.html. Accessed 9 January 2019. 12. This list is neither exhaustive nor exclusive. There is also, for example, Dan Graham’s neon installations, Robert Montgomery’s burning poetry sculptures and Nancy Holt’s buried poems. On the installation of words in American Land Art, see Craig Owen’s influential 1979 essay ‘Earthwords’, in Kastner and Wallis (1998), pp. 281–282. 13. ‘A decade or so ago I adopted the letterbox as a means to compose walks within landscapes. Letterboxing is a kind of hide-and-seek hiking, a hobby-­ pursuit invented on Dartmoor in 1854, and the predecessor to geo-caching. What drew me to the letterbox was that, like the nest-box, it is an informal sculptural form, an everyday container which conceals meaning and offers itself as a “blue flower” to search for.’ http://alecfinlayblog. blogspot.fr/2013/03/letterboxing-and-circle-poems.html. Accessed 9 January 2019.

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14. ‘Letterbox-guides, word-maps, rubber-stamps, ink-pads, take-away poems’; ‘These poems, they have homes’, from Finlay’s Hill of Streams renga poem. 15. ‘When I began the project I had only recently identified myself as an artist, and I was drawn to projects that combined modesty of means with a wide, even ambitious, reach. Still shy of making objects of stone and bronze, avoiding scale, wary of bombast; the idea of installing 100 letterboxes, over ten years, in locations around the globe, offered itself as a BIG-little idea. It allowed me to work imaginatively with places I had never been, signalling a network of friends, who would site the boxes and write the guides, creating a kind of world-book.’ http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/2013_03_08_ archive.html. Accessed 9 January 2019. 16. In Alec Finlay (2005) Shared Writing: Renga Days (Edinburgh: Morning Star). See also Alec Finlay (2003) Verse Chain: Sharing Haiku and Renga (Edinburgh: Morning Star). 17. From Finlay’s collaborative translation of Celan’s ‘Irish’ (1967): ‘Gib mir das Wegrecht/grant me the right of way/Give me the right to go/Give me the right to pass the way/Give me leave to tread/Tabhair cead mo chos dom/Give me the right of way’, in Celan, Paul, Alec Finlay et al. (2002) Irish 2 (Edinburgh: Morning Star). The idea that the impact of written language on art is more of a cognitive and sociocultural than visual nature is developed by Esther Pasztory in Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art (2005). 18. On the garden of Little Sparta as attack, see Gairn 2008, pp. 142–144. 19. ‘The Nietzschean return closed once and for all the curve of Platonic memory, and Joyce closed that of the Homeric narrative. This does not condemn us to space as the only other possibility, for too long neglected, but reveals that language is (or perhaps, became) a thing of space. That it might describe or pass through space is no longer what is essential here. And if space is, in today’s language, the most obsessive of metaphors, it is not that it henceforth offers the only recourse; but it is in space that, from the onset, language unfurls, slips on itself, determines its choices, draws its figures and translations. It is in space that it transports itself, that its very being “metaphorizes” itself.’ (Foucault 1964, p. 164) 20. From Sorley MacLean’s poem ‘Ceann Loch Aoineart/Kinloch Ainort’, MacLean 1989, p. 36–37. 21. See Finlay’s reference to Antonio Gramsci’s process of presentification in his video presentation of the exhibition ‘a-ga: on mountains’ (2014, Sleeper Gallery, Edinburgh). https://vimeo.com/111398283. Accessed 9 January 2019. 22. The following excerpt from MacDiarmid’s poem is now permanently engraved on the Stones of Scotland in Regent Road Park, Edinburgh: ‘So

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I have gathered unto myself all the loose ends of Scotland, and by naming and accepting them, loving them and identifying myself with them, attempt to express the whole’. 23. ‘when i visited these places, i found not forest but moorland, or grazing land realising the impoverishment of this landscape, i studied all the topographical maps and made the text of a book, in memory of the scottish forests, containing the names of all those lost forests but with a book you don’t get back a forest’ (de vries 2007). 24. http://gathering-alecfinlay.blogspot.fr/p/word-mntn.html. Accessed 9 January 2019. 25. On the subject of A Company of Mountains and The Road North (2010– 2011), which took Finlay and Cockburn on a journey across Scotland to retrace Basho and Sora’s 1689 oku, Finlay writes: ‘It was “Bashoing”, as Ken and I came to know it, writing in places, that we began to notice the change: being in the places, working with the poem-labels, recalibrated the conventional brief of landscape poetry as recollective description.[…] We knew our journeying poets—Gary Snyder, Alice Oswald, Hamish Fulton, Gerry Loose—and understood our Bashoing as kin to ginko, the traditional practice that translates, roughly, as walking-to-be-composing-poetry’. http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/2013/03/a-company-of-mountains. html. Accessed 9 January 2019. 26. On the subject of ‘Dùn Caan’: ‘A conspectus appears to follow the supposed objectivity of cartography; it is in fact entirely subjective. As everyone knows, a little hill that is nearby is larger than a great mountain that is far away’. http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/2013/04/conspectus.html. Accessed 9 January 2019. 27. In his influential 1990 work Médiance, De Lieux en Paysages, Berque defines médiance as an emplaced relation and reciprocal absorption between humans and their milieu, or as the interpenetration and intercomposition of the subjective and the objective and of the sensible and factual elements of the latter. See Berque 1990, p. 38. He later speaks of ecoumène to refer to the relation between humans and the world at large. 28. ‘a-ga: Sanskrit, “mountain,/that which does not go”’ (Finlay et al. 2014, page unnumbered). The term was in all likelihood borrowed from Arne Naess’ essay ‘Modesty and the conquest of Mountains’: ‘Mountains are big, very big, but they are also great. They have dignity and other aspects of greatness. They are solid, stable, unmoving. A Sanskrit word for them is a-ga, that which does not go’ (Naess 2008, p. 65). 29. See ‘The significance of the hut’, Bachelard 1958, pp. 29–37. 30. In Roy, Claude (1971) Renga: A Chain of Poems by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson (New York: Braziller).

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31. http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/2013_10_08_archive.html. Accessed 9 January 2019. 32. See Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques (1999) ‘La géopoétique ou la question des frontières de l’art’, Philosophique, Number 2, pp. 3–13, http://philosophique.revues.org/236. Accessed 9 January 2019.

References Bachelard, Gaston. [1942] 1995. Water and Dreams. Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Trans. Edith Farrell. Dallas: Pegasus. ———. [1958] 1994. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press. Barthes, Roland. [1980] 1982. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang. Berque, Augustin. 1990. Médiance, de milieux en paysages. Paris: Belin. Bourriaud, Nicolas. [2002] 2005. Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. New York: Lukas & Sternberg. Celan, Paul, Alec Finlay, et al. 2002. Irish 2. Edinburgh: Morning Star. de vries, herman. 1999. ‘vegetation and art. 10 theses’. In Trans’plant. Living Vegetation in Contemporary Art, ed. Barbara Nemitz, 130–131. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag. ———. 2007. in memory of the scottish forests. Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche: Centre des Livres d’Artistes. Finlay, Alec. 2003. Verse Chain: Sharing Haiku & Renga. Edinburgh: Morning Star. ———. 2005. Shared Writing. Renga Days. An Anthology of Nijuuin and Hyakuin Renga and Renga Days on the Renga Platform, 2002–2004. Edinburgh: Morning Star. ———. 2014a. There Were Our Own There Were the Others, with Ken Cockburn, Edmund Harry, Alison Loyd, Amy Shelton, Luke Allan and Hannah Devereux. Edinburgh: Morning Star. ———. 2014b. Some Colour Trends, with Ron Brander, Maoilios Caimbeul, Alexander Twig Champion, Peter Drummond, John Murray, Gill Russell and David Wheatley. Huntly: Deveron Arts. Finlay, Alec, and Ken Cockburn. 2014. The Road North. A Journey Through Scotland Guided by Bashō ’s oku-no-hosomichi, 15 May 2010–15 May 2011. Bristol: Shearsman Books. Finlay, Alec, Ken Cockburn, and Luke Allan. 2014. A-ga: on mountains. Edinburgh: Morning Star. Foucault, Michel. [1964] 2007. The Language of Space. In Space, Knowledge and Power. Foucault and Geography, ed. Jeremy Crampton and Stuart Elden, Trans. Gerald Moore, 163–168. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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———. [1971] 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. Gairn, Louisa. 2008. Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goldsworthy, Andy. 2007. Enclosure. New York: Abrams. ———. 2015. Ephemeral Works 2004–2014. New York: Abrams. Gratton, Johnnie, and Michael Sheringham. 2005. The Art of the Project. Projects and Experiments in Modern French Culture. New York: Berghahn Books. Greig, Andrew. [2010] 2011. At the Loch of the Green Corrie. London: Quercus. Ingold, Tim. 2007. Materials Against Materiality. Archaeological Dialogues 14 (1): 1–16. http://home.zcu.cz/~dsosna/SASCI-papers/Ingold%202007-materiality.pdf. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Jamie, Kathleen. 2012. Sightlines. London: Sort of Books. Kastner, Jeffrey, and Brian Wallis. 1998. Land and Environmental Art. London: Phaidon. Latour, Bruno. [1991] 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lefebvre, Henri. [1974] 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-­ Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Loose, Gerry. 2014. Fault Line. Glasgow: Vagabond Voices. MacLean, Sorley. [1989] 1999. From Wood to Ridge. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet. Naess, Arne. [2008] 2016. Ecology of Wisdom. London: Penguin Classics. Pasztory, Esther. 2005. Thinking with Things: Toward a New Vision of Art. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ponge, Francis. [1933] 1948. Le parti pris des choses and Proêmes. Paris: Gallimard. Rancière, Jacques. [2008] 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London/New York: Verso. Roy, Claude. 1971. Renga: A Chain of Poems by Octavio Paz, Jacques Roubaud, Edoardo Sanguineti and Charles Tomlinson. New York: Braziller. Tiberghien, Gilles. 2004. Cheminements, Les Carnets du paysage, Number 11. Paris: Actes Sud - ENSP. Wunenburger, Jean-Jacques. 1999. La géopoétique ou la question des frontières de l’art. Philosophique (2): 3–13. https://doi.org/10.4000/philosophique.236.

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Websites Finlay, Alec. A Company of Mountains. http://www.company-of-mountains. com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. ———. Blog. http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. ———. Website. https://www.alecfinlay.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Goldsworthy, Andy. Sheepfolds. http://www.sheepfoldscumbria.co.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Gormley, Antony. http://www.antonygormley.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Striding Arches. http://www.stridingarches.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.

CHAPTER 7

Soundmarks and Ecotones: Ensounding Scotland

This chapter focuses on some of the strategies of reproduction and representation of nature implemented by the contemporary Scottish artists in order to share and transmit the transience, ‘connection’ and sense of communalism that they experienced on site. Of particular interest here is the production of space through sound, performance, film and online remediation. The term ‘remediation’ is considered as Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin describe it in Remediation: Understanding New Media as ‘mediation of mediation’ (Bolter and Grusin 1999, p. 56). In this sense, it is approached as a means of creating new spatialities by reworking and rethinking the binaried worldviews which consider as mutually exclusive on-site and off-site experiences of space and social interaction, the embodied and the virtual, proximity and distance, down to the very dichotomy between experience and art, or between the experience of space and the art of space-making. In 2014, Alec Finlay and Ken Cockburn were among the 20 commissioned artists who converged on Glen Nevis to take part in the Remote Performances project and produce a series of sound performances aimed at charting the ways in which artistic creation can be impacted by the land, the natural environment and the ecological and cultural values that they carry. Remote Performances was the result of a collaboration between contemporary artists Bruce Gilchrist and Jo Joelson, Malcolm Fraser Architects and art radio station Resonance 104.4 fm. Prior to the commissioning of

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the 20 artists, the project revolved around the building of an off-grid artists’ field station named Outlandia.1 This low-impact wooden treehouse is located in the forest overlooking the Glen and the western and southern flanks of Ben Nevis and facing the hill of Meall an t-Suidhe. While making explicit references to literary precedents—Goethe’s Weimar Gartenhaus, Thomas’ writing shack in Laugharne and Thoreau’s Walden Pond—and less explicit references to the Reforesting Scotland’s Thousand Huts campaign, the designers of Outlandia sought to open a ‘portal’ into ‘another’ experience of the land in words that hint at an alternative form of creative sociability that it was hoped would arise out of the building itself. In the collection of essays based on the broadcasts—another case of re- or transmediation—the editors recall the origins of the project: Inspired by childhood dens, wildlife hides and bothies, we imagined a fieldstation for use by artists: local, national, international; a meeting place, a hideout, a shelter, a studio, a cabin in the forest, a platform for artists to be in residence, and for others to stumble across and wonder about its contents. We wanted the space to encourage creative interaction between artists and the land, its history and its people; to be off-grid, a space to disconnect, a sustainable sculpture, a contribution to contemporary arts development in Lochaber. (Gilchrist et al. 2015, p. 2)

In addition to the bothy and the actual on-site performances, the project thus led to a week-long live daily broadcast, the publication of a collective volume and the creation of a dedicated participative website. The latter was specifically designed with a view to exploring the potential creative interactions between the cryptic notion of ‘contemporary remoteness’ on the one hand (possibly suggesting a form of imperviousness to influences from external systems) and the permeability of the artwork to changing perceptions of the landscape and ‘the wild’ on the other. The project exemplified in more ways than one the concept of spatial production through intermediation(s). Through a complex creative apparatus or rather a web of interrelated apparatuses at the superstructural level, these ‘remote performances’ address interesting issues concerning the modalities of the conversation between: –– the tangible and the intangible, the material and the immaterial: from building a cabin in the woods to transmitting sound via radio waves, both of which require logistics expertise in either area;

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–– stasis and motion, inhabitation and transience: the bothy as dwelling and passing place; –– presence and absence, immediacy and distance: from on-site collective walks to radio and, later, online broadcasting; –– disconnection and connection, isolation and communalism: the cabin as both ‘hideout’ and ‘meeting place’, notwithstanding the artists’ repeated and necessary contacts with local communities, scientists, historians and the many institutions that supported the project2; –– the local and the global: Outlandia as ‘a portal between Lochaber and the rest of the world’, from a site-specific and context-based project to the world wide web3; –– the verbal and the non-verbal: using maps and place names as visual aids to write stories and then making birdcalls, whistling, yodelling and shouting across space; –– the human and the nonhuman: recording conversations between the artists and the local residents as well as biotic and non-biotic nature sounds; the wind in the leaves, running water, birdsong or the sound of stags ambling around; –– tradition and innovation: some of the performances that were part of the week’s programme involved outdoor storytelling, Gaelic music or chanting to the sound of the clàrsach and violin; others required using modern technological contraptions such as hydrophones to record shrimp cracking underwater or high-sensitivity microphones to capture the white noise of the satellite connection; meanwhile, the project’s reliance on radio and then online transmission helped bridge the gap between archaic and modern forms of communication. With these considerations in mind, I offer to examine the modes of capture and production of what the Canadian writer, composer and environmentalist Raymond Murray Schafer coined ‘soundscape’ or ‘sonic landscape’ in his key 1977 monograph The Tuning of the World through a case study of acoustic performances by contemporary Scottish artists.4 Schafer’s book has exerted considerable influence over the theoreticians of the spatial and geographic turn. Schafer is well known as the founder of the World Soundscape Project, a cross-cultural comparative study of sonic environments and their impact on their inhabitants, social practices and activities, which initiated the modern global Acoustic Ecology movement,

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also termed Ecoacoustics.5 As will soon appear rather obvious, this movement has emulated (and continues to emulate) a large number of initiatives from Scotland’s young artists whose interest in ethnomusicology, acoustic anthropology and archaeoacoustics, as well as in sounds as social signifiers, will be illustrated below. While endeavouring to map the modes of inscription of spatialised and spatialising sounds within the scripted and the non-scripted, I will, as suggested by Nicholas Till, consider the acoustic turn as being dialectically dependent upon and thus ‘inextricable’ from the spatial and geographic turn: ‘[…] the acoustic and spatial turns must be understood dialectically, since full awareness of sound involves awareness of the relationship of sound to space, and vice versa’ (Till 2013, p. 164). Particular attention will be paid to the relationship between the romantic ideal of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk, and the collective creation or re-creation of a total (occasionally even verging on the [h]utopian and/or heterotopian) space that is to be experienced through forms of augmented textuality and spatiality and inhabited by the community through a holistic, synaesthetic or, at the very least, polysensorial and multimedial perspective. The Imagining Natural Scotland conference that took place at St Andrews University in August 2013 provided a number of contemporary Scottish artists with the material and, for some, financial means to launch a series of cross-art-form projects enquiring into the changing perceptions of wildness and of the natural versus the unnatural. The projects often demonstrate a keen and growing interest in sound art, sonic experiments and nature recordings, all aimed at a form of embodied listening or ‘attuning’ with the environment.6 Most of all, they epitomise a widespread tendency to aestheticize the sonic world by working with bioacoustics (where one sound is intentionally isolated, generally for identification purposes), nature recordings (where the background to the sound in focus includes biotic and non-biotic components of the sound environment) and the ‘blind’, acousmatic (sound with no visible source) recording of all the sounds generated by the given location, freed of contextual or procedural considerations. Practices vary greatly from artist to artist, from site to site and needless to say from commissioner to commissioner, yet they demonstrate a collective (symphonic) production of an audio-map and soundscape of early twenty-first-century Scotland, as evidenced in the following selection. For her 2010 Turner Prize-winner Lowlands (2008–2010), Susan Philipsz installed three different low-fi versions of the sixteenth-century Scottish ballad ‘Lowlands Away’ on the underside of three bridges along

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the Clyde walkway in Glasgow. Disembodied and untrained, Philipsz’s voice played on the tension between two different soundscapes and between two different space-times: the sounds and sounding board of the city on the one hand, and the sonic space delineated or ‘contoured’ by the song itself, sung and recorded in another time and space, on the other. The song then belongs, all at once, to the there and then of the Lowlands of sixteenth-century Scotland, and to the here and now of twenty-first-­ century Glasgow. Lowlands, with its almost palilalic repeats of the song, offers a compelling case of schizophonia: a form of perceptional alienation and defamiliarising process of mediation and transduction, as well as another ‘fold’ or ‘tilt from one [space-time] into another’. The installation both produces and captures the sound of collective memory, that which Jonathan Sterne called ‘the audible past’ (Sterne 2003), and which allows the listeners and passers-by to relocate themselves within another—here, mnesic—space of in-betweenness, with the walkway being, by essence, another space of transience. To listen is to ‘take place’, as Jean-Luc Nancy argues in Listening: To listen is to enter that spatiality by which, at the same time, I am penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me: it opens me inside me as well as outside, and it is through such a double, quadruple, or sextuple opening that a ‘self’ can take place. (Nancy 2002, p. 14)

The production and reproduction of space through the collusion or merging of soundscapes is also exemplified in Emily Hall’s three-track musical piece titled ‘Hear and Now’ which was aired on 19 December 2015 as part of the BBC Radio 3 season programme Northern Lights. The composition merged instrumental music with on-site recordings from a trip Hall had made to the Shetland isle of Unst in that same year. These field recordings include, in no particular order, the cackling calls of gannets, a boat song sung by school children, the crackling sounds of dolphins underwater and the wind rattling through a door. It is easy to see, or hear for that matter, that what Hall was attempting to capture was the overall ambience or atmosphere of the place, that is, the acoustic signature of that most northerly, most remote, possibly even most exotic part of the UK. The piece presents its listeners with the sound of a distinctively other space that is mediated (or presentified ‘now’) through music yet still ­irreducibly absent (‘remote’) from the listening space in which it is performed—in other words, as in Philipsz’s Lowlands, a space in which here is there and then is now.

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The notions of otherness, distance and, again, presence-absence are key to the practice of aural landscaping. This is also demonstrated by the artworks that address ecological and historical issues through hybrid soundtracks combining archive material and on-site recordings. In 2008, as part of his ‘Beneath and Beyond’ project,  the Glasgow-based sound artist Stephen Hurrel recorded and amplified seismic sounds from beneath the earth’s crust. In 2012, for ‘Dead Reckoning’, he shot a film and recorded its soundtrack at the Cromarty marine mammal research station, and in 2014, his ‘Mapping the Sea’ audio-video installation involved sound and image capture in and around Barra. While all these places are other and beneath and beyond the here and now, they are also close in the sense that, beyond the sheer documentary perspective, all these pieces seek to provide their audience with an immersive aural window (a portal or, as in Kathleen Jamie’s poetry and Andy Goldsworthy’s pens, a ‘fold’) into places that they may never visit but which they are nevertheless able to engage with, to emplace—or, in Tim Ingold’s preferred term, to ‘ensound’—themselves in (Ingold 2011, p. 139). These soundscapes, ambient soundworks, sonic field investigations and sound installations are therefore to be considered ecotones, that is, transition areas, thresholds and places of tense encounter between realms, and between media. They also raise the question of how such processes of transduction can accommodate and welcome the human voice and body in their deliberate attempt to fuse, reconcile or trigger a creative conversation between eco- and anthropocentric perspectives. The film Speaking the Land by environmental artists James Dalziel and Louise Scullion was part of a ‘Homecoming in Your Landscape’ project, put together by Dumfries and Galloway Arts Association along with SNH and the Educational Institute of Scotland. It was first screened at the 2015 edition of the Environmental Art Festival Scotland. Dalziel and Scullion invited the three writers Robin Lloyd-Jones, Jay Griffiths and John Burnside to produce short narratives inspired by three selected locations in the Galloway Forest Park, namely the Waters of Minnoch, Glen Trool and Loch Dee, respectively. Dalziel+Scullion, as they are known to the public, then superimposed the recording of an anonymous reader’s voice over close-up shots of rivers, burns, moss and berry-laden branches and wide-angle shots of treetops, complete with the sounds of trickling water, birds chirping in the trees and leaves rustling in the wind. The result is an uncanny encounter not just between the three media (video, naturalistic

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sounds and the human voice) but most significantly between the self-­ referential world of nature that resists interpretation on the one hand and the deictic intent of the spoken word on the other. This is exemplified by award-winning author of Wild: An Elemental Journey (2006) Jay Griffiths’ ‘Trool’ text, whose final lines can be transcribed as follows: If there is presence here you can never quite catch it. You may feel it, but it is never clearly defined. There is possibility and opportunity here, a woodland metamorphosis. And it is open to all, this transformation. Open equally for a child, a leaf, a king and oak, or a commoner, or us. Woodlands spell an essential commonality and equality, the distinctions of class in the city just don’t apply here.7

Although the ‘here’ that Griffiths refers to is supposed to locate the speaker in her environment, the repetition of the adverb once the soundtrack is laid over the film results in the exact opposite. This ‘here’ remains elsewhere and unattainable, withheld somewhere on the river bed or behind the canopy of leaves, which the static video camera never even attempts to pierce despite its slow zooming effects. The recorded voice therefore functions as a counterpoint to space and as the measure of the sensory experience of distance between the human and the nonhuman, that unique feeling of emplaced presence-absence, that ‘aura’. As such, the ideal of a synesthetic cooperation between the subject and their environment through the multimedial artwork is forced to test itself against the unfathomable wilderness that appears in front of us on screen: as Griffiths reminds us, we may ‘feel’ it but can never ‘catch’ it. Speaking the Land thus never achieves Michaux’s utopia of some universal language, nor does it open a new unified space that the human and the nonhuman could cohabit symphonically—but then it never intended to. Instead, the film apposes what musicologists term the extrinsic acoustic space (phenomenalised here in the sounds of nature) and the intrinsic sonic space (that of the score or, in this particular case, the text that is read aloud). The piece therefore performs, in Jacques Lévy’s words, ‘interspatiality by interface’ (Lévy 1999, p. 323) by layering three different social-­ aural geotypes and turning them into a three-dimensional conceptual space. First, there is the nonhuman homotopia of the soundscape captured in situ, second, the human heterotopia of the recording studio (the place of production) and third, the virtual reality—termed ‘utopia’ by Lévy— conveyed through the online version of the film (the place of reception).

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Moreover, this layering initiates a phenomenological experience of a sublime that is hardly conspicuous in either the naturalistic footage or the magical realist text,8 when these are considered separately. For this interface to be effective and for us viewers and listeners to immerse in this sublime interspatiality, the viewer will need to ensound the recorded text or textsound into the environment and emplace themselves into it by emotionally and intellectually aligning themselves, behind their screen, with the two geotypes and approaches to nature put in contact and therefore in tension by the film. What is required is therefore a form of transcendental watchfulness and listening that might well be the key to Griffiths’ ‘woodland metamorphosis’—all potential shapeshifting aside… at least for now. The question to be addressed is therefore how the ‘voice’ and sounds of the land can be asserted through the artwork without being subjugated to discursivity and how their intrinsic otherness can be embedded in the less unfamiliar language of artistic expression. Hanna Tuulikki’s site-­ specific extra-linguistic vocal artworks and performance practices provide an interesting model of how sound and music can re-enchant the human into the place, that is, sensually, emotionally and intellectually—one might say geo- and ecopoetically—collapse the distance constraint and reconcile the human and the nonhuman and the ‘here’ and the ‘there’ within an intermediary immersive space created by the performance. Tuulikki is a Finnish-English artist, vocalist and composer based in Edinburgh. One of her most significant multi-disciplinary arts projects to date is Air falbh leis na h-eòin//Away with the Birds (2010–2015), a site-specific non-lexical vocal composition that was performed in the harbour on the Inner Hebridean Isle of Canna as part of the Glasgow 2014 Cultural Programme. This project also engendered a Gaelic place-names map of the island, a series of naturalistic drawings, video captures of the performance, audio-­ recordings, essays and the elaborate, three-metre-long calligraphic score and intermedial visual poem of Guth an Eòin//Voice of the Bird. In the five-movement musical piece, which is imitative of birdsong and written and drawn by the artist for an all-female choir, Tuulikki weaves archived traditional Gaelic songs and poems into a site-specific soundscape that fuses recordings of local birds and non-biotic sounds, such as those of the wind or the waves on the shore. The artist becomes a sound gatherer, a collector not of found objects but of found sounds, of animal call s­ ystems and of alternative, or ‘other’, modes of sociality. Voice of the Bird can now be heard and read via the dedicated online interactive iteration that was commissioned in 2015 by the publicly subsidised digital art website The Space (Figs. 7.1 and 7.2).

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Fig. 7.1  Hanna Tuulikki 2013, Voice of the Bird, pen and ink on paper, ‘Night-­Flight to the Burrow’. (Copyright Hanna Tuulikki)

Fig. 7.2  Hanna Tuulikki 2013, Voice of the Bird, pen and ink on paper, ‘Night-­Flight to the Burrow’. (Copyright Hanna Tuulikki)

Voice of the Bird could be described as an imitative polyphony (or ‘skein’, as Tuulikki puts it) of the social calls produced by some of the most emblematic birds that can be heard in and around Scotland. Here again, the performance relies on transduction, with the motion of birds across ‘their’ space being converted into song by an all-female ensemble. Each movement is an evocation of a bird community and of their sea, shoreline, cliff, moorland or woodland habitats. Although experimental in nature, the project borrows from a rich cultural context, starting with the close ethnopoetic relationship that exists between Gaelic (ceòl) and song, which is at the core of the ornithophanic thread that runs through Gaelic folklore, music and poetry. Examples of this include Edwin Morgan’s ‘Chaffinch Map of Scotland’, the more recent onomatopoeic poem ‘Burra Grace’ by Jen Hadfield and Rody Gorman’s ‘Ceileireadh/Twittering’.

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Edwin Morgan’s holographic poem ‘The Day the Sea Spoke’ also immediately comes to mind. The repeated occurrences of birdsong in Scottish verbal, visual or sound poetry bear witness to a collective interest, since the 1950s, in the pre-linguistic voice of nature and the semiotisation of sounds (through an onomatopoetics and processes of transcription and vocalisation) to restore an emotional bond between the community and some pre-human, pre-historical proto-language, the language, one might assume, of the land.9 The onomatopoeia—famously described as ‘the ceaseless, muffled sound of the origin’ by Henri Meschonnic—and phonetic representations of notes in birdsong therefore participate in the re-­ creation of the primordial tongue of the world’s creative force, that almost Baudelairean ‘unconquerable and wild lament’ that we find here in Tuulikki’s keening—from the Scottish Gaelic term caoineadh, meaning mourning. As the piece relies increasingly on the combination and interplay between biotic/non-biotic sounds and human/nonhuman voices (both in the visually patterned score and between the sonic, gestural and verbal figures), it enacts a form of intersemiotic hypostasis aimed at reconnecting the human and the nonhuman with the space-time in which the song was performed: here, Canna, August 2014. Voice of the Bird makes extensive use of patterns of alliteration and repetition of vocables that are suggestive of the swooping of birds, waves crashing on the shore and the island’s topography, which all appear to have been translated into the visual score. Once again, Tuulikki’s practices draw on a long line of precedents. The direct treatment of sonic material and the rejection of semantic primacy must be considered within the artistic context of the experimental sound poetry movement instigated by Dada and later diffracted into Arthur Petronio’s verbophonia, François Dufrêne’s ultra-lettrism, Pierre Garnier’s spatial poetry and Fluxus and John Cage’s anechoic pieces. The notion that sounds are physical entities permeates Voice of the Bird and its accompanying essays, as does the idea that the pre-linguistic signifier can be epiphanic and even liberating (‘I gave myself permission to use my voice’, says Tuulikki) through the psychophysical and social energy that is then released.10 An attempt at responding to place and, in Tuulikki’s own words, at ‘reconnecting with the land, the soil and the more-than-human world’, Voice of the Bird is therefore also to be considered a therapeutic endeavour, both during the weeks of rehearsal and during the performance itself. The artist thus readily acknowledges the ‘emotional regenerative aspect’ and healing experience of ‘exploring the breadth and depth

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of the female voice’ as well as the soothing, settling synergy of working together as a group with her fellow vocalists, with the audience and with the surrounding space itself. Most of all, the focus is on the creative interaction of liminality (the shoreline, the ‘resting point’ between sound and silence), communality (through the absorption, reflection and diffraction of sound by the physical environment, the ‘singing back’ of nature) and corporeality (the collusion of body and place, the acute awareness of ‘being present’). Of all the influences on the Away with the Birds project, it would be impossible not to mention David Abram’s phenomenological hermeneutic of sensuous ‘reinhabitation’ in The Spell of the Sensuous and Edward Casey’s geo-philosophical approach to the ‘place-world’ (Casey 1993), which is most perceptible in Tuulikki’s investigation of mnemonic topographies and mutual encoding of song, lore and land. In his best-selling monograph, Abram builds on the work of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty as well as on Heidegger’s concept of ‘presencing’ exposed in On Time and Being to develop an animistic theory of the living landscape and its ‘recuperation’ through sensorial experience (Abram 1997, p. 65). In Voice of the Bird, we most definitely hear echoes of Abram’s chapters devoted to the ‘flesh’, ‘ecology’ and ‘landscape’ of language and his insistence that ‘we must learn our native language not mentally but bodily’ and assertion that ‘each language is a kind of song, a particular way of “singing the world”’ (pp. 75–76)—in other words, a ceòl. Tuulikki proves particularly sensitive to Abram’s urges to deepen our compassion for the land, to reconnect and realign with ‘an expressive, gesturing landscape, […] a world that speaks’ (p. 81) and with the sedimented knowledge contained in the land. This compelling need to ‘reconnect’, ‘realign’ and ‘empathise’ with the land infuses Tuulikki’s approach to song with strong shamanistic and magico-religious undertones. To write and sing, Abram insists, is to cast a spell, to effect a magic, to summon the thing forth (p. 133). Tuulikki’s vocal practices are then essentially—I intentionally leave the scope of this word unrestricted—performative and incantatory, especially when they come in the form of a lament. The keening that lies at the core of the composition is therefore meant to express the collective feeling of loss (of a culture, of the primordial ­language, of the connection with the land) that finds its resolution in the fifth movement and the transitivity of perception that it implements between the group (singers and audience) and the nonhuman animals. ‘The basis of mourning is the impression of enfeeblement that is felt by the group when it loses a member’, Durkheim wrote. He continued:

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But this very impression has the effect of bringing the individuals close to one another, putting them in close touch, and inducing in them the same state of soul. And from all this comes a sensation of renewed strength, which counteracts the original enfeeblement. People cry together because they continue to be precious to one another and because, regardless of the blow that has fallen upon it, the collectivity is not breached. […] To commune in sadness is still to commune, and every communion of consciousness increases social vitality, in whatever form it is done. (Durkheim 1912, p. 405)

Voice of the Bird is indeed infused with a strong sense of communal togetherness, which climaxes in the overlapping of female voices on the one hand and in the juxtaposition of these voices with the sounds of nature and the silent, physical presence of the audience on the other. The piece therefore creates another intermediary space, this time aural, between the human and the nonhuman. As is often the case in Tuulikki’s art, the intercessor or passeur is a woman. Tuulikki has devoted a significant part of her recent work to the investigation of Celtic mythology or, more specifically, to the reclamation of the neo-pagan archetype of the Wise-Wild Woman and Eco-Heroine—the topic of Sharon Blackie’s recent monograph If Women Rose Rooted: The Power of the Celtic Woman (2016). In addition to being a powerful trend in contemporary Scottish women’s eco-literature, this renewed interest in Gaelic goddess figures and their relevance today adds to the spiritual perspective on nature adopted by many current writers and eco-artists. Although we might be tempted to blow the whistle on the underlying essentialism of the Celtic Woman archetype and on the ensuing exclusive connection that it seeks to establish between women and nature, Tuulikki’s reclamation of the Goddess figure raises interesting issues as to the ecopoetic and teleological value of her works. The most recurrent Gaelic goddess figure in Tuulikki’s art is Cailleach, mother of all gods and protector of the land. Endowed with land-shaping powers, she is said to drop mountains from her creel and to hammer hills and glens into shape. Cailleach, in short, is a land artist. This is best exemplified by the site-specific o ­ utdoor performance titled Women of the Hill that Tuulikki gave in Skye in October 2015—or, to be exact, at sunset on 31 October, on Samhain. It consisted in a vocal, gestural, archaeoacoustic re-enactment of the mythical battle between the seasonal deities Bride (Brigid, the Maiden of Spring) and Cailleach (the Crone Goddess, Queen of Winter).11 The performance took place on the archaeological site at High Pasture Cave on the Isle of Skye where the remains of an Iron Age woman were discovered in 1972.

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The site-specific performance pertained to gender archaeology, geomythology and, in Tuulikki’s words, ‘mnemonic topography’, while celebrating a ‘forgotten’ matriarchal culture and ‘honouring’ or re-awakening the subdued, ‘buried’ feminine. Tuulikki thus (em)places her art at the point of contact between the eco-phenomenology of David Abram and the ecofeminist interest in gynomorphic landscapes and cosmogonic myths borrowed from Celtic folklore. The mythical embodiment of matrilocality, Cailleach also appears in Tuulikki’s Eigg-based Jungian performance Cloud Cuckoo Island (2015), a re-enactment of Sweeney’s predicament in which Cailleach ‘mourns for the severance of humanity from the wild earth’, and in her keening sonic and vocal ‘offerings’ to Glen Caillich as part of the Heart-to-Heart project (2014). Yet Tuulikki’s place-responsive art goes way beyond the mere fulfilment of archaic sacred rituals. Embedded both in Abram’s more-than-human world and in what Patrick Curry terms the politics of an ecocentric, ‘post-secular nature’ (Curry 2007), Tuulikki’s performances also aim at relocating the female voice in the Scottish landscape, that is, in its historical and cultural circumstances. The artist creates or re-creates her own locational identity by using words (by recovering idioms of land that are continuous with ancient forms) and practice (by turning or re-turning the outdoors into a production workshop and permanent residency for the female artist). We might be well advised to view Cailleach as an activist too. Returning to Away with the Birds, the social dimension of the performance emerges out of a nested configuration of the group and of the interlocking of different communalities within the same locale. The tight-­ knit ensemble of female vocalists, the community formed at that very moment by the 150 individuals who attended the performance, the people of Canna whose lore Tuulikki pays homage to and the collective, intersubjective Lebenswelt in which the human and the nonhuman engage with each other are all embodied and embedded in the new space of in-­ betweenness created by the site-specific performance. However, the question remains how this performance and its ecologically-aware sense of grounding—its transient enactment of the place-world—can be mediated beyond the here and the now of the performance and how its translation into something/somewhere/sometime else can attempt to convey as much as possible of the original and communal experience. The visual score of Voice of the Bird alone provides some preliminary answers. The score must be approached as a place in itself insofar as it was designed to serve as an intermedial ecotone not just between the visual,

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the verbal and the aural but also between two communalities at two different points in the project. In the weeks that preceded the performance on site, the score guided the vocalists to the intended outcome just as a soundpath or a map would. After the performance, that is, after and away from Canna, the visual score works as the visible trace of the past act, where ‘act’ comprises all that led to its completion, that is, the project design, the rehearsals, the research conducted by Tuulikki and her team of vocalists, the historians and the locals and the full pictorial realisation of the artwork. Hence, although the spatiotemporal difference between Voice of the Bird and its representation in print appears irreducible, the score succeeds in retaining some of the temporal constituents of the original soundwork.12 Moreover, while the score technically remains a non-site— in Robert Smithson’s terms, ‘a space of metaphoric significance’ and thus of displacement13—and a two-dimensional analogy, this analogy is not that of the site itself but of a mode of sociability that is based on the way the site was experienced and inhabited by all those who came to participate, one way or another, in the performance. While the score sampled and sedimented the time-space of the performance, Tuulikki was also careful to leave room for the representation of that other essential element of the artwork’s Gestalt, the gestural. We cannot be sure Tuulikki would readily acknowledge the influence of Raoul Haussmann’s optophonetic experiments on visible speech sounds or Bernard Heidsieck’s score-poems, but it can safely be assumed that she intended the score of Voice of the Bird to work as a phenomenological interface between the viewer and her body and those of her fellow vocalists. The effectiveness of this interface-as-effect builds on a twofold shifting process. First, there is the translation or metaphorisation of the pitch, texture and thickness of the singers’ voices into motion. Second, we have the transposition of the motion performed by the human body to that of the things (waves, wind) and beings (birds) that inhabit the site of Canna— or, to adopt Tuulikki’s ecocentric perspective, to whom the site belongs. In this way, some extra-linguistic production of space occurs, which allows artist and viewer, however separated in time and space they may be, to ‘connect’ within a conceptual, conversational, sentient, gesturing landscape in which, to paraphrase Ming-Qian Ma, ‘the shape of space in the visual becom[es] acoustically temporal’ and ‘the shape of time in sound becom[es] visually spatial’ (Ma 2009, p. 269). The visual score of Voice of the Bird is therefore impossible to categorise, as it wavers between sheet music, visual poetry, drawing and cartography. It is most of all an audio-

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graphic reflection on the emotional intensity of language and its ability to convoke (from convocare, to call together) and then disseminate (from disseminare, to sow away) a communal sense of emplacement that is intimately tied to the collective reinhabitation of the primordial language as the site where the verbal and the non-verbal as well as the human and the nonhuman can congregate. Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous reads: Language is not a fixed or ideal form, but an evolving medium we collectively inhabit, a vast topological matrix in which the speaking bodies are generative sites, vortices where the matrix itself is continually being spun out of the silence of sensorial experience. (Abram 1997, p. 84)

Polysensorial (aural, visual, gestural), intersemiotic, polylinguistic, transmedial, multimedial projects such as Away with the Birds now urge us not only to conceive of the medium itself in terms of spatiality but also to imagine the kind of spatiality that it constructs as a measure of the sociability promoted by the artist(s). Caught in a dynamic and constantly evolving social space, these projects operate within a complex and expanding network of operators, which implies that the interface of production-­reception is to be carefully anticipated if not incorporated into the fabric of the artwork and the many processes that lead to its finalisation and later transposition from one interactional space to another. As one form of archive (pre-performance, those ‘findings’ that come in the form of field recordings and audio excerpts from Gaelic songs) is converted into another (post-performance, the ‘keepsakes’ of the score, the photographs and films shot on location), the work displaces itself, from one in-between to another, from one heterotopia to a slightly different one. In so doing, it constantly reconfigures what it had sought to implement, what we might call the geographicity of existence, that is, the pursuit of uprooting through spatial, social (here, also artistic) practices on the one hand and an acute perceptual awareness of the surrounding world on the other. Although it is tempting to focus on the loss of authenticity and, in Benjaminian terminology, ‘aura’ that is commonly blamed on the shift from site to non-site and from ‘real’, raw material to the mediating and mediated artefact, I propose instead to consider these transmission apparatuses as means of duplicating (re-producing) the interactional space and subsequent locational identity(-ies) created on site. I thus offer to approach the processes of (re)spatialisation at work at the interface of communication by considering this interface as yet another point of contact between

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the site and the already or soon-to-be sited communities that compose the mediated (as opposed to immediate) on-site audience—‘sited’ rather than ‘imagined’, with specific reference to Hal Foster’s 1995 essay ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’ and Miwon Kwon’s definition of such communities as ‘already ha[ving] clearly defined identities in the sense of having established locational bases, modes of operation, or a shared sense of purpose’ (Kwon 2002, p. 120).

Notes 1. See also, as part of the British ‘hutting movement’, Tim Knowles’ Exploration Aids project (2015–2016) in Huntly. The project, ‘stimulated from discussion of common property rights’, involves building a network of temporary shelters (or ‘Howffs’) on location. http://www.deveronarts.com/exploration-aids. Accessed 9 January 2019. 2. The project received financial and logistic support from Arts Council England, Nevis Landscape Partnership, Oxford Brookes University, Live Art Development Agency and Forestry Commission Scotland. 3. http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/projects/remote-performances-online. Accessed 9 January 2019. 4. Schafer’s Tuning of the World was republished as The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World in 1994. 5. ‘Ecology is the study of the relationship between living organisms and their environment. Acoustic ecology is thus the study of the effects of the acoustic environment or soundscape on the physical responses or behavioural characteristics of creatures living within it. Its particular aim is to draw attention to imbalances which may have unhealthy or inimical effects’ (Schafer 1977, p. 271). 6. See the ‘Imagining Natural Scotland’ projects of Tim Collins and Reiko Goto (‘The forest is moving, Breadalbane’) and of Tommy Perman and Rob St. John (‘Water of life, Edinburgh’). 7. A short version of Speaking the Land is now available online: http://www. dalzielscullion.com/works_page/film/speaking_video.html. Accessed 9 January 2019. To this day, I have not been able to find the transcription of the text. The latter thus appears to be accessible only in online audio form, which is consistent with Richard Kostelanetz’s definition of ‘text-sound art’: ‘The art is text-sound, as distinct from text-print and text-seen, which is to say that texts must be sounded and thus heard to be ‘read’, in contrast to those that must be printed and thus be seen. The art is text-sound, rather than sound-­text, to acknowledge the initial presence of a text, which is subject to aural enhancements more typical of music’ (Kostelanetz 1977, p. 61).

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8. See Jay Griffiths’ explicit references to ‘the dreamtime of the oaks’ and ‘the quest for the green man, the spirit of the woods’. 9. Edwin Morgan’s holographic (and slightly tongue-in-cheek) poem ‘The Day the Sea Spoke’ immediately comes to mind. This poem is available in print in Morgan’s Uncollected Poems (1949–1982) and in audio version on the aforementioned accompanying CD to The Order of Things. 10. Hanna Tuulikki, interview by the author, Edinburgh, 18 February 2015. All following quotes come from the same interview. 11. ‘The performance and resulting film is a work of contemporary archaeo-­ acoustics, utilizing natural echo-phenomena and mnemonic topographies—the land encoded in the song, the lore embedded in the land—making visible what has lain hidden and audible what has been forgotten.’ http:// www.hannatuulikki.org/portfolio/women-of-the-hill. Accessed 9 January 2019. 12. ‘Both visual and auditory perception obviously occur in space and time, but the spatial dimension takes priority for visual signs and the temporal one for auditory signs. A complex visual sign involves a series of simultaneous constituents, while a complex auditory sign consists, as a rule, of serial successive constituents’ (Jakobson 1987, p.  469). ‘Vision: Spatial richness  – Temporal poverty/Sound: Spatial poverty  – Temporal richness’ (Ihde 2007, p. 65). 13. In ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites’, http://www.robertsmithson. com/essays/provisional.htm. Accessed 9 January 2019.

References Abram, David. 1997. The Spell of the Sensuous. Perception and Language in a More-­ than-­Human World. New York: Vintage Books. Blackie, Sharon. 2016. If Women Rose Rooted. Tewkesbury: September Publishing. Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. 1999. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Casey, Edward S. [1993] (2009). Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. New Haven: Indiana University Press. Curry, Patrick. 2007. Post-Secular Nature: Principles and Politics. Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 11: 284–304. Durkheim, Emile. [1912] 1995. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Trans. Karen Fields. New York: Free Press. Foster, Hal. 1995. The Artist as Ethnographer? In The Traffic in Culture. Refiguring Art and Anthropology, ed. George Marcus and Fred Myers, 302–309. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gilchrist, Bruce, Jo Joelson, and Tracey Warr, eds. 2015. Remote Performances in Nature and Architecture. Abingdon: Routledge.

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Ihde, Don. 2007. Listening and Voice. Phenomenologies of Sound. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ingold, Tim. 2011. Being Alive. Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London/New York: Routledge. Jakobson, Roman. 1987. Language and Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kostelanetz, Richard. 1977. Text-Sound Art: A Survey. Performing Arts Journal 2 (2): 61–84. http://www.ubu.com/papers/kostelanetz.html. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place after Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Lévy, Jacques. 1999. Le Tournant géographique. Penser l’espace pour lire le monde. Paris: Belin. Ma, Ming-Qian. 2009. The Sound Shape of the Visual: Toward a Phenomenology of an Interface. In The Sound of Poetry / The Poetry of Sound, ed. Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, 249–269. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nancy, Jean-Luc. [2002] 2007. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Schafer, Robert Murray. [1977] 1994. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Rochester: Destiny. Sterne, Jonathan. 2003. The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke University Press. Till, Nicholas. 2013. ‘Sound Houses’: Music, Architecture, and the Postmodern Sonic. In The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Western Art, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson, 163–190. New  York: Oxford University Press.

Websites Dalziel+Scullion. https://dalzielscullion.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Deveron Projects. https://www.deveron-projects.com/ Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Live Art Development Agency. Remote Performances. http://www.thisisliveart. co.uk/projects/remote-performances-online. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Remote Performances. http://www.remoteperformances.co.uk/ Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Tuulikki, Hanna. http://www.hannatuulikki.org/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. ———. Away With the Birds. http://score.awaywiththebirds.co.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.

CHAPTER 8

Filming Space: Transenunciation as Re-production. Susan Kemp’s Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson and Roseanne Watt’s Quoys With a view to investigating the ways in which conceptual and performative artworks can ‘reinstate the connection between individual and society, and between artistic activity and social reality’ (Lowndes 2014, p.  12), this chapter focuses on the means by which this site-specific ‘connection’ can rematerialise through artefactual communication and thus expose a different, potentially displaced form of sentient interaction between site, body and time beyond the immediate locality (here, the Shetland Isles) and outside the original medium. I offer to conflate sound, voice and language and consider them as an ensemble of representative and performative functions, or as an ensemble of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. Once it has been recorded and transmediated, the locational voice represents, re-presentifies and re-performs something (somewhere, sometime) that, however much caught up in a consistent signifying system, involves a shift in the originally intended interrelation between site and time or between the geographicity and historicity that were exposed in the ‘original’ artwork. As Henri Meschonnic argued in his 2000 essay ‘The Strength of Language’, the artwork lies in the concept of performance, meaning a coherent whole and continuum. This continuum is one of enunciation, of meaning, of the relationship between creative thought and affect and of the relationship between the subject (the body) and their language. The performance and recording of a distinctively ‘Scottish’ voice (ceòl, the vernacular, the sociolect and all ‘situated’ sounds that partake in the © The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_8

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audio mapping of Scotland) is thus to be approached as means of creating or recreating a milieu, that is, another interactional space for the listener to experience both physically and intellectually. The idea that, just like the verbal and the visual, the aural can construct territoriality implies that this vocal production of space is also to be approached in terms of presence-­ absence, of what can be heard and captured, and what cannot. But if the phenomenological voice is a guarantee of presence, if it is rooting, what form of worldliness or Dasein does it withhold?1 Finally, how is this being-­ in-­the-world affected by the overlapping of aural, scriptural and visual encodings? As suggested above, performed and performative language generates a specific and complex time-space, which is further thickened by the incorporation of field recordings, sonic gestures and other non-semantic sounds produced by the performer, conveying timbral, textural and gestural information. Inhabited, breathed in, expressive and incarnate, this time-space functions as a surrounding, encircling ambience that is both medium and message and in this sense is a means to an end. Moreover, this ambience provides the listeners with the opportunity to situate themselves in relation to the sentient, living, attentive body (whether human or nonhuman) that occupies the space at the same time as it produces it. Both topos and logos, the voice in space therefore serves as a signature in motion that will strive to tighten the loop of production-reception and reduce the distance of spectacularisation in order to provide the audience with an ontological, poetic, sensorial, kinetic experience of that particular piece of the world that is as immediate as possible. There are times when this experience needs to be re- and inter-­ mediated, enhanced, supplemented, transported and transformed as the production of space shifts from medium to multimedium and place to interplace. One example of this is Susan Kemp’s 70-minute video documentary Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson, which was first screened in Sandness, Shetland, as part of Shetland’s Film Festival and later aired on the Scottish Mainland at the 2014 Glasgow Film Festival. The viewers should beware of the potentially misleading subtitle and its reference to portraiture. Although the film is partly composed of edited interviews with the Shetlandic poet, these appear to complement what emerges as the core material of the film, namely the original, yet already multimedial collection of poems, black and white photographs and a­ ccompanying, partly autobiographical commentaries that Jamieson published in 2007 under the same title Nort Atlantik

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Drift.2 A tribute to Shetland, its dialect, its ‘old folk’ and its changing way of life, the collection is also characterised by a decidedly inclusive take. Besides the text-image dialectics which I will return to shortly, the poems, which are written in Shetlandic, are translated into English, while Jamieson sheds light on the events, people and customs that inspired them. In this sense, Nort Atlantik Drift, however professedly liminal in its subject matter and language, is already very much about transmission, circulation and displacement in both content and form. The collection eschews exclusive logocentric or iconocentric perspectives by establishing a creative dialogue between the verbal and visual elements, both upstream and downstream of its publication. It is telling that the book’s synopsis should introduce the translations and commentaries as means of ‘explor[ing] and enhanc[ing] the visual impact of the book’ and that Kemp should later state that she intended her film ‘to increase the reach and significance’ of the original poems by making these available to a wider audience. The poems are therefore caught between two visual apparatuses—one still and one mobile—that place them in yet another open, intermedial milieu. Nort Atlantik Drift, book and film, could easily be approached as a whole, and the chronological mismatching of its elements could be considered largely irrelevant. There remains, however, the fact that transmediating a poem equals creating a new artwork that is separate from the text itself in form, intent and reach. In line with Richard Kostelanetz’ concept of text-sound art, I therefore propose to approach Kemp’s documentary as an exemplar of performative text-sound-image art, while paying particular attention to how space and place are (re)presented and (re)produced through text-based vocal performances and strategies of mediation between place, text and the human. The aim is to investigate the relationship between place, poetry and film and, more specifically, to look at how film allows place and poetry to become ‘visible’ through the combinative form and interplay of visual and verbal imaginations—or perhaps these should be viewed as spatialised processes at their intersection.3 While the word–image relationship has elicited great interest among academics and practitioners alike, the iconic and vocal treatment of text on film has so far been comparatively overlooked. The exceptions to this are William Wees’ cutting-edge essays on ‘the poetry-film’ (also known as poetry-video and cinematic electronic poetry, or Cin(E)-Poetry), written in the 1980s, and Fil Ieropoulos’ recent PhD thesis on the filmpoem, a genre that appears increasingly popular in the United States and Great Britain.4 Both Ieropoulos and Wees focus on the relational dialectics of

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openness and closedness and of connection and disconnection implemented by the multivocal form, while stressing the capability of the hybrid form to generate new connotations and metaphors (possibly even, I contend, new perceptions of space and place) that are independent of and/or interdependent from the verbal and visual text(s).5 I will take as a starting point the more pragmatic approach of the Scottish contemporary artist, photographer and filmpoet Alastair Cook and his notion of the poet’s and filmmaker’s reciprocal ‘hope’ in the mutual enhancement of the textual and the visual through what he terms an ‘organised symbiosis’.6 Here is how the practitioner approaches the text-image, or, rather, the text–moving image relationship in his online manifesto: the filming of poetry falls into the following categories: –– The simple use of the graphic text of a poem, in part or whole, without any visual movement or film; the literal filming of a text. –– The simple use of the graphic text of a poem, in part or whole, underlaid with visual movement, either animation or natural filmic elements; a visual film of text and audio [...]. –– Performance, by the poet or other, of the poem in a stage and audience context; a film of a poet at work. –– The unabridged reading of a poem by the poet, or another, over a film that attempts to combine the poem with visual and audio elements; essentially the embodiment of William Wees’s Poetry-film concept [...]. The Poetry-film should successfully bring the work to the audience through visual and audio layering, attractive to those who would not necessarily read the poetry. The film needs to provide a subtext, a series of suggestions and visual notes that embellish the poem, using the filmmaker’s subtle skills to allow the poet’s voice to be seen as well as heard. The collaboration remains with the words. If this subtext is missing, the film resorts to being a piece of media, the reading of a text over discombobulated imagery, a superimposition.

Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson shows ‘RAJ’ delivering his poems in a variety of settings in and around Sandness, both indoors and outdoors. These locations were evidently scouted so as to echo the related texts, thus insisting on the mutually illustrative and deictic relationship between text, site and image. For example, Jamieson reads from his late father’s house (‘Atlantis’, accompanied by embedded captures of the Ordnance Survey map of Northern Scotland), Sandness

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Methodist Church (‘Metadist Metafir’), the banks of a lochan (‘Frisk Waatir Troot’), the hinterland (‘Da Boat Biggir’s Nefjoo’, a narrative poem on the transmission of knowledge between generations, hence the metaphoric passing place sign in the film) and the shore (‘At Da Eela’, ‘Ta Da Holm’, ‘Konstint Starn’, with scenic captures of Eshaness, The Drongs and Dore Holm rock arch in the distance). With very few exceptions, the readings are sequenced as follows: 1) a bilingual intertitle (the ‘silent image’, which is simultaneously seen and read) announces the poem that is about to be delivered; 2) Alan Jamieson is filmed reading his piece on location and 3) a scripted and translated version of the poem appears overprinted on the landscape, as exemplified in Fig. 8.1.7 The intertitles and scriptural versions of the poems that frame the aural deliveries offer two different modes of spatialisation in terms of the contact between words and image, notably through the asynchronous or simultaneous entextualisation of image and/or the iconisation of text. A third mode is attempted by the cross-fading effects that command the overprinting of the animated texts over the still shots of the landscapes and seascapes of the Shetland Isles. Whether in dialect or in translation, which are potent scriptural metaphors for the passing of both time and words, the texts themselves are transient and can only briefly occupy what is and must remain a ‘passing place’—ironically, the only scriptural form in the

Fig. 8.1  Susan Kemp 2014, still image from Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson, 1:08:09. (Copyright Susan Kemp)

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sequence that does not get deleted. As regards the actual readings, the dialect is thus recontextualised insofar as it is, this time, simultaneously visually re-emplaced and orally re-ensounded on the very sites that, in Jamieson’s own words, gave the ‘local poems’ their ‘local voice’. The vocal-visual-gestural three-dimensional space that the poems are performed in is therefore supplemented by the silent, allo-cultural, two-­ dimensional space of the scriptural that is plated both pre- and post-delivery (also post-production) on the screen. In Kemp’s mind, clearly, today’s Shetland is located in the in-between, in one or several of the many interstices that emerge out of the overlapping, the juxtaposition and the displacement of these domains of difference: Shetlandic/English, scriptural/ aural/visual, on site/off site. The stylistic, linguistic, cultural and situational in-betweenness that lies at the core of Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait is further epitomised by the film’s soundtrack. Level with the poet’s voice are the sometimes dysphoric on-site and on-time sonic tropes of the howling winds, crashing or lapping waves, crackling peat fire, ticking clock or bleating sheep—the sound of the eternal island, that specific, distinctive acousmatic environment that Kemp was obviously very keen to capture. As for the film landscapes, these are usually accompanied by enhanced hybrid electro-instrumental musical pieces by Chapelier Fou, aka Louis Warynski, and the syncretic Celtic fusion of the Shetlandic band Bongshang—the soundmark of the changing times.8 The locative vernacular of Jamieson’s poetry therefore embeds itself at the juncture of two separate sonic landscapes. Here Shetlandic is meant to sound at the confluence of the verbal and the non-verbal, the human and the nonhuman and the modern and the timeless. If language and place do seem to engage in a creative dialogue that fuses authenticity and innovation within a verbal-visual-sonic ensemble, the way Jamieson asserts his voice and bodily presence on site and on screen—how he emplaces himself in both site and non-site—is an altogether different story. Although, as John Cage pointed out, absolute silence does not exist, Kemp takes the greatest care to film, through visual and gestural forms of silence, those significant moments when time and voice are suspended before, after and during the delivery of the poems. The spacing between acousmatic sound and spoken text is equally ­significant, as it serves to figure the resistance of nature to the written form and the persistent forays of this written form into the stubbornly ‘other’ space that existed long before the text and will remain long after.9 The readings occur within a physical space that can therefore both visually

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supplement and orally compete with the spoken and written form. As Jamieson reads to the sea or to a pod of unconcerned seals, we can hear the poet strain his voice, fall silent to shiver from the cold or see him retreat, book in hand, from the unexpected gushing and splashing of the waves behind him. Sound and image intensify the text at the same time as the poet’s bodily presence on location intensifies the landscape. The perception of location, environment and site thus relies primarily on this elemental, disruptive agency that Jamieson pits himself against. In this particular case,  one might be tempted to call this agency ‘the wilderness’ and to consider that it is identifiable as such when it marks itself out against the text (even against the actual, material book itself), leaving the poet a lone figure in a recognisably Wanderer above the Sea of Fog-like romantic posture of Kantian self-reflection before the incommensurable and infigurable powers of nature (Fig. 8.2). The dramatic, even sublime visual and aural confrontation between man and the sea that is part of the theatrics of the readings on location is therefore only in part counterbalanced by the ‘external’ soundtrack and the cooperation that it seeks to engage between voice and sound, between dialect and field recordings, where the former takes over the latter and vice versa, where one hushes the other and vice versa. Image and sound may thus appear to work concurrently.10 The visual appears at times to drive a

Fig. 8.2  Susan Kemp 2014, still image from Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson, 03:05. (Copyright Susan Kemp)

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wedge between the human and the nonhuman, whereas the aural seems to work towards their reconciliation into that most identifiable choral ‘sound of Shetland’ (this term is used by both Kemp and Jamieson in the film), which constitutes the aural interface within which the film and Jamieson’s poetry can really take place. Once again, a place, which is neither a mere landscape nor the place, is being produced in between these two modes of coexistence, one oppositional, the other synergetic. As the film itself seems to waver between portrait (an image that strives to be still) and performed poetry (language that strives to be kinetic), the viewers witness the proliferation of interstices between what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘sound images’ and ‘visual images’. I quote from The Time-Image: What constitutes the audio-visual image is a disjunction, a dissociation of the visual and the sound, each heautonomous, but at the same time an incommensurable or ‘irrational’ relation which connects them to each other, without forming a whole, without offering the least whole. It is a resistance stemming from the collapse of the sensory-motor schema, and which separates the visual image and the sound image, but puts them all the more into a non-totalizable relation. (Deleuze 1985, p. 256)

This not-quite-whole, which stems from a disjunction that is already fundamentally a relationship, constitutes another (third-)space—possibly, even, another Shetland—that will be inclusive, exclusive, visual, aural, gestural and shaped by the confluence of forms, media and the filmmaker’s creative and aesthetic choices, such as framing, lighting, camera angles, rhythm and editorial transitions. This implies that the film should also re-­ present some form of a continuum between language, motion and space— a (third-)time that would combine not just visual, aural and gestural elements but also relational elements, dependent upon the former and constitutive of some off-camera social space, co- and re-produced by the kinetic text and the moving image.11 While Kemp’s Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait operates transgenerically between the documentary, the portrait and the filmpoem, Roseanne Watt’s pieces are unequivocally identified as the latter. Watt is a Shetland-­ born poet and filmmaker, and recipient of the 2018 Edwin Morgan Poetry Award. Following her 2014 filmpoem Sullom, which, as its title implies, deals with the impact of the oil industry on Shetland’s landscapes, Watt produced Quoys, Unst, which earned her the 2015 Out-Spoken Poetry Film Award. In her haunting 3.26-minute silent film, Watt introduces us

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to an abandoned house in ‘Ooter’ Quoys, north of Baltasound and Haroldswick, one of the most northerly inhabited villages in the UK. Not quite a ruin yet, the house stands in another fold and in another in-­ between, as it displays tokens of recent habitation (a light bulb, shelves, a bunny wall sticker above the bathroom sink) and signs of permanent abandonment. The house is filmed as it has started consuming itself. Watt’s fixed shootings of dilapidated walls, chipped paint, crumbling coatings, flaking varnish and peeling wallpaper linger on the rubble to find a sheep skull here, an empty nest there, the same objets trouvés and signs of presence-­absence that echo with those examined in Chap. 5 in Kathleen Jamie’s poetry and nonfiction. Watt makes use of the focal range, depth of field and background/foreground blur to suggest a first-person point of view and the unstable, possibly vulnerable gaze that the viewers are led to think is imposed upon her (and them) by the house itself. Watt only moves to handheld shooting twice. On both occasions, she slowly proceeds along the hall, that ultimate transitional non-place—‘this place of gaps’, in her own words—where the ghost of a young man appears in a startling subliminal image that is accompanied by a razor-sharp Larsen sound effect. The film ends on an arguably pleonastic visual trope with the ghostly image of a hand pressed against the glass of the bathroom window. Something and somewhere else is there that belongs in this house, refuses to leave and will not let itself be seen. The question then is whether or not it will let itself be read. Watt’s filmpoem falls into the second of Alastair Cook’s categories, that is, ‘the simple use of the graphic text of a poem, in part or whole, under-­ laid with visual movement, either animation or natural filmic elements’. The text appears overprinted on the visual captures or, rather, along the side of these. In only one instance does it mimic itself and quite literally comes to nest in the image. Contrary to Watt’s use of the aural in Sullom, the poem is not read aloud. The scriptural is the ghost of a voice that the viewers shall not hear, more spectral even in the consistent evanescence, sometimes semitransparency, of the verses and words as they appear and disappear on the screen. I therefore reproduce the text as it was definitely not meant to be read: we came here on the last day after the doontöm12 that brought the bones

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scuttling down the braes bringing to the half-light all that we had wished would stay hidden. What brought us to this place of gaps which whistled like the sibilants of toothless bairns I still can’t fathom but there was something in its slow return to wilderness which captured me that day and when I turned to find you gone I thought for a second of that old lore of how, perhaps, this place was built on some long-abandoned knoll, and in its fabled dark I’d been gone a hundred years or more to emerge from this absence and hear your voice again I’d turn to ash

When watching-reading Quoys, Unst, the viewers soon come to the conclusion that the (moving) text–(moving) image relationship is only functional when it dysfunctions, that is, when it treads the tightrope between discordance and harmony, contraction and expansion of meaning, alignment and disalignment. Verbally, visually and verbovisually, the point for Watt is to try to find focus and at the same time to be very cautious not to achieve it so as to remain (and to keep her viewers-readers) in the discomfort zone of the in-between, which is that of the magic, or rather, of the uncanny. See, for instance, the verbovisual hiatuses both between the references to concealment (‘the half-light’, ‘hidden’, ‘I still can’t fathom’) and the three unsettling, ghostly visual epiphanies of the

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film, and between this ‘slow return to wilderness’ that the text suggests, which contrasts with the images of the sheep skull and the empty, featherless nest that rests on the mantelpiece. In this last instance, it is the use of pulsating, kinetic typography (the unheimlich of the inter-, of the word/ image/motion relationship) and a false attempt at figurative mimicry that bridges and at the same time widens the gap between text and image. This almost ovate, yet oxymoronic ‘gone’ that takes the place of the missing egg epitomises the Saussurean unmotivated relationship between the (here, also typographic) signifier and the signified. Meaning and ‘possibility’ are space, because it is precisely in this interstitial space between text and image and between signifier and signified—the void between the object and the word—that Watt emplaces her gaze… and her viewers’ (Fig. 8.3). If meaning is space, it is also time. Because the text comes after and over the image, it induces, in Liliane Louvel’s words, a ‘rhythm’ or ‘spatiotemporal syncopation’.13 Louvel further argues that ‘[t]he image alters the text on the antithetical or tautological, agonistic or specular mode’, although when considering Quoys, Unst, one might want to reverse the sentence and contend that in this case, it is the text that alters—or ‘punctuates’—the image as it strives to phenomenalise itself. Likewise, it is the

Fig. 8.3  Roseanne Watt 2015, still image from Quoys, Unst, 01:55. (Copyright Roseanne Watt)

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scriptural composition of the image that can be compared to musical composition. In Poetics of the Iconotext, Louvel writes: The visible or visual image punctuates the text with or against it in its linearity or heterogeneity, producing a hybrid being worked at by the image in the mode of the fugue and the counterpoint, of the symphony or the concerto, or even of syncopation. The pictorial composition of the text is akin to a musical composition, with its harmony rules and its dissonances too. It is a punctuation, a tempo, linked to the poetic charge of the text; it is a rhythm. We can thus see the articulation of sight and hearing, image, text and music. (Louvel 2011, p. 179)

The Quoys and time-space of Watt’s filmpoem could therefore be termed a dissonant harmony, as the overprinted poem echoes and expands the sequence of inhabitation that is suggested by the text and which the film complements with a post-human dimension. From the magical to the human, from the human to the animal, from the animal to the spectral, what the filmpoem inhabits is not so much a Shetland of the mind as yet another affective space-time of in-betweenness whose main characteristic is that it only exists in the filmmaker’s vacillating gaze and the subsequent ‘tempo’ of image sharpness and blur that is the ‘punctuation’ of the uncapturable. Let us now return to Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait and to the intertwined notions of contact and gaze and the power of silence—also a form of punctuation—to manifest the ‘open’ that allows, to subvert Giorgio Agamben’s analysis, ‘a different economy of relations’ (Agamben 2002, p. 3) between space and the human on the one hand and between space, the artists and their viewers-readers on the other. A striking feature of both Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait and Quoys, Unst are their persistent focus on the dialectics of permanence and transience, as well as the attention that Kemp and Watt pay to the ways in which the perception of place can be redefined and denoted by the presence or absence of the human. Inseparable from these are the dialectics of voice and silence, motion and stillness. In Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait, just as the dialectal voice is heard as it works against erasure, Kemp ponders at length over the interaction between the poet’s corporeality and his surroundings, that is, over the construction of a three- or even four-­ dimensional (insofar as it is choreographically experienced and gesturally inhabited, both percept and affect) time-space. The notions of co-­presence

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and contact are once more of the essence, as testified by Kemp’s attentiveness to Jamieson’s body language (the moves of the poet’s hands through space, the physical contact he initiates with the place itself) and those frozen, intense moments of stasis when what is captured on film is no longer merely spatial and kinetic but moves into the realm of the non-localisable and the chronic.14 The first example is Kemp’s use of cinematic mise en abyme. In the Jamiesons’ house, she aims her video camera at a series of black and white photographs of Shetland crofts taken at a time when these were both lived in and operational. As Alan Jamieson and his brother recall the stories of the everyday life on the croft that their parents used to tell them about, the viewers get to see and hear the workings of the poet’s memory, itself embedded in a narrative that was passed on to him by the previous generation. This scene is followed by a sequence filmed in situ, where the recollection-­image is actualised by Kemp and Jamieson’s visit to the now roofless and abandoned crofts. These are first captured in quasi-­ photographic stasis in this intense immobility that clearly aims at registering absence and the passing of time over space. This stasis is breached when Jamieson enters the frame and lays his hand on the ruins in a simple gesture, captured in close-up, that is enough to re-temporalise and re-­ presentify the site as the location of both short and long timescale actions. The crofts then leave the realm of the fixed, memorial image to re-­ phenomenalise into the here and now of the affect and the experiential. A second example that pertains to the treatment of transience in North Atlantik Drift: A Portrait has to do with the overall tone of the documentary, a tone that was inevitably informed by the death of Jamieson’s father just a week before Kemp started filming. In the graveyard scene, time is again visually figured in Kemp’s lingering close-up shots of the oldest tombstones and her slow travelling shots to the clean headstone over Bertie Jamieson’s grave. Despite a visual rhetoric that could all too easily have lapsed into pathos, the scene succeeds in circumventing complacency or plain voyeurism by reasserting the filmmaker’s presence and offering her own gaze as an interface not only between the poet, his family history and his community but also between Jamieson’s acute sense of emplacement and Kemp’s equally acute sense of displacement. This is particularly noticeable in her considerate medium shots of the grieving poet. There may be a sense of that other distance in this tactful zooming out, which the film seeks to bridge, between two separate mediated (and disjointed) approaches to the islands and their way of life, one the aggrieved insider’s,

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the other the empathetic outsider’s. This particular moment epitomises the collusion of two affects, each caught in a specific temporality, namely the time of recollection on Jamieson’s part and the time of the backward step on Kemp’s part. The unworded interaction between these two affects and temporalities makes itself visible through the interface of the camera’s eye, particularly through its refusal to zoom in. The relationship between subject and filmmaker is therefore created not through a speech-act but through what I would term a gaze-act. Roseanne Watt’s use of image sharpness and blur comes to mind here. Just as earlier in Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait the poet was filmed as he was perceiving his environment, the viewers now get to see and empathise with the filmmaker as she captures the poet as he is perceiving his environment. This other kind of mise en abyme, this time out of field properly speaking, is grounded in the perception of perception which is the foundation of the relational dynamics that the film implements both on and off site. Kemp was indeed later to expand on the therapeutic role that the filming of Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait played in helping Alan Jamieson deal with his grief and in helping her remedy her own sense of exclusion from what she, as a child, used to term the dialect speakers’ ‘club’.15 Rather than focusing exclusively on place, the film thus explores a certain idea of what belonging to that place means in terms of rootedness, of residing and passing through and of longing, displacement, ancestry and responsibility. This sense of belonging and conversely of non-belonging is equally perceptible in both the original photo-textual collection and the film, especially in its investigation of the space that lies between the different media, each of them indicial of a specific mode of interference (through corporeality, iconicity or textuality) between human and site. I offer to add a fourth proposition to the three possible approaches (semiotic, global and epistemological) to the interface between text and image. This fourth approach would consider the interplay of text, image, voice, gaze and body as fulfilling a social role, namely that of creating an interzone between emplaced and displaced, knowing and nonknowing communities. From off site, one might even need to move off film to consider the multiple ramifications along which this social space was, is and will be constructed. Before the documentary, there was the book, with its interplay between the visual, scriptural and exegetic and marked by a deliberate effort on Alan Jamieson’s part to transmit his knowledge and affect of the place to his readers. After the documentary, the same effort is perceptible in Kemp’s handling of multiple paratextual, parapictorial and social interfaces,

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including the screenings themselves, the interviews, the trailers and the websites. We should therefore consider all of these as the interconnected elements of just one multimedial, multivocal, even multi-spatial network. This would work simultaneously at the production and dissemination of a sense of place, which must be experienced physically, cognitively and ideologically both in situ and ex situ out of the accretion of already mediated traces, despite the absence of who or what left them in ‘the first place’.

Notes 1. Steve McCaffery’s 1998 essay titled ‘Voice in Extremis’: ‘The twentieth century presents two distinct scenarios for the voice in poetry. One is a primal identity, culturally empowered to define the property of person. This is a phenomenological voice that serves in its self-evidence as the unquestionable guarantee of presence—when heard and understood through its communication of intelligible sounds this voice is named conscience. The other scenario—renegade and heterological—requires the voice’s primary drive to be persistently away from presence. This second is a thanatic voice triply destined to lines of flight and escape, to the expenditure of pulsional intensities, and to its dispersal in sounds between body and language’ (McCaffery 1998, p. 163). 2. The notes section of the book mentions an audio-visual counterpart to the collection, which features recordings ‘RAJ’ made of the poems in 2006 ‘synchronized’ with a selection of photographs and available for download from a website that appears to have been offline for years. Jamieson, Robert Alan (2007) Nort Atlantik Drift (Edinburgh: Luath Press). 3. See Italo Calvino’s much quoted excerpt from Six Memos: ‘We may distinguish between two types of imaginative process: the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression’ (Calvino 1988, p. 83). 4. Fil Ieropoulos (2010) The Film Poem, PhD Thesis, University of the Creative Arts, Kent. Available online: https://www.academia.edu/20849128/The_ Film_Poem. Accessed 9 January 2019. See also Alan Riach’s ‘On film and film poetry’, The National, 31 March 2017. 5. As argued by Wees, ‘the poetry-film expands upon the specific denotations of words and the limited iconic references of images to produce a much broader range of connotations, associations, metaphors. At the same time, it puts limits on the potentially limitless possibilities of meaning in words and images, and directs our responses toward some concretely communicable experience’ (Wees 1984, p.  109). Wees then proceeds with early examples from avant-garde poetry-films by Man Ray (L’Etoile de Mer,

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1928), Marcel Duchamp (Anemic Cinema, 1926), Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand (Manhatta, 1921), Hugh Parker Guiler (Bells of Atlantis, 1952) and so on. 6. Alastair Cook (2010): ‘The combination of film and poetry is an attractive one. For the poet, perhaps a hope that the filmmaker will bring something to the poem: a new audience, a visual attraction, the laying of way markers; for the filmmaker, a fixed parameter to respond to, the power of a text sparking the imagination with visual connections and metaphor. […] The filming of poetry […] cannot merely be a juxtaposing of the two but an organised symbiosis, a series of gentle signposts, an undercurrent of narrative embellishing the poet’s intentions’. http://filmpoem.com/about/. Accessed 9 January 2019. All following quotes by Alastair Cook come from the same source. 7. See Gilles Deleuze on ‘the components of the image’ and on the ‘noiselessless’ of the silent film: ‘The silent image is composed from the seen image, and the intertitle which is read (second function of the eye). The intertile includes, among other elements, speech-acts […]. Whilst the seen image kept and developed something natural, took on the natural aspect of things and beings’ (Deleuze 1985, p. 225). 8. On the production of acousmatic and electronic soundscapes, see also Tom Merilion’s short film titled 48 Hours in Shetland, produced in 2016. 9. While I choose to use spatial terminology, Fil Ieropoulos prefers more literary terms such as ‘visual syntax’ and ‘visual phrasing’ (Ieropoulos 2010, p. 2). 10. ‘In short, pure optical and sound situations can have two poles—objective and subjective, real and imaginary, physical and mental. But they give rise to opsigns and sonsigns, which bring the poles into continual contact, and which, in one direction or the other, guarantee passages and conversions, tending towards a point of indiscernibility (and not of confusion)’ (Deleuze 1985, p. 6; 9). 11. ‘Movement in space expresses a whole which changes, rather as the migration of birds expresses a seasonal variation. Everywhere that a movement is established between things and persons, a variation or a change is established in time, that is, in an open whole which includes them and into which they plunge. […] the movement-image is necessarily the expression of a whole; it forms in this sense an indirect representation of time. This is the very reason that the movement-image has two out-of-fields: the one relative, according to which movement concerning the set of an image is pursued or can be pursued in a larger set of the same nature; the other absolute, according to which movement, whatever the set which it is taken as part of, refers to a changing whole which it expresses’ (Deleuze 1985, pp. 237–8). 12. Doontöm: a downpour of rain, from John Graham’s Shetland Dictionary.

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13. On the subject of Roy Lichtenstein’s verbovisual pop art, Liliane Louvel writes: ‘Lichtenstein’s goal is to reposition color within its proper role and to make it also an essential component of painting, what gives it its flesh, in contrast with drawing, which represents its skeleton or framework. In the interval between color and voice is to be found rhythm, a spatio-temporal syncopation, that of the body caught between the interiority of the voice that comes out of it and the exteriority of the color that penetrates it. We are still in Escoubas’s rhythmic interval, the “spatio-rhythmic sharp”. When color becomes rhythm and line, drawing, and even writing (as in Kandinsky or Klee), synthesis is close to being achieved’ (Louvel 2011, p. 181). 14. In Deleuze’s words again, when the image shifts from the ‘organic’ to the ‘crystalline regime’: ‘Two regimes of the image can be contrasted point by point; an organic regime and a crystalline regime, or more generally a kinetic regime and a chronic regime. The first point concerns descriptions. A description which assumes the independence of its objects will be called “organic”. It is not a matter of knowing if the object is really independent, it is not a matter of knowing if these are exteriors or scenery. What counts is that, whether these are scenery or exteriors, the setting described is presented as independent of the description which the camera gives of it, and stands for a supposedly pre-existing reality. In contrast, what we will call a crystalline description stands for its object, replaces it, both creates and erases it […] and constantly gives way to other descriptions which contradict, displace, or modify the preceding ones’ (Deleuze 1985, p. 126). 15. See the 13-minute dual interview of Kemp and Jamieson that was shot for Writerstories.tv at the first Shetland showing of the film in Sandness on Friday 29 August 2014: https://vimeo.com/105014783. Accessed 9 January 2019.

References Agamben, Giorgio. [2002] 2004. The Open. Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Redwood: Stanford University Press. Calvino, Italo. 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Trans. Patrick Creagh. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Deleuze, Gilles. [1985] 1989. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ieropoulos, Fil. 2010. The Film Poem. PhD Thesis, University of the Creative Arts, Kent. https://www.academia.edu/20849128/The_Film_Poem. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Jamieson, Robert Alan. 2007. Nort Atlantik Drift. Poyims Ati’ Shaetlin. Edinburgh: Luath.

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Kemp, Susan. 2014. Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson. https://nortatlantikdrift.com/. Accessed 9 Jan 2019. Louvel, Liliane. 2011. Poetics of the Iconotext. Trans. Laurence Petit. Farnham: Ashgate. Lowndes, Sarah. 2014. All Art is Political. Writings on Performative Art. Edinburgh: Luath. McCaffery, Steve. 1998. Voice in Extremis. In Close Listening. Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein, 162–177. New  York: Oxford University Press. Riach, Alan. 2017. On Film and Film Poetry. The National, March 31. Watt, Roseanne. 2015. Quoys, Unst (Filmpoem). https://vimeo.com/151152119. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Wees, William. 1984. The Poetry Film. In Words and Moving Image: Essays on Verbal and Visual Expression in Film and Television, eds. William Wees and Michael Dorland, 105–113. Montréal: Médiatexte Publications.

Websites Cook, Alastair. http://filmpoem.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Kemp, Susan. Nort Atlantik Drift. https://nortatlantikdrift.com/ Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Watt, Roseanne. http://kishiewife.tumblr.com/, https://vimeo.com/roseannewatt. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.

CHAPTER 9

The Hyperzone: Is There a Space on This Screen?

The title for this chapter is borrowed and subverted from Bertrand Gervais’ essay titled ‘Is There a Text on this Screen? Reading in an Era of Hypertextuality’, published in 2007 in Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman’s Companion to Digital Literary Studies. In this essay, Gervais interrogates the transformation of the semiotic status and materiality of the literary text once it has become virtual. This is what he concludes: The difference between discovery and revelation, between searching for a truth and having one simply revealed without any effort, is the difference between a word and a word button, between a real sign and a hyperlink, between the semiosphere (Lotman 1990) and cyberspace. Hypertextuality, by its very structure, strings us along from revelations to revelations. (Gervais 2007, p. 199)1

By shifting perspectives from text to space (or rather to its representation and re-presentification through online apparatuses) and subsequently from hypertextuality to hyperspatiality, I offer to apply the same dialectics of discovery and revelation to the digital ramifications of the sited experience. The aim is to examine the ways in which the hyper- or intermedial can expand the realm of the acousmatic to the spatial and by extension to the social realms. In other words, this chapter looks at how (and if) site-­ specific modes of sociability can be generated outside the site itself through the shift (or drift) from on-site to online production of a virtual yet no less communicational and hence social space. © The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_9

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Does the montage of an online environment, whether participative or not, succeed in convening a communicational space that is in keeping with the space that stemmed from the writer’s, poet’s, performer’s or artist’s original experience of the site? This question is posed with great acuity in the case of those artists whose site-specific production is rarely (if at all) distributed (physically at least) outside of Scotland. The landscape of Scottish publishing is a dynamic one, in part thanks to the support that Scottish presses receive from the institutions and advisory bodies who have been actively promoting the arts and literature of the region in recent decades.2 However, in Scotland and elsewhere, the artists are often compelled to put their shoulder to the wheel and take an active role in the distribution and marketing of their books, projects or films. This has led to the proliferation of promotional and communicational apparatuses (often self-published, sometimes outsourced to companies offering such services) specifically designed to encourage distribution, advertise the publications and establish spaces of discussion both on the local and global scale. Taking advantage of the explosive phenomenon of online social networking, most of the walker-writers and artists who feature in the present study keep an online journal or blog and are very active on Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. They also share videos of public readings, interviews, performances and the like on online platforms such as YouTube, Dailymotion and Vimeo. In the case of site-specific performances and place-aware installations, the free online access to these videos is proof of the artists’ determination to extend the dialogue established at the physical site and to set their artwork in motion, launch it on another journey and thus displace it both outside the seeing place and outside more conventional distribution circuits. In other respects, the artists complement their online publications with a wealth of contextual information and exegetic content aimed at retracing and expanding the original on-site experience, while also seeking to establish and maintain communication with new viewers and participants. This last word ‘participants’ is to be used cautiously, and I shall refrain from interpreting the facilitation of interactions provided by the Internet as the sole key to the somewhat idealistic concept of ‘relational art’ or ‘artwork as social interstice’ developed by Nicolas Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics (1998) and Postproduction: Culture as Screenplay (2002).3 Sitting alone at the computer screen, the Internet user can ­seldom feel that they engage as a ‘participant’ in any decision-making activities concerning the art object. What few decisions they can make are,

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at best, limited by the algorithms and parameters of the machine. Most of the time, they are only on the receiving end of the creative process, provided the contours of the artwork have been properly identified, which is not always the case. Likewise, and no matter how hospitable or relation-­ based the mode of operation of these digital apparatuses may seem, the power of the Internet to enhance human sociability is still to be effectively proven, as Evgeny Morozov and Jaron Lanier both most convincingly contend in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (2018) and The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (2011), respectively. It would probably be safer to consider that the shift in logics from expression to dissemination induces the conversion of modes of sociability into modes of connectivity, thus charting a wealth of different possibilities for Internet users to ‘connect’ with the place beyond (outside and after) the time-space in which it was originally experienced. One way to look into this is to reposition the relationship possibilities or valencies offered by online remediations within a Greimasian semiotic square that both opposes and relates site and non-site on one axis and the human and the machine on the other. The intrinsic hybrid nature of the objects under scrutiny below is closely tied to the issues inevitably raised by the interference of the mechanical and the technological in the relationship between viewer and meaning—or place, for that matter. In What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, Giorgio Agamben places this interference under the regime of governance and subjectification: I shall call an apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures, behaviors, opinions or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth […], but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones and—why not—language itself, which is perhaps the most ancient of apparatuses. (Agamben 2006, p. 14)

Agamben’s definition, if taken literally, suggests that apparatuses that seek to mediate site-specific practices are bound to jeopardise the initial project developed by the artists, that is, they are bound to initiate immediate, physical and intersubjective contact with the land. The challenge for the site-specific artists will therefore be to design apparatuses that mitigate

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their own subjectification effects without substantially altering the way their viewers, as not-yet-‘emancipated spectators’ (Rancière 2008), understand their creations as partaking in the production or reproduction of imaginary space allocations and social-spatial communities of perception. The key to this catch-22 situation, apart from another willing suspension of disbelief, may well lie in the concepts of intermediality and transmediation, particularly insofar as the notions of conversion and hence relocation of meaning from the textual to the figurative and from the figurative to the hermeneutic are concerned. It might then be possible to relocate the artist’s moves in physical space onto the screen and in the digital space that is thus produced. When considering the constraints and possibilities offered by the digital space, Michel De Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life comes to mind: [I]f it is true that a spatial order organizes an ensemble of possibilities (e.g., by a place in which one can move) and interdictions (e.g., by a wall that prevents one from going further), then the walker actualizes some of these possibilities. In that way, he makes them exist as well as emerge. But he also moves them about and he invents others, since the crossing, drifting away, or improvisation of walking privilege, transform or abandon spatial elements. […] The walker transforms each spatial signifier into something else. (De Certeau 1984, p. 98)

In his contribution to Discours, image, dispositif, Bernard Vouilloux further demonstrates how the motion that sustains the mechanical model of the apparatus places the apparatus at the heart of a flow of energy whose ‘genealogy’ and ‘becoming’ ensure the actualisation of the scene in which the artistic experience takes place within a time-space that is fundamentally relational—in the sense that it involves people, places and objects (Vouilloux 2008). I shall therefore focus on the way questions of placement, position and disposition inform the modes of production of meaning and presence within a chain of materiality that works to make place proliferate both inside and outside the artwork—provided the latter, as said place itself, has set boundaries. Most of the site-specific projects which this book has examined have led to the creation of dedicated websites and web-based services aimed at enabling the artists to exhibit their art online, outside the existing mechanisms of the commercial or academic nexus—although these services occasionally intersect with it. As such, these online services display the

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artworks for anyone to see, evaluate and consume. The point is not only to further the democratisation of art but also, and more specifically in the case of locally or institutionally funded art, to encourage physical visits to the site and advertise the dynamism of the community that commissioned or sponsored the projects in the first place. This is particularly true of three of the projects investigated above: Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds project, commissioned by Cumbria County Council from 1996 to 2000 and later sponsored by East Cumbria Countryside from 2000 to its completion in 2003; Stuart McAdam’s Lines Lost, commissioned in 2013 by Deveron Arts in Huntly and supported by Aberdeenshire Council; and Remote Performances (2014), which, despite its specific focus on the Lochaber area, landscapes and community life, was later re-set within Scotland’s then pressing political agenda. The context was only addressed during the interviews and in the exegetic contents that came to supplement the actual field recordings. As stated on the dedicated website, [t]hrough performances artists from England, Scotland and beyond will respond to Outlandia’s distinctive and remote geographical forest location overlooked by the UK’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis, in the Scottish Highlands. Taking place at the moment when Scotland votes on the continuance or dissolution of the 300  year old Acts of Union the week-long series of broadcasts and blogposts will be a timely reflection on contemporary ideas of remoteness, capturing and transmitting creative interactions with the land, its history and people and the tensions between nature, industry, tourism and heritage.

The website remoteperformances.co.uk therefore paradoxically reconfigures the artwork as an on-site, on-air and online experience, while providing its users with opportunities to replay the radio broadcasts as off-site, pre-run and now (provided they were indeed contextualised) outdated pieces. If the users had felt they were expected to suspend disbelief (which they are not, since the website never claims it is anything but a digital archive), they would have met with a sizeable challenge. Other Scottish or Scotland-based artists, such as Hamish Fulton and Alec Finlay, have chosen to develop personal web pages and blogs, which they use as electronic portfolios for self-promotion, personal expression and social networking as well as to provide their creative endeavours with an outlet that they might otherwise—that is, in the conventional, physical

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art market sense—struggle to find. Although promotionally oriented whether or not they contain a ‘buy’ button, these websites, blogs and freewheeling online anthologies recall the tradition of autonomous publication and the dream of a free circulation of works away from the mainstream. They often display their designers’ creative efforts at making the viewer’s experience as immersive as possible and the virtual experimental space as much of a venue as possible. This is where sound makes a comeback, such as on the website devoted to Andy Goldsworthy’s Striding Arches project or Hamish Fulton’s personal web page. Fulton’s website deserves further examination, as it exemplifies the assumption that the addition of pre-made automatically triggered sonic material—the sound of the walking artist’s footsteps, for instance, as one ‘enters’ the page—suffices to make the website users’ experience more realistic or immersive and to provide them with a three-dimensional illusion of the gestural space in which Fulton performed and which he then inhabited. By recreating, albeit artificially, the auditory field in which Fulton operated, website designer Andy Foulds wants the users to experience the artist’s spatial and emotional connection to the (actual) site in terms of atmosphere and time in a form of sonic re-enactment of the meditative state that is achieved after days and nights spent walking. The temporal dimension is paramount in Fulton’s art, as is the perception of the artist’s body in space as both actor and spectator of that space, as interacting with it. While the sounds of nature (the wind, the birdsong) are meant to recreate the sonic Gestalt that was experienced on site, the sound of footsteps achieves a different goal. It provides the website users— or ‘visitors’—with an interface, the invisible, unidentified gestural body that is the artist’s but could very well be theirs too and which, as a consequence, affects the syncopation between Fulton’s photo-textual artworks and this acousmatic-turned-acoustic sound whose overlaying gestures towards a deepening of the digital site. In the same way that the text appeared printed over the moving image in Susan Watt’s and Roseanne Kemp’s filmpoems examined in Chap. 8, the sound clips here were added after the fact, that is, after the walk or even after the production of the resulting artwork. The fact that the website purposefully does not achieve complete synchronisation between the automatically generated images and the sound sequences therefore contributes to further blurring the frontiers between in and out, between now and then, between the Scottish locale and the rest of the world, and between the dematerialised artwork and the gestural space and physio-emotional experience that inspired it.

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Once again, zones of in-betweenness proliferate. These are generated by successive processes of transmediation between the artwork and its digital archive, between the (possibly apocryphal) field recordings and the scrolling images and between Fulton’s walking art, the resulting two-­dimensional photo-textual artworks (remember, ‘an object cannot compete with an experience’, Fulton argues) and Foulds’ respatialisation of these artworks, not on site but online, through sound and computer-generated motion. ‘Sound […] spreads in space,’ says Jean-Luc Nancy in Listening: In the external or internal space, [sound] resounds, that is, it re-emits itself while still actually ‘sounding,’ which is already ‘re-sounding’ since that’s nothing else but referring back to itself. To sound is to vibrate in itself or by itself: it is not only, for the sonorous body, to emit a sound, but it is also to stretch out, to carry itself and be resolved into vibrations that both return it to itself and place it outside itself. (Nancy 2002, p. 8)

As Chap. 7 demonstrated, sound is at once space and the fabricator of spatial fantasies. These are further enhanced by their relationship with the visual, narrative and emotional elements displayed on the screen as the users visit the website, almost as they would stroll through a gallery or a museum. Foulds’ simple yet effective sonic animation of the images thus succeeds in mimicking a form of gestural interaction between the website users’ alleged stasis and the artist’s motion through the physical space of the artwork, a motion replicated in the cyberspace of its transmission. What occurs in the gallery—digital as it may be—is no other than a relationship, as argued by Australian academic and composer Garth Paine in his enlightening paper on sonic immersive gallery installations: A relationship is established as soon as one notes that the environment changed on your entrance. That change is an invitation to explore, and an acknowledgement that you are immediately a part of an intimate causal loop. The patterns of relationship in an interactive, immersive environment are made explicit and coherent through many iterations of the closed causal loop. Each one rendering with greater detail the nature of the relationship. The user/inhabitant of the interactive, immersive environment installation develops a cognitive map of the responses of the installation, testing their map through repeated exploration, confirming prior experience, and actively engaging in the evolution of the ecosystem of which they have become part. (Paine 2007)

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Hamish Fulton’s website thus succeeds in being both a gallery and an installation in itself. It is both a space—some digital Scotland, perhaps—to be imaginatively walked through and the gateway that leads into this space as well as the apparatus that maps it out. While other more linear blogs present us with objects resulting from an artist’s experience of place, Fulton’s website does exactly what he himself claimed was impossible, that is, it makes an object compete with an experience.4 In this particular case, for the object to compete with the experience requires the laying of hurdles and the devising of encrypting strategies. With its arcane menu, its ideographic, numbered rather than titled catalogue of artworks and its seemingly erratic use of superimposition and fast crossfade effects, the interface of Fulton’s website rejects all user-friendly standards of transmediation in order to turn passive revelation into active discovery—or, in Jacques Rancière’s words, the website user into an ‘emancipated spectator’. The users have no other choice when entering this hermeneutic space but to go on a fishing expedition and, running with the metaphor, to navigate between the non-site of the menu and the site of the artworks, thus repeating the artist’s own sited experience of transience, only this time displaced into the cyber sphere. As the shift from site to non-site is translated into a shift from physical to cyber space, the website therefore provides its users with a potent illustration of the powers of online transmediation to extend the materiality of the artwork beyond scriptural, visual and even sonic apparatuses. Another example of the digital replication of the temporal, aural and gestural dimensions of site-specific art is the online sonic map-score of Hanna Tuulikki’s Away with the Birds project. Designed as an interactive iteration, the website is optimised for use on a touch tablet or computer, and is to be viewed in landscape mode and listened to through ‘decent quality speakers or headphones’. There is already in these simple directions something that pertains to cognitive preparation and to a form of reciprocal relationship grounded in the assumption that the visitors’ expectations match the artist’s and that the artist who contributed to the design of the website did so with the visitors’ experience in mind. The website makes no secret that this experience is to be spatial and spiritual in nature, as evidenced by the repeated calls to ‘explore the extended soundscape’, to ‘steer [our] own way through Tuulikki’s score’ ‘in [our] own time, taking [our] own course’ and to ‘immerse [ourselves]’ in ‘a prismatic experience that tunes us into a sonic continuum that reaches into the “more-than-human” world’. The use of spatial terminology and m ­ etaphors

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(some more relevant than others) to conceptualise online practices is not uncommon. Website users are frequently encouraged to surf the web, enter portals and gateways, access the information highway, visit websites and the cyberspace or connect with the ‘global village’. When referring to site-specific art, however, such expressions may actually be understood in more ways than just metaphorically. Tuulikki’s Away with the Birds online score presents its visitors with an elaborate how-to-use introduction to the intersecting aural, graphic and exegetic interfaces that are accessible through embedded hotspots. Although they are not supplied in chronological order, these hyperlinks allow the users to access information related to the different ‘moments’ of the performance: the research phase (field recordings, commentaries on the source material, original recordings of the songs ‘performed by a Gaelic tradition bearer’, the exact localisation on the score where these songs were woven into Tuulikki’s composition); the Canna performance (films of the five movements as they were performed live); and the process of transmedial reproduction and dissemination of the vocal performance (a grid reference to the visual score, extracts from the studio recording of the composition). Whether they are informative or illustrative, these interfaces fulfil a wide array of pragmatic and cognitive functions. They provide the website users with the spatial and timely referents that contribute to re-emplacing and re-ensounding the artwork, and they ensure that, however dematerialised, the off-site and out-of-time performance remains hybrid, hypermedial, gestural and participative. Indeed, not only does the website urge its visitors to make informed choices every step of the way and to direct themselves across the digital text-soundscape, it also compels them to conceive of this multimedial apparatus as a three-dimensional, non-Euclidean (since it combines width, height and time) model or replica of the performance. The point is not to re-produce or re-present Canna, the space in which the performance took place, but to dis-locate and re-place it so that its ‘experience’ can be conveyed. When faced with such sophisticated apparatuses, the website users, viewers and listeners are no longer expected to simply read the screen. Rather, they are expected to engage in perceptive-cognitive mechanisms with a view to imaginatively reconfiguring the space of the artwork into another, this time immaterial, one. In other words, they are asked to participate in an aesthetic, cultural and creative experience aimed at constructing a Foucauldian heterotopia or a ‘potential space’ (Winnicott

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1971) that is capable of embracing the seen and the unseen, the heard and the unheard and the known and the unknown. The point, as it often is in the cyber sphere, is not so much what the apparatus can effectively achieve but what one lets oneself imagine it can achieve. There will soon come a day when the mass production of wired gloves, virtual reality glasses, motion trackers, surround sound acoustic, holographic projection and smell and taste replication appliances will allow website users to achieve a convincing form of spatial immersion where all five senses are stimulated while sitting at their computer screens.5 This virtual spatial immersion is frequently—and arguably—termed ‘presence’ by virtual reality researchers. Only time will tell if this is a case of putting the cart before the horse and if this technologically enhanced ‘presence’ can effectively compete with field experience. We can safely vouch for Hamish Fulton’s opinion on the matter. If, as contended above, the ‘screen-page’ can indeed function as a portal into yet another space of in-betweenness, one might wonder how communicational and social—not to mention how ‘Scottish’—this space can be. The online score clearly establishes that the word—or ceòl—is to be spread freely across the cyber sphere: the visitor is invited to ‘share all of this content’ and join, with a simple click of the mouse, an open Facebook community dedicated to discussing the artwork, sharing comments on the source material or participating in the artist’s scientific investigation of the folklore and mnemonic topographies of Scotland. In this sense, the online iteration may indeed be conceived of as a cultural space and venue that is occupied by its users and which promotes group discussions and alternative modes of sociability, although these alternatives are nowadays becoming the norm. In the field of environmental literature and arts, this facility for adding contextual information also encourages crossovers between the domains of artistic creativity, scientific research and geopolitical sensibility. Relying on the interactional space offered by social media, many eco-­ artists turn to dedicated websites not just as portfolios but also and possibly more importantly as platforms for environmentally and culturally focused sociabilities, where the presentation of the artwork ultimately serves as a pretext for the community to engage in (admittedly most often one-sided) debates on local politics and global environmental issues. A good example of this is the array of art websites and blogs that Alec Finlay keeps and relays via his Facebook page. Here, aesthetic and political considerations intertwine, with each verbal or visual post prompting

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comments on Scottish independence, Brexit, the NHS, Scotland’s transition towards renewable energies or Land Reform. Finlay’s online activity is designed to provide his audience—his ‘followers’—with an updated online gallery of past, recent and ongoing site-specific projects. But it also seeks to promote the actual, physical spaces that inspired these artworks, while encouraging the use of portable devices and thus simultaneously the on-­site (immediate) discovery and online (mediated) revelation of the natural features, ecosystems and cultural history of the sites. Let us briefly consider three of Finlay’s projects. One is white peak/dark peak (2010), which is an ‘audio-visual word-map of the Peak District National Park’ combining QR codes, word-drawings and audio poems, all available online. Another is the Company of Mountains collaborative project and its dedicated blog featuring word-mntn poems and conspectuses of 14 viewpoints on the Isle of Skye to be ‘read ideally on location’. The third is Finlay’s collaborative Gathering/Cruinneachadh project,6 which is an ‘ecopoetic mapping of the mnemonic topographies’ of the Cairngorms in the form of a blog and poetic guides dedicated to the Gaelic place names and ecology of the area and designed, in the words of Alec Finlay, to ‘help us understand that region as it was, is and could be’. Finlay’s use of the first-person plural (how local and, conversely, how global is this ‘us’?), past and present tenses and this most meaningful modal auxiliary suggests that the project is much more than a collection of local place names. Gathering is indeed to be visited and used as an ecopoetic, poietic, photo-textual and digital topo-guide to spaces and places that are charged with cultural significance, where location binds with collective identity as social determinants and where practices are embedded in each corrie (‘Coire an Fhiadhaich: Deer-­ stalkers Corrie’) and ruined shieling (‘Allt Phouple: Shelter Burn’) that Finlay meticulously names, mediates through poetic translation and captures on film. His blog, which was published in book form by Hauser and Wirth in 2018, further epitomises the spatial turn by offering itself as an interface for the transfer of knowledge and responsibility. Nature here is no longer just a space but a matrix for a collective sense of belonging and historicity. A Facebook post dated 20 August 2016 announcing the publication of a new page on topography ends with these words: ‘Happy placeaware walking’. Beyond the casual closing, these four words might very well encapsulate what this whole book has been about, namely the need for ‘us’ (which I take to mean whoever in the global virtual community or ‘village’ feels like joining in) to learn the land—its features, history, language, names—before ‘we’ can walk its physical paths and then (and

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possibly only then) call it ‘ours’. Finlay’s wish for ‘happy walking’ is in fact anything but metaphorical. The point is and always has been to replace and relocate the experience on site. In this sense, the artwork and its related communicational apparatus are neither complementary nor objectual. Rather, they are an event, an incentive to walk, act and, again, to connect with the Scotland that lies beyond the screen, In Real Life. This last point leads me to the third aspect of Finlay’s online activity. As mentioned above, local and global issues are never far from the poet’s mind, and he makes no secret of his political views. There is no doubt there is a correlation between these views and his artistic practice. Indeed, the artist willingly acknowledges what he calls his ‘naive Yes-Scotland take on politics as a creative act’.7 As is often the case in the field of site-specific art, Finlay’s ephemeral installations (his poem-labels, for instance) and collaborative projects (the communal renga poems) are specifically designed to be reproducible and reproduced, whether in the form of copyright-free photographs posted online or as guides for similar projects to be undertaken by others in the future. In Walter Benjamin’s words, the artwork’s ‘auratic mode of existence’ (Benjamin 1936, p. 24) is therefore subsumed within the greater goal, which is to produce and reproduce social and spatial determinants capable of re-emplacing the members of this virtual inclusive community into a no less inclusive land and culture. Although, as Morozov argues in The Net Delusion, there is little if any evidence to back up the claim that online activity plays any part in organising political action, 80 years on, it is tempting to take Benjamin at his word: For the first time in world history, technological reproducibility emancipates the work of art from its parasitic subservience to ritual. To an ever-increasing degree, the work reproduced becomes the reproduction of a work designed for reproducibility. From a photographic plate, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense. But as soon as the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applied to artistic production, the whole social function of art is revolutionized. Instead of being founded on ritual, it is based on a different practice: politics. (Benjamin 1936, pp. 24–25)

In The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, Benjamin also contended that the subsequent politicising of art was communism’s response to fascism (p. 42). The idea of communism has evolved considerably since the mid-1930s, and Benjamin’s words must be read in

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the context in which they were written. Yet in Finlay’s art, as in the work of many eco-poets and eco-artists, there is undoubtedly an echo of Bobi’s dream in Jean Giono’s Joy of Man’s Desiring that people, having embraced a new social and natural contract, will say ‘our’ someday soon and really mean it. In the present Scottish context, the underlying call for collectively reclaiming and reinhabiting the land goes beyond a mere act of the imagination. The point, it seems, is not so much to create imaginary ‘folds’ and ‘Opens’ but to turn the work of art—together with whatever white cube, book or screen in or on which it is displayed—into a portable spatial-­ relational antechamber from which the spectator, reader, user or website user can ‘get back into place’ and into the place-world (Casey 1993). The point is then to unfold space through new poetics of the interface, modes of dwelling and forms of enhanced presence to the world that are capable of turning ‘us’ into ‘happy’, ‘place-aware’ but also historically aware—that is, aware of the historical and political forces that shaped the land—and ecologically-mindful individuals. Finlay may have in mind the words attributed to that other communist thinker who has had such a positive influence on his work, Antonio Gramsci, who called himself ‘a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will’.8 In the light of the social, political and environmental challenges that lie ahead both on a local and global scale, the point is in short to commit ‘ourselves’ to knowing where ‘we’ stand as a community in the making—and to will ‘ourselves’ into taking the next step forward.

Notes 1. Gervais borrows the term ‘semiosphere’ from Yuri Lotman’s 1990 monograph Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). 2. Another form of support, this time non-financial, relates to the publication of reviews and excerpts and their distribution through literary magazines or dedicated websites. As for poetry, mention should be made of the Saturday Poem section in The Guardian and online resources such as poetryfoundation.org and scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk 3. ‘The possibility of a relational art (an art that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an autonomous and private symbolic space) is testimony to the radical upheaval in aesthetic, cultural and political objectives brought about by modern art’ (Bourriaud 1998, p. 14).

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4. Conversely, Alec Finlay’s interrelated blogs offer entries (or ‘posts’) displayed in reverse chronological order and accompanied by exhaustive exegetic content to be viewed by vertical scrolling with few or no gimmicky effects: see http://gathering-alecfinlay.blogspot.fr/ and http://alecfinlayblog.blogspot.fr/. Accessed 9 January 2019. 5. Research is very active in this area. A limited number of 4D films have recently been released in custom-built theatres and amusement parks, where simulated environmental effects (smoke, rain, wind and lightning, among others) are supplemented by motion effects such as the seats vibrating in synchronisation with the film. Although used by artists outside the mainstream entertainment market, these physical effects remain extremely costly and raise significant technical problems, which limit their use. In the field of olfactory art, for instance, the development, diffusion area and duration of artificial scents are particularly difficult to monitor. 6. Defined by the Faclair Beag Dictionary as (noun) a collection and anthology and (past participle) ‘the act of gathering, assembling, collecting and accumulating’. The project (2015–2018) was commissioned by Hauser & Wirth. It is a collaboration between, among others, Alec Finlay (poetry), Hannah Devereux and James Dyas Davidson (photography), Gill Russell (maps and walks) and Rhynie Woman (‘foraging’). Yet another case of literary and scientific ‘doubling back’, the project was inspired by Adam Watson’s 1984 survey of The Place Names of Upper Deeside. 7. Facebook post, 27 August 2016. 8. Although its authorship remains disputed to this day, the statement is generally attributed to Gramsci and his ‘Letter from Prison’ dated 19 December 1929.

References Agamben, Giorgio. [2006] 2009. What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays. Trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Benjamin, Walter. [1936] 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bourriaud, Nicolas. [1998] 2002. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Dijon: Les Presses du Réel. ———. 2002. Postproduction. Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World. Trans. Jeanine Herman. New York: Lukas and Sternberg. Casey, Edward S. [1993] 2009. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World. New Haven: Indiana University Press. De Certeau, Michel. [1984] 2011. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Gervais, Bertrand. 2007. Is There a Text on This Screen? Reading in an Era of Hypertextuality. In A Companion to Digital Literary Studies, ed. Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman, 182–202. Oxford: Blackwell. Lanier, Jaron. 2018. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. New York: Henry Hold. Lotman, Yuri. 1990. Universe of the Mind. A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Morozov, Evgeny. 2011. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. New York: Public Affairs. Nancy, Jean-Luc. [2002] 2007. Listening. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. New York: Fordham University Press. Paine, Garth. 2007. Sonic Immersion: Interactive Engagement in Realtime Immersive Environments. SCAN, Journal of Media Arts and Culture 4 (1). http://scan.net. au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=90. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Rancière, Jacques. [2008] 2009. The Emancipated Spectator. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London/New York: Verso. Vouilloux, Bernard. 2008. Du dispositif. In Discours, Image, Dispositif. Penser la Representation II, ed. Philippe Ortel, 15–31. Paris: L’Harmattan. Winnicott, Donald. [1971] 1991. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge.

Websites Finlay, Alec. http://alecfinlay.com. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. ———. A Company of Mountains. http://www.company-of-mountains.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. ———. Gathering. http://gathering-alecfinlay.blogspot.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. ———. White Peak/Dark Peak. http://whitepeak-darkpeak.co.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Fulton, Hamish. http://www.hamish-fulton.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Goldsworthy, Alec. Sheepfolds. http://www.sheepfoldscumbria.co.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. McAdam, Stuart. Lines Lost. https://www.deveron-projects.com/stuartmcadam/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Remote Performances. http://www.remoteperformances.co.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Striding Arches. http://www.stridingarches.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Tuulikki, Hanna. Away With the Birds. http://score.awaywiththebirds.co.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.

CHAPTER 10

Conclusion

The examination of the practices and representations of the land and space in the literature and arts of early twenty-first-century Scotland has revealed a wide array of forms. These have included everything from the allegedly archaic forms of the almanac and nature diary to the hypermodern forms of the blog and interactive website; from the most descriptive approaches to nature to the least explanatory; from the actualisation of space to its virtualisation; and from seemingly homogeneous products of the writers’ and artists’ imagination to the ostensibly compound (hypermedial, audio-­ photo-­textual-gestural). At the risk of going round in circles, these forms have been exposed to the many theories on the spatial, phenomenological, epistemological, material, ecological, anthropological, affective, acoustic and digital turns.1 However, in the Scottish context, at the very least, all these turns may ultimately all just amount to the same thing. This book has considered a number of spatial practices, which have almost always turned out to be prefixed. In an aesthetic and experiential approach, or prospection, which is more often than not about ‘doubling back’, the point it seems is to ‘re-­ walk’, ‘rename’, ‘return’, ‘retrace’, ‘remark’, ‘renegotiate’ and ‘reconnect’ with a view to retrieving, remediating or relocating meaning in the land. Neither irremediably lost nor created ex nihilo, space can only be transformed, rethought and reimagined by means of narrative structures, codes and modalities—‘spatial stories’ and ‘narrative actions’ (De Certeau 1984, © The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_10

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pp. 115–116)—whose common denominator is an obvious and collective will to reconcile perceptual and intellectual experience for the human to reinhabit the immediate locale and common ground. Nature therefore appears as the realm in which the artificial boundaries between detached observation and poiesis can finally be collapsed. This book has thus sought to examine the strategies developed by contemporary Scottish writers and artists to resolve their sense of estrangement from a natural world that is so laden with historical significance because of the Clearances, Scotland’s quasi-feudal system of land ownership and the land reforms that have been implemented since the devolution. Transformation as a conversion, a process or, in the theatrical acceptation of the word that is more than relevant here, a ‘change of scenery’ has implied an intended departure from the post-Romantic orophilic stance of the twentieth century on the one hand and an appropriation of the mindscapes savoured by the Symbolist and Surrealist avant-gardes on the other. By revisiting psychophysical dualism and emplacing the subject in a distinctive yet hospitable milieu or interface, the artists and creative activists succeed in transforming what was previously a locus dei and then a locus amoenus into an in-between, or perhaps even a new locus scotiæ, that is able to accommodate both classical and perceptual experience and turn stravaiging into a place-aware, socially-conscious ‘art in the public interest’. Quoting art critic Arlene Raven, Miwon Kwon defines this ‘art in the public interest’ as being ‘activist and communitarian in spirit’ and as ‘encompass[ing] a variety of traditional […] and non-traditional media’, including literature, video, billboards, performative art, protest actions and demonstrations. I would also add not just digital art but also its remediation processes to this list. In One Place After Another, Kwon writes: Most importantly, [Arlene Raven] has argued, art in the public interest forges direct intersections with social issues. It encourages community coalition-­building in pursuit of social justice and attempts to garner greater institutional empowerment for artists to act as social agents. Artists engaged in such art ‘aspire to reveal the plight and plead the case of the disenfranchised and disadvantaged, and to embody what they [the artists] view as humanitarian values.’ Additionally, they ‘demand more artist involvement in institutional decision-making, representation of minorities and women artists, and use of the influence of museum and funding agencies to change government policies on social issues.’ (Kwon 2002, pp. 105–106)

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The multiple intersections of the selected artists’ practices with local and otherwise social, political and environmental issues suggest the ongoing elaboration of a new Scottish Pastoral which coalesces the experiential and phenomenological knowledge of the locale, an ontological reflexion on the boundaries (or lack thereof) between self and other and Here and There, and an appreciation of the technological means available to help expand (that is, share and communicate) this knowledge beyond the site itself. The renaissance of the nature writing movement in Scotland is thus to be read as an exercise in individual and collective experiential freedom whose primary agency is the human body.2 The walking diarists, poets and artists—the hodologists—who are intent on ‘taking reading of the land’ (Macfarlane 2012, p. 133) therefore strive to trace and retrace the ‘reticular trails’, ‘pathways, networks, meshworks’ and ‘archi-textural entanglements’ of the palimpsestual rural space (Lefebvre 1974, p. 117) and the anthropological determinants that attest to prior social practices of the land while transforming the act of walking into one of resistance against erasure in the process. This active search for conversation, connection and alignment has induced a heightened state of awareness of the presence-­ absence of the past (most specifically, of the way the Clearances have shaped the land) and a reconfiguration of the ‘wild’ (but in reality, cleared) areas of Scotland into écoumènes, to be reclaimed and re-inhabited by the spatialised and spatialising body. The pure visual enjoyment of the Scottish landscape is therefore replaced by its intellection as a comprehensive, chronotopic and most importantly non-dysphoric relational zone: a space in the making. While implementing a form of reciprocity between the perceiver and the environment, this intellection also enables the reappropriation through sensory-motor activities of a shared spaciousness constituted by the experience of travelling, transience, arrivals and departures: a land made by walking. These works and practices thus exemplify what James Hatley, in his analysis of Hamish Fulton’s phenomenology of motility, terms a ‘walking textuality’ (that is, a form and language that are inseparable from physical and material contingencies) and ‘a syntax that is synchronic and polysemantic rather than sentence-driven and linearly determinant’ (Hatley 2003, p. 206). This raises the issue of the capacity of the work of art to satisfactorily account for the experience of space and spaciousness, should it even attempt to do so. Rather than making the impossible choice between the fact of the walk and the mirage (or fiction) of its trace, some

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like Hamish Fulton, Thomas A. Clark and Alec Finlay therefore choose to focus on this moment when language is brought to a halt. This is testified by their highly disciplined, minimalist, visual and spatialised typo- and topographic poetry and by their taste for short, often collaborative and intermedial forms. As both intermedium and message, the iconic poem models the space-time of the original experience by transposing the rhythm of the walk, the alternation of motion and stasis and the attentiveness to thought that characterises it. At the same time, it reflects on its own materiality so as to test the elasticity of the demarcating lines between form and world, text and space. The geographer Claude Raffestin conceives of the territory as ‘the prison that human beings build for themselves’ (Raffestin 1980, p. 129). Conversely, he views territoriality as a necessarily multidimensional and relational system and as a set and meshwork of connections between the individual, the community and the alterity that is brought to them by the figure of the mediator. As such, the construction of territoriality can only be informed by human practice and our resulting experiential knowledge of the physical world, by a series of inherited social representations of that same space and by the ways in which it is mediated within the abstract space of society. Starting from the notion that all milieux and all in-­ betweens imply contacts and relationships, this book has addressed the strategies used by the writers, sculptors and lexiconographers to make themselves ready for such encounters and to carve their own milieu (also as middle or intermediary ground) out of the Scottish locale. These strategies include the rejection of Romantic tropes and allogeneous representations of Scotland as ‘wild’ and ‘sublime’, a posture of collaboration with nature rather than intervention on nature and a form of ontological humility that combines the equanimity and creaturely mode of being in the world favoured by Arne Naess and John Burnside, respectively.3 This demonstrates the artists’ intent to re-enter a space from which they feel excluded, whether this exclusion is to be blamed on colonial history, the commodification of nature (as shown in Gerry Loose’s Fault Line and Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds) or language attrition (as remedied by Alec Finlay’s Company of Mountains). No magic formula would suffice to turn back the clock and restore the lost connection with some primordial Scotland that very few yearn for anyway. After all, why swap one Brigadoon for another, however ‘authentic’ or ‘grounded’ it claims to be? The point is rather to reach out to the landscape and the Scotland of the here and now with a view to becoming reacquainted with its creatures,

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colours, textures, names and sounds. However, this reaching out—this writing and creating ‘towards’ the natural world—can only occur within the liminal space-time of the ‘almost’, in which I proposed to view a verbospatial translation of Kathleen Jamie’s ‘Fold’ and Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Open’. In order to step into the Open, the subject must first become vulnerable to it by losing all sense of their own centrality and by shifting perceptions from an egocentric to an ecocentric, yet still ego-friendly, perception of their milieu.4 This is reminiscent simultaneously of Rilke’s injunction to ‘throw inner space around’ the things we long to know and of Agamben’s concept of the ‘zone of nonknowledge’ in which the animals are simply ‘let be’ (Agamben 2002, pp.  91–92). And ‘let be’ they are, even when they turn into those mysterious diplomats poised on the edge of our world, both known (‘I know you’, Jamie 2012, p.  201) and nonknown, as transient intercessors for the elusive realm of the other. The treatment of the figure of the nonhuman has thus revealed a keen interest in animal social behaviour and attention to animal communication and call systems, as Hanna Tuulikki’s mimetic birdsong in Away with the Birds exemplifies. While being extremely cautious never to slip into over-­aestheticising anthropomorphic tropes that might cause a diplomatic incident and disrupt the fragile balance of the ‘almost’, the artists therefore write and sing towards a form of universal localism. They probe into the poiesis of the nonhuman realm so as to expose the interrelatedness of the spaces they and their readers, viewers or spectators inhabit. Moving from animate to inanimate passeurs, this book has also enquired into the value of the found, replaced and rebuilt natural or human-made objects also used to restore creative communication with the land, its features, its names and possibly most crucially its past. Like Andy Goldsworthy’s Sheepfolds project, Alec Finlay’s Company of Mountains sheds light on the complex procedures by which the absence of the referent is staged by the artist. By writing a Gaelic place name on a small label, reinstalling it on site, capturing it (along with the time interval during which it was emplaced) in photography and finally sharing it online, Finlay successively collects, indexes, replaces and, in his own (and Heidegger’s) words, ‘presences’ the ‘truth’ of each chosen site in order to reveal the multiple (first-, second- or third-hand) spatial experiences possible for that site. The recording and filming of certain designated space ambiences in Susan Kemp’s documentary Nort Atlantik Drift: A Portrait of Robert Alan Jamieson and Roseanne Watt’s filmpoem Quoys, Unst have shifted

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the experience of space—here, of Shetland—to that of spatiality. Their works also reveal how the artists reconfigure (trans-enunciate) the site into a relay of interconnected material and digital environments. As receivers and transmitters, noticers and makers, the artists rely on a variety of materials, processes and media including text, photography, sculpture and sound from site to non-site and eventually to website to explore the many interstices and interzones carved out of the expansion and dissipation of matter. Gilles Deleuze contends that [w]hat constitutes the audio-visual image is a disjunction, a dissociation of the visual and the sound, each heautonomous, but at the same time an incommensurable or ‘irrational’ relation which connects them to each other, without forming a whole, without offering the least whole. It is a resistance stemming from the collapse of the sensory-motor schema, and which separates the visual image and the sound-image, but puts them all the more into a non-totalizable region. (Deleuze 1985, p. 256)

These ‘regions’ therefore overlap through patterns of assemblage and re-arrangement, that is, through a number of apparatuses capable of presentifying and relating experiential and derealised spaces. I chose to view these verbovisual, photo-textual, audio-video and online apparatuses as strategic spaces in their own right. By this I mean transitional heterotopias, transects and interactional networks, as Lebenswelten, where words and looks can be exchanged and a collective (re)production of space can occur.5 The artwork, from the original project to its remediation online, is therefore defined as a transient experience per se, as indexical rather than representational and as circulation rather than imposition.6 Hence the proliferation of cross-media practices, transpositions and doublings back that characterises contemporary Scottish ecopoetry and arts in their efforts to overcome the dualisms of nature and culture, object and experience, materialism and spiritualism, centre and margin, body and mind and local culture and global change. This all points in the direction of conversational art and interactional aesthetics, while begging the question of how these interactions play out politically and how works can act and acts can work as part of a constant negotiation between images, texts, contexts, codes (including numerical coding), mediologies, rhizomatic inter-­ activities (art, science, activism) and, as far as this book is concerned, between tradition and innovation, between the natural world and technologically advanced modernity.

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It was obvious from the outset. What matters is less to emplace the subject than to connect spaces, places, objects, practices, minds and bodies. At this point I want to quote from Jean-Luc Nancy’s enlightening pages on the concept of ecotechnè: the ecotechnical, linking and connecting up bodies in every way, placing them at sites of the intersections, interfaces, and interactions of every technical procedure, far from turning bodies into ‘technical objects’ […] sheds light on them as such, through this areal connection, which also creates space for the withdrawal of any transcendental or immanent signification […]. Places, places for the existence of being, henceforth, are the exposition of bodies, in other words, their being laid bare, their manifold manipulation, their multiple swerves, their interlinked networks, their cross-breedings (far more technical than ethnic). In sum, areality provides the rule and the milieu of a proximity, at once world-wide and local, one within the other, instead of a dialectic of transcendental/immanent. (Nancy 1992, pp. 89–90)

Like bodies, like spaces? The artists are therefore not aiming at some impossible Gesamtkunstwerk but at a form of ecotechnical dialogue that is interspatial, interactional and intermedial with a view to creating new narrative and participative models and, most importantly, restoring locational social links. The notions of interspatiality and social space raise questions as to the part played by online activities in the emergence of new concepts of relational territoriality and in the sharing of interfaced and intermediated power/knowledge through art. New media furthermore seek to found alternative heterotopic and flexible public spaces, which when used sensibly enable the ‘contouring’ (Finlay’s word) of the not-so-virtual community’s spatial, cultural and political identities in the context of the current debates on Scottish independence, the land reforms and Scotland’s place in (or out of) Europe. This can be achieved by forging closer links between writers and artists, members of the general public and regional and institutional partners. In this sense, some of the artists’ blogs and social networking websites may also be approached as strategic apparatuses insofar as they partake in the reconfiguration of both traditional and non-­ traditional local and global paradigms of identity. It is clearly an understatement to say that there is a large area here still to be explored, and that it is likely to grow substantially larger post-Brexit.

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This book does not contend a new genius loci, nor does it argue for an emerging ecopostcolonialism—some ‘Into-the-Scottish-Wild’ movement—that would identify the Scots as historically or transcendentally closer to nature than others. Rather, it has enquired into the changing cultural attitudes towards nature and the eco-aesthetics of a selection of artworks designed and viewed as environments per se within a historical, political and environmental context that makes it increasingly difficult to define Scottish culture by its connection to the landscape. There are needless to say a great number of projects and practices that rely on the processes of sacralisation and/or standardising nature that I have had to leave aside for now. See, for instance, Valerie Gillies’ poetry and cross-media art, itinerant mapping of Scottish and Irish wells and springs and subsequent collection of landmark poems The Spring Teller (2008); her collaborative and site-specific installations with sculptors Jake Harvey, Denys Mitchell and Gary Fay (Quick Water, 2001; The Glide, 2001; The Ballad of Leaderfoot, 2001), with textile artist Anna King (Close, Closer, Closest, 2007), illustrator Will Maclean (St Kilda Walking, 1998) and photographer Rebecca Marr (Men and Beasts: Wild Men and Tame Animals of Scotland, 2000); and her recent edition of the online interactive Poetry Map of Scotland for the Scottish Poetry Library.7 Other literary works and artworks of interest include Hanna Tuulikki’s Orkney-based Sea Psalm project, Malachy Tallack’s 60 Degrees North: Around the World in Search of Home (2015), Amy Liptrot’s debut novel The Outrun (2016), Stephen Davismoon’s sound-art installation pieces (Stations of the Clyde, 2013), Julie Brook’s site-specific sculptural work (the Firestacks series on Jura in 1992 and Lewis in 2015) and the artist Douglas Robertson’s collaborative publications with Donald Murray (The Guga Stone, 2013) and Gordon Meade (Les Animots: A Human Bestiary, 2015), to name but a few. The road ahead is long, and there is comfort in knowing that it is getting longer by the day. This book has sought to demonstrate how volatile the definitions of terms such as ‘place’, ‘space’, ‘environment’, ‘self’ and ‘other’ are when they are confronted with a collective will to reinvent an inclusive and welcoming yet distinct ‘land’. Further to this exploration of the aesthetics and poietics of space in Scottish contemporary eco-literature and arts, the very phrase ‘Our Land’ that has flourished in the pro-independence Scottish media these past few years appears to extend far beyond the concept of ownership—at least when used creatively. I contend that there can be a whole world of difference between the ‘we want our country back’ of

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some and the ‘this land is our land’ of others, and that maybe the ultimate Open lies in the space occupied by a possessive adjective and in what one makes of what follows. Finally, it is particularly inspiring to see how today’s Scottish artists, as citizens rather than consumers of this place and space, succeed in transforming what is still often romantically regarded as a withdrawal from social life into its exact opposite, that is, a social fiction and an exercise in fellowship that, as I hope this book has established, extends far beyond Scotland’s geographical and imagined borders, into the first foothills of that Homeland Earth (Morin and Kern 1993) that is theirs or better still ‘ours’ to make.

Notes 1. On the affective turn, see Clough and Halley 2007. 2. On the concept of preconceptual freedom, see Nancy 1988. 3. See Naess’ Buddhist reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, in which the deep ecologist denies that Spinoza meant wisdom should be gained through meditative tranquillity alone, away from social and active life. ‘Equanimity integrates internal and external balance and shows itself in vigorous action. The mode of human nature exposed by Spinoza, as I understand him, is maximally expressed in the supremely active life–internally and externally, insofar as internal and external can be distinguished at all’ (Naess 2008, p. 254). 4. ‘To know a physical place you must become intimate with it. You must open yourself to its textures, its colors in varying day and light lights, its sonic dimension. You must in some way become vulnerable to it.’ Also by Lopez: ‘To hear wild animals is not to leave the realm of the human; it’s to expand this realm to include voices other than our own. It’s a technique for the accomplishment of wisdom. To attend to the language of animals means to give yourself over to a more complicated, less analytical awareness of a place’ (Lopez 2002, p. 232; p. 236). 5. Oosterling further offers to consider intermedia as ‘embedded in intentional acts, mediated by signs and socially and historically determined’ (Oosterling 2003, p. 36). He continues: ‘nowadays the intermedial aesthetic experience par excellence is perhaps no longer exclusively found in the white cube (the museum) or the dark room (the theatre hall or cinema), but in the public sphere as a spacing of the “inter”, be it physical or virtual’ (p. 46). 6. ‘Despite the adoption of architectural terminology in the description of many new electronic spaces (websites, information environments, programming infrastructures, construction of home pages, virtual spaces, etc.), the spatial experience on the computer is structured more as a sequence of

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movements and passages than as the habitation or durational occupation of a particular “site.” Hypertext is a prime example. The (information) highway is a more apt analogy, for the spatial experience of the highway is one of transit between locations’ (Kwon 2002, p. 173). 7. In the same vein, see the 2013–2014 project Writing the North: http:// www.writingthenorth.com/writing-the-map/; http://stanzapoetry.org/ blog/poetry-map. These websites both operate in the same way, with each visitor-contributor being invited to pin down their creative writing on a map of Scotland or, more specifically in the case of Writing the North, of the Northern Islands.

References Agamben, Giorgio. [2002] 2004. The Open. Man and Animal. Trans. Kevin Attell. Redwood: Stanford University Press. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, and Jean Halley, eds. 2007. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press. De Certeau, Michel. [1984] 2011. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press. Deleuze, Gilles. [1985] 1989. Cinema 2. The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hatley, James D. 2003. Taking Phenomenology for a Walk: The Artworks of Hamish Fulton. In Lived Images: Mediations in Experience, Life-World and I-Hood, ed. Matti Itkonen and Gary Backhaus, 194–216. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä Press. Jamie, Kathleen. 2012. Sightlines. London: Sort of Books. Kwon, Miwon. 2002. One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Lefebvre, Henri. [1974] 1991. The Production of Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-­ Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Loose, Gerry. 2014. Fault Line. Glasgow: Vagabond Voices. Lopez, Barry. 2002. The Language of Animals. In Extreme Landscapes. The Lure of Mountain Spaces, ed. Bernadette McDonald, 227–237. Washington: National Geographic Society. Macfarlane, Robert. [2012] 2013. The Old Ways. A Journey on Foot. London: Penguin. Morin, Edgar, and Anne-Brigitte Kern. [1993] 1999. Homeland Earth: A Manifesto for the New Millenium. Trans. Sean Kelly and Roger Lapointe. Cresskill: Hampton Press. Naess, Arne. [2008] 2016. Ecology of Wisdom. London: Penguin Classics. Nancy, Jean-Luc. [1988] 1993. The Experience of Freedom. Trans. Bridget McDonald. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

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———. [1992] 2008. Corpus. Trans. Richard A.  Rand. New  York: Fordham University Press. Oosterling, Henk. 2003. Sens(a)ble Intermediality and Interesse: Towards an Ontology of the In-Between. Intermédialités: histoire et théorie des arts, des lettres et des techniques 1: 29–46. https://doi.org/10.7202/1005443ar. Accessed 16 Mar 2019. Raffestin, Claude. 1980. Pour une géographie du pouvoir. Paris: LITEC.

Index1

A Abram, David, 81, 106, 159, 161, 163 Agamben, Giorgio, 6, 76, 83, 84, 94n7, 102, 104, 134, 178, 187, 205 the Open, 6, 76, 102, 104, 178, 205 Anthropocentricism, 80, 84, 101, 154 Aphorism, 53, 56, 57, 62 Apparatus, 11, 12, 21, 39, 124, 131, 134, 141, 150, 163, 169, 185–188, 192–194, 196, 206, 207 Archive, 36, 70, 135, 154, 163, 189, 191 Ardnamurchan, 78, 81 Assynt, 21, 48–50 Augé, Marc, 67, 72n16 B Bachelard, Gaston, 57, 130, 141 Ban Macintyre, Duncan, 7 Barthes, Roland, 27, 50, 55, 64, 136

Basho, Matsuo, 31, 39, 66, 109, 118n1, 137, 141, 145n25 Bateman, Meg, 7, 15n11 BBC, 19, 20, 34, 42n7 Biophilia, 28, 95n11 Body bones, 105–107, 110–112, 115, 133, 175 skulls, 112, 175, 177 sky-burial, 110 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 121, 186, 197n3 Brexit, 195 Buchan, John, 47 Buell, Lawrence, 10, 11, 52 Burns, Robert, 7 Burnside, John, 12, 28, 99–116, 154, 204 C Clark, Thomas A., 12, 31, 47–70, 204 Clearances, 3, 4, 27, 69, 132, 202, 203

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s) 2019 C. Manfredi, Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6

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INDEX

Cockburn, Ken, 38, 39, 132, 133, 145n25, 149 Concrete poetry, 129 Conspectus, 134, 137, 139, 145n26, 195 Cracknell, Linda, 11, 12, 19–41, 49, 51, 53, 66–68, 123 Crawford, Robert, 28, 95n10 Crumley, Jim, 8, 60, 77, 85 Cumbria, 123, 124, 126, 127, 189 D Dalziel+Scullion, 154 De Certeau, Michel, 9, 20, 21, 29, 30, 39, 41, 44n17, 49, 62, 188, 201 Deleuze, Gilles, 42n8, 174, 182n7, 182n10, 183n14, 206 Dumfriesshire, 126, 127 Durkheim, Emile, 76, 80, 159, 160 E Ecoartscotland, 8 Ecocentrism, 84, 161, 162, 205 Ecocriticism/ecocritic/ecocritical, 9, 27, 91, 100 Ecofeminism, 161 Eco-Heroine, 160 Ecopoetry, 28, 95n13, 206 Elphinstone, Margaret, 34, 68 Essentialism, 160 F Filmpoem, 10, 11, 169, 174, 175, 178, 198, 205 Finlay, Alec, 11, 38, 39, 121–142, 149, 189, 194–197, 198n4, 198n6, 204, 205, 207 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 7, 53, 79, 130, 132

Fishing, 48, 49, 52, 192 Foucault, Michel, 27, 67, 134, 137, 144n19 Fulton, Hamish, 11, 12, 15n12, 34, 38, 47–70, 75, 123, 145n25, 189–192, 194, 203, 204 G Gaelic, 5, 25, 32, 48, 80, 130, 136, 137, 151, 156–158, 160, 163, 193, 195, 205 Gairn, Louisa, 8, 38, 108, 112 Genius loci, 38, 84, 208 Geocriticism/geocritic/geocritical, vi, 9, 20, 21 Gestalt, 162, 190 Gibson, Rob, 2 Goldsworthy, Andy, 11, 121–142, 154, 189, 190, 204, 205 Gormley, Anthony, 121, 122 Gramsci, Antonio, 197, 198n8 Greig, Andrew, 12, 21–23, 28, 29, 34, 47–70, 137 Griffiths, Jay, 60, 61, 154–156 Gunn, Neil M., 7, 28, 31, 47 H Haiku, 56, 65, 134 Hall, Emily, 153 Hall, Stuart, 20 Heterotopia, 27, 155, 163, 193, 206 Highlands, 2, 3, 31, 37, 42n5, 48, 58, 80, 85, 189 Home, 6, 13, 29, 31, 35, 39, 81, 87, 91, 92, 99, 100, 106, 107, 109, 112, 114, 116, 130, 137, 139, 209n6 Hurrel, Stephen, 154 Hut, 141 bothy, 32, 141, 150, 151

 INDEX 

I In-between fold, 175 interface, 202 third-space, 54, 174 Ingold, Tim, 25, 42n6, 71n7, 130, 154 Intercessor diplomat, 205 passeur, 76 Intermediality cross-media art, 208 remediation, 60 transmediality, 13, 188 Internet artists’ websites, 188 cyberspace, vi, 185, 191, 193 hyperlinks, 185, 193 social media, 11, 194 Islands Canna, 21, 25, 136, 156, 158, 161, 162, 193 Ceann Ear, 113 Ceann Iar, 112, 113 Lewis, 8 Orkney, 15n9, 114, 208 Outer Hebrides, 30 Shetland, 101, 114, 153, 167, 171, 174 Skye, 15n9, 37, 137, 160, 195 St Kilda, 113, 114 J Jamie, Kathleen, 11, 12, 14n2, 28, 30–32, 75–92, 99–116, 123, 136, 154, 175, 205 Jamieson, Robert Alan, 168–174, 179, 180, 181n2 Jencks, Charles, 122

215

K Kemp, Susan, 13, 167–181, 205 Kesson, Jessie, 34, 38 Knickerbocker, Scott, 86, 90 Kwon, Miwon, 10, 12, 29, 42n4, 164, 202, 210n6 L Land land reform, 1, 2, 14n1, 202, 207 ‘Our Land’ campaign, 1–13, 208 Land Art/land artist, 13, 58, 60, 64, 78, 93n3, 123, 126, 143n12, 160 Landseer, Edwin, 83 Latour, Bruno, 100, 130 Lebenswelt/Lebenswelten, 90, 161, 206 Lefebvre, Henri, 9, 27, 67, 124, 133, 134, 142n4, 203 Lévy, Jacques, 21, 155 Lister-Kaye, John, 8, 69, 77 Loose, Gerry, 11, 12, 34, 68, 75, 109, 128, 136, 145n25, 204 Louvel, Liliane, vii, 12, 177, 178, 183n13 M MacCaig, Norman, 7, 22, 23, 29, 48–51, 88 MacDiarmid, Hugh, 7, 136, 144n22 Macfarlane, Robert, 12, 19–41, 67, 203 Mackay Brown, George, 7, 28, 115, 130 MacLean, Sorley, 7, 28, 39, 79, 144n20 Map, 14n3, 19–21, 23, 25, 27, 30, 35, 39, 41, 41n1, 41n2, 49, 109, 126, 129–131, 135–138, 144n14, 145n23, 151, 152, 156, 162, 170, 191, 192, 198n6, 210n7

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Material turn, 12, 130 McAdam, Stuart, 12, 19–41 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 52, 82, 94n6, 139, 159 Meschonnic, Henri, 158, 167 Michaux, Henri, 141, 155 Milieu, 28, 106, 138, 139, 141, 145n27, 168, 169, 202, 204, 205, 207 Mitchison, Naomi, 28 Morgan, Edwin, 7, 130, 157, 158, 165n9 Morin, Edgar, 209 Morizot, Baptiste, 100, 103 Mountains Ben Nevis, 150, 189 Cairngorms, 30, 31, 42n7, 50, 51, 58, 60, 64, 65, 71n14, 71n15, 85, 195 N Naess, Arne, 60, 145n28, 204 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 9, 67, 83, 143n12, 153, 191, 207 Nature ‘Natural’ Scotland, 3, 4, 9, 30 nature writing, 27–30, 32, 34, 38, 49, 80, 81, 104, 114, 203 wilderness, 4, 5, 27, 28, 84, 106, 109, 110, 113, 114, 117n2, 155, 173 wildlife, 2, 27, 77, 85, 109, 150 wildness, 12, 28, 152 Nonhuman animals bacteria, 109 birds, 64, 100, 101, 103, 104, 106, 108, 110, 154, 156–158, 162, 182n11 deer, hinds, 81, 82, 85 jellyfish, 86–88 more-than-human, 69, 158, 161, 192

other-than-human, 65, 69 sheep, 3, 35, 36, 78, 110, 124, 172, 175, 177 whales, 90, 100–103 Noticing, 50, 108 P Pastoral, 3, 4, 52, 64, 106, 107, 109, 110, 113, 114, 124, 142n4 Performance, 11, 25, 30, 40, 42n7, 59, 69, 129, 149–151, 156–158, 160–162, 165n11, 167, 169, 170, 186, 189, 193 Philipsz, Susan, 13, 152, 153 Photography, 198n6, 205, 206 Prieto, Eric, 9, 13 R Rancière, Jacques, 9, 69, 128, 129, 192 Renga, 130–132, 134, 141, 144n14, 196 Riach, Alan, vii, 6, 7, 92 Romanticism, 3, 52, 77, 80, 81, 92, 110, 113, 114, 152, 173 sublime, 28, 40, 50–51, 54–55, 76, 87–90, 101, 114, 156, 173, 204 S Said, Edward, 6, 20 Scheese, Don, 27, 28 Scott, Andy, 122 Scott, Walter, 7, 113 Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), 2, 3, 30, 154 Sculpture, 121, 122, 125, 128, 129, 142n5, 143n8, 143n12, 150, 206 Sheilings, 37, 42n5, 67 Shepherd, Nan, 7, 31, 38, 42n7, 50, 51, 60, 81

 INDEX 

Shetlandic, 168, 169, 172 Signature, 56, 126, 134, 135, 153, 168 Site-specific art, 10, 29, 63, 192, 193, 196 Situationists, 9, 59, 62 Smithson, Robert, 130, 134, 162 site and non-site, 172, 187 Smout, T.C., 7 SNP, 2, 14n2, 19 Soja, Edward, v, 27, 67 Solastalgia, 29, 68 Solnit, Rebecca, 31–33, 76 Sound music, vi, 42n7, 151, 153, 156, 157, 162, 164n7, 178 recording, 25, 42n7, 151–156, 163, 167, 168, 173, 181n2, 189, 191, 193, 205 silence, 55, 59, 71n9, 89, 133, 159, 163, 172, 178 singing, 32 soundscape, 100, 151–156, 164n5, 182n8, 192 soundtrack, 154, 155, 172, 173 Spaciousness, 49, 53, 133, 203 Spatial turn, v, 8, 12, 152, 195 Spiritualism animistic, 61, 79, 159 Cailleach, 160, 161 Celtic mythology, 80, 160 Jainist, 79 Zen Buddhism, 60 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 31 Sublime, 28, 40, 50–51, 54–55, 76, 87–90, 101, 114, 156, 173, 204 Szuba, Monika, 8

217

T Tally, Robert T., 9 Technology, vi, 11, 13, 28, 115 Territory, 2, 6, 7, 11, 12, 21, 29, 31, 34–36, 101, 122, 125, 132, 204 territoriality, 7, 42n8, 69, 100, 132, 168, 204, 207 Thoreau, Henry David, 59, 81 Tiberghien, Gilles, 125 Topophilia, 28 Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), 80, 93n4 Transcendentalism, 49 Transience, 12, 56, 59, 67–69, 75, 86, 89, 92, 99, 110, 111, 122, 123, 149, 151, 153, 178, 179, 192, 203 Tree, 66, 99 Tuulikki, Hanna, 11, 13, 21, 25, 26, 42n7, 136, 156–162, 165n10, 192, 193, 205, 208 U Unheimlich, 37, 177 Umwelt, 62, 94n7 W Walking hodology, 55, 125 rewalking, 31, 36, 38, 39 stravaiging, 50, 51, 202 Watt, Roseanne, 11, 13, 167–181 Westphal, Bertrand, 9, 21 White, Kenneth, 31 Wightman, Andy, 1, 2, 14n1 Wordsworth, William, 31