Lockdown
seems to be psychologically transformative. The famously grumpy guy on the
street I live on is now doing pensioners’ shopping; people whose social media
I follow for news and politics are, for the first time, posting
photos of birch buds unfurling. Personally, I seem (hopefully briefly) to have lost
the ability to read extended prose. I'm drawn so frequently
back to screens, that focus is hard to sustain - dragged into news of what still seems an even balance of extraordinary generosity and unnecessary cruelty. Instead, I’ve been taking seriously my daily 'one form
of exercise' and getting my literary fix almost exclusively from short
bursts of focus on poets.
And the
practical effects of lockdown have been - for me, so far - less severe than expected. Although
I had several dream events lined
up for the spring and summer (from an ocean conference in Newfoundland, to a
long Irish sea voyage in a tiny wooden boat, and a talk in the Highland Park distillery) most events have been transformed
into other kinds of collaboration, with generous people finding ways to turn
cancellation to adaptation. My bigger projects – which would have involved
setting off for extensive Atlantic travel in June – have simply been turned
back-to-front. My usual habit is to start by travelling in the most unplanned way possible, gaining
access to new areas of interest by talking to people, then allowing the perspectives I picked up to inform how I read back home. For Afloat: Small Boats and Sea Spray I’ll be doing the reverse: burying myself in books - mainly about the cultures of Atlantic Greenland and Canada (particularly first nations) - for most of 2020 and taking
to the sea in the project’s final phases. My very first trip for Afloat happened during the storms of February, wandering the Irish coastline and meeting with boat builders...
It involved some extremely invigorating, almost camera-wrecking, storm paddling in the kayak:
Material gathered during that week will sustain me for some time (possibly for an essay or article soon, just need to decide what/where).
And there’s plenty to look forward to too. The paperback for The Frayed Atlantic
Edge comes out in May (alongside the US release). This would've been
accompanied by a book tour. I have a few weeks to think up ways to create
online equivalents, which I hope will include poets or musicians (as most of my favourite events last year did). It was nice to get the cover
design this week, the paperback reinventing the hardback design…
…with the nice added feature of quotes from reviews:
And the verdict of the committe of the Highland Book Prize, for which The Frayed Atlantic Edge is up alongside the work of three of my favourite authors (Roseanne Watt, Kathleen Jamie & Ali Smith), will be announced on May 9th.
There's also been purpose to be found in new kinds of project that will make good use of mine and
other people’s time. I haven’t set foot in my secondary school, Glossopdale
Community College, since I left, but will now be judging two essay prizes for
the pupils. My own second-year undergrads at the University of Birmingham - 249 of them, studying historical
theory - have had their summer exam cancelled (they’d already written an essay
which would've been 50% but is now 100% of the mark). So I’m turning the payment from a cancelled
book event into credit with an online bookshop as the prize for an
essay competition. This will hopefully provide those of them who want it with both something to focus on and
some writing practice over the next two months. They can choose their own prompts,
but the only thing that seemed fitting to give as an example, in this crisis-ridden moment (and with 2020 also the International Year of the Tree) was 'What
kind of times are these, when to talk about trees is almost a crime, because it
implies silence about so many horrors?' (Bertolt Brecht). Discuss.’
This brings
us back to getting outdoors, among the trees, for ‘one form of exercise a day’.
I’ve been for one run this week, but my running shoes are falling apart so badly that my
feet ended up full of twigs. So I’ve headed out in the kayak almost every evening. To kayak locally I’d usually drive a few miles and throw the boat onto the Severn
or the Avon. Instead, I’ve been putting it straight into the canal by the house (these two are photos from last summer, hence the people and lights in the pubs).
Some days, I’ve been heading backwards and forwards along the 2 mile stretch
between locks to practice technique and build speed. I’ve never really treated
kayaking as workout before, and never paddled with earphones in. Pushing the
speed, while switching musical genres every 4 miles (yesterday was Salt House’s,
Huam, Alice Coltrane’s Journey in Satchidananda, Richard
Dawson’s 2020, and Allegaeon’s Apoptosis) has felt surprisingly
escapist and indulgent.
But the real interest has come from local exploration: finding the
ways that midlands canals and rivers link up. This has meant
passing along waterways behind houses in Worcestershire villages that occasionally
have large piles of toilet rolls packed into glass-doored back rooms. But more
often, it has meant confrontations with emboldened nature on these living waterways. I’ve never seen so
many kingfishers or defiant-looking herons…
…and the
roe deer, muntjacs & foxes have been out in force:
I’ve
found nests of long-tailed tits and grey wagtails…
…and the
evening light has often been exceptional:
The
weather has transformed day by day. Lockdown began with bright, still days of
surprising warmth. But then winds rose until even the canal had waves and
snow flurries. This quickly-shifting weather has been staggeringly evocative of the places I can’t be.
Rounding a corner into a sudden burst of headwind, it was impossible not to
imagine the rolling waves that were conjured by a similar breeze on the Atlantic
coast of the Isle of Lewis:
At the
same time, spring has been happening out of the window of the room I work in. Like
last year, wrens are nesting on the windowsill, so I’m hoping for more of these
ridiculous faces before too long:
The best
new addition this year is that ducks are nesting on the pond I dug last spring.
Since I’m using
the garden for a bit of extra exercise, I’m hoping occasional offerings of oats will be enough to mean
we coexist without them deciding against raising ducklings here. That would make for the purest form of lockdown entertainment.
And the
sense of investment in small pleasures and displeasures has been one of the
most striking things about this strange time. Being emotionally destabilised
and uprooted has meant that music, weather, and the actions of other people and
species all seem to have exaggerated potential to swing feelings in wild
directions. Seeing small acts of generosity is a source of disproportionate joy,
as is cheering on those companies who put the wellbeing of employees above next
month’s balance sheet. But witnessing anything uncharitable on social media suddenly
feels more immediate and damaging than it usually would.
I think the
deeply-felt immediacy of such small things is where poetry has come in handy. I’ve
found myself filtering these experiences through the imagined eyes of people
who see more clearly than I do, whether that’s favourite poets like Gillian
Allnutt, Vahni Capildeo and Moya Cannon (whose new Donegal Tarantella has
accompanied me on several kayak trips), or poets I haven’t read for years, and
not even liked much in the past, such as John Ashbery. For the first time I’m
seeing the logic of Jon Lerner’s view that ‘Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend
to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange
kind of presence’; although I still think that’s far truer of many other
writers (or even - possibly - that contemporary poetry does this better than poetry used to in Ashbery's heyday?), it’s certainly the characteristic I’m finding most valuable in things I'm reading now.
One
event this week brought a particularly intense mix of feelings. This was
learning of the passing of Máiréad Robinson. The email I received described Máiréad perfectly: ‘a powerful intellect who exuded kindness at every step’. There’s
no doubt that she and her husband (the cartographer Tim Robinson) were one
of the great cultural power couples of our age and also exceptionally generous
with their time and knowledge. The body of ideas they produced, since arriving
on the Aran Islands with just a suitcase in the 1970s, might amount to a richer
appreciation of a place than exists for anywhere else in Ireland or Britain – as rich
at least as even Nan Shepherd or George Mackay Brown. The Robinsons learnt
Irish together and collaborated intensively on the rediscovery of the
sophisticated and beautiful forms of Irish coastal living that were just
beginning to be appreciated, after a long period of dismissal and neglect, in the
1970s and ‘80s. These were expressed through annotated maps and books of extraordinarily poetic prose.
You can read more about this work in an excellent interview conducted by Pippa Marland on the Land Lines website entitled, with a typically Robinsonesque turn of phrase, 'Adequacy is for Archangels'.
I first
met Máiréad and Tim when kayaking down the west coast of Ireland in 2017. I’d recently read
some paragraphs in Tim’s writing in which he praised Connemara hospitality, so
I felt emboldened to drop in. When I rang, the night before
arriving, it was Máiréad who answered and embraced the idea of a visitor,
however damp and unwashed. She made sure I didn’t want to arrive before 10am
(because, she said, they were looking forward to an indulgently slow start) and told me the
timing was ideal because they’d just been given more eggs than they could
possibly eat themselves.
I slept,
the night before I met the Robinsons, on the bleak low peninsula of Slyne Head in heavy
rain. Here's looking back the morning after:
So when I arrived at their door on the pier in the tiny village of
Roundstone I was even less presentable than usual. This is a house from whose windows every coming-and-going of small boats in the bay can be observed...
The warmth of the welcome was glorious. I’d expected to stay for
about an hour, have a short chat and, if I was lucky, a lunch. But we went visiting – dropping
in both on favourite people and favourite coastal places – and it was nine
hours later by the time I set off again. It was, no doubt, one of the happiest,
most story-filled, days of the journey: a reminder that meeting your heroes doesn't always fall short of even the most exaggerated expectations. I wish I'd asked to take their photo that day.
A few
weeks ago I visited Máiréad and Tim in the home they’d moved to in London, and
once again found myself immersed in a world of fabulous stories and a
generosity that, even in West Hampstead, felt embedded in coastal
tradition (where culture was shaped by the principle that everyone coming from
the water must be warmly welcomed, because sending someone back to sea could be their undoing). We talked about tiny details of the construction of particular boats,
and about individual Connemara singers and how their geographical origins shaped the inflections of their songs: the living water ways of Carna, Inishnee and Lettermullen. The same comment, whoever made it,
would draw a small, wry smile from Tim and a glorious big guffaw from Máiréad –
perfectly expressive of the ways in which she was the outward-looking,
gregarious element in their collaborative balance.
Then, two
weeks ago, I was asked to give the opening talk at a morning devoted to the
significance of the Robinsons’ work at the Clifden Arts Festival
in September. I'd looked forward to hearing the witty and wise voice of Máiréad at the other end of a phone while piecing together the things I’d say. The
sad thing about the timing of Máiréad’s passing is that her legacy, amid so
many current crises, might not immediately get the recognition and celebration
it deserves. I hope some ways can be found – now or when the virus threat
subsides – to honour her influence on Irish and UK culture. For now, I’m going
to ask permission to call my second-year students’ essay competition ‘The Máiréad Robinson Prize'. And my thoughts will very much be with Tim.
The only
prose I’ve successfully read this week has been Robinson writings that conjure
their personalities, especially the late essays and the early Stones of Aran
books. They’ve sent me on wilder shifts of emotion than anything else – feeling
intensely the privilege of having had some small glimpse into the
Robinsons’ world. One thing I’m entirely convinced of is that we’ll weather our
current storms in the best possible ways if we all strive to be just a little
bit more Máiréad Robinson.
