International Bog Frog Blog Day

At least two months had passed since my last sighting of a full-size adult woolly mammoth. Then, just two days ago, I encountered one here in north Shropshire.

The Beringia Centre outside Whitehorse in The Yukon boasts several versions of this extinct behemoth. The permafrost beneath a tundra landscape preserves all sorts of specimens from 10,000 years ago and beyond. Beringia is the geo-scientists’ name for the land mass that once covered a joined-up Siberia and North America. The woolly mammoth is the star of the show in any recreation of life before the comings and goings of the ice sheets and the voracious hunting peoples who used the land bridge to colonise present day Canada and America.

Just a few miles up the way from my home in Shropshire is an extensive area called Fenn’s, Whixall and Bettisfield Mosses. After 20 years of careful work to undo the depredations of man and allow nature to take its course, the Mosses are beginning to resemble what the Beringian tundra would have been like when vast herds of mammoths grazed. And therefore to resemble what the tundra may return to if the permafrost continues to recede via climate change. The remains of mammoths have been found in Shropshire too…..hence the hulking, shaggy presence in a disused barn on land owned by Natural England, guardians of the Mosses.

Last Sunday was International Bogland Day, and I was lucky to be part of a group given a guided half-day tour of the Mosses. Part of the north Shropshire landscape is notable for a smattering of small lakes, the Meres. These are the relics of glacial melt in the deeper hollows. The Mosses are the spongey, peaty, fibrous chest-wig that covers the slightly more raised ground. Since industrial peat-cutting was stopped in 1990 the Mosses have gradually regenerated and now sustain a rich roster of insects, birds, plants and small mammals. Things can only get better too as efforts continue to persuade farmers to complete a surrounding barrier of sympathetically managed land, thus retaining the life-pulsing moisture within the Mosses.

On a warm July day the swathes of exposed peat shimmered like a desert runway, only without the benefit of direct sunshine. The temperature on the Mosses is routinely well above the temperature just a few yards away. You can see why early hominids made the link between peat and fire. Left to its own devices, peat is very good at retaining moisture and sealing in carbon. It is a living organism with myriads of fine filaments that weave and bind and inter-penetrate and support many forms of life. When people bag it up and spread it on their garden they pulverise thousands of years of growth and release a belch of carbon equivalent to 50 miles of high-speed driving in a standard car.

As well as the more usual flora and fauna, the Mosses are home to growing numbers of nightjar, curlew, lapwing, hobby, short-eared owl, snipe, shovellers, teal, peregrines, brimstone butterflies, water voles and rare species of frogs and toads. Moths are somehow always seen as less sexy, but the walk guide did casually mention that there are over 300 varieties on the Mosses. Some creatures are poling their way back from the brink of extinction, particularly the raft spiders and various kinds of dragonflies and damselflies. We were buzzed continuously by platoons of neon dragonflies, including plenty of white-faced darters, long since thought to have taken the same involuntary redundancy package as the dodo. Some of the clumps of sedges and sphagnum moss pillows looked like miniature versions of Piccadilly Circus, throbbing with garish lights and pulsing signals.

There are plenty of adders, but they are fortunately shy types (go to the island of Jura if you want to see adders…along with George Orwell’s writing retreat). The other main predator is the insect-eating sundew plant, which is all over the Mosses in tiny, spore-like clusters, very close to the sweating turf. Innocent-looking beaded droplets tremble on the end of each sundew frond, hovering over the tiny,oblivious, flies. Now that’s a scenario they should have included in the classic 1950s paranoia movie The Fly. It wasn’t even in the over-blown (fly-blown?) remake starring Jeff Goldblum.

There are pine stumps that date back 3,500 years, but the Mosses do not support any current tree growth, though there are plenty of dwarf species amongst the reeds and buckthorn scrub. There is an area in the middle splendidly called Oaf’s Orchard. I’d like to start a campaign to reinstate the word ‘oaf’…as in “Parliament is now home to a particular breed of political oaf, and Cameron-Clegg is merely the current Über-Oaf”. Is it mere coincidence that the manifest drivel phrase ‘Big Society’ has the same initials as another BS acronym? I digress. I digress therefore Iam.

The mammoth in the disintegrating barn looks to be in need of some energetic grooming, but is perhaps all the more true to life for that. In the dark interior, lit only by shafts of daylight pouring through rust patches in the corrugated iron, it has a presence somehow more lumberingly grand than its partners-in-taxidermy in the Yukon Beringia Centre.

At the other end of the scale, the day after the ramble round the Mosses I became acutely aware of another connection with the wetter parts of the Canadian tundra. My legs are now mottled with assertively cheerful red bite bumps. If I had been in Yukon or Alaska I would have automatically slapped on my Muskol pheromone forcefield and biked home with unbitten legs and a female sasquatch on my trail. I will be going back to the Mosses and Meres regularly, but I’ll be Muskolmaintenantman…safe in the knowledge that I will have gone the way of the woolly mammoth by the time the sasquatch has been reintroduced to north Shropshire.

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Which conjures an image from an early Robert Crumb comic strip, Bill Ding Meets Bigfoot, where an uptight all-American male meets an Amazonian yeti woman in the woods and is turned on to all sorts of interesting new experiences. Crumb was one of the first artists to illustrate the comic book narratives of Harvey Pekar, who died last week.

Pekar became better known after his graphic novellas under the title of American Splendour became the basis of a successful documentary film about his life. He was a notoriously grouchy and cantankerous individual, but also a gifted writer who paved the way for greater talents by prising the comic book genre away from its superhero imagery. Pekar made it possible for ’ordinary’ lives to be seen as rich material for graphic art, ensuring that cutting edge comics caught up with other media such as films and novels. He was lucky to get the support of someone as skilled and artistically cunning as Robert Crumb in the early stages. Pekar’s stories are best when interpreted by a sympathetic and talented draughtsman, but he is a symbol of the determined outsider, stubbornly convinced of his vision and sticking to it until the world learns to see with his eyes.

In the UK there is still a lingering snobbery about comic book narrative, a snobbery not shared in Europe, Latin America, North America, Japan and many other places. Crumb himself remains supreme (and interestingly controversial), but in my own limited knowledge I’d certainly recommend Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Julie Doucet, Joe Sacco, Linda Barry, Aline Kaminsky, Chester Brown, Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez…and from these shores, the genteel but biting satire of Posy Simmonds.

There are some lines on pages that make words. There are some lines on pages that make drawings. When the two are combined by someone who knows what they are doing a whole world of subtle inter-connections opens up.

A farewell tip of the inkwell to Harvey.

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Owww! Those pink pingos on my legs are itching. “Something in my veins bloodier than blood”, as Jeff Tweedy out of Wilco sang…

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My Mum has now been moved to a different nursing home. I picture her travelling along on a gentle conveyor belt. A gentle speed, but still enough to create a soft breeze, a breeze that catches at tatters of her memory, teases at them, then detaches them so that they drift away behind her. Those tatters can no more be collected and put back than a dead leaf can be grafted back onto a tree.

Fortunately a stage arrives when there can be no memory of ever having possessed memory.

There is real consolation in seeing my Dad enjoy some days of simple, unremarkable pleasures after stretching his own frailty into the thinnest of threads through dutiful care over the last few years.

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 Whilst travelling up and down the country, writing, looking for gainful employment, trying to get Pick Up the Pieces picked up by a publisher, and starting some d.i.y., I am also doing a little life laundering. I don’t have very many possessions to whittle down, but I am trying to do something about my books and my music.

I realise that I have been what might be called an obsessive-completist. I used to think that if someone had written some great music, or a fine song, or a good book, then everything they touched must be gold. It must be right to gather as much of their art as possible, mustn’t it? Errr…not true if you think about it – very few, if any, can survive the ‘complete works’ test in terms of quality.

So, I have been carrying out a cull of the book shelves and the cd racks. I have been making compilations of loved music and getting rid of the rest. In this context it’s interesting to see who so far remains complete and unweeded.

In fiction it is Alice Munro. In poetry it’s Don Paterson (though poetry is easy in a way as you get your Blake, your Yeats etc all there in a single volume). To be an obsessive-completist in classical music was always beyond my means and my space, but in non-classical music it is Richard Thompson whose cds just will not crunch down into my own version of a Best Of.

And now he’s rubbing it in by bringing out a new album later this year, Dream Attic. Will that also pass into the hallowed shelf space occupied by the rest of his music? Maybe obsessive-completism never disappears entirely, it just gets more narrowly focused. I see it has a track called Demons In Her Dancing Shoes so I’m hooked already…

Ted

xox

Take What You Need You Think Will Last

“But whatever you wish to keep you’d better grab it fast”.

Over the past month, various events and thought patterns seem to have conspired to give extra force to that great song (It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue by Bob Dylan). Memory has been one theme. Wouldn’t it be nice to think that we can grab our most prized memories and keep them safe…to think that it is those memories that will remain uncorrupted by age and sickness…wouldn’t that be nice? If only will power could extend that far.

The second verse of Baby Blue alludes to another theme that recurs in this blog: “Take what you have gathered from coincidence”.

One of those glorious moments of chancey synchronicity hit me between the eyes the other day when I wandered into Southampton City Art Gallery. I have been staying at my sister’s in Southampton since I came back from Canada and felt in need of a break between visits to my Mum and to my Dad. I have a long list of previous convictions for wandering round art galleries. Socialism? Communism? Conservatism? Hinduism? Calvinism? Give me recidivism every time…I repeat my follies therefore I am.

Anyway, I walked up the stairs and made a turn to the left in order to view the permanent collection before checking out the special exhibition. Slap bang in front of me, the size of a fat barn door, was a work called Old Crow, Yukon by David Tremlett. Instead of a gasp of appreciative surprise (it is a magnificently striking abstract evocation of Yukon essence) I found myself laughing with the shock and pleasure of such an unexpected gift, such a moment of nourishing connection. It felt like one small salve towards an eventual healing of disappointment.

Old Crow is the only community of any size in Yukon that I have yet to visit. You have to fly to Old Crow, there are no roads, and a canoe trip would take many days of linking together various watercourses, probably starting from Alaska. Old Crow lies within the Arctic Circle and has about 300 residents, most of them from the Vuntut Gwitch’in First Nation. Shirley, the Tagish / Carcross lady who invited me to the rattle-making described in an earlier post, is originally from Old Crow. Shirley was also a prominent organiser of the Solstice event I wrote about in the last entry. Much of the impetus for the Solstice celebrations in Carcross came from a dream that Shirley had and described to the local Elders. Shirley now has an anglicised family name, but her original Old Crow family name translates as ‘Two Rivers Meeting’.

My house-sit for the wonderful 5 weeks referred to in the early parts of this blog was in a home built on land once occupied by Shirley. She helped design and build the house itself. From Old Crow, Yukon, to Southampton, England, via several human links along the way. Apparently David Tremlett lived in Old Crow for a couple of years in the early 1980s and has made various paintings, drawings and art projects from his time there. His large canvas in Southampton City Gallery is underscored by a warmly appreciative paragraph by the writer Helen Simpson. I won’t attempt to describe the image, but it has a powerful simplicity and an overall sense of harmony and wholeness. The sheer scale of it evokes the vast dimensions of the Yukon elementscapes.

A spore of wilderness seed amidst the pounding traffic and the dehumanising malls, the paving-concrete-steel-glass brute force of the city.

“The empty-handed painter from your streets / Is drawing crazy patterns on your sheets”……

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Mentioning art galleries reminds me that I have been intending to put in some words of encouragement for UK readers to explore a little of Canada’s art history. Before I first went over in 2005 I was truly ignorant of Canadian art. The European and British movements and big names tend to dominate over here, with liberal helpings of American art from the last 60 years. Other cultures are given headline exhibitions from time to time, but Canada has remained better known for its music and writing than for its painting or sculpture.

So it is nice to record (and how many nations can say this?) that probably the best known single artist in Canada’s short history is a woman – Emily Carr. Her life story and her bold solo expeditions around the Pacific North-West coast are fascinating in themselves, as are many of her treescapes and paintings of aboriginal life. I love her swirling, dance-of-life forest images that teem with energy and hum with depth.

The other key figures to check out from the formative period spanning 1915 – 1970 are Tom Thomson and the artists known as The Group of Seven. Thomson produced a batch of highly influential landscapes in a few feverish years before dying young. The Group of Seven were partly motivated by a desire to carry forward the breakthroughs in colour and composition that Thomson had achieved. And they also had a deliberate mission to explore the idea of a specifically Canadian and ‘Northern’ vision. Perhaps the most interesting (in his writings as well as in his painting) is Lawren Harris, who pared down his landscapes to bold and increasingly abstracted forms. They each deserve to be much better known outside Canada…do check ‘em out if you are not already familiar with them.

Of course, within Canada itself the reaction against the ‘national’ art that The Group of Seven came to embody has been going on for some time, with all contemporary currents and eddies well represented (Canadada anyone?). When I was passing through Prince George in northern BC recently I re-visited the excellent Two Rivers Gallery, where the current exhibition included a huge representation of Tom Thomson’s iconic The Jack Pine, but where the tree and rocks consisted of densely packed images of enthusistically copulating wild animals.

Not all modern or contemporary Canadian art uses The Group of Seven, Thomson and Emily Carr as touchstones, whether ‘pro’ or ‘anti’. I saw a fine retrospective of Jean-Paul Riopelle in Calgary…like luscious mosaic takes on the best of Jackson Pollock. Jeff Wall has been at the forefront of photographic art for some 40 years. I’m ashamed to say that the only others I have heard of, and know to be Canadian, are Michael Snow, Janet Cardiff and Peter Doig. And then there is also the wealth of vibrant art produced by First Nations and Inuit carvers, sculptors, craftsfolk and painters, much of it astonishing in its simplicity, symmetrical beauty, and updating of traditional forms.  

Becoming even a little familiar with another country’s art is a happy aspect of travel as opposed to tourism. As the world becomes rapidly more and more uniform and a globalised monoculture becomes more and more entrenched, art is one of the few unique experiences left. When I am too decrepit to ramble the mountains, lakes, forests, rivers and tundra, I would love to make an east-to-west trip across Canada, zigzagging a trail around the musical and artistic map.

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I seem to be inhabiting a strange bubble of unasked for time just now. As I write this I am conscious that at this point in July I had planned to be exploring the area around Inuvik and beginning the long trek back down the Dempster Highway, with lots more to come. Instead I am starting to bring forward everything I had assumed would be happening in September: a search for some paid work; renewed efforts to get Pick Up the Pieces out there; consistent work on other writing; reconnecting with family and Friends; work on my home-nest in case I have to sell up; getting my prize sweet peas up to competition standard (…not…).

Except that it is all in a slo-mo daze and haze, a waking dream of motorway drives, infinite subtleties of maternal madness, and an overwhelming sense of several lives on hold…the double bars of a ‘pause’ key firmly pressed down.

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As a special gift for Owl’s 500,000th birthday, Raven organised a collection. He received contributions from Bear, Coyote, Wolf, Salmon, Turtle, Eagle and many other entities. After much deliberation they decided to buy Owl a state-of-the-art digital camera. The camera could take the best still pictures in the world, and could shoot hours of video film as well.

Owl was suitably grateful, and everyone was very pleased that they had given Owl such a fine present.

However, over the course of the next 12 months no-one ever saw Owl taking any photographs or filming anything with the camcorder function. Finally Raven made a series of spy flights around Owl’s nest and was shocked to see that the camera was still in its unopened box, propping up a bookcase and gathering dust and downy feathers. Raven reported this to all those who had contributed to the gift, and on Owl’s 500,001st birthday they came to confront him.

As spokesperson, Raven did not mince words: ‘We clubbed together to buy you the most expensive, most versatile and most wonderful camera in the world…but you have not even bothered to take it out of its box, and you have not taken one single picture or captured one single minute of film…why?’

Owl gave them a piercing look, shrugged his wings a couple of times and replied: ‘I am very grateful for your generous gift, and I considered very carefully after you gave it to me, but, you see, I don’t really want to take any photographs or video film of my world…I want to see everything, to remember everything as I want it to be, not as it is.’

(This is a true story. What happened next is less clear but legend has it that Owl gave the camera to a charity shop in aid of cattle, called Oxenfam, and Coyote stole it. But that’s another story).

*                    *                    *                    *

“Strike another match, go start anew…”

Ted xox

These Boots Were Made For Floating

Mum is now snagged on a health and social care rock: physically well enough to still be alive, to eat and drink and be given enemas; mentally everywhere and nowhere at the same time. An existence cannot be more simplified.

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I am back here in Wem right now, but about to head down to my sister’s again. Only a week ago I was still in the far west of Canada. My immediate awareness of the difference between the UK and Yukon / BC is centred around the sheer density of the population here. It’s not a judgemental thing, just an observation of fact. Instead of inhabiting space people tend to contest space, to consume it like any other commodity.

Robert Macfarlane wrote a whole book (The Wild Places, Granta 2007) based on a quest to see if he could find any places in Britain that could still be called wild. It is part of a growing, and interesting, genre that is reflected in many other countries around the world. He found that there are still a few landscapes and terrains in the UK that can perhaps be called wild, though they are more and more embattled. However, his main conclusion is that we now need to train ourselves to appreciate wild nature in miniature…in the tangled thickets of mini-woodlands, in the small uncultivated and unbuilt on enclaves in both urban and rural settings.

I am all for seeing Heaven in a grain of sand, and for celebrating nature in the minute details of life, but Macfarlane’s conclusion is also a form of desperate acceptance of the unacceptable. Like a boxer dwelling on a good jab he landed before being knocked senseless in the first round. We need both the inward micro-wild and the outward macro-wild. And it is the latter that is the most under threat, and the most removed from many people’s experience.

Anyway, before I left Ashcroft I spent a fine day stravaiging the desert hills and the clay-crumble canyons above the Thompson River. I picked a sackful of the freshest, pastel-purplest, ‘smudgingest’ sage to mail to the Tagish lady who led the rattle-making described in an earlier post. I ended up down beside the fast-flowing water. With my flight brought forward 2 months to leave Vancouver the following day I needed to mark the moment, and to lighten my baggage. I removed my dust-caked and well-worn boots and launched them carefully onto the Thompson. They floated away swiftly, riding the currents and the eddies, and disappeared from sight, riding confidently in mid-stream around a wide bend.

I imagined them bobbing all the many miles down to Lytton, where the even mightier Fraser River assumes control of the watershed. They are maybe snagged up in a fallen tree by the Stein Valley N’lakapamux mountains where they left many cleat marks three years ago. I strode back into Ashcroft in my flip-flops reflecting on the old Mexican proverb: if you want to give God a good laugh, tell Him your plans!

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I have also been reflecting on my Summer Solstice day in Yukon. I went to a fine celebration of the longest day in Carcross (Caribou Crossing) organised by the Tagish / Carcross First Nation.

I joined the almost exclusively First Nations throng at 4.28 a.m., the official dawn, though it had not even become properly dark all night. A wide circle of around 60 people formed around an open fire by the main lake, with the mellow early morning sunlight soothing everyone into wakefulness. Each participant cleansed themselves in a ‘smudging’ ceremony, a sweet-smelling shower in sage smoke. The local Chief and a female Elder welcomed everyone and we all introduced ourselves.

There was a lengthy period for individuals to call out the names of deceased family and friends, to summon them to stand behind us and join in the celebration of light and warmth. There was singing and ritual feeding of the fire. Some of the Elders and visiting guests from other First Nations gave short, impressive speeches. The day ended in the bold midnight sun, again around the fire, with the focal point of the whole event being the dedication of the foundations of a new potlatch house in the village. The outlawing of the potlatch was seen by the conquering Europeans as essential to undermining the social cohesion of the First Nations, so its restoration as a living institution has enormous significance.

The day was filled with eating, talking, music, stories, and a great performance by a Tlingit dance troupe. The whole event was also centred around a link between the local First Nations and the Whitehorse Buddhist group (who are very strong in the relatively small town). The Buddhists were hosting a visit from a rimpoche (leading priest) from Bhutan and four of his associates. The rimpoche arrived mid-morning and spoke at length about Buddhism, the desirability of links with other cultures, and the philosophy of the ‘Medicine Buddha’. This was part of a speaking tour based around links with a Buddhist grouping in California.

I have always felt a level of attraction towards Buddhism, particularly the Zen path, with its poetic concentration and fine balance of seriousness and humour. Some of this attraction also stems from the fact that Buddhists seem to have indulged in infinitely fewer bloody wars and abusive power games than the other major world religions. I know you shouldn’t necessarily judge faiths and ideologies by the humans who practice them, but as century upon century mounts up the violent evidence, you have to question whether the horrors are somehow a product of deep flaws within the faiths and ideologies themselves.

At the same time, I have often felt alienated by the forms of Buddhism that stick to rituals and texts that were designed for an earlier time and a very different culture. I have found more relevance in the form of Sufi practice that tries to adapt spiritual life (there’s the ‘s’ word again) to the contemporary world, particularly through the use of storytelling. And I have to say that on Solstice day in Carcross I found that the rimpoche’s words and the exaggerated air of holy reverence left me feeling that the rhetoric and the ritual were far greater than the connective substance. I bow to the rimpoche’s vast learning and have full respect for the culture and traditions of Bhutan. But there is a strong vein of Buddhism in the west that is in danger of becoming a lifestyle accessory, a bolt-on array of flags and clothing and mini-shrines that give a comfortable gloss to lives of rampant materialism. Take a good look at magazines such as Shambala Sun for the full capitalism-compatible package of shiny happy (expensive) meditation retreats and plush sects, all with their own authentic, well-dentured, beatific leaders.

For me there was a clash between the flawed, honest, questing, elementally connected First Nations presence, and the smoothly detached charm of the Buddhist presence. I was probably missing something (my mind snagged on an octagon pattern in the dancers’ costume) but it was a fascinating, absorbing occasion and I felt  very awake, attuned and aware of the various currents. For an excellent, stimulating look at the original meaning and modern day relevance of the Buddha, try Pankaj Mishra’s An End To Suffering (Picador 2004).

Meanwhile, all best wishes to the Tagish / Carcross potlatch house, and to the sense of resurgence amongst many of Canada’s First Nations communities. The social problems are obvious and can’t be ignored and will not go away without lots of work, but there is growing evidence that these are communities that can value and honour their traditional culture whilst also integrating fully into the world as it is lived now.

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And now I am having to get used to the sun going down and darkness falling by 10 p.m…..so what are the good things about being back in England?

• Closeness to Jack (my son), to sister Carol, and to the good Friends here who have been reading this blog and have been in touch.
• Being here for the start of Oxford United’s new season in the mighty League Two of the Football League.
• Witnessing my father beginning to experience some relief from the caring role he has devoted himself to for decades.
• Listening to my loved music, and dancing to it.
• Seeing the good things in my humble Wem nest with fresh eyes. And also the life-laundering that needs doing.
• Appreciating the joys of those 2 months in Yukon, Ashcroft, Gabriola and Vancouver…and beginning to collate the experiences and thoughts and feelings for renewed energy in writing.
• Great curries.
• Fantasising about the next journey to BC / Yukon / Alaska !

I need to find some paid work. My sector is being shredded by spending cuts and I feel torn between looking for a renewed professional role (better pay) and going for work with no responsibility and minimal emotional commitment (and therefore low pay). I am waiting to hear from one publisher in particular about Pick Up the Pieces, but I do need to pick up the pace, never mind the pieces, of trying to get it ‘out there’.

My other writing projects are: a sequel to PUP (the book only covers half of my lengthy travels  in 2007); a novel based on a lottery round I used to do as a young teenager; and a comic-erotic spoof translation of a fictitious Renaissance epic of courtly love.

Hmmmm…what would it look like if I rolled them into one…?

Ted xox