People vs Place
Im in the process of reading two books, almost simultaneously. The one counters the other you see and I would veer into one side of my personality too much if I didn’t balance the books out. Become too much about “people” or too much about the wilds, the “place”. The first book is Homo Deus by Yuval Harari, a book about human civilisation, about us as this collective machine churning forward under the bleating mantra of “progress”. It talks less about the great achievements we have made, and more about the path of destruction each civilisation has left in its wake, from the Sumerians, to the Mayans, and the Easter Island folk. Of course the Easter Island folk. He is gearing us up to ask where will be tomorrow, as a civilisation. What is our end game? We roll relentlessly ‘forward’, all the time watching the ball rather than the game. And could that ever have been more true than right now, with our civilisation on the brink of… something. It could be one of many things: civil war as politics polarises our every opinion; nuclear war as two fat man-children wave their warhead-willies at each other; or an almighty natural disaster, as floods and winds, seas and sun batter our wildly short-sighted urban habitats. I dunno, it just feels like something is going to happen. Safe to say, the book whilst a must read, is really fucking depressing. And the weight of it is bearing on me. I said to Kristian last night that I used to only read novels and books less about people but more about place, or at most books by people who just walked around places (see Fiona Campbell in Africa for another good read, she used to bonk Ray Mears and he appears in a bush in the book!). But now I read politics day and night. I no longer subscribe to BBC Wildlife or National Geographic, but to the Washington Post and The Economist. I no longer live on the edge of a forest or the sea or a moor, but in a city. Granted, I found a tiny oasis of park and lake and live on the edge of that instead. But on one side where I have ducks, grebes, herons, owls, foxes and every native deciduous tree that can grow here, on the other I have a busy road churning with city traffic, airplanes overhead, sirens in the distance, litter instead of leaves. My flat could not be more of a metaphor for my life if I had planned it! Torn between my ambitions that keep me in cities and my desire to roam and live a wilder life. To make the metaphor more reflective, the “city side” has a hospital - hidden by trees – that houses a mental ward. On nice days people come outside and in between the rush of cars you hear the screaming and manic shrieking of the unwell…
So the other book is probably the main reason I am so tetchy right now. Its hit a nerve that has made me realise all of the above. Its called the Outrun by Amy Liptrot, an Orcadian who like others, left the Islands and moved South to London of all places. In London she found she constantly searched for the horizon and never found it, looking for ‘the edge’ of things all the time. I get that – Its been a decade since I left Cornwall and I still find myself doing it. Whilst South she developed a problem with drink and after a years of abuse has returned to the Orkneys to get better. She has moved out to Papay where she is holed up in an RSPB property (she was a “corncrake wife”) called Rose Cottage, and is documenting her recovery and inner revelations whilst talking us through everything about the island life: The seals, the skies, the ‘merry dancers’. All the while she is tuning into the tide and moon cycles, the stars, the weather. And I realised how detached I am from them here. We don’t get much weather in Birmingham, which is weird for me. I grew up on the Cornish coast, I’ve never lived somewhere so stable. If civilisation pacifies you into insignificance through the weight of our population size and the rituals of consumerism, then cities are the final nail in the lid, pacifying you from your very nature. Detaching you from the cycles of the world. Infrastructure making tides and weather and seasons irrelevant. Kristian and I grow stuff, keeping a tenuous thread of attachment to the cycles going. I’m about to clear out the aphid infested purple sprouting broccoli and plant the Autumn stocks for next Spring: Garlic and some Spring onions I think. We’ve had our first crop of apples on the trees I bought Krisitan for his birthday last year, and we recently slept overnight in the forest at Cannock Chase so we could fill as many tubs as the daylight would allow with blackberries. Little threads.
I wonder if I am homesick, but I don’t really have a home so don’t really know if that is it. Cornwall is kind of home, but I cant really go back for any length whilst my dad still exists there. Scandinavia is a close second, but the language barrier jars on me. Makes the place too much about the people all over again. I think about Scotland as an in-between, but don’t know what I would do for work up there. I do like the choice of communities in Birmingham though. I like cycling through the park and seeing the Asian guy doing tai-chi every morning in the bandstand, the catholic nuns basking in the sun on the benches, the burka clad women running in circuits with their white Nikes flashing out from under their black skirts. The three Sikh guys that stroll out together in deep conversation, turbans bowed into one another as they walk. The military fitness club, the yummy-mummies, the hooded lads draped over bikes and benches as they huddle over a smart phone. And then I remember how pointless it all is. How we are just little specks in a machine of civilisation. I don’t know them, they don’t know me. And if one of us ‘went’ tomorrow, it wouldn’t really matter. Nothing would change. I don’t really believe that the “butterfly flaps its wings” metaphor is applicable to humans. We are too many.
And that’s kind of where I have got myself too. I wonder if that’s the reason most people feel the need to be away somewhere remote: so that you are surrounded by fewer people in order to be more significant. On Signy, in Antarctica, our footsteps in the moss would last years. Here, on the tarmac, I leave none.
I wonder where my place is. So yeah. That old chestnut!