23rd / 24th slipstream January 2008
There’s a hunger that compels at this lean time of year. The hinds feel it in scarcity, driven to feed the calves they carry, growing. The bared woodlands , framework for light made leaf, through terminal buds grope away from last summer towards another spring. I feel an urgency to make marks to represent all this. To re present before present is past. To signify the fleeting thin things of winter.
I’d wanted to make maps. A map marking seasons’ boundaries. A map that counteracted the victories of mapmakers, perhaps. A map that marked cleared villages here: Smirisary, Port a Bhata, Buarblaig, Inniemore, Uladail, burial grounds mossed over. A map of stories told by placenames, when story & tradition translated is no more than a loss.
I’d make a map of the boroughs & colonies of woodants – a story of community going & coming. A map of badger setts. Another of where the woodbine scrambles in its tangled way through branches of oaks; a map of the homes of the insects that make different kinds of oak-gall their home. Another of April’s early purple orchids. An underwater map that left aside the numbers on a chart, which show only depth in metres; the lives of tubeworms & mussels have depth for those who feel that imperative hunger.
But of course the oak or the birch is a map of itself. Lichens stain the trunks, mosses clamber the boles, worts & ferns & microfauna consider it a territory, an occupancy, a home & commonwealth.
The circumambulation of the hinds round Carn Mor may be the start of our art. Quartered, crossed, marked with hoofprints. We map ourselves in a physical act, not reverential but existential. The first art of the circle, of cup & ring marks on stone; the art of palaeolithic hand prints in ochres from earth.
My hind tracking is a wonder at the art of creatures in a territory – inhabitants of a map which is not distinct from their selves. The present can’t be re presented. Experience & memory impel the hinds in their search for sustenance & constrain me to my appreciation of their mapped world, from which I derive a feeding for the breathy spirit.
There’s a hunger that compels at this lean time of year. The hinds feel it in scarcity, driven to feed the calves they carry, growing. The bared woodlands , framework for light made leaf, through terminal buds grope away from last summer towards another spring. I feel an urgency to make marks to represent all this. To re present before present is past. To signify the fleeting thin things of winter.
I’d wanted to make maps. A map marking seasons’ boundaries. A map that counteracted the victories of mapmakers, perhaps. A map that marked cleared villages here: Smirisary, Port a Bhata, Buarblaig, Inniemore, Uladail, burial grounds mossed over. A map of stories told by placenames, when story & tradition translated is no more than a loss.
I’d make a map of the boroughs & colonies of woodants – a story of community going & coming. A map of badger setts. Another of where the woodbine scrambles in its tangled way through branches of oaks; a map of the homes of the insects that make different kinds of oak-gall their home. Another of April’s early purple orchids. An underwater map that left aside the numbers on a chart, which show only depth in metres; the lives of tubeworms & mussels have depth for those who feel that imperative hunger.
But of course the oak or the birch is a map of itself. Lichens stain the trunks, mosses clamber the boles, worts & ferns & microfauna consider it a territory, an occupancy, a home & commonwealth.
The circumambulation of the hinds round Carn Mor may be the start of our art. Quartered, crossed, marked with hoofprints. We map ourselves in a physical act, not reverential but existential. The first art of the circle, of cup & ring marks on stone; the art of palaeolithic hand prints in ochres from earth.
My hind tracking is a wonder at the art of creatures in a territory – inhabitants of a map which is not distinct from their selves. The present can’t be re presented. Experience & memory impel the hinds in their search for sustenance & constrain me to my appreciation of their mapped world, from which I derive a feeding for the breathy spirit.
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