January 8th 2008

Even when you take to the woods,
you're taking political steps
on political grounds.
Apolitical poems are also political,
and above us shines a moon
no longer purely lunar.

Wisława Szymborska

Away in the city for a while, captured by its busyness, bludgeoned by noise, I return through the blizzards home. Beinn Resipol, white in the night sky lights my way as surely as a crescent moon.

It’s not an escape here, but an engagement with the world as it is; something that’s not entirely as we have determined it to be. It’s just more apparent in Ardnamurchan that we have built over the rotting layers of sandstone & pitchstone, over the black basalt. Geology is obvious here, the topography where we settle in the hollows away from a climate predominantly of wind & rain. The woodlands have naturally been exploited and manipulated, the beasts & plants who live in, on, & around them exploited too.

This world, though, as it presents itself more clearly than elsewhere in a wholly built environment. It’s as well to engage & re-engage with small sounds that punctuate the quiet, the greenfinch darting for crumbs outside the byre, the hirpling grey crow making a single note before rising idly away as I walk by, reed buntings tseek-tseeking their calls back & forth, sleet falling onto the bare branches & boles of the oaks. Domestic noises too: after the power cut the click of the hotplate & the creak & groan of the heating kettle.

& the things whose noises I don’t hear, simply take in with silent eyes – the white capping of each hill from here to Morvern, & north to Moidart, the glisten of the tidal flats in the bay, below which live the worms whose songs are of dark & of crackling salt.

I’m at the top of the chain that starts below the worms & their subterranean songs, a chain (rather a web) of mutual dependence, of symbiosis & clear ecological interdependence. That knowledge is a barn full of riches. It’s also the wealth on which cities are built, & it’s here that I fully engage with that.

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As a child, I pictured the ancient Greeks as philosophers walking back & forth, or standing still, lost in thought, dressed in loose robes, scattered across rolling hills bathed in sunlight. To enter the sloping woodlands this morning is to enter that place of my early imagining; the oaks sombre & silent, the random holly trees fresh with their green, aspens whitely standing & all apace on the hill, occupying precisely the positions of the philosophers, with here & there a rowan & an alder twined in earnest debate. Some have stood still so long that their feet have become buried in moss, which creeps up their boles to knee height; their limbs speckled with lichens like the liver spotted skins of the very old. Like any dialectic, winter has revealed the woodland armature, demonstrating, enacting, structure & formation of organic growth.

Here I have found the world as it is & also as it was for that child; a place of myth & of undisputed poetry, a place that has its location wherever I am properly awake & fully engrossed, enmeshed in things – which may be another definition of politic.