Goodbye Oxford

Eran and I are moving to Paris later this week. This blog may fall quiet for a little while until we're settled into our new flat and have set up internet access. City Pollen will resume soon with a more urban focus than of late and hopefully news of environmental arts in France as well as elsewhere. For now, this is goodbye to Oxford…

Mull and Iona

From Cumbria earlier this week my parents and I visited the Scottish west coast and the islands of Mull and Iona. 

Right on the edge of the ocean the land becomes fluid with the wind and the sea. Rocks and hillsides rise suddenly from the tides and lochs fill up any low place in this beautiful area. Iona’s light and colour is often praised, perhaps because the sky is so large there. Here’s a sunset over our campsite on the Ross of Mull.

Even Iona’s rocks are extravagantly coloured and organic.

Rockpools cluster with Mussels, Limpets, Anemones and seaweeds. More camera-shy were Eider Ducks, Gannets, Guillemots, Herons and the occasional Seal.

One moment we had light bright enough to turn the sea crystal, and the next moment the wind rushed in rain storms. Honestly, the seasons changed every ten minutes.

Iona is most famous for the abbey established there by St Columba who came to the island in 563 and was important in spreading Christianity from Ireland to Scotland and England. The Book of Kells is likely to have been written there, and Iona is still home to much beautiful Celtic stonework.

The modern cloisters draw upon the Celtic tradition of creating sacred art from the natural world. 

No wealth but life

I’m in Cumbria with family at the moment and this week visited Ruskin’s house, Brantwood, where Alexander Hamilton has responded to the place with an exhibition, Sensorium: Picture’s from Nature’s Laboratory. In a blue room he displays a series of photograms of plants, images made from laying plants on light sensitive paper which when exposed to the sun catches the plant’s shape in a vivid white against the indigo.

(from Sensorium, (c) Alexander Hamilton)

Hamilton explains, ‘I want to let the plants reveal themselves’. By the chance of his chemicals and the plants’ forms the resulting image is very beautiful, laying out the plant as though moonlit so you look again at a crocus or snowdrop because it has been made strange. I appreciated this glimpse of spirit of crocus, anemone, fern; Hamilton himself avoids naming.

(Sensorium, (c) Alexander Hamilton)

Hamilton is also experimenting with images drawn from the plants’ sap. He tries to show the inner life of the plants by making a solution of sap and water that soaks up into paper to form bubbling layers of greens and browns. From day to day the images change, perhaps responding to the moon, to the weather, or to the artist.

Hamilton worked in Ruskin’s moorland garden on the slopes above Coniston Water. Ruskin (who is quoted in today’s title) shaped grassy terraces between the trees and created small reservoirs in a stream that flows down through Brantwood’s gardens. The path zigzags up to this place away from the more managed gardens. Ruskin had a plan for the slopes patterned on Dante’s Mount Purgatory, topped by the garden of the earthly paradise. 

The idea made me smile, since we visited on a grey Cumbrian day and the moorland garden stream gives out before reaching the lake, so it didn’t appear to have the cleansing force of Dante’s Lethe. But after we’d spent a quiet moment there listening to the breeze in the birch leaves and smelling the damp grass, while a last heavy bodied dragonfly danced alone at the end of summer and clattered above the ponds, I felt differently about Ruskin’s idea.  

and grieved to have a soulless image on the eye

 My brother recently returned from a trip in the French Alps in an area we often visited as children and he reports that the glaciers have retreated remarkably over the past decade. His photos are here, and there’s an article here about climbing and climate change that really gives a sense of time running out.

It's a painful situation. One of the most powerful parts of the magnificent film Age of Stupid shows a Chamonix guide thinking about what's happening:

Alps timelapse from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

Here are images from around the world:

The thought of mountains without glaciers gives the title quote, wrenched from Wordsworth's account of first seeing Mont Blanc:

. . . That day we first
Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and griev'd
To have a soulless image on the eye
Which had usurp'd upon a living thought
That never more could be. (The Prelude, Vl 452-6)

(There is good news. While Wordsworth did have some more positive experiences in the Alps later, his heart was in the Lakes. Also, there were great winter conditions in Scotland last year as the Mountainplan blog recorded. So flying isn't totally necessary. But really, there are no easy answers to this.)

Late summer in the Botanic Garden

The route into the city is fruiting riotously just now, with blackberries, rosehips, conkers and all sorts of red berries, cherries and so on. At the Botanic Garden the apple trees are heavily loaded with all different varieties, in shades from apricot through lime to chestnut-red:

Hillieri

Cat's head

John Innes 1001

John Downie

Golden Hornet

Here's Magdalene Tower from behind the pond, as though rising out of the jungle:

Some jolly sunflowers:

Something spiky from Spain (Eryngium Tricuspidatum):

Cyclamen:

And finally crocuses hallucinating spring, even as we approach Autumn Equinox:

Evening at the edges

Popular history likes to state that medieval Europeans were afraid of monsters at the edge of the world, such as races of men with their faces in their chests and others who had dog-heads or who lived balanced on one gigantic foot (a foot that they could hold above themselves as a shield against the sun on hot, eastern days):

 (This is the thirteenth-century Psalter Map; the monstrous races can be seen on the lower right side, the coast of Africa)

The world had an edge wrapping around from Ireland to China and a centre, the walled city of Jerusalem. At the end of time Jerusalem would be renewed as the City of God, but was still imagined stiffly walled (shown here in the Gulbenkian Apocalypse).

The axiom that medieval culture walled out the forest, desert, the ocean and the wild ignores many more complex ways in which they thought about edges and centres, what did or did not belong to God. Where’s the centre in this name of Christ from the Book of Kells? Are the cats, mice and the otter eating a fish marginal to God?

Medieval experiences, ideas and art were actually far more ambivalent about whether what is feared can or should be fenced out than I’ve implied, but I was thinking about the dichotomy partially because of reading this comment by Ann Haskell: ‘In comparison with medieval people, who walled themselves in, leaving their fears and what they were afraid of outside, we in the twentieth-century, have reversed this situation: we have fenced in what was out there and put it in zoos, parks, prisons, hospitals, and nature preserves, the result being that we are now outside, living side-by-side with our fears of their escape.’

Something of this urge to contain what feels dangerous could be heard in the outrage at a dying man’s release from prison last week. Reading a poem about the New Jerusalem I recalled being there a few years ago and  seeing a new Wall trapping a people inside, but also being there another time on the day of a bus bomb. We’ve performed a slow act of reversal on medieval geography so that cities feel dangerous and forests endangered. Perhaps it would help to live in a home that drifted unpredictably between inside and outside, like Sylvie in Housekeeping:

When we did come home Sylvie would certainly be home, too, enjoying the evening, for so she described her habit of sitting in the dark. Evening was her special time of day. She gave the word three syllables, and indeed I think she liked it so well for its tendency to smooth, to soften. She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of counterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship’s cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude. We had crickets in the pantry, squirrels in the eaves, sparrows in the attic. Lucille and I stepped through the door from sheer night into sheer night.

A moment for microbes

All my latest posts have been lengthy, so today I’m giving a moment to microbes:

In a gram of soil there may be more than 10,000 species of bacteria.

There can be about a million microbes per cubic centimetre of sea water.

I dimly remember being told these things repeatedly before reading them again here, but something so boggling is easily forgotten: life jostling in all corners.