In silence
the wood declares itself:
angles and arabesques of darkness,
branch, bramble,
tussocks of ghost grass
- under my heel
ice shivers
frail blue as sky
between the runes of trees.

        Far up
rooks, crows
flail home.

…

No matter how often I tell myself that chance happenings of this kind occur far more often than we suspect, since we all move, one after another, along the same roads mapped out for us by our origins and our hopes, my rational mind is nonetheless unable to lay the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency. Scarcely am I in company but it seems as if I had already heard the same opinions expressed by the same people somewhere or other, in the same way, with the same words, turns of phrase and gestures.

…

Perhaps there is in this as yet unexplained phenomenon of apparent duplication some kind of anticipation of the end, a venture into the void, a sort of disengagement, which like a gramophone repeatedly playing the same sequence of notes, has less to do with damage to the machine itself than with an irreparable defect in its programme.

…

I have only an indistinct notion of how beautiful it all was, said Anne, nor can I properly describe now the feeling of being driven in that limousine that appeared to have no-one at the wheel. It was not really like driving at all, it was more like floating, in a way I have not experienced since my childhood, when I was able to hover a few inches above the ground. As Anne was talking, we had walked out together into the garden, where night had already fallen. We waited for the taxi beside the Hölderlin pump, and by the faint light that fell from the living-room window into the well I saw, with a shudder that went to the roots of my hair, a beetle rowing across the surface of the water, from one dark shore to the other.

Anybody accustomed to wander among the moorlands of the country will remember how common it is to hear the people practising sacred music in their lonely cottages. It is not uncommon to meet working men wandering over the wild hills, “where whin and heather grow,” with their musical instruments, to take part in some village oratorio many miles away.

René Guénon

This diary has been dormant in recent months, during which time I’ve been working on an expanded edition of Landings, incorporating new and previously unpublised writing from 2009-2011. Much of the new writing explores my sense of connection with, and disconnection from, Anglezarke, during an extended period of absence.

BOND

As the instrument has partaken
of the landscape – its body
bequeathed to soil, and later
exhumed –
so, a bond is made.

A pairing of movements. Of gestures.

The second finger hovers over the third fret.
The swift downwards stroke of the bow.
Kill note.

The string stopped with a feather touch.
A piercing cry.

And on the moor’s edge
the red-brown bird takes up again.
Bridges the air above the Yarrow.
Its hunger momentarily sated.

Landings will be installed at The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, July 22nd – August 29th. Visitors can listen to ‘Landings’ on headphones and read from copies of the book. In addition, five new text works have been produced that explore the linguistic and toponymic heritage of the Lancashire landscape.

The waves go quiet, lady,
Like sheep into the fold.
What do you wait for, lady?
His kissing mouth is cold.

±

It was a busy summer for Robert Haack, an entomologist with the U.S. Forest Service’s North Central Forest Experiment Station in East Lansing, Michigan. Haack is interested in the high-pitched sounds that trees make as they wither in a drought. The water tubes that normally suck water from the ground begin to snap, and the plants literally cry out for water. Haack thinks their sound may be detected by marauding bark beetles. He had many drought-stricken trees to tape-record in Michigan.

It was also a busy summer for the beetles. Bark beetles killed cedar, fir and pine. Flatheaded borers killed oaks and birches. Caterpillars prospered among the dry leaves. The borers bored millions of those long, mazy galleries that one finds carved beneath the bark on fallen logs in the woods, like illegible hieroglyphics. In short, says Haack, of the Forest Service, “forests throughout much of the country were being slowly nibbled to death.”