‘THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY OF THE NEARBY’

Part 1. A Geographical Tension

In 1697, traveller and author Martin Martin set sail to explore the remotest of the Scottish Western Isles. His agenda was an early example of the enthusiasm that would grow throughout the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe, Thomas Pennant, and Samuel Johnson following in his footsteps:

‘It is a piece of weakness and folly merely to value things because of their distance from the place where we are born: thus men have travelled far enough in the search of foreign plants and animals, and yet continue strangers to those produced in their own natural climate.’

This embarrassed confession that our homeland might be as mysterious to us as the antipodean and purportedly exotic, finds its echo – if an echo can somehow magnify – today under a sky cut to shreds by luminous vapour trails and among a local, natural world under threat. There have been a number of times when we have sought to rediscover the land at our feet, and we are currently undergoing such an endeavour in Britain at the moment. Today though, the embarrassed confession is coupled with an urgency to protect against homogenising industrial and capitalist change. Archipelago, begun in June 2007 by professor Andrew McNeillie, is a recent literary journal with such an agenda. Many of the authors and artists it publishes have gone to the outer isles of our archipelago to reacquaint themselves and, more importantly, our culture, with landscapes that we ought to be more familiar with.

The first edition of this journal publishes two important figures: Roger Deakin and Robert Macfarlane. It is appropriate that they should both appear in this edition, not only because they were great friends but because this represents something of a passing of the torch. Roger Deakin served as a kind of mentor to Macfarlane before his tragic death in 2006, and his presence here reminds us of another very important organisation that he helped to found in 1982: the arts and environmental group Common Ground, whose raison d’etre is ‘local diversity’. In fact we could almost suggest Archipelago is extending the important work of Common Gound beyond the homely mainland and into more wild, but equally threatened landscapes and cultures. Macfarlane has described Deakin on a number of occasions very fondly as an ‘explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby,’ borrowing from John Hanson Mitchell. It’s a beautiful phrase that almost sounds like it could - if only - one day become a professional position. I was thinking about this, and what might be different in the way we approach the landscape of the near and the landscape of the far, when I read the following from Martin’s trip across the North Atlantic to St. Kilda, the furthest of the Outer Hebrides, 41 miles west of Benbecula:

‘The inhabitants of St. Kilda take their measures from the flight of fowls, when the Heavens are not clear, as from a sure compass, experience shewing that every tribe of fowls bends their course to the respective quarters, though out of sight of the Isle; this appeared clearly in our gradual advances, and their motion being compared, did exactly quadrate with our compass. The inhabitants rely so much upon this observation, that they prefer it to the surest compass; but we begg’d their pardon to differ from them, though at the same time we could but that their rule was as certain as our compass.’

There are two different approaches to the navigation of landscape/seascape here: one by fowls, and one by compass. Both parties concede the others’ preferred method, though we can imagine the dispute had ‘their rule’ not been ‘as certain as our compass.’ But it was. And both methods seem equally as dependable a way of navigating the strait. The difference, though, is an interesting one, and one that I think John Wylie approaches in his book on Landscape.

Wylie describes the term ‘landscape’ as being made up of a number of tensions. The first tension he describes is between ‘proximity and distance’. Proximity, he suggests, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is the realisation that ‘observer and observed, self and landscape, are essentially enlaced and intertwined, in a ‘being-in-the-world’ that precedes and preconditions rationality and objectivity’. And distance, he suggests, drawing on Raymond Williams, is the opposing realisation that ‘landscape is a particular way of seeing and representing the world from an elevated, detached and even ‘objective’ vantage point... akin to other visual technologies (microscopes, telescopes, sextants)’. Both of these, I think, are inescapable in our experience of the world before us, though one often wrestles for dominance over the other. There is something to be learned from this boat’s fragile journey across the strait.

That the inhabitants ‘prefer’ the fowls is an issue of familiarity and of trust, one that seems to emerge from their ‘being-in-that-specific-world’ and their ‘having-been-in-that-specific-world’ for some time. Their involvement living and working on the sea has made it somehow intimately legible. As newcomers, Martin and his companions are prepared to be alienated and the compass is the tool to read for a transcendental logic of the landscape - what Göethe would have called urphänomen – in the absence of a familiar intimacy. In fact, one of the first benefits of the compass when it began to be used at the end of the 13th century was that it opened the sailing season up from April through October to January through December because it meant ships could travel under cloud cover without seeing the stars. It afforded blind travel.

All of this is not to say that one way is preferable to the other. What Wylie identifies is an inescapable tension. The boat approaching St. Kilda has both methods at its disposal, and those aboard should be doubly reassured for it. What is interesting about this example is that both methods are hemmed in together - in the same boat if you like – not quite co-operating but certainly operating side by side. Martin does not dismiss the islanders’ method as primitive hokum. And it could be argued that his openness, warmth and interest are due to the very intention to explore ‘our own natural climate’; and even, perhaps, that such openness, warmth and interest are an integral part of the methodology of the ‘explorer of the undiscovered country of the nearby.’ In a sense the blind instrumentality and transcendental logic of the compass begins to open its eyes to the possibility of an intimacy there before it. It embraces the productive tension rather than the unbalanced opposition of proximity and distance and begins to be able to read a familiar landscape’s foreign language.

‘PART 2. A LITERARY TENSION’ to follow...