A QUESTION OF GRACE

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It seems somehow appropriate to begin such a blog with some thoughts on Gerard Manley Hopkins, particularly on his idea of 'inscape', and where that might lead in a discussion of landscape. James Cotter, in one of his several studies of Hopkins, quotes the following from an early poem:

It was a hard thing to undo this knot.
The rainbow shines, but only in the thought
Of him that looks. Yet not in that alone,
For who makes rainbows by invention?
And many standing round a waterfall
See one bow each, yet not the same to all,
But in each a hand's breadth further than the next.
The sun on falling waters writes the text
Which yet is in the eye or in the thought.
It was a hard thing to undo this knot.

A hard thing indeed. I wonder if the knot is there to 'undo' - which I take to mean understand - at all. This is not the Newtonian unknotting of the spectrum that Thomson alludes to a century earlier in The Seasons ('The various twine of light, by thee disclosed / From the white mingling maze.') This is the difficult knotting of so much more than that. Cotter comments: 'In water, eye, and thought, the sun inscribes the same curling hieroglyph which knots the three together: matter, sense, and mind. Sunlight words a bond between the world and the soul: the cypher is "the looker's eye" which catches the wording fire in acts of inscape.'

Inscape is too large a concept for me to do justice to here entirely, but perhaps it's clear from the above that it is not a seeing into the thing as it is, but an acknowledgement of the intimate connection we have with the world before us. As Paddy Kitchen points out, it is found through a 'counterpoise between attention and reception.' It is also important to stress that for Hopkins this 'counterpoise' acquaints us with our position in the heart of divine Being, an experience above and beyond our individuality.

In recent British and Irish environmental non-fiction, the concerns of inscape are very much at the fore. Exploring our relationship to wilderness and the natural world, more and more writers are taking to the hills, knotting and unknotting 'matter, sense, and mind'. And yet the movement appears to be a secular one. This raises the question: How is it that we find ourselves qualitatively elaborating what has at times been a christian and deeply religious project?

Tim Robinson, for example, perhaps one of the greatest landscape writers of our time, in his first book about the Aran Islands, asks the following question:

'a dolphin may be its own poem, but we have to find our rhymes elsewhere, between words in literature, between things in science, and our way back to the world involves us in an endless proliferation of detours. Let the problem be symbolized by that of taking a single step as adequate to the ground it clears as is the dolphin's arc to its wave. Is it possible to think towards a human conception of this "good step"?'

That imperative to find rhymes 'between words' and 'between things' that marks us out from the dolphin is the same quest for order that drove Hopkins in search of inscape in the first place ('All thought is of course in a sense an effort at unity.') And yet Robinson qualifies his question by suggesting that it doesn't come out of a 'nostalgia for imaginary states of past instinctive or future theological grace.' It seems so strange to me that he distances his notion of the 'good step' from the idea of grace. Or is it just a nostalgic idea of grace? Or is it simply that unity, harmony, and ethical goodness, are a vocabulary for distinct christian and environmental philosophies. Apparently not, as he goes on even to suggest the impossibility of this step:

'every step carries us across geologies, biologies, myths, histories, politics, etcetera, and trips us with the trailing Rosa Spinosissima of personal associations. To forget these dimensions of the step is to forgo our honour as human beings, but an awareness of them equal to the involuted complexities under foot at any given moment would be a crushing backload to have to carry. Can such contradiction be forged into a state of consciousness even fleetingly worthy of its ground?'

This humble and dutiful intent, this sense of 'honour', voiced at the outset of such a Quixotic task, to me at least, seems to hint at grace, by which I mean at the realisation of a guiding force beyond the individual and into the bigger picture. Whether that bigger picture be geological time or theological seems almost moot, since both are - in all honestly - surely in some way metaphorical and beyond our grasp to really imagine. Hence our immersion in the mystery, knotting and unknotting what we can, testing where we begin and the world ends and vice versa, or just enjoying the slippery overlap.

But it does remain to wonder if there is a role to be played for a spiritual vocabulary in this landscape writing. Or is the absence of such a spiritual vocabulary part and parcel of a spiritually sound methodology, a doing rather than a talking about? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I think there might be something to the following by John Burnside, a poet who seems quite at ease moving between religious and environmental registers:

'Right dwelling in the world is the key to living as spirit... Living as spirit depends on the relationship you maintain with the rest of the world, moment by moment and day by day. So there are times when you have no soul, and times when you do. The soul exists as a possibility, as something that you bring into being by the way in which you dwell on Earth.'