Read the answer, if you can, in the starry blue firmament.
"Have I not been trying to use the obstacle
Of language well? It freezes around us."
I find myself thinking of the poem 'Malcolm Mooney's Land' by the Scottish poet W.S. Graham as the structure of waking life begins to shudder with the strange a-temporality of days that barely blossom before they slip into night. It is a crystalline thing, this poem, an isolated voice speaking from the cold white of disconnected paper.
You can hear Graham introduce and read three of the works from his 1970 collection in this recording from 1968, and/or read it on the poetry foundation’s excellent site.
Perhaps this poem has been haunting me because of the stunning descriptions of cold in a week of snow, upon more snow. Images such as “thistles of ice” and “my breath a ruff of crystals” as well as the “sweaty seams” that lay below the surface shape in language the visceral experience of moving through freezing weather.
It is just as likely that I am thinking of W.S. Graham’s attempt in this poem to talk about the strange, disquieting process of writing. Last week we received the proposed edits for Nature’s Calander back from our editor at Granta. There has been something of a feeling of words falling upon words in a deluge of white.
At times I have felt as though this book which we have worked on for over a year now, is “walking at my ear, and speaking of old summers”. The Noticing Nature project began in spring on the thrumming and alive medium of twitter. It feels very curious to be spending the darkest coldest days two years later grinding the bergs of the chapters into their final form on unresponsive pages. We are all really looking forward to sharing this book with you in the late summer this year, when the ice has thawed and the days are long. Imagining it now feels like imagining another world.
Revisiting Malcolm Mooney’s Land for this newsletter led me to Fritijof Nansen’s volume of Arctic exploration, Farthest North.
In his extensive notes on Graham’s work, the British poet and literary scholar Matthew Francis identifies the images in Nansen's memoir of his 1893 attempt to reach the North Pole as a key influence in Malcolm Mooney’s Land. Graham even alludes to the spectre of Nansen haunting the work “A fox was here last night (Maybe Nansen, Reading my instruments)”. Nansen’s evocative descriptions of ice floes the polar night, snowdrifts and the like are clearly at work in Malcolm Mooney’s Land.
Nansen was a Norwegian explorer who led a number of expeditions to the Arctic, and oceanographic expeditions in the North Atlantic. He was also a Nobel prizewinning humanitarian who carried out extensive relief work after World War I.
And so I leave you, for this instalment with a taste of Nansen, who was amongst everything else a vivid nature writer who was clearly bewitched by the Arctic landscape. In this passage he describes a beautiful Arctic night, we hope you enjoy it and feel inspired to look at your surroundings with these spellbound eyes in these dark days.
Tuesday, September 26th. Beautiful weather. The sun stands much lower now; it was 9° above the horizon at midday. Winter is rapidly approaching; there are 14½° of frost this evening, but we do not feel it cold.
To-day’s observations unfortunately show no particular drift northward; according to them we are still in 78° 50′ north latitude. I wandered about over the floe towards evening. Nothing more wonderfully beautiful can exist than the Arctic night. It is dreamland, painted in the imagination’s most delicate tints; it is color etherealized. One shade melts into the other, so that you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, and yet they are all there. No forms—it is all faint, dreamy colour music, a far-away, long-drawn-out melody on muted strings. Is not all life’s beauty high, and delicate, and pure like this night? Give it brighter colours, and it is no longer so beautiful.
The sky is like an enormous cupola, blue at the zenith, shading down into green, and then into lilac and violet at the edges. Over the ice-fields there are cold violet-blue shadows, with lighter pink tints where a ridge here and there catches the last reflection of the vanished day. Up in the blue of the cupola shine the stars, speaking peace, as they always do, those unchanging friends. In the south stands a large red-yellow moon, encircled by a yellow ring and light golden clouds floating on the blue background. Presently the aurora borealis shakes over the vault of heaven its veil of glittering silver—changing now to yellow, now to green, now to red. It spreads, it contracts again, in restless change; next it breaks into waving, many-folded bands of shining silver, over which shoot billows of glittering rays, and then the glory vanishes. Presently it shimmers in tongues of flame over the very zenith, and then again it shoots a bright ray right up from the horizon, until the whole melts away in the moonlight, and it is as though one heard the sigh of a departing spirit.
Here and there are left a few waving streamers of light, vague as a foreboding—they are the dust from the aurora’s glittering cloak. But now it is growing again; new lightnings shoot up, and the endless game begins afresh. And all the time this utter stillness, impressive as the symphony of infinitude. I have never been able to grasp the fact that this earth will some day be spent and desolate and empty. To what end, in that case, all this beauty, with not a creature to rejoice in it? Now I begin to divine it. This is the coming earth—here are beauty and death. But to what purpose? Ah, what is the purpose of all these spheres? Read the answer, if you can, in the starry blue firmament.