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Website of poet Elizabeth Rimmer

September 2020

Tongues of Fire by Seán Hewitt

Front cover

This book is the one I waited for most anxiously, having read Seán Hewitt’s debut pamphlet Lantern last year. It didn’t disappoint. Right from the opening poem, the quiet, but not at all understated Leaf, you have some idea what you are in for:

For woods are the form of grief
grown from the earth. For they creak.
——
For even in the nighttime of life
it is worth living, just to hold it
Tongues of Fire p. 1

This collection is all about grief, chiefly for the slow death of the poet’s father from cancer, but also the deaths of friends and contemporaries by suicide, and the loss of love. The book is heavy and heartfull with grief, but it is not a sad book. It studies darkness and night, but also light, air and water.

It is essentially a ‘moniage‘ book, a going out into nature to discover wisdom and meaning, and it is full of trees, birds and plants. The poems about wild garlic and St John’s Wort are among my favourites, and I wish I had come across the latter when I did the St John’s wort newsletter! But Oak Glossary

In oak,
essential nouns include soil,
water and time – these are produced
from their elements. Water is a high
and gentle noise of clearest quality
which results from branches dripping
Tongues of Fire p16

and I Sit and Eavesdrop the Trees show the poet entering deeply into the life of other living things, rather than discussing how they figure in our lives. As a gay man in a very Catholic environment, the poet must consciously go ‘outside’ to think about his relationships and sexual identity, and he discovers a place full of secrets, danger and death, but also strength, wisdom and love.

The crux of the book is Hewitt’s ‘versions’ (as opposed to direct translations) of Buile Suibhne, the twelfth century Irish epic about a king who is cursed with madness by a monk, and has to live in the woods among the birds (I can’t find any justification for the assertion that he becomes a bird himself in the translations available to me). Seamus Heaney produced a translation in 1985, and I’ve found it useful to compare the two. Heaney’s Sweeney is a very physical, forceful disruptive man, reacting with violence whenever he is crossed, and rampaging about Ireland

poking his way into hard rocky clefts,
shouldering through ivy bushes
unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles
wading estuaries
breasting summits
trekking through glens.
Sweeney Astray p.10

He winds up in Glen Bolcain, a valley of madmen, where he has to fight for the best of the wild watercress, and he is ‘flailed’ by the thorn bushes where he has to sleep, and battered by falling from branches which don’t bear his weight. He is always on the defensive, getting into fights with people who comment on his plight, and the weight of the poem falls on the loss of the social world he used to inhabit.

Hewitt’s Sweeney is quieter, and more introspective, lonelier and more vulnerable

no matter where I go
my sins follow. First,
the starry frost will fall
at night onto every pool
and me left out in it, straying.

Hewitt focusses on the friendships Sweeney forms first with the madman Fer Caille whom he meets in Britain, and with whom he agrees to protect each other until Fer Caille’s death, and then with the monk Moling, through whom he is healed, and who mourns his death. People have often seen this poem as a clash between an oppressive Christianity, and a more pagan pantheism, but in this version, Hewitt seems to create an reconciliation between the two worldviews, without necessarily giving ascendancy to either.

I find this elsewhere in the book, particularly in the final section – Tree of Jesse and the title poem Tongues of Fire, which is a reflection on the fungus clavariiforme (you can see it on the cover), which he finds in the woods, and also on the Pentecostal tongues of flame. In spite of the close attention to Biblical motifs, it is not exactly clear who or what he asks

for correlation – that when all is done,
and we are laid down in the earth, we might
listen, and hear love spoken back to us.
Tongues of Fire p.69

My own reflections on our relationship to the earth and the question of moniage in particular, will be a long time brewing, but start here. This is a stunning book.

September 25, 2020
Tappoch Broch

Brochs are tall stone towers, double walled, with viewing galleries. They are almost always situated in Scotland, mostly in the north and on the islands, and dating from the Iron Age. The most famous one is on Mousa. This one is the southernmost, and the closest to us, the Tappoch Broch at Torwood near Falkirk. It is pre-Roman, and excavations in 2014 showed the existence of an earlier hill-fort, and occupation in Neolithic times.

There isn’t much left of it now, just overgrown walls, a staircase

a bit of the gallery wall you can walk on to look out over the countryside, the doorway which I featured last week, and a fireplace, which I assumed had been improvised by campers, but which is actually an original structure

It retains its ancient atmosphere, but it is clearly well used by dog walkers and families, and well cared for. The path from the road sets the scene,

up through a forestry planting that has been partially harvested and cleared. Replanting has been carried out with mixed deciduous trees, oak and hazel and hawthorn, and wild trees, baby birch and seedling fir, are already making their presence felt.

Since lockdown, we have become more conscious of our need for contact with nature, of the impact wilder places can have on our well-being and self-understanding. One of the strands of my reading (which seemed fairly random and disorganised at the time, but which is settling into useful patterns of understanding now) has been the magical, shamanic, witchy kind of thinking that has crept into writing, not just from the romantic lawless outsider writers, but from some heavy-duty, politically engaged academics, which provides a very different perspective on what used to be dismissed as superstition and fantasy. I’m looking at books like Seán Hewitt’s Tongues of Fire, Rebecca Tamás’ Witch, Jacob Polly’s Jackself and Seamus Heaney’s translation of Sweeney Astray, and thinking some more about Kathleen Jamie’s famous ‘lone enraptured male’ article. I think we are looking at the emergence of a new take on nature writing, in which the environment is going to be the ground of all our moral, psychological and political thinking. You wouldn’t think a single walk on a sunny afternoon would do all that!

September 17, 2020
Farewell Summer

And just like that, it was gone. Once the ivy is in flower, you know, but the signs were all there. All the flowers in the garden are busy setting seed, and the trees are bright with rowan berries, rose-hips, haws. The last field has been cut and all the small birds have disappeared from the garden after the spilled grain. The skies are cloudier, there’s a brisk westerly wind, and the resident geese are grabbing first dibs on all the good places before the northerners arrive next month.

This is Sherriffmuir, where we went to see the heather.

My big ritual for this time is collecting brambles The haggard is full of them, and I took advantage of the good weather last week. The heavy rain and extended dry periods this year meant that many promising shows of blossom never set fruit at all, the earliest ones had gone over already and birds and wasps have been at the ones they missed. But it has been a generous year and there are lots left, shining with ripeness, making it worth the scratches, the torn jeans, the purple splashes from wrist to elbow. The best berries are always further in, higher up or on the most defiant tangles of thorn, and there seems to be an unholy alliance between bramble and nettle. But I hate to miss it.

It’s an autumn experience that is common to a lot of people and most poets have a blackberry picking poem somewhere. I have one myself as part of my Eurydice Rising sequence from Wherever We Live Now. In northern versions of the story, Orpheus gets Eurydice back, so I used both versions to talk about creativity, and mental illness and the kinds of relationships artists develop with their community. In the Breton romance, King Orfeo, Orpheus leaves the court, distraught after the loss of Eurydice, living wild in the forest, in a sort of shamanic disintegration. One day, he sees the fairy hunt passing, and follows.

The next bit is quite significant. He remembers, ‘I used to do that, long ago’. Hunting was a social marker then, restricted to the nobility, and was seen as a useful contribution to the community, culling deer which might have destroyed crops. Orfeo has rediscovered himself, his humanity, and his role in the community. It is only then that he is able to recognise his lost wife Erodys riding among the fairy host, and to follow it back under the grey stone, into the otherworld.

I decided that the role of hunting, especially as it is is practised nowadays, was not one I wanted to endorse, so I chose blackberry picking as an iconic memory, and a prompt to Orpheus’ recovery of human bonding.

Moniage 1: Orpheus in the Wilderness
Orpheus deserts his post. Her flight
is like a magpie raid on his whole life –
what isn’t gone is broken, pulled apart.
Only the harp goes with him, and he plays
in doorways, under arches, in the space
between the human places. When he sings,
the trees bend down to listen. No-one else will.

He is lost without her, and demented,
follows strange girls home, asks who’s hiding her,
shouts obscenities at those who pass him by.
He hears voices in the dark, and follows them
out into wilder places, to be alone.

He comes on children, picking brambles,
noisy, carefree, quick and neat as birds.
They do not notice him, and go their way
unfrightened, and he hears the women call
them home to breakfast. When they are gone,
the silence stirs him like a changing wind.
He says, “I used to do that, long ago.”

He thinks of berries shining, intact, black,
the small hairs tickling his outstretched palm,
the scratches worn like war wounds, and the brag
of secret places, where there’s loads still left.
That’s when the door opens, the shadowed way
beneath the grey rock, to the other place.

This is Tappoch Broch near Torwood, as otherworldly as the central belt can get! (This will be next week’s post.) My bramble-picking only led me as far as blackberry and apple crumble, and very nice it was, too!

September 10, 2020
Living La Vida Lockdown – the Reset

Being Alive Tim Ingold

Reading this was tough, and I’m not sure how much I got out of it. Ingold says he is an anthropologist not a philosopher, but there was an awful lot of post-phenomenological explanation in it, and though I like some of its assumptions, a lot of it felt like verbal games, played by someone who mostly restricts his vocabulary to the academic.

I like the basic premise that ‘being’ is a verb as much as a noun, and that being alive needs to be seen as a constantly evolving process, not a yes/no question. I like the reminder that we are immersed in the material world, not apart from it, and the detached viewpoint espoused by science is a narrative fiction. I like the reminder that we are as much acted upon as actors in the ‘weave of the world’ (p9), and that our decisions are inherently responsive to the way the world is, rather than self-started.

To perceive and act in the weather-world is to align one’s own conduct to the celestial movements of sun moon and stars, to the rhythmic alternations of night and day and of the seasons, to rain and shine, sunlight and shade. (p132)

Life is a conversation, even at an intra-cellular level (an idea I paraphrase from Colin Tudge’s Secret Life of Trees).

But this book does not touch on the experience of individuality, of boundaries, filters, permissions, preferences, differences, disputes and reconciliations which make up not only our psychology, but even our physical life. Our skins are waterproof. Breathing in requires reflexes. We have to swallow to take in food, and we would rather have the orange than the peel. Marking personal boundaries is common to many living things – plants have prickles and stings, some beetles secrete a vile tasting oil to keep themselves from being eaten, and gulls on a roof ward off other birds getting too close with screaming, lifted wings and menacing lunges. Tim Ingold seems to see naming, the recognition of individual identity, as possessiveness and the desire to dominate. (p160), which seems to me to be a statement of enormous privilege.

Identity can be a fraught issue, just now, and I don’t want to disappear down any of the tempting rabbit holes, but it matters enormously. To belittle ‘identity politics’ is to reduce a person’s arguments to the inconvenience of their demands to be respected as an individual. A black person demanding an end to racism does not want everything to be about being black, he wants to prevent his blackness being the only thing anyone notices. A feminist doesn’t want to spend her life discussing women’s issues, she wants women’s issues to be a factor in the normal functioning of society just as men’s are. Disabled people want accessible venues, not because everything has to be about their disability, but so they like the able-bodied, can think about the rest of their life.

It is fairly difficult for me to acknowledge this, but individual identity is a multi-faceted, rich and complex gift. I come from a tradition where self-sacrifice and self-giving is considered to be noble and generous, and self-assertion is arrogant and really rather vulgar, but often this isn’t how it works. In theory you should be generously poured out in the service of your fellows, in practice you just feel you’ve been laid waste. Thomas Merton wrote in Contemplation in a World of Action – a book clearly influenced by the Nuremberg trials which were happening at the time:

Let us not imagine that this “existing for another” is compatible with perfect love. The alienated man cannot love. He has nothing to give. Nothing is his. The lover is able to give himself completely to another precisely because he is his own to give. He is not alienated. He has an identity. He knows what is his to surrender. The alienated man has no chance to surrender. He has simply been taken over by total control.

(Note the male pronouns. I forgive him because he was living in an all-male community, and with a bitter experience of how it worked but —–).

It isn’t just about exploitation. If you don’t have any sense of yourself as an individual, you can’t get any satisfaction from your activity, and you burn out. You have no realistic assessment whether what you are doing is effective, or whether you are just ticking boxes, so your performance is haphazard at best. You don’t give yourself time to consider whether there is a better way of doing things, or a better person to do it, or if your particular gifts make it more appropriate for you to do something entirely different. Your contribution to community life gets compromised. There is no conversation in entropy.

Identity is important. Boundaries are important. I was thinking a bit about this on the InterlitQ blog last week. Claiming and understanding one’s own identity is vital not just for your own survival, but for the integrity of what you have to share. Barriers are something else, as we see personally and politically. Since I wrote Haggards I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance of places in between, edgelands where beings from two adjoining zones can meet, blend, adapt to each other and thrive, listening places, places for translation and transformation. They are places of reciprocity and connection rather than containment and separation. They are places where individuality can become communal, where the weave of the world holds together.

As we come out of lockdown, a three steps forward, two steps back process here in Scotland, I’ll be taking this insight with me.

September 2, 2020

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