twenty-seven essays making up the book are grouped into six parts. We begin in the woods, conversing with trees, then trace an arc from sea to land to sky and back down to earth. We go to ground, mix with the elements, follow lines and threads from the gatherings of nature to the pages of the book, and conclude with a plea to restore words to the hand. Although the journey itself, proceeding in gradual steps from world to words, unfolds without interruption, it is assembled out of singular elements each of which – taken on its own – has its own character and integrity. Rather like a bird’s nest, it is constructed from assorted fragments that were never designed to fit together. The contingent coherence of the nest, and the latitude it affords to its constituents, gives it a resilience thanks to which it hangs together even under the most adverse of weather conditions. Irregularity holds it fast. It is the same with this book, affording the reader the latitude to dip in at any point, to read the essays in any order, and perhaps to circle back to look at some again. Like walking in the woods, you can take any number of alternative routes. Think of the book’s pages, then, as the ground on which you walk, and of its lines as paths. Happy wandering!
Notes
1 1. ‘The crisis of education’ (1954), in Hannah Arendt: Between Past and Future, introduced by Jerome Kohn, London: Penguin, 2006, pp. 170–93, see p. 193.
2 2. Tim Ingold, ‘Anthropology beyond humanity’ (Edward Westermarck Memorial Lecture, May 2013), Suomen Antropologi 38(3), 2013: 5–23.
3 3. Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines, Abingdon: Routledge, 2015, pp. 147–53.
4 4. Amanda Ravetz, ‘BLACK GOLD: trustworthiness in artistic research (seen from the sidelines of arts and health)’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 43, 2018: 348–71.
5 5. Ravetz, ‘BLACK GOLD’, p. 362.
6 6. ‘Digging’, in Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems, 1966–1987, London: Faber & Faber, 1990, pp. 1–2.
TALES FROM THE WOODS
Introduction
Can there be any better example of conviviality, of living and growing together, than the trees of a wood? They are so much more sociable than people. Humans come and go, obsessed by passing troubles. But trees stand their ground. They tell tales, they communicate among themselves; older trees watch over young saplings, which sprout amidst the roots of their forebears. We humans are but diminutive eavesdroppers on their long, majestic conversations. Enter the woods, then, as into a library or a cathedral, with a certain reverence. Sociology begins here, in your studies with the trees. Ahead of you, like rows of books on the shelves, or the columns of the nave, are the serried ranks of trunks. Each trunk – each codex, as the ancients called both trunk and book – holds its story, not between its covers, as with the book, but up aloft, as with the fan-vaulting of the cathedral roof or the branching tracery of its windows. You’ll need to strain your neck to read it.
Peer closely into the canopy, listen intently, feel the textures of bark and moss as if they were under your skin or fingernails. No doubt you feel more alive in the presence of trees. Yet to us, they seem to speak in riddles. Even as we strain to decipher their meanings, we sense no progress towards clarity. In the woods, everything is so complicated! It is, quite literally, folded together – from the Latin com, ‘together’ plus plicare, ‘to fold’. Of the trees that gather there, we cannot say where one ends and another begins. They don’t adjoin or abut like fragments of a mosaic, or square up back to back, each sunk into itself. Rather, they fold over and into each other as they go along. Observe the ground, riddled with roots that threaten to trip you up, the ridged and furrowed tree bark, the ruffled wind-swept mass of foliage. Every line of the gathering is a fold in the fabric of a crumpled world.
But crumples are alien to our desire for order. We prefer a world that answers to the call of reason. Whenever we build or make, we endeavour to straighten things out, to simplify. We like external surfaces to be smooth and flat, and angles sharp. Perhaps we envy the trees their complicated conviviality. We cannot countenance the thought that they might enjoy a way of living together, in peace and tranquillity, that to us remains unfathomable. ‘It’s them or us,’ we say; ‘there’s no more room for both.’ Needing land for cattle and plantations, timber for ships and cellulose for the paper industry, humans through history have hacked the woods, or put them to the torch. Even as I write these lines, regions of the planet are in flames, their inhabitants fleeing for their lives. After the conflagration, the woods will once more rise from the ashes. But human society? Maybe; but maybe not.
Somewhere in Northern Karelia …
On New Year’s Day, 2016, I – along with some thirty others – received an invitation from the writer and broadcaster Tim Dee to compose an essay on the topic of a place that personally speaks to me. Tired of the numbing combination of facts and spirituality that permeates so much contemporary environmental writing, Dee wanted to show how precious ordinary places are to us, and why it is so important that we continue to care for them. A place, we were told, could be anything or anywhere. It might be a hollow tree or the corner of a street, a childhood bedroom or a sewage farm. It could be in the paved world of the city, with its streets and buildings, or in the vegetated world of the countryside, with its fields and forests. All that mattered was that it should be close to our hearts. The essays would eventually be assembled into a book. Entitled Ground Work, the book was published in 2018.1
I decided to focus my essay on a place especially dear to me. Indeed, many of the ideas gathered in this book first took root there. This essay, therefore, seemed like a fitting place from which to embark on the correspondences to come.
Somewhere in the woods of Northern Karelia lies a huge boulder. Once it rode a glacier as a wandering erratic, having been torn from granite bedrock by the force of moving ice. Then, when the ice melted, it was unceremoniously dumped on a steep incline. It has remained there ever since, ever about to roll down the hill but never quite doing so, as soil, moss, lichen, shrubs and trees have grown up all around it. The boulder has become its own environment, providing shade and shelter for plants on the lower side, and surfaces for other plants to grow upon; there is even a pine sapling rooted in a fissure near the top. Deep in the forest, you have to pick your way over rocks and wade through a carpet of vegetation to find it. Standing some four metres tall, with an equivalent girth in all directions, what meets your eyes is about two hundred tons of rock, not settled flat on the ground but falling down the slope with a velocity of zero. Only a precarious balance of forces holds it there. But at some time in the past – possibly thousands of years ago – it was rent asunder. Water must have penetrated a crack, expanded when it froze, and, with immense force, split the boulder from top to bottom, breaking off a massive slab that at the same time shifted some seventy centimetres to the side. The wedge-shaped crack remains open at the top, and a small block of stone has fallen into it, where it remains jammed, about a third of the way down. Another shard of rock has slid from the cracked face and rests on the block exactly as it fell, supported on its sharp edge (Figure 1). All this must have happened in a split second, and in the stillness of the forest I try to imagine the explosive sound it would have made, and how it would have echoed through the landscape. Looking at the precariously balanced assembly, of shard on block, of block in crack, of crack in boulder, of boulder on incline, I have the feeling that I inhabit a silence on the inside of
