An attempt at a place
The other weekend I went to a poetry bookshop that turned out to be a bookcase inside another shop. Which was even more charming, in fact. I got a book of poetry all written about a single loch, by the same person. I love this idea of coming back to somewhere, returning again and again.
It feels very self-appointed artist-in-residence - Be the Artist-in-Residence of Your World, a whole series by Amy Stewart. No big retreat somewhere glamorous. No grants or permission needed.
There's also hyperlocal news, hyperlocal action, hyperlocal politics. Hyperlocal history is very much my jam - a street, a house. There's also psychogeography: 'that emphasises interpersonal connections to places and arbitrary routes'.
Which is also An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris, a 1974 book by Georges Perec, which I have not read. From Wikipedia:
It is a collection of observations which Perec wrote as he sat in Saint-Sulpice Square in Paris. Rather than describing impressive or notable things such as the architecture, Perec aims to describe all the things that usually pass unnoticed. He charts brief details of buses and people who pass, not worrying about repetition.
I am getting to know my garden. The slightly different texture in the soil on one side from the other. Where to go gently because there are likely to be frogs or newts, where I might see a mouse shooting along the wall. Which birds stalk the lawn, which stay in the trees, and how the robin always appears when I turn the compost. I know where the ant nests are and which ivy the bees like best. How the sun moves across it in the summer, how the shadows fall in the winter. I can see it when I close my eyes.
There are always so many questions. I found an acorn buried by a squirrel - there isn't an oak on this block. Did a bird drop it and a squirrel bury it? Did a squirrel bring it across roads, over a quarter of a mile? Did it steal an acorn from a child's collection left out somewhere? I left the acorn where it was. I'm not going to have an oak in my bean patch but if it grows I will move it elsewhere.
I think there was really only one time and place I felt I really knew and even that was with the knowledge that it changed all the time: on the field.
I was the self-appointed druid, the bog monster. Sitting out in all weathers with my can of coke. I knew where the best bramble patches were and when to pick them around the weather for the best fruit. I tidied branches off the paths, moved brambles, whacked down nettles, covered over dead birds. Other people, when they trespassed walked on my field would encounter my feet sticking out from the long grass. Sometimes I was crying. In 2020 a lot of us were often crying so it wasn't that weird. Sometimes I was singing.
I knew the shape of the treeline along the ridge. I knew the buzzards: which was the young from last year, where the parents returned to, which branches the fledgling sat in. I knew where to sit so you couldn't see the city anymore, even though it was just over the hill. Where to look for the rainbow, for Mercury, for the moon.
I knew the crackle of the barley in the sun. I knew the ruts where I turned my ankles. I knew that even after weeks of nice weather the 'bog end' was indeed still a bog. Trees fell, verges grew. Metal detectorists dug holes in the footpath. I'm pretty sure they aren't supposed to leave holes in the footpaths.
I knew the sound of the brook the day after heavy rain. I knew the hoofprints of deer, though I rarely saw them. I cried when the horse chestnut tree fell, and the tree that was already dead. I smiled when I saw a fox sunbathing on the log. The peace breached by screaming parakeets and the little prop planes getting a nice view and occasionally doing a roll.
I watched the field ploughed, the bales made. The pattern of beans to barley. The smell of the fertiliser. The floods and the parts left fallow. I knew the shadows cast half a mile in the winter. Watching the clouds and feeling the ill wind that meant the heavens were about to open. I knew how it looked empty but then a hundred pigeons would rise. I could walk it in the night without a torch, to see the stars or a barn owl.
I remember the corner I was turning when I thought of a funny line for a fic. Where I outlined a story. Where I wanged a welly. Wrote my journal. The books I read, the words I wrote, the songs I sang, the tears, the yelling into the wind, the rolling in the dirt. I know the exact spot where I was on the phone to my sister and she said this was it, the nurse told her it was my dad's last days.
There was a spot rubbed out by my bum. Not flattened grass - bare scuffed ground that couldn't grow. The field was the only thing keeping me sane.
Places are also times. Sometimes grief is a place.