Scholars, I plead with you,
Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?
English painter, John Constable, did more than looking at clouds. He spent much of his time collecting and classifying them. In a letter written in 1821 he expressed his conviction that clouds carry the mood of a painting, calling it the key note. He would leave his house in the morning with a bundle of papers and his pocket full of brushes and spent hours on the heath painting the changing formations overhead. Back home, he would arrange his sketches according to meteorological classifications, noting the date, time, and weather conditions.
John Constable: Cloud Painting (1821)
He wanted to master the language of the sky and looking at his paintings you get the impression that he did. It can be said that he was merely a child of an age obsessed with the desire to label and put into categories, but fact is, he was constantly aware of the sky overhead. He was in touch with it.
More focused on matters underfoot, nature writer Robert Macfarlane writes about a Peat Glossary, a treasure trove of a document he came across on a visit to the Outer Hebridean island of Lewis. The 120 Gaelic terms listed and gathered from inhabitants of villages in the Lewis Moorland, denotes various aspects of the moor.
A caochan, for instance, is “a slender moor-stream obscured by vegetation such that it is virtually hidden from sight,” while a feadan is “a small stream running from a moorland loch”, and a fèith is “a fine vein-like watercourse running through peat, often dry in the summer”.
Other terms were expressions of visual poetry: rionnach maoim means “the shadows cast on the moorland by clouds moving across the sky on a bright and windy day”; èit refers to “the practice of placing quartz stones in streams so that they sparkle in moonlight and thereby attract salmon to them in the late summer and autumn”.
In his book, Landmarks, Macfarlane states that this glossary testifies of the close relationship of a people and their land. Its nuanced observations bear witness to mindfulness and awareness.
I read this with alternating feelings of sadness, envy and shame. I am out of step with the phases of the moon, ignorant of the needs of bees and after years of hatching chicks in the Ash tree in front of the living room window, I still do not know why the Hadeda nest is surrounded by those of the weavers. Asked why the Natal bottle brush is blooming again this year down at the river after several seasons devoid of colour, I say it can probably be linked to drought and a good rainy season. But I'm guessing.
Natal Bottlebrush (Photo by George Angus)
I am a resident alien with a language devoid of wildness and awareness.
George
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