19 April 2017
During my road trip north last month, I read a book called Rising Ground: A Search for the Spirit of Place by Philip Marsden, in which the author chronicles his journey on foot through Cornwall in the United Kingdom. His east-to-west walk also follows history chronologically – as he walks, Marsden researches history and mythology connected to the landscape, starting in the Neolithic era and continuing through the Industrial Revolution to the present day. Catalyzed by the author’s move to a farmhouse in the Cornish countryside and interspersed with anecdotes of his family’s work restoring the house and land, the book focuses on the concept of place – as Marsden puts it “the effect that physical surroundings have on individuals and whole communities, the ability of places to create mythologies around them” (21-22).
Reading this book was an odd experience: it felt simultaneously like finding fragments of my own thoughts written out in someone else’s handwriting, and like walking into a room full of strangers who all, for some reason, welcome me as an old friend. It was one of the most evocative reactions to a text that I’ve had in a long time; from the moment I began to read, I felt understood. (Nearly every page has at least something underlined, circled, or annotated with varying numbers of exclamation points. I apologize in advance to anyone who borrows this book from me – I was just really, really excited). I am never more apt to invoke the powers of words like “fate” and “destiny” as when I stumble across the right book at the right time. Tell me – is there anything more magical, more serendipitous, than finding a piece of yourself in the pages of a book that you had no idea existed, in a bookstore 11,000 miles away from the place you were born? I believe there is nothing quite like it.
I have written frequently this year on the subject of home, as it has appeared to me in its many forms and iterations. All I have been trying to do – all I ever try to do in my writing – is understand; in this case, understand “home” as a concept, as well as the way I personally perceive it. Underlying this attempt (paralleling it, perhaps) has been an effort to also understand the nature of the places I have found myself in over this past year. I have often felt a kind of yearning, an ache that I generally attributed to homesickness or loneliness as I have been often on my own in strange places over these past months. It feels a little bit like this:
You’re riding a train at night across some vast plain, and you
Haruki Murakami | Sputnik Sweetheart
catch a glimpse of a tiny light in a window of a farmhouse. In an
instant it’s sucked back into the darkness behind and vanishes. But
if you close your eyes, that point of light stays with you, just
barely for a few moments.
In his project Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, John Koenig invented the word “sonder” which means, loosely, the realization that everyone you meet, every random passerby you come into contact with, has a life just as vivid and complex as your own, both internal and external. As I have realized, this also applies to places. Every place, just like every person, has a character and a history just as complex as the most familiar places in your life. The people in that farmhouse live full and colorful lives, with their joys and fears both large and small, their unconscious habits, a head full of stories and memories; just so, the farmhouse itself and the land it was built on have their own intricately woven histories. Think of how many centuries it has existed untouched and unseen, quietly growing and simply existing. Think also of how many lives have passed in and out of those walls, and of the feet that have trod on the fields around it! Think of all the maps, hand-drawn by crayon or pencil held in small fingers, that have been made of that little copse of trees and the path wandering through it; how many names that little creek has had!
The ache that I felt has, perhaps, not necessarily been one of homesickness; rather, it has just been a desire to know intimately the richness of each place I pass through. This feeling is at the heart of Marsden’s book, and that is why it first curled itself up so surely and quickly in the center of my chest, like a cat on a warm lap; simply, it told me that I was not alone.
Marsden’s interest in the microcosms of land and history are mainly explored through the restoration of the farmhouse he and his family relocate to, as he becomes more intimately acquainted with its history and its floral and faunal residents as well as those of the surrounding landscape. It is something that I find best demonstrated by the idea of “seity” or “haecceity.” As Marsden discusses, it is a concept first introduced by medieval philosopher John Duns (or as he was commonly called, Duns Scotus) to refer to qualities of each person that makes that person different from everyone else – the word itself, “haecceity,” is from the Latin haecceitas and translates to “thisness”. Later, this concept is applied to the study of landscape by “proto-archaeologist” Sabine Baring-Gould, who argued that “what ‘the learned Scotus said of individuals…may as truly be said of localities’” (180). Places have unique character, and to know one truly, deeply, and lengthily is a privilege as intimate as knowing the same of any person.
First and foremost, however, Rising Ground examines landscape on a larger scale, both physically and theologically. I have been drawn this year to intimacy with location, something that relies on a person-driven layering of history, memory, and meaning over the ecological aspects of place – this is perhaps as close as I can come to my own personal definition of “home.” Strangely, though, my interest in place and landscape diverges simultaneously in this other direction.
As Marsden discusses, the landscape itself – in a physical, topographical sense – has played a vital role in religion and spirituality across the world and throughout time. He looks at Neolithic monuments, how stone circles and other similar structures highlighted the shape of the land itself, often focusing attention (and even sunlight on solstice days) on the highest point in the visible region; how certain places seem to “attract” more myth than others (Tintagel in Cornwall is famous in particular for the depth and breadth of its Arthurian legends); how even today, modern pastoralist societies like the Mongolian herders center their spiritual life around the land itself. “The land is a story-book,” Marsden writes of Mongolia, “places are narrative, and high ground is the home of heroes and gods” (74).
This belief in the power of the land itself, and the search for meaning in it, for the true “spirit of place”, is at the very core of this book, and that is why I connected so powerfully to it. I have thought and written often of places that I struggled to find the right words for, struggled to capture the genuine feeling of physically standing there. Marsden’s words – and those of all the other writers and artists and historians he cites – was an introduction to a whole legion of people who have thought and felt in similar ways as I have, and it was like finding a treasure map.
He tells of Ruth Manning-Sanders, a novelist who was “overwhelmed” by Cornwall, by “‘its sense of the primordial, the strange and savage, the very long ago…something akin to dread’” (27). I read this, and I thought of Moke Lake – how small I often felt in the cradle of that valley, how aware of my smallness; how standing alone in its quiet canyons raised a prickling heaviness between my shoulder blades.
Painter Jeremy Le Grice, a friend of Marsden’s, said of the special quality of St. Ives in Cornwall that it is “‘something innate…a secret buried in the land. It’s not something you see – it’s something you feel’” (231). I read this, and I thought of the Scottish Highlands – a place where I felt nearly bowled over, by its high windy places, its bracing air, its history.
At a pagan gathering in Penwith that the author attends, a man tells a story from his childhood: his grandfather takes him for a walk through the countryside; “‘‘He kicks back the grass round the top there and grabs my ‘ands and presses them down into the bare soil. “Feel that, boy? Does ‘ee feel it?…That, boy! ‘Tes the beating heart of Cornwall!’’” (243).
‘Tes the beating heart of Cornwall! The soil – the very soil! – of the place was enough to evoke that much passion. What beauty – that we, as humans, can find such indescribable feeling in this simplest of things.
This comparison is not meant to elevate my own writing in any way. It is just meant to say this: without noticing it, the language that others have used before me to try to understand the spirit of place have come out of my mind and onto the page again and again this year; it seems I was searching before I even knew how to name or identify what I was searching for. Simply put, Rising Ground echoed my thoughts, and gave me MORE – and that, folks, is why I love to read.
In the grand scheme of things, none of this comes as a surprise. I have always been a lover of folklore and mythology; raised by a mother who taught me which local plants soothed headaches and nettle stings; raised by a father who plopped me on the front of his surfboard before I could walk and still runs into his friends from kindergarten in town; a howler at the mountain moon, an easy crier when presented with awe-inspiring sights, a collector of maps and antique keys, none of which ever quite fit that pirate box in the back room of the house. Of course I would find myself here as an adult, flying across the world and back again, writing and reading God knows how many words in an attempt to understand something whose roots were neatly encapsulated in the entirety of my childhood memories all along.
So what, exactly, am I going to do with all these nifty connections and revelations and moments of self-discovery, this crystallization of interest and inspiration? I don’t really know, to be honest. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to turn it into a book or something; maybe it will just continue to manifest itself in an ever-growing self-curated library, in the striving for balance between homesickness and wanderlust, and in Google searches like “is ancestral memory real?” For now, though, a simple blog post is pretty satisfying in and of itself.
Safe travels, as always, and don’t forget to take some time every now and then to wander through a book store. You never know what you might find.
-Sierra
SGBRSH 