THE LICHEN AND THE LENS
WE TEND TO TAKE the astonishing power of our eyes for granted, until they go wrong, or their vision is, for some reason, mysteriously enlarged. This once happened for me ironically, plumb in the middle of an anxiety attack. I’ve been prone to these since I was a child, and the jolt they give to your normal attention can create a sense of unreality, of disjunction. You receive familiar images, but your concentration is somewhere else. It’s often described as like having a pane of glass between you and the outside world. But it can be a lens, too. The wobble it gives to normal, unthinking perception can lead to a strange heightening of awareness. On this occasion I was out walking, trying to concentrate on the landscape and not the weird feeling in my head, when I became convinced that I could make out the minute physical details of the world a quarter of a mile away — individual bricks, the ears of a man, discrete eddies in a plume of smoke, the wings of flying birds. It seemed, in that moment of hypersensitivity, to be some kind of supernatural gift; but of course I’d simply become aware of the sensory processing I did unconsciously every second of my life.
I’d acquired my first exterior lens much earlier. My parents had given me a pair of second-hand binoculars as a reward for passing the Common Entrance exam. For a schoolboy birder it was like getting your hands on a Philosopher’s Stone, a magical instrument that could turn base spadgers into gold-finches. One afternoon I was walking a favourite beat in a valley close to my Chiltern home when I spotted what I thought was a robin, dashing flamboyantly up and down from a hedge. I focused my new equipment on it, and was transfixed to see that it had a swaggering chestnut-red tail and a jet-black face. I felt sure I knew what it was, and when I finally lost sight of it I raced home in a state of high excitement to look up ‘redstart’ in British Birds in Colour — the other half of my exam prize. There, in the thrush section, was John Gould’s portrait of one in an alder tree, glowing the colour of red-hot iron, and my bird to the life. But the text puzzled me. It said the bird, a summer migrant, haunted ancient oak woodland. But there weren’t any old oakwoods where I’d seen it. Had it been off course, or more excitingly, on course, bound for one of its upland strongholds? And using an ancestral flyway that took it from Africa through this narrow valley, my valley? If so, I’d found a point where our territorial paths crossed, and for a fleeting moment the world seemed, to my childish imagination, a more whole and comprehensible place.
When list-making palled later in my life, I began to relish the sheer surface beauty that binoculars could reveal — the blue sheen on swallows’ backs, the lovely marbling of the gadwalls’ plumage, the terrifying golden glare of a sparrowhawk’s eye. But these revelations are always bought at a cost. The detail is heightened, but the context diminished. The bird framed in the circle of a lens is a creature partially abstracted from its habitat and its interaction with other birds. Not long ago, while I was in a boat on the Norfolk Broads, an osprey appeared and began flying over us along the dyke. It was stupendous against the vast sky. It dwarfed the marsh harriers that rose up to mob it and for a brief moment seemed to dim the sunlight. Its harassers strafed and retreated, then dashed recklessly in again. The osprey hovered, dipped, and finally went into a spectacular stoop into the water for a fish, followed by the harriers, which almost went in with it. So much was happening that I put down my binoculars and watched the whole dramatic scene unfold with my naked eyes.
At such moments technology can be a barrier and over-privilege its user, breaking any sense you have of being engaged with what you’re watching. Of course, I’m being hopelessly inconsistent about this. Identifying that nomadic redstart and glimpsing what our encounter meant, couldn’t have happened without my binoculars. The insights into nature that technology can provide are almost always double edged.
In the late eighteenth century, before the Romantic Movement was really established, another optical gadget was fashionable. The Claude glass, named after the French painter Claude Lorrain, was a hand-held, slightly convex mirror, which provided on-the-spot, selective, ready-framed reflections of promising views. Significantly, the person using it usually stood with their back to the real landscape, shifting backwards and forwards, waving the mirror about until it contained a pleasing image. The business wasn’t without its dangers. The poet Thomas Gray fell into a ditch whilst backing off to improve an image. And a much more tragic tumble became the focus for one of the defining moments of the Romantic era. Early in the nineteenth century, William Wordsworth climbed Helvellyn in the Lake District with the novelist Walter Scott and Humphry Davy, the brilliant chemist. He was leading them to the spot where the body of a young artist, Charles Gough, had been found after a calamitous fall a few years earlier — with a Claude glass about his person. It’s not clear what these three prophets of the new age hoped to find on their pilgrimage. Perhaps the echo of a heroic death in the search for beauty, or the triumph of nature over art. But their account suggests that they felt the glass was implicated in some way, and were gripped by this symbol of the downfall of an over-regimented concept of ‘natural’ art.
The Claude glass was a product of the Picturesque movement, which taught that landscapes and natural scenes could be fully appreciated only when judged as if they were pictures — and that art could be refined only by more attentive study of landscape and nature. Painting and landscapes have been locked in this self-referential bind ever since, to the extent that pictures may now be our communal models for how scenery — and by implication nature — should look. The view from the top of the hill, the artfully framed scene in the Claude glass, the prospect that puts the viewer himself at the focal point, have come to dominate our visual perspective on the natural world. Even among painters who might loosely be described as Romantic, it is hard to find a view from the hedge-bottom or the inside of a wood.
But not in poetry. I mentioned in the first of these essays John Clare’s highly visual take on the world, and his insistence that other organisms had perspectives too. He had a custom on his walks of what he called ‘dropping down’, which was both a way of peering closely at the earth, and the posture in which he scribbled his verse, on scraps of paper and old seed packets. In his poem ‘To the Snipe’ — addressed to the bird, out of sympathy and respect — he drops down comprehensively, and pictures the snipe’s boggy habitat from its point of view, as a wilderness towering above the quagmire. The reeds are transmuted into giant trees: ‘the clump of huge flag forest that thy haunts invest … suiting thy nature well’. Clare’s ramping dialect catches the swampiness, the strangeness, the privacy of the bird’s home: ‘The little sinky foss / Streaking the moors whence spa-red water spews / From pudges fringed with moss.’
Clare’s dropping down opens up a new perspective on the world. A swamp is usually seen as an undifferentiated morass of greens, which lies under our feet. Clare, imagining it through the snipe’s senses, transforms it into a place of teeming ecological detail, spreading over us, and dwarfing us by its complexity.
This is what a microscope can do, dropping us down into small and insignificant worlds. I held off from using one till quite late in my life, fearing that it would reduce organisms I knew as living entities into inanimate fragments. But exactly the opposite happened. I acquired a stereoscopic microscope chiefly to look at lichens, which in their haunts on trees and rocks can look at times like no more than superficial ornaments. But magnified a hundred times they become labyrinths of complexity. And it isn’t just pretty structural patterns you see but whole unexpected life processes. Diving down in three dimensions through the architecture of the plant it becomes clear that it’s symbiotic, a partnership of two plants — a fungal shell impacted with the minute green cells of a food-producing algae. There are tiny insect eggs embedded in the fungus. And then, scurrying through the tangle of trunks and roots, is an insect itself, a grey, louse-like creature no bigger than the eye of a needle. It is browsing on the lichen. There are even microscopic toadstools growing on the fungal surfaces. There is an entire forest ecosystem in this one square centimetre. It is a fractal world, each magnified layer reflecting the structure and processes of the one before.
The American poet Gary Snyder has questioned the inevitability of looking at the natural world from a conventionally humancentred viewpoint. In his essay ‘Unnatural Writing’, he traces connections between our stories of the world and other creatures’ ‘narratives’. ‘All our literatures are leavings’, he writes, ‘of the same order as the myths of wilderness people who leave behind only stories and few stone tools. Other orders of being have their own literature. Narrative in the deer world is a track of scents that is passed on from deer to deer, with an art of interpretation which is instinctive. A literature of bloodstains, a bit of piss, a whiff of oestrus, a hint of rut, a scrape on a sapling, and long gone.’ Later in the essay he argues that conventional natural history and science writing are what he calls ‘naively realistic’, in that they unquestioningly view nature from the perspective of the front-mounted bifocal human eye.
We can’t ‘see’ as a dragonfly does, of course — though with the help of computers we can reconstruct the images which its multiple-lensed eye presents to its brain. But we can subvert our orthodox view of nature, in which, either literally or culturally, we’re invariably at the focal point.
Recently our view of one of the least known of the planet’s habitats has been transformed by a simple change of perspective. The top storey of the rainforest used to be seen exactly in accordance with its conventional name — as a canopy. In a kind of mirror image of Clare’s swamp, it was defined from our groundling’s point of view as an undifferentiated parasol, a mere provider of shade for the important earthbound business below. The traditional way of exploring it had been to hack the trees down — at which point, of course, its intricate ecosystem collapses.
But in the 1980s, a group of French biologists had the idea of approaching the canopy from above. They developed an inflatable raft in the shape of a starfish, which could be delicately lowered onto the canopy to provide a platform for the scientists. The vague overhead sunscreen was now reconfigured as highly detailed ground. And what was discovered there challenged many of our other assumptions about the nature of life on earth. It looks, for example, as if more than half of all earth’s plant and animal species live in the canopy; that most of the plants don’t need fertile soil, but live on rainwater and sunlight; and that partnership, or symbiosis, is the norm.
The most extraordinary — and most powerfully Romantic — image of our lifetimes is the unforgettable portrait of our planet from space. The earth beneath our feet, cast as our property, taken for granted, riven into myriad disconnected systems, was suddenly glimpsed as something beyond us — a single place, fertile, vulnerable, terribly alone. The American essayist Lewis Thomas wrote: ‘Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the Earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dead as old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of the bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos.’ A framed vision, provided by technology, that transformed our whole cultural frame of reference.
