THE MAP AND THE WORD
DURING THE 1980s there was a flurry of scientific interest in one of the contenders for a sixth sense — the sense of direction. It looked for while like a promising bridge between the Romantic imagination and natural science. Was there something in ley lines beyond Druidic mysticism? Did dowsing work? Why could some people orientate themselves in space and others not?
Scientists from Manchester University came up with some intriguing experimental evidence. They found that dowsing — for metal pipes and underground rocks as well as subterranean water — worked; that most people had the ability to do it, and that a coathanger was just as good as the traditional and talismanic hazel fork. Another experiment showed that the majority of people could find their way in the general direction of home from an unfamiliar place, but not if their heads were encased in lead helmets. The conclusions were more speculative, but physiological tests suggested it was a group of muscles in the shoulders that made the twig or hanger twitch, not some mysterious link between wood and water, and that maybe these muscles were neurologically wired up to iron-rich cells in the bridge of the nose. It looked as if an anciently inherited sensitivity to small variations in the earth’s magnetic field (known from other animals) might still persist in humans.
The research fizzled out after a few years, maybe because of too close links with New Age cults. But there’s another route to knowing where you are that is beloved of Romantics. It’s not a single sense in the physiological meaning of the word, but that confection of sight, smell, sound and memory that makes us register the genius loci, the spirit of place. Its technological companion is the map, whose impact — in common with all sense-extensions — is ambiguous.
I’ve been a map-worm since I first began exploring the countryside. Maps, I discovered, weren’t just aids to find your way about; they were a kind of cryptogram. Reading them intensely was an act of divination, which could liberate the genius loci from its coded ciphers. Maps were paper dreams.
When I lived in the Chilterns, it was the commons, not the human settlements, which seemed like the centres of civilisation on the map. Paths radiated from and through them like a starburst. When I first discovered East Anglia, I was captivated, in contrast, by the oriental delicacy of its mapped countryside. The outlines of tiny woods echoed the ebb and flow of ancient greenways. The village names were strung out along yellow B-roads like concrete poems. As I pored over the Ordnance Survey charts, I tried to imagine what these unvisited corners would be like in reality — the nuances of slope, the declensions of light and shade, where favourite plants would be growing — exactly where, since a diviner’s pride was at stake. When I moved to Norfolk, recovering after a long illness, I’d read the entire local landscape before I set foot in it. The valley I live in now is a complicated essay in the varieties and forms of wetness, and on the map the interconnected dykes and ponds and streamlets have the look of a sheet of splintered ice, a fragmented fenland still held together by the fluidity of water.
Some of this incidental poetry is apt to disappear when you visit places in the flesh. In the end maps are only ciphers. They were never intended to catch the character of the landscape. This isn’t just because they are drawn from a point of view only available to us in an aeroplane. There are also problems of scale. Maps are chiefly intended for people on the move, so roads are shown as hugely inflated. They dominate both the physical area of a map (a trunk road would be hundreds of yards wide at the same scale as its mapped counterpart) and its imaginative reach. Marked roads and tracks suggest where you should go, the order in which you should view things. They are the modern map’s centre of gravity, the skeleton which gives logic and structure to the entire landscape.
But there are other kinds of chart, less human-centred. I saw one after a rare snowfall some years ago, in a meadow I knew well in the Chilterns. I’d forgotten how dramatically snow redraws the map. Everything shallow and insubstantial in the landscape — roads, crops, surface soil — simply vanishes. All that remains are the gaunt fundamentals of hill, dip, rock and tree. But the snow itself then becomes a blank sheet for a new kind of plan that sketches out the ephemeral routeways and land-uses of myriad other creatures. On the meadow that morning there were the lurid stains of bird droppings under a rowan bush; the ancestral pathways that badgers followed out of their sett in the wood, full of curves and diversions and scuffled pauses; small mammal prints going round in circles. Footnotes to the events of the night.
The meadow that morning was a revelation, and I began to develop a taste for feral walking, deliberately avoiding human paths, and allowing the urge to potter to overcome any intention to get somewhere. I’m intrigued by what pulls me this way and that. Big trees on the horizon are an obvious magnet, but so are tiny self-sown oaklings, the beginnings of future woods. Any toadstool makes me tack, but so do other curious breaks in the surface: animal bones, anthills, wet hollows. Sometimes I try to navigate by animal tracks alone, but these routes are as wobbly as my own ambulatory doodles.
I’m not sure what kind of map I am building up when I potter like this. It’s spontaneous and fleeting, but also, I’ve found, quite memorable. It gives objects in the landscape a quite different significance from those they have on a formally drawn map. Somehow, I guess, following your nose (or your inner eye) brings together a vestigial animal curiosity with your own cultural fascinations.
I think I must have moved about like this as a young boy, exploring that wasteland that lay at the back of our house. The Field felt like a second skin, prickly with sensations, full of meaning and associations, but never in a consciously reflective way. (Much later I learned that in parts of the Caroline Islands of the Pacific the inhabitants had plans of their home ground actually tattooed on their skin.) Now, up in the flatlands of Norfolk, the landscape is less emotionally charged, and I am consciously reflecting on its echoes. Our house is only a few hundred yards from the edge of Norfolk’s great arable plateau. There’s scarcely a trace left of the great hornbeam forest that grew here until medieval times — a shocking thing for someone who did their growing-up in wood country. As for the farmed landscape, it’s not so much flat as flattened. Developing a Romantic sense of place here isn’t easy.
But in the wetland and fens in the valleys, it’s another matter. They have a spirit of place that is mercurial — shiny but fleeting. You register it not so much from immobile markers in the landscape, as from ambience and rhythm, moments of natural theatre. The dialect of Norfolk’s wetlands is made up from scribbles of geese across the sky, the bare fretwork of alder twigs in winter, the seductiveness of dykes disappearing into the reeds. Water animates a landscape, makes it impossible to pin down in the fixed geometry of a map. A minor flood up here turns dry hollows into lakes, and ferries the solid lumps of the landscape — fallen branches, fern clumps, roots, the soil itself — into new situations. Water is the connective tissue of these places, but it has none of the static rigidity of a road system on a map.
Wetness also gives the lie to the cliché that Norfolk is flat — or ‘VERY flat’ in the words of Noël Coward’s notorious put-down. That cliché has always seemed to me a perversion of the truth — and not because some parts of north Norfolk are as hilly as Wiltshire. But I couldn’t work out why, until I saw that Coward’s quip — which has stereotyped Norfolk’s landscape ever since — was, again, a map made from a peculiarly limited human viewpoint — about five feet something above the level of the ground. It was a literally superficial perspective, too — of the single dimension of surface elevation. Much of what is important to the life of fen or marsh depends on what is under the surface. It’s here that the mosaic of pools, the alternation of vegetation, the long rhythms of succession, are determined. One day, maybe inspired by John Clare’s poetic vision of a swamp from the point of view of a snipe, it occurred to me that you could re-imagine a wetland as a landscape whose contours were under the ground, as an inverted habitat, riddled with concave depressions. You could then imagine it turned upside down. The prospect would suddenly erupt with mounds and banks. Glacial hollows and peat-pits dug out by humans would swell like prehistoric barrows. Dykes would appear like three-dimensional fences.
Then, in my mind, I turned it the normal way up again, and tried to see the surface of the marsh — the conventional map — as an outgrowth of this damp labyrinth below. The idea that it is a flat place, in the sense of being homogeneous, became ridiculous. I could make out dark sedges, livid bogmosses, mist-green patches of reed. There are grass tussocks, scrubby tumps, flashes, pools, inscrutable ribbons of vegetation, a mosaic of tonal elevations. And the whole prospect is in constant motion. Even the birds and insects that float above the surface are like dowsers of this deep world, responding to invisible currents in the air, tiny thermals generated by the minute shifts from water to grass to reed.
Henry Thoreau had a vision of the true mapmaker and would-be writer about nature as a kind of amanuensis for the wild: ‘he would be a poet’, he dreamed, ‘who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive down stakes in the spring … who derives his words as often as he used them, transplanted them to his page with earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and natural that they would appear to expand like buds at the approach of spring.’
In one sense this is what John Clare did, not just in his insistent use of evocative dialect, but in the directness of his vision. He looked the world in the eye, on the level, in its own terms. But he knew his was a human perspective, and he spoke up for the human voice as well as for nature’s. In a poem called ‘Shadows of Taste’ he repeats his hatred for the narrow scientific view of the collector and all those who ‘steal nature from its proper dwelling place’; and applauds instead the man of taste — by which he means anyone who appreciates wild things in their context, which includes their accumulated cultural associations. But in a remarkable stanza, he insists that ‘taste’ is a faculty enjoyed by all living things. It’s their unconscious, inherited choice of — and comfortableness in — their own habitats. Their internal map, if you like. By the startlingly original use of a single word he puts all beings on a common footing:
Not mind alone the instinctive mood declares
But birds & flowers & insects are its heirs
Taste is their joyous heritage & they
All choose for joy in a peculiar way
What I hope has emerged from these essays is how powerful our unassisted senses are when they’re guided by the imagination. Scientific insight and technological enhancement can open new perspectives, but it’s in our gift to use this to change our ordinary point of view. Language, that special human gift, itself becomes a transforming instrument. It can expand the imagination as arrestingly as an electron microscope. Clare sees taste as a faculty of all living things. Gary Snyder describes animal trails as narratives. Henry Thoreau creates a poetic analogy of botanical taxonomy. Marcel Proust glimpses the role of scent as a universal carrier of memory and message. Richard Dawkins interprets birdsong as emotional persuasion. Lewis Thomas has a vision of the earth, seen from space, as a single cell. All these remarkable insights begin with a specialised, near-scientific revelation, but are transformed into a common perspective by a leap of the imagination, through the ever-fresh air of language. The word becomes a map of the new world.
