Augustin Ehrensvärd was probably more abreast of current affairs than he was of scientific nomenclature. He will have had the news, in the middle of the eighteenth century, that there were experiments underway by settlers in New England. This I've already written about: the experiments were to grow rice in north America.
Ehrensvärd wrote to Linnaeus with his own plan for rice-growing on his Saari estate in Finland. Linnaeus replied with enthusiasm.
What Ehrensvärd perhaps did not know was that the New England settlers must have known of the Ojibwa people of the Great Lake district. One of the Ojibwas' food staples was wild rice, which they harvested from canoes with sticks, since it grew and still grows in the water there. They had surpluses which they traded. Their food, like most earlier peoples, was about more than satisfying hunger: it had and still has to do with community and tradition. Traded rice must have reached the settlers - though colonists or imperialists (or sometimes refugees) might describe them more accurately.
The rice the Ojibwa people harvest now as then grows naturally in both northern America and in China. Its botanic name is Zizania aquatica.
Cultivated rice is Oryza sativa. The two plants are distant relatives, but of distinct genus. Oryza sativa in the indica variety is grown submerged for part of its cycle.
Perhaps Ehrensvärd was unaware of the distinctions; the Swedish (Ehrensvärd's language) for rice is ris and would have conveyed none of the important differences between the two plants. The Ojibwa word is manoomin and would mean less to Ehrensvärd. It's possible the New Englanders tried to grow Zizania aquatica and that Ehrensvärd heard tell of "rice"-growing experiments there.
The seed most likely to have been available to Ehrensvärd was probably Oryza sativa.
The excitement that Linnaeus felt would have been based on scientific knowledge, rather than hearsay. It was Linnaeus, Carl von Linné, who in 1753, at least ten years before Ehrensvärd's letter, classified and named both plants according to his own binomial nomenclature.
Linnaeus would have corrected Ehrensvärd's misconceptions about "rice" if there were any. It might also account for the fact that there are no records of the rice-growing experiments at Saari, beyond that first letter.
Tuesday, 9 November 2010
Monday, 8 November 2010
Habituation
Tammimäki is more than an oakwood on a wee hill as its name implies. More than a once-upon-a-time island in Mynämäki in south west Finland: part then of a still existing archipelago. It creeps up on me in the dark, sleeping in bed. It gets into the bed and lies down beside me. It's a state of mind - inserted somewhere between wakefulness of the small hours and night dreams. But then again, it's also daylight reverie.
But for the moment it's night. I navigate my way into the wood, careful not to step on the slender illuminated yearlings and saplings that somehow here seem to have escaped Oak Change and the fungus which helped the crisis along the way. I feel rather than see the elder and ancient trees around me. It's a small wood, with 35 or 36 such trees, five hundred and four hundred years in age, the oldest generation. They're all broken-limbed, wind-torn, leafless now, moon lighting the fabric of old wooden bone systems.
If I were to feel that there is a measure of acceptance now, cutting both ways, it would not be any form of anthropomorphism: rather a simple acknowledgement of fact. Sentient creatures are precisely that.
It's taken a long time to reach this point. I've slipped in and out of the wood for weeks. I've gratefully accepted, according to season, the mushrooms, the berries, the seeds and acorns the woodland produces; not for me or the deer, but for its own systemic purposes, its own continuing sustenance and existence. In the same way my body produces blood, but it's not for the benefit of mosquitoes.
I walk steadily and slowly round an inner meandering path of my own devising, assuring myself that each tree is in its rightful place, that each erratic boulder is in the place it found itself at the tongue of the last gacier. I step carefully over the fallen trees and round the raspberry tangles; more than once. And more than once realising that this is more than a vagary.
It's a dream; not because I'm asleep, which I'm not (though I'm not awake) but because the oaks are there at all. I'm visited now by these trees, just as I have visited for these months. It's a reverie not of my making, but one determined by my constant walking, by continued absorption - a word I use deliberately - of the woods and its internal structures and relationships, of which I am now a temporary part.
Sooner, perhaps rather than later, I'll pass along elsewhere in a way the oaks cannot, but part of me, the woodland flaneur, will always linger now in that small wood at the edge of the mainland on the Baltic; just as the oaks' wood, presence, timespan, timescale, has become a state of mind for me. Habituation. True dwelling. And it's here now in this very world and all its suffering.
But for the moment it's night. I navigate my way into the wood, careful not to step on the slender illuminated yearlings and saplings that somehow here seem to have escaped Oak Change and the fungus which helped the crisis along the way. I feel rather than see the elder and ancient trees around me. It's a small wood, with 35 or 36 such trees, five hundred and four hundred years in age, the oldest generation. They're all broken-limbed, wind-torn, leafless now, moon lighting the fabric of old wooden bone systems.
If I were to feel that there is a measure of acceptance now, cutting both ways, it would not be any form of anthropomorphism: rather a simple acknowledgement of fact. Sentient creatures are precisely that.
It's taken a long time to reach this point. I've slipped in and out of the wood for weeks. I've gratefully accepted, according to season, the mushrooms, the berries, the seeds and acorns the woodland produces; not for me or the deer, but for its own systemic purposes, its own continuing sustenance and existence. In the same way my body produces blood, but it's not for the benefit of mosquitoes.
I walk steadily and slowly round an inner meandering path of my own devising, assuring myself that each tree is in its rightful place, that each erratic boulder is in the place it found itself at the tongue of the last gacier. I step carefully over the fallen trees and round the raspberry tangles; more than once. And more than once realising that this is more than a vagary.
It's a dream; not because I'm asleep, which I'm not (though I'm not awake) but because the oaks are there at all. I'm visited now by these trees, just as I have visited for these months. It's a reverie not of my making, but one determined by my constant walking, by continued absorption - a word I use deliberately - of the woods and its internal structures and relationships, of which I am now a temporary part.
Sooner, perhaps rather than later, I'll pass along elsewhere in a way the oaks cannot, but part of me, the woodland flaneur, will always linger now in that small wood at the edge of the mainland on the Baltic; just as the oaks' wood, presence, timespan, timescale, has become a state of mind for me. Habituation. True dwelling. And it's here now in this very world and all its suffering.
Thursday, 4 November 2010
Kurki
Quite simply then, sitting on the porch in dark frost-crackling night. Venus is there and a hooked edge of the moon.
I have the very last of the Campbeltown malt in my glass; I’m still barefoot after the sauna.
My eyes are cleansed of the day’s grit – inner eye cleared of the grit of the day too. I’d set out to look for an oak forest towards Kustavi and found only a tunnel in the vuori – what Finns call a mountain – a high expanse of bedrock. I’d walked in through burst steel gates in perpendicular rockface onto an earth floor along a tunnel carved through rock. There was a cracked-open fusebox. I followed the tunnel until the dark became absolute. The weapons- and oil-bunkers at Faslane came to mind and I became nervous and retraced my steps.
Barefoot with good malt here in the night and I’m surprised by the voices of geese – I know the geese have gone south – before I realise it’s the bugling of cranes, who have a more restricted vocabulary than goose tribes. Bugling does it no justice: it’s musical: there’s a blare and a peal in it; a two note piping that echoes the day’s tunnel.
One crane is warbling, momentarily rousing the others to call before they all shut off for the night. And I’m back to the medieval of Taivassalo kirk; the back of my neck prickles and then beyond Taivassalo’s frescoes into the wild ancient mind where crane shrieks are omens.
Sibelius saw a crane flock two days before his death: “There they come, the birds of my youth."
Above and below Ainola, where Sibelius lived and died and above Saari and at the bay of Mietoisten the cranes fly and call still.
The archaic in our world is palpable in wetlands and woods; and is almost tangible in our wild minds.
Old men are boys again.
I have the very last of the Campbeltown malt in my glass; I’m still barefoot after the sauna.
My eyes are cleansed of the day’s grit – inner eye cleared of the grit of the day too. I’d set out to look for an oak forest towards Kustavi and found only a tunnel in the vuori – what Finns call a mountain – a high expanse of bedrock. I’d walked in through burst steel gates in perpendicular rockface onto an earth floor along a tunnel carved through rock. There was a cracked-open fusebox. I followed the tunnel until the dark became absolute. The weapons- and oil-bunkers at Faslane came to mind and I became nervous and retraced my steps.
Barefoot with good malt here in the night and I’m surprised by the voices of geese – I know the geese have gone south – before I realise it’s the bugling of cranes, who have a more restricted vocabulary than goose tribes. Bugling does it no justice: it’s musical: there’s a blare and a peal in it; a two note piping that echoes the day’s tunnel.
One crane is warbling, momentarily rousing the others to call before they all shut off for the night. And I’m back to the medieval of Taivassalo kirk; the back of my neck prickles and then beyond Taivassalo’s frescoes into the wild ancient mind where crane shrieks are omens.
Sibelius saw a crane flock two days before his death: “There they come, the birds of my youth."
Above and below Ainola, where Sibelius lived and died and above Saari and at the bay of Mietoisten the cranes fly and call still.
The archaic in our world is palpable in wetlands and woods; and is almost tangible in our wild minds.
Old men are boys again.
Friday, 29 October 2010
Establishment
Down the ages
they conduct their long monologue:
can't you hear?
Mirkka Rekola
I'm struggling towards a notion of experiment here.
Saari is no backwater, though it's rural. In 1761 Augustin Ehrensvärd moved into Saari Manor. A soldier, a count and an architect, he had a deep interest in the arts and natural sciences, perhaps like me seeing not much difference between the two. He was a good friend of the great Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné - Linnaeus, and some time in that decade wrote to Linnaeus asking his advice on agricultural experiment at Saari:
"I have ... a plot of 24 tunnlands that is under salt water each spring, and would thus seem suited to the purpose. The earth is sandy. ... I have thought [of] experimenting with growing rice."
In New England at that time, settlers had also been trying this, though with what success can be imagined. Linnaeus was enthusiastic, but there are no rice-paddies ever recorded at Saari (nor New England as far as I can tell). Short summers and dark frozen winters may not help, however sandy your soil.
In 1959 Agrifood Research Finland took over Saari Manor and conducted cropping experiments and research here on clay land, including seed testing. They only left five years ago. Many of the apple trees the scientists planted still bear fruit and are delicious; though some others mysteriously wither on the bough or are dry when bitten.
A thousand years ago Saari was an actual island, surrounded by a small flotilla of others - the archipelago reaching right in here. One such small island was Tammimäki. It's now impossible to determine whether there were oaks at that place back then, but when the water receded, if not there already, the seeds came.
It's possible, though, to see the great waves of land-history, with glaciers retreating, sea levels falling and flora and fauna moving in to take the place of water and ice as linked to the later experiments of Agrifood scientists and Ehrensvärd. Sand deposits, boulder-clay soils a gift to agriculturists of every period.
Oakwoods are rare elsewhere in Finland; round here are plenty, placenames tell that story - always on higher ground - islands once. The first experiments are always those of the land: best land use determined by climate, seed availability, soil type, geology and altitude; achieving perfect management without human intervention. Balance, and at the same time, constant flux; and working with that to achieve a harmony of mineral and soil, flora and fauna, that I can only incline my head to.
The oakwood of Tammimäki is a manifestation of successful earth experiment. We may walk under the oaks, but we are not needed.
Terrain established and thriving.
they conduct their long monologue:
can't you hear?
Mirkka Rekola
I'm struggling towards a notion of experiment here.
Saari is no backwater, though it's rural. In 1761 Augustin Ehrensvärd moved into Saari Manor. A soldier, a count and an architect, he had a deep interest in the arts and natural sciences, perhaps like me seeing not much difference between the two. He was a good friend of the great Swedish naturalist Carl von Linné - Linnaeus, and some time in that decade wrote to Linnaeus asking his advice on agricultural experiment at Saari:
"I have ... a plot of 24 tunnlands that is under salt water each spring, and would thus seem suited to the purpose. The earth is sandy. ... I have thought [of] experimenting with growing rice."
In New England at that time, settlers had also been trying this, though with what success can be imagined. Linnaeus was enthusiastic, but there are no rice-paddies ever recorded at Saari (nor New England as far as I can tell). Short summers and dark frozen winters may not help, however sandy your soil.
In 1959 Agrifood Research Finland took over Saari Manor and conducted cropping experiments and research here on clay land, including seed testing. They only left five years ago. Many of the apple trees the scientists planted still bear fruit and are delicious; though some others mysteriously wither on the bough or are dry when bitten.
A thousand years ago Saari was an actual island, surrounded by a small flotilla of others - the archipelago reaching right in here. One such small island was Tammimäki. It's now impossible to determine whether there were oaks at that place back then, but when the water receded, if not there already, the seeds came.
It's possible, though, to see the great waves of land-history, with glaciers retreating, sea levels falling and flora and fauna moving in to take the place of water and ice as linked to the later experiments of Agrifood scientists and Ehrensvärd. Sand deposits, boulder-clay soils a gift to agriculturists of every period.
Oakwoods are rare elsewhere in Finland; round here are plenty, placenames tell that story - always on higher ground - islands once. The first experiments are always those of the land: best land use determined by climate, seed availability, soil type, geology and altitude; achieving perfect management without human intervention. Balance, and at the same time, constant flux; and working with that to achieve a harmony of mineral and soil, flora and fauna, that I can only incline my head to.
The oakwood of Tammimäki is a manifestation of successful earth experiment. We may walk under the oaks, but we are not needed.
Terrain established and thriving.
Growth
Is there room on the island, land on the main part of the island
for me to sing my songs, intone my long lays?
Words melt in my mouth, sprout on my gums.
. . .
Then reckless Lemminkäinen now began to sing.
He sang up rowans in farmyards, oaks in the middle of farmyards,
sturdy boughs on the oaks, an acorn on a branch.
The Kalevala
Ruotsalainen is an island of oaks.
Not a big island, like nearby Ruissalo, which has a larger oakwood, but with ancient oaks, mostly overlooked by timber hunters.
They were owned by the King of Sweden. The people of the island once came to hate the oaks as symbols of an unloved monarchy. The oaks are still there; the king long gone and his fleets with him.
Sadly, few islanders are left in the twenty-first century. The Turku archipelago and its sometimes difficult winter climate has shared a rural decline with much of the rest of Finland.
My hosts at Saari have arranged a special trip for me to see the oaks. There's a regular ferry for the islanders, but there's no facilities on the island for anyone else. Twenty-one folk live here.
The ferry-crossing is bitterly cold this October day; all my layers are cut right through by the wind. Sisko Ilmalahti, our guide for the day (our wee group is Anna from Saari, Morven, Niran and myself), greets us at the ferry landing and accompanies us directly to her house for coffee and an early lunch. Islanders eat early and heartily. Her house is off by a small bay, surrounded by piles of anchors.
The heavy horse left the island two days before we arrived, but evidence of its work is everywhere. They've felled some trees in the woods: not oaks - pines mostly, and big ones at that. Any fool can fell a tree. What happens then is a large tractor entering the woodland, compacting earth, destroying flora, including saplings, breaking overhead branches, to drag or worse, load out the stems on a heavy trailer.
The best woodland management is the oldest. Here, they've felled the trees not for the timber, though of course, nothing will be unused from trunks to lesser branches, but for the light their absence brings to the woodland. The horse has trodden carefully round all saplings, its heavy weight nothing compared to the tons of a forestry tractor. Its chains and harness, its strength and intelligence alongside its handler’s mean each tree is hauled out, slowly and with care, bringing trunk after trunk with no more damage than the walk through the woods we’re taking now.
Oak trees seem now to need a great deal of light if they are to grow from acorns which fall from trees onto the woodland floor. Regeneration needs a little help. Sometime around 1900 there was the accidental introduction into Europe of American oak mildew, which spread to every deciduous oak in Europe. While not deadly in itself, its effect is to add to the burden of oak saplings attempting to grow under a heavy canopy; the combination of mildew and absence of light does mean death to the saplings, however. Acorns carried by jays or squirrels outside the woodland, buried and forgotten grow perfectly well. Oaklings now grow happily anywhere except in oakwoods.
Here on Ruotsalainen, they want to rejuvenate this precious woodland - there's nowhere for acorns to germinate on an island except inward to the oakwood - hence the felling for light and the great care taken by that horse avoiding oak roots and already struggling oak saplings.
There's snow flurries, with fat flakes landing on the floor as I stand at the foot of an ancient, broken-limbed oak with Sisko's husband. Morven's stravaigin somewhere, doing her thing with the old slide camera and Anna has wandered off with Sisko looking for mushrooms. There can be no better companions to a forest than the quiet hunters of mushrooms and photographs and this island-forester weighing each word with myself and Niran an environmental artist, who's thoughtfully translating.
We estimate the tree to be older than five hundred, but there's no way of knowing for sure without a core sample, which would be foolish with such a precious tree. We talk of ancient island grazing regimes; of how islands are washed over not just by heavy seas, but by history. Forgotten woodlands the man's saying, which allowed them to survive. We talk a long time, round the tree, looking up, with snow falling on our faces, knowing that all is being done to help the woods live on into a time we'll never see. We stroll across a small clearing to another ancient and continue the discussion at its foot. I do my nose to outstretched arm's fingertip circling - an infallible yard-length each time - and the old tree gives me five and a half yards of circumference. The conversation is perfect and slow as growth; but Anna calls across the woods asking if we're waiting for winter. And we realise we're cold and hungry. Anna has found fat perfect ceps and shows us her haul as we straggle back the long way to the anchored yard.
On the way, we pass the manor house and its outbuildings - wood of course, with a windvane carrying the date 1677. The timber ends of old log-built barns have been used to help date woodlands elsewhere in Finland, but these are too weathered. The date though and the size of the great foundation timbers, old when felled, points to an ancient woodland of oak on the island in the middle ages - the time of Taivassalo kirk with its peopled and demoned landscape frescoes.
The islanders have ever lived in the present though and have tried everything to put food on the table. We pass a low deserted part brick buiding with a date of 1928: there was a brief attempt then to establish a brick manufactory with local clays, but it never amounted to anything in Depression times; islanders staying with the fishing and farming.
Along the way too, we clamber up the weathered outcrop at the centre of the island. It's no longer snowing, the skies are blue and we're treated to a 360 degree view of small islands, skerries and trees wherever they can crimp their roots. To each horizon: islands and trees.
Back at her house, Sisko busies herself with cooking another meal on her old steel log-range; Anna cooks up the mushrooms and we talk with Sisko and her husband about island life. The TV is on in the corner, sound down: an incongruous documentary about logging truck drivers in Alaska. In gaps in the slow moving conversation, we all stare out the windows - each one with a different view of up-close pines and birches, with flittering tits; between the trunks the glimmer of cold Baltic water.
A helicopter can be heard away to the south, then seen: it's the mainland hospital helicopter. Sisko tells us they don't turn out if the patient is very old. I don't know if this is twenty-first century health economics or that the helicopter ride would prove too much for a frail old person.
Sisko was born on Rekisaari, King's island, which she says should be pronounced Reksaari. It's called that because the king (him of the oaks) visited once. Her great-great-grandfather was a Pilot in these waters which are deep, mostly narrow and very difficult unless one knows the reefs and rips. Her great-grandfather and his son were Pilots too. Children are baptised here in sea water - that way they'll not drown at sea.
Sisko and her husband came to Ruotsalainen to build this house as a summer house sixteen years ago. No-one now lives on Rekisaari. Sisko shows us a photograph of herself and her father and brothers all smiling back in the seventies, leaning on the farmgate outside the Rekisaari house; without nostalgia.
The rain all falls on the mainland she says and it was hard to find water for the garden - by which she means what I say too: a vegetable garden for feeding a family. It proved impossible in the end to stay summers in Ruotsalainen and visit the Rekisaari garden to water, daily across the sea to the northwest and still have time for fishing and the other things that make up island life. The Ilmalahtis live in this house all year now.
Until two years ago there was a fishing co-operative on this island; we see the smoke house for catches of Baltic herring just outside. The co-op is no more. When we can't understand his name for the herring traps, Sisko's husband draws us a picture with his biro of the box nets that are used to catch the herring - the anchors sit outside. The herring have their own traditions and have always run the same places when they arrive. The Ruotsalainen folk know their routes and it allows them to funnel the fish into an anchored box-frame lined with net, which is lifted when the shoal is inside.
Fish were smoked or salted and taken to the annual fish fairs lasting a week in Helsinki and Turku for sale.
With a decline in fish numbers, aggravated by State protection of seals here - a tourist attraction - Sisko estimates there are ten thousand seals in the archipelago, all of whom eat fish and raid and damage the box-traps, fishing is no longer a way to earn a living.
There's also the question of cormorants - we discover their name after a long description and a mime of a bird with wings outspread on a rock, drying for lack of sebaceous glands - the dinosaur looking bird. No-one knows the Englishing until after the mime: merimetsu in Finnish. They migrate in their thousands and eat the pike-perch. Wherever I go in the archipelago I'm given this name, but I'm none the wiser as to what species a pike-perch is.
It was seasonal work; the Baltic, being barely salty because of the influx of so much mainland river water and its lack of noticeable tides to flush it, freezes hard each winter.
As if a final nail were needed in island fishing economy, the small scale salmon farming proved susceptible to nitrates in the water from mainland crop growing practices. All the salmon now comes from Norway.
It's with a little regret, but a lot of pragmatism our conversation moves through all this. Ruotsalainen islanders are resourceful folk and maybe can see the days ahead through their oakwoods.
A faint sound of oak-song today, here in the island of trees and people growing together and growing old together, a backwash of events allowing enough time for the changes of that growth.
for me to sing my songs, intone my long lays?
Words melt in my mouth, sprout on my gums.
. . .
Then reckless Lemminkäinen now began to sing.
He sang up rowans in farmyards, oaks in the middle of farmyards,
sturdy boughs on the oaks, an acorn on a branch.
The Kalevala
Ruotsalainen is an island of oaks.
Not a big island, like nearby Ruissalo, which has a larger oakwood, but with ancient oaks, mostly overlooked by timber hunters.
They were owned by the King of Sweden. The people of the island once came to hate the oaks as symbols of an unloved monarchy. The oaks are still there; the king long gone and his fleets with him.
Sadly, few islanders are left in the twenty-first century. The Turku archipelago and its sometimes difficult winter climate has shared a rural decline with much of the rest of Finland.
My hosts at Saari have arranged a special trip for me to see the oaks. There's a regular ferry for the islanders, but there's no facilities on the island for anyone else. Twenty-one folk live here.
The ferry-crossing is bitterly cold this October day; all my layers are cut right through by the wind. Sisko Ilmalahti, our guide for the day (our wee group is Anna from Saari, Morven, Niran and myself), greets us at the ferry landing and accompanies us directly to her house for coffee and an early lunch. Islanders eat early and heartily. Her house is off by a small bay, surrounded by piles of anchors.
The heavy horse left the island two days before we arrived, but evidence of its work is everywhere. They've felled some trees in the woods: not oaks - pines mostly, and big ones at that. Any fool can fell a tree. What happens then is a large tractor entering the woodland, compacting earth, destroying flora, including saplings, breaking overhead branches, to drag or worse, load out the stems on a heavy trailer.
The best woodland management is the oldest. Here, they've felled the trees not for the timber, though of course, nothing will be unused from trunks to lesser branches, but for the light their absence brings to the woodland. The horse has trodden carefully round all saplings, its heavy weight nothing compared to the tons of a forestry tractor. Its chains and harness, its strength and intelligence alongside its handler’s mean each tree is hauled out, slowly and with care, bringing trunk after trunk with no more damage than the walk through the woods we’re taking now.
Oak trees seem now to need a great deal of light if they are to grow from acorns which fall from trees onto the woodland floor. Regeneration needs a little help. Sometime around 1900 there was the accidental introduction into Europe of American oak mildew, which spread to every deciduous oak in Europe. While not deadly in itself, its effect is to add to the burden of oak saplings attempting to grow under a heavy canopy; the combination of mildew and absence of light does mean death to the saplings, however. Acorns carried by jays or squirrels outside the woodland, buried and forgotten grow perfectly well. Oaklings now grow happily anywhere except in oakwoods.
Here on Ruotsalainen, they want to rejuvenate this precious woodland - there's nowhere for acorns to germinate on an island except inward to the oakwood - hence the felling for light and the great care taken by that horse avoiding oak roots and already struggling oak saplings.
There's snow flurries, with fat flakes landing on the floor as I stand at the foot of an ancient, broken-limbed oak with Sisko's husband. Morven's stravaigin somewhere, doing her thing with the old slide camera and Anna has wandered off with Sisko looking for mushrooms. There can be no better companions to a forest than the quiet hunters of mushrooms and photographs and this island-forester weighing each word with myself and Niran an environmental artist, who's thoughtfully translating.
We estimate the tree to be older than five hundred, but there's no way of knowing for sure without a core sample, which would be foolish with such a precious tree. We talk of ancient island grazing regimes; of how islands are washed over not just by heavy seas, but by history. Forgotten woodlands the man's saying, which allowed them to survive. We talk a long time, round the tree, looking up, with snow falling on our faces, knowing that all is being done to help the woods live on into a time we'll never see. We stroll across a small clearing to another ancient and continue the discussion at its foot. I do my nose to outstretched arm's fingertip circling - an infallible yard-length each time - and the old tree gives me five and a half yards of circumference. The conversation is perfect and slow as growth; but Anna calls across the woods asking if we're waiting for winter. And we realise we're cold and hungry. Anna has found fat perfect ceps and shows us her haul as we straggle back the long way to the anchored yard.
On the way, we pass the manor house and its outbuildings - wood of course, with a windvane carrying the date 1677. The timber ends of old log-built barns have been used to help date woodlands elsewhere in Finland, but these are too weathered. The date though and the size of the great foundation timbers, old when felled, points to an ancient woodland of oak on the island in the middle ages - the time of Taivassalo kirk with its peopled and demoned landscape frescoes.
The islanders have ever lived in the present though and have tried everything to put food on the table. We pass a low deserted part brick buiding with a date of 1928: there was a brief attempt then to establish a brick manufactory with local clays, but it never amounted to anything in Depression times; islanders staying with the fishing and farming.
Along the way too, we clamber up the weathered outcrop at the centre of the island. It's no longer snowing, the skies are blue and we're treated to a 360 degree view of small islands, skerries and trees wherever they can crimp their roots. To each horizon: islands and trees.
Back at her house, Sisko busies herself with cooking another meal on her old steel log-range; Anna cooks up the mushrooms and we talk with Sisko and her husband about island life. The TV is on in the corner, sound down: an incongruous documentary about logging truck drivers in Alaska. In gaps in the slow moving conversation, we all stare out the windows - each one with a different view of up-close pines and birches, with flittering tits; between the trunks the glimmer of cold Baltic water.
A helicopter can be heard away to the south, then seen: it's the mainland hospital helicopter. Sisko tells us they don't turn out if the patient is very old. I don't know if this is twenty-first century health economics or that the helicopter ride would prove too much for a frail old person.
Sisko was born on Rekisaari, King's island, which she says should be pronounced Reksaari. It's called that because the king (him of the oaks) visited once. Her great-great-grandfather was a Pilot in these waters which are deep, mostly narrow and very difficult unless one knows the reefs and rips. Her great-grandfather and his son were Pilots too. Children are baptised here in sea water - that way they'll not drown at sea.
Sisko and her husband came to Ruotsalainen to build this house as a summer house sixteen years ago. No-one now lives on Rekisaari. Sisko shows us a photograph of herself and her father and brothers all smiling back in the seventies, leaning on the farmgate outside the Rekisaari house; without nostalgia.
The rain all falls on the mainland she says and it was hard to find water for the garden - by which she means what I say too: a vegetable garden for feeding a family. It proved impossible in the end to stay summers in Ruotsalainen and visit the Rekisaari garden to water, daily across the sea to the northwest and still have time for fishing and the other things that make up island life. The Ilmalahtis live in this house all year now.
Until two years ago there was a fishing co-operative on this island; we see the smoke house for catches of Baltic herring just outside. The co-op is no more. When we can't understand his name for the herring traps, Sisko's husband draws us a picture with his biro of the box nets that are used to catch the herring - the anchors sit outside. The herring have their own traditions and have always run the same places when they arrive. The Ruotsalainen folk know their routes and it allows them to funnel the fish into an anchored box-frame lined with net, which is lifted when the shoal is inside.
Fish were smoked or salted and taken to the annual fish fairs lasting a week in Helsinki and Turku for sale.
With a decline in fish numbers, aggravated by State protection of seals here - a tourist attraction - Sisko estimates there are ten thousand seals in the archipelago, all of whom eat fish and raid and damage the box-traps, fishing is no longer a way to earn a living.
There's also the question of cormorants - we discover their name after a long description and a mime of a bird with wings outspread on a rock, drying for lack of sebaceous glands - the dinosaur looking bird. No-one knows the Englishing until after the mime: merimetsu in Finnish. They migrate in their thousands and eat the pike-perch. Wherever I go in the archipelago I'm given this name, but I'm none the wiser as to what species a pike-perch is.
It was seasonal work; the Baltic, being barely salty because of the influx of so much mainland river water and its lack of noticeable tides to flush it, freezes hard each winter.
As if a final nail were needed in island fishing economy, the small scale salmon farming proved susceptible to nitrates in the water from mainland crop growing practices. All the salmon now comes from Norway.
It's with a little regret, but a lot of pragmatism our conversation moves through all this. Ruotsalainen islanders are resourceful folk and maybe can see the days ahead through their oakwoods.
A faint sound of oak-song today, here in the island of trees and people growing together and growing old together, a backwash of events allowing enough time for the changes of that growth.
Thursday, 28 October 2010
Presence
There are still things in the world that cannot be bought or bartered. Some things cannot be worshipped or derided, not even touched or held; yet here, now, worldly; tenacious, solid flesh and muscle and brain.
This morning passing through the air in and above my soil born world, the impossible grace in passing of seven impossibly slender and muscular El Greco elongated common cranes.
They are silent. I'm jubilant; almost making their bugling noises in my own throat as I salute their fleeting presence; our joint existence in this very world.
This morning passing through the air in and above my soil born world, the impossible grace in passing of seven impossibly slender and muscular El Greco elongated common cranes.
They are silent. I'm jubilant; almost making their bugling noises in my own throat as I salute their fleeting presence; our joint existence in this very world.
Carpenters' work
Bear, apple of the forest, honey-paws with arched back . . .
Golden cuckoo of the forest, lovely shaggy-haired one . . .
Väinämöinen addresses the Bear.
The Kalevala
What are the consequences and materiality of a culture and tradition of wood use? The filigree and decoration as well as the practical construction and materials and tools?
I don't really expect to see the bear in the forest, but it seems worth a trip to Karelia in the east, the entire width of the country away. Where city road signs read St. Petersburg; not quite in Russia, but in Finnish Karelia: the rest of Karelia was ceded to the then USSR after the 1939-40 Winter War that raged here, with Finland a small republic torn between large militaristic neighbouring dictatorshps.
Väinämöinen was not known as a particularly peaceful man, starting fights with everyone he met, including epic battles with the Mistress of North Farm.
My first sights on walking by Lake Saimaa into town are of tanks: one German-, one Russian-made, both bought in the last century's war for the Finnish Army. The reality of crude machine brutalism designed to kill and maim is always a surprise.
The Swedish name of Lappeenranta, Vilmanstrand, translates as Wild Man's Shore, though might not refer to Väinämöinen or the Apple of the Forest.
The Kalevala stories were collected largely in Karelia by Elias Lönnrot. That music, poetry and song, playing itself to me is reason enough to visit Lappeenranta in Finnish Karelia.
Linnoitus, the fortress on the hill overlooking the harbour is another surprise. Through three hundred years, passing through the hands of Swedes, Russians and Finns in wars with names like The Great Wrath and used as a prison during the 20th century, today the elegant barracks have been converted to warm comfortable modern museums: South Karelia Art Museum, South Karelia Museum. Here is the oldest Orthodox church in Finland, smack opposite the Cavalry Museum.
It's cold here and I've been walking all morning. The fortress has also a cafe; though that is to underestimate the effect it has on a cold man entering. In a room full of antique sofas and tables is the largest selection on a side buffet table of berry pies, chocolate cakes and Karelian pies possible; in the largest possible helpings. A bear would sit and quietly eat through it with me; these cakes are probably the closest I'll get to honey-paws.
But it's at Linnoitus, a strange place for delicacy, that finely preserved wooden buildings display that materiality of culture I'm in search of.
The construction and decoration of the buildings demonstrates a deep knowledge of and love for wood. The diagonal quartered door panels - when they could be plainly horizontal or perpendicular - show not only an eye for the way wood grows, but make use of shorter planks than other styles of door panelling. The filigreed planking at wall tops also protects beam ends. The low, wind-resistant solid length of the architecture itself reflects huge fallen trees.
It's not fanciful to find faint traces of the songs of Kalevala in carpenters' work. Songs, people and buildings grew alongside and within Finnish forests - here Karelian - where old honey-paws walks to this day. Through yesterday's wars and the consumerism that sits below in the town, here is a continuity, a culture still cherished, but above all lived through and in.
Väinämöinen sang to a birch tree before cutting it for a new harp:
Do not weep green tree!
Do not keep crying, leafy sapling! Do not lament, white girdled one!
You will get abundant good fortune, get a pleasanter new life.
and then after cutting:
There is the body of the harp, the frame of the eternal source of joy.
Väinämöinen is referring to the music the harp brings; but also to the joy of the labour of carpentry, of the skill of working and love of wood, of the knowledge of trees and the forest and its dwellers.
I know carpenters who select wood with equal care and who are aware that they work part of a once living organism taken from a living woodland. It's the old way. Found here in Lappeenranta.
With only one daylight short visit here the big lake beckons. Lake Saimaa is difficult to walk round, even though I start by walking down Lönnrotinkatu - Lönnrot Street. I catch a bus for Saimaa Canal, the waterway between Saimaa and Vyborg, now part of Russia, always Karelia.
Woodland shores of the lake are encroached by urban life; a long motorway bridge arcing high leads to Taipalsaari, one of the largest islands. But here, walking along by water is old Karelia still: an old wooden barn, with wooden scaffolding up the southern side. It's being re-thatched. The farmhouse stands neaby as does the sauna. For all I know it's called North Farm.
I shamble to my night's rest the other side of Lappeenranta, by the shore of Saimaa, in the dusk, cold, hungry and content. I knew I wouldn't find the bear, but I found his dwelling place; and somehow, "the splendid fellow himself" found me.
Golden cuckoo of the forest, lovely shaggy-haired one . . .
Väinämöinen addresses the Bear.
The Kalevala
What are the consequences and materiality of a culture and tradition of wood use? The filigree and decoration as well as the practical construction and materials and tools?
I don't really expect to see the bear in the forest, but it seems worth a trip to Karelia in the east, the entire width of the country away. Where city road signs read St. Petersburg; not quite in Russia, but in Finnish Karelia: the rest of Karelia was ceded to the then USSR after the 1939-40 Winter War that raged here, with Finland a small republic torn between large militaristic neighbouring dictatorshps.
Väinämöinen was not known as a particularly peaceful man, starting fights with everyone he met, including epic battles with the Mistress of North Farm.
My first sights on walking by Lake Saimaa into town are of tanks: one German-, one Russian-made, both bought in the last century's war for the Finnish Army. The reality of crude machine brutalism designed to kill and maim is always a surprise.
The Swedish name of Lappeenranta, Vilmanstrand, translates as Wild Man's Shore, though might not refer to Väinämöinen or the Apple of the Forest.
The Kalevala stories were collected largely in Karelia by Elias Lönnrot. That music, poetry and song, playing itself to me is reason enough to visit Lappeenranta in Finnish Karelia.
Linnoitus, the fortress on the hill overlooking the harbour is another surprise. Through three hundred years, passing through the hands of Swedes, Russians and Finns in wars with names like The Great Wrath and used as a prison during the 20th century, today the elegant barracks have been converted to warm comfortable modern museums: South Karelia Art Museum, South Karelia Museum. Here is the oldest Orthodox church in Finland, smack opposite the Cavalry Museum.
It's cold here and I've been walking all morning. The fortress has also a cafe; though that is to underestimate the effect it has on a cold man entering. In a room full of antique sofas and tables is the largest selection on a side buffet table of berry pies, chocolate cakes and Karelian pies possible; in the largest possible helpings. A bear would sit and quietly eat through it with me; these cakes are probably the closest I'll get to honey-paws.
But it's at Linnoitus, a strange place for delicacy, that finely preserved wooden buildings display that materiality of culture I'm in search of.
The construction and decoration of the buildings demonstrates a deep knowledge of and love for wood. The diagonal quartered door panels - when they could be plainly horizontal or perpendicular - show not only an eye for the way wood grows, but make use of shorter planks than other styles of door panelling. The filigreed planking at wall tops also protects beam ends. The low, wind-resistant solid length of the architecture itself reflects huge fallen trees.
It's not fanciful to find faint traces of the songs of Kalevala in carpenters' work. Songs, people and buildings grew alongside and within Finnish forests - here Karelian - where old honey-paws walks to this day. Through yesterday's wars and the consumerism that sits below in the town, here is a continuity, a culture still cherished, but above all lived through and in.
Väinämöinen sang to a birch tree before cutting it for a new harp:
Do not weep green tree!
Do not keep crying, leafy sapling! Do not lament, white girdled one!
You will get abundant good fortune, get a pleasanter new life.
and then after cutting:
There is the body of the harp, the frame of the eternal source of joy.
Väinämöinen is referring to the music the harp brings; but also to the joy of the labour of carpentry, of the skill of working and love of wood, of the knowledge of trees and the forest and its dwellers.
I know carpenters who select wood with equal care and who are aware that they work part of a once living organism taken from a living woodland. It's the old way. Found here in Lappeenranta.
With only one daylight short visit here the big lake beckons. Lake Saimaa is difficult to walk round, even though I start by walking down Lönnrotinkatu - Lönnrot Street. I catch a bus for Saimaa Canal, the waterway between Saimaa and Vyborg, now part of Russia, always Karelia.
Woodland shores of the lake are encroached by urban life; a long motorway bridge arcing high leads to Taipalsaari, one of the largest islands. But here, walking along by water is old Karelia still: an old wooden barn, with wooden scaffolding up the southern side. It's being re-thatched. The farmhouse stands neaby as does the sauna. For all I know it's called North Farm.
I shamble to my night's rest the other side of Lappeenranta, by the shore of Saimaa, in the dusk, cold, hungry and content. I knew I wouldn't find the bear, but I found his dwelling place; and somehow, "the splendid fellow himself" found me.
Wednesday, 27 October 2010
Diamond
Ten feet from my window – I’ve paced it – there’s a deep steep-sided ditch. It’s a channel for water, of course, but also a highway for small rodents. Seconds ago a buzzard stooped, fast, into the ditch. I could see her brown mottled feathers, her spread wings among the dead, still-standing grasses that line the ditch. Jays screeching like the demented souls of some former bedlam. I’m thinking the buzzard has stooped on one of them, when she jumps, takes off with a gallus wingbeat. In her claws a long tailed field mouse.
Yesterday a large raven, high overhead the cottage was boldly flyting a sea eagle, making that deep musical chiming call. Above, then below: the raven was doing his best aerobatics, but never coming too close to the claws of the sea eagle.
The raven has a wingspan of about four feet. The sea eagle’s eight foot span dwarfed the bold raven.
The sea eagle coasted on, higher, then higher still, ignoring the raven.
As the buzzard had been apparently oblivious to the squawking jays.
Raptors have diamond pointed minds.
Yesterday a large raven, high overhead the cottage was boldly flyting a sea eagle, making that deep musical chiming call. Above, then below: the raven was doing his best aerobatics, but never coming too close to the claws of the sea eagle.
The raven has a wingspan of about four feet. The sea eagle’s eight foot span dwarfed the bold raven.
The sea eagle coasted on, higher, then higher still, ignoring the raven.
As the buzzard had been apparently oblivious to the squawking jays.
Raptors have diamond pointed minds.
Suppilovahvero
Everyone's hungry this morning.
I'm out early looking for late chanterelles - the tubiform kind with black tops and yellow stems. They have no English common name; I call them yellow-legs, the Finns call them suppilovahvero. Cantharellus tubaeformis. It's been wet lately and not too cold - good conditions and the right time and place: the woods.
Overnight, though, everything has turned to silver. Frost reaches right up into the trees. Frosted spider webs cross the paths. There are frozen deer slots at the wood edge, hard set and clear.
A red squirrel, actually a ruddy brown, stirs herself from a reverie of cold as I walk by; acorns are frozen to the ground where they fell. We regard each other solemnly, as folk who realise that autumn is over. The last aspen leaves are tumbling too, early sun touching the tops of the trees and releasing the stems from the grip of frost.
My old friend, the fox, kettu, hears me coming crackling leaves underfoot and makes his near invisible, silent russet way off along the path through falling buttery aspen leaves and frosted brown oak leaves.
Jays are beginning to flash about, pinkish and part blue-winged, singing a little. They sound like squirrels should sound like. But more are noticing me and scolding from one side, then echoed on the other.
The cold makes us all cranky. I've little hope of finding yellow-legs among all these falling yellow leaves, so being pragmatic will head back and have a breakfast egg without mushrooms. I have the choice; fox, jay and the others must forage all the harder.
And it'll get harder too. As I get back to Saari, Simo is using an old drill to make holes for snow poles in the frozen ground next the driveways . They look a little gay, a little odd - they are made from the tops of spruce trees with topmost branches still intact, needled thickly. Snow is on its way.
I'm out early looking for late chanterelles - the tubiform kind with black tops and yellow stems. They have no English common name; I call them yellow-legs, the Finns call them suppilovahvero. Cantharellus tubaeformis. It's been wet lately and not too cold - good conditions and the right time and place: the woods.
Overnight, though, everything has turned to silver. Frost reaches right up into the trees. Frosted spider webs cross the paths. There are frozen deer slots at the wood edge, hard set and clear.
A red squirrel, actually a ruddy brown, stirs herself from a reverie of cold as I walk by; acorns are frozen to the ground where they fell. We regard each other solemnly, as folk who realise that autumn is over. The last aspen leaves are tumbling too, early sun touching the tops of the trees and releasing the stems from the grip of frost.
My old friend, the fox, kettu, hears me coming crackling leaves underfoot and makes his near invisible, silent russet way off along the path through falling buttery aspen leaves and frosted brown oak leaves.
Jays are beginning to flash about, pinkish and part blue-winged, singing a little. They sound like squirrels should sound like. But more are noticing me and scolding from one side, then echoed on the other.
The cold makes us all cranky. I've little hope of finding yellow-legs among all these falling yellow leaves, so being pragmatic will head back and have a breakfast egg without mushrooms. I have the choice; fox, jay and the others must forage all the harder.
And it'll get harder too. As I get back to Saari, Simo is using an old drill to make holes for snow poles in the frozen ground next the driveways . They look a little gay, a little odd - they are made from the tops of spruce trees with topmost branches still intact, needled thickly. Snow is on its way.
Monday, 25 October 2010
Heart of the sauna
Nothing: what the mind amounts to.
A relief, then, dripping onto pine boards; pine, pine and birch burning on the stove, pine planking inside straight pine logs, adzed and trimmed a hundred years ago and laid true.
Wood, fire, water. Water thrown on hot stone to steam and become instant dry steam heat alchemy: nothing; no thought other than of wood and become elemental. With steamheat, with eyelids calmed, heart slowed, mouth heat-cleansed. No-mind no-thing.
And back to the cottage, barefoot through sleet and ice-stiff grass.
A relief, then, dripping onto pine boards; pine, pine and birch burning on the stove, pine planking inside straight pine logs, adzed and trimmed a hundred years ago and laid true.
Wood, fire, water. Water thrown on hot stone to steam and become instant dry steam heat alchemy: nothing; no thought other than of wood and become elemental. With steamheat, with eyelids calmed, heart slowed, mouth heat-cleansed. No-mind no-thing.
And back to the cottage, barefoot through sleet and ice-stiff grass.
Lambency
The last bus drops me off at the road end in full moon: a hunter's moon. The air is crisp and clear; the temperature very low.
Snow poles are out all along the roadside, though there's no need of them tonight.
The sky is clear too; nothing but the moon and a few stars: the Plough, Venus. It's not hard to imagine the blue light to the north is the aurora borealis, what's called here fox fire. The story goes that an arctic fox was running in the far north, brushing his fur on the mountains as he passed, causing sparks to fly up into the sky, becoming the northern lights.
Foxfire is also the bioluminescence of some species of fungi that enjoy decaying wood, like the Armillaria species: honey mushrooms - also good to eat, but I've seen none here along by the woodland.
Aside from the moon, there's a small fire of brushwood and brash left over from recent fellings way out in a pale newly ploughed field. The moon illuminates its smoke.
Moonlight lifts the long white plastic bale lines of silage waiting to be brought home so that they appear floating, luminous above their shadows.
My shadow walks companionably beside me, merging with the shadows of roadside trees, but always emerging again and stepping to my steps.
Shadows are fewer where the trees are thin; the moon strikes right to the woodland floor in pale shafts, dappling the fresh frosted leaves, sparking a hundred lights. A fallen aurora.
Just before the dark woodland - pine and oak and birch, alder and spruce - a slender shadow of a tall thin birch is cast all along the whole lit length of an old oak-bole's crinkled skin. That too merges with my own shadow as I pass.
It's so seldom that I walk at night, I'd like to prolong this short walk - half an hour is not long enough; and though there's plenty of white on the white page to write these words, zero degrees mean it's too cold to linger.
I breathe a last plume at the night sky; my shadow does the same, then I move inside the old farmhand's cottage; but I move around inside by moonlight, stepping where moon fingers the wooden floors.
Light's not just what strikes into the eye. It's what a fox delivers, a mushroom on dying wood; it's ciphered in the whorl and mottled grain of wide old oak floorplanks. Shadow is nothing but the far side of what we see.
Snow poles are out all along the roadside, though there's no need of them tonight.
The sky is clear too; nothing but the moon and a few stars: the Plough, Venus. It's not hard to imagine the blue light to the north is the aurora borealis, what's called here fox fire. The story goes that an arctic fox was running in the far north, brushing his fur on the mountains as he passed, causing sparks to fly up into the sky, becoming the northern lights.
Foxfire is also the bioluminescence of some species of fungi that enjoy decaying wood, like the Armillaria species: honey mushrooms - also good to eat, but I've seen none here along by the woodland.
Aside from the moon, there's a small fire of brushwood and brash left over from recent fellings way out in a pale newly ploughed field. The moon illuminates its smoke.
Moonlight lifts the long white plastic bale lines of silage waiting to be brought home so that they appear floating, luminous above their shadows.
My shadow walks companionably beside me, merging with the shadows of roadside trees, but always emerging again and stepping to my steps.
Shadows are fewer where the trees are thin; the moon strikes right to the woodland floor in pale shafts, dappling the fresh frosted leaves, sparking a hundred lights. A fallen aurora.
Just before the dark woodland - pine and oak and birch, alder and spruce - a slender shadow of a tall thin birch is cast all along the whole lit length of an old oak-bole's crinkled skin. That too merges with my own shadow as I pass.
It's so seldom that I walk at night, I'd like to prolong this short walk - half an hour is not long enough; and though there's plenty of white on the white page to write these words, zero degrees mean it's too cold to linger.
I breathe a last plume at the night sky; my shadow does the same, then I move inside the old farmhand's cottage; but I move around inside by moonlight, stepping where moon fingers the wooden floors.
Light's not just what strikes into the eye. It's what a fox delivers, a mushroom on dying wood; it's ciphered in the whorl and mottled grain of wide old oak floorplanks. Shadow is nothing but the far side of what we see.
Posterity
Tikka päätään puulun nakkaa
muttei loukkaa
koskei lakkaa
(Lauri Viita)
I'm out of the woodland for a while, visiting Tampere, but the woodland isn't out of me.
Tampere is an interesting place. Here, two lakes almost meet, one fifty-nine feet lower than the other: Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi, only the town, squat on its landmass keeping them apart.
That fifty-nine feet led the Glaswegian James Finlayson, a Quaker Victorian capitalist to build a cotton mill here in 1823 - the mill race and enormous factory bearing his name in stone are still here. Finlayson is the man credited with bringing the Industrial Revolution to Finland - a dubious distinction.
Tampere's also the place where Stalin first met Lenin at the Bolshevik Party Conference of 1906. During the Finnish Civil War Tampere was a Red Guard stronghold; the last Reds were killed in 1918 at the highest spot of what was then a small village outside Tampere: Pispala.
Pispala was built to house working men and their families, high on the moraine ridge between those two lakes. I'm here as guest of the Scottish poet Donald Adamson, who lives at Pispala. Which brings me back to the woodlands.
Donald's house is next to the house of Lauri Viita, the carpenter; a son of a carpenter, and a poet steeped in that socialist and working class tradition that
seems to pervade Tampere and Pispala still.
I can't help wondering about the wood Viita used in his daily trade; what timbers his father built houses from. I know that they will have used both pine and oak. Oak, being scarce and locally confined in Finland, likely will have come from around here at Tammimäki or perhaps even from Ruotsalainen, the island once owned by the king and which was his oak preserve for war-fleets. I like that circle of a working man reaping the benefits of a monarch's belligerent paranoia.
Later, after fighting in the Winter War and the Continuation War Viita wrote his first book, never losing sight of his political allegiances:
Some voice is explaining:
– This is that sick head
in which the lunacy is bread.
Is it a leak in the mould, a blast
in the alloy, or a fault in the cast?
At the end of his life he wrote sometimes in the Kalevala metre; maybe something of those oak beams and Väinämöinen at his heart.
There's a museum to Viita in Tampere; the building in which it's housed was built in part by his father.
There's a museum to Lenin, too; I don't know who built that.
Finlayson built his own museum - a cotton mill - and had his name carved on it.
The Viita part-poem I started with: Tikka päätään puulun nakkaa, I love the sound of. It roughly translates (I'm told) as: the woodpecker bangs his head, but never hurts it.
This morning early, down in the oak wood, I saw a green woodpecker, sitting as though she'd had enough banging for one day already.
While there's no official museum for the woodpecker, the tikka, this whole oakwood serves that purpose. Lauri Viita, poet and carpenter, would understand.
muttei loukkaa
koskei lakkaa
(Lauri Viita)
I'm out of the woodland for a while, visiting Tampere, but the woodland isn't out of me.
Tampere is an interesting place. Here, two lakes almost meet, one fifty-nine feet lower than the other: Näsijärvi and Pyhäjärvi, only the town, squat on its landmass keeping them apart.
That fifty-nine feet led the Glaswegian James Finlayson, a Quaker Victorian capitalist to build a cotton mill here in 1823 - the mill race and enormous factory bearing his name in stone are still here. Finlayson is the man credited with bringing the Industrial Revolution to Finland - a dubious distinction.
Tampere's also the place where Stalin first met Lenin at the Bolshevik Party Conference of 1906. During the Finnish Civil War Tampere was a Red Guard stronghold; the last Reds were killed in 1918 at the highest spot of what was then a small village outside Tampere: Pispala.
Pispala was built to house working men and their families, high on the moraine ridge between those two lakes. I'm here as guest of the Scottish poet Donald Adamson, who lives at Pispala. Which brings me back to the woodlands.
Donald's house is next to the house of Lauri Viita, the carpenter; a son of a carpenter, and a poet steeped in that socialist and working class tradition that
seems to pervade Tampere and Pispala still.
I can't help wondering about the wood Viita used in his daily trade; what timbers his father built houses from. I know that they will have used both pine and oak. Oak, being scarce and locally confined in Finland, likely will have come from around here at Tammimäki or perhaps even from Ruotsalainen, the island once owned by the king and which was his oak preserve for war-fleets. I like that circle of a working man reaping the benefits of a monarch's belligerent paranoia.
Later, after fighting in the Winter War and the Continuation War Viita wrote his first book, never losing sight of his political allegiances:
Some voice is explaining:
– This is that sick head
in which the lunacy is bread.
Is it a leak in the mould, a blast
in the alloy, or a fault in the cast?
At the end of his life he wrote sometimes in the Kalevala metre; maybe something of those oak beams and Väinämöinen at his heart.
There's a museum to Viita in Tampere; the building in which it's housed was built in part by his father.
There's a museum to Lenin, too; I don't know who built that.
Finlayson built his own museum - a cotton mill - and had his name carved on it.
The Viita part-poem I started with: Tikka päätään puulun nakkaa, I love the sound of. It roughly translates (I'm told) as: the woodpecker bangs his head, but never hurts it.
This morning early, down in the oak wood, I saw a green woodpecker, sitting as though she'd had enough banging for one day already.
While there's no official museum for the woodpecker, the tikka, this whole oakwood serves that purpose. Lauri Viita, poet and carpenter, would understand.
Sunday, 17 October 2010
Time-givers
The barn is made of wood, the cladding of pine planks. It's red painted and glowing in the low evening sun. The shadow, of the big poplar tree, older than the barn, is cast against the gable end and its topmost branches reach to the roof ridge and below that the lower limbs are shadowed in perfect symmetry. The trunk and its shadow are the precise straight perpendicular axis of not just the barn, floor to apex, but this exact cold autumn evening as well. The sun is at a level with both tree bole and gable end; balanced, poised, halted. Everything is caught and folded into the spirit of place.
A provocative harmony is manifested here, as if those zeitgebers - time-givers - of Circadian rhythm have switched attention to a century measure, away from day's cues and have lit up this relationship of elegant distinction, in which the man-made is stamped fleetingly with the poplar's seal of approval.
A provocative harmony is manifested here, as if those zeitgebers - time-givers - of Circadian rhythm have switched attention to a century measure, away from day's cues and have lit up this relationship of elegant distinction, in which the man-made is stamped fleetingly with the poplar's seal of approval.
Thursday, 14 October 2010
Plenty and enough
October days ride seven horses
Finnish saying
The first snow of the season fell softly this morning, quietly and with no fuss.
By the time I got to the lower tower with jays squabbling all around me, the tide was out and the tower was swaying slightly in gusts of wind that followed on from the snow. The wind had alternated with hail and dazzling sun.
The top of the tower in the middle of the wetlands is level with the sraight growing pines' and birches' uppermost branches, maybe 36 or 40 feet up. The trees' tops are close enough to reach out to and today in the east wind they lean over right into the open tower.
The jays are constant in their bickering and only a solitary grey crow flies purposefully on his errand against this east wind. A finch hurtles by on a squall followed by a leaf of birch at almost the same speed. Five swans beat up and away, black in silhouette against the sun.
The sun kindles odd corners of the woodland now that the leaves are thinning, sending shafts to search the woodland floor, revealing silent citadels of wood-ants. Bullfinches flicker from floor to low branch seeking shelter; despite the snow and hail and the lip-cracking east wind and eyebright sun; despite cold biting nosebones and seeds hidden in leaf drifts, their fleeting brightness seems to light seeds in front of them and then over there and then elsewhere.
For me too, on low shrubs there's plenty of fraochans and enough lingonberries for my tongue to remember summer.
Snow makes the event; taste liberates the body's memory. Whatever it is that happens, it happens here.
Finnish saying
The first snow of the season fell softly this morning, quietly and with no fuss.
By the time I got to the lower tower with jays squabbling all around me, the tide was out and the tower was swaying slightly in gusts of wind that followed on from the snow. The wind had alternated with hail and dazzling sun.
The top of the tower in the middle of the wetlands is level with the sraight growing pines' and birches' uppermost branches, maybe 36 or 40 feet up. The trees' tops are close enough to reach out to and today in the east wind they lean over right into the open tower.
The jays are constant in their bickering and only a solitary grey crow flies purposefully on his errand against this east wind. A finch hurtles by on a squall followed by a leaf of birch at almost the same speed. Five swans beat up and away, black in silhouette against the sun.
The sun kindles odd corners of the woodland now that the leaves are thinning, sending shafts to search the woodland floor, revealing silent citadels of wood-ants. Bullfinches flicker from floor to low branch seeking shelter; despite the snow and hail and the lip-cracking east wind and eyebright sun; despite cold biting nosebones and seeds hidden in leaf drifts, their fleeting brightness seems to light seeds in front of them and then over there and then elsewhere.
For me too, on low shrubs there's plenty of fraochans and enough lingonberries for my tongue to remember summer.
Snow makes the event; taste liberates the body's memory. Whatever it is that happens, it happens here.
Saturday, 9 October 2010
Väinämöinen's oak
In order to reach the small island community of Iniö, maybe twelve miles from here down the bay and out into the Gulf of Bothnia, if you don't have a boat (and I don't) it's necessary to travel by bus maybe forty five north and then turning south west to negotiate the bays, inlets and islands scattered along the coastline. Then the two ferries, first to the island of Jumo, then another to Iniö.
While I'm here to look at the oakwoods - unusual for Finland, the country of pine and birch, I need to get an idea of the bigger landscape in which they formed. Waterscape would be as correct as landscape with twenty thousand islands in the archipelago.
The road north starts with surprises for me - among the spruce and pine , fir and birch in large tracts, broken only by farmland - crops of sunflowers and of raspberries. After the raised eyebrows, I realise the length of summer days and relative mildness (it's comparative) are responsible. As must surely be the case with the long growing oak.
We move on edging south west into a place full of lakes and rivers, each with tiny mooring places and boathouses, inlets bounded by rock outcrops with the trees in feathery mossed bedrock cracks. Causeways and bridges lead the way, which becomes almost more water than land, more rock than farm, more woodland than all those. In this landscape, in this place it's easy to believe in the presence of not just the bears and wolves still here in forest and told of in the Kalevala, but the legends around them, of Väinämöinen's sowing of the ancient wilderness itself:
He sowed the hills with pine groves, sowed the knolls with stands of fir
He sowed birches in swales, alders on light-soiled lands
rowans in holy places, willows on flooded lands
junipers on barren lands, oaks by the side of a stream.
The names of the places we pass or are signed are the melody of epic: Lautenpää, Rautila, Taivassalo, Pukholma, Lehtinen, Aasmaa, Hakkenpää, Parattula and Laupustentie.
The first ferry is Aurora. The chart on the cabin wall shows me absolutely that there is as much land - island - as water. I find it hard to get a bearing on where we might be, with islands to each horizon, with hard by, tree'd island on isle on islet, skerry on reef; up close, and we are, these are upthrusts of weathered granite with the trees clawing into fissures. And we're floating not only on the water the ferry sails, but on the reflected mass of piled cumulus.
Iniö kirk is a beautiful spare Gustavian building. Indeed it was Gustav IV who had it built in 1798, perhaps fearful of the Revolution in France, building churches for merit in the next kingdom. The white interior is loved by the priest who tells us not only of the strong grace of the kirk architecture, but of the people who live on the island. There's a small community of 250, with two schools, a shop, a post office, a nurse, a library visiting twice a week and a doctor visiting once or twice a week. And the ferry is free.
Inside the doorway of the kirk proper, beyond the entrance leading to the belltower hangs a small model three-masted schooner. In august and spare Gustavian surroundings I find it heartening to find this ex voto. With prayer, it brings sailor and fisherman safely home.
I climb, with the priest to the very top of the bell tower - she's a little nervous of the open sided stairway at the very top, but we make it just fine, among a couple of fossil like bird skeletons and a fluttering finch. The finch has come in through a gap in the wooden shutters and disturbs the priest greatly - she'll return later to make sure it's away.
At the top, above the two bells, the vast oak beams are scrawled with the names of the old carpenters and repairers. Some have taken a chisel and carved, most a stub of pencil and written names and dates in copperplate handwriting as fine as the beams themselves. The priest speaks with fondness of the descendants of some of those who have written their names.
The easy-going island ways mean that a mention of the bells demands that the bell ringer be phoned to ring them, though it might mean the islanders wonder who they are tolling for.
And he duly arrives, a farmer in boiler suit and cap, speaking an elegant island Swedish, as though Gustav was still around. The bells - after introductions - are rung. I'm in the tower with ear protection and watch as the bell-ringer muscles the bells into heavy chimes - no ropes, but short cords (looking like baling twine) to each bellhead which is swung to rebound the clapper. One bell, one ring, the other bell, another ring, repeated and repeated. I feel all this as much as hear it.
The bells are cradled and swung in massive oak squared beams.
The ferry, the Skagen had brought us to the north settlement here, Norrby, so I head south to the other end's village, Söderby. It's an island of boats, though we pass the mandatory island rusting cars at farmroad end - old Volkswagens, each costing more to move to scrap than it ever cost to buy. It's a living island, full of apple trees and caravans, with those boats at Söderby tucked into fine boathouses and mostly out of the water. A couple of steel working boats pull against the ropes; a classic wooden island two master rides beautifully each small swell in the wee harbour.
A living island anywhere has its problems, too, with folk far away inheriting country cottages here - there's more than half a million in the old wooden-hut tradition of city escape now in Finland; with these driving the price of houses, it's hard for the youngsters to find somewhere to live.
The old island troubles and concerns remain of course. The priest tells of the old lore of winds - which not to set out in; which will bring rain. And above all which quarter's wind bring the fish which mean winter food.
The midsummer tower is still here at Söderby, with four ships at the top spinning in the wind, the rowan leaves twined through it now brown. Soon it will come down until summer rises again in Iniö and the archipelago.
The little oakwood at Saari is inseperable, not just from the land that allowed them to grow - or maybe Väinämöinen had a hand - but from the people and their lives, who still cherish trees and the use of timber in church and boat.
Back on Skagen and midway between Iniö and Kustavi there is a little transforming magic: the spirit of place, oak and pine and sky and rock takes over, somehow an inversion of island and sky - the skerries, reefs and whitecaps rising into the blue overhead and the same number of small drifting cumulus clouds buoying Skagen from below.
The ferry drifts this way, between clouds, with tree'd islets above until two shadows arrive moving somewhere between: a pair of white-tailed sea eagles out-skerry size pass languidly, making small the laboured distance of Skagen's engines.
Louhi, mistress of north farm, takes her broken boat and fashions it again:
. . . the planking she knocked into wings,
the steering oar into a tail for herself . . .
She spreads her wings to fly, raises herself aloft like an eagle
She flies swiftly along, seeking out Väinämöinen;
one wing brushed the clouds, the other grazed the water
While I'm here to look at the oakwoods - unusual for Finland, the country of pine and birch, I need to get an idea of the bigger landscape in which they formed. Waterscape would be as correct as landscape with twenty thousand islands in the archipelago.
The road north starts with surprises for me - among the spruce and pine , fir and birch in large tracts, broken only by farmland - crops of sunflowers and of raspberries. After the raised eyebrows, I realise the length of summer days and relative mildness (it's comparative) are responsible. As must surely be the case with the long growing oak.
We move on edging south west into a place full of lakes and rivers, each with tiny mooring places and boathouses, inlets bounded by rock outcrops with the trees in feathery mossed bedrock cracks. Causeways and bridges lead the way, which becomes almost more water than land, more rock than farm, more woodland than all those. In this landscape, in this place it's easy to believe in the presence of not just the bears and wolves still here in forest and told of in the Kalevala, but the legends around them, of Väinämöinen's sowing of the ancient wilderness itself:
He sowed the hills with pine groves, sowed the knolls with stands of fir
He sowed birches in swales, alders on light-soiled lands
rowans in holy places, willows on flooded lands
junipers on barren lands, oaks by the side of a stream.
The names of the places we pass or are signed are the melody of epic: Lautenpää, Rautila, Taivassalo, Pukholma, Lehtinen, Aasmaa, Hakkenpää, Parattula and Laupustentie.
The first ferry is Aurora. The chart on the cabin wall shows me absolutely that there is as much land - island - as water. I find it hard to get a bearing on where we might be, with islands to each horizon, with hard by, tree'd island on isle on islet, skerry on reef; up close, and we are, these are upthrusts of weathered granite with the trees clawing into fissures. And we're floating not only on the water the ferry sails, but on the reflected mass of piled cumulus.
Iniö kirk is a beautiful spare Gustavian building. Indeed it was Gustav IV who had it built in 1798, perhaps fearful of the Revolution in France, building churches for merit in the next kingdom. The white interior is loved by the priest who tells us not only of the strong grace of the kirk architecture, but of the people who live on the island. There's a small community of 250, with two schools, a shop, a post office, a nurse, a library visiting twice a week and a doctor visiting once or twice a week. And the ferry is free.
Inside the doorway of the kirk proper, beyond the entrance leading to the belltower hangs a small model three-masted schooner. In august and spare Gustavian surroundings I find it heartening to find this ex voto. With prayer, it brings sailor and fisherman safely home.
I climb, with the priest to the very top of the bell tower - she's a little nervous of the open sided stairway at the very top, but we make it just fine, among a couple of fossil like bird skeletons and a fluttering finch. The finch has come in through a gap in the wooden shutters and disturbs the priest greatly - she'll return later to make sure it's away.
At the top, above the two bells, the vast oak beams are scrawled with the names of the old carpenters and repairers. Some have taken a chisel and carved, most a stub of pencil and written names and dates in copperplate handwriting as fine as the beams themselves. The priest speaks with fondness of the descendants of some of those who have written their names.
The easy-going island ways mean that a mention of the bells demands that the bell ringer be phoned to ring them, though it might mean the islanders wonder who they are tolling for.
And he duly arrives, a farmer in boiler suit and cap, speaking an elegant island Swedish, as though Gustav was still around. The bells - after introductions - are rung. I'm in the tower with ear protection and watch as the bell-ringer muscles the bells into heavy chimes - no ropes, but short cords (looking like baling twine) to each bellhead which is swung to rebound the clapper. One bell, one ring, the other bell, another ring, repeated and repeated. I feel all this as much as hear it.
The bells are cradled and swung in massive oak squared beams.
The ferry, the Skagen had brought us to the north settlement here, Norrby, so I head south to the other end's village, Söderby. It's an island of boats, though we pass the mandatory island rusting cars at farmroad end - old Volkswagens, each costing more to move to scrap than it ever cost to buy. It's a living island, full of apple trees and caravans, with those boats at Söderby tucked into fine boathouses and mostly out of the water. A couple of steel working boats pull against the ropes; a classic wooden island two master rides beautifully each small swell in the wee harbour.
A living island anywhere has its problems, too, with folk far away inheriting country cottages here - there's more than half a million in the old wooden-hut tradition of city escape now in Finland; with these driving the price of houses, it's hard for the youngsters to find somewhere to live.
The old island troubles and concerns remain of course. The priest tells of the old lore of winds - which not to set out in; which will bring rain. And above all which quarter's wind bring the fish which mean winter food.
The midsummer tower is still here at Söderby, with four ships at the top spinning in the wind, the rowan leaves twined through it now brown. Soon it will come down until summer rises again in Iniö and the archipelago.
The little oakwood at Saari is inseperable, not just from the land that allowed them to grow - or maybe Väinämöinen had a hand - but from the people and their lives, who still cherish trees and the use of timber in church and boat.
Back on Skagen and midway between Iniö and Kustavi there is a little transforming magic: the spirit of place, oak and pine and sky and rock takes over, somehow an inversion of island and sky - the skerries, reefs and whitecaps rising into the blue overhead and the same number of small drifting cumulus clouds buoying Skagen from below.
The ferry drifts this way, between clouds, with tree'd islets above until two shadows arrive moving somewhere between: a pair of white-tailed sea eagles out-skerry size pass languidly, making small the laboured distance of Skagen's engines.
Louhi, mistress of north farm, takes her broken boat and fashions it again:
. . . the planking she knocked into wings,
the steering oar into a tail for herself . . .
She spreads her wings to fly, raises herself aloft like an eagle
She flies swiftly along, seeking out Väinämöinen;
one wing brushed the clouds, the other grazed the water
Friday, 8 October 2010
In the beginning
I've seen the face of God. It's kept in the nearby church at Taivassalo on a Dutch surplice made in 1510 and quite human for a god.
The tree of the crucifix at the altar was made 700 years ago by a great artist. His or her name is lost and the work was hidden for centuries when the Lutheran reformation swung this way.
The Christ, along whose arms wooden blood drips from wounded wooden hands, is angular, elongated yet entirely human in his expression of agony become its own morphic dulling of sense and senses. He is made of lime wood. He is hung on a cross, that oldest emblem of a tree, made from spruce: a beautifully circular paradigm of the living tree become the symbol of itself. The bosses at the ends of the tree's arms are of oak. These woods are practical considerations for a sculptor.
Lime has a stable nature when seasoned and is soft enough to the chisel and gouge, while being robust enough to hold even delicate carving well. Spruce, as any boatbuilder would also know, grows straight and true - no curves or knots to this cross. And the oak bosses, never warping, possibly even offcuts from other work the sculptor was making, but perfect for this job. Of course the Trinity is echoed in these three woods.
This whole church might have been made of wood, but instead was made of brick and stone. The brick indicates societal and woodland wealth, albeit in the control of a local aristocrat. It was built in the 1430s and what makes it remarkable, as if the artistry of that cross were not enough, are the glowing brightly coloured frescoes, uncovered in 1890 from two hundred and fifty years of Lutheran whitewash. Protestantism brooks no intermediaries between man and god. There is no need of visual prompts to illustrate creation, so long as there is the bible. In the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god. The absolute primacy of logos over the writhing forms of devils, dragons, martyrdoms, resurrections.
But the sheer vibrancy, vitality of these frescoes, the imagination, the fleshing out of creatures never seen, the faith is something that shakes this cynical old unbeliever: here is beauty.
A pelican feeds her children with her own blood - gushing from her wound - like the christ dripping limewood blood: it's a dragonish pelican - the painter never having seen such a bird, sitting in a pine tree. The pine is instantly recognisable, though not slavishly realistic and its lower limbs have at some point been pruned - the depiction is accurate for old woodland practices.
St John himself cradles the lamb, but he is dressed in a camel's skin.
Here is the first depiction anywhere in Finland of musicians - one a woman - who plays some percussion instrument now lost to the orchestra; the other - a man - blows baggy-cheeked into a bagpipe.
There is a man-headed creature in a hood, with a dog's body and a fish tail. From his mouth comes not the word, but a curling snaking vine.
In purgatory there are two sinners on all fours with sticks in their mouths, roped face to face at the neck - when one pulls away from the flames, the other burns more fiercely and pulls back; but for eternity; 580 years so far.
The evidence of a deep knowledge of wood types and their management is everywhere to be seen in the work of the fresco painters - and is as subtle as the work of the artist who made christ on his wooden tree.
Just behind saint Peter with his key the size of a small iron gate is a couple of lop-limbed oaks. Their limbs may have been used to frame smaller parts of wooden building: possibly small supporting beams. They may also have been used as fuel for the brick furnaces that would have made such demands on timber that pollarding and coppicing practices will have been widespread. Manage the trees, make the bricks, build the church to house the wooden christ.
St Christopher carries that same christ child across an invisible river. Round his calves swim fish that the painter would recognise from this very spot - to this day Baltic herring are caught here and remain a strong part of the economy. Christopher's staff is an entire lopped oak, retaining a topknot of leaves, complete with three remaining roots.
Everywhere, covering walls, arches, corbels is a vast flowering of leaf and green as alive as the medieval woodlands once outside, among which, as today, farmers carve their fields. The church writhes with plant life.
That medieval world effectively came to an end in 1650, when it was painted over and a more sombre colourless world began to be spoken of. In principio erat verbum. Except that Latin was banished too. Here, in the medieval church of Taivassalon in the real Finland, with its whitewashed walls and its crucifix banished to an attic, mass was said in the Finnish tongue for the first time ever.
I should relish the word, and I do; but the loss of the timber-and-plant medieval world - that knowledge, existential rather than symbolic (though it worked through its own powerful visual symbolisms) that loss is more than painful. The supremacy of brick, the down rating of wood is the first modernism leading inevitably to our own habitat impoverished times. A straight path to the debased political manipulations of language that the rule of the word, or the Word, if you prefer, made possible.
There can be no intercession between man and the Word. The trees are painted out.
The tree of the crucifix at the altar was made 700 years ago by a great artist. His or her name is lost and the work was hidden for centuries when the Lutheran reformation swung this way.
The Christ, along whose arms wooden blood drips from wounded wooden hands, is angular, elongated yet entirely human in his expression of agony become its own morphic dulling of sense and senses. He is made of lime wood. He is hung on a cross, that oldest emblem of a tree, made from spruce: a beautifully circular paradigm of the living tree become the symbol of itself. The bosses at the ends of the tree's arms are of oak. These woods are practical considerations for a sculptor.
Lime has a stable nature when seasoned and is soft enough to the chisel and gouge, while being robust enough to hold even delicate carving well. Spruce, as any boatbuilder would also know, grows straight and true - no curves or knots to this cross. And the oak bosses, never warping, possibly even offcuts from other work the sculptor was making, but perfect for this job. Of course the Trinity is echoed in these three woods.
This whole church might have been made of wood, but instead was made of brick and stone. The brick indicates societal and woodland wealth, albeit in the control of a local aristocrat. It was built in the 1430s and what makes it remarkable, as if the artistry of that cross were not enough, are the glowing brightly coloured frescoes, uncovered in 1890 from two hundred and fifty years of Lutheran whitewash. Protestantism brooks no intermediaries between man and god. There is no need of visual prompts to illustrate creation, so long as there is the bible. In the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god. The absolute primacy of logos over the writhing forms of devils, dragons, martyrdoms, resurrections.
But the sheer vibrancy, vitality of these frescoes, the imagination, the fleshing out of creatures never seen, the faith is something that shakes this cynical old unbeliever: here is beauty.
A pelican feeds her children with her own blood - gushing from her wound - like the christ dripping limewood blood: it's a dragonish pelican - the painter never having seen such a bird, sitting in a pine tree. The pine is instantly recognisable, though not slavishly realistic and its lower limbs have at some point been pruned - the depiction is accurate for old woodland practices.
St John himself cradles the lamb, but he is dressed in a camel's skin.
Here is the first depiction anywhere in Finland of musicians - one a woman - who plays some percussion instrument now lost to the orchestra; the other - a man - blows baggy-cheeked into a bagpipe.
There is a man-headed creature in a hood, with a dog's body and a fish tail. From his mouth comes not the word, but a curling snaking vine.
In purgatory there are two sinners on all fours with sticks in their mouths, roped face to face at the neck - when one pulls away from the flames, the other burns more fiercely and pulls back; but for eternity; 580 years so far.
The evidence of a deep knowledge of wood types and their management is everywhere to be seen in the work of the fresco painters - and is as subtle as the work of the artist who made christ on his wooden tree.
Just behind saint Peter with his key the size of a small iron gate is a couple of lop-limbed oaks. Their limbs may have been used to frame smaller parts of wooden building: possibly small supporting beams. They may also have been used as fuel for the brick furnaces that would have made such demands on timber that pollarding and coppicing practices will have been widespread. Manage the trees, make the bricks, build the church to house the wooden christ.
St Christopher carries that same christ child across an invisible river. Round his calves swim fish that the painter would recognise from this very spot - to this day Baltic herring are caught here and remain a strong part of the economy. Christopher's staff is an entire lopped oak, retaining a topknot of leaves, complete with three remaining roots.
Everywhere, covering walls, arches, corbels is a vast flowering of leaf and green as alive as the medieval woodlands once outside, among which, as today, farmers carve their fields. The church writhes with plant life.
That medieval world effectively came to an end in 1650, when it was painted over and a more sombre colourless world began to be spoken of. In principio erat verbum. Except that Latin was banished too. Here, in the medieval church of Taivassalon in the real Finland, with its whitewashed walls and its crucifix banished to an attic, mass was said in the Finnish tongue for the first time ever.
I should relish the word, and I do; but the loss of the timber-and-plant medieval world - that knowledge, existential rather than symbolic (though it worked through its own powerful visual symbolisms) that loss is more than painful. The supremacy of brick, the down rating of wood is the first modernism leading inevitably to our own habitat impoverished times. A straight path to the debased political manipulations of language that the rule of the word, or the Word, if you prefer, made possible.
There can be no intercession between man and the Word. The trees are painted out.
Monday, 4 October 2010
Knowledge of things
The winged seeds of the Norway maples are spiralling down in their hundreds this morning. I stand face upward and they clatter off me on their way to germination below.
An event in the true sense of the word, as is the dazzling scarlet of the chest of a single high flying bird as she wing-zips into a yielding birch top.
And then to encourage a three foot grass snake to quit the road outside the farm-hand's cottage.
And two feet away a small brown-haired caterpillar on its tread across the road in the opposite direction: I help it across the vast expanse of asphalt, but it curls on itself, becomes a miniature tumbleweed and blows off my hand where it had walked and rolls into the dry stems of rosebay willow herb.
Winged seeds like the maples' are known as samara; I do not know the name of the scarlet chested bird. Linnaeus wrote: "Without names, our knowledge of things would perish." But even knowledge cannot blunt the raw edge of pure awe in seeing scarlet across a blue sky or of a ripple of snake muscle across grey road.
An event in the true sense of the word, as is the dazzling scarlet of the chest of a single high flying bird as she wing-zips into a yielding birch top.
And then to encourage a three foot grass snake to quit the road outside the farm-hand's cottage.
And two feet away a small brown-haired caterpillar on its tread across the road in the opposite direction: I help it across the vast expanse of asphalt, but it curls on itself, becomes a miniature tumbleweed and blows off my hand where it had walked and rolls into the dry stems of rosebay willow herb.
Winged seeds like the maples' are known as samara; I do not know the name of the scarlet chested bird. Linnaeus wrote: "Without names, our knowledge of things would perish." But even knowledge cannot blunt the raw edge of pure awe in seeing scarlet across a blue sky or of a ripple of snake muscle across grey road.
Part heard
I love the activity of sound
John Cage
In that 1991 interview, Cage also quoted Kant: "two things that don't have to mean anything - music and laughter".
I'm staying close to the barn and farmhand's cottage today; it's Sunday and I'm baking bread. There's no-one about and clearly to be heard is the sound of a single aspen leaf oscillating in the coming-and-going breeze from the sea. When the wind freshens a little, I stand under the aspens and they tick like a museum full of clocks. Move a little and the onshore wind brings on the sound of seething water in a pan on the stove. Further off all the aspens together make that noise of a burn running sharply downhill, tumbling across boulders then falling a foot or two.
The maples, Norway maples, Acer platanoides, in the same wind have the sound of surf soughing on the strand.
The first Aeolian harps were not only placed in trees' branches, but must have been inspired by the music of trees in wind. The colours of autumn, or rather the dryness of each tree's leaves colour the sound. These maples are pure fire; the aspens range from butter-gold to green; a shade that brings to mind syboes: tender young spring greens, but in autumn.
There's a red maple leaf: silent, come to rest in falling onto the latch of the gently listing nineteenth century four-seater privy.
I sit on the sun-warmed stone steps of the granary. It's the highest point of Saari, the former island. I'm somewhere between hearing and listening; in fact I'm not sure here, now, how to differentiate between the two states. One is of attention, perhaps; the other of awareness. There's leaf drop as the oak sheds: one, two three, four: drifting down rustling off branches on the way to the floor.
The counterpoint is the drone and zuzz of fast flying insects. The jay chatter: clicks, whirrs; and shriek. The short trills of fleeter lives than mine. Island music, and always the far-off whooping of Canada geese.
Here's a cricket, sunning like me on the steps to the scribble of my pencil, scratching in the quiet. Dragonflies below the threshhold of my hearing, except for a low whirring of the rotor wings of one brown dragon as it settles on my head, who knows in what reverie of its own. The blue-flies' buzz is distant part-heard speech.
The eight sweet notes of a blackbird as rapid as any bat-skreeks and clicks come sudden into the mix.
With ears finely tuned - listening or hearing - could I hear growth and decline, or is that what the hum of the day is?
Could I hear wind whistle through spider webs as it does through a steel wire fence? Could I hear the clicks of communicating woodants?
It all happens when there are no expectations. And this music can never be played twice the same.
John Cage
In that 1991 interview, Cage also quoted Kant: "two things that don't have to mean anything - music and laughter".
I'm staying close to the barn and farmhand's cottage today; it's Sunday and I'm baking bread. There's no-one about and clearly to be heard is the sound of a single aspen leaf oscillating in the coming-and-going breeze from the sea. When the wind freshens a little, I stand under the aspens and they tick like a museum full of clocks. Move a little and the onshore wind brings on the sound of seething water in a pan on the stove. Further off all the aspens together make that noise of a burn running sharply downhill, tumbling across boulders then falling a foot or two.
The maples, Norway maples, Acer platanoides, in the same wind have the sound of surf soughing on the strand.
The first Aeolian harps were not only placed in trees' branches, but must have been inspired by the music of trees in wind. The colours of autumn, or rather the dryness of each tree's leaves colour the sound. These maples are pure fire; the aspens range from butter-gold to green; a shade that brings to mind syboes: tender young spring greens, but in autumn.
There's a red maple leaf: silent, come to rest in falling onto the latch of the gently listing nineteenth century four-seater privy.
I sit on the sun-warmed stone steps of the granary. It's the highest point of Saari, the former island. I'm somewhere between hearing and listening; in fact I'm not sure here, now, how to differentiate between the two states. One is of attention, perhaps; the other of awareness. There's leaf drop as the oak sheds: one, two three, four: drifting down rustling off branches on the way to the floor.
The counterpoint is the drone and zuzz of fast flying insects. The jay chatter: clicks, whirrs; and shriek. The short trills of fleeter lives than mine. Island music, and always the far-off whooping of Canada geese.
Here's a cricket, sunning like me on the steps to the scribble of my pencil, scratching in the quiet. Dragonflies below the threshhold of my hearing, except for a low whirring of the rotor wings of one brown dragon as it settles on my head, who knows in what reverie of its own. The blue-flies' buzz is distant part-heard speech.
The eight sweet notes of a blackbird as rapid as any bat-skreeks and clicks come sudden into the mix.
With ears finely tuned - listening or hearing - could I hear growth and decline, or is that what the hum of the day is?
Could I hear wind whistle through spider webs as it does through a steel wire fence? Could I hear the clicks of communicating woodants?
It all happens when there are no expectations. And this music can never be played twice the same.
Saturday, 2 October 2010
Stored
My grandmother taught me thrift. Each quarter pound paper packet of tea from the grocer was emptied into the tin tea caddy, then carefully taken apart so that not one curled leaf could remain undetected in any fold. The paper was later used to light a fire in the hearth.
Tea, any crops, are hard come by however wealthy you are if you know what goes into the sowing and harvesting. And what comes in between.
I put up with the pricks to my fingers when I'm picking the junipers' berries.
I don't mind that a wasp stings me if I'm collecting windfall apples; we can share.
Each yard here has an old apple tree - at least one, often more. Down by where the marsh harriers hunt around Kuustonmaa on the flat sea-reclaimed land there's a yard has twenty trees. I counted them. There seems to be as many varieties of apple in that orchard. A small child plays there collecting apples from the ground and piling them. Many are gone from the trees, safely harvested. The wasps are no more, with days shorter and nights colder. Maybe it was the great grand-mother and -father of this wee girl who planted the orchard, tree by tree, waiting patiently for the first crop after seven years of tending - keeping frosts and deer at bay, the dog chasing rabbits from the tenderness of the young growing stems.
The land farmed here for a thousand years; apples a recent enough introduction, with a crop going into preserves, jams, pies. Some dried. Sweetness before sugar became commonplace. Fructose - a summer's days stored in each sweet apple. The surplus, when enough had been laid in the cold loft to see a family through winter, sold at market. Essential cash income to small farmers.
Such patience and such rewards. I think of my own tiny orchard at Carbeth, just fruiting its first large crop while I'm away, after those twenty-eight seasons of waiting, spring following winter for seven years. Seven apple-lean years. They're standards mostly and will grow to about fifteen feet high with as big a spread, just as those planted here; grafts onto good rootstock.
There's only nine apple trees at Carbeth and that's planting to the utmost of the available space. All the trees have a connection with children, mine or friends', who get the first fruit each season. The patterns of land and kinship grow strong.
I have no title-deed to that Carbeth orchard and never will. If we succeed in buying the land from the landowner in whose family it's been for generations, it'll be in community ownership. I can only go to the earth, the earth can't go with me. The way it should be.
The old man down the road has brought all his apples in. He used old cardboard apple boxes from a supermarket and his wheelbarrow to move the boxes to the apple loft in his big old wooden barn. The barn itself an old log construction possibly made from the logs from his own felled pines. His driveway is of pines with all the lower branches taken off. They grow straight and tall, plenty of space, plenty light. It's likely he won't see them fully mature. But he grows them on.
Who knows in fifty years will be eating apples from the trees I planted.
Tammimäki has somewhere between fifty and a hundred mature oak trees. Ten times that number growing up with their roots interlocked and part of the land for a thousand years. The farmers here let them grow in the middle of arable crops. Not sentiment, but there's immovable bedrock upthrusts where the trees are islanded. Nevertheless, each knows the oaks are an inseperable part of this land - no financial value any more, but adding, for just one example, their leaves all and every autumn to the soil's fertility.
From walking around and slowly adding trees to my internal mapping I estimate that there might be a couple of hundred apple trees in the immediate vicinity in farm yards.
In Saffa, summer before last, the valley was set on fire by newcomers: about forty acres burnt clear of shrub and seven hundred trees destroyed. Productive trees, providing that essential income to farmers; planted by grandmothers, grandfathers. Fountains of fire as wee children watched. Soldiers stood by and watched as well, preventing the farmers from quenching the flames, telling them that this is declared State Land, though the farmers have ancient deeds proving the land theirs.
People are injured trying to reach their fields, other newcomers act as observers and are helping to try to plant new orchards, with the harassment of the military: this is declared State Land.
My apple trees grow in the wet west of Scotland. This is Finland, where apples are gathered in the burnish of October sun. Saffa is in hot dry Palestine where trees are easily burned to ash.
Watching the flames of family trees, just as I watched granny emptying tea, what is stored in the memories of the children of Saffa?
Tea, any crops, are hard come by however wealthy you are if you know what goes into the sowing and harvesting. And what comes in between.
I put up with the pricks to my fingers when I'm picking the junipers' berries.
I don't mind that a wasp stings me if I'm collecting windfall apples; we can share.
Each yard here has an old apple tree - at least one, often more. Down by where the marsh harriers hunt around Kuustonmaa on the flat sea-reclaimed land there's a yard has twenty trees. I counted them. There seems to be as many varieties of apple in that orchard. A small child plays there collecting apples from the ground and piling them. Many are gone from the trees, safely harvested. The wasps are no more, with days shorter and nights colder. Maybe it was the great grand-mother and -father of this wee girl who planted the orchard, tree by tree, waiting patiently for the first crop after seven years of tending - keeping frosts and deer at bay, the dog chasing rabbits from the tenderness of the young growing stems.
The land farmed here for a thousand years; apples a recent enough introduction, with a crop going into preserves, jams, pies. Some dried. Sweetness before sugar became commonplace. Fructose - a summer's days stored in each sweet apple. The surplus, when enough had been laid in the cold loft to see a family through winter, sold at market. Essential cash income to small farmers.
Such patience and such rewards. I think of my own tiny orchard at Carbeth, just fruiting its first large crop while I'm away, after those twenty-eight seasons of waiting, spring following winter for seven years. Seven apple-lean years. They're standards mostly and will grow to about fifteen feet high with as big a spread, just as those planted here; grafts onto good rootstock.
There's only nine apple trees at Carbeth and that's planting to the utmost of the available space. All the trees have a connection with children, mine or friends', who get the first fruit each season. The patterns of land and kinship grow strong.
I have no title-deed to that Carbeth orchard and never will. If we succeed in buying the land from the landowner in whose family it's been for generations, it'll be in community ownership. I can only go to the earth, the earth can't go with me. The way it should be.
The old man down the road has brought all his apples in. He used old cardboard apple boxes from a supermarket and his wheelbarrow to move the boxes to the apple loft in his big old wooden barn. The barn itself an old log construction possibly made from the logs from his own felled pines. His driveway is of pines with all the lower branches taken off. They grow straight and tall, plenty of space, plenty light. It's likely he won't see them fully mature. But he grows them on.
Who knows in fifty years will be eating apples from the trees I planted.
Tammimäki has somewhere between fifty and a hundred mature oak trees. Ten times that number growing up with their roots interlocked and part of the land for a thousand years. The farmers here let them grow in the middle of arable crops. Not sentiment, but there's immovable bedrock upthrusts where the trees are islanded. Nevertheless, each knows the oaks are an inseperable part of this land - no financial value any more, but adding, for just one example, their leaves all and every autumn to the soil's fertility.
From walking around and slowly adding trees to my internal mapping I estimate that there might be a couple of hundred apple trees in the immediate vicinity in farm yards.
In Saffa, summer before last, the valley was set on fire by newcomers: about forty acres burnt clear of shrub and seven hundred trees destroyed. Productive trees, providing that essential income to farmers; planted by grandmothers, grandfathers. Fountains of fire as wee children watched. Soldiers stood by and watched as well, preventing the farmers from quenching the flames, telling them that this is declared State Land, though the farmers have ancient deeds proving the land theirs.
People are injured trying to reach their fields, other newcomers act as observers and are helping to try to plant new orchards, with the harassment of the military: this is declared State Land.
My apple trees grow in the wet west of Scotland. This is Finland, where apples are gathered in the burnish of October sun. Saffa is in hot dry Palestine where trees are easily burned to ash.
Watching the flames of family trees, just as I watched granny emptying tea, what is stored in the memories of the children of Saffa?
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Here
My walking today on the way to Tammimäki is through a blue sea-sky continuum along the newly raked gravel paths that remind me of that luxurious austerity of some Japanese gardens; but these are for walking on, not just the eyes. The blue is brilliant and though it's full morning, the sun low. Only the belt of trees, their green, breaks up this shining blue.
Overhead fly Canada geese in dozens, their shadows across the gravel and shadows passing quickly up the lit birches. They fly lower and heavier than greylags, their carolling lighter. Memory of place is strong in us all, even when we're passing through, like the geese and me. My walking today is through the places of revealed dreamscape: the small and intimate map made step by step, reading land. I name the places and they exist for my next walk. The place of adders; the bay of the boat-house; the inlet of the blue wooden boat; the apple tree of wasps. Though here all are wasp-ridden, the insects drunk on fermenting juice; but it's at this tree I was stung - picking windfall apples with wasps inside. Our storytelling moves across the land and is a record.
Winter is the stalker in the woods. It's behind the intoxicated wasps, the chittering squirrels laying up stores and the yodels of Canada geese, but summer will not yet yield: its last movement still to be played. A single cormorant flies into the bay from the expanse of the Baltic sea. Jays work the acorns before they tumble to the woodland floor.
This place is called Saari - the Finnish word for island. As well as saari, there are placenames for skerries, rocks, points and sounds all now inland along the Gulf of Bothnia. Oulunsalo (island of Oulujoki) is a peninsula. Turning north and facing the maples on the rise I see quite clearly where the island would have been a thousand years ago, before post-glacial rebound forced the sea to walk from here. I'm strolling on old seabed. Fertile farmland supporting many head of cattle and growing silage and sugar beet.
That long view, were we able to take it, would be the proving of the fact that these oak trees of Tammimäki also walk. Generation on generation, moving out from the parent tree; that oldster dying, leaving this new generation to march outward, until checked, when the trees move back inwards, rippling the years, walking always: slowly walking. A walk of centuries in one place.
On my own daylong flickering ephemeral walk I fill a pocket with rosehips like nipples; I fill my red-spotted handkerchief with puffballs; I carry some stems of yarrow and their pure white flowerheads. These things flame into life and burn out in their walk of shorter days than mine.
The rose hips are for their redness, the puffballs for the skillet, the yarrow for a posy in the jamjar on my desk. I invent these things afresh as stories in my walking, in my memory of place.
Overhead fly Canada geese in dozens, their shadows across the gravel and shadows passing quickly up the lit birches. They fly lower and heavier than greylags, their carolling lighter. Memory of place is strong in us all, even when we're passing through, like the geese and me. My walking today is through the places of revealed dreamscape: the small and intimate map made step by step, reading land. I name the places and they exist for my next walk. The place of adders; the bay of the boat-house; the inlet of the blue wooden boat; the apple tree of wasps. Though here all are wasp-ridden, the insects drunk on fermenting juice; but it's at this tree I was stung - picking windfall apples with wasps inside. Our storytelling moves across the land and is a record.
Winter is the stalker in the woods. It's behind the intoxicated wasps, the chittering squirrels laying up stores and the yodels of Canada geese, but summer will not yet yield: its last movement still to be played. A single cormorant flies into the bay from the expanse of the Baltic sea. Jays work the acorns before they tumble to the woodland floor.
This place is called Saari - the Finnish word for island. As well as saari, there are placenames for skerries, rocks, points and sounds all now inland along the Gulf of Bothnia. Oulunsalo (island of Oulujoki) is a peninsula. Turning north and facing the maples on the rise I see quite clearly where the island would have been a thousand years ago, before post-glacial rebound forced the sea to walk from here. I'm strolling on old seabed. Fertile farmland supporting many head of cattle and growing silage and sugar beet.
That long view, were we able to take it, would be the proving of the fact that these oak trees of Tammimäki also walk. Generation on generation, moving out from the parent tree; that oldster dying, leaving this new generation to march outward, until checked, when the trees move back inwards, rippling the years, walking always: slowly walking. A walk of centuries in one place.
On my own daylong flickering ephemeral walk I fill a pocket with rosehips like nipples; I fill my red-spotted handkerchief with puffballs; I carry some stems of yarrow and their pure white flowerheads. These things flame into life and burn out in their walk of shorter days than mine.
The rose hips are for their redness, the puffballs for the skillet, the yarrow for a posy in the jamjar on my desk. I invent these things afresh as stories in my walking, in my memory of place.
Monday, 27 September 2010
Low moon
I seek for charms that autumn best can yield
In mellowing wood & time bleaching field
John Clare
The sky is purpling as the light fades. There's a snell wind, but the days are still full of sunlight - dawn to dusk.
It's that sunlight that these trees have been storing, summer following spring, year on year, decades at a time. From the size I'd say fifty years of stored energy giving bursts to growth of limb and leaf, holding back some for those bitter winters that are written through their trunks in concentric circles.
Just now, birch and pine, they're felled, split and stacked in the sauna woodshed. Twelve feet long of a stack, six feet up and six feet across.
There's a melancholy in the air today. Folk are silent, a little withdrawn. There's sunlight in plenty, but there's also that wind, blowing from the east and hopping straight over autumn to speak of winter.
I've missed the sauna time and it's late but I mooch dragging my toes over there anyway and at midnight find it still hot. I have it all to myself. There's a greeting from the pine logs and the birch logs throwing their lives of digested sunlight outwards from the stove. I sit on the pine bench and breathe. Simply breathe. My gratitude is to the split logs and Simo the log splitter and to the trees that gave up their stores of energy for this moment.
The axe sits behind the splitting block just outside where I'm suspiring now, rather than breathing. It's a fine tool, with a curve to it that brings to mind those axes carved onto Pictish stones in Scotland; a collar grips the shaft which curves as gracefully as a young birch.
I throw a ladle of water onto the hot stones and a wave of scorched air, seconds in coming, hits the throat and nose first making breathing a searing awareness. I taste the salt of my own lips and at the same time the resinous smell of pine burning is brought to my nostrils straight after the heat.
I'd twisted a calf muscle, but it's uncramping; even my hard-working liver, often a weight on me, seems to relax.
The heat becomes too much, but on my way out I throw on a couple more splits of pine which crackle into flame at once. I cool off in the open porch. I'll not use the dipping pond, it's rank green with duckweed. Just steam in the midnight black.
Distant planets are caught up in the branches of the pines. There's a lowing from the cattle in the one cleared field among the trees down by the bay.
I steam-roast and cool off a few more times, the time in the heat shorter and the cooling longer, until finally the high moon beckons. A dark shadow, stepping delicately through crisp undergrowth, slips among the larch trees over by. The pine and spruce cones are hard underfoot, but the grass is cool and sweeping heels and toes as I walk towel-wrapped, barefoot home.
The living trees softly rolling in the wind, might with me, be recollecting their dead.
In mellowing wood & time bleaching field
John Clare
The sky is purpling as the light fades. There's a snell wind, but the days are still full of sunlight - dawn to dusk.
It's that sunlight that these trees have been storing, summer following spring, year on year, decades at a time. From the size I'd say fifty years of stored energy giving bursts to growth of limb and leaf, holding back some for those bitter winters that are written through their trunks in concentric circles.
Just now, birch and pine, they're felled, split and stacked in the sauna woodshed. Twelve feet long of a stack, six feet up and six feet across.
There's a melancholy in the air today. Folk are silent, a little withdrawn. There's sunlight in plenty, but there's also that wind, blowing from the east and hopping straight over autumn to speak of winter.
I've missed the sauna time and it's late but I mooch dragging my toes over there anyway and at midnight find it still hot. I have it all to myself. There's a greeting from the pine logs and the birch logs throwing their lives of digested sunlight outwards from the stove. I sit on the pine bench and breathe. Simply breathe. My gratitude is to the split logs and Simo the log splitter and to the trees that gave up their stores of energy for this moment.
The axe sits behind the splitting block just outside where I'm suspiring now, rather than breathing. It's a fine tool, with a curve to it that brings to mind those axes carved onto Pictish stones in Scotland; a collar grips the shaft which curves as gracefully as a young birch.
I throw a ladle of water onto the hot stones and a wave of scorched air, seconds in coming, hits the throat and nose first making breathing a searing awareness. I taste the salt of my own lips and at the same time the resinous smell of pine burning is brought to my nostrils straight after the heat.
I'd twisted a calf muscle, but it's uncramping; even my hard-working liver, often a weight on me, seems to relax.
The heat becomes too much, but on my way out I throw on a couple more splits of pine which crackle into flame at once. I cool off in the open porch. I'll not use the dipping pond, it's rank green with duckweed. Just steam in the midnight black.
Distant planets are caught up in the branches of the pines. There's a lowing from the cattle in the one cleared field among the trees down by the bay.
I steam-roast and cool off a few more times, the time in the heat shorter and the cooling longer, until finally the high moon beckons. A dark shadow, stepping delicately through crisp undergrowth, slips among the larch trees over by. The pine and spruce cones are hard underfoot, but the grass is cool and sweeping heels and toes as I walk towel-wrapped, barefoot home.
The living trees softly rolling in the wind, might with me, be recollecting their dead.
Thursday, 23 September 2010
Screwcap Letter
Nevertheless, his soul is about to slip through their fingers. As his life ebbs away he wavers, appalled by the thought of an eternity without alcohol, and calls for aquavit.
Peter Høeg: The History of Danish Dreams
Pentti Saarikoski passes this way every day at about 4pm. His beard grows ever longer. He's muttering his latest poem: we adore other gods here now your feathers are on special offer in the supermarkets. Today I’m outside, hanging the washing with good wooden clothes pegs on the green plastic line under the Scots pines.
I wave as Pentti cycles past and he wavers on the bike, slows a little, but continues. I yell and run up the cottage steps and fetch the bottle of Finnish vodka – Leijona Original Viina Brännvin, new, pristine, unopened, the last bottle having sort of disappeared – and hand at the neck of the bottle, wave it, shouting Hey hey!
But he’s out of earshot, slipped by, cycling down the hill into what a thousand years ago was the Baltic sea. I’m islanded; but I save that cracking of the vodka bottle screwcap for when he passes tomorrow.
Peter Høeg: The History of Danish Dreams
Pentti Saarikoski passes this way every day at about 4pm. His beard grows ever longer. He's muttering his latest poem: we adore other gods here now your feathers are on special offer in the supermarkets. Today I’m outside, hanging the washing with good wooden clothes pegs on the green plastic line under the Scots pines.
I wave as Pentti cycles past and he wavers on the bike, slows a little, but continues. I yell and run up the cottage steps and fetch the bottle of Finnish vodka – Leijona Original Viina Brännvin, new, pristine, unopened, the last bottle having sort of disappeared – and hand at the neck of the bottle, wave it, shouting Hey hey!
But he’s out of earshot, slipped by, cycling down the hill into what a thousand years ago was the Baltic sea. I’m islanded; but I save that cracking of the vodka bottle screwcap for when he passes tomorrow.
Meandering
Following your nose is a fairly common phrase – if not thought about a lot. I’m not sure if it is the foremost part of my body, but I guess I follow it more than most.
It’s good to walk into unknown parts of woodland, checking out which jays are feeding off which oak’s acorns in their strange jubilant frenzy, not even bothering to scold me. The red of autumn creeps upward in these places with no path; seedling rowans flaming on the floor, maple saplings glowing like any peat fire late at night.
Oaks overhead still green.
Here’s a fine birch – a downy birch, much given to those adventitious clumps of twisted warty growths in its branches – recurving its way up to light – bent at a steep angle by some unknown force before returning to the upright trunk our eyes demand of a forest tree.
There’s broken charcoal burners (the mushroom of that name) along this way; I’m following the path of deer who’ll not bother nibbling the brittle dryness of these – nor will I.
I can hear the geese in the bay – I think (certainly deluding myself) that I can tell from their gabble that they are Canada geese, not the few greylags left. A woodpecker taps an oak in the afternoon filtered light. I wander on, but alerted by something I can’t pin down to move a little to my right. I have no idea where I am in the woods; lost again, my usual state. The canopy is high and blocking any glimpse I might have of the sun. There’s no shadows so I can’t even tell whether I’m going north or east.
But, and here’s the point: here’s a wee clearing. On an old stump I smell, then see: chicken of the woods. Laetiporus sulphureus, a strong smelling, sulphur-coloured polypore that puts many folk – mushroom folk, I mean – off. It is of course just delicious. The smell is purest autumn woods and lingers on the fingers and the carefully wielded knife I use to gently slice it from the stump. No druid was ever more careful with a (almost certainly apocryphal) golden sickle. It goes into the yellow cloth bag that travels in my back pocket for just such an occasion.
With a bouncing step, and with the notion that I’m now travelling (no longer following my nose) east; I walk straight to the wood’s edge and find the dirt road home. Occasionally I stop and put my nose to the bag, like an eager glue-sniffing lad.
Fried in butter, with garlic, lemon flavoured; both supper and breakfast assured.
It’s good to walk into unknown parts of woodland, checking out which jays are feeding off which oak’s acorns in their strange jubilant frenzy, not even bothering to scold me. The red of autumn creeps upward in these places with no path; seedling rowans flaming on the floor, maple saplings glowing like any peat fire late at night.
Oaks overhead still green.
Here’s a fine birch – a downy birch, much given to those adventitious clumps of twisted warty growths in its branches – recurving its way up to light – bent at a steep angle by some unknown force before returning to the upright trunk our eyes demand of a forest tree.
There’s broken charcoal burners (the mushroom of that name) along this way; I’m following the path of deer who’ll not bother nibbling the brittle dryness of these – nor will I.
I can hear the geese in the bay – I think (certainly deluding myself) that I can tell from their gabble that they are Canada geese, not the few greylags left. A woodpecker taps an oak in the afternoon filtered light. I wander on, but alerted by something I can’t pin down to move a little to my right. I have no idea where I am in the woods; lost again, my usual state. The canopy is high and blocking any glimpse I might have of the sun. There’s no shadows so I can’t even tell whether I’m going north or east.
But, and here’s the point: here’s a wee clearing. On an old stump I smell, then see: chicken of the woods. Laetiporus sulphureus, a strong smelling, sulphur-coloured polypore that puts many folk – mushroom folk, I mean – off. It is of course just delicious. The smell is purest autumn woods and lingers on the fingers and the carefully wielded knife I use to gently slice it from the stump. No druid was ever more careful with a (almost certainly apocryphal) golden sickle. It goes into the yellow cloth bag that travels in my back pocket for just such an occasion.
With a bouncing step, and with the notion that I’m now travelling (no longer following my nose) east; I walk straight to the wood’s edge and find the dirt road home. Occasionally I stop and put my nose to the bag, like an eager glue-sniffing lad.
Fried in butter, with garlic, lemon flavoured; both supper and breakfast assured.
Wednesday, 22 September 2010
Sentences from Finland
Acorns crackle underfoot.
Woodstacks grow higher.
Hands clasped behind her back, an old woman in a headscarf watches
an old man stooping, lifting some potatoes from the row.
Hidden under his mattress a revolver and a bar of gold.
Woodstacks grow higher.
Hands clasped behind her back, an old woman in a headscarf watches
an old man stooping, lifting some potatoes from the row.
Hidden under his mattress a revolver and a bar of gold.
Tuesday, 21 September 2010
Autumn folded
"When the need for food comes, when you desire to eat,
eat forest mushrooms, . . ."
Charms against bears; the Kalevala
The day opens with a red squirrel undulating along the road in front of me. I'm off to the woods again still checking mushroom spots as I pass by, and after that to sit awhile in the bird hide, Vasikkahaan. As this is a wetland reserve, as everywhere, the needs of humans are the first to be taken into account, by making a building; though the hide - a tower really to reach above the reedbeds - has me admiring its solid no-nonsense construction.
The bone-headed yaffles - green woodpeckers - seem intent on bashing their brains out on not just the trees, but on the telephone poles leading to the couple of houses at the bay. They pay no attention to me. Like any of the bird-hide's visitors, I hope to see the altogether more shy black woodpecker which is also common here.
A jay scolds me as I pass under her: autumn's folded in her wings and she wants no intruders now.
What the woods reclaim the seasons reveal. I've walked extensively through these woods now for 20 days. How could I have failed to notice the skeleton of a small shed in the centre, collapsed on itself and being taken by mosses and lichens, sagging low, so that only the leaf fall of the covering maple is slowly lifting the woodland curtain on this wee puzzling view.
There's none of that damp moss and musty scent in the air that alerts to the presence of ceps. Though there's more fly agaric than I've ever seen anywhere, spilling over themselves at the feet of the old birches - the largest the size of dinner plates and together with the smaller making up a whole set, side plates, inverted teacups and saucers as well; ranging in colour from deep red to faded yellow that ceramicists would enjoy. But they are not edible. I'm wary of the word poisonous. So often it simply means that the old lore of how to use them has been lost. These were once ingested in animistic religion in these parts. While they do poison - extreme vomiting and diarrhea - they are seldom killers and (so it's said) grant visions of the seat of illness in a sick person and to locate lost cattle, lost people. There's more to it of course; I simply admire them. The world is odd enough for me anyway without inducing hallucinations.
Reaching, eventually, the bird tower, even though I'm pretty quiet in the woods, I disturb a napping buzzard who has time to cast me a look before silently moving off along the wood's edge. I can't restrain myself from laughing at a bird hiding from bird watchers in a bird hide. Though I'm sorry for waking the buzzard.
On my stroll back I'm accompanied by ever increasing numbers of cumulus clouds; east and west and north, wherever I look they're massing, pile on pile. They open the sky: maybe it's the rare glimpses of blue among them. A late cricket hops out of my way on the sandy path. There's the hot resinous smell of pine in the air and through that the breath of birches. There's flame now in the maples.
Another half crushed viper at the road's edge. I collect the emptied skin of another.
That the fox is there outside my quarters in the old farmhand's cottage is a fine red bracketing, together with the squirrel, of morning and evening in which nothing happens; literally.
eat forest mushrooms, . . ."
Charms against bears; the Kalevala
The day opens with a red squirrel undulating along the road in front of me. I'm off to the woods again still checking mushroom spots as I pass by, and after that to sit awhile in the bird hide, Vasikkahaan. As this is a wetland reserve, as everywhere, the needs of humans are the first to be taken into account, by making a building; though the hide - a tower really to reach above the reedbeds - has me admiring its solid no-nonsense construction.
The bone-headed yaffles - green woodpeckers - seem intent on bashing their brains out on not just the trees, but on the telephone poles leading to the couple of houses at the bay. They pay no attention to me. Like any of the bird-hide's visitors, I hope to see the altogether more shy black woodpecker which is also common here.
A jay scolds me as I pass under her: autumn's folded in her wings and she wants no intruders now.
What the woods reclaim the seasons reveal. I've walked extensively through these woods now for 20 days. How could I have failed to notice the skeleton of a small shed in the centre, collapsed on itself and being taken by mosses and lichens, sagging low, so that only the leaf fall of the covering maple is slowly lifting the woodland curtain on this wee puzzling view.
There's none of that damp moss and musty scent in the air that alerts to the presence of ceps. Though there's more fly agaric than I've ever seen anywhere, spilling over themselves at the feet of the old birches - the largest the size of dinner plates and together with the smaller making up a whole set, side plates, inverted teacups and saucers as well; ranging in colour from deep red to faded yellow that ceramicists would enjoy. But they are not edible. I'm wary of the word poisonous. So often it simply means that the old lore of how to use them has been lost. These were once ingested in animistic religion in these parts. While they do poison - extreme vomiting and diarrhea - they are seldom killers and (so it's said) grant visions of the seat of illness in a sick person and to locate lost cattle, lost people. There's more to it of course; I simply admire them. The world is odd enough for me anyway without inducing hallucinations.
Reaching, eventually, the bird tower, even though I'm pretty quiet in the woods, I disturb a napping buzzard who has time to cast me a look before silently moving off along the wood's edge. I can't restrain myself from laughing at a bird hiding from bird watchers in a bird hide. Though I'm sorry for waking the buzzard.
On my stroll back I'm accompanied by ever increasing numbers of cumulus clouds; east and west and north, wherever I look they're massing, pile on pile. They open the sky: maybe it's the rare glimpses of blue among them. A late cricket hops out of my way on the sandy path. There's the hot resinous smell of pine in the air and through that the breath of birches. There's flame now in the maples.
Another half crushed viper at the road's edge. I collect the emptied skin of another.
That the fox is there outside my quarters in the old farmhand's cottage is a fine red bracketing, together with the squirrel, of morning and evening in which nothing happens; literally.
Sunday, 19 September 2010
Entering
What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realise I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts that have entered my head.
So 800 years ago the monk Yoshida Kenko noted in his book Essays in Idleness.
Falling short of demented, I nevertheless share Kenko's feelings. While I've been trying for years to do less and to be more - there's something very odd in the recording of states of being. Or if you like states and places of non-doing.
Although everything else is foraging for a living in the wood, including the trees in the last days of a prolonged summer almost putting on a little extra weight for winter, I'm just sitting here with my back to an old oak.
I'm looking out over flat farmland, due east at the edge of the woods. Here and there an isolated red painted wooden barn settled in a clump of sheltering trees and a big sky above all this flatness.
It's been raining off and on, drizzle mostly, not too wetting, so I'm sitting on my inside-out hat to keep arsebones dry. The great comfort of the woods eases itself into my shoulders. Muscles and bones relax. Behind me are small rustlings and silences. In the silences every now and then I can hear a leaf fall with a papery rustle catching on twigs in its slow descent. The arc of a rainbow appears in the grey sky slightly south of east, its outer edges of red and violet shimmering a little - a result either of the smirr of rain, or my own vision - I can't tell.
I stare so long at the rainbow which shifts only slightly that my eyes dance with entering colour; the woods have folded me in and I drift off into the shortest of dozes, a step beyond reverie.
With solstice right here, right now, earth turning and sun standing, nights already as long as days, this is not idleness. I'm storing up light and colour, a gathering-in of some of the energy of the sun that I'll need to last through the darker days of winter.
So 800 years ago the monk Yoshida Kenko noted in his book Essays in Idleness.
Falling short of demented, I nevertheless share Kenko's feelings. While I've been trying for years to do less and to be more - there's something very odd in the recording of states of being. Or if you like states and places of non-doing.
Although everything else is foraging for a living in the wood, including the trees in the last days of a prolonged summer almost putting on a little extra weight for winter, I'm just sitting here with my back to an old oak.
I'm looking out over flat farmland, due east at the edge of the woods. Here and there an isolated red painted wooden barn settled in a clump of sheltering trees and a big sky above all this flatness.
It's been raining off and on, drizzle mostly, not too wetting, so I'm sitting on my inside-out hat to keep arsebones dry. The great comfort of the woods eases itself into my shoulders. Muscles and bones relax. Behind me are small rustlings and silences. In the silences every now and then I can hear a leaf fall with a papery rustle catching on twigs in its slow descent. The arc of a rainbow appears in the grey sky slightly south of east, its outer edges of red and violet shimmering a little - a result either of the smirr of rain, or my own vision - I can't tell.
I stare so long at the rainbow which shifts only slightly that my eyes dance with entering colour; the woods have folded me in and I drift off into the shortest of dozes, a step beyond reverie.
With solstice right here, right now, earth turning and sun standing, nights already as long as days, this is not idleness. I'm storing up light and colour, a gathering-in of some of the energy of the sun that I'll need to last through the darker days of winter.
Thursday, 16 September 2010
Directions
On my flaneur way this morning, I was stopped and asked for directions by two men in a car who wanted to find the water – the sea - and the woods: “the real Finland” as one put it. They spoke in English, I guess having no Finnish, but the irony of asking a man just twelve days in the country for the real Finland amused me. I told them they could not drive there.
I have the sort of face that wherever I go, I’m taken for a local. I’ve been saluted in Stornoway and hailed in the forest of Fontainebleau; people ask my advice about the destinations of buses.
Truth is, I’m just wandering around and frequently lost. Though I feel at home wherever I go, I don’t always know how to get from here to there. If I can’t read the language of a country I happily rely on the kindness of strangers.
Once, in a place where I was effectively illiterate, my direction-giver (a laughter-wrinkled old woman with a roadside stall) took my hand and led me to my destination - a ten minute walk. Deliciously, I was a child again.
Here, since for example I can’t understand even the nearby signpost that seems to my ignorant eye to point to Yggdrasil, the world tree, I get by orienting with various landmarks: the clump of old birches, the glade of the mushrooms.
The equinoctial storms are fast stripping not just the leaves from trees, but me of my natural signposts. The old birches no longer look the same; the mushrooms deliquesce in the sudden rains.
The geese, an aural marker for me these past days are leaving.
They have circled lazily all my short days here, settling in the bay to my east, muttering into their breasts until night blankets them.
With the storms, however, all is activity. I thought them completely flown yesterday, until my ears led me to them in the opposite direction, to the west. Standing in hundreds in a cutover wheat field, up close, their raging discussions in greylag tongue was as loud as it was incomprehensible.
Except; I knew instinctively their talk was of migration and the way south.
Theirs is a language rich in tonality: the honks and whiffles, the clacks and hoots rising and falling along the scale. The language of the body is easy to understand, though; when they as one spread their wings and made a small run to get airborne, it was clear a decision had been made.
They lifted then, into the wind, the massed lines of their flight-path writing their decision across the grey of the sky in bold quill work: hieroglyphs, ideographs, fine scripts.
Ignorant as I am of even their smallest phonemes, I have enough of their flowing calligraphy to know that it all spells one word: south.
Their landmarks remain constant: the waters and the hills; all pointing their direction with the clarity of territory, not the symbols of a map.
The oldest lead the youngest: south.
I have the sort of face that wherever I go, I’m taken for a local. I’ve been saluted in Stornoway and hailed in the forest of Fontainebleau; people ask my advice about the destinations of buses.
Truth is, I’m just wandering around and frequently lost. Though I feel at home wherever I go, I don’t always know how to get from here to there. If I can’t read the language of a country I happily rely on the kindness of strangers.
Once, in a place where I was effectively illiterate, my direction-giver (a laughter-wrinkled old woman with a roadside stall) took my hand and led me to my destination - a ten minute walk. Deliciously, I was a child again.
Here, since for example I can’t understand even the nearby signpost that seems to my ignorant eye to point to Yggdrasil, the world tree, I get by orienting with various landmarks: the clump of old birches, the glade of the mushrooms.
The equinoctial storms are fast stripping not just the leaves from trees, but me of my natural signposts. The old birches no longer look the same; the mushrooms deliquesce in the sudden rains.
The geese, an aural marker for me these past days are leaving.
They have circled lazily all my short days here, settling in the bay to my east, muttering into their breasts until night blankets them.
With the storms, however, all is activity. I thought them completely flown yesterday, until my ears led me to them in the opposite direction, to the west. Standing in hundreds in a cutover wheat field, up close, their raging discussions in greylag tongue was as loud as it was incomprehensible.
Except; I knew instinctively their talk was of migration and the way south.
Theirs is a language rich in tonality: the honks and whiffles, the clacks and hoots rising and falling along the scale. The language of the body is easy to understand, though; when they as one spread their wings and made a small run to get airborne, it was clear a decision had been made.
They lifted then, into the wind, the massed lines of their flight-path writing their decision across the grey of the sky in bold quill work: hieroglyphs, ideographs, fine scripts.
Ignorant as I am of even their smallest phonemes, I have enough of their flowing calligraphy to know that it all spells one word: south.
Their landmarks remain constant: the waters and the hills; all pointing their direction with the clarity of territory, not the symbols of a map.
The oldest lead the youngest: south.
Brecht
Ah, what an age it is
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
Brecht wrote that in 1939, while Nazis were burning books and more. Finland was fighting the Winter War with Stalin's Soviet Union and Europe was at war again.
Wars in the twenty-first century are physically removed from Europe, but still often of our making or connivance.
But to speak of trees is not to ignore injustice, and Brecht has that qualifying "almost".
Finland's forested terrain also helped in keeping Finland from Soviet subjugation.
It becomes a necessity to speak of trees more and more as injustices increase. War, even when dressed up in polluting 'ideology' as with the Nazis, is about resources, including land. We are fighting in the middle east for the control of oil and increasingly, of water. That trees and plants, past and present have a role in this is obvious: no laying down in the Carboniferous era of plants, no oil. Without the current stabilising effect of trees, no topsoil, no water retention. When lemon groves and olive orchards are cut down as an act of military aggression in Palestine, it does more than ruin the farmers - it leads to eventual desertification.
To be silent about injustice is not an option. But to speak of trees is not to be silent. It is not only a tacit oppositional stance to that of warmongers, but is also an engagement with some of the underlying causes of war.
Poor people do not own resources. In Europe, aristocrats once owned vast tracts of forest; some still do. Multinational companies now control the world's resources where once aristocrats did; the effect is the same, often the owners and controllers are the same too. A discussion of trees is not complete without a discussion of land and land ownership and hence the control of resources.
It's also part of a larger discussion of the way the world is regarded by the ever greedy Homo sapiens (though we should now find a new word to replace sapiens). The most fleeting look at ecology reveals that we depend on other species more than they on us. Our relationship is at best symbiotic, but we act parasitically. The climax of parasitism - say mistletoe in an oak - is the stifling of the host, to the detriment of both.
Brecht was right, we have a duty to act in the prevention of daily - and often terrible - human injustice (there is no other kind). No-one discusses trees to prevent a firing squad or a suicide bomber. But to speak of trees and importantly for trees becomes an imperative as well. It's to ask questions; the who, the why.
If a primarily aesthetic (or proper economic) appreciation of trees, of woodlands, leads to an understanding of the political aspects of land ownership and its control and misappropriation; so much the better.
To wander in the woods - where we're not needed - is to realise this. It's also to realise that we're often not wanted by a landowner.
Brecht also wrote: You can't write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.
Fences are absentee policemen.
When to speak of trees is almost a crime
For it is a kind of silence about injustice!
Brecht wrote that in 1939, while Nazis were burning books and more. Finland was fighting the Winter War with Stalin's Soviet Union and Europe was at war again.
Wars in the twenty-first century are physically removed from Europe, but still often of our making or connivance.
But to speak of trees is not to ignore injustice, and Brecht has that qualifying "almost".
Finland's forested terrain also helped in keeping Finland from Soviet subjugation.
It becomes a necessity to speak of trees more and more as injustices increase. War, even when dressed up in polluting 'ideology' as with the Nazis, is about resources, including land. We are fighting in the middle east for the control of oil and increasingly, of water. That trees and plants, past and present have a role in this is obvious: no laying down in the Carboniferous era of plants, no oil. Without the current stabilising effect of trees, no topsoil, no water retention. When lemon groves and olive orchards are cut down as an act of military aggression in Palestine, it does more than ruin the farmers - it leads to eventual desertification.
To be silent about injustice is not an option. But to speak of trees is not to be silent. It is not only a tacit oppositional stance to that of warmongers, but is also an engagement with some of the underlying causes of war.
Poor people do not own resources. In Europe, aristocrats once owned vast tracts of forest; some still do. Multinational companies now control the world's resources where once aristocrats did; the effect is the same, often the owners and controllers are the same too. A discussion of trees is not complete without a discussion of land and land ownership and hence the control of resources.
It's also part of a larger discussion of the way the world is regarded by the ever greedy Homo sapiens (though we should now find a new word to replace sapiens). The most fleeting look at ecology reveals that we depend on other species more than they on us. Our relationship is at best symbiotic, but we act parasitically. The climax of parasitism - say mistletoe in an oak - is the stifling of the host, to the detriment of both.
Brecht was right, we have a duty to act in the prevention of daily - and often terrible - human injustice (there is no other kind). No-one discusses trees to prevent a firing squad or a suicide bomber. But to speak of trees and importantly for trees becomes an imperative as well. It's to ask questions; the who, the why.
If a primarily aesthetic (or proper economic) appreciation of trees, of woodlands, leads to an understanding of the political aspects of land ownership and its control and misappropriation; so much the better.
To wander in the woods - where we're not needed - is to realise this. It's also to realise that we're often not wanted by a landowner.
Brecht also wrote: You can't write poems about trees when the woods are full of policemen.
Fences are absentee policemen.
Tuesday, 14 September 2010
Shiva
Today is yellow where yesterday was green. The butter yellow of the aspen catches my eye. The trees are still vital, but here and there the green is stripped away, revealing the yellow underneath. There is no appreciable difference between the length of light yesterday and today. No difference in temperature that I can feel. Yet all the trees are showing a little yellow; some a lot. Maybe tomorrow the maples will be red.
The aspen leaf between my fingers trembles just as it did on the tree. The aspens, still in full leaf, though yellow, are seething in the wind, each leaf rattling on its stem, making a noise like the gentle soughing of waves onto a strand. The tall birches all droop away from the wind. Maples shed their leaves in their own yellow shadow - falling to windward in a grounded double-image of their upward limbs. Leaves drift down in parabolas to land against the paths, yellow on yellow.
The oaks stand against all this, neither much yellowing, swaying nor dropping leaves.
There's a hierarchy of trees which we have imposed. In a woodland there's none of that. I've written before of Shiva (I don't mean the Shiva the god, the destroyer, the bringer of change; though who knows? but Vandana Shiva the Indian physicist and environmental activist) going to the woods to learn of democracy.
What a weasel word democracy has become, though I malign weasels. Self government is what Shiva is really learning from the woods, not a hierarchical trickle down materialism delivered by self-seeking manipulators purporting to represent something they call the people.
In a wood, there's balance in the active presence of large numbers of interdependent species; none with greater significance than any other. Aspen leaves and oak leaves alike fall to the forest floor and are pulled down (even in this thin soil) by tribes of earthworms. The woodpecker holes shelter other, smaller birds too. The fungal infestation Ascocalyx abietina has no favourites among the pines it attacks.
Here at Saari, the tree surgeons are in.
Years ago I climbed trees with all the shackles, ropes and harnesses I could muster to give first aid to living broken boughs. It's not a foolproof method of getting up and especially down a tall tree. If you'd ever seen a twelve stone apprentice stuck dangling because of a faulty running knot - and with him two heavy rescuers also stuck for the same reason, and a ground crew in helpless laughter, you'd know the same.
But tree surgery has moved on. Here, there's a woman, a men and a cherry picker. And they are pruning the oaks. Only the oaks; of dead limbs.
The value we place on trees, the ranking, that imposed hierarchy, is nearly always financial. The timber will be valuable. So birch is worth less than oak because it's not much use except for firewood; oak is sought after by boat builders and cabinet makers. There's a small island of oaks south of here that was owned by a former Swedish king for building his naval fleets. People, commoners, were kept away from valuable assets (except to cut and haul the trees; ever met a king who did his own work?)
So on the cherry picker basket, thirty feet up, the surgeon is delicately cutting wood with a small chainsaw, as delicate as if with a scalpel. It's not only the oaks that have dead limbs, but the maples too. In a parkland situation like this (built landscape: to resemble savannah with browsing deer where sheep may safely graze for the extremely wealthy)these trees will never be felled for money. They are planting the next controlled and managed generation underneath them; these oaks have become valuable aesthetically (as a former display of wealth, but primarily now for the eye to gaze upon).
It's the aesthetics of the situation that demand the oaks be trimmed, more than the dangers of falling limbs. Maples pose no such threat and are left untrimmed. The tidy civic mind is at work: partial death is unsightly. And let us put the next generation of oaks where it'll be most appealing.
Gardening with trees has long been practiced; no different from where the roses go.
The woods, however provide something else. Vanadana Shiva may have held philosophical-political conversations with herself in woods. I go to the woods to experience that pleasure of controlled anarchy a woodland brings. Where the fox depends on the mouse, the mouse on the seed, the seed on the pollinating bee and wasp. Where the dead birch leans into the living pine and the bracket fungus slowly reverts to the horizontal as the tree slowly leans in death.
The delight of living, as the other Shiva knew full well, is the awareness of death.
There's no implication of disorder in anarchy; the order of woodlands is neither random nor chaotic, and never destructive. The order of woodlands is self-generative.
I go to the woods because they do not need me.
The aspen leaf between my fingers trembles just as it did on the tree. The aspens, still in full leaf, though yellow, are seething in the wind, each leaf rattling on its stem, making a noise like the gentle soughing of waves onto a strand. The tall birches all droop away from the wind. Maples shed their leaves in their own yellow shadow - falling to windward in a grounded double-image of their upward limbs. Leaves drift down in parabolas to land against the paths, yellow on yellow.
The oaks stand against all this, neither much yellowing, swaying nor dropping leaves.
There's a hierarchy of trees which we have imposed. In a woodland there's none of that. I've written before of Shiva (I don't mean the Shiva the god, the destroyer, the bringer of change; though who knows? but Vandana Shiva the Indian physicist and environmental activist) going to the woods to learn of democracy.
What a weasel word democracy has become, though I malign weasels. Self government is what Shiva is really learning from the woods, not a hierarchical trickle down materialism delivered by self-seeking manipulators purporting to represent something they call the people.
In a wood, there's balance in the active presence of large numbers of interdependent species; none with greater significance than any other. Aspen leaves and oak leaves alike fall to the forest floor and are pulled down (even in this thin soil) by tribes of earthworms. The woodpecker holes shelter other, smaller birds too. The fungal infestation Ascocalyx abietina has no favourites among the pines it attacks.
Here at Saari, the tree surgeons are in.
Years ago I climbed trees with all the shackles, ropes and harnesses I could muster to give first aid to living broken boughs. It's not a foolproof method of getting up and especially down a tall tree. If you'd ever seen a twelve stone apprentice stuck dangling because of a faulty running knot - and with him two heavy rescuers also stuck for the same reason, and a ground crew in helpless laughter, you'd know the same.
But tree surgery has moved on. Here, there's a woman, a men and a cherry picker. And they are pruning the oaks. Only the oaks; of dead limbs.
The value we place on trees, the ranking, that imposed hierarchy, is nearly always financial. The timber will be valuable. So birch is worth less than oak because it's not much use except for firewood; oak is sought after by boat builders and cabinet makers. There's a small island of oaks south of here that was owned by a former Swedish king for building his naval fleets. People, commoners, were kept away from valuable assets (except to cut and haul the trees; ever met a king who did his own work?)
So on the cherry picker basket, thirty feet up, the surgeon is delicately cutting wood with a small chainsaw, as delicate as if with a scalpel. It's not only the oaks that have dead limbs, but the maples too. In a parkland situation like this (built landscape: to resemble savannah with browsing deer where sheep may safely graze for the extremely wealthy)these trees will never be felled for money. They are planting the next controlled and managed generation underneath them; these oaks have become valuable aesthetically (as a former display of wealth, but primarily now for the eye to gaze upon).
It's the aesthetics of the situation that demand the oaks be trimmed, more than the dangers of falling limbs. Maples pose no such threat and are left untrimmed. The tidy civic mind is at work: partial death is unsightly. And let us put the next generation of oaks where it'll be most appealing.
Gardening with trees has long been practiced; no different from where the roses go.
The woods, however provide something else. Vanadana Shiva may have held philosophical-political conversations with herself in woods. I go to the woods to experience that pleasure of controlled anarchy a woodland brings. Where the fox depends on the mouse, the mouse on the seed, the seed on the pollinating bee and wasp. Where the dead birch leans into the living pine and the bracket fungus slowly reverts to the horizontal as the tree slowly leans in death.
The delight of living, as the other Shiva knew full well, is the awareness of death.
There's no implication of disorder in anarchy; the order of woodlands is neither random nor chaotic, and never destructive. The order of woodlands is self-generative.
I go to the woods because they do not need me.
Friday, 10 September 2010
Conversation
I'm standing with my hands in my pockets by the side of the road. I'm contemplating the stones beneath the oaks. They are not small, but each maybe the size of a kitchen chair and have been dropped off here from the front loader of a tractor at some time I'm guessing. There's an odd thing here with age. These oaks have been here a long time - from the girth of the largest I've seen, 250 years at a guess. Who knows what generations preceded them. I'll try to find out the history of this little wood as I can, but for now, I'm thinking at least 250 years.
They're growing on thin sandy soil; bedrock emerges here and there, each covered with a plumage of lichen and short mosses. The oaks have an intimate relation with the rock and the soil. The new kitchen chair rocks are just as old as the bedrock - they were perhaps left behind in Mynämäki by a retreating glacier; rubble, but the stuff of geology.
I'm wondering how long it'll take the oakwood to assimilate these stones, for them to weather and leach and to grow into one another in that intricate way minerals and trees have with each other.
It's not Pentti Saarikoski, long dead, but he certainly looks like a photograph I've seen of him with full beard and long flying 1970s hair. He cycles a little past - I think his brakes need attention - then halts and turns his bike and himself round and comes to stand beside me, facing the same direction. He speaks: in Finnish, but when I apologise in English for not understanding the language, he attempts English.
I'm guessing he's about my age. His bike is old, his clothes denim and well worn; world-wide America sits on his head in the shape of a baseball hat. His clear eyes regard me with some curiosity and he makes his thoughts plain in one word and a grand gesture in the direction of where I had been looking: What?
I shrug - how to tell him I'm thinking of the interdependence of mineral and plant? I say one of my three Finnish words: Oak. His eyes wrinkle around the edges Ah! he says, sighing and I warm to a man who can take that as a full explanation.
He speaks again in Finnish and indicates the cloth bag on his handlebars. For a moment I think he might bring out anything: mushrooms, glittering mica, an ammonite, a seahorse.
It's vodka - the cheapest available from Alko, the State monopoly drink shop in town. Leijona brand at 13 euros 25 cents a bottle. I know this because not two hours ago I bought a bottle.
Twisting the screwtop with a crack he offers me the bottle and it's then I say my second Finnish word: Cheers! His blue eyes wrinkle again, he smiles as I swig and hand it back. He swigs and we together contemplate oak. Another swig each and the bottle goes back into the bag.
He's cycled a round trip of 24 kilometres for that bottle. He remounts his bike and points it towards the west again, and my third Finnish word comes out as he cycles off: Thanks!
His smile again and I have no need to understand the words of his reply as he waves his arm up and back. It's a gesture that takes in oak, minerals, age, kitchen chairs, and humanity.
***
Life is given to man
to make him consider carefully
the position he'd like to be dead in
Pentti Saarikoski
They're growing on thin sandy soil; bedrock emerges here and there, each covered with a plumage of lichen and short mosses. The oaks have an intimate relation with the rock and the soil. The new kitchen chair rocks are just as old as the bedrock - they were perhaps left behind in Mynämäki by a retreating glacier; rubble, but the stuff of geology.
I'm wondering how long it'll take the oakwood to assimilate these stones, for them to weather and leach and to grow into one another in that intricate way minerals and trees have with each other.
It's not Pentti Saarikoski, long dead, but he certainly looks like a photograph I've seen of him with full beard and long flying 1970s hair. He cycles a little past - I think his brakes need attention - then halts and turns his bike and himself round and comes to stand beside me, facing the same direction. He speaks: in Finnish, but when I apologise in English for not understanding the language, he attempts English.
I'm guessing he's about my age. His bike is old, his clothes denim and well worn; world-wide America sits on his head in the shape of a baseball hat. His clear eyes regard me with some curiosity and he makes his thoughts plain in one word and a grand gesture in the direction of where I had been looking: What?
I shrug - how to tell him I'm thinking of the interdependence of mineral and plant? I say one of my three Finnish words: Oak. His eyes wrinkle around the edges Ah! he says, sighing and I warm to a man who can take that as a full explanation.
He speaks again in Finnish and indicates the cloth bag on his handlebars. For a moment I think he might bring out anything: mushrooms, glittering mica, an ammonite, a seahorse.
It's vodka - the cheapest available from Alko, the State monopoly drink shop in town. Leijona brand at 13 euros 25 cents a bottle. I know this because not two hours ago I bought a bottle.
Twisting the screwtop with a crack he offers me the bottle and it's then I say my second Finnish word: Cheers! His blue eyes wrinkle again, he smiles as I swig and hand it back. He swigs and we together contemplate oak. Another swig each and the bottle goes back into the bag.
He's cycled a round trip of 24 kilometres for that bottle. He remounts his bike and points it towards the west again, and my third Finnish word comes out as he cycles off: Thanks!
His smile again and I have no need to understand the words of his reply as he waves his arm up and back. It's a gesture that takes in oak, minerals, age, kitchen chairs, and humanity.
***
Life is given to man
to make him consider carefully
the position he'd like to be dead in
Pentti Saarikoski
Thursday, 9 September 2010
Greylags
I spend my days mostly in silence, around the little oakwood or at the shoreline. It's been years since I smoked a cigarette, but I can still feel that intake of smoke past the lips and down. A dram would be good, though maybe at midday, whisky - even a good Islay - would prevent much fruitful thinking - since that's what I'm attempting. But looking out over the bay, these stimulants might just be a substitute for speech. Or thought.
The greylag geese resolutely refuse to answer me, so I simply listen to their conversations. I can't understand the fine points of their humour, though they do laugh a lot, but the gist of the grammar seems clear enough - it's based on volume. The louder the language (or maybe it's a dialect; is greylag a variation on beangoose or Canada goose?) the more they are likely to take flight. Softer whiffles and gurgles denote contentment. So much is universal. The orthography of their language is beyond me mostly though. There are vocables that have no exact equivalent in English. Finnish might come closer, with its vowel and consonant clusters. But the most tricky would be that click which humans can only make at the back of the throat - and then not all of us.
Individual greylags make words: eu ö; k'-eu k'o; and phrases: eu ö k'eu eu eu; wy,eu ö-ö-ö on a rising inflection. And then with that near back of throat click: wee - 'k' ö wa'k' yeu yeu yeu.
What I do understand is when they rise up in cackles and hoots and barks, wheeling higher and round again, their cries collectively mingle: they become one organism with one voice: a distant gale howling when the cabin door is shut and the fire's lit.
The greylag geese resolutely refuse to answer me, so I simply listen to their conversations. I can't understand the fine points of their humour, though they do laugh a lot, but the gist of the grammar seems clear enough - it's based on volume. The louder the language (or maybe it's a dialect; is greylag a variation on beangoose or Canada goose?) the more they are likely to take flight. Softer whiffles and gurgles denote contentment. So much is universal. The orthography of their language is beyond me mostly though. There are vocables that have no exact equivalent in English. Finnish might come closer, with its vowel and consonant clusters. But the most tricky would be that click which humans can only make at the back of the throat - and then not all of us.
Individual greylags make words: eu ö; k'-eu k'o; and phrases: eu ö k'eu eu eu; wy,eu ö-ö-ö on a rising inflection. And then with that near back of throat click: wee - 'k' ö wa'k' yeu yeu yeu.
What I do understand is when they rise up in cackles and hoots and barks, wheeling higher and round again, their cries collectively mingle: they become one organism with one voice: a distant gale howling when the cabin door is shut and the fire's lit.
Oak and maple
Trees are being planted at Saari Manor. Oaks and maples, puddled in well to this sandy soil. There's been no rain for days. The green rain gauge by the barn is empty; dry on its iron cradle. The young trees are well tended, broken roots trimmed back along with damaged branches, but nothing else - the curve of young limbs as they've formed where they first were grown are left to find their own way to the light in this new home.
There's harmony in the planting of trees. A music of hole digging and root pruning, of puddling and planting; of hands on the roots to spread and gently bury them; the tamping and raking and setting aside of stones.
And there's songs in the tools used and laid by in casual lunchtime arrangements: the blue-back handle of the bow saw with its black blade lever and the two orange-handled loppers, one short and the other long against an ash stem; the blue-shafted spade with its yellow handle (a more spoonlike spade than mine at home) together with the orange-toothed soft rake and the black steel rake against an old oak. And over there, stabbed in the turf, an isolated spade.
There's harmony in the planting of trees. A music of hole digging and root pruning, of puddling and planting; of hands on the roots to spread and gently bury them; the tamping and raking and setting aside of stones.
And there's songs in the tools used and laid by in casual lunchtime arrangements: the blue-back handle of the bow saw with its black blade lever and the two orange-handled loppers, one short and the other long against an ash stem; the blue-shafted spade with its yellow handle (a more spoonlike spade than mine at home) together with the orange-toothed soft rake and the black steel rake against an old oak. And over there, stabbed in the turf, an isolated spade.
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
St Patrick
At the very same spot that a couple of days ago I persuaded the grass snake to quit the unmetalled sandy road, this morning on my way down to the shoreline, there's a dead adder. It's at a point near a barn on a slight rise where the sun strikes hot - or as hot as it gets in September in Finland, which this year is fairly hot: 19 degrees today. On the sand, an obvious place for reptiles to bask. When I pick it up, it reaches from the ground almost to my waist. It's roadkill, though nothing will eat it but scavenging beetles and other insects. The poor beast's intestines are coiled out; blackened blood coating them with around that, a grime of sandy soil. I examine the head and teeth with care, noting the grin of death, and then stretch the dead snake out to rest in the cool grass. It was a big male, as thick as a child's wrist, with a zig of black lightning all along its spine.
Having tired of the conversation of geese - it's all one sided - they never listen - I head for home and here at this same wee rise in the road is an adder. A strong male again, guts erupting. Thinking it's the one of the morning, I check anyway; but there's that one I laid in the grass still unmoving, dead. I retrace my few steps, noticing blood staining the dirt and examine the second one. He has a yellow underpart to his tail. As I lift him to measure and heft, he writhes gently and I realise he's still alive. It's hard to know what to do - I don't kill things. Is the viper suffering? I lay him in the grass like the first and at this point I notice the small nick on my pinky - bleeding gently. My brain tells me that a dead adder and a half dead one don't bite and I'm sure I was careful to keep my fingers away from fangs, but I suck the knuckle and spit anyway, an atavistic but maybe prudent reaction.
Having finished work for the day, and since it's still early - light and warm, I ramble down to visit the geese again. I'm ever hopeful of engaging them in a short discourse. My two adders are still there, the second cold now; basking between the two corpses, on the dirt road in the last of the day's heat is a female adder. I have no truck with anthropomorphism but nevertheless it's hard not to wonder: why a female? Why now and why between two dead males. I know the logical explanations.
I pluck a long stem of rosebay willow herb with its seeds still adhering, to persuade her to leave the road. This is all getting a little biblical. I'm feeling like some latter day saint (not a Mormon, that would be odd) but a sort of Patrick, banishing snakes from a dirt track in Mynämäki. The snake bares her fangs and raises her head to strike as I gently brush. A long moment passes then we both retire: she to the long grass gracefully, me a step backwards with none of the grace of a saint.
Having tired of the conversation of geese - it's all one sided - they never listen - I head for home and here at this same wee rise in the road is an adder. A strong male again, guts erupting. Thinking it's the one of the morning, I check anyway; but there's that one I laid in the grass still unmoving, dead. I retrace my few steps, noticing blood staining the dirt and examine the second one. He has a yellow underpart to his tail. As I lift him to measure and heft, he writhes gently and I realise he's still alive. It's hard to know what to do - I don't kill things. Is the viper suffering? I lay him in the grass like the first and at this point I notice the small nick on my pinky - bleeding gently. My brain tells me that a dead adder and a half dead one don't bite and I'm sure I was careful to keep my fingers away from fangs, but I suck the knuckle and spit anyway, an atavistic but maybe prudent reaction.
Having finished work for the day, and since it's still early - light and warm, I ramble down to visit the geese again. I'm ever hopeful of engaging them in a short discourse. My two adders are still there, the second cold now; basking between the two corpses, on the dirt road in the last of the day's heat is a female adder. I have no truck with anthropomorphism but nevertheless it's hard not to wonder: why a female? Why now and why between two dead males. I know the logical explanations.
I pluck a long stem of rosebay willow herb with its seeds still adhering, to persuade her to leave the road. This is all getting a little biblical. I'm feeling like some latter day saint (not a Mormon, that would be odd) but a sort of Patrick, banishing snakes from a dirt track in Mynämäki. The snake bares her fangs and raises her head to strike as I gently brush. A long moment passes then we both retire: she to the long grass gracefully, me a step backwards with none of the grace of a saint.
Monday, 6 September 2010
Scaup and smew
There's a gentle rasping of oak limbs one against another in the north wind. It stopped me where I was carefully walking, thinking I'd heard a very dainty woodpecker.
On the fringes of the little oakwood Tammimäki are birches and some poplar, but here at the centre is very little but oak, just a small number of rowans. Oak of all ages, from the oldest, which I measure tip of nose to outstretched left fingertips as one yard, to be five yards in circumference to the smallest underfoot saplings, a single stem and inches high. There's little or no grazing here so the regeneration is thick, healthy and vibrant.
Among the freestanding large boulders the woodland floor is carpeted with berries. Down low, the lily of the valley berries glow orange, poisonous miniature persimmons. Herb Paris too, its single fruited stem offering what appears to be a cultivated blueberry. It's a narcotic. Mrs Grieve tells me it's only used in homeopathy these days, and considered poisonous. There's a red berry borne by a plant with leaves like a raspberry but growing low. The only edible berry here is the wild redcurrant, growing higher, but just about tasteless.
It's a small woodland, cared for by the government: conserved with minimal management. I see dead trees left to stand or fall as they will. There's also some that have been deliberately ring-barked: a double cut deep into the wood that killed these trees which were certainly alien species. But in decay and death they have provided homes for more invertebrates than they did alive.
They are still standing and I'm thinking of the old gamekeepers' gibbets on which were hung "vermin": unwanted species around a pheasant run - crows, foxes, buzzards and the like. Our manipulation of other species is unbounded.
I don't think anyone walks here any more, but there's the remains of a stone dyke, more of a boundary marker made from large boulders removed from the adjacent field, than anything to keep stock in or out. It's hard to get to grips with the origins of this woodland. Most Finnish woods are of mixed trees - predominantly birch and pine. A complete stand of oaks, extending to a woodland is rare.
A brown dragonfly moves along the path ahead of me as I leave Tammimäki and head west for the wetlands which are a staging post for birds on their migrations. The beautifully named garganey and gadwall; the scaup and smew all rest here. As do some thousand of greylag geese who are here at the moment, until their long flight south and west to Spain
And dancing, circling cranes.
The geese ululate and warble above; resting in a form is a hare in the middle of the big cutover wheatfield next to the bay.
As I move south, inland a little through a deep fringe of woods, aspens are rattling in the wind and a little below that red squirrels are dancing, making curious soft clicking noises. Now and then a leaf falls from their gymnastic browsing and flutters slowly to the floor of the wood. There's a drone of winged insects. The wood is an orchestra this evening - from the aoelian harp top notes, to the cello continuo of mosquitoes.
I've done a kind of spontaneously choreographed walk here, led by sightings - now under this tree, now against that bank - of mushrooms; led as much by my appetite as any squirrel.
I head for home with the sun beginning to sink, a bagful of what Finns call butter ceps - sticky and brown on top, butter yellow underneath.
On the fringes of the little oakwood Tammimäki are birches and some poplar, but here at the centre is very little but oak, just a small number of rowans. Oak of all ages, from the oldest, which I measure tip of nose to outstretched left fingertips as one yard, to be five yards in circumference to the smallest underfoot saplings, a single stem and inches high. There's little or no grazing here so the regeneration is thick, healthy and vibrant.
Among the freestanding large boulders the woodland floor is carpeted with berries. Down low, the lily of the valley berries glow orange, poisonous miniature persimmons. Herb Paris too, its single fruited stem offering what appears to be a cultivated blueberry. It's a narcotic. Mrs Grieve tells me it's only used in homeopathy these days, and considered poisonous. There's a red berry borne by a plant with leaves like a raspberry but growing low. The only edible berry here is the wild redcurrant, growing higher, but just about tasteless.
It's a small woodland, cared for by the government: conserved with minimal management. I see dead trees left to stand or fall as they will. There's also some that have been deliberately ring-barked: a double cut deep into the wood that killed these trees which were certainly alien species. But in decay and death they have provided homes for more invertebrates than they did alive.
They are still standing and I'm thinking of the old gamekeepers' gibbets on which were hung "vermin": unwanted species around a pheasant run - crows, foxes, buzzards and the like. Our manipulation of other species is unbounded.
I don't think anyone walks here any more, but there's the remains of a stone dyke, more of a boundary marker made from large boulders removed from the adjacent field, than anything to keep stock in or out. It's hard to get to grips with the origins of this woodland. Most Finnish woods are of mixed trees - predominantly birch and pine. A complete stand of oaks, extending to a woodland is rare.
A brown dragonfly moves along the path ahead of me as I leave Tammimäki and head west for the wetlands which are a staging post for birds on their migrations. The beautifully named garganey and gadwall; the scaup and smew all rest here. As do some thousand of greylag geese who are here at the moment, until their long flight south and west to Spain
And dancing, circling cranes.
The geese ululate and warble above; resting in a form is a hare in the middle of the big cutover wheatfield next to the bay.
As I move south, inland a little through a deep fringe of woods, aspens are rattling in the wind and a little below that red squirrels are dancing, making curious soft clicking noises. Now and then a leaf falls from their gymnastic browsing and flutters slowly to the floor of the wood. There's a drone of winged insects. The wood is an orchestra this evening - from the aoelian harp top notes, to the cello continuo of mosquitoes.
I've done a kind of spontaneously choreographed walk here, led by sightings - now under this tree, now against that bank - of mushrooms; led as much by my appetite as any squirrel.
I head for home with the sun beginning to sink, a bagful of what Finns call butter ceps - sticky and brown on top, butter yellow underneath.
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