‘To
sit, to listen, to be, to observe, to breathe, to think, to remember – the most
urgent choreography’ (Lepecki 1996: 107).
‘Beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will
sense them. The least we can do is try to be there’ (Dillard 1998: 10).
***
Deep space
For two years
in the mid-1980s I lived on a mountain in Australia, some miles to the west of
the national capital Canberra. My rented home on the mountain – Mount Stromlo -
was one of a number of 1950s single-storey wooden houses in a small community attached
to a major observatory. A little further around the mountain towered half a
dozen huge, brooding, domed telescopes. My neighbours were astronomers,
astrophysicists, PhD researchers, computer engineers; they usually worked at
night, and I rarely saw them out and about during the days. This was a place of
deep looking of a specific kind. Initially established as a solar observatory,
research at that time was focused primarily on galactic astronomy, notably supernovas
and the rate of change of cosmic expansion, as well as the monitoring of space
weather. To walk at night amongst the structures housing the reflector
telescopes was an uncanny experience. These silent monolithic sentinels would
suddenly crank and whir into life without warning, their slowly revolving
aluminium domes winking in the moonlight as they opened to the infinite
pearl-strewn intricacies of the night sky. Once I lay on the ground beside
them, looking upwards, trying to imagine something of what they were seeing.
Awakening: ‘the 10,000 beings’
‘Don’t be a mountaineer, be a mountain’ (Snyder 1999:
20).
Lucy Cash and
Simone Kenyon’s short film How the earth
must see itself (a thirling) offers a distilled, poetic mapping of an area
of mountain terrain – Glen Feshie on the western side of the Cairngorms in Scotland
– through embodied engagement with and perceptions of its particular material
attributes and energies. The film concerns itself with modalities of seeing, sensing
and knowing, ecologies of place making, an explicitly gendered economy of
respectful attention and exchange (in sharp contrast to the ‘heroic’ assaults,
conquests or catastrophes of so many mountaineering narratives), and a resonant
wonder that both recognizes the provisionality of its understandings and
affirms the abundant complexity of a wilderness environment which exceeds the cognitive
reach of the self. In image and sound, it proposes to displace any singular
perspective in favour of a more modest, contemplative, ecological immersion in
the protean dynamics of present process.
The film draws
on and refashions material developed for a series of live performances directed
by Kenyon with a group of women collaborators, their work inspired by Nan
Shepherd’s astonishing book The Living
Mountain, originally written during the second World War and first
published in 1977. Shepherd’s book might
be read as a kind of modernist mystic’s love song to a place she knew
intimately, and the amplified sensory attention and devotion of her enquiry are
in many ways tonally and thematically reminiscent of Annie Dillard’s exquisite
writings about Tinker Creek in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Both women
elaborate a grace-ful pedagogy of seeing and sensing. And while Shepherd’s
Presbyterian materialism perhaps offers a particularly Scottish counterpoint to
Dillard’s ecstatic questioning pantheism, both seek a profound interpenetration
of body, consciousness and place – they are thirled
(1) - that undoes the self and sets it in motion, casting it into an unfinishable,
contoured endeavour to understand an abundant, auratic here-and-now that will never
fully give away its abiding mysteries.
In his
perceptive introduction to a recent edition of Shepherd’s slim volume, Robert
Macfarlane characterizes her writing in terms of ‘a compressive intensity, a
generic disobedience, a flaring prose-poetry and an obsession (ocular,
oracular) with the eyeball’ (Shepherd 2011: xiii). Consciously or otherwise, Cash
and Kenyon appear to have conceived and moulded their film at least in part in
the light of these qualities, and they condense fragments of Shepherd’s acutely
pensive text to accompany and guide us in voice-over through the film. Spoken
by the Scottish performer Shirley Henderson, these voicings are marked with a
distinct gender, accent, timbre, and a flinty, weathered grain (in Barthes’s
sense, grain as the body in the
voice) that reminded me of Linda Manz in Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (I can think of no higher compliment). Like Manz’s,
Henderson’s voice is indeterminate in terms of age and historical time, as if
archetypal – a benign revenant version of the pre-Christian Cailleach of the highlands, perhaps. And
what she says come to us in a dream-like close-up, at times whispered, little
more than shaped breath, like thoughts on the threshold of consciousness and at
the cusp of articulation. Hers is the voice of an old soul, like Shepherd’s:
faraway and so close.
The film as a whole
seems to be discreetly rounded with sleep, framed by the very first voice-over words
we hear in terms of the fresh perceptions activated when one emerges from a
night spent on the mountain. From its opening blurred pan across the dormant
body-like folds of the Cairngorms, set against a misty skyline, one might
perhaps conceive of the film itself as a soft, porous ‘awakening’ into an
attuned, uninsulated receptivity in an immersive, quasi-animist present. ‘Noone knows the mountain completely who has
not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid. The body
melts. Perception alone remains. One neither thinks nor desires nor remembers.
There is nothing between me and the earth and sky’. And the mountain itself
seems to stir into flickering life – a sprig of heather dancing softly in the
breeze, a scurrying beetle, the astonishing feel-stretch of a caterpillar
exploring a budding twig, the play of light on a spider’s web. The film’s
closing fade-to-black, set alongside the sounds of a women’s choir and bird
song, returns us to the darkness of (a different) sleep.
On first ‘awakening’,
we are drawn into proliferative life and movement in image and sound, registers
of the teeming material world often referred to in Buddhist literature as ‘the
10,000 beings’. We slip (at first I wrote the verb ‘plunge’, but that’s much
too sudden a trajectory for this study in slow perception) (2) – we slip gently into a world of dynamic complexity, delicacy, precarity,
resilience and interconnectedness, and over time we come to sense a tacit
invitation to ‘think like a mountain’, to borrow Aldo Leopold’s celebrated
phrase. For the film perceives and maps this mountain massif as an intricate
ecosystem, a biodiverse web of agencies, interrelations and interdependencies
between earth, rock, flora, fauna, water, weather, sky, all of them intertwined
and in process.
As the film
unfolds, our orientation through seeing and listening pulses between crystalline
resolution and out-of-focus, proximity and distance, extreme close-up and wider
context. The camera knowingly makes of our vision a modality that is imperfect
and provisional, its rhythms contrapuntal and discontinuous, its points of view
shifting. At moments the materiality of the 16 mm film and the camera’s
mediation of seeing interrupt the ‘natural’ quality of these images, declaring
their contingent madeness. A range of evanescent visual textures and effects,
both deliberate choices and chance mechanical accidents happily embraced, briefly
undo the integrity and singularity of the filmed image, destabilising the
authority of the camera’s claim to truth, its ‘mastering’ of reality. These
include frame slippage – the split-frame judder that registers those spaces
between frames that are usually invisible to the viewer – the flaring
micro-tempests of light leak, over-exposure and solarisation, shifting unstable
focus and the sense at times of a softer peripheral vision, and the foggy blur
of halation around certain objects, like breath on a mirror. Although superficially
reminiscent of the work of certain other contemporary filmmakers in terms of
their heightened engagement with film’s textural materiality (for example, Ben
Rivers, Guy Maddin or Mark Jenkin), in Cash’s work, in addition to her
activation of duration itself as material – an analogue to the deep time of the
topography of this place - the very act
of seeing is foregrounded as mercurial, unpredictable and dynamic,
entailing an active process of negotiation of the partial and the compromised.
In this way, the film enacts a kind
of formal equivalence to Nan Shepherd’s own nuanced phenomenological insights in
The Living Mountain as to the unsteady
provisionality of vision, its morphing multiplicity and its inevitable implicating
- literally, ‘en-folding’ - of other senses in embodied processes of
experiencing and (always partial) meaning making. In particular, hearing and
touch.
Never silent, the
film’s complex sound track invites a kind of somatic ‘deep listening’, to use
Pauline Oliveros’s term. It layers Henderson’s voice over a montage of bird
sounds (corvids, a cuckoo, a skylark), the chattering flow of a small stream, footfalls
in heather, a tiny crunching like infinite insect legs scurrying across pine
needle debris, the soft thwoosh of bodies falling, and the continuous movement
of wind and air, which at times suggests the tidal susurration of a distant
spectral sea. In addition, a choir of women sings Hannah Tuulikki’s meditative vocal
score, its compositional arc rising gradually towards collective celebratory flight
towards the film’s ending. Combining sonic materials that are both spatially
close-up and further afield, this heterogeneous sonic environment elaborates a detailed
topography of holistic entanglement in a textured braiding of elements, sensations,
creatures and perspectives. ‘For the
mountain is one and indivisible … all are aspects of one entity: the living
mountain’ ...
Look out
‘I knew when I had looked for a long time, that I had
hardly begun to see’ (Shepherd 2011: xix).
The mountain observatory
that was my home in Australia all those years ago was a designated place of
looking in other ways too. At weekends during the summer months, I worked a
6-hour solitary shift as a fire ‘watcher’, spending a sustained chunk of
daylight hours at the top of a tall circular metal lookout platform on one side
of the mountain. In this windowless space high above the pine canopy there was
a tall chair, a curved bench table, a logbook, binoculars to scan the
surrounding ranges and valleys for any trace of smoke, a phone and a 2-way
radio to file hourly reports to a central fire office in the city. I remember
maps, a radio for weather reports, and a printout detailing different kinds of
smoke plumes and how to read their specific colours in terms of the combustible
materials involved. At the top and bottom edges of the framed panoramic field
of vision were compass points etched into a metal strip, a version of the old
32-point wind rose. The direction of any smoke seen in the distance could be
gauged relatively accurately by suspending a line vertically through the field
of vision and aligning the plume with the compass coordinates above and below.
A number of such readings from partner lookout points in the area, with
intersecting fields of vision, would enable the central office to triangulate
and fix the whereabouts of the fire. The semiotics and mapping of smoke.
My rhythm was
to scan steadily and formally, backwards and forwards across the 180 degrees of
visible landscape to be surveyed, then step away from the binoculars to rest my
eyes in a softer drifting mode of looking, an undirected hazy pan of reverie or a jump-zoom in on something much closer at hand. A
tuning in and out. Whenever I was distracted from the methodical, meditative
engagement with what lay in the scalloped distance, it was triggered by
registering change of some kind, something ‘fleet and fleeting’ as Annie
Dillard might say: the interruption-event of a boisterous flock of white
cockatoos, a loping wallaby or kangaroo foraging in the undergrowth at the base
of trees nearby, an unfamiliar insect or spider alongside me in the lookout
space, a caterpillar edging forward hesitantly with invisible information, a
shift in the cloud cover, the breeze, temperature or light on my face.
One Saturday
afternoon, I fell asleep up there, I’m not sure for how long. Looking out just
folded slowly and softly into a looking in. When I woke up with a start,
flushed with self-consciousness as if someone or something might have seen me
sleeping, above all I was anxious as to what I might have missed; I immediately
looked up and out. And I saw that it was almost dusk, and that there were no
visible smoke plumes, and that everything had been transformed utterly and
remade while I wasn’t even looking. And I saw ‘in a blue haze all the world
poured flat and pale between the mountains’ (Dillard 1974: 41) …
***
Almost twenty years
later in January 2003, long after I had left Mount Stromlo, in the height of a
summer drought a devastating firestorm consumed the mountain utterly, sweeping
through the pine forests on its flanks and destroying five of the telescopes,
their aluminium domes, mirrors and lenses literally melted away, along with
years of research data. The fire also razed to the ground many of the research
buildings and houses, including my former home, and the lookout tower. The
residents were given 20 minutes warning for their evacuation. Only one
telescope survived the inferno.
Seeing touching
‘I walk out; I see something, some event that would
otherwise have been utterly missed and lost; or something sees me, some
enormous power brushes me with its clean wing, and I resound like a beaten
bell’ (Dillard 1998: 14).
Like
Shepherd’s book, Cash and Kenyon’s film activates a perceptual and conceptual
terrain that sits astride a number of apparent binaries: looking/seeing,
proximity/distance, small/large, subject/object, human/non-human, material/immaterial,
speed/slowness, deep time/the present moment, knowing/mystery, sleeping/waking,
living/dying. In both book and film each of these is unstable, in flux, the
axis of a potential becoming. Each term is implicated in the other. To this
list must be added the core pairing of seeing/touching, a conventional Western clefting
that is actively frayed and then repurposed in this film. The women performers
– quietly receptive explorers of and somatic witnesses to the mountain - embody
the vibrant connective tissue in the space between these two kinds of
perception.
As a range of
writers, philosophers and phenomenologists have suggested over the past half-century
or so – Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emanuel Levinas, Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Elizabeth Grosz and others – touch, the first sense to
develop in the human foetus, involves a corporeal doing that exposes the sensitivity,
porosity and vulnerability of the self to the world. As act and metaphor, touch
represents the impingement of the world as a whole upon subjectivity; and
touching locates oneself in proximity with the givens of the world, rather than
in opposition to them. At the threshold of inside and outside, touch as
encounter and interface with the more-than-oneself, the event of another. Touch
as a modality of difference.
As the film
unfolds we see one, then three, then five women on the mountain: Jo Hellier, Claricia Parinussa, Caroline Reagh, Keren Smail
and Petra Söör. Their clothes - hand-knitted jumpers,
leather belts, trousers, an elegant contemporary version of what women hikers
would have worn half a century ago – reflect the textures, shapes and colour
spectrum of their surroundings. They appear to belong in the mountain. They practice
movements and states of being-in-place that are akin to what are known as ‘The
Four Dignities’ in Chinese literature, fundamental modes of being mindful and
present (‘at home’) in one’s body: Standing, Lying, Sitting, Walking. First we
see one of the women standing immobile, dwarfed by a tree, contemplating its
soaring presence, before softly placing her hand on its trunk and stepping
‘into’ it. Then the women as a group, walking slowly and silently through the
heather. We see their eyes seeing, their bodies sensing, feeling the air on
their skin and through their hair. At one point they lie folded in the heather,
their arched woolen backs like scattered boulders that slowly stir into
movement. A hand dips into running water, lingering with its energy and
temperature, drinking them in. Another hand, then bare feet, carefully explore
the qualities and architecture of thick spongey moss. The pleasure of tender exchange
in the rust-coloured moss’s give and return, the responsive dance of toucher
touched in the flesh of the world. Subsequently the women perform a simple collective
choreographic cycle of organic emergence and return, appearance and
disappearance: individually rising from the heather, standing, swaying in the
breeze, gradually provoking imbalance by bending backwards and inverting their
perception of the world - ‘unmaking’ the habitual - before finally letting go
and falling back softly to earth. At times the camera adopts the fallers’ point
of view, tracking the backward slide of their visual field across the sky.
Ultimately perhaps
the film invites us to see a range of tactile encounters in proximity, with a
view to the experience of the film itself offering the viewer an engagement
with a haptic space rather than a
singularly optical one. No opposition is established between these different
kinds of sensing; instead the film encourages us to recognize the possibility
that the eyes can see - and the ears hear - in a tactile fashion, apprehending and lightly brushing the epidermis of
the world. If we are to find a trajectory ‘into’ any environment through open embodied
contact, it seems to suggest, our journey will necessarily entail something of that
pulsing world entering and taking (a) place within our own internal topography.
For the edges of our bodies are membranes for two-way traffic …
So let us take
time, make space.
Dissolve the
mind, walk out of the body.
Allow what’s
out there to in-here.
That’s the
invitation, the most urgent choreography.
‘Lick a
finger; feel the now’ (Dillard 1998: 99) …
***
Footnotes
1. Online Scottish dictionaries offer an uncertain etymology for the term ‘thirl’, with possible links to the
words ‘through’, throw’, ‘thirl’ (a hole, aperture, nostril), ‘hurl’, ‘thrill’
and ‘thrall’. Formally, as a noun or verb ‘thirl’ suggests the creation of an
interconnecting hole or passage way, a perforation that enables an intersection
and interpenetration between spaces; the sensations and symptoms of intense
emotion, physical stimulation or piercing cold (trembling, tingling, throbbing,
vibrating, a literal and figurative ‘thrilling’); and a binding connection to a
particular place (see DSL). The glossary appended to Shepherd’s book simply
contains the following short entry: ‘Thirled,
bound, tied’ (Shepherd 2011: 114).
2. René Daumal: ‘There is
nothing quite like the mountains for teaching slowness and calmness’ (Daumal 2010:
19).
References
Dictionary of
the Scots Language (DSL). ‘Thirl’, entry in the online ‘Scottish National
Dictionary (1700-)’, https://www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/thirl_v1_n1
Daumal, René (2010. Mount Analogue,
New York: The Overlook Press
Dillard, Annie
(1998). Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, New
York: Harper Perennial
Lepecki, André
(1996). ‘Embracing the stain: notes on the time of dance’, Performance Research 1:1 (‘The Temper of the Times’), Spring, 103-7
Shepherd, Nan
(2011). The Living Mountain,
Edinburgh: Canongate Books
Snyder, Gary
(1999). The Gary Snyder Reader,
Washington DC: Counterpoint
Photo at the top: Stuart Lindenmayer - Mount Stromlo, burnt out observatory at night, 31 August 2017 (remains of one of the original telescopes, which now exists alongside new observatory facilities). Wikimedia Creative Commons license
This essay was originally written as a response to a film by Lucy Cash. Entitled ‘'The
most urgent choreography’: reflections on seeing and sensing in How the earth must see itself (a thirling)', it was commissioned by Lucy Cash in 2019
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