Necramass
‘If
the word ‘death’ were absent from our vocabulary, the great works
of literature would have remained unwritten…creativity and
pathology of man are two faces of the same medal, coined in the same
evolutionary mint’. Arthur
Koestler.
“Hey
John, still climbing?” “What are you doing back here?” Reply,
“Losing my tan.” “How’s the art?”
Usual
one liners on my return to Llanberis. I had popped over to mourn and
celebrate the passing of a friend, Andy Pollitt. For some time I had
been saying to myself, ‘go see him before it’s too late’. It
certainly was too late for his ashes already coat the Arapiles. But,
having a stroke, in the bar, beer in hand amongst friends sounds
about right for a deal with death. Gathered in the Mowberry Bar in
Sheffield were the semi-aged climbing elite of the 80’s and 90’s.
Although most seemed to be fairly fit and still active and involved
in the climbing world business, most conversations were centred
around arthritis, the cold dampness of Sheffield and trips to dry
Spain, new knee joints, new hip joints, sports physiotherapy,
massage, memory loss and worse. The worse comprising of diabetes,
heart operations, cancer diagnosis, self-catheterisation and
attempted suicide. No mention of anxiety, depression or stress,
surely the precursor for most illnesses? For some, unable to lift a
kettle or perform simple domestic duties, but managing to climb 7b
plus is a workout to disintegration.
For the minority, no ageing
seems to have taken place, but dietary needs were enthusiastically
talked about as if they were a life-support machine. I had thought
that at least one name had died, so was pleasantly elated to converse
with a voice ‘from the past’. I mentioned that the climbing
culture needs a ferryman, a reaper, who goes around and collects
personal messages, the words chosen by the climbers upon the event of
their own death, kept in an archive ready for use upon departing.
Every year there should be a gathering of these lifeforms, the Andy
Day, where life’s gems and troubles, injuries and disabilities are
celebrated and messages reaffirmed or brought up to date. The class
of the 80’s and 90’s gradually descending into joyful extinction.
In this sporting gathering you will find, I am sure, the same if not
more illnesses as you would in a heroin rehabilitation centre.
Andy Pollitt:Image-John Kirk
I
understand the workout to disintegration, ‘forcing the heart, nerve
and sinew’, not in a climbing sense as I never pushed too hard, but
in an essential sense - a workout with the woodland as my gymnasium.
By this I mean no disrespect to the woodland in relation to the banal
enterprise of sport related fitness and exercise. I refer to logging,
an outdoor pursuit more suitable to my ‘spectrum’s’
sensibilities of what survival
means. The woodland is steep and access is only by foot and
carry-outs difficult and becoming longer. This steep terrain is
closed canopy and is streaked with the pale skeletal trunks of dead
chestnut. Like ghostly white antlers forking above a green sea, they
have had their day, dry and brittle, their bark pealed off like
papyrus, standing up as if suddenly shocked to death, almost beer in
hand. Their youngsters are already forming their own tight canopy
with glossy, broad leaves spreading out to reduce precious sunlight
filtering down to competitors eager and alert for a way in. Youth eh.
The
chestnut is a survivors tree, planted as a measure to control
erosion, for its nuts, flour, culinary and medicinal use. Great for
bees, and getting wild boar ‘drunk’ and gnarly, it produces
strong building timber, but its chief advantage is for seasoned,
hardwood fuel to feed the woodburners. Keep the hearth burning is my
heartfelt mantra, the soul of the home and one’s connectivity with
the land. There is nothing more important… Politics and religion is
not how we survive… we survive by knowing that the earth and us are
a complete sentient being… we are the dwelling…
My
workout is simple. I log till I drop. It is a full body workout
involving every muscle in the body and yes, muscles ache, the heart
pumps, tendons fail and sinews struggle to lift that proverbial
kettle in the kitchen. It is my campus board, chalkless, shared with
ravens, snakes and wild boar. For this, my approach has to be
logistical. I work out the access through the woodland, cutting steps
on steeper sections as and where necessary. I fell five or six dead
trees and saw into six foot lengths. Half the tree is left to
decompose. This amounts to about eighteen carries, each the weight of
a small child. On this terrain, falling is expected, normally
controlled, but sometimes a lurch for the chainsaw brake is missed
and a dangerous, painful tumble onto rocks, spiny burrs and colonies
of ants are remembered. The large leaf of the chestnut is
extraordinarily slippy and carpets the land as thick as a gym mat.
Lucky so far. I meet the hoofed footfall of deers, the sprung,
predator intent of badgers, foxes and creatures unknown in passing,
as the speckled sun contours their foot-shape and movement up and
down the hill. A large cat print the size of a fist joined my bruised
elbow after a silly fall.
A lynx undoubtedly. Since moving onto this
land I have seen her twice, and twice a brief and glassy stare joins
us. The established naturalists in this area refer to the ‘phantom
lynx’, cat of a few sightings but supposedly extinct in this area.
Stabbed, scraped, bitten and stung, probed by antennae, among worms,
borers and blights, I am branded under the aegis of the green world.
I think of pathogens and microbes that slithered off prehistoric
creatures. I laugh upon every fall, every nose-dive into scrub and
soil, every branch on high that knocks me off my feet, is surely a
celebration of living and belonging here. As a stumbling creature of
the woodland I am sure the griffin vultures are keeping their noses
open for my final move, and meanwhile, alarmed or amused at my
behaviour and methods of keeping warm. Every night the ‘tea-tree
and a needle’ expel the bits of woodland that have penetrated my
fingers.
Threshing Circle
Dropping
down here, chainsaw idling until empty of gas, chewed and chomped and
dismembered by creatures better than I, is my idea of a beer in hand
in the pub among friends… ‘eaten
where he fell, they said’.
Delicious.
Meanwhile,
until then, there is carrying, and keeping warm. I drop the gears
down after six or seven trips, slowly becoming more exhausted with
the carries and almost stop. The will to energise is in itself a
fascinating business. Being a slave to the consciousness of the job
is a weary business, but when stepping out of this obvious role into
more of a ‘dream’ role, meaning is altogether more rejoicing.
This instant glimpse of joy is strangely harder to find than the
fatigue that comes with the doubt of each step and the pain of
stopping. That this doubt is so much easier to fall into is surely a
human trait, a brain fault? I find that any movement, in leaf, grass,
branch or bird help in the effort. There always seems to be a single
leaf nearby, waving frantically as if sprung-coiled or animated by
unseen pixies. The overflow from the source, bursting deep through
the earth’s structure, flowing, gurgling, alive and free, inspires
energy and meaning, and a final push to the chopping camp.
‘We
live subject to arrest by degrees of fatigue which we have come only
from habit to obey’. William
James.
I
think the process of moving through the woodland is like the pushing
and mixing of paint on the palette, but its meaning, the work in
question belongs to a more objective, esoteric reasoning, where both
the logs and the painting can seem like a by-product…
The
psychological and motivational approach to achievement and success in
sport that I see as belonging to reptilians and professional cyborgs
may have a place for the hunter gatherer here. I recall the task of
carrying down 2000 slates from a mountain in Wales -
‘Some
days my resources to cope with the effort were infinite and on others
such resources could not be tapped… the task was like
mountaineering, summoning the energy whilst knowing that there is no
summit or goal to attain, only numbers to count. Following through
when hit by fatigue eventually creates this control over the messy
business of accounting or attempts at routine that try to package the
effort…’
‘I
had reached one thousand and sixty eight slates. This was the
problem. I had no heart to continue. I had created a mental block
that took two thousand as the next aim. I had taken a month to date,
and, with four trips a day, should already have two thousand.
Thinking of another whole month exhausted me and drained all my
spirit and will. I knew from previous days that to think in these
terms made the going slow and laborious. I had to ‘tone down’ to
the realistic aims of another hundred slates. That is a maximum of
three days. Three days were a manageable mental proposition…’
So,
surveying the hill, logistically thinking, I worked out a line that
took in two camps. A complete trip from logging to base is too
demanding, knowing there are eighteen more long trips. The break
between camps is crucial and gives space to consider that before me
is a world hardly known. I force my energy against the weight of
gravity and gases above knowing there is sensational stuff above and
below my feet, small stuff, ancestral organisms, spores, just getting
on with it…waiting patiently to seek an entry or not…and make
soil. When people talk of there being no more wildlife left, I say
hang on, get a microscope, just look under my fingernails.
In
my experience, the topmost of the trees are more likely to contain
colonies of ants. These habitats are sawn and left, together with the
bark and it’s black millipedes that scamper out of fissures
menacingly. I often made the mistake of shoulder carrying a length
without checking its inhabitants, only to find rashes and bites
throughout my torso. This territorial invasion can last for days, as
the clothing is brought into the house. Each ‘toddler’ that I
carry to the chopping block is a world. It is a thriving business, a
habitat in its present form for a short while still. Regardless of
the sawdust that goes in the compost toilet, and the ash that is
spread on the garden and the logs that fire the woodburners, they are
home, food and shelter for a myriad of creatures living off the dead
and dying.
There
are a few really old Spanish Chestnuts, with wide bases, cleaved
apart, exposing a core of dead wood. They are grounded, steady, but
gnarled, spiralling creatures, twisting to their own dance. The
heartwood is a nacromass, a gathering of dominant lifeforms and
matter, locked in and held tight by its life-giving folds, looking
dead to us, but is a biomass-bank store for its sustainable future
and progeny, stored safe from other plants.
There
is fullness and plentitude here, and the more I sit by it and
contemplate the richness and mystery of it’s being and spirit, the
more I consider the planetary habitat of our own being, the Magna
Mater and myths of origin. I cannot see that the unfolding of human
life as I look around me in the world, the confusion and chaos and
hatred so manifest, is remotely connected with that before me, but
perhaps I am wrong. We seem to have departed that guided tour of
experience sponsored by what I would like to describe as ‘a sacred
instruction’. It is like we are full of ourselves, of nonsense,
busy, holy, negligent, left with no trace, or way of knowing our
ancient story, and travelled to another planet where we can do what
the hell we want, reap havoc, instill fear and kill for the sake
of…because we can…be clever and dangerous…strong, cocky and
holder of the fire. As I sat there, as if in the company of Aeons,
imagining the human genome created by ‘galactic’ minds of the
Pleroma, drifting as thoughts and ideas and jokes and future washing
machines and coffee grinders into terrestrial materialism…with life
emerging, and to all intents and purposes, fucking up, seemingly.
I
like the visions here, sat, still, looking, working dreams into the
necramass, the poetry of our own meaning and purpose. This has no
name I guess apart from the language known to me through what is
called art. If we evolved from this ‘death’, the microbes and
bacteria, the small microbiomes, protozoa that are us, seeking,
probing, multiplying, forcing their agenda, fighting their cause, and
on and on and on, do not be alarmed at today’s conflicts and
war…Iraq, Syria, Yemen, etc etc etc, or climate change, or indeed,
the ease of catching a cold or virulent bugs. In my visions, there
are also migrants and the homeless here, waiting a chance encounter
to be churned out of their ‘holding’ camp in the soil, or blown
by a favourable wind…or not.
Abiogenesis
of Acari
‘In
1837, Andrew Crosse reported to the London electrical Society
concerning the accidental spontaneous generation of life in the form
of Acurus genus insects while he was conducting experiments on the
formation of artificial crystals by means of prolonged exposure to
weak electric current. Throughout numerous strict experiments under a
wide variety of conditions utterly inimical to life as we know it,
the insects continued to manifest. The great Michael Faraday also
reported to the Royal Institute that he had replicated the
experiment. Soon afterwards, all notice of this phenomenon ceased to
be reported, and the matter has not been resolved since then’.
Till
this period I had no notion that these appearances were any other
than an incipient mineral formation; but it was not until the 28th
day, when I plainly perceived these little creatures move their legs,
that I felt any surprise, and I must own that when this took place, I
was not a little astonished. In the course of a few weeks, about a
hundred of them made their appearance on the stone.
Andrew
Crosse
John
Redhead, Lous Manes, Coustouges. December 2019
All images- John Redhead apart from John Kirk photograph
Taken from a forthcoming collection of essays 'Amuse-Bouche for the Hero Gone Bent'
