Dr Freya Sierhuis teaches English literature at the University of York. By
training a historian who specializes in Renaissance literature and
literary culture, particularly of religious writing and of the stage,
she has in recent years branched out into the field of ecocriticism and
the environmental humanities.
At York, she teaches a module on literature and the environment which
offers a variety of historical and critical perspectives on our relation
to the environment, ranging from the poetry of Wordsworth and John
Clare, to classics of nature writing, such as Thoreau’s
Walden and Nan Shepherd’s
The Living Mountain,
to the novels of Aboriginal writer and activist Alexis Wright. Drawing
on studies in literary criticism, nature writing, and philosophy, it
asks the question of what constitutes environmental literature, how such
literature shapes environmental consciousness and action, and how new
perspectives generated by the emergence of ecocriticism raise questions
about the relationship between human perception and the natural world,
and our co-existence as human beings in the larger living organism of
the earth.
“Above all,
do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state
of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself
into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one
cannot walk away from it”.
Søren Kierkegaard
“I only went out for a walk and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in”.
John Muir
A keen hiker and mountain walker, Freya is interested in the
relationship between walking, writing and thinking. The connection
between walking and philosophy as we know it from Rousseau’s
Reveries of a Solitary Walker
and Thoreau’s essay ‘Walking’ is part of a tradition whose roots
stretch back far into history; perhaps to the very origins of philosophy
with the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece. Walking, writers
like Rebecca Solnit and Frédéric Gros have argued, can be a form of
liberation through the crossing of spatial geographical and personal
boundaries, and through the freedom afforded by simplicity and
self-reliance. Yet walking also affords a particular kind of knowledge
or insight, both of the self and of the walked landscape. The act of
walking itself involves a kind of knowing that is both sensory,
cognitive and embodied, reliant on physical sensation, movement, sight
and smell as a medium for thought. Nature writers often describe this
sort of knowledge as a process, rather than an outcome, and view it as
ever-developing, and open-ended, rather than fixed, stable and finite.
“People
exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend
what they love — and to defend what we love we need a particularising
language, for we love what we particularly know.”
Wendel Berry
Walking can also be a way of retrieving, recuperating specific forms of
knowledge about the natural world. In our late-capitalist, urbanized,
and increasingly digital culture, time-honoured forms of knowledge of
our natural surroundings are beginning to fall into abeyance. Words to
describe the natural world, its flora, fauna, soil- and weather
conditions are, as Robert Macfarlane noted in
Landmarks,
disappearing from our dictionaries and vocabularies at alarming rate and
speed. If language does indeed shape perception, and if the limits of
our language constitute the limits of our world, such a process of
linguistic impoverishment must inevitably have a detrimental effect upon
our relationship to nature.
Walking, then, Freya claims, can function as form of cultural resistance
against environmental ‘forgetfulness’, by enabling an imaginative and
affective re-possession of the landscapes that were shaped by centuries
of human coexistence with the natural world. Beyond and behind the
routes marked out on the Ordinance Survey map lies a myriad of
itineraries and pathways, parish boundaries, pilgrimage routes and
Holloways, many of them now sunk into oblivion. Taking imaginative
possession of a landscape thus makes it possible to ‘read’ its physical
and linguistic signs and features, to know the etymology of place names,
and to understand how geography and environment evolved over time. It
is here that environmental activism and literary criticism converge. For
the language of place, the ‘particularising language’ of which Wendel
Berry speaks has common ground with literary criticism in its attention
to what is historically specific, singular, and irreducible.
Such intimate attention to the particularity of place we can find for
instance in the work of John Clare (1793-1864), perhaps England’s best,
and certainly most radically innovative, nature poet. Clare was born in
Helpston, Northamptonshire, and witnessed the transformation of the
rural landscapes of his youth in the wake of the industrial revolution
and the enclosure movement. As a naturalist, his knowledge far exceeds
that of other Romantic poets like Wordsworth. Clare’s bird poems betray
an intimate but entirely unsentimental understanding of animal
behaviour, while a poem like ‘A Copse in Winter’ requires the reader to
make the link between the woodland practice of coppicing, and the
appearance of flowers in summer.
Yet Clare’s poetry does not simply celebrate the beauty of a vanishing
world in a pastoral, elegiac mode, rather, it creates through its
language a poetics of resistance. Clare’s highly personal, idiosyncratic
spelling and frequent use of dialect words (eliminated by his editor
John Taylor, but reinstated in most modern editions) shape a poetic
voice that is as unique as it is specific to the particularities of
place: only in Northamptonshire is a song thrush called a ‘throstle’, a
ladybird a ‘lady-cow’. Local language, Clare knew, conveys forms of
knowledge that is historically and locally specific, and which is often
lost in attempts of classification or systematization. Throughout his
career Clare rejected any form of language that was abstract and
universalizing, and whose rules he associated with the rationalist,
efficiency-driven impetus behind the enclosure movement. He had no
patience with grammar, which he viewed as a tyrannical form of
constraint on the freedom of language. A skilled herbalist, he was
indifferent to the grand classificatory work of Linneaean botany, yet
discovered in the vernacular language of plants and flowers something
that filled him with delight, something which he regarded as a kind of
poetry. Rather than nostalgic, or backward-looking, Clare’s poetic
language is radical in the sense that it articulates a claim, made
explicit in poems like ‘To a fallen Elm’, that the land belongs to those
who truly know it, rather than to those who merely own it.
If you have any favourite literary quotes about woodlands, please send them to us at imagwoods@virginmedia.com and we will share them.
Images in this post by Jo Dacombe.
This post was originally posted as a newsletter on 8 July 2017
