Thursday 24 August 2017

Introducing Imagining Woodlands' collaborators: Freya Sierhuis



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

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