Only Man

No new impressions can efface those that are so deeply cut. The scenes which stand out hard and clear the mind and pen dwell upon.
I would like to claim this observation as my own but it's not. It's Arthur Conan Doyle's. He wasn't though, as I would be, referring to childhood but to heroisms. The heroisms of man: the goals they set themselves, the expeditions to discover new worlds or conquer lands and summits. For man, only man, as a mountaineer might put it, is the heart of action itself. Only man can overcome and affirm himself, and realise himself in the struggle. Only man can touch the absolute – a Oneness or God; can pierce and see above the clouds where He reigns, and know glory. A selfish glory.
Only man knows overblown language.

Picture credit: Ascent to the Summit of Mount Sinai, David Roberts (source: WikiArt).

See The Lost World by Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joe Simpson's Introduction to Annapurna by Maurice Herzog.

Journal entry, December 2021.

Jurassic

A time before man, a time of reptilian life. A time of harshness and beauty: cruel and evolutionary nature. A time that man can only learn of and about through its remains: its natural traces of Time, which in some, like Mary Anning, produces a 'passion for bones', or rocks and stones; for examining the landscape with observant eye and sharp hearing. Take notice! such characters say of your surroundings: the sounds, the sights of nature; of Time before and after; of Change gone and Change coming. Listen to, and appreciate, the recorded sound of the singing wren; watch through a lens a solar eclipse – the sun directly behind the moon, one oval disc on top of another, the light circumferencing the dark. Acknowledge and respect nature, and the persons, whether lay or professional, who explain it to us: bring it into our human world.

Picture credit: Ammonite, 1989, Jacek Yerka (source: WikiArt).

From journal, December 2021.

O to Visit Lyme!

O to visit Lyme! I'm told I've been there on one of the two occasions we holidayed in Bridport, but don't remember it. I remember nothing of it, that seaside resort, not walking along the Cobb, not shell and fossil hunting, not visiting the museum, not any of the things I'm told in a family group we did. My memory retains other snapshots, some of which exist as photographic evidence: a wooden dining table in a country-style kitchen and Nan Miriam unwrapping, then christening, her birthday present (a teapot); an indoor swimming pool, a Minnie Mouse costume and a giant inflatable whale, though I would probably not have placed them in Dorset; I wouldn't have been able to place them, physically, geographically, anywhere.

Lyme, at maybe 7 or 8 years, did not call as it later did, and still, every now and again, does. The Lyme Regis of Jane Austen, John Fowles, and even Beatrix Potter, another keen fossil hunter. O to visit Lyme again! 

Picture credit: From the Old Walls, Lyme Regis, 1932, Richard Eurich (source: WikiArt).

From journal, December 2021.

Fossil

A time of great change, a time of great science. The American, the French, the Industrial Revolutions; the slave trade not yet fully abolished, and the emergence of new science, of 'deep time'. The Bible challenged on the goodness of mankind and the story of Creation. Mary Anning's prehistoric finds upsetting minds and whole belief systems; Mary's finds and knowledge enhancing men's careers, reputations and incomes. Mary herself side-lined, almost blotted out. A time of great change and growing scientific interest, and yet women – women of all classes – were excluded from commercial activities and natural sciences, indeed from any pursuits – professional or hobbyist – and any discussions – political and scientific – unless they were of a determined character, but were otherwise mostly mentioned or brought into the conversation (by a man), unnamed, if blame rather than credit was to be apportioned. Such attitudes seem much like fossils now.

Picture credit: Mary Anning with her dog Tray, Natural History Museum (Source: Wikipedia).

See Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters by Patricia Pierce.

From journal, December 2021.

Patagonian Drifter

Patagonia! An enchantress! enticing many, and once enfolded in her arms rarely letting them go. Where is it exactly? South A. And yet it's landscape reads like no country ever seen. And yet it's climate reads as 'all weathers'. And yet the mind despite being told cannot grasp its geographic position, wondering, somewhat confusedly, if it exists at all. How did Bruce Chatwin get there? Those details are omitted; he is there! Drawn there by a piece of skin with reddish hair. For six months he'll rub along with the inhabitants, who represent different tongues, different cultures and different religions, and which like themselves they've established in Patagonia. O Patagonia! The place for everyone! Adventurers, refugees, missionaries, outlaws etc. Can I really believe all that I'm reading? Is it really possible Chatwin met all these people? Is Patagonia the enchantress or Chatwin the caster of spells?

*

A road that's hardly a road, then a track that isn't a track, yet Chatwin would have it that all roads and hardly roads and all tracks and tracks that aren't tracks lead to Old Pat. Perhaps he's right? For his theories concerning the origins of Conan Doyle's Lost World, Swift's Brobdignagians, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner and Shakespeare's Caliban are compelling. Perhaps all artist-drifters drifted in mind if not in body to Old Pat, led there by writings of actual voyages, led there by events that happened to captains and sailors. Old Pat, its actual or fictional reality, speaks to those who feel like strangers anyplace: their roots unable to sink into any soil where there's not solitude, birds and space.

*

Can Patagonia ever be adequately explained to an unseeing brain? Its history of peoples fantastic, full of characters you might find in a Joseph Conrad or John Steinbeck novel. Peoples and events mirrored in life or art; which blurred. The real, the stuff of movies or the product of an inventive imagination; the artistic, a yarn twisted or exaggerated by the teller and seeming more suggestive of fact. Each though containing some substance of truth, buried deep or plain to see.

*

A collection of stories, of sea, of tent-dwelling; everything remembered put down, for house-dwellers who never part from their possessions to read. Disordered they might be, and perhaps repetitive in their telling, but to those who abide in one place they tell of a different life: a life lived, though it may seem, when pieced together, too incredible to be true.

*

Large stories proved by the existence of photos or a camera crew; by spinsters – the adventurer's unmarried sisters – with sad skin and thinning hair, or sad hair and thinning skin, and crushed spirits; by intellectuals reading many books and, when not, gazing at stars; by souvenirs – some physical object legally or illegally obtained – of ridiculous journeys.

*

A land of myths and contradictions, of eccentrics and exiles; its roads scattered with the hopes and wrecks of life: mining towns, ranches, Indians, bones and animal skins. Its beauty said to be 'metaphysical', its reputation dangerous and unpredictable. Down in Patagonia!

Picture credit: The Drifter, Andrew Wyeth (source: WikiArt).

From journal entries, written in the course of reading In Patagonia by Bruce Chatwin (Vintage Classics, 40^th anniversary edition), November 2021.