COUNTERPOINT

 

	" ... he lives eternally who lives in the present"  - Wittgenstein  Tractatus 6.4311
	To find the World, vividly there In plain sight .....
	Scattered dog tracks in the frozen mud Hanging ferns encased in ice Bare twigs a glow of purple-brown across the hillside Frosted tussocks crisp underfoot River rushing loud along a swollen course
	.....   and touch it deeply, its wet and its dry places; Not looking inward at its image as in a crystal ball only to lose the vision, and say 'such rhings are glimpses out of time'; But only when the time is NOW to go there, to the place of the soul.
		∞

Wild Time

Loch Coruisk, June 2013

It’s more than a year since I stood by the waters of Loch Coruisk surrounded by the peaks of the Cuillins, so reading Robert MacFarlane’s The Wild Places where he recounts his own impressions of the lake, enlivened my own memories of that remote basin in the mountains of the Isle of Skye.

I was particularly struck by his perception of the altered sense of time and the provisionality of our assumptions about the passing of time. He says that

“In such a place, your conventional units of chronology … become all but imperceptible, and your individual gestures and impulses … acquired an eerie quickness. The larger impulses of the human world - its wars, civilisations, eras - seem remote. Time in the Basin moves both too fast and too slowly for you to comprehend, and it has no interest in conforming to any human schedule. The Basin keeps wild time.”

This is an interesting variation of the notion of time being suspended or of moments out of time, often reported by others having similar experiences, [e.g. R.S Thomas - HERE]. Rather, he suggests that ‘Wild Time’ doesn’t just slow down so it seems not to be passing at all, as in the usual human experience of a ‘timeless’ moment, but that it also flashes past suddenly, in the “sudden drop of a raven” or “the darts of the damselflies”. This is to experience time as “shades and textures” rather than the ticking away of chronological units .

If 'Wild Time’ is a different way of experiencing time, why should a particular place bring this about? Or if time, in such places, passes differently do we bring our own sense of the long unfolding of time since the Ice Age when the basin was carved out, and as it has remained, balanced against the life span of a midge which lasts a single day? These are imponderables. But my own memory of the place certainly stretches out the time I spent there and at the same time compresses it to a single moment.

You can cross by boat across a bay with small islands on which seals bask to get to the Loch. Those returning the same way are certainly bound by human time in order to catch the scheduled boat back after climbing the rocks and following the path through to the Basin. This was not my schedule. Having spent some time around the Loch our small party climbed to a pass on the other side and then followed a slow descent down an extended valley. The long June day and the late sunset helped alleviate the sense of time needed to get to the nearest road and welcome refreshments. In memory I can capture the experience as a single event. At the time it seemed to go on forever.

The trail back from the Loch

Ebb and Flow on the Mawddach

John Ruskin said of the Mawddach Estuary that the only thing more beautiful than the trip between Dolgellau and Barmouth was the trip between Barmouth and Dolgellau. It is not just the panorama of the wooded hills above the wide river, or the distant prospect of the sea beyond the estuary, or even the sheer magnificence of the whole valley at the southern end of Snowdonia. It is contained in the experience I had today - and not for the first time - of the atmospheric intensity of the place.

We walked the path along the river , bending away from it in some stretches through woodland, and caught the first intimations of autumn in the wind's chill and the cloudy skies above the manifold greens of the woodland just taking on a hint of autumn colour. As the wind bent over the slender birches they creaked at the woodland edge as if in anticipation of a winter that cannot be far away.

On the sandbanks exposed by the low tide geese gathered in increasing numbers. Along the creeks in the salt marsh at the river's edge a heron stood staring with tilted neck at one of the rivulets running through the debatable territory between river and woodland as the tides rise and fall. This is a liminal zone in an estuary that changes rapidly. As we walked downriver the waters swirled around extensive sandbanks. But only a few hours later the tide had rushed back in , covering them and changing the view to one of a wide expanse of water. The vigour of the current visibly changed the nature of the river as we walked on and soon engulfed all of the exposed sand. The geese then assembled in large flocks on the salt marsh while the herons - and there seemed to be a different one every half mile or so - stood in the rising waters watching with intent gaze for any movement of prey beneath the flow. Occasionally one would spread wide wings and then flap slowly for a short distance before subjecting another spot to the same intent gaze.

Above the tidal ebb and flow the air currents were also engaged in constant flux. Cloud drifted over and then cleared. For a moment there was rain in the air. Then a patch of intense blue as the sky cleared. On the hillside oaks, ashes, birches hung above the valley, ancient woodlands that have turned from green to russet and shed their leaves for hundreds of years of recent time. Twice daily this estuary shifts with the tides. And its weather reflects this. Today as the last of summer shifted to autumn the edge in the wind was also the edge between seasons and this too was reflected in the shifting edge of the river : a dynamic zone in which the flow of time is caught in the act, not of slipping past unnoticed but still, for a swift perception of transitoriness, isolated in its passing.

Shells, Stones and Mermaid's Purses

Shells on a beach lying between pebbles banded with quartz, others the colours of jade or garnet, embedded in gritty sand, infused in some far-distant geological event, worn smooth by the tides ebbing and flowing across a beach that was once a forest and before that a salt marsh, changes in the ebbing and flowing of the land itself through the relentless tide of time seeming to flow one way only but bringing with it changes that turn sea beds into mountains and wash away even the highest mountains.

Yet on this beach now, lying next to fragments of ancient rocks, are these shells, new-formed by comparison but discarded, their inhabitants digested by the oystercatchers foraging in the sea's edge. And here, too, the empty egg case of a dogfish, its hard casing and vetch-like tendrils obsolete on this beach where it attracts the name 'mermaid's purse', an apparently more fitting identification for so durable an object than one that assigns its purpose as a container for the eggs of a fish. So fact and fancy dwell together in the combination of the name of the object and what we know it to be in this blink of time's eye, though two blinks ago it would have been otherwise.

So as the the Sun in the northern hemisphere begins, gradually, to strengthen (as from the standpoint of this beach it appears to us)and we turn our calenders to day one of our arbitrary reckoning of a new year, these shells, this mermaid's purse, these ancient stones - all fragments of time's relentlessness - lie in witness ( lie in witness?)to what was, to what is, and await with deceptive stillness the flux of what will be.