Biophony
Finding your poetic beat in the soundscape.
At great risk of plagiarising myself, and not being arsed to see if I’ve touched on these things before, Imma burble on about craft. Yes, I used ‘Imma’ because language is evolving, and I’m a big fan of MLE; Multi-cultural London English. But I digress, fam.
I’m always fascinated by the minutiae of other poets’ craft tips and tricks, or more specifically the habits and sometimes rituals that underpin their ‘writing lives’, whatever we are supposed to infer from that. Right now, I have the ‘writing life’ that would induce envy in many; off work since forever with an injury on Spain’s generous statutory sick pay, alone for days at a time in a remote rambling farmhouse. Yeah. Lucky me.
There isn’t a but or a downside, it’s the best. I wake when I want, eat when I want, write when or whatever I want. If I draw a blank, I walk, taking my dogs through the woods along an ancient track hardly anybody knows about (I’m sure I’m one of about six people who still know its name). I can wander down a broad valley of horseshoe terraces with 1000-year-old olive trees where almost nobody ever goes but me, to an abandoned well and water wheel. If my loins are sufficiently girded, I climb to the top of the hill behind my house, sometimes to the summit, sometimes also to the cave hermitage of Mary Magdalen that sits about halfway up. If I do both I always think of it as the ‘Walk of the Double Devotions’.
Years ago, an old friend in our group of stoner-mountaineers nicknamed ‘My-Mate Marmite’ would harangue us up to the summits of fells and Munros with a Nietzschean rallying cry; ‘Peaks mean prizes!’ and it’s hard to shake off the feeling that walking in the mountains if you don’t make it to the top is missing the better blessing. One of the things I like most about walking, climbing and scrambling in the mountains is that you go through the physical rinsing of exertion, oxygenating your blood, shaking out the stale synapses festering in corners of the brain, pushing all that coffee through your kidneys and out.
The great purge of your meat-suit complete, you arrive somewhere beautiful; the top of Ben Nevis, Great Gable, Scafell Pike, in a state of something approaching grace. ‘My Mate Marmite’ had a house in Kendal when I was living in London and being a ‘Mr. Mum’, and periodically I’d get away for a weekend of fell-walking. He knew the Lakes better than I, and at my request, would prepare a punishing, cathartic itinerary of vertical waterfall ascents and boggy slogs that made me question everything I held dear. I still remember with fondness how difficult it was to descend the narrow stairs of his little cottage on Kendal’s Fellside, three days of peaks and prizes behind me, changed utterly.
On my way up the hill today I will meet no other people. Depopulation is a beautiful thing, with its long silences and winter nights of nothing but stars, here in the demographic desert, the ‘Mordor’ of Spain, the province of Teruel. As the wind stiffens up, there’ll be vultures out, husbanding their energy on speculative adventures, their huge, globular eyes spotting me from above as they skim the treetops in twos and threes. They watch for the silhouettes of crows, then the hungriest set off first, a heads-up display of air pressure leading them though seams and pockets of lift.
As I walk, there are two rhythms: the pace of the gait, which is surely a beat as intrinsic to the human condition as that of the heart, hypnotic once it has settled into a steady pulse. There is also the ‘biophony’, in this wild and richly biodiverse middle of nowhere. I’m pretty good at identifying birds by sight, but absolutely hopeless with all but the most singular and iconic calls. Of course I have a birdsong app, but when it listens to my recordings it effectively asks, ‘err..which one?’ I am woven into the bird-realm, the Énflaith of John Moriarty’s ‘Invoking Ireland’, an ecumenical communion of all living things. It is the surge and settle of a collective mind, all of us wild and smelly animals listening to each others’ languages, if we’re lucky, living long enough to learn something from each other.
I have a theory, based entirely on unscientific and solitary rumination, that language and certainly music, or the music of language, evolved in a din of birdsong and probably pulsed with the beat of walking. As someone who’s often had to walk some distance through this high country out of necessity, I noticed I’d acquired the ‘caminar dels masovers’ This rhythmic long lope of a country people, living in masias like mine, is a natural development of need and environment. If you have to walk 10km for car parts or a jerrycan of diesel in 40 degrees, the brain falls quiet and your trancelike reduction slowly devours the distance. In such a situation, haste or overexcitement will precipitate an ‘event’ and maybe lop days off your life.
All very heroic I know. It’s a privilege to live in this noisy, lonely labyrinth and one I enjoy more and more with the passing of time. Today’s song is the wind’s, sculpting a colossal and invisible transient structure over the woods and crags, itself a language. I’ve learned some of its vocabulary; dark, low and strong on the mountain to the south means big weather, long days of the Cierzo to the north-west means dry cold and dazzling light. In high summer, when there seems not to be a breath of air on the move, a thin finger of wind might tousle the tops of the high pines across the valley with a cool hiss, just enough to tell me the Earth is still turning.
Is wind ‘biophony’ or ‘geophony’? Surely the rocks are silent, if not the water. I’m not clear where the distinction falls, they are the sounds that fit within our tiny envelope of human aural perception. Other animals have a broader or narrower range accordingly and emit the same. Though I may now have to crane my neck and proffer my ‘good’ ear in a noisy bar to hear what’s being said, I can still just about pick up the clicks from the noctule bats outside the back door, where I tilt the odds in their favour by leaving a light on for the moths. Those guys need all the help they can get.
I’m not sure I could ever return to living in a place cluttered with the anthrophony; the din of human activity. But who knows how the wind will blow across Europe? I may not be welcome here one day, in which case I would probably relocate to Ireland, somewhere wild and mad, like the Blasket islands. Dear God.
On the way out, and by way of a post-script, one of the things we Dharma Bums used to do for a while on attaining some fearsome summit would be to bust out a ‘chillum’ and fire up a plug of the ‘devil’s lettuce’. I’m still partial to a little tickle now and then, though baulk at the wild-eyed shamanic vision quest sometimes to be had from modern cultivars. A little mild weed, as DBC Pierre put it, is good for ‘unexpected thinking’, and he won the Booker Prize with ‘Vernon God Little’. Just saying…
Bless ups, poets. In a bit. Hope your Sunday is peng.