Cees Nooteboom – 533 – een dagenboek

Een dagenboek. Nooteboom verteld over zijn dagen in zijn Menorcaanse woning. Microscopische beschouwingen over zijn cactussen, de insecten rond zijn woning, de yucca, de ruines op Menorca.

Zorgvuldig beschreven in een nauwkeurige stijl die doet denken aan de veel minder bekende Tim Robinson die de Aran eilanden beschreef en ik leerde kennen via Boudewijn Buch.

Nooteboom schrijft over Brecht en Frisch. Over de muziek waar hij naar luistert.
En dan ook macroscopische beschouwingen over de reis van de Voyagers.
Over de kleine en grote dingen van het leven.

Een prachtige kruimel op de rok van Nooteboom’s universum. (naar Lucebert)

Islands – text by John Fowles, photos by Fay Godwin

Islands - text by John Fowles, photos by Fay Godwin

I bought this second-hand book (cheaply). Admittedly, I was primarily interested in Fay Godwin’s photographs in the book. Her photographs of the Scilly Islands landscape are monumental. However, I find the texts from John Fowles difficult to follow.

The island atmosphere of Fowles’s text reminds me of Tim Robinson’s books, especially those about the Aran Islands. Tim Robinson’s work provides a lot of detail on the landscape; in this book, Godwin’s photos provide a similar visual detail to Fowles’s meandering texts.

Fay Godwin The Shags

Fowles’s texts follow a historical and mythological sort of baseline. He discusses the characteristics of island communities: solitude and emptiness, independence of any legal power, a unifying feeling that sets people from the islands apart from mainlanders. Islands, withdrawn from common law and ethics, provide a unique magic. Fowles weaves a reasonably diverting story touching many topics. He mixes Homeros’ Odyssey (was it really written by a man, or must this have been a woman) with Joyce’s Ulysses, Shakespeare’s work, historical deviations, Robinson Crusoe, and other Greek mythology.

Troy Town Maze, St. Agnes, Isles of Scilly, 1977, Fay Godwin

The Wild Silence by Raynor Winn

raynor winn
the wild silence

I read The Salt Path and immediately bought its sequel, Wild Silence. I read Wild Silence in the same breath as I had read The Salt Path.

I cried a little. I never cry reading books. But it was so good.

Raynor continues her story after a lucky finish of walking the coastal path and finding a friend who could rent a small house for Winn and her husband. Moth is studying in his old age, but his disease seems to be getting hold of him now.

I closed the book, overwhelmed with the sadness of the thought that the day would come when Moth couldn’t remember what we did. The day when CBD had crept so far that the clear, magical, wild experience we’d shared was lost to him forever and I’d be left alone with the memory. The day when the guidebook would be the only record that our walk had ever happened. Where the hell was he?

As a last resort to retain their shared memories, she wrote the story of the coastal path as a present for her husband.

‘What is this? Is this what you’ve been doing?’ ‘Yeah, I’ve been writing it for you.’ I felt shy and nervous, as if it was the first present I’d ever given him. ‘All that time and it was for me.’ ‘It’s the path, the book of our path. So you can always keep the memory.’

Raynor and Moth Winn
Raynor and Moth

Even more than in The Salt Path itself, Winn’s detailed descriptions of nature and surroundings remind me of the beautiful, rigorous details that Tim Robinson uses in his books.

Following the coastal path down from the skylark fields, through the gorse, to the steep dip in the land where winter storms funnel high winds into a jet-powered blast of air, making it hard to stay on your feet.

Many threads run through the books, including Moth’s health, Raynor’s shyness, the death of her dominant mother, the development of a writer, and Raynor’s love for Moth. These could make the reading cheesy, but that never happens.

Don’t ‘be careful on the stairs’, run up them, run as fast as you can, with no fear of clocks ticking or time passing. Nothing can be measured in time, only change, and change is always within our grasp, always simply a matter of choice. I closed my eyes and let the sounds come, let the voice come.

Tim Robinson’s joy for precision

Tim Robinson’s books are amazingly interesting precise works of litarature. He has created a new genre of literature, a landscape biography.

With meticulous labor, Robinson in the two books Stones of Aran: Pilgrimage and Stones of Aran: Labyrinth tells us about the history of the islands. He does this while describing his systematic hikes across the Aran Islands, painting a detailed view of the barren island.

The small Aran Islands are presented meter by meter, crag by crag, fissure by fissure.
As a mapmaker he records every limestone rock, house, barn, wall. But he also talks to the farmers. He talks about the isolation of the islanders. Their strange habits. Their faith. Their own Saint Enda of Aran. Their history.

The people of Aran were extremely poor and permanently threatened by famine. On their small rock island on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, they made a living by fishing, harvesting burning seaweed to sell the kelp (which contained iodine and alkali), and growing potatoes on their fissured rocky field fertilized with seaweed.

“Large families live of the bounties of a few small plots, and save all other income for the rent; the potato thrived on the plenteous labour of those families, the carting of sand and seaweed that created the plots out of rock, the spadework that doubled the shallow soil into ridges, the weeding and watering could be done by children. Fecundity led to overcrowding: the ridges full of low-quality potatoes vulnerable to drought, pests, diseases and prolonged salty winds that scorched their stems…” (Labyrinth)

“The Aranners distinguish about thirty types of seaweed, each with its own advantages and disadvantages as fertilizer, for various crops or as raw materials of kelp. The main division is between feamainn dhubh, blacked and feamainn dhearg, redwood. The former comprises the dark-toned Focus species that grow on the upper and middle shore, …” (Pilgrimage)

They hunt for basking sharks in wobbly boats, called currachs, made of lath and canvas …

“All available tackle – ‘spears, gaffs, bocáns, pocáns, buoys, boreógs, straimpíns, one knives and poles and chains taken from a ship wrecked at Big Cleft’ – was assembled and carried down to Port Bhéal and Dúin; a spear was attached by a rope and a cable to a chain wound around a big boulder in a depp pot-hole of the shore; five three-men in currachs were launched, a shark was eventually speared, and when it had run itself to exhaustion another team of fitted men hauled it ashore.” (Pilgrimage)

And go on life-endangering searches high on the cliffs for eggs and birds.

“Razor bills, guillemots, and black guillemots, puffins and cormorants were the birds usually taken on the cliffs. Both eggs and birds were eaten, …
…
The hunt was conducted as follows. The men would walk across the the cliffs at dusk with the rope, which was often a communal investment. One end of it would be tied around the cliff man’s waist and between his legs, and the other made fast to an iron bar driven into a crevice or wedged in a cairn on the clifftop. A team of up to eight would lower the cliff man, guided by signals from a man stationed out on a headland from which he could watch the progress of the descent. The cliff man would carry a stick to keep himself clear of the cliff face while swinging of the rope…” (Pilgrimage)

A masterpiece of scrupulous investigation. Wonderfully written with massive joy and persistence.