Fossil-Chained Grounds

By R. M. Francis:

In July 2020 I took up an 18 month post as Poet in Residence for the Black Country Geological Society (BCGS). A role enabled by the University of Wolverhampton Doctoral College’s Early Research Award Scheme. Exploring the UNESCO Black Country Geopark I’ve written poems inspired by and set in these wonderful places.  The poems are creative responses to the environment, considering how the geological make-up of the land impacts, connects and clashes with the overlooked cultures of the region. 

The Black Country is famous for its role in the Industrial Revolution. Its industrial heritage forged unique and important communities and cultures. This, in many ways, was connected to the grounds that gave life to these cultures - the fossil and mineral rich grounds dating back to the Silurian era. One such fossil is Chain Coral; a now extinct form of colonising coral. Single cells branch off, forming helix, webs or chain patterns. This species colonised the area that was to become known as the Black Country. These fossil-chained grounds gave rise to the chainmakers, steelers and miners - the chain continues to be an important symbol of the region’s heritage, representing strong communal / cultural links. Chains run deep in the region’s cultural psyche - they run deep in the deep time soils.

These poems re-figure our relationship with the local environment; both in its surfaces and depths, the building materials and the forces that create them. This project considers these issues in an overlooked region, famed for its  'dark satanic mills', considering this in conjunction with conservation, ecology, sustainability, and new ways of experiencing place in the anthropocene.

The Mind Seemed to Grow Giddy By Looking So Far Into The Abyss of Time

This quotation is from John Playfair's observation of James Hutton's work and echoes the sublime experience of geopoetic travel and perception. The Black Country Geopark is a group of rich, lush and mysterious places; drifting through them with a geopoetic lens has profoundly impacted my own sense of place and heightened my passion for this region's history and culture. There is something special and astonishing in the experience of getting lost and being awestruck in sites that are just outside or on the edges of our everyday realms. 

Take West Park in Wolverhampton - here you'll find huge glacial erratics pitched in the park grounds like ancient totems. They travelled hundreds of miles during the glacial epoch, and are older still. A poignant reminder of the toddlerdom of humanity on Earth. You can touch this piece of ancient movements where kids play football, where dog walkers and joggers circulate, just minutes from Wolverhampton's bustle. The same can be said of Hayes Cutting; a fascinating dipping sequence tucked behind a rusted rail on the Industrial Estates of The Lye. Commuters, deliveries, school runs zip passed as it sits in almost invisibility.   

There is something atavistic in these sites, or something that summons and imbues atavism. I don't mean this in any negative way; I see it as a touchstone for reconnecting with our locales, lands and the Earth in a deep time context and with the tactile knowledge that runs down to the oldest parts of our biology. Alyson Hallett recognises this in her evaluations of human cultures' relationship to stones; “Since we’ve been on this planet, as humans, we’ve paid attention to the patterns of stars and the spirits that live in stones”.[1] Kenneth White talks about this, saying: "The geopoeticist is immediately placed in the enormous".[2] Francis Ponge stated "they sink into the night of logos - until finally they find themselves at the ROOT level, where things and formulations merge".[3] George Amar thinks about the embodied knowledge of reading the land "reading is like swimming or dancing [...] eskimos can read snow and nomads desert sand".[4] These are things that we can walk through, touch, see and smell, and in that, connect us to our region and our land in ways that are both intellectual and visceral. It is, like ancient wayfinding skills, embodied and physical wisdom.

Robert Brechon discuses the relationship between cognition and feeling and between self and landscape in context to the work of Fernando Pessoa:

[...] something shatters in the vision of the landscape. The exaltation of color, light and night turns against itself and falls back into the abyss of self-awareness. Intelligence takes over from emotion, which it unmasked after having caught it in the act of posing and imposture. All the symbols that the landscape suggests to the mind of the walker, far from filling it, complete the disenchantment. He can neither absorb the landscape nor let himself be absorbed by it. His conscience overflows the landscape on all sides, as the landscape overflows from his consciousness. There is no possible identification or consubstantiality between the mind and the world.[5] 

It seems Totem is exactly the right word for West Park's erratics, and I'd use it for the geological cuttings and other features across the region too: that which, with a strange sense of animism, calls and connects people and place.

*** 

Errare

They know their address, they don’t know where they are.
Kenneth White

West Park wanderer,
erratic and stiff,
exforms in shades
cast over pathways:
Eros pole, glacially 
guided from Arenig -
an arrow rebinding space.

Fred and Ken err perma-trias
tracks, check the state of chestnuts
and their own scape. Iss too icy still,
ay it, me mon. Them ay ripe. Shrug.

On to bowling green 
and their own Aegil, 
but never without a slight 
palm pat against wet Felsite - 
cosmos-pointing and terrafirmed,
enforming in firm attention - 
a honing farewell.

***

Thursday: Beacon Hill Quarry 

Our Roy said iss scarred - 
beautymarked by beacon fires,
Wrottersley’s luna scopings. 
He shepherds limestone ways,
lighting lens on knapweed, carline
ox-tongue, heeding optic glares
against hairstreak flutterings. 
Roy said, they’m rare, our kid,
rare beauts on beautmarked mount.
Thass why Sedgley Morrismen come
circlin’ among whitsun flames. 
Yo’ cor ave a beacon wi’out watchmen.
He lays the ley’s spine, supporting
steep steps. Sunrays make dirt glimmer,
magnifies silty mudstone and brown lime, 
lagoon shallowed in Gorstian days (if earth bones
know what days mean) and further to skeletal
stems of sea lily, bryophyte, velvet worm. Concestors,
hand holding, forward facing, tracing and traced in
Thunor’s forge, like me and my shepherd.

On Wolverhampton Road, we stop for fags at the BP
and sup a pint at the Mount Pleasant. He grandads me.
Reaches into pocket, hands me three black 
bubbled bibbles of clinker. Tarra’abbit he says.  

***

Lindworm

Lindworm under Leasowes
muddied brooke bank, tracking 
tended greens and walkways;
Shenstone etched in delicate circuit
where flow, rush, plunge quilts 
slow steps passed urn, bench, footbridge:
Soft drone of petrichor.

In calm it makes its goblin market,
unnoticed, unheard. Set in vermi-
oubliettes as Halesowen bypasses
flood engines on routes to Brum. 
Their own flow, rush, plunge. They
used to come 'ere, but they doh come
'ere no more. Lindworm under Leasowes
leaks its mulching bites under A458, no.9,
Whittington Road and Hawne Basin ...

… turning scoop wheel under lapal tunnel
its half-sleep churning grumble-growls
in Murder Ballad rhythm out to Dudley
and the leisure steps of Leasowes’ ramblers
feel skinshedding of lindworm mercy.

***

Overhanging

Olistoliths slump-slide
as resisting stresses buckle
and atavistic avalanches - submarine, 
like hangover guilt: 
that dew-drenched dawn 
when we grazed feet
along New Year frosts 
and we didn’t speak a word 
and we didn't hold hands 
and we didn't see anyone
and badgers were hibernating 
just like the trees - seem unstill. 
Up Dolerite dyke, the Heathen Coal 
underhung in extract where brittle 
bramble waits dusk-strike. She says, 
there's something in the extraction,
something seeding, imbedding, gulfing us.

***

R. M. Francis is a lecturer in Creative and Professional Writing at the University of Wolverhampton and author of five poetry pamphlet collections. His debut novel, Bella, was published with Wild Pressed Books and his poetry collection, Subsidence, is out with Smokestack Books. Wild Pressed Books recently published his second novel, The Wrenna and he co-edited the book Smell, Memory and Literature in the Black Country (Palgrave). He is currently the Poet in Residence for the Black Country Geological Society.

***

Notes:

[1] Hallett, A., Stone Talks (Axminster: Triarchy Press, 2019) p. 13
[2] White, K., ‘The Great Field of Geopoetics’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics: Founding Texts, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/textes-fondateurs/8-le-grand-champ-de-la-geopoetique 
[3] Amar, G., ‘The Meaning of the Earth’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics:Geopoetic Notebooks, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/cahiers-de-geopoetique/24-le-sens-de-la-terre  
[4] Amar, G., ‘From Surrealism to Geopoetics’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics: Geopoetic Notebooks, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/cahiers-de-geopoetique/118-du-surrealisme-a-la-geopoetique
[5] Brechon, R., ‘Landscapes by Fernando Pessoa’ from The International Institute of Geopoetics: Geopoetic Notebooks, https://www.institut-geopoetique.org/fr/cahiers-de-geopoetique/28-paysages-de-fernando-pessoa

Photo Essay: Nancekuke, by Michael Crocker

By Michael Crocker:

Nancekuke is situated on an isolated cliff top between the villages of Portreath and Porthtowan on the north coast of Cornwall. With uninterrupted horizons and far-reaching coastal views, it is an alluring and beautiful space to visit.

In the 1950’s, Nancekuke was the home of a British government chemical defence establishment where 20 tonnes of Sarin nerve gas were secretly manufactured. By the 1970’s, the site was cleared, with the toxic manufacturing facility being levelled and then buried on site in disused mine shafts. Today, the site continues to be the operated by the Ministry of Defence and is now known as Remote Radar Head Portreath. With a disturbing history, Nancekuke remains shrouded in relative secrecy.

The project documents Nancekuke and its surrounding area as it is found today. The rugged natural beauty of the coast is juxtaposed with a secretive and sinister past, leaving the informed visitor to contest opposing identities of place. The images offer the viewer conflicting interpretations of place; those of beauty, serenity and nature are challenged by remnants of a sinister past, where a human desire to kill and to harness science for widespread destruction remain ever present within the landscape.

The Nancekuke project records the rugged vistas and the ever-changing seascape of the area, whilst acknowledging it as a place with a destructive and unsettling history when viewed through a contemporary lens.

About the photographer: Michael Crocker’s creative practice is centred around photography of the landscape and the agency that can be formed between place, artist and visual outcome. His work creates a visual response to the phenomenological link between spatial experience and consciousness and is often informed by literary sources recording experiences of place. The notion of what we consider place to be within space is an area of interest within his image making.

On Barra Hill

By Ian Grosz:

Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.  
– Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory.

I have lived in northeast Scotland now for many years. It is home, and yet always seems to remain at arm’s length; never quite a place in which I feel I truly belong. I grew up in the northwest of England and spent my early childhood playing in the back alleys of the tightly packed terraced housing of our town; on family days out to Southport and Blackpool; and soggy summer camping holidays in the Lake District. Later we moved to the suburbs where I roamed the playing fields and neighbouring farmland with my friends, taking our BMX bikes far beyond where we were allowed. We knew every patch of ground within a ten-mile radius as intimately as our own homes; named trees and hiding places; invented our own legends and hauntings. Our places lived within us: every track and shortcut; every park and empty house; every field, brook, hill, dip and hollow. No map could be as richly textured as those that we embodied in the landscapes of our young lives. 

Perhaps the need to somehow make a deeper connection with where I live now – to understand and fully realise that connection – is through the lack of this intimate knowing of place that comes from childhood, and born of the experience of being an outsider in a place that I consider to be home. It is home, but I know deep down that I am not from here, not of the place. My connections to it come from circumstance, and my roots go back for only as long as I have lived here; no further. 

Rising up above the village where I live, is Barra Hill; its flattened dome presiding over the immediate landscape.  I have walked the hill many times; have become familiar with its landmarks filled with their hidden histories. In an attempt to get under the skin of the place, I’ve explored these histories; delved into the time held by the hill. 

Close by is the fourteenth-century battle site of Robert the Bruce and his rival John Comyn, part of a bitter fight for the Scottish Crown which led to the formation of a medieval independent Scotland. ‘The Bruce’, as he was known, is said to have directed the proceedings of this battle from a chair-shaped boulder once sited somewhere on the hill’s slopes. This is known as Bruce’s seat, and now sits by the roundabout on the road leading out of the village, complete with a small plaque: a site of half-forgotten story and remembrance; but still reminding us of the long and troubled history between the two nations. 

Earthen walls on the hill’s summit form part of an old fort, built in three phases from the late Bronze Age through the Iron Age. Neolithic stone circles ring the hill’s flanks, while remnant undulations from medieval rig and furrow cultivation give its upper slopes the appearance of a crumpled, grassy carpet. On its far side, an old church houses a seventh-century Pictish symbol stone. The hill tells the story of this small corner of northeast Scotland stretching back to the last Ice Age, but holds much more personal histories too. 

I set off early not long after sunrise to make my way up to the hill through a short section of woodland at its base. Gorse laced with spiders’ webs glisten with dew. Cow parsley and nettles fill the woodland floor and a wren darts amongst the brambles that line the path. The trees of the woods seem to hold the morning: imbue it with a spirit of place and time as I walk beneath their high, heavy branches. A small burn gurgles contentedly through a narrow gulley, running down toward the village where it empties into the larger Meadow Burn. The name of the village – Oldmeldrum - is likely drawn from this burn and the prominent flattened dome of the hill. 

Meldrum is an anglicised conflation of the old Irish meall-droma and the old Scots Gaelic mealldruim, both of which mean ridge of the hill. The ‘Old’ is likely to have a phonetic, elided origin in the Gaelic ‘Alt’ which means the burn, or stream, possibly referencing the Meadow Burn running from the hill toward the edge of the modern village before draining into the nearby River Ury.  Alt Mealldroma therefore appears to be a geographic signifier for the beginnings of what became the modern-day settlement, its literal translation a direct reference to the burn of the ridge of the hill. Learning of this brings the village and its context within the landscape closer to a truer understanding. But it also signals my outsideness, my Englishness: reminds me that the people who named this place so long ago were somehow foreign to me; or rather, coming from a place outside of it, I am in some way foreign to this landscape.

The air is still cold as I emerge onto the open hillside, my breath billowing out ahead of me before being swept back and away across the fields, dispersing quickly to invisibility. My eyes seek out a line of trees along a ridge leading to the hill’s summit, silhouetted now against the skyline. I have always been drawn to these trees. Their rootedness reinforces my own sense of place here, brings me closer to a sense of belonging. 

Their silhouettes have seemed familiar since moving here over a decade ago, take me back to my childhood in the northwest of England. They remind me of trees my eye sought out on the bus journey home from school as a boy; a secret marker in the landscape between the school and home known only to me, I imagined; something I held within me that brought me home ahead of the bus. Seeing them after the regimentation and continual tussle of the school day was a signal that home was drawing near. Recognising them in the trees along the ridge leading to the hill now, fills me with nostalgia; a sense of both reassurance and loss. I am simultaneously here and there: where I live now and where I have come from; transported by the ghosting of trees from my childhood.

Finally reaching the summit, there is a definite sense of trespass as I enter the old enclosure, as if the ghosts of Pictish warriors still guard against intrusion. The slope of the hill falls away steeply on its western side, down to the old battle site of Bruce and Comyn, now peaceful looking fields filled with ripening crops. The village is visible below, with its old centre dating back to the seventeenth-century; the new houses at its outskirts and the small, modern industrial estate slowly growing at its southern borders. Silent cars make their way around the village by-pass and a passenger-jet traverses the sky in a wide circuit for the airport to the south, as if in slow motion. 

A group of swifts have begun darting and swooping across the open enclosure around me, catching midges and flies on the wing. The orchestra of their flight is a language without words, communicating with a deeper sense within me. It is something that is in me rather than in them; something within me that I recognise in them. It seems connected to the landscape; to the trees along the ridge; the morning light now brightening the fields. Everything around me feels perfectly a part of this place, bound up with the language of the swifts. I am just as much part of this landscape as the swifts are now; as much as the people who once occupied this fort; part of the endless narrative thread of life woven through the land and time, and yet I remain somehow outside of its slow unravelling. 

***

Notes: Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, (1995, repr. London, Harper Press, 2004), p. 7

Ian Grosz is a writer based in Scotland. He draws largely from the landscape for his work and is published across a range of magazines, journals and anthologies both in print and online. He is currently working on a non-fiction book project exploring how landscapes help to shape a sense of place and identity. 

A Small French Town at Dusk

By David Lewis:

Our kitchen is full of family, cooking and laughter, and I can slip away. The door closes behind me, the garden gate clangs and I am on the narrow green lane connecting the town’s heart with the riverside vegetable gardens. Stone walls and dark houses rise on either side. Our town, St Hilaire, stands on an outcrop of rock in a heavily-wooded river valley, and the green lane runs over the town’s softened ramparts, built in the 1300s against the English troops of the Hundred Years’ War. Our house perches on the memory of the battlements. There is a cool wind from the river, but the bedroom windows are soft and golden in the grey-blue light. It is starting to get dark. 

French dusks are uniquely melancholy. The decaying grey-blue light holds a memory of summer skies, and Emil Zola called it ‘the emotional hour of twilight’ and noted the ‘quiet voluptuous moments’ and ‘delicate shadows’. The grey sky is fading to a pale gold over the woods in the west and soon a shadow-river of bats will appear between the dark houses. The green lane leads me to the smallest of the town’s squares, a mere widening of pavement to create urban dignity. The lamps are being lit on iron scrolls fixed to the wall, that illuminate the streets without sacrificing pavement space or dark sky. Once we met our neighbour reading quietly beneath a scroll light, but tonight the wind is brisk and the streets are empty.

I walk into the Place St Hilaire, dominated by the Mairie and the church. The heart of the town is an irregular space for public assembly, hacked from medieval lanes and passageways. Scroll lamps illuminate the streets gently, as if afraid to disturb the darkness, but the scrubbed stone on the church glows even in this weak light. New floodlights will soon pour white light up the ancient tower, glorifying every carved face and capital, silhouetting the pollarded trees around the war memorial like defiant fists - but the twilight magic will be lost. Around the square the houses are shuttered, some closed, stony-faced and silent. But in the big house, empty for so long, the young couple are working with their friends, paintbrushes, glasses, laughter, with the tall windows wide open – they do not feel the cold. Sometimes we see their cycling daughters on the green lane, small dark girls with solemn faces and immaculate hair. 

On the medieval streets there are glimpses of warmth and a whiff of slow-pot cooking even through the shutters. There are no people on the streets and no traffic. Dark steps take me down to the deep-blue silver of the weir, where the river doubles back on itself and blue-black bats are reflected in the gunmetal water. The old town is silhouetted above me, blunt roofs, a slab of streetlight. Stars are starting to appear. I climb slowly for home and rejoin the church road, past iron crucifixes dark against the pale cemetery sky. A cat runs through a soft pool of streetlamp, one of Zola’s quiet voluptuous moments. The cemetery stands as an unofficial city wall, and beyond it the forestry tracks run off into the woods. A late car sweeps the grey trunks with light and is gone. I am above the allotments now, climbing slowly over the slumped and overgrown battlements and back onto the green lane. I can hear laughter from our kitchen and imagine I can already smell the evening meal. Someone from our family is always here, and this is our home. 

My French is slow and awkward, but I make an effort. I am European, proud of my melting pot British family, still hoping for a French retirement and the dream of thinking in French. And yet, since the cynicism and racist stupidity of Brexit, Zola’s delicate shadows have fallen over our relationships with our neighbours and it is harder to celebrate being European and British. It is many years since I have seen the bats over the green lane or watched the sunset over the valley, yet once loved a place does not leave us. In these strange days, when to declare yourself European on your census form is an act of defiance, cherishing European dreams is a form of rebellion.

***
David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside. He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 - and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter

Between the Forest and the Sea

By Sara Bellini:

I don’t know why the sea. I like expanding my gaze, following the waves in reverse until they reach the horizon and the water dissolves into the sky. It must be this idea of infinity - the line you can never reach, the water you cannot quantify - and of all the things that exist beyond the horizon and that I hold in my gaze without seeing them; another coast; another country; people and birds and trees. And while I contemplate these transcendental thoughts, I hear the waves in the background, repetitive and calming, always the same and always different.

When I was a child, we’d have a seaside holiday every year, and yet the sea of my childhood is different than that of my adulthood. The first one symbolised summer, ice-cream, playing and swimming, while the latter is more often a place of cold wind, of fish and chips, of walking and healing. This new relationship was forged around a decade ago, when I was living in London and unhappily so. Work was stressful and I needed to slow down. The lack of time, money and energy dictated my escape route: a Southern Railway train to Brighton. Every few months I would spend a day there, more rarely a night or two. I didn’t do anything special. I just wandered for hours and stared at the sea. 

When I found myself in a similarly strenuous situation a couple of years ago, with no possibility of taking significant time off work, I thought of the sea again. The closest option from Berlin was the Baltic. My friend K. also needed to step out of her life for a moment, so we stepped out of our lives together, at the same time anchoring each other in order to avoid drifting away. 

The trip itself was serendipitous, but the reason behind it was rooted in our existential impasse and the tiredness of not being able to find a way out. In our perception we were akin to severely ill pious women on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Our Lourdes was nature. It was the sea.

If you take a train from Berlin up to what the Germans call the Ostsee, you reach a city called Stralsund. But the railway doesn’t stop there - it arches over the water to land again on Rügen. The island is connected to the mainland via a bridge, it’s that close. And yet, like every island, it is its own world. 

“Beyond their actual geographical coordinates, islands will always be places we project onto, places which we cannot get a hold on through scientific methods but through literature.”*

Rügen became famous during the 18th century, when the Romantics made art of nature and in nature itself found the sublime. It was the painter Caspar David Friedrich who showed the world the charm of the island, its stunning white cliffs covered in leafy trees on a background of cobalt and till sea. The Romantics had good taste and heavy moods, and we followed in their steps with a ravenous hunger for the sublime, looking for something that would overwhelm us with beauty and shake us out of our skin.

The core of our stay on the island was an excursion to Jasmund National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site in the north-eastern part of Rügen. To be precise, UNESCO granted the title to the primeval beech forests in Germany, which shaped the whole continent after the last Ice Age, and have been severely damaged by human intervention. The title is there to keep these ecosystems intact, to protect them from us.

Tourists visit the park every year, mainly to see the impressive chalk cliff known as Königsstuhl. K. and I found it rather curious how people would pay to step on a platform on the cliff, rather than admiring it for free from an adjacent cliff. This is named for Victoria of Prussia (daughter of the English Queen Victoria) by her father-in-law Kaiser Wilhelm I, because she loved that spot. We thought about how the fact that someone once found that particular cliff so lovely brought someone with temporal power to give it a name and put it on a map, initiating a process of conservation and meaning-giving. It reminded us of the many ways in which human and natural history were intertwined, and how the former - shorter and more insignificant - has so often tried to claim the latter.

From the Victoria-Sicht we walked along the Hochufer - the path following the shoreline down below - dipping in and out of the woodland. It looked like some trees were growing from the rock walls, almost parallel to the sea underneath. A sign told us that the cliffs were made of chalk, which has the property of freezing during the winter and then thawing once more in spring. When that happens, the cliffs crumble down, taking pieces of the forest with them. This process is called natural erosion and it made me muse on the idea that the island we were on was the same island of Friedrich’s, but also significantly different. If I go back to Rügen every year, I thought, it will always be a geologically altered place, where the cliffs scratch and reshape themselves ever so slightly each spring: an island of entropy.

That was the first time I’ve walked in a forest on a cliff, and it was sensorially baffling. The smell of the wet ground and understory mixed up with the saltiness, whose scent was coming in waves, mirroring the water that generated it. On our right slugs and mushrooms, and on our left swans and a lonely red sail. 

All of a sudden we had to stop, stupefied and awed, on a man-made path descending towards the sea. The dappled light made everything look green: our hands, our faces, the ground. The phenomenon appeared almost fairy-like, and we felt like we were about to metamorphose into sylvan creatures. The light seemed to possess a tangible quality, a volume, a physical presence. A few steps away, everything looked normal, and wooden stairs led us down to a pebbled beach.

We sat in the sun, enjoying the marine breeze and the glistening depth of the Baltic. We had swum the day before and we would swim again the day after, allowing the cold water to remodel our skin and turn us into marine creatures, dissolving the distance between us and the natural world where we craved to belong.

Walking in the woods was a richly immersive experience and we felt we were part of our surroundings, just like the birches and the chaffinches, the fungi and the mosses. Our minds were too busy processing all these inputs, in being present, that we didn’t have the time to get caught up in anxious thoughts about the future and the lives we had briefly put on hold. Wasn’t that what we were looking for - a reminder that we were made of the same matter of the sea and the forest? The cliffs themselves didn’t worry about anything, including their own demise, so it felt silly to do anything other than simply being.

The trees suddenly ended at the outskirts of the village of Sassnitz. We walked silently under the sun to reach the station, barely meeting any other people. As our bodies moved from nature to tarmac interspersed with rose-studded gardens, our headspace shifted from a present mode to our city-life mode, at the same time leaning forward towards the future while looking backward at the past. And yet we knew we had left some of our worries back in Jasmund National Park, perhaps lifted up by the birch branches while we were staring at the green light.

We started and ended our stay on the island in the same way, with fish and chips and a cup of coffee from a stand near the beach in Binz. At that moment, it was the best fish and chips we had ever had.

 ***

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

* Judith Schalansky, Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands

Bearing Witness

Barney Sidler and Zeev Borger

By Paul Scraton:

On a soft summer evening in Weimar we walk through the traffic-free streets of the historic city centre, this monument to German culture with its theatres and museums, palaces and music schools, town of humanism and the Enlightenment. In the square where Goethe and Schiller stand in front of the theatre they look down upon a typical summer scene, as young people gather at their feet to drink beer while football matches are screened to the terraces of cafes and restaurants as, in the beer garden over in the corner, a live concert is about to start.

Throughout the city there are signs that it is awakening from the pandemic. There are posters for concerts and plays, puppet shows and readings, exhibitions and fairs. Bach and Liszt. Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm. Gropius and Kandinsky. Outside Goethe’s old illustration studio, paintings hang beneath the windows of an art school while across the way music drifts out from the rehearsal rooms of the university.

This is Weimar? What does the name Weimar mean to you? A small town in Germany made great through art and words and music. A place that gave us the Bauhaus and named the democratic republic that would emerge from the devastation of the First World War battlefields. And yet, north of the centre, as we walk up towards the railway station from the New Museum, a collection of faces remind us of the other side of Weimar’s story. That this is a town that played host to some of the heights of German culture and also, up there on the hillside, some of its deepest depths. 

Because Weimar is also Buchenwald, the concentration camp on the Ettersberg that was opened in 1937 by the Nazis and would claim the lives of more than 56,000 who were held there. The bus that takes you from the town to the camp follows what became known as the ‘Blood Road’ even while the camp was in existence. If you want to walk, there is another route, a ten-kilometre trail that starts at the railway station and follows the route of the Buchenwald Railway, along which many of the inmates were taken to the camp.

Petro Mischtschuk

The stories of Buchenwald are part of the story of Weimar, and are tied to the city via the Blood Road and the old railway tracks. Within the city itself we discover stories of Goethe and Schiller, of Bach and Liszt and Strauss and Wieland and Hummel and all the other greats who lived and worked here. They have their museums and their exhibits, and they give their names to streets, schools and squares. And since 2019 they have had some company, joined along Weimar’s streets by the faces of some other, less well-known names.

Pavel Tichomirow
Andrej Moisejenko
Chaim Bukszpan
Vasile Nußbaum
Heinrich Rotmensch
Naftali Fürst
Alina Dabrowska
Petro Mischtschuk
Ottomar Rothmann
Gilberto Salmoni
Barney Sidler
Boris Romantschenko
Zeev Borger
Alojzy Maciak
Aleksandr Bytschok
Magda Brown
Eva Fahidi-Pusztai
Günter Pappenheim
Josef Falkash
Raymond Renaud
Tadeusz Kowalski
Zbigniew Pec

These men and women are just some of the more than a quarter of a million people who passed through Buchenwald or its subcamps. They were photographed by the Weimar artist Thomas Müller for Die Zeugen (The Witnesses), an exhibition that can be found in the north of Weimar between the New Museum and the station. The aim of this exhibition is relatively clear to all who emerge from the station on their walk down into town. It is to make this part of history visible and, in the words of the exhibition organisers, to ‘invite the people of Weimar and their guests to consciously pause for a minute.’

The twenty-two faces that make up the exhibition are of twenty-two survivors of the camps. They were brought to Buchenwald from Poland, Hungary, France, Ukraine, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Belarus and elsewhere in Germany. They were held for being Jewish or as political prisoners or for forced labour. By the time Müller took their pictures, they were old. In the meantime, since the exhibition was opened in April 2019, at least one of their number has passed away.

Alojzy Maciak

These are people who have been to Weimar. They were taken to the hillside where Goethe once walked, held in a camp that had been cleared from the forest. They are the witnesses to what was done in the name of Germany within sight of this symbol of German culture. And with these photographs, the town recognises them as it does its other sons and daughters. In Weimar, there are many different stories to be told and all shall have their say. All need to be heard.

On a soft summer evening we walk through Weimar. Twenty-two faces. Most are still with us to bear witness, to tell us what happened behind those gates and the barbed wire fences. Looking at them now, it is sad to think that we do not have much time left. All too soon there will be no one left to remember, at the very time nationalism is on the rise across the continent and the history of what happened in places like Buchenwald is beginning to be rewritten. In this atmosphere, as we slowly lose those who can tell us what happened in the camps, it is up to the rest of us to continue the work of remembering. Of how we got from Weimar to Buchenwald, from one end of the Blood Road to the other. The names of the victims and what was done to them, and those who survived to give us their testimony. We need to keep listening and we need to keep speaking their truth.  

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place

Koşuk of the Konik, a poem by Alistair Noon

The koniks don’t neigh but skitter and dodge
across the reclaimed sewage park,
their part of the sand’s post-glacial splodge
our ancestors mapped as the Brandenburg Mark,

a wire-ringed paddock we've left these guys,
who stand aloof as the ninja flies
land on their feet, their black disguise
nothing for horses’ eyes to mark.

Although their skins are tones of grey,
one’s chromosomes came out all bay,
but muted shades will still convey
mutated grace as well as Franz Marc.

Rainclouds resemble their sagging paunches:
a signal out of their genome launches
pale lightning down their well-honed haunches
to give the koniks their common birthmark.

They look as if they’ve just concurred,
one homely and harmonious herd
unbothered by the fall of a merd
to earth that reels of steel wire mark,

quite unlike Rilke's bar-gazing panther,
or keepers shut in with a Leopard panzer:
they seem to be more of a coelcanth, a
pebble let go at the tidal mark.

The paddock does without a padlock:
the konik needs no clothes or clock,
just grass and a trough. The fence is a shock,
a neural scar its defining mark.

This world is small, so why think big?
Under its solemn black legal wig,
the equine head will study a twig
and leave a meticulous dental mark.

***

Alistair Noon's poetry collections include Earth Records (2012) and The Kerosene Singing (2015), both from Nine Arches Press. Concert at a Railway Station (2018), his translations of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, was reviewed in the TLS. ‘Translocal Underground’, a short film about him by filmmaker Paul Cooke, appeared in 2018. He's lived in Berlin since the early 90s.

The Ruins

By Ben Tufnell:

Traveling north, the vast skies, marshes and glittering lakes of Corrientes province slowly give way to endless forest. There are winding red rivers and rule-straight logging roads and, as the horizon disappears, it becomes almost impossible to orient oneself. What towns there are resemble ribbons festooned along the edges of the highways.

Here, it is said, deep in the forest, the author Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937) slowly lost his mind. Here, you are a long way from Buenos Aires or Montevideo and everything is tenuous. Life is fragile. Quiroga loved the jungle but understood that his presence there was at best contingent. In brilliant stories such as ‘Drifting’ (1912) and ‘The Dead Man’ (1920) he wrote of a constant and unceasing conflict between man and nature. He wrote of suffering, of life right at the edge of things. After his first wife committed suicide by taking poison and his second wife left him, Quiroga reportedly filled his empty swimming pool with snakes. I imagine him sitting on the veranda of the wooden house he has built with his own hands, in the middle of the forest, contemplating that febrile spectacle, a boiling, writhing mass of serpents.

Quiroga later committed suicide himself. Both his children killed themselves. These facts are like scenes from his own fiction. The river runs as red as blood, there are bird-eating spiders in the trees and there are hundreds of snakes in the swimming pool. 

Travelling north, the air grows hotter and more humid. We took Ruta 12 north from Posadas to one of the most spectacular places in South America, the Iguazu Falls. The Rio Parana and the Rio Iguazu and the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay all converge here. The jungle here is improbably dense, excessively verdant, the air heavy with moisture and filled with the fluttering of masses of huge and kaleidoscopically coloured butterflies. Capuchin monkeys laugh hysterically in the forest canopy. The falls themselves are vast, overwhelmingly so. The roar of the waters is deafening.

This is Misiones province. In the seventeenth century it was one of the strongholds of the Jesuit faith in South America. At their peak the Jesuits had twelve major missions scattered across the region, each with populations in the thousands. They were eventually expelled from Argentina in 1767 and, hidden by the jungle, their cities succumbed, as all things must, to decay. Now, the very idea of the missions seems not only foolhardy but inherently doomed. The landscape ensured that the project was shadowed with failure from the very moment of its first imagining.

The biggest ruins are at San Ignacio, a few hours south of Iguazu, and they are justly famous, a must-see for any visitor to the region. Well-cleared and restored, one can wander through what must once have been a considerable town. There are the remains of many houses. There are information panels about life in the mission. And one can wander through the nave of the huge red sandstone church, now open to the sky, and admire the fig, olive, orange and lemon trees that continue to flourish amidst the crumbling stones.

But while the ruins of San Ignacio are the biggest and best maintained, a few miles south, down a red dirt track leading into the forest, we discovered a site that, although much smaller, was, in many ways, more affecting, and which seemed somehow to better illuminate the conflict between man and nature which so preoccupied Quiroga. 

The Santa Luisa Mission was founded in 1633 and, alongside the Jesuit brothers, was home to some two thousand Guarani Indians. Deserted in the eighteenth century it was soon overrun by the jungle and forgotten. 

This is a place in flux, where the principle of entropy is made visible. The site had been cleared, mostly, not long before our visit, and there is even a small (and empty) visitor centre, but the jungle was already reasserting itself. One of the first things we saw were the roots of a tree curling through the stones of an ancient wall and breaking it apart in imperceptible slow motion.

The site has been cleared, revealing its profound dereliction, but nothing has been reconstructed. A few fragile walls have been secured with wooden scaffolds but nothing more. And because of this it is extraordinarily evocative. The main square and the broken spine of the church are mostly clear of forest but everywhere else is doubtful. In comparison, San Ignacio seems too tidy. Santa Luisa,  a ruined city in the middle of the jungle, could be a setting for a tale by Lovecraft or Borges (and of course the blind librarian was much in my mind during my travels in his country). Creepers cover every surface, gripping and pulling. There is incredible heat and humidity and a very strange kind of stillness. The forest was quiet, as if waiting.

Away from the main square everything is overgrown, is being overgrown. Santa Luisa is a place simultaneously taken from the jungle and being reclaimed by the jungle. The cracks widen. Huge flowers bloom, briefly. Things are drifting back into the entropic zone. It is impossible to tell where the old Jesuit mission ends and the jungle begins. I didn’t – couldn’t – go far enough into the undergrowth to determine that precise border. Thick spider’s webs were stretched between the trees and I turned back when I noticed the husks of some huge and grotesque looking insects, as big as my hands, clinging to the underside of a branch that barred my passage.

The old cemetery is the eeriest part of the site.  The locals continued to use it until the 1960s and it is dense with graves, tombs, and even grand crypts, all now  derelict. Dragon’s Teeth forces up through the graves. The once ornate tombs are broken open. The beautiful ironwork and stone carvings are now embellished with gripping tendrils of the very foliage they were meant to imitate. A steady humming of insects fills the air. Wasps nest in crypts filled with impenetrable shadows and dusted webs. Broken coffins are glimpsed through the wrought gates of the big family mausoleums, the heavy wooden doors long since rotted away. Flowers, creepers, vines cover every wall. Even in the bright sunlight, it is an unnerving spectacle. An old skull, missing its jawbone, dislodged by the ongoing collapse, had rolled from one decrepit sanctuary and lay in my path. 

I wondered what it must have been like for the priests, their pale European skin blistered by the unceasing glare of the sun. How did they cope with the always encroaching darkness of the forest, the spiders and snakes concealed within every shadow, the overwhelming heat and humidity? How did they keep faith when His work seemed to be constantly undoing their best efforts?

It was clear to me that if the caretakers stopped maintaining the square and the broken church, it would be only moments before the jungle completely enclosed and obliterated the site, breaking down the ruins and pulling them back into the red earth.

We were not there long. We looked around together and then I wandered off to the edge of the site, where it was difficult to tell if I was still in the site. When I looked back I saw that C had crossed the square and was making her way back down the track towards the car. She passed out of sight and I was alone. There was silence. Or rather there wasn’t silence, for the forest is always busy, but there was a focussing. I became overwhelmed by my thoughts; I was aware of simultaneous registers of time (a sensation not unlike a fissure opening at what Robert Smithson once called ‘the cracking limits of the brain’). Undoubtedly, I was affected by the heat, the long drive, the ruination, the tropical Gothic of the cemetery, the pool of snakes, the blood red river, the huge waterfalls and the vast whirlpool that lies at their base. Standing there, a few minutes seemed to stretch like hours, years. I felt I could almost see the forest creeping forward, tightening its grip on the shattered brickwork, bright flowers like fresh wounds blooming and fading.

I saw that I was looking down into an open tomb. The sunlight at my back was so bright and the contrast with the inky darkness inside so extreme that there was an astonishing contrast, so that the shadows within that grim enclosure seemed to be solid. And I had the idea that I was looking through a point, a punctum, in its surface. I thought then of the Aleph, described by Carlos Argentino in Borges’s account as ‘the only place on earth where all places are -- seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending…’ For it seemed to me I could then see before me the unfolding of this place over time, from primordial swamp, filled with ferns, mosses and small crawling things, to the gradual encroachment of the forest and the eventual arrival of the missionaries (I saw their terrified passage deep into the unknown interior of dessicated deserts, fugal marshes and evil forests) and even the birth and death of the lizards, insects and trees, all those things that were here and now. 

The Aleph was not an opening. Carlos Argentino himself described it as ‘a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance.’ He attempted the impossible task of writing down what he saw:

‘At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe.’ 

This mysterious object was located in the basement of an old house in Garay Street in Buenos Aires, now long vanished. We had been there, of course, and to Borges’s house too, hoping to discover some vague trace but finding, inevitably, nothing.

But now, in the jungle amidst the ruins, staring into that dark tomb, I had, just for the most fleeting moment, a glimpse of the Aleph (or of a kind of Aleph, for Borges himself said that he thought the one in Buenos Aires was a false one, and that there might be many). It was gone as soon as it was present. And then the darkness was only darkness again. I walked slowly onwards, wading through a warm viscous liquid: time itself. I saw human activity, the jungle, each assimilating the other again and again, not erasing the past but absorbing it. Endless and infinite cycles.

Something large moved in the forest. I had the weird notion that if I saw what it was, my reason would give way, would crack; for I fully expected a great and ancient lizard to come lumbering out of the undergrowth. Shuddering, I quickly made my way back through the trees to the main square, where the full sun had now attained an infernal intensity. Huge birds (or were they pterodactyls?) flapped wearily into the sky from the tops of some of the trees. I passed through the crumbling gateway and down the dirt track, past the empty information centre and back to the car, where C was waiting. Behind me the whole site shimmered in the heat, like a reflection in oil, unsteady. Already I was wondering if I had dreamt it.

I started the car in silence, drove us back along the track onto Ruta 12, and we headed north.

***

Ben Tufnell is a curator and writer based in London. He has published widely on modern and contemporary art with a particular focus on art forms that engage with landscape and the environment. His most recent book is In Land: Writings About Land Art And Its Legacies (Zero Books, 2019).