Landmarks Read Free

aesthetics, human experience, ecology and semantics are given parity in his list. Of these losses the last is hardest to measure. But it is clear that there is now less need to know in detail the terrains beyond our towns and cities, unless our relationships with them are in some way professionally or recreationally specialized.
    It is my hope (but not my presumption) that the words grouped here might in small measure invigorate our contemporary language for landscape. I do not, of course, believe that these words will magically summon us into a pure realm of harmony and communion with nature. Rather that they might offer a vocabulary which is ‘convivial’ as the philosopher Ivan Illich intended the word – meaning enriching of life, stimulating to the imagination and ‘encouraging creative relations between people, and people and nature’. And, perhaps, that the vibrancy of perception evoked in these glossaries may irrigate the dry meta-languages of modern policy-making (the DEFRA glossary, for instance, which offers such tautological aridities as ‘
Land use
: the use to which a piece of land is put’). For there is no single mountain language, but a range of mountain languages; no one coastal language, but a fractal of coastal languages; no lonetree language, but a forest of tree languages. To celebrate the lexis of landscape is not nostalgic, but urgent. ‘People
exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they
defend
what they love,’ writes the American essayist and farmer Wendell Berry, ‘and to defend what we love we need a particularizing language, for we love what we particularly know.’
    I am wary of the dangers of fetishizing dialect and archaism – all that
mollocking
and
sukebinding
Stella Gibbons spoofed so brilliantly in
Cold Comfort Farm
(1932). Wary, too, of being seen to advocate a tyranny of the nominal – a taxonomic need to point and name, with the intent of citing and owning – when in fact I perceive no opposition between precision and mystery, or between naming and not-knowing. There are experiences of landscape that will always resist articulation, and of which words offer only a remote echo – or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject. Sometimes on the top of a mountain I just say, ‘Wow.’
    But we are and always have been name-callers, christeners. Words are grained into our landscapes, and landscapes grained into our words. ‘Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind,’ in Wade Davis’s memorable phrase. We see in words: in webs of words, wefts of words, woods of words. The roots of individual words reach out and intermesh, their stems lean and criss-cross, and their outgrowths branch and clasp.
    ~
    ‘I want my writing to bring people not just to think of “trees” as they mostly do now,’ wrote Roger Deakin in a notebook that was discovered after his early death, ‘but of each individual tree, and each kind of tree.’John Muir, spending his first summer working as a shepherd among the pines of the Sierra Nevada in California, reflected in his journal that ‘Every tree calls for special admiration. I have been making many sketches and regret that I cannot draw every needle.’ The chapters of
Landmarks
all concern writers who are particularizers, and who seek in some way to ‘draw every needle’. Deakin, Muir, Baker, Nan Shepherd, Jacquetta Hawkes, Richard Skelton, Autumn Richardson, Peter Davidson, Barry Lopez, Richard Jefferies: all have sought, in Emerson’s phrase, to ‘pierce … rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things’. All have written with committing intensity about their chosen territories. And for all of them, to use language well is to use it particularly: precision of utterance as both a form of lyricism and a species of attention.
    Before you become a writer you must first