I’ve been re-reading Sara Baume’s beauty of a novel Seven Steeples, a book which weaves so vividly the lives of human and more-than-humans together.
Inside the green-pelted black plastic back of the right wing mirror, a garden spider had sewn a beautiful trap. During every journey, it took refuge behind the adjustable glass. After every journey, it mended the damage done to its tenuous web by the force of rushing air and whipping briars.
It mustered up fresh silk; it darned each new hole1.
Baume attends to her non-human characters – the spider, the dogs, the robin (‘prepared for murder’) with the same depth and care as her human characters, Bell and Sigh. All are part of the same growing, shedding, shifting continuum. Reading it, I am reminded of the teeming, quiet exuberance of life.
And then yesterday morning I took two hours to play back the first of four workshops I am taking over this year with Mari Kennedy titled Forces of Nature. She began by playing a song titled 'The Incantation of Amergin', in a version sung by Pádraigín Ní Uallacháin. Amergin was a legendary bard and judge of the Milesians, or sons of Míl, a group said to represent the Irish people who, on arrival on the island contended with the Tuatha Dé Danann and decided to divide Ireland between them. The Milesians took the world above, the Tuath Dé the world below.
There are many translations of the mystical poem Amergin was said to utter as he set foot in Ireland for the first time. I like the simplicity of this translation excerpt:
I am Wind on Sea,
I am Ocean-wave,
I am Roar of Sea,
I am Stag of Seven Tines,
I am a Hawk on a Cliff,
I am shining tear of the Sun,
I am Fairest among Herbs,
I am Boar for Boldness,
I am Salmon in Pool,
I am a Lake on a Plain,
I am a Hill of Poetry,
I am a Word of Skill 2
As Mari played this incantation for a second time at the end of the two hours, I lay on the floor of my cabin, my dog nosed in beside me to my left, and I let the words of the bard wash over me.
I let my bones become stones,
I let my blood course a river,
I let my breath open to the nudge of the wind.
This week I was also drawn back into the work of Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta3. I first came across her work when I was researching my book about two years ago. I had been writing about the ways in which my body felt to me like a landscape, of how my body at times felt to be in porous connection with the natural world, of how the viewpoint of Chinese Medicine, it’s descriptions of points on the body in terms of geographical features – valleys, mounds, streams, an abyss – felt hugely resonant. I wanted to see whether there were any female artists who had explored these ideas in a visual form. And that is how I found the work of Ana Mendieta.
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