Soundtrack 

Björk, Jóga

Bonobo & Bajka, Days To Come

Manuel Garcia, Venga la Vida

Massive Attack, Daydreaming

Reading List 

Foucault, Michel, Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias

Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space

Cabeza de Vaca: from the version translated and edited by Cyclone Covey and published by the University of New Mexico Press (1983)

Quotes

Hayes, Nick, The Book of Trespass: Crossing the lines that divide us [Bloomsbury; London: 2021]

p.156

"In 2004, Trevor Phillips, the then chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, spoke of a 'passive aparthied' in the British countryside. Figures show that the 9 per cent of Britain's population who are from an ethnic minority constitute only 1 per cent of the visitors to the countryside. Further to this that stats say that while 10 per cent of the population in towns are from ethnic minorities, only 1 per cent of the rural population are black or minority ethnic. In 2013, Brian True-May stepped down from producing the ITV show Midsomer Murders after declaring that 'we just don't have ethnic minorities involved becuase it wouldn't be the the English village with them... We're the last bastion of Englishness and I want to keep it that way.'

     Academics from the University of Leicester in their 2011 report of Rural Racism found that minority ethnic incomers 'were often treated with suspicion as many white rural residents felt that they belonged only in the city, with all its concomitant "negative" attributes of noise, pollution, crime and, crucially for some, multiculturalism'. In the eyes of rural England, black means urban, but the moment these communities cross the line into the countryside they challenge 'the very idea of Englishness itself'."

p.158

Read her [Vanessa Kisuule] words, and then, with the permission, try swapping the word story for land: 'For so long it felt like this story, I wasn't entitled to it, it didn't belong to me, it wasn't my place, so I made a decision, a small decision in my head and heart: this story is yours too.'"

p.264

The greatest lie of Nationalism is that it defends the interests of its nationals. The people it defends, however, are not those it defines, but those who define it. Englishness has always been defined by the landed lords of England and fed in colkumns of hot air to the landless: you might not have land, but at leas you have England.

p273

BUt after sociologist Henri Lefebvre's book The Production of Space was published in 1974, a new wave of academics began to view space not just as an impassive backfrop to the theatre of society but as a protagonist in the play.

The way space is divided (or, in other words, the way pace is constructed) has a direct influence on the people who operate within it - it affects their habits, customs and ideologies. Ther decision of who and what space is directly for shapes the structure of society within it: what is allowed, what is encouraged and what is forbidden. Lefebvre created the term 'Third Space' to discuss the interaction between how places were conceived (mapped and designed) and how they perceived (how they affected the lives of those that lived within them); THird SPace is the place where real life occurs amid its theoretical design. His theories were influenced by philosopher Michel Foucault, who had developed the notion of heterotopia five years before.For Foucault, 'spatial politics', the interaction of societies with the places they created, was the 'central theme of modernity'.

p280

This is the place for every occasion and every mood. This is the place you can come to when your best mate's dad dies, when your friend announces the baby in her womb, when you don't want to pay sixty quid to get into a club on New Year's Eve, where you can howl and whoop and sing your throat raw without offending your neighbours, and where you can get profoundly and marvellously high.

p282

Rationalism is a long way away and when night falls there are no concrete walls of electirc lights to protect you from the atavistic  - the boggarts, changelings, giants, ghosts and monsters step out from behind the lie of fiction, and dance in the dark spaces around us.

p294

Frances Zaunmiller ... defined wilderness as the psychological expanse where 'a man can walk without trespassing.' In her fierece and phenomenal  book Pip Pip, Jay Griffiths goes several steps further: 'wilderness is a ferocious intoxication whihc sweeps over your senses with rinsing vitality, leaving you stripped to the vivid, your senses rubbed until they shine. It is an untouched place which touches you deeply and its aftermarth - when landscape becomes innerscape - leaves you elated, awed and utterly changed. forget the lullaby balm of nature tame as a well-fedlawn, here nature has a lean and violent waking grandeur which will not let you sleep ... It is an aphrodisiac; it is a place of furious fecundity ... not virginal but erupting with the unenclosable passion at the volcanic heart of life.'

Wildness means self-willedness and is the state of being undirected, uncultivated, free from the template of someone else's design.

295

True wildness is unpredictable, and can lead people to question their position in society.

298

Hundreds of years of private property laws hav morphed into a strict orthodoxy in English society, an unquestioned consensus as to what can and can't happen in the countryside. If it's not a walk along a Right of Way, or a picnic in a designated area, if you haven't paid of it then you're almost certainly not allowed to do it. This has led to a peculiar and hugely distorted vision of the English countryside: its brand. Watch TV, read the papers, walk into a camping shop and you'd think the countryside is cutom-built for enthusiastic middle-class white people in Thinsulate hats and sensible walking shoes. This is the land as it is sold to us, because, today, even leisure is an industry.

 He ['Rooster' Byron from Jezz Butterworth's Jerusalem] is talking about the wild sabbats on the opne plains, the world outside the heedful eye of the patriarchs, an alternative, vernacular lifestyle that operates beyond the matrix of commerce. He's talking about a place where wildness doesn't come with a price tag, where freedom is free.

365

In Finalnd, the freedom to roam is called jokamiehenoikeus; in Sweden allemansrätten, in Norway allemannsrett and in Austria Wegefreiheit. In all instances, these  rights existed in the country long before there was a nation or a language to define them. In a recent campaign by the Swedish tourist board, the advertisers chose simply to register the land of Sweden on Airbnb. The move was an inspired peice of free publicity, but also expressed one of the key concepts of the Swedish psyche: the land is your home. In the words of the Visiti Sweden website: Sweden has no Eiffel Towers. No NIagara Falls or Big Bens. Not even a little Sphinx. Sweden has something else - the freedom to roam. This is our monument.'

376

'The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land. The ownership of land is the great fundamental fact which ultimately determines the social, the political, and consequently the intellectual and moral condition of people.' [Henry George, Progress and Poverty]

381

The fences and walls that are strangling our land are contricting our connection to the stories that can heal us, the magic that can link us once again to the land and to each other.

385

It [land ownership] is a story that redefines a walk as an act of agression...

Solnit, Rebecca, 'A Field Guide to Getting Lost' [Canongate: Edinburgh, 2017]

5

It is the job of artists to open doors and invite in prophecies, the unknown, the unfamiliar; it's where their work comes from, although its arrival signals the beginning of the long disciplined process of making it their own... But they [scientists] transform the unknown into the known, haul it in like fishermen; artists get you out into that dark sea.

6

"But to losse oneself in a city  - as one loses oneself in a forest p that calls for quite a differnt schooling." To lose yourself: a voluptuous surrender, lost in your arms, lost to the world, utterly immersed in what is present so that its surroundings fade away. In Benjamin's terms, to be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery. ANd one does not get lost but loses oneself, with the implicaton that it is a conscious choice, a chosen surrender, a psychic state achievable through geography.

     THat thiing the nature of which is totally unknwon toyou is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

14

[From Thoreau's Walden] "Not till we are completely lost. or turned around, - for a men needs only to be turned round once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost, - do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of nature. Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations."

16

For Woolf, getting lost was not a matter of geography so much as identity, a passionate desire, even an urgent need, to be come no one and anyone, to shake off the shackles that remind you who you are, who others things you are. THe dissolution of identity is familiar to travelers in foreign places and remote fastnesses

(the moving migrant???)

19

The [Pit River] Indians refer to it as 'wandering'. They say of a certain man, 'He is wandering,' or 'He has started to wander.' It would seem that under certain conditions of mental stress an individual finds life in his accustomed surroundings too hard to bear. Such a man starts to wander. He goes about the country, travelling aimlessly. He will stop here or there at the camps of friends and relations, moving on, never stopping at any place longer than a few days. He will not make any outward show of grief, sorrow or worry.... The Wanderer, man or woman, shuns camps or villages, remains in wild, lonely places, on tops of mountains, in the bottom of canyons." THis wanderer isn't far from Woolf, and she too knew despair and the desire for what Buddhists call unbeing... De Angulo goes on to say that wandering can lead to death, to hopelessness, to madness, to various forms of despair, or that it may lead to encounters with other powers in the remoter places a wanderer may go.

31

[Simone Weil] "Let us love this distance, which is thoroughly woven with friendship, since those who do not love each other are not separated."

47

A case coukd be made that they [migrants] would have been better off melting into the landscape as no doubt many now forgotten did, adopting native tongues, stories, places to love, ceasing to be exiles by ceasing to remember the country they were exiled from so that they could wholly embrace the country they were in. Only by losing that past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it.

(I have often considered this - if it would just be easier to let go; to forget)

58

The histories I've written have often been hidden, lost, neglected, too broad or too amorphous to show up in others' radar screens, histories that are not neat fields that belong to someone but the paths and waterways that meander through many fields and belong to no one.

(like my parents?)

71

Often initially, these strays and captives felt they were far from home, distnat from their desires, and then at some point, in a stunning reversal, they came to be at home and what they had longed for became remote, alien, unwanted. For some, perhaps, there was a moment then they realised that the old longings had become little more than habit and that they were not yearning to go home but had been home for some time;

80

And some people travel far more than others. There are those that receive as birthright an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far. Some people inherit values and practices as a house they inhabit; some of us have to burn down that house, find our own ground, build from scratch, even as a psychological metamorphosis. As a cultural metamorphosis the transition is far more dramatic.

(this describes my class journey)

107

I lost a whole life and gradually gained another one, more open and more free.

113

An earlier one [compilation tape] had been called Geography Lessons, Mostly Tragic, and there too I had tried to get something about the evocation of place and its emotional resonance in the music.

(maybe, deep down, that is what No Place Like Home is about - the emotional resonance of place. just that.)

118

The places in which any significant event occurred become embedded with some of that emotion, and so to recover the memory of the place is to recover the emotion, and sometimes to revisit the place uncovers the emotion. Every love has its landscape. Thus place, which is always spoken of as though it only counts when you're present, possesses you in its absence, takes on another life as a sense of place, a summoning in the imagination with all the atmospheric effect and association of a powerful emotion. The places inside matter as much as the ones outside. It is as though in the wya places stay with you and that you long for them they become deities - a lot of religions have local deities, presiding spirits, geniuses of the place. You could imagine that in those songs Kentucky or the Red River is a spiit to which the singer prays, that they mournthe deamtime before banishment, when the singer lived among the gods who were not phantasms but geography, matter, earth itself.

119

is it that such sadness is only the side effect of art that describes the depths of our lives, and to see that described in all its potential for loneliness and pain is beautiful?

136

A happy love is a single story, a disintegrating one is two or more competing, conflicting versions, and a disintegrated one lies at your feet like a shattered mirror, each shard reflecting a different story, that it was wonderful, that it was terrible, if only this had, if only that hadn't.

152

As you step up to the ridgeline, the world to the west suddenly appears before you, a colossal expanse even more wild and remote than the east, a surprise, a gift, a revelation. The world doubles in size. Something like that happens when you really see someone,

Björk, Jóga [One Little Indian / Mother / Polydor; 1997]

I feel

Emotional landscapes

They puzzle me

Then the riddle gets solved

And you push me up into 

This state of emergency

How beautiful to be

This state of emergency

Is where I want to be

Shepherd, Nan, The Living Mountain [Canongate; Edinburgh: 2014]

xiii

[Quoting Patrick Kavanagh] "In the world of poetic experience it is depth that counts, not width. A gap in a hedge, a smooth rock surfacing a narrow lane, a view of a woody meadow, the stream at the junction of four small fields - these are as much as a man can fully experience."

xxvii

For Merleau-Ponty, post-Cartesian philosophy had cleaved a false divide between the body and the mind.

xxxi

For Shepherd, the body thinks best when the mind stops, when it is 'uncoupled' from the body. She writes exquisitively of these moments on the mountain when one 'is not bedeviled by thought'. 'They come to me most often', she says, 'waking out of outdoor sleep, gazing tranced at the running of water and listening to its song.' BUt the best way of all to uncouple the mind is to walk: 'After hours of steady walking, with the long rhythm of motion sustained until motion is felt, not merely known by the brain, as the "still centre" of being... [you] walk the flesh transparent.' 'On the mountain', she says in the book's closing sentences, 'for an hour I am beyond desire. It is not ecstacy... I am not out of myself, but in myself. I am. That is the final grace accorded from the mountain.

(uncoupled or actually coupled?)

4

To pit ineself against the mountain is necessary for every cimber: to pit oneself merely against other players, and make a race of it, is to reduce to the level of a game what is essentially an experience.

7

I am a mountain lover because my body is at its best in the rarer air of the heights and communicates its elation to the mind.

8

The sustained rhythm of movement in a long climb has also its part in inducing the sense of physical well-being

15

Yet, often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.

30

and as the rose and violet hues spread over snow and sky, the colour seemed to live its own life, to have body and resilience, as though we were not looking at it, but were inside its substance

90

As one slips over into sleep, the mnd grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. One netheir thinks, nor desires, nor remembers, but dwells in pure intimacy with the tangible world.

92

One's body is limber with the sustained rhythm of mounting, and relaxed in the ease that follows the eating of food. One is as tranquil as the stones, rooted far down in their immobiliy.

(I am now locked out of this tranquility becauseof my body?)

96

But now and then comes an hour when the silence is all but absolute, and listening to it one slips out of time. Such a silence is not a mere negation of sound. It is like a new element, and if water is still sounding with a low far-off murmur, it is no more than the last edge of an element we are leaving, as the last edge of land hangs on the mariner's horizon.

104

This plunge into the cold water of a mountain pool seems for a brief moment to disintegrate the very self; it is not to be borne: one is lost: stricken: annihilated. Then life pours back.

106

These moments come unpredictably, yet governed, it owuld seem, by a law whose working is dimly understood. They come to me ost often, as I have indicated, waking out of outdoor sleep, gazing tranced at the running of water and listening to its song, and most of all after hours of steady walking, with the long rhythm of motion sustained until motion is felt, not merely known by the brain, as the 'still centre' of being. In some such way I suppose the controlled breathing of the yogi must operate. Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent*. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible, but paramount. Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body. 

     It is therefore when the body is keyed to its highest potential and controlled to a profound harmony deepening into something that resembles trance, that I discover most nearly what it is to be. I have walkied out of the body and into the mountain. I am a manifestation of its total life, as in the starry saxifrage or the white-winged ptarmigan. 

(*great exhibition title: walking the flesh transparent; to walk the flesh transparent)

So I have found what I set out to find. I set out on my journey in pure love. It began in childhood...

Works

Cliff Andrade

Chasing Sunyata

(working title)

October 2023

Coda

City

Day 1

Dragonflies

Day 2

Mushrooms

Collected Walks

Day 3

Jellyfish

Day 4

Sand

Day 5

Wind

Day 6

Toadstool

Day 7

Lychen

Day 8

Rushes

Day 9

Deer

Day 10

Woodpecker

Day 11

Granite

Day 12

Paper