So we stood, alive in the river of light

On Tuesday I attended the dedication of the memorial to Ted Hughes in Poet's Corner.  Poems were read by Juliet Stevenson, Seamus Heaney and Daniel Huws (the Welsh writer who knew Hughes at Cambridge); there is a Channel 4 news clip which gives a sense of the atmosphere there.  The readings took place in front of Chaucer's tomb, which brought to mind that poem in Birthday Letters where Hughes remembers Sylvia Plath declaiming Chaucer to a field of cows, who seemed enthralled, 'ears angling to catch every inflection.'.  Perhaps it would have felt more apt to have heard Hughes's poems out in the landscape, but there in the Abbey, he was connected to a tradition of English poets that began with Cædmon, who found his voice whilst caring for the animals at the monastery of Streonæshalch.  Seamus Heaney made a short speech in dedication, invoking the closing lines of Beowolf where a memorial mound, high on a headland is built for the dead hero, 'far-famed and beloved'.  The inscription on this new memorial comes from one of the poems in River (1983), 'That Morning', in which Hughes recalled standing solemnly 'in the pollen light / Waist-deep in wild salmon.'   It seemed a moment of blessing, as if the fish had let the world as it is pass away: 'there, in a mauve light of drifted lupins, / They hung in the cupped hands of mountains...'

The kill of New York is a brook in New England

BRANCH – RUN – FORK – BROOK – KILL – STREAM – BAYOU – SWAMP – SLOUGH – WASH – CAÑADA – ARROYO - RIO 

I came across Derek Watkins' excellent map, showing the distribution across America of different toponyms for 'river', on the Spatial Analysis blog (where James Cheshire has added his own UK version).  It reminded me that I have been meaning for some time to do a post here about Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney and compiled by a team of writers between 2002 and 2006.  Robert Macfarlane described this book in a wonderful essay published last year ('A Counter-Desecration Phrasebook'): 'Its ambition was to retrieve, define and organise nearly 1,000 terms and words for specific spects of landscape.  Its ethical presumption was that having a language for natural places is vital for two reasons: because it allows us to speak clearly about such places, and because it allows us to fall into the kind of intimacy with such places which might also go by the name of love or enchantment, and out of which might arise care and good sense.'

So what does Home Ground have to say about these river terms?  For the first one, BRANCH, the reader is referred to FORK and the entry, written by Bill McKibben, describes some of the geographical variation evident in Derek Watkins' map.  Easterners are likely to call forks branches, tributory is used elsewhere, 'and those in west Texas would call smaller forks prongs.'  His example of a 'prong' is the North Prong of the Little Red River Fork in Briscoe County Texas.  RUN, according to Kim Barnes, always denotes movement and 'can refer to any small stream, brook, creek, rivulet, channel, overflow, or swiftly flowing watercourse.'  Early Virginian settlers, naming the landscape, came to think in terms of a hierarchy by size: rivers > creeks > runs.  BROOK needs no explanation, but KILL?  It is the Dutch word for brook and appears in the name of landforms of the Hudson and Deleware Valleys, most famously the Catskill Mountains.  The term is not seen in the lower Hudson Valley, probably because, as Jan DeBlieu explains in Home Ground, the Dutch colony was subsumed into the surrounding English speaking culture after the capture of New Netherland in 1644.

Often the authors of Home Ground include illustrative quotations from American literature, like the 'dark stream shooting along its dismal channel' in Melville's Typee.  Gretel Ehrlich's entry on STREAM describes it as a dynamic force that 'receives, and thus reflects, the abuses that have taken place on the land.'  The next few terms, BAYOU, SWAMP and SLOUGH, sound aything but dynamic.  'The bayous are spaces of open water, sluggish or stagnant' and a slough 'is a narrow stretch of sluggish water in a river channel'. The city of Chicago is built on filled sloughs. The word bayou is derived from the Choctaw word for a small stream, bayuk.  Okefenokee Swamp gets its name from a Creek Indian word meaning 'Land of the Trembling Earth'.  A Harry Crews quote explains why: 'most islands in the swamp - some of them holding hundreds of huge trees growing so thick that their roots are matted and woven as closely as a blanket - actually float on the water; and when a black bear crashes across one of them, the whole thing trembles.'

With the word WASH we move into the American Southwest : Carrizo Wash in Arizona, Hunter's Wash in New Mexico. These are areas of land over which 'subtle contours allow water to flow, or "wash", from elevated to lower zones.'  ARROYO can be used to describe the same general feature, or, more specifically, a steep-walled, flat-bottomed creek.  Either way it is ephemeral, 'carrying water only briefly during such events as spring runoff or the summer monsoons.'  Two more Spanish terms complete the map: RIO and CAÑADA, 'a wetland rich with river reeds'.  The words RIVER and CREEK are also included but, are so common that they have been coloured grey.  Here in Britain, a creek is a saltwater inlet or the estuary of a stream.  In the entry for 'creek' in Home Ground, novelist Charles Frazier explains that the term spread to mean any flow smaller than a river.  'In a few places, though, a distinction was retained.  M. Schele DeVere, in his 1872 Americanisms: The English of the New World, put it succinctly: "The kill of New York is a brook in New England, a run in Virginia and alas! a crick or creek, almost everywhere else."'

Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles

Two photographs in magazines I’ve been reading this month caught my eye.  The first, from Tate etc. (Summer 2011) is Magritte’s Les Idées Claires (1955), an image chosen by Jeff Koons (who likens the boulder floating over the sea to one of his basketballs in water).  The second, from The Wire (May 2011) is Herbert Distel’s Projekt Canaris (1970), showing a three metre long polyester egg which the artist launched from the coast of West Africa.  A similar piece is referred to in David Clarke’s recent book Water and Art – in Beyond Twelve Nautical Miles (2000) Zhan Wang set one of his stainless steel rocks adrift at sea near Lingshan Island.   And I have written here before about David Nash’s Wooden Boulder, which began as a sculpture in the landscape but after describing the course of a river ended up as another of these art boulders, set free on the sea.  As far as I know the current location of Wooden Boulder remains a mystery.  Distel’s egg  was driven by trade winds across the Atlantic and reached Trinidad seven months later.

I wonder why there hasn’t been more ‘sea art’, floating equivalents to the famous land art projects of the American West?  Tacita Dean may have had trouble ‘Trying to Find Spiral Jetty’ (1997) but tracking down a sculpture in an ocean could have been even more interesting.  Herbert Distel sought help from the Cuban authorities in locating his egg after it sailed beyond the Canary Islands and was thought to be heading into the Caribbean.  It was eventually spotted by the captain of a Dutch ship who sent a telegram: ‘Egg seen on 6 December 1970 gmt 17.50, about 100 km east off the island of Trinidad.’ Of course I’m not really advocating that we litter the sea with permanent floating art works.  Instead sea artists might take inspiration from Buster Simpson, who has an ongoing project to drop disks of limestone into the Hudson River: rocks that will gradually dissolve and counteract the effects of acid rain.

High in the gorges a rock dam will rise

I have been reading about contemporary Chinese artists this week - disturbing news of the detention of Ai Weiwei and an interesting survey of recent art questioning Chinese state power in David Clarke's book Water and Art.  Clarke traces the importance of water control schemes in modern China: the Yangtze river bridge at Wuhan linking north and south for the first time, the bridge at Nanjing built in 1968 entirely by Chinese engineers, the South-North Water Transfer Project and most recently The Three Gorges Dam which has flooded a landscape celebrated in Chinese literature.  Whilst earlier artists celebrated these achievements (Wei Zixi's The Yangtze River Becomes a Thoroughfare, 1973), recent artists have been freer to depict their human cost (Liu Xiaodong's Three Gorges: Displaced Population, 2003).  In 1995, a year after the Three Gorges Dam was given the go-ahead, Zhuang Hui made a series of transitory marks at locations that would soon be submerged, had them photographed and exhibited as Longitude 109.88 E and Latitude 31.09 N.  These were among the works in a show in Chicago a couple of years ago called 'Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Chinese Contemporary Art.'

Wang Jin's Fighting the Flood - Red Flag Canal (1994) involved a trip to another famous Mao era water-control project.  There the artist released 50kg of red pigment into the water, transforming the colour of communism into an agent of pollution, as well as a memorial to the blood sacrificed by those who built the canal.  David Clarke relates this work to Olafur Eliasson's similar Green River works, in which green dye has been poured into various rivers around the world and the artist has waited to observe people's reactions.  In an interview Eliasson recounted how in Tokyo 'a lot of people stopped and looked... And of course they were stunned. I did it in a spot where the cherry blossom comes out a month later. It's well known as a beautiful place. Actually the police came and. basically I ran away. And the police then put up posters asking anybody who had seen somebody suspicious to contact them.'  Incidentally, both of these river dying projects were preceded by an attempt by Denis Oppenheim and Peter Hutchison in 1969 to paint the irregular shape of Highway 20 onto the waters of a Caribbean cove, using magenta dye and gasoline.  Unfortunately the dye seeped ashore, impregnated beach towels and then, through the hotel washing machines, contaminated other laundry so that "everything was pink".  Oppneheim said later that he considered the outcome a better work than the one he had originally envisaged.

Some of the contemporary Chinese artists discussed in Water and Art have been producing work that challenges the Chinese cult of swimming, typified by Mao, who developed it into a public spectacle (see clip below).  This was not about immersion in nature or a Daoist sense of going with the flow; Mao said that 'swimming is an exercise of struggling with nature', and 'the current going against you can train your will and courage to be stronger.'  Mao's swim across the Yangtze in 1956, with its emphasis on the body and endurance, in some ways 'strangely prefigures aspects of Chinese performance art.' An earlier chapter of Clarke's book is devoted to Fu Baoshi, who specialised in rainswept landscapes but also painted On the Theme of Mao Zedong's 'Swimming'.  'Swimming' was the poem Mao wrote after crossing the Yangtze, but its emphasis on the mastery of nature is barely felt in Fu's painting, which seems to show Mao's head marooned in a vast expanse of water.  Painted in 1958, this work could not be directly critical but was hardly heroic either.  And in adding calligraphy to the painting, Fu chose to ignore those lines in which Mao looked to the future: 'high in the gorges a rock dam will rise, / cutting off Wu Mountain's cloud and rain. / A still lake will climb in the tall gorges.'