Little we see in nature

On paying fresh attention to the world around us

Over the last couple of years, I have found myself dwelling with increasing frequency on the common grace of the world around us, and why this kindness from God is easily overlooked and undervalued by a section of those who worship him. Regular readers of New Grub Street will already know that the Christian background I come from placed hefty significance on special or saving grace, with a nod at best to the wider world that is the theatre for God’s activity and a gallery for the beauty of what he creates and values. In this atmosphere, the reality of the body, of the physical environment we live in, was viewed as a means of living a spiritual life, a mere host for the holy things of prayer, devotion and service. William Wordsworth’s iconic words may have no finer landing spot than in that spiritual location: ‘little we see in nature that is ours’.

I have come to think of much of this worldview as a kind of baptised gnosticism, with Christ at the head of a primarily spiritual universe which is served by the lesser spatial and temporal realms. This position was further reinforced by a soteriology that engaged in a kind of fundamentalist affective piety about the cross with little reference to the resurrection, and an eschatology that saw the elements of the world as easily dismissed materials for an apocalyptic bonfire. Almost every aesthetic move flowed from this assumed theology, with church buildings that looked more like substations of the underworld than portals to the heavenly realms, with music and dress, poetry and paintings that felt full of function and emptied of any abundance or excess of beauty. This position might be in the foreground in full-blooded Fundamentalism, but its influence can be felt across many other expressions of faith as well.

I have written about some of these things before, and a recent BBC Radio Ulster religious broadcast I was privileged to script took our relationship with creation as part of its theme. In this post, I want to take a non-Christian resource, Simon Armitage’s recent collection entitled Dwell, and from it plot some points of critique and aspiration concerning the natural environment.

Unnoticed neighbours and unshared space

Dwell begins with a short introductory essay by Simon Armitage, in which he outlines the urgent need for us to engage and cohabit well with nature. Some of his observations spring from recollections of the neglect of the environment that he witnessed in childhood, and others from current statistics about how precarious life is for some of our neighbours in the animal kingdom. Right at the heart of all of this is his concern to notice and understand more fully our co-dependency on the creatures who share the earth with us,

If I describe a planet without other living creatures as ‘unthinkable’, it is not only because of our interdependence within a highly sophisticated and diverse ecosystem. It is also because I envisage a world where our capacity for wonder, curiosity, invention and empathy would be limited to our own perceptions and experience, a kind of narcissistic echo chamber, one-dimensional in all its dealings. Other living creatures enhance what is to be human - why are we so interested in life on other planets when we show such disregard for life on our own?

This sentiment should immediately chime with any view of the world which seeks to authentically link Christian spirituality with animal life and inanimate things. Human beings, bedecked in divine dignity, are placed in a world where the natural environment is neither contingent nor irrelevant. We live in the ‘what is’ (as TS Eliot termed it), upon birth we enter a fully furnished chamber replete with the food we need, and a sense of fellowship with our surroundings. There is a consonance between the human soul and the setting of the sun, between a rise in our emotions and the swell of a tide, between our capacity for wonder and the cacophony of wonder that the Dawn Chorus brings. To make this place and these creatures secondary or a mere utility is to live in denial of the best instincts of our souls.

For those readers who share my Christian faith, this falls into line not just with our constitution but with our understanding of our creation as living beings. Adam named the animals, an act of neighbourly noticing, a kind of intuition of the nature and characteristics of the remarkable and enigmatic living things that surrounded him. When no comparable partner was found from this band of beings, God didn’t slaughter the other animals and then make Eve. These creatures kept their place and maintained their relationship with the human species.

This makes ignoring our neighbours and, even worse, refusing to share space with them not just a diminishment of our experience of the world, but a denial of our God-given place in it. The baptised gnosticism that finds itself impatient with the tangible, the touchable, the inherently physical realities of the world we inhabit is impoverished aesthetically, but it is also dramatically unsound theologically. Wildlife and landscape, the dizzying variety of what this amazing world holds, is there on purpose, not just as a kind of movie set for the drama of human existence but as an absorbing world in itself, worthy of our attention and affection.

Naming nature all over again

Dwell does not merely deliver an exhortation to notice, but it sets a powerful example of how we might do this. Taking the Lost Gardens of Heligan as his centre of focus, Armitage applies a keen eye, an open heart, and a glimmer of words to capture the world around him. Poetry can get a bad reputation as an obscure art form, but in the hands of someone like Armitage it becomes a lens through which we can glimpse the surprising and ineffable beauty of simple things around us. Among my favourite poems in the collection is ‘Drey’ which captures the movements of a squirrel so powerfully that the mind’s eye can see it clearly,

At dawn she marches head first
down the slippery trunk, back feet
swivelled south-to-north,
then takes stock on the ground,
freezes when the world twitches,
fidgets and jerks when the world holds still.

This is merely a representative example of how such poetry can magically transport us to a place where we ‘see’ and ‘feel’ the world through mere words. Later, a beaver’s lodge is described as ‘a spillikin stave church/a scuppered galleon hull/run aground, a drowned bonfire or washed up wood pile/a lumberyard after a force 10 gale’; a fox’s tail is portrayed as ‘a copper beech hedge/backcombed by west winds/and tipped with snow’; rabbits are described as lurking and skulking ‘in the brain of the burrow./The hill is thinking’. These perspectives are the fruit of a long and lingering gaze upon the world by Armitage, and reflect an intense commitment on his part of name nature in ways that are free of cliche and pulsating with the very life of the universe.

It would be easy to attribute all of this to the power of poetry, but it isn’t just that. The poet’s words and the illustrations of Beth Munro are all about the eye, heart, hand and voice coming into contact with what is there all around us. Armitage cannot say without first deeply seeing, Munro cannot portray without first paying keen attention.

Around us and over to us

All of these elements make Dwell a sheer delight of a collection, but they also sound a note that sustains itself far beyond the final page of the book. This naming work falls to all of us; this noticing life is one well worth living, and this collection of poems goes a long way to showing us how to incorporate it into our lives. The world Armitage writes and Munro captures in visual art, is all around us. It can be found in the vast wilderness places of national parks and managed gardens, but it can also be witnessed in urban environments and on our very doorsteps. What counts isn’t how much natural world there is around us, but how much is noticed by us. Dwell makes me want to see and say the world all over again, and I imagine that it will affect many other readers in the same way.

Behind all of this is a deep and abiding question: where are the Christian writers who are spending this time, investing these kinds of thoughts, producing this kind of art in response to a world which they knowingly receive from their Creator’s hand? There are good examples of individuals who privilege these things in their work while yielding authentic glory to God for ‘dappled things’ but surely such a theatre of God’s beauty and glory should be inspiring movements of writers, artists, dancers and musicians to take up the tools of their calling in rhapsodic praise of what this given world is, and ardent defence of its wonder and welfare. Dwell has challenged me as a poet to slow down, to see more clearly, to eschew the rush to write, to seek an observational and reverential posture towards the glorious place we have been given. Perhaps it might do the same for you?

Dwell is published by Faber and Faber, is written by Poet Laureate Simon Armitage and illustrated by Beth Munro. It can be purchased via major online retailers and (preferably) local booksellers. Further details can be found here.