Authors: Robert Macfarlane
What Shepherd learns – and what her book taught me – is that the true mark of long acquaintance with a single place is a readiness to accept uncertainty: a contentment with the knowledge that you must not seek complete knowledge.
‘Slowly I have found my way in
,’ she says: slowly, but not fully, for ‘[i]f I had other senses, there are other things I should know’. This is not a book that relishes its own discoveries; it prefers to relish its own ignorances – the water that is
‘too much
’ for her, or the dark line of geese that melts ‘into the darkness of the cloud, and I could not tell where or when they resumed formation and direction’. Shepherd is compelled by the massif’s excesses, its unmappable surplus:
‘The mind cannot carry away all
that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.’
~
I worry that I am making
The Living Mountain
sound abstruse, cold, over-intellectual. It isn’t. It is deeply wise and it is propositionally structured, but not abstruse. It is also avidly sensual. What physical joy Shepherd records! Up in the mountains she lives off wild food, foraging for cranberries, cloudberries and blueberries, drinking from the
‘strong white
’ water of rivers. ‘I am like a dog – smells excite me. The earthy smell of moss … is best savoured by grubbing.’ She swims in lochs, and sleeps on hillsides to be woken by the sharp click of a robin’s foot upon her bare arm, or the snuffle of a grazing deer. She observes with brilliant exactness how frost ‘stiffens the muscles of the chin’ (a part of the body we don’t usually associate with muscularity, let alone thermometric sensitivity), or the pleasure of ‘running my hand after rain through juniper … for the joy of the wet drops trickling over the palm’. Heather pollen which feels ‘silky to the touch’ rises from the moor. The body is made ‘limber’
by the rhythm of walking.There is, unmistakably, an eroticism tingling through this book, clandestine and surreptitious – especially thrilling because Shepherd was a woman writing at a time and in a culture where candour about physical pleasure was widely regarded with suspicion.
‘That’s the way to see the world: in our own bodies,’
says the poet, Buddhist and forester Gary Snyder, and his phrase could stand as an epigraph to
The Living Mountain
. True, Shepherd knows well how rough mountains can be on the human body – sometimes fatally so. She admits to the
‘roaring scourge
’ of the plateau in summer, when the midges are out in their millions and the heat rises in jellied waves from the granite; and she deplores the ‘monstrous place’ the mountain becomes when rain pours for hours on end. She describes getting burnt by snow-glare until her eyes are weeping, she feels sick and her face for days afterwards is left scorched ‘as purple as a boozer’s’. She demonstrates – like many mountain-goers, myself included – a macabre fascination with the dead of the hills: the five killed in falls; the crew of Czech airmen whose plane crashes into Ben a’ Bhuird in low cloud; the four
‘boys
’ who are caught and killed by storms, including two who leave a ‘high-spirited and happy report’ in the waterproof logbook beneath the Shelter Stone at the west end of Loch Avon, but whose frozen bodies are later discovered
on the hill, their knees and knuckles raw with abrasions from the granite boulders over which they had crawled, trying desperately to make their way in the blizzard wind.
Yet if the body is at risk in the mountains, it is also, for Shepherd, the site of reward, a fabulous sensorium – and the intellect’s auxiliary. In the mountains, she writes, a life of the senses is lived so purely that
‘the body may be said to think’
. This is her book’s most radical proposition. Radical because, as a philosophical position, it was cutting-edge. In the same years that Shepherd was writing
The Living Mountain
, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty was developing his influential theories of the body-subject, as laid out in his
Phenomenology of Perception
(1945). Merleau-Ponty was at the time working as a professional philosopher in Paris with all the institutional support and vocational confidence that such a position brings. He had been trained as one of the French philosophical elite, studying alongside Sartre, De Beauvoir and Simone Weil at the École Normale Supérieure, where he passed the
aggrégation
in philosophy in 1930. Shepherd was a teacher in an Aberdeen tertiary college, but her philosophical conclusions concerning colour-perception, touch and embodied knowledge are arrestingly similar to those of Merleau-Ponty.
For Merleau-Ponty, post-Cartesian philosophy had cleaved a false divide between the body and the mind. Throughout his career he argued for the foundational role that sensory perception plays in our understanding of the world as well as in our reception of it. He argued that knowledge is ‘felt’: that our bodies think and know in ways that precede cognition. Consciousness, the human body and the phenomenal world are therefore inextricably intertwined. The body
‘incarnates
’ our subjectivity and we are thus, Merleau-Ponty proposed, ‘embedded’ in the ‘flesh’ of the world. He described this embodied experience as ‘knowledge in the hands’; our body ‘grips’ the world for us and is ‘our general medium for having a world’.
And the material world itself is therefore not the unchanging object presented by the natural sciences, but instead endlessly relational. We are co-natural with the world and it with us – but we only ever see it partially.
You will already be able to hear the affinities between Merleau-Ponty’s thought and Shepherd’s, as well as between their dictions. On the mountain, she writes, moments occur at which
‘something moves between me and it
. Place and mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both are altered. I cannot tell what this movement is except by recounting it.’ ‘
The body is not
… negligible, but paramount,’ she elsewhere declares, in a passage that could have come straight from
Phenomenology of Perception
. ‘Flesh is not annihilated but fulfilled. One is not bodiless, but essential body’:
The hands have an infinity of pleasure in them. The feel of things, textures, surfaces, rough things like cones and bark, smooth things like stalks and feathers and pebbles rounded by water, the teasing of gossamers … the scratchiness of lichen, the warmth of the sun, the sting of hail, the blunt blow of tumbling water, the flow of wind – nothing that I can touch or that touches me but has its own identity for the hand as much as for the eye.
Shepherd’s belief in bodily thinking gives
The Living Mountain
a contemporary relevance. We are increasingly separated from contact with nature. We have come to forget that our minds are shaped by the bodily experience of being in the world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit and
ideologies we absorb. We are literally ‘losing touch’, becoming disembodied, more than in any historical period before ours. Shepherd saw this process starting over sixty years ago, and her book is both a mourning and a warning.
‘This is the innocence we have lost
,’ she says, ‘living in one sense at a time to live all the way through.’ Her book is a hymn to ‘living all the way through’: to touching, tasting, smelling and hearing the world. If you manage this, then you might walk
‘out of the body
and into the mountain’, such that you become, briefly, ‘a stone … the soil of the earth’. And at that point then, well, then
‘one has been in
’. ‘That is all,’ writes Shepherd, and that ‘all’ should be heard not diminutively, apologetically, but expansively, vastly.
Like Martha Ironside, the heroine of her first novel,
The Quarry Wood
, Shepherd
‘coveted knowledge
and willingly suffered privations in the pursuit of learning’, and among those privations were the hardships of hill-walking (the toil, the cold, the rain), for to Shepherd walking was inextricable from ‘learning’. Her relationship with the massif was lifelong. She kept walking ‘into’ the Cairngorms until infirmity made it impossible.
In her final months, harrowed by old age, she was confined to a nursing home near Banchory. She began to suffer illusions, confusions, ‘mis-spellings’. She hallucinated that the whole ward had been moved out to a wood in Drumoak:
‘I can see the wood
– I played in it as a child.’ She began to see Grampian place-names blazoned in ‘large capital letters’ in a glowing arc across the ‘dark and silent’ room in which she slept. Even in this troubled state, Shepherd was still thinking hard about the nature of perception and about how to represent perception in language. ‘It took old age to show me that time is a mode of experiencing,’ she wrote then to her friend, the Scottish artist Barbara Balmer, ‘but how to convey such inwardness?’ Reading true literature, she reflected, ‘it’s as though you are standing
experiencing
and suddenly the work is there, bursting out of its own ripeness … life has exploded, sticky and rich and smelling oh so good. And … that makes the ordinary world magical – that reverberates/illuminates.’
This ‘illumination’ of the ordinary world was, of course, what Shepherd’s own work achieved, though it would never have occurred to her to acknowledge her immense talent as a writer.
Shepherd was, the novelist Jessie Kesson recalled,
‘reticent about herself
’. She possessed a ‘grace of the soul’ that expressed itself in part as discretion. But she was also a person of passions. She lived with zeal, right to the end. Speaking of the poet Charles Murray – the man to whom Shepherd is thought to have become closest – Shepherd attributed the
‘striking power
’ of his poetry to the fact that ‘he said yes to life’. So did she, and the huge ‘power’ of her writing is also born of this affirmative ardour. Kesson, at one time a student of Shepherd’s, asked her if she believed in an afterlife.
‘I hope it is true for those
who have had a lean life,’ she replied. ‘For myself –
this
has been so good, so fulfilling.’
~
The more I read
The Living Mountain
, the more it gives to me. I have read it perhaps a dozen times now, and each time I re-approach it as Shepherd re-approaches the mountain: not expecting to exhaust it of its meaning, rather to be surprised by its fresh yields. New ways of seeing emerge, or at least I find myself shown how to look again from different angles. This book is tutelary, but it is not the
expression of any system or programme, spiritual or religious. It advances no manifesto, offers no message or take-home moral. As on the mountain, so in the book: the knowledge it offers arrives from unexpected directions and quarters, and seemingly without end. It is a book that grows with the knowing.
In the last days of September, ten years after first reading Shepherd, I returned to the Cairngorms. I wanted to spend days and nights in the hills without fixed destinations. Too often I had been hurried across them by weather and logistics, unable to linger and pry. Shepherd called herself
‘a peerer into corners’
, and I took this as my mandate to wander and be distracted.
With two friends I walked in from the north, through the dwarf pines of the Rothiemurchus Forest, under a blue sky and a daytime moon, and into the Lairig Ghru. It was hot work for autumn. The sun was slant but bright. Mare’s-tail clouds furled 30,000 feet above us. A mile into the Ghru, I saw a golden eagle catch a thermal near Lurcher’s Crag, rising coil over coil in slow symmetry. It was only the second eagle I had ever seen in the Cairngorms, and it set my heart hammering. Up the long shoulder of Sron na Lairige we toiled, over the tops of Braeriach and at last onto the plateau proper: a huge upland of tundra and boulder at an altitude of around 4,000 feet. I heard a barking and saw to my north-east a flight of a hundred or so geese arrowing through the Lairig Ghru in a ragged V. Because I had height, I looked down onto their flexing backs rather than up at their steady bellies as they passed.
We made camp far across the plateau, near to the source of the Dee – the highest origin of any British river. I pitched my tent by a stream, looking south-east over the Lairig Ghru towards the battleship flanks of Carn a’Mhaim. Butterflies danced. There were no
midges. I had some real coffee with me for the morning brew. I was very happy indeed.
Later that afternoon we dropped 600 feet north off the plateau in search of Loch Coire an Lochain, the ‘loch of the corrie of the loch’, which Shepherd prized as one of the range’s
‘recesses’
, or hidden places. She had also visited it on a late-September day, and marvelled at the chilly clarity of its water, and its secrecy as a site.
‘It cannot be seen until one stands almost on its lip,’
she wrote. At the hour we reached it, a curved shadow had fallen across the corrie which, when doubled by the surface of the water, perfectly mimicked the form of a raven’s beak. We swam in the loch, which was steel-blue and speckled on its surface with millions of golden grains of dust or pollen. The water was gin-clear and bitingly cold.
Sunset was close as we climbed back up to the plateau, so we waited for it on a westerly slope. As the sun lowered and reddened, cloud wisps blew up from the valley and refracted its light to form a dazzling parhelion: concentric halos of orange, green and pink that circled the sun. Once the sun had gone a pale mist sprang up from the plateau, and we waded knee-deep in its milk back to camp, from where we watched a yellow moon rise above the Braeriach tors. After dark had fallen I walked to the edge of the plateau, where the young Dee crashed down 1,000 feet into the great inward fissure of the Garbh Coire.
The air that night was so mild there was no need for a tent. I woke soaked in dew and shrouded in cloud that had rolled up out of the Lairig Ghru. We were in a white world. Visibility was twenty yards at most. Blinded of sight, for a full hour, in a way I have never done before, I sat and simply listened to the mountain. Ptarmigans zithered and churred to one another, dotterels kewed, and water moved: chuckled, burred, glugged, shattered.
‘The sound of all this moving water is as integral
to the mountain as pollen to the flower,’ Shepherd reflected beautifully: