Notebook fragments #1: Naming
Why I write, uplands in dialect, naming the birds
Dear friend,
I’ve been a bit under the weather lately, so I wanted to share something gentle in lieu of the bigger pieces I’ve gotten behind on. Below are some fragments from my writer’s notebook and some recent encounters, which all managed to coalesce under a bit of a theme without my intending it.
If you like this format, maybe I’ll do it again.
Why I Write: My brief, partial stab at an answer to a classic prompt. If you feel moved to try your hand at it, feel free to share yours :)
Hope is a hill: A found poem (by me) from the British Isles dialect glossary of Robert Macfarlane’s book Landmarks, which is all about naming the landscape. Reading this book started me on my public-facing landscape/place-writing journey some years ago. I hope to write a post about it sometime.
Two encounters: An entire Flora painted on royal dinnerware, and why we learn the names of birds—in French and English.
Why I Write
I write because I love collecting things, including synapses, especially sparkly ones. I write because I want to have the birdsong or the mountain or the petal as my own. I want it knitted into my mind and onto the page where it won’t sieve away. I write because I want not only the fact of the birdsong or the mountain or the petal, but also the glimmer and heft and body of what it was to me in that liquid moment of encounter. I write to watch my sparks dance with others’ sparks as I glean them from their own glowing pages. I write because I love the sense of it. I write because I love puzzles, especially auditory ones, Rube-Goldberg machines of sound and sizzle and sift. Maybe machine is the wrong word. I write because it’s an improvisatory act of remaking the world and who doesn’t kind of want to be a goddess sometimes. I write because I lost the ability to play pretend the way I did as a child. I write because I’m good at it and that feels good. I write because I want to stake a little claim on your synapses. I write to shift the ground a little under your feet. I write to seduce you to mingle your mind with mine.
For just a few moments.
Is it working?
Hope is a hill
Hope is a hill Hope is a blind valley Slaag is the low skyline skirting hope A nick lets the weather through Hylde calls the water down Careful on the carrach and the skruid, the scree, the places of tumble and ankle twist Don’t become cragfast on the cliff-girt corrie the cairn shouldered and crenellated, the chockstone, the choss Close your ears to the saidse, the sound of a body falling Listen closely to the unheeve as it frees the blebs from the ice-bound isetblue.
Selected glossary
from Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane
Hope (Cotswolds): a hill Hope (NE England and Scotland): blind valley Slaag: low skyline of hill Nick (Yorkshire): gap in the hills where weather comes through Hylde (Old English): slope of a hill Skruid (Shetland): steep, slippery eroded slope Cragfast: stuck while climbing Coire/corrie (Gaelic/anglicized): high, hanging glacier-scooped hollow on a mountainside, often cliff-girt Cairn (Gaelic): complex peak with corries, shoulders, ridges Carrach (Irish): boulder-strewn Chockstone: wedged rock impeding climbing Choss: unstable rock unsuitable for climbing Saidse (Gaelic): sound of a falling body Bleb (NE Ireland, N England): bubble of air in ice Unheeve (Exmoor): thaw Isetblue (Shetland): the color of ice
Two encounters
A botanical thing
Flora Danica is a 1530-piece, 18th-century dinnerware set with the entire Flora of Denmark painted on it, which I simply must go see the next time I visit Copenhagen’s Frederiksberg Palace.
The story is nicely told in this instagram reel by curious__grace, and here is the official website where you can buy your own replica piece if you so wish.
A nature thing in French
A comic illustrated and shared on Instagram by Lauriane Miara, about why we name the birds.
Here’s my English translation:
Panel 1: One of my friends knows the names of all the birds.
Bider: Griffon vulture!
Panel 2: We may wonder what the point is of knowing the names of all the birds. In fact, naming the birds, the plants, and the animals, that's just the beginning.
Birder: Yellow-billed choughs! (Phyrocorax graculus)
Panel 3: To know how to name is to know how to distinguish. And it's important in a world that lumps all the birds, the vegetation, and the minerals under one word: "Nature."
Birder: Another yellow-billed chough, and two red-billed choughs.
Yellow-billed chough: Nice to meet you, I'm nature.
Red-billed choughs: Weird! Us too!
Mountain: Me too
Panel 4: To know how to name the birds is to open a door onto a world made of relationships and perspectives.
Panel 5: And I believe that the birds have something to teach us about existence.
Birder: "Ah, there it is again!"
Panel 6: In the end, to name the birds is to inhabit the world.
Sorry to hear you're under the weather but, at the same time, if that makes you share something like this, then perhaps it is not all bad?! Loved this format, works beautifully, telling a series of stories in a relatively small space. 11/10 would read again. (And get well soon!)
I like this different format - - and I hope you feel better soon!