Trying to Keep Still by Jenny Diski

I had just started my latest attempt at book writing, limiting my reading and blogging to one book a week, when I picked up this book by Jenny Diski on an impulse from the local Oxfam shop. It was only £2.99, which was part of the reason (though Oxfam books are rarely more expensive than that), and another blogger had mentioned Diski positively quite recently which was another piece of the strange puzzle that is my book buying disease. I had also, some time ago, encountered Diski’s name when researching books about the Arctic and had flagged one of her books for future reading (Skating to Antarctica, specifically. Yes, I do know that is quite the other side of the planet). I had no real idea what this book was about, yet when I was mooching about the house feeling a little sorry for myself I picked it up thinking I’d read a few pages to get a feel for it and then next thing you know I’d put all my other books to one side and made this my one book of the week. Or the quarter, at least.

Diski is a travel writer, and this book explores three journeys she undertook: one to New Zealand, one in Somerset and one to Lapland. Yet whilst the structure of the book is created around these journeys, this is very much an exploration of Diski’s desire to keep still.  This seems a crazy premise for someone who is a travel writer, though it also seems that becoming a travel writer is something that mystifies Diski and results, largely, from her more pressing inability to say no. What follows is a strange kind of meditation on the idea of stillness, the guilt at not wanting to leave the house (or even her bed necessarily), the social pressure to enjoy activities such as walking or going out in general, the internal and, sometimes, external conflicts that arise and the difficulty in being honest. It is also very amusing, very truth-filled and wry. What Diski does or doesn’t explain about travel is neither here nor there, but her musings are absorbing, like here:

“What people always say about being alone for long periods is some variation on the theme of the immense and unimagined difficulties of having to confront oneself, a concealed self which lurks unnoticed below the requirements of everyday sociability. Coming face to face with yourself, is how they describe it. ‘You really find out who you are’, they say with a look of agonisingly acquired wisdom, implying an inevitable dark night of the soul. What I have discovered during these periods of being alone for as long as possible, is that I am extremely good at passing the time, and taking pleasure in passing the time, reading, idling and pottering, rarely bored, hardly ever restless, sometimes miserable, often dissatisfied with myself and the world, without finding out an iota more than that about who I am, because that is pretty much what I’m like in company too. The agony of solitude passes me by, until, because social guilt and self-analysis are never far away, the lack of agony at being with myself become an agony of lack of self.”

It is a book very heavily seated in introspection, the journeys being as much about Diski’s own response to her environment as the environment itself. Not such much travel writing as a woman writing about herself travelling. And it works. It is insightful and amusing, it is wise, it is challenging in the way watching anyone doing mental gymnastics whilst being rigidly honest can only be. There were times when reading this book that I felt like I was reading my own thoughts expressed more articulately and with greater insight and humility. It had such a familiarity about it, like listening to the rambling of your own thoughts in a dead moment, which was exactly the space I happened to be in at the time of reading it.

For the purists who like a travel writer to write about travel, there is still plenty of travel in this book. But what makes it so interesting is the intensity of reluctance Diski brings to the whole experience “nothing will persuade me that the mere fact of being in a place is enough in itself to justify the effort of getting out of bed to become a tourist, or even a traveller” Diski says, and there is so much truth in that little statement, the reminder that everything we experience is happening exactly where we are right now and we don’t really need to go anywhere to find it, or prove ourselves to anyone. And if this book tells us anything it’s that we can be exactly who we are, without the need to take part or live up to a certain standard. Exactly what I needed to read.

What I didn’t need, however, was the extraordinary list of books she took away with her to Somerset, listed on pages 77 and 78 and from which I have lifted a shortlist of about 5 or 6 I want to read for myself. Including Montaigne, who I think has heavily influenced this book but whom I know too little about to truly appreciate the connection. And I don’t have to either. In fact it is perfectly fine if I never read Montaigne, though I think I will in the end.

I can’t express here how much I enjoyed this book. It was a breath of stale bedroom air, beckoning me to sleep in. It won’t quash my love of travelling, unlike Diski I love walking and experiencing new places. But in many respects she articulated, with great clarity, the way my mind has been turning. It may have been a stroke of serendipity, but I don’t care. I loved it. 

The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald (translator: Michael Hulse)

There are many kinds of books you can encounter in a lifetime. There are books which are soulful and full of grace. Books that are like a slap in the face. Books that nurture and console you. Books that make you laugh. Books that are like a lifelong journey. Books that are like a puzzle you don’t have the brainpower to solve. Books that never seem to end.

Then there are books that are like walking along the riverside in the company of an erudite and well informed man, someone with whom you have only a tenuous relationship, perhaps through work or a shared acquaintance, but whose company is always interesting. You are walking along the riverside on a pleasant summer day, heading towards a pub you visited together a number of years ago. The sun is blinking through the trees, there is a gentle breeze and soft summer clouds floating fatly in the blue air. Your companion is telling you a story about a man he once encountered as a child, a lord of something or other who had a peculiar penchant swans – your friend mentions this pointing towards a pair of swans paddling along the river. The lord had such a love of swans that he had created a sanctuary somewhere hereabouts. The swan sanctuary turned out to be short lived and the ruin of the man.

As your companion talks you see the pub come into view. It is on the top of a small hill to your left, its grounds rolling down towards the riverbank clustered with picnic benches and you remember when you came here the last time. Then you were much younger, you were newly arrived in the area and this man, through your shared acquaintance or work, had offered to show you around. The day, one similar to today, was bright and warm, there were bees buzzing in the grass and ducks on the water and your anxiety about having moved from your home to a new, strange place had been assuaged for the duration of the afternoon. Something about your companion and his excellent conversation.

When you arrive at the pub the man goes off to the bar to buy beer, and you sit down at one of the tables close to the waterside. It is then that you discover that things are not exactly the way you remember them. The pub, its grounds so well situated on such a lovely day, is largely deserted. The wood of the picnic table splinters under your nails, there are cracks in its surface and great gouges torn out of the wood. The swans are gone from the river and the ducks from your memory are absent. Your friend returns and sits down, passing you your beer glass from which you take a great gulp. The beer doesn’t taste as good as you remember. ’It was here,’ your friend explains. ‘This was the place of lord such-and-such’s swan sanctuary.’ The Swan, is the name of the pub. As the bitter taste of beer melts from your tongue, you realise with surprise that you are now the same age as your companion was the last time that you were here together.

The air turns chill, a dark cloud rumbles overhead blocking out the sun. A melancholy mist rises from the river, drawing with it the brackish tang of decay. It reminds you, somehow, of a dream you had recently in which you had been walking along the self-same riverbank heading towards the pub at which you were now drinking. In the dream it had been a day much the same as today, but you had walked alone. The air seemed thick and dense, and as you walked a great, ancient forest appeared. With each step more trees grew, until the forest grew so thick you became lost within it. The familiar houses and landmarks had decayed to tumbledown ruins, and if there were any other people in the forest there was no sign of them. You walked until you were ready to lie down with exhaustion, and only then did the forest open into a clearing and the way out became obvious. You turned to find that the light was failing, that the path you had walked along had disappeared. It was a peculiarly vivid dream, and though you had felt lost you woke from it feeling only that you had experienced something like truth.

That is The Rings of Saturn.   

Holloway by Robert McFarlane, Stanley Donwood & Dan Richards

A holloway is a sunken path, a deep and shady lane, a landmark that “speak[s] of habit rather than suddenness” explains this brief and poetic book by acclaimed nature writer Robert McFarlane (plus buddies). It is a book which is very much an exploration, a way of being in nature, a memorial to a man – Roger Deakin – with whom McFarlane began this journey. In the beginning the two men set out to find a holloway, to which there is no map, mentioned in a book called Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household – a book, as it happens, that I have also heard mentioned somewhere else very recently, the result of which is has found itself onto my to read list. It is the book that inspired them, their shared love of it, and so they set out with map and tent, penknife, matches and candles and a hipflask each to find this hidden place. Together they enter a church, crest the summit of a half-moon of hills; they enter the dusk of the holloway and camp out in a flower meadow with full and glorious views of the stars.

Then Roger Deakin died, suddenly and unexpectedly. A few years following Deakin’s death McFarlane returned to the holloway, this time in the company of Dan Richards and Stanley Donwood who contributed to this book. They slept in the holloway, pursued by rain and something mysterious they they couldn’t identify but all felt. It is fitting, perhaps, that in the course of this second journey McFarlane should encounter the ‘ghost’ of Deakin, though not in a literal sense as he explains:  

“That long & happy day passed in exploration, tree-climbing, walking, talking, lounging. I had not gone in search of Roger’s shade, but I found him there nonetheless, glimpsed startlingly clearly at the turn of a corner or the edge of a tree-line. Actual memory traces existed in the stumps of the holly saplings we had cut as staffs, our blade-marks still visible in the wood. He knoweth hym by the traces & by his denne and by the soole.”

A further outing ensues, similar to the last in tone, in character and emotion. There is a sense of boys out at play, rediscovering the freedom of the countryside as described here:

“That car. That strap. My bike. This. The tactile reassurance of the close at hand. Sunlight falls and kestrels call to disavow what we’d just seen and been through and, indeed, the clouds seem to have lifted off and melted quite away when we turn and look back.

Stan and I plunge down the brink and speed. The rifled lanes spill past and we grin tight until, turn approaching, brakes applied – and now, and now; no, come on; now – I begin a slow crash into Dorset with its gleaming chalk and plough-turned flint-tipped ruts.”

So, in Holloway, McFarlane shows us both the experience of continuance and renewal: continuance in returning to the holloway, renewal in that each experience was unique whilst bearing the scars, or the ghost, of the previous visit. There is no ending. It is a book not so much about seeking as it is about discovering something about the self, a way of being, an honesty which comes from using your body out there in the world, surrounded by hills and hidden groves. The book is accompanied by strange, pencil-line drawn black and white pictures of the holloway itself, pictures which are at once unnerving and yet also bring to mind the birth canal, all ridged and furred, a place which may be frightening to enter but which brings you out into a new, and exciting world. And there’s a sense that this is what the book is inviting us to do – to enter the world. Before it is too late.

The language echoes the theme; a dense filigree of words that tangle and yet draw your eye down a path. It is beautifully written, and achieves a great deal in its brevity. Each sentence can be read and re-read repeatedly, the words spilling through the mind like water, un-claimable yet etching their way in. Through these words we learn of history, of ghosts, of nature wild and untameable, hidden places and what they reveal about ourselves and others. We touch on the question of loss, so delicately, and it is, perhaps, the absence of reflection of Roger’s death, the way it is so barely mentioned, that makes the loss seem more poignant. The return to the holloway allows McFarlane to discover that “stretches of a path might carry memories of a person just as a person might of a path” and this is a source of comfort: that a path carries the echo of a person means, somehow, that the person is never truly lost, and the holloway itself is the memory of many, the slow returners, the creatures of habit, a path formed by years and repetition, hidden but always discoverable.

Hol weg. Holwy. Holway. Holeway. Holewaye. Hollowy. Holloway.

Tracks by Robyn Davidson

Sometimes there are books you pick up and you know instantly that you’re going to love them. For me, Tracks was one of those books. It may have helped that I had already watched the movie, and it was this that had prompted me to decide to read the book anyway, but I’m not convinced that explains it entirely. Instead there is something about the cadence of the early paragraphs, the feeling of the words spinning me straight into the mind of this woman “There are some moments in life that are like pivots around which your existence turns – small intuitive flashes, when you know you have done something correct for a change, when you think you are on the right track. I watched a pale dawn streak the cliffs Day-glo and realised this was one of them. It was a moment of pure, uncomplicated confidence – and lasted about ten seconds.”

Tracks is the true story of how Robyn Davidson set out to cross the Australian desert accompanied only by camels. She arrived in Alice Springs, a town for which she expresses little affection, equipped only with an idea, a dog (Diggity) and an independent streak. Davidson had no money, no real knowledge of camels and no support network in the local vicinity. Consequently she spent much of her early time in Alice Springs being taken advantage of, working rubbishy jobs, not really getting anywhere, hating the misogyny and the nasty attitudes towards the indigent Aboriginal population.

A considerable part of the book describes how Davidson put off, by any means possible, actually starting out on this journey. For a start, she knew next to nothing about camels and had to learn from scratch. This resulted in an exploitative relationship with a local camel rancher called Kurt whose behaviour was manipulative and abusive. Eventually she exits this relationship, but does so without getting hold of the camels she needs. Later on when she does acquire her camels, the problems she faces continue to grow. The camels are frequently sick, one of her first camels has to be euthanized due to illness, and when they’re not sick they’re wandering off. This trend continues on her trek.

I enjoyed the honesty that Davidson conveys in this early part of the story. That she was torn between going and not going becomes apparent, and some of her behaviour suggests that not going is the preferred option. She recognises this in herself, in her uncompromising nature which will not allow her to borrow the money she needs to start the trek. Then she encounters Rick Smolen, a photographer for National Geographic who convinces her to allow the magazine to sponsor her trip. She agrees, but at a cost: Rick must photograph her along the way and she must allow the magazine to report on her journey. Thus she embarks on a love/hate relationship with both Rick and the magazine which crops up at regular intervals throughout the trip (pretty much whenever Rick appears to take photographs).

The trip itself is the real meat of the story, and Davidson is equally honest about this. A lot of the time she hates the journey, the endless walking, the pain, the camels disappearing, the heat, the sweating, the drab food. Yet there are moments of sheer transcendence, as she describes here:

“And as I walked through that country, I was becoming involved with it in a most intense and not yet fully conscious way. The motions and patterns and connections of things became apparent at a gut level. I didn’t just see the animal tracks, I knew them. I didn’t just see the bird, I knew it in relationship to its actions and effects. My environment began to teach me about itself without my full awareness of the process. It became an animate being of which I was a part[…] What was once a thing that merely existed became something that everything else acted upon and had a relationship with and vice versa. In picking up a rock I could not longer simply say, “this is a rock,” I could now say. “This is part of a net,” or closer, “This, which everything acts upon, acts.” When this way of thinking became ordinary for me, I too became lost in the net and the boundaries of myself stretched out for ever.”

This is not just a story about a journey, but also a story about a place and time. Whilst Davidson is a key character, so is the desert, so is Australia and so are the Aboriginal people who make their home in this seemingly barren land. Davidson reflects widely on the position of Aboriginal people in Australian society and the cultural identity of the people themselves. That she generated a high degree of respect and admiration for these oft put down people is heavily apparent throughout the book, and whilst drawing the line at a complete understanding the nature of Aboriginal links to the land become more apparent to Davidson as she traverses the desert. I always find talk of the Aboriginal beliefs soul-stirring and this was no different hear. Davidson shares with affection her time travelling with Eddie, an aged Aboriginal man who helped her across a difficult part of the desert. I think this part of the story was the most heartwarming for me.

She also discusses in some depth the misogyny inherent in Australian ‘outback’ culture, and the way in which being absent from it freed her from social conventions. I’m not sure Davidson set out to write a feminist book, but throughout her musings she is also unable to contain her absolute belief that women, people, can achieve anything they set their minds to. As she explains here:

“I was now a feminist symbol. I was now an object of ridicule for small-minded sexists, and I was a crazy, irresponsible adventurer (though not as crazy as I would have been had I failed). But worse than that, I was now a mythical being who had done something courageous and outside the possibilities that ordinary people could hope for. And that was the antithesis of what I wanted to share. That anyone could do anything. If I could bumble my way across a desert, then anyone could do anything. And that was true especially for women, who have used cowardice for so long to protect themselves that it has become a habit.

The world is a dangerous place for little girls. Besides, little girls are more fragile, more delicate, more brittle than little boys. ‘Watch out, be careful, watch.’ ‘Don’t climb trees, don’t dirty your dress, don’t accept lifts from strange men. Listen, but don’t learn, you won’t need it.’ And so the snail’s antennae grow, watching for this, looking for that, the underneath of things. The threat. And so she wastes so much of her energy, seeking to break those circuits, to push up the millions of tiny thumbs that have tried to quelch energy and creativity and strength and self-confidence; that have so effectively caused her to build fences against possibility, daring; that have so effectively kept her imprisoned inside her notions of self-worthlessness.”

I have noticed a trend in my more recent reading, something I seem to seek out, to desire. It appears in this book in buckets, it was present in A Woman in the Polar Night, in Full Tilt, in Lost Paradise and A Book of Silence. It is this idea of transcending the limits of human social construct, of reaching a moment of pure blending with the world, of being present and at one and at peace. I crave it. I wish I knew why, but until I do I am willing to keep seeking and finding it in wonderful books like this. Tracks is quite different in character to the movie (for those who have seen it), it is more raw and brutal, it is more present, Davidson breathes hot dust and sand through the pages. She sees with honesty and frailty; she is human, she is alive and she is free.