Correspondences. Tim Ingold

which is visible only as you go along it? It is a line made by walking; an inscription of human activity on the land. Yet while one can distinguish the path from the ground in which it is inscribed – albeit only faintly and with an eye already tuned to its presence – it is not possible to distinguish the ground from the path. For the ground is not a base upon which every feature is mounted like scenery on a stage set. It is rather a surface that is multiply folded and crumpled. The path is like a fold in the ground.

      Somewhere in Northern Karelia there are still cows. But here there are none. The fields fell silent many years ago. Once we would row across the lake with a churn to fetch milk, warm and fresh, from the dairy. But these days, it doesn’t pay to look after a few head of cattle, and anyway, who will do the milking when the old folk retire? No girl wants to follow her mother into the cowshed; no boy aspires to what has always been seen as women’s work. Nowadays cattle are concentrated in big production facilities, whose managers rent the fields once used for grazing to provide a year-round supply of fodder. Sometimes I imagine that the cows are still there, wandering the fields like ghosts. I think I see them staring asquint with their doleful moon-eyes, and hear them lowing, chewing the cud, crashing through undergrowth. Then silence falls again, pierced only by the wistful cry of the curlew. Where the cows once lingered, strange white oval forms can be seen scattered here and there over the meadows, or lined up on their trackside perimeters. People call them ‘dinosaur eggs’. Really, they are gigantic rolls of machine-cut hay. The machine rolls the hay as it cuts, and as each roll is completed, it is automatically wrapped in white plastic sheeting and laid – like a great egg – on the ground. Later, the ‘eggs’ will be collected and taken far away, to the place where all the cows are now.

Amidst fields bordered by woods and lake stands an old timberbuilt cottage. As a family, we have often spent our summers here. The cottage has a living room, two small bedrooms, a porch and a little veranda. Outside, a set of wooden steps leads up to the front door. Every morning I sit on the steps and think. I think about all the life that has passed there, from when our children were taking their first steps to now when they have families of their own. I listen to the birds, watch the bees as they pollinate the flowers, follow the sun as it passes between the trees, and drink a mug of tea. And I think about what I am going to write that day. If the weather is fine, I write outside at a small wooden table, seated on a bench hewn from a log, and look across the yard to the trees on the other side. The table is covered by a plastic-coated cloth, which is bare apart from a tin on which I mount a spiral of insect repellent. I light one end and it burns very slowly, giving off a sweetly aromatic smoke that is alleged to drive away the mosquitoes that might otherwise invade my writing space. It is hardly needed as there are fewer mosquitoes these days – an effect of climate change perhaps – and I’m not even sure that they take much notice of the smoke. But I burn it anyway, as I quite like the smell. It is a sign that I am thinking. As the spiral of repellent is slowly consumed, it seems to me that my thoughts curl up, like the smoke, and waft into air.

      For the rest of the year, when I am not here, I dream about my bench and table and about the steps to the cottage. Nowhere is there a more tranquil place to be. Nowhere is more conducive to intense reflection, for my mind can withstand the stress of churning thought only when it is otherwise at peace. And nowhere are the multiple rhythms of the world, from the glacial to the atmospheric, more perfectly nested. The cracked boulder, the twisted tree, the empire of the ants, the sighing wind and the suns that reflect from ripples on the lake, the memory of a lost kite, the fading path and absent cows, the dinosaur eggs, the steps on which I sit and the table at which I write these lines: these are among the many stories woven into the fabric of my favourite place. I won’t tell you exactly where it is, as this would give away my secret. But it is somewhere in Northern Karelia.

Notes

      1 1. Ground Work: Writings on Places and People, edited by Tim Dee, London: Jonathan Cape, 2018.

Pitch black and firelight

      David Nash is a sculptor who works on a large scale, with the wood of whole trees. Lately, he has taken to setting the wood ablaze. In one work (Black Trunk, 2010) he enveloped the trunk of a redwood tree in planks and set it on fire. For a while the rising conflagration lit the sky, but when it was over the trunk remained standing. It is standing still, gaunt and black as charcoal. But its blackness does not betoken death and destruction. Quite to the contrary, it is as though the charred trunk, like a black hole, had sucked into itself all the energy of the blaze. It endures as a concentration of strength, power and vitality, ready to burst into life at any time.

       Nash’s work got me thinking about how wood, the mother of all materials, is related to light, the giver of all life. I recalled that besides solid charcoal, burned pine also releases a liquid residue which coagulates as pitch. What kind of substance is this, blacker even than charcoal? And how does its blackness compare with that of a pitch-dark night? ¹

      In the beginning was a pine tree. There it stood, its roots bedded in the hard ground, its upright trunk firm but thinning towards the tip, its branches and twigs swaying in the wind, all adorned with fine green needles quivering in the sunshine.

Then the navy started to build great ships, for which it needed quantities of timber. Our tree, along with countless neighbours, was felled. Brought to the sawmill, the trunk was cut into square-faced planks and beams. But for a while at least, the stump and roots remained in the ground. The ships, however, needed more than wood. They needed tar to coat the sails, ropes and rigging, in order to waterproof them and to protect them from rot. And they needed pitch to caulk the timbers, to ensure that no water could seep into the joints. For this purpose, the remaining stump was rooted up. Hacked into pieces, it was placed in a furnace and fired. The wood turned to charcoal, but at the base of the furnace, a dark brown sticky liquid ran out along a pipe, at the end of which it was collected in a bucket. This was tar. To make pitch, the tar was boiled in a cauldron, driving off the aqueous content as steam. The result was a thick, highly viscous fluid that would dry into a hard lump. But however solid it appears when dried, pitch remains fluid. It just flows very, very slowly. In colour, it is absolutely black.

      In the story of the tree, what began with the white light of the sun caught in its canopy of needles ended with the blackness of pitch, drawn off from its roots and stump in their consumption by fire. Here, what happened to wood, as it was reduced to pitch, was also what happened to light, as it was extinguished. The story tells of wood and light, and its theme rests in their affinity.

      To pursue this theme, let us return to the sawmill, where the trunk has been turned into beams. These days we also speak of beams of light. When the rays of the sun, low in the sky, glance through broken cloud, we say we see sunbeams. In Latin they were known as radii solis, ‘spokes of the sun’. But why should these spokes have entered the vernacular of English as ‘beams’? What do sunbeams and beams of wood have in common that would have led to the same word being applied to both? Could it have been their evident straightness? The wooden beam is a straight length of timber of thick, rectangular section, destined to carry a heavy structural load. The light beam is a ray, or a bundle of parallel rays, as of the sun or emitted from a candle. What they share, it seems, is clear-cut rectilinearity.

Yet within every beam of wood, in its grain, knots and rings, lurk the vestiges of the living tree from which it was once cut. And so, likewise, the word itself harbours traces of its past usage. In Old English, ‘beam’ simply meant any tree: not yet cut but alive and growing in the ground. Though otherwise obsolete, this usage survives in the names of common tree species such as hornbeam, whitebeam and quickbeam (also known as rowan or mountain ash). In this original sense the tree is a beam not because it is especially straight but because it rises like a column from the earth. Beaming is upward growth.

      Remarkably, this is also the sense in which we first hear of beams of light. This was