Correspondences. Tim Ingold

The way of art

Corresponding with as much rigour and precision as I can command, I have tried in these essays to stay close to the grain of things. I want to show that the practice of thinking we often call ‘theory’ doesn’t mean having to lift off into a stratospheric realm of hyper-abstraction, or to mingle in our imagination with concepts that have drifted so far from the ground of experience, to which they owe their origin, as to have lost all touch with it. Quite to the contrary, theoretical work can be as much grounded in the materials and forces of the inhabited world as the conduct of any other craft. To practise theory as a mode of habitation is to mix and mingle, in one’s thinking, with the textures of the world. This means, if you will, not taking literal truths metaphorically, but taking metaphorical truths literally. The theorist can be a poet. For example, inspired by the poetry of Seamus Heaney, I might compare my digging for words to the crofter’s digging for peat, and my pen to a spade.⁶ I would be urged on by an intuition that a deeper truth lurks within the comparison, and in my theorizing, that’s the truth I’m trying to find. And I know that I’ll have a greater chance of finding it by going to ground than by lifting off. I should pick up a spade and dig! I should think, as I do so, of what the spade is telling me about the earth, or rather of what the earth is telling me through the spade. And I can then bring the lessons I have learned to my thinking on the page.

      Taking metaphorical truths literally, however, is not just the way of poetry; it is also – and perhaps above all – the way of art. The work of the artist is to embody such truths, to make them viscerally present to us, so that we can experience them in their immediacy. The majority of essays gathered here were originally written in response to artistic provocations. Some were commissioned by the artists themselves, or by the curators of their works; others were composed on my own initiative. It is not my purpose to make any judgement, aesthetic or otherwise, of the art itself. I offer no expert interpretation or analysis. I write as an amateur respondent, not a professional critic. But working in the medium of words, I have set out to insert my own voice into the correspondence. And to be honest, I have very much enjoyed doing so. It has been a relief to drop my academic persona and write with my own voice, hand and heart. Above all, I have relished the freedom both to embrace fresh ideas and to be shaken up and disturbed by them.

The twenty-seven essays making up the book are grouped into six parts. We begin in the woods, conversing with trees, then trace an arc from sea to land to sky and back down to earth. We go to ground, mix with the elements, follow lines and threads from the gatherings of nature to the pages of the book, and conclude with a plea to restore words to the hand. Although the journey itself, proceeding in gradual steps from world to words, unfolds without interruption, it is assembled out of singular elements each of which – taken on its own – has its own character and integrity. Rather like a bird’s nest, it is constructed from assorted fragments that were never designed to fit together. The contingent coherence of the nest, and the latitude it affords to its constituents, gives it a resilience thanks to which it hangs together even under the most adverse of weather conditions. Irregularity holds it fast. It is the same with this book, affording the reader the latitude to dip in at any point, to read the essays in any order, and perhaps to circle back to look at some again. Like walking in the woods, you can take any number of alternative routes. Think of the book’s pages, then, as the ground on which you walk, and of its lines as paths. Happy wandering!

Notes

      1 1. ‘The crisis of education’ (1954), in Hannah Arendt: Between Past and Future, introduced by Jerome Kohn, London: Penguin, 2006, pp. 170–93, see p. 193.

      2 2. Tim Ingold, ‘Anthropology beyond humanity’ (Edward Westermarck Memorial Lecture, May 2013), Suomen Antropologi 38(3), 2013: 5–23.

      3 3. Tim Ingold, The Life of Lines, Abingdon: Routledge, 2015, pp. 147–53.

      4 4. Amanda Ravetz, ‘BLACK GOLD: trustworthiness in artistic research (seen from the sidelines of arts and health)’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 43, 2018: 348–71.

      5 5. Ravetz, ‘BLACK GOLD’, p. 362.

      6 6. ‘Digging’, in Seamus Heaney, New Selected Poems, 1966–1987, London: Faber & Faber, 1990, pp. 1–2.

TALES FROM THE WOODS

Introduction

      Can there be any better example of conviviality, of living and growing together, than the trees of a wood? They are so much more sociable than people. Humans come and go, obsessed by passing troubles. But trees stand their ground. They tell tales, they communicate among themselves; older trees watch over young saplings, which sprout amidst the roots of their forebears. We humans are but diminutive eavesdroppers on their long, majestic conversations. Enter the woods, then, as into a library or a cathedral, with a certain reverence. Sociology begins here, in your studies with the trees. Ahead of you, like rows of books on the shelves, or the columns of the nave, are the serried ranks of trunks. Each trunk – each codex, as the ancients called both trunk and book – holds its story, not between its covers, as with the book, but up aloft, as with the fan-vaulting of the cathedral roof or the branching tracery of its windows. You’ll need to strain your neck to read it.

      Peer closely into the canopy, listen intently, feel the textures of bark and moss as if they were under your skin or fingernails. No doubt you feel more alive in the presence of trees. Yet to us, they seem to speak in riddles. Even as we strain to decipher their meanings, we sense no progress towards clarity. In the woods, everything is so complicated! It is, quite literally, folded together – from the Latin com, ‘together’ plus plicare, ‘to fold’. Of the trees that gather there, we cannot say where one ends and another begins. They don’t adjoin or abut like fragments of a mosaic, or square up back to back, each sunk into itself. Rather, they fold over and into each other as they go along. Observe the ground, riddled with roots that threaten to trip you up, the ridged and furrowed tree bark, the ruffled wind-swept mass of foliage. Every line of the gathering is a fold in the fabric of a crumpled world.

But crumples are alien to our desire for order. We prefer a world that answers to the call of reason. Whenever we build or make, we endeavour to straighten things out, to simplify. We like external surfaces to be smooth and flat, and angles sharp. Perhaps we envy the trees their complicated conviviality. We cannot countenance the thought that they might enjoy a way of living together, in peace and tranquillity, that to us remains unfathomable. ‘It’s them or us,’ we say; ‘there’s no more room for both.’ Needing land for cattle and plantations, timber for ships and cellulose for the paper industry, humans through history have hacked the woods, or put them to the torch. Even as I write these lines, regions of the planet are in flames, their inhabitants fleeing for their lives. After the conflagration, the woods will once more rise from the ashes. But human society? Maybe; but maybe not.

Somewhere in Northern Karelia …

      On New Year’s Day, 2016, I – along with some thirty others – received an invitation from the writer and broadcaster Tim Dee to compose an essay on the topic of a place that personally speaks to me. Tired of the numbing combination of facts and spirituality that permeates so much contemporary environmental writing, Dee wanted to show how precious ordinary places are to us, and why it is so important that we continue to care for them. A place, we were told, could be anything or anywhere. It might be a hollow tree or the corner of a street, a childhood bedroom or a sewage farm. It could be in the paved world of the city, with its streets and buildings, or in the vegetated world of the countryside, with its fields and forests. All that mattered was that it should be close to our hearts. The essays would eventually be assembled