ISSN 1758-6488
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From 'Edgelands' Non-fiction |
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Around the same time, Stevenson wrote the poem ‘Skerryvore: the Parallel’. ‘Skerryvore’ was the name of the house in Bournemouth that Thomas Stevenson bought for his son’s wife; Skerryvore itself was the name of a rocky reef to the west of Mull that had claimed many ships, until a lighthouse was erected there by Alan Stevenson, the novelist’s uncle.
Here all is sunny, and when the truant gull
Skims the green level of the lawn, his wing
Dispetals roses; here the house is framed
Of kneaded brick and the plumed mountain pine,
Such clay as artists fashion and such wood
As the tree-climbing urchin breaks. But there
Eternal granite hewn from the living isle
And dowelled with brute iron, rears a tower
That from its wet foundation to its crown
Of glittering glass, stands, in the sweep of winds,
Immovable, immortal, eminent.
Later, in the Samoan Isles, Stevenson, while working on his Records of a Family of Engineers, wrote home asking for his father’s engineering pocket book: ‘I cannot do without it.’ In some complex way, Stevenson always fretted over the usefulness or true value of art, art compared to the practical, life-and-death construction work of the engineer. Strange now that even the lighthouses of our inshore waters are all automated and unmanned, though his father’s simple and elegant screen for meteorological instruments is still an absolutely standard piece of kit.
What’s worth more in the end: art or practical utility? As Matthew Arnold put it: ‘Doors that open, windows that shut, locks that turn, razors that shave, coats that wear, watches that go, and a thousand more such good things, are the invention of the Philistines.’
Edgelands do weather very well. The aesthetics of weather are enhanced by the forms and colours of the place. Rain at night is often beautiful, but look at slant rain at night, falling on a fenced-off yard full of identically liveried vans or brand-new cars, lit by powerful security lights; the multiple tones and rhythms of torrential rain on metal roofs and doors. Then there are the squalls of rain that blow across a motorway to settle over pools of unnamed standing water, rattling through the scrappy copses beside the water. As Paul Muldoon says in his early poem ‘Wind and Tree’, ‘most of the wind / Happens where there are trees’.
But it’s not just rain. Have you seen the sudden, filmic light effects of low winter sun across a ruined factory, the hard-cut shadows and blinding reflections off broken glass? Late-afternoon sun on a clear day throwing giant shadows like ink fields on the scrubland behind power station cooling towers? Or milk morning sun brushing the tops of willowherb, nettle, thistle, in the unkempt field behind the car-crushers? Perhaps it is because we are so used to seeing the edgelands used as a movie set that this angled sunlight seems so dramatic, so designed.
And is it the brokenness of the edgelands that renders them so susceptible to weather, so apparently responsive to it? Many people with broken bones will claim, years after the break has healed, that they can still tell when the weather is about to turn by an ache at the point of the fracture. Muldoon’s poem ‘Wind and Tree’ goes on to describe two trees, entangled by the wind:
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