Re-Storying the Land
Rewilding. It's become something of a buzzword lately. Plant more native trees, restore the ancient woodlands. Bring back the apex predators, the bears and the wolves. Reroute the rivers, often straightened as agriculture was industrialised, back into more natural courses – a work that's been termed, in what seems a quintessentially English way, "rewiggling."
I am not an ecologist in any practical sense. I have no skills I can contribute to any such projects. To be honest, I am barely a gardener (though I am learning). I'm a writer, a storyteller in the oral tradition, an artist of sorts. But there's a work of rewilding to be done with stories, too, not to mention some rewiggling and a great deal of recovery.
"Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is a work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock," wrote Simon Schama in Landscape and Memory.[i] There's a very real sense, I think, in which story flows through the land, and through us, as a river of memory. And when stories are bound up with a landscape, then the landscape becomes as much a web of stories as it is a physical presence, while the stories are made physical – a natural environment of consciousness, in effect.
Probably the best known surviving examples of stories woven into the landscape are the "songlines" of Australia's aboriginal cultures. These pathways – traversed through tales, songs, ritual dances and art among other related means – act as maps of both geography and culture. They constitute a spiritual relationship with the land that is passed down through countless generations.[ii]
That kind of relationship has been largely lost to modern, Westernised societies. What happens if it returns? In his novel Strandloper, Alan Garner touches on that question through the story of Will Buckley, set at the turning from the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Will, a Cheshire bricklayer, is arrested for participating in a local fertility celebration and condemned to transportation to Australia. There he becomes, through a sequence of events, a healer and law-giver among the Aboriginal peoples, and then after thirty-two years he returns to England where he fuses the Dreaming of the Aborigines with the ancient magics of England.
Water of life, water of death,
Each has my soul fed.
Sun, river and thunder
Give me new breath.[iii]
In Will Buckley's condemnation, exile and return we see highlighted a tension between the reawakening of an ancient dreaming and the more recent monotheistic, materialist and alienating cultures that have sought to overlay and suppress it. Yet we see also that the old ways repeatedly break through as they must, emerging again in our consciousness because they are integral to the very earth that we walk upon.
The land is alive regardless of human interest or disinterest. Yet story breathes meaning into the land in a way that allows us, as humans, to make and feel a deeper connection with it. In the past, such connection has often also contained matters of simple survival. Stories can teach – which plants are nutritious and which are dangerous, how to avoid being killed by angry bears, how to read weather patterns, and so on. It's a sad fact that much of that kind of knowledge has been lost in the process of urbanisation.
Yet stories do linger in landscapes that have accumulated centuries, even millennia, of collective folk memory, ancestral as much as individual, that continues to resonate. It's a resonance that can be felt as "atmosphere" even by people who don't know concrete narratives, a sense that can be reforged into new (or perhaps in some sense recovered) stories without changing, let alone losing, the inner essence of a place.
The importance given to stories of place in most cultures is difficult to overstate. As one example, the dindsenchas preserved in Irish tradition – brief mnemonics in poetry and prose that summarise tales relating to the landscape – are evidence that, at least in the Celtic cultures, the association of specific lore and legend with particular places was an important element in knowing the land and its interwoven histories. In The Wooing of Emer, the hero Cuchulain tells the route that he travelled not by giving the names of places on the route but by naming the stories associated with those places.[iv]
However, in modern culture there are great swathes of our landscapes that languish with a kind of collective amnesia. This can be due to awareness being swept aside by the rush and bluster of modern life, it can be through neglect or outright abuse of the environment, it can be simply a consequence of human detachment from the land. In all such cases, the web of stories can be rewoven and can bring the land back to life. There are two related aspects to such a task – revival and reconstruction.
By revival, I mean the work of researching and recovering the stories that may remain lingering in memory, but this can be taken in a very broad way. It includes the stories that continue to be retold as local folktales and folklore, urban myths and legends, local histories, archived materials, oral histories, personal memories, and so on.
This aspect of the work can be quite labour intensive. It can take hours of poring over old books, maps and documents in order to turn up fragments of almost-lost knowledge. For instance, I once uncovered a treasure hoard of stories from my hometown, but only by sifting through volume after volume of the county archaeological society's annual proceedings until I reached back as far as 1870!
But there can also be occasions when information comes as if it's being purposely passed along. Recently, the chance finding (through a series of apparent coincidences) of an early 19th century map covering the immediate area where I live led to the location of a "lost" stone circle close to the local church. The original purposes of that site, and the stories that may have been bound up with it, are not recovered through its appearance on a map. Which brings me to the matter of (re)construction.
Processes such as religious conformism, urbanisation, the fragmentation of communities, all this and more has buried many if not most stories of place under layers of forgetfulness even when they have not been deliberately suppressed. Little or no trace might be left of the tales that belonged in many locations – if they existed at all. In such circumstances, the task at hand is to (re)create stories that fill the vacuum. It is possible that, by using various esoteric techniques, we might even recover lost tales, but at other times and locations it can be necessary to construct stories afresh from a process that involves establishing contact with the genius loci and any Otherworld or non-physical beings associated with the specific place, through use of divination tools such as the Tarot and the runes, through commercially produced or "homebrewed" story cards, through trancework and visualisation, among many methods that can be explored and experimented with.
The intention behind such work is to breathe life back into the geography of the land. A land that is reduced by capitalism and monotheism into nothing more than a resource to be exploited, an assembly of lifeless objects and landscapes without spirit and meaning in and of themselves. It's a work of reclamation; and that task gains urgency as capitalism heats the planet towards a point at which parts become uninhabitable, and life on Earth is driven inexorably towards mass extinction.
Engaging with the process of re-storying the land is, in its essence, an intrinsically anti-capitalist activity. By restoring the physical terrain as a web of stories, we begin to retrieve it as a living entity rich in memory and meaning, a landscape with which our relationship is one of connection rather than of exploitation, where our steps resonate in the footsteps of ancestors human and not-human rather than our way of walking through this world being the heavy tread of domination. While not as dramatic as participation in a strike or demonstration, or in some other form of physically direct action, the process of re-storying serves to quietly undermine the hegemony of capitalist ideas about, and relations with, our environment as it percolates through and re-enchants the land and the culture around us.
Harvesting those stories that still exist, and re-creating to populate the land with stories that are "new" yet rooted in and resonant with the ancient meaning of place, and propagating them as tools to reinforce activism and agitation; this work becomes a key element that helps us build towards a genuinely ecocentric future.
[i]Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (HarperPerennial, 1996).
[ii]Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines (Jonathan Cape, 1987).
[iii]Alan Garner, Strandloper (The Harvill Press, 1996).
[iv]http://www.ancienttexts.org/library/celtic/ctexts/emer.html
Philip Kane
Philip Kane (by Grace Sanchez)
Philip Kane is an award-winning poet, author, storyteller and artist, living in the south-eastern corner of England. He is an “Old Craft” practitioner, a supporter of Anti-Capitalist Resistance, and a founding member of the London Surrealist Group. Philip's work has been published and exhibited across Europe, in the Middle East and in the USA. He is a contributor to The Gorgon's Guide to Magical Resistance (Revelore Press, 2022).