watering wheelbarrow
Robert Macfarlane asks (in, ‘The
Old Ways’) what does he know when he is in a place that he can know nowhere
else, and, what does this place know of him that he cannot know of himself?
‘The Old Ways’ is an account of
various walks Macfarlane has made and what he has learned by them, the
intimacies of nowhere else around, within and without him. So far as I have
accompanied him along his written recollections, some of the routes and locations of the walks are familiar to me (e.g. the Icknield Way), yet by his
eloquent knowing and writing the ways are also rewardingly unfamiliar.
Macfarlane suggests there is
vanity involved in the making of the journeys (and the written accounts)
however he has looked beyond himself, and his sense of place, to seek the insights
of others who have made similar and very different journeys to him, most
notably, the old way romantic, George Borrow, and the haunted and haunting
poet, Edward Thomas. They, and other companions, have enabled Macfarlane to
avoid immersion in a vanity project.
I have been wondering where I
have been, and where I could go, to apply Macfarlane’s questions. Appropriately,
a place that came to personal prominence recently might have much to say about
vanity; the place being a poly-tunnel on an allotment, in Chingford, at the edge
of the Lea Valley. This poly-tunnel, and the site around it, has some relevance to
E17 in that surplus fruit and vegetables grown there are sometimes sold from
Organiclea’s Saturday stalls – and are labelled ‘ultra local’.
Organiclea Stall Skill Share 4th August
Red ants in the polytunnel
I have been going to the
allotment since late summer 2003 following an invitation via a flyer from
Organiclea. The poly-tunnel was erected by the founding members of Organiclea who started reclaiming the neglected site from a bramble thicket in 2001.
The tunnel consists of a series of metal hoops, deeply set in the ground, over
which translucent plastic sheeting is stretched. Its length runs east west; an
orientation that maximises the sunlight it can receive. The special
‘greenhouse’ plastic has seldom been cleaned and therefore the tunnel is not
performing optimally; although for such an old tunnel it is still in good shape
structurally. The brambles have only just started encroaching through the
inevitable cuts, tears, and rips in the plastic skin and so they are perpetuating a
cycle of counter reclamation (with more vigour this year) since the
collectively minded ‘Organiclea’ departed for pastures new and more in keeping
with their
‘permacultural’ ambitions.
Recently I found myself walking, then standing, then dancing in the poly-tunnel; making awkward balletic steps on my
toes to move between the raised beds, in-between the lush verdancy. All the
while I held a watering can to water the needy plants. What had precipitated
my clumsy toe stepping and wayward spouting? This year the poly-tunnel has
become something of a formicarium – a ‘formilopolis’ - and there is barely a square inch, let alone a square foot, of ground that is not teaming with red ants, each of them, I’m told,
selflessly pursuing an anarchistic socialist utopia. My two-toe-steps were made
to minimise the square footage of my rubber based footprints, for heavier steps (I'm told) trigger the offensive defensive instincts of the myrmidons with their intensely
irritating bites. My efforts to avoid the attentions of the ants
were made in vain, as this year many ants scaled the heights of my inside
legs and bit where no ants have bitten before. What indeed does this place
know of me that I cannot know of myself? Modesty?
What is the anarchistic socialist
utopia I was trampling on? William Morton Wheeler (1865-1937), the founder of
American myrmecology, was inclined to anthropomorphise ant behaviour (or
sociality) with an imagination perhaps informed by a culture of classical myth
and militarism. John Berger (1926- ) wrote in, ‘Why Look at Animals’, ‘animals first
entered the imagination as messengers and promises ..... magical functions,
sometimes oracular, sometimes sacrificial.’ Sacrifice is what Homer celebrated
of the ancient nation, the Myrmidons, in The Iliad,
“Ye far famed Myrmidons, ye
fierce and brave! Think with what threats you dared the Trojan throng”
Modesty prohibits me from describing
the fate of some of the ants which scaled my mythical heights however I imagine way
down deep, beneath my square toes, the Myrmidons are exchanging classical concoctions of
pheromones that describe legendary derring-do in the dark and vertiginous regions of
Field Study’s Man in E17 in E4. Rumours, on the grapevines of that valley side, that I wear a thong, while gardening, are specious, and serve only to elevate the bawdy warrior myth of the surviving mighty Myrmidons.
Another ethologist, Konrad Lorenz
(1903-1989), questioned this metaphorical and mythical coexistence more
seriously in the wake of World War II, and during, The Cold War. He stated he ‘was tempted
to believe that every gift bestowed upon man by his power of conceptual thought
has to be paid for with a dangerous evil as the direct consequence of it.’ Ants
had emerged terrifyingly large from the irradiated deserts of that man’s
generation.
As ever, one man’s (if not ant’s)
utopia is another’s dystopia and according to
Pierre Andre Latreille (1762
-1833), a place of ants is one ‘of inequalities, hard labour and dreary
chastity’. When Latreille penned his dour perceptions of the lot of ants,
‘myrmidon’ was also a term used to describe a loyal, unquestioning follower and
hired ruffian; that is, a person lacking imagination. But here, from the peaceable gift
of the polytunnel (a modest Eden nestled in a vein of the Lee Valley), milk and
nectar must break, and honey sweat through the pores of oak* and so there has
to be another way of re-imagining the proliferation of
‘them’, the ants.
So I have continued to dance, contorting to scratch the tops of ant bite induced spots bloodily, to enter a funky
reverie of pain that could be a rite of passage by which, one day, I might become
Solenopsidini. Alas, conceptual
thought disrupts the trance, as a question has occurred to me about the collective
mass/weight of the ants, in the poly-tunnel, and around the allotment as a whole.
Could it be there is more ’ant’ than ‘man’ at work in the paradise garden?
This year the allotment as a collaborative human effort has been something of a
failure as few of us sharing the allotment have been able, willing or wanting
to cultivate it; some loss of oneself to the intimacy and poetry of the place
has been tainted by resentful thoughts about the absence of ‘
the others’. Outnumbered
and outweighed! To counter this emotional density I have tried to
accommodate thoughts about the benefits of the ants – how fantastically they
are turning over the soil, how efficiently (ruthlessly?) they are preying upon
all sorts of fellow beasties that can try the patience of a hopeful gardener. I
can also wonder at their intimacy with the place, how there is barely a square
millimetre of the terrain untracked by (and to) the power of 6 legs & feet, and
communicable by senses/sensations only imaginable.
Have I found the ‘nowhere else’
of the place and the nowhere, or no-one else, of me? This is unlikely, for vanity
has come between the place. Typically, I performed for a story to be
recounted later on. In this state of un-communion I am overweight, rather than
outweighed, and carrying too much of a sense of self towards a place. This prevents
actually getting and being there. In, ‘The Old Ways’, Macfarlane probably gets
over this threshold (of vanity) by a
balance of imaginative recall and reinvention.
