Wednesday 15 August 2012

a field study of Myrmidonia E4


watering wheelbarrow

wheelbarrow holloway

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.


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