The title to this post is a line from poet John Clare
(1793-1864). The line continues “and
only wrote them down.” I’ve been thinking about Clare a lot lately, as the
precursor to contemporary ecological poetry, but also as a figure important to
field studies and research. After all, that line could easily be transposed …
“I found the data in the fields and only wrote them down…”
Clare had a difficult and in some ways a tragic life. Born
into a family of farm labourers in the village of Helpston, Northamptonshire,
he was schooled enough to become literate—a mixed blessing since it set him
apart from his family and fellow villagers. As a child he wandered throughout
the countryside around the village, enthralled by the life he found there—birds,
animals, plants, springs—and when he discovered poetry he began to write in
exquisite and exact detail about the countryside he knew. His poems are in fact field notes.
A local bookseller arranged for Clare’s poetry to be
published and he enjoyed a brief celebrity—made much of as “the peasant poet,”
invited to London to meet with the movers and shakers in the literary world.
Though writers like Coleridge took his work seriously, to most people he was
merely a curiosity, a rural versifier, and his fame didn’t last. Nor did it aid his attempts to
support a growing family.
In 1809 the Act for the Enclosure of Helpston had been
passed, marking the end of the world Clare knew and loved. The landscape was
radically changed, the commons made inaccessible, and Clare’s poems took on a
political cast. The hard physical labour of his working life, coupled with his
sense of dislocation within the changing countryside he loved, led eventually
to a breakdown. He spent the last 20 years of his life in the Northhampton
Lunatic Asylum.
All of this has been going around in my mind as I read about
our government’s short-sighted and narrow-minded closure of the Experimental
Lakes Area Field Station … done in an unforthcoming manner as the following
article from The Globe tells: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/as-dismantling-begins-shuttering-of-research-station-called-a-travesty/article9846568/
(If you want to know more about the Experimental Lakes Area
check out their website here: http://www.experimentallakesarea.ca/)
As we become more and more a species that lives virtually,
it becomes more and more important to maintain the few possibilities that exist
for experience and exploration of the material world around us, the planet that
supports the virtual dreams and fantasies that seem to beguile those in power.
Too many of those fantasies deny what current research is telling us about the
effects we are having on the world we live in.Clare knew the importance of field studies and research—if
he were alive now I reckon he’d write poems about this closure—and others.
The
Experimental Lakes Area is not the only Canadian field station to face closure.
The University of Saskatchewan has decided to close it’s Kenderdine campus at
Emma Lake. Emma Lake is very well known as a centre for the arts. What is not
as well known is that since 1965 the Biology Department of the U. of S. has
used the campus for field study and research. It’s closure means that students
in biology will no longer have field studies and research as part of their
program. A petition has been circulating against the closure and an
organization dedicated to preserving the area has been formed. You can find out
more, if you want to, at: www.keepkenderdine.com
Here’s what George
Monbiot had to say about Clare in a piece* he wrote for The Guardian on Clare’s birthday (July 13) last year. It’s worth
paying attention to.
“What Clare
suffered was the fate of indigenous peoples torn from their land and belonging,
everywhere. His identity crisis, descent into mental agony and alcohol abuse,
are familiar blights in reservation and outback shanties the world over. His
loss was surely enough to drive almost anyone mad; our loss surely enough to
drive us all a little mad.”
The
closing of these field stations seems to indicate that we are already a little
mad.
*You
can read the full article here:
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