Riverwise: Meditations on Afon Teifi E-Book

Jack Smylie Wild

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 126

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

Riverwise, a volume of slow river prose centred around Afon Teifi, is a book of wanderings and wonderings, witnessings and enchantments, rememberings and endings. Weaving memoir, poetry and keen observation into its meandering course, it shifts across time and space to reflect the beauty of hidden, fluvial places, and to meditate on the strangeness of being human. Along the way, hosts of things glimmer on the water and resurface from the depths: characters, creatures, plants, ruins, roots and words, all bound and etched together in the liquid slate of Teifi's ceaseless becoming. As new questions are asked beside old, half-forgotten streams, currents conjoin into an unexpected narrative.

Leseprobe

Contents

Map of Cardigan Bay

About Jack Smylie Wild

About Ian Phillips

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction

A Warning

Catchment, Centre, Source

Still

Tributary: Nant Clywedog-isaf

Muse (or, Advice to a Young Poet)

Salmon & Whisky

Island – June

Island – August

Misfits, Magic & Time

Home

April: Gillo-fach

Tributary: Hirwaun

Map

Catch

Nest: Llain-Fforest

Tributary: Piliau

June in the Piliau Valley

Spirit

May in the Mwldan Gorge

Mushrooms & Mystics in the Brefi Valley

Acknowledgements

Copyright

Jack Smylie Wild is a poet, nature writer and award-winning baker. Born in Aberystwyth in 1989, but mostly raised on the edge of Dartmoor, he has been moving between Wales and England for thirty years. It was from his home in Buckfastleigh that as a teenager Jack began wandering, and writing about, the moors and its rivers. He has been captivated by wild spaces ever since, and in 2011 won the Write It, Make It Happen award, which financed an expedition to Central America to write a collection of poetry about the remote cloud forests of Nicaragua. After studying philosophy at Cardiff University, he made a permanent return to his country, and county, of birth, settling in Llandysul with his partner Seren. It was here, jobless and with time on his hands, that he began to heed the calls of Afon Teifi – to explore her length and breadth; her creatures and her catchment. Jack now resides in Cardigan, with his wife and two boys, a stone’s throw from the river he loves.

In 2001Ian Phillips moved away from a career as an illustrator in London to mid-Wales, to study the landscape and improve his printmaking. Since then he has been creating sequential series of large scale landscape and seascape linocuts, utilising all the inspiring mark making, pattern and techniques he has absorbed over the years from a wide variety of sources. He has attended a residency with artists from the Torres Strait Islands at Djumbunji Print workshop in Cairns, studied with Professor Wang Chou in Hangzhou, China, and worked with the Pine Feroda print collaboration.

Phillips now specialises in prints based on drawing long distance walks and exploring areas of iconic interest and lonely beauty.

RIVERWISE

Meditations on Afon Teifi

Jack Smylie Wild

Illustrations by Ian Phillips

for my parents

who showed me the way;

for those teachers

who believed in my words;

and for Jolyon Parish, also,

who wanders the wild lanes

…Remember the small

secret creases of the earth – the grassy,

the wooded, the rocky – that the water

has made, finding its way…1

Wendell Berry

1 Wendell Berry,This Day: Collected and New Sabbath Poems, 1979-2013 (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2014), p.100.

Introduction

This isn’t a traditional river book: it doesn’t tie history and scholarship into an ordered, geographically straightforward account of the Teifi’s course. I tried, once, to write such a book – but the voice that came through wasn’t my own. So I wrote this – a description of how my life is bound to, and entangled within, the currents of a river I love.

In 2012 I moved west to settle in Llandysul, where my partner lived. I was lost, jobless; I had no car, no knowledge of where I had landed; I was yet to make friends; I lacked purpose and motivation. Then, one day, the river called me. It asked me to find out where it came from, where it was headed. (Years later the river would encourage me to ask the very same questions of myself.) I searched for sources and endings to see what they could tell me. I stared at water and wondered what it was. And then I heard the river speak again. Look beyond the water, beyond the banks – look at the life, and the lives, that arise here.

If this book, then, grew out of a yearning for topographical and spiritual connection, in the end its words arose as a hymn to those liminal, fluvial places where one glimpses with astonishment the secret, unfolding moments of an enchanted universe. And if I began this exploration with a heavy leaning toward the ontological mysteries of water itself, eventually my obsession centred around the context of water – that is to say, the landscapes through which it winds its way, the lives it passes by, the moments idled away in its presence. In this way, after years of Teifi-focussed wanderings, I began to turn more and more toward those tributaries and their valleys which fuel the Teifi – those secret springs and rivulets and streams which are, literally, its lifeblood. Three such streams, and their landscapes, emerged as places of deep importance to me – that is, as friends, as sanctuaries.



As with most relationships, the process of befriending the Teifi wasn’t a linear affair – instead, it took place across disparate times and places. I came to know her over many years, by exploring her context, contours and catchment in a somewhat erratic manner. The side effect of this is that the seasons, and sometimes years taken as wholes, are jumbled up into a mishmash of “Teifi time”, jerking, sometimes obviously and at others more subtly, hither and thither against a backdrop of more ordered geographical progression. This is, after all, how we ourselves play out our lives – moving forward, yes, but also skipping ahead, retreating back, mixing time and place in currents of remembering and dreaming.

And it happens that I began life by the Teifi, in her surrounding valleys and hills. I never set out to incorporate memoir into this account, but as the years went by – and I realised more and more that this book was to be a tale of friendship, as much about myself as it is about Teifi – it came to seem important to relate certain aspects of my own life which are intertwined with her currents and her country. Acquainting myself with Teifi’s landscape, it turned out, was to inadvertently begin a process of refamiliarisation with my own past. Four years in, it occurred to me that one tributary in particular, high in the hills, needed to be revisited, and had hitherto remained mysteriously absent from my writing and radar. Old questions and some new answers, neglected throughout the entire course of this journey, were waiting for me there.



The book also represents a searching for some kind of answer to a question Seamus Heaney poses at the end of his poem, ‘A Herbal’:

Where can it be found again,

An elsewhere world, beyond

Maps and atlases,

Where all is woven into

And of itself, like a nest

Of crosshatched grass blades?1

1 Seamus Heaney,Human Chain(London: Faber & Faber, 2010), p.43.

A Warning

No one will teach you your land – not in its full, hidden charm; not in the secret ways it can become your own: you must journey out, alone, seeking those forgotten places where pieces of your total self dwell, lying in wait, residing in the form of a gorse-covered slope, in the bend of a lonely brook, in the view of the high moor curving into the sky. At first you might not realise that you are seeking and finding pieces of the puzzle of the self; after all, you are discovering the intricacies and intimacies of an outer realm too. But upon returning home, you feel how knowing the land is also to acquaint yourself with that vaster body, or being, which you, in small but glorious part, form.

Catchment, Centre, Source

“Of al the pooles, none stondith in so rokky and stony soile as the Tyve doth, that hath withyn hym many stonis. The ground al about Tyve, and a great mile toward Stratfler*, is horrible with the sight of bare stones, as Cregeryri Mountains be. Llin Tyve is in cumpase a iii quarters of a mile, being ii miles est from Strateflere. It is fedde fro hyer places, with a little broklet, and issueth out again by a small gut. There is in it very good trouttes and elys, and noe other fisch…”1

*Strata Florida Abbey

Sometimes the source beckons, and suddenly I am driving the fifty winding miles from the mouth of the river to the place, high in Elenydd, where the Cambrian hills give birth to many springs. I travel up the coast road, and then pass inland, over Mynydd Bach – the bleak moorland where I spent the first few years of my life.

As I drive along the twisting, familiar lanes of this small wilderness – where the weather rules supreme – I move backwards in time as I pass the landscape of my childhood: feral sheep; lichen-flecked walls; lakes – orllyns – like the crystal eyes of the hillsides; abandoned, graffitied bus stops; petrol stations fit only to refuel rusty Morris Minors and antique tractors; lonely shacks sheltered by a single tree, surrounded by decaying vehicles, their yellow paint flaking to reveal the rust that will return them to the ground; tussocks of grasses, rushes and sphagnum mosses that ooze an earthy, damp perfume.

It seems to me that anyone who spends time getting to know this range of hills between the Cambrians and the coast will fall for it in a profound way. Gwyn Williams, writer and translator of Welsh poetry, was one such inhabitant of Mynydd Bach. He lived for many years near its centre, and his deep bond to the area is recorded in hisSummer Journal 1951.

Before settling on the moorland permanently, he would spend his summers in the isolated cottage of Blaenbeidog, near Trefenter, with his wife Daisy, a textile artist and painter. Between his translation work and visiting Aberystwyth to socialise and go to the National Library, he spent his days hunting wildfowl, fishing and birdwatching, as well as partaking in the more pragmatic affairs of cutting peat, harvesting oats and making hay with his old friend, and second cousin, Dai Morus.

His diary entry for Saturday the 4thof August describes a typical summer day for Gwyn, although his sighting in the evening sky was presumably a less ordinary occurrence:

“Helped Dai Morus with some rough hay and went shooting with him after supper. We did the usual pools and bits of bog and put nothing up. Dai got a teal at a pool beyond Garn Wen but the mountain was very quiet. The curlew seem to have gone. A lovely evening with a wild sky… on the way home we saw a flying saucer, or what has come to be called so. It was fairly high in a clear patch of sky to the north-west… it shone like polished silver, was very slim and slightly curved on the top side… It gave me the impression of being extremely far away, but it was quite distinct in the sky.”2

These days the hills here harbour a new cast of characters. Tucked away on a lonely hillside, in an ancient, rusting school bus, lives our old friend Greg. Biker, hippy, wild man, bearded recluse – none of these epithets do justice to the individual who has made this place his home, by dwelling here quietly, under the radar, for thirty or so years in order to lay claim to this small patch of Mynydd Bach. On the face of it, he probably epitomises the kind of person more traditional folk such as Gwyn would have frowned upon; would have even feared perhaps. But Greg has become as much a part of this wild land as Gwyn or any of his forebears; has come to understand and love it in his own way just as deeply.

And while Gwyn and Dai took pleasure in hunting the wild creatures that abounded in the forests, bogs and fields here – thus cutting their lives short – Greg has set up a makeshift sanctuary for the wounded animals he sometimes chances upon on the moor or in the lanes that meander about these quiet hills. When I stop by, he is caring for a buzzard and a fox, which otherwise would have perished from their human-inflicted injuries.

We sit out in the hot sun in front of his antique bus and stare at the distant glistening of Cardigan Bay. ‘This is what it’s all about,’ he muses. ‘People are welcome to come here and enjoy it, but if they’re arseholes, they can piss off.’ Driving on to my destination, these words echo round my head. I found out two years later that he’d been diagnosed with a ferocious form of lung cancer just before I visited him; he literally didn’t have time for people – who lacked respect for this land – to get in the way of his connection to it. When death is on your doorstep, anything that threatens to get in the way of raw life is unwelcome. Greg and Gwyn aren’t so different after all, I think: both want visitors to respect their home and their way of life.

Two years before this particular trip to Greg, I happened to consider my own (inevitable) death in relation to this elemental landscape of stone, water, wind and light:

I will die,

Fulfilled or not so much –

Or somewhere in between.

But the smells of Mynydd Bach will endure –

Those damp perfumes of rain-hammered moor

And water-logged moss

And the base note which strikes a deep chord

And cannot be named –

Cannot be found elsewhere.

The scent of dark pine plantations,

Of nibbled grass and sheep shit –

These come and go;

But always the odour of earth,

Of its peat and its plants,

Of the life and the light

That grow from the dirt and the dead.

When I die this smell will be the last thread

Of my spirit to linger here,

Before dispersing into unknown ethers.

It will depart after my other senses

Have thrown up the place,

Conjured Mynydd Bach in the mind of a man dying:

A row of gnarled beeches,

Like a many-legged beast,

Arching down the hillside

To sip from a llyn –

Eiddwen or Fanod,

Whose waters lap the shore,

Ruffled into waves

By the wild west wind.

The birds here

Suddenly ascend –

The grey gulls,

The heron, the nervous flock of lapwings;

The swallows above the glistening water

Rising higher,

And way up, in the cloud almost,

A red kite spiralling.

I will glimpse the things men made –

Tools to tame a wasteland,

Walls to hold a home,

Ravaged by the elements.

The ruined shacks and crumbling stone of cottages,

Where a holly grows through a chimney

And an ash climbs through a window;

The rusting gates, the rotting stiles,

The fences succumbing to the ground

And the grind of the long winters.

And then the view from Hafod Ithel,

Shared one hazy evening with my father,

Of all Ceredigion.

And then the smell of death and life,

That damp perfume of Mynydd Bach.