"I've spent most of my life under the cover of trees, and the rhythms of the woodland year have been a kind of metronome: that burst of brilliance and energy in the spring, the long, dense trance of summer, the sumptuous fading-away of the autumn, the clean, bare months of winter, the season of working and cutting back. I reckoned I could always lose myself in a wood, not just in its spaces, but in the layers of history bound up in its grain and forkings and clow cycles of light and shade. A wood's aura of history seems to go back not just beyond what generations of humans have done to it, but beyond civilisation altogether. The forest, the wildwood, is the nature we think we have, in both senses, 'grown out of', and in woods you have always the feel of 'going back'. They are places of long memory, and resilience"

- Richard Mabey, from Nature Cure: A Story of Depression and Healing.

"The long, dense trance of summer" - niiiiiiice

Mabey grew up in my hometown Berkhamsted. For most of his life he continued to live in the Chilterns (Nature Cure is about his decision to jolt himself out of depression by moving to the very different landscape of East Anglia). 

I wonder where he lived in Berko and whether he frequented what we called The Wood.

 (There are plenty of other woods around Berkhamsted but for us, this, being the nearest one, was just The Wood. A magical place, for boys running wild and free in the school holidays.  But looking on maps online, the Wood is considered so insignificant, it doesn't even have a name - nor could I find any photo documentation up there. It seems to have the status of an oversize spinney, the kind of geographical feature that no one bothers to memorialize.) 

A man with a sense of stile. 

Although known as a naturalist - author of the best-selling guide to foraging Food For Free, during that early '70s cultural moment of interest in self-sufficiency, The Good Life etc -  Mabey actually wrote one of the earliest serious books about pop: part of that flurry of rock books that came out between 1968-70. 

Discovering this irritated me as I had imagined I was 

a/ the first rock critic to come from my town 

b/ the first rock critic to come from my school. 

The Pop Process is a curious book: a melange of sociology (Mabey had been involved in an earlier publication about class) and enthused pop reviewing (largely remixed from articles for places like New Society). There is a detailed account of a gig by a local band in Berkhamsted Town Hall.  

I am fascinated by these early documents of people trying in real time to make sense of what had happened from the mid-50s to the mid-60s.  Or not quite real-time, but very immediate recollection in the aftermath of the headlong rush of it all. 

Here are my attempts to move into the Mabey Zone.  Not bad as first attempts at Nature Writing. 

A book rated by hauntology / psychogeographic types, about strange patches of wilderness e.g. the strips of land that form pathways for pylons. I've had but not read this for quite a few years now.

 "A nutty Puritanism still flourishes in the arts, not just in the schoolteachers’ approach of wanting art to be “worthwhile,” but in the higher reaches of the academic life with those ideologues who denounce us for enjoying trash as if this enjoyment took us away from the really disturbing, angry new art of our time and somehow destroyed us.....

"The problem with a popular art form is that those who want something more are in a hopeless minority compared with the millions who are always seeing it for the first time, or for the reassurance and gratification of seeing the conventions fulfilled again. Probably a large part of the older audience gives up movies for this reason—simply that they’ve seen it before. And probably this is why so many of the best movie critics quit. They’re wrong when they blame it on the movies going bad; it’s the odds becoming so bad, and they can no longer bear the many tedious movies for the few good moments and the tiny shocks of recognition. Some become too tired, too frozen in fatigue, to respond to what is new. Others who do stay awake may become too demanding for the young who are seeing it all for the first hundred times. The critical task is necessarily comparative, and younger people do not truly know what is new."

                   --- Pauline Kael,  "Trash, Art, and the Movies",  Harper's, February 1969   

 "[Baudrillard's] vision of contemporary society exhibits a careening of growth and excrescence (croissance et excroissance), expanding and excreting ever more goods, services, information, messages or demands — surpassing all rational ends and boundaries in a spiral of uncontrolled growth and replication. Yet growth, acceleration, and proliferation have reached such extremes, Baudrillard suggests, that the ecstasy of excrescence (i.e., increasing numbers of goods) is accompanied by inertia. The process of growth presents a catastrophe for the subject, for not only does the acceleration and proliferation of the object world intensify the aleatory dimension of chance and non-determinacy, but the objects themselves come to dominate the exhausted subject, whose fascination with the play of objects turns to apathy, stupefaction, and inertia."

-- unknown writer, entry on Baudrillard, from Stanford Guide to Philosophy

 “Art arrived at that point of extreme maturity that determines civilizations which have grown old; ingenious, complicated, clever, full of delicate hints and refinements, gathering all the delicacies of speech, borrowing from technical vocabularies, taking color from every palette, tones from all musical instruments, contours vague and fleeting, listening to translate subtle confidences, confessions of depraved passions, and the odd hallucinations of a fixed idea turning to madness.... 

"... language already veined with the greenness of decomposition, savoring of the Lower Roman Empire and the complicated refinements of the Byzantine School and the last form of Greek Art fallen into deliquescence; but such is the necessary and fatal idiom of peoples and civilizations where an artificial life has replaced a natural one and developed in a person who does not know his own needs. Contrary to classical style, it admits of backgrounds where the specters of superstition, the haggard phantoms of dreams, the terrors of night, remorse which leaps out and falls back noiselessly, obscure fantasies that astonish the day, and all the soul in its deepest depths and innermost caverns conceals the darkness, deformity, and horror, move together nervously”

                        - Théophile Gautier on decadence, from Constantinople. 

 "Art is domination. It's making people think that for that precise moment in time there is only one way, one voice. Yours" 

- Maria Callas

 

Green Gartside, speaking to Smash Hits, in 1982

 “You must be regular and natural in your habits, like a bourgeois, that you may be violent and original in your work.”

- Flaubert