Echoes of the Woods: Exploring the Ancient Speech of Nature

2. ‘to exorcize these shades speech ceaseless Hunt Master’s ancient speech archaic rocks woods echoes explain where are you ancient pronunciation held in this window branches thrash by fable cries Le Grand Veneur are you mad in your bed your room the corridor to the level skies fragment sounds those black rain windows decayed leaves cover roots do you hear me (...) interrogator disturb Hunter question series between stations have you wonderful intelligible voice’ Eric Mottram, A Book of Herne (1981)

3. ‘Tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra FormosamresonaredocesAmaryllidasilvas.’ You, Tityrus, at ease beneath the shade, teach the woods to resound with “fair Amaryllis.” ‘noscanimussurdis, respondent omniasilvae’ We sing to no deaf ears; the woods echo every note Virgil, Eclogues

4. ‘The woods shall to me answer and my echo ring’ Edmund Spenser, ‘Epithalamion’ (1595)

5. ‘Each type of forest produces its own keynote. Evergreen forest, in its mature phase, produces darkly vaulted aisles, through which sound reverberates with unusual clarity – a circumstance which, according to Oswald Spengler, drove the northern Europeans to try to duplicate the reverberation in the construction of Gothic cathedrals. When the wind blows in the forests of British Columbia, there is nothing of the rattling and rustling familiar with deciduous forests; rather there is a low, breathy whistle. In a strong wind the evergreen forest seethes and roars, for the needles twist and turn in turbine motion.’ R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1994) • ‘The dense forest around and beyond seemed to echo back the warning tones of the speaker’s voice, and as the congregation united their voices in songs of praise, the very trees seemed to lend their cadence in the melody.’ • George Green, History of Burnaby and Vicinity (1947) • ‘The silence of our Western forests was so profound that our ears could scarcely comprehend it. If you spoke your voice came back to you as your face is thrown back to you in a mirror.’ • Emily Carr, The Book of Small (1942)

6. ‘Thamus climbed onto the prow and shouted the message: Pan is dead. ‘Immediately there arose from the forest a great lamentation, which resounded through the peaceful evening sky,’ wrote W. R. Irwin, in his essay, ‘The Survival of Pan’.’ • David Toop, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (2010) • ‘Pan shaking the pine leaves that cover his half-human head often runs over the open reeds with curved lip, that the panpipes may never slacken in their flood of woodland music ... Therefore the whole place is filled with voices.’ • Lucretius, De RerumNatura

7. ‘Already in the wood I was troubled by a multitude of voices – the voices of the hill beneath me, of the trees over my head, of the very insects in the bark of the tree.’ E. M. Forster, ‘The Curate’s Friend’ (1907) ‘There was a rustling everywhere in the woods, beasts sniffing, birds calling one to another, their signals filled the air. And it was flying year for the Maybug; its humming mingled with the buzz of the night moths, sounded like a whispering here and a whispering there, all about in the woods.’ Knut Hamsun, Pan (1894)

8. ‘Chefaquelloachiporti amore? Ah more.’ What does one do whose love has been taken away? Ah, die. Poliziano, Pan and Echo (1494)

9. ‘Sometimes, on Sundays, I heard the bells, the Lincoln, Acton, Bedford, or Concord bell, when the wind was favorable, a faint, sweet, and, as it were, natural melody, worth importing into the wilderness.  At a sufficient distance over the woods this sound acquires a certain vibratory hum, as if the pine needles in the horizon were the strings of a harp which it swept.  All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces one and the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it.  There came to me in this case a melody which the air had strained, and which had conversed with every leaf and needle of the wood, that portion of the sound which the elements had taken up and modulated and echoed from vale to vale.  The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it.  It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating in the bell, but partly the voice of the wood; the same trivial words and notes sung by a wood-nymph.’ Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854)

10. from Athanasius Kircher, Neue Hall –und Thonkunst(1684)

11. O who will show me those delights on high?Echo.         I.Thou Echo, thou art mortall, all men know.Echo.         No.Wert thou not born among the trees and leaves?Echo.         Leaves.And are there any leaves, that still abide?Echo.         Bide.What leaves are they? impart the matter wholly.Echo.         Holy.Are holy leaves the Echo then of blisse?Echo.         Yes.Then tell me, what is that supreme delight?Echo.         Light.Light to the minde : what shall the will enjoy?Echo.         Joy.But are there cares and businesse with the pleasure?Echo.         Leisure.Light, joy, and leisure ; but shall they persevere?Echo.         Ever. George Herbert, ‘Heaven’ (1633)

12. ‘Echo’s a trope for lyric poetry’s endemic barely hidden bother: As I am made to parrot other’s words so I am forced to form ideas by rhymes, the most humdrum. All I may say is through constraint, dictation straight from sounds doggedly at work in a strophe.’ Denise Riley, ‘Affections of the Ear’ (2000)

13. BARK Fig. 16 • (1) (s. c.) (wood structure) A non-technical term • covering all the tissues outside the *xylem cylinder. • NOTE: In older trees, generally divisible into *inner • bark and *outer bark and, in any growing season, • into early bark (consisting typically of *sieve tubes • with *companion cells or *sieve cells → SOFT • BARK) and late bark (consisting typically of *paren- • chyma and a few, small sieve tubes or sieve cells → • HARD BARK) ( ≈ MGWA) ‘The Vocabulary’, ibid., p. 17 BARK cover the outside in season, with a few, ‘Bark’ in Terminology of Forest Science, Technology Practice & Products (1971) / Anthony Barnett’s A Forest Utilization Family (Burning Deck, 1982)

15. ‘It is the task of the translator to find that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original ... Unlike a work of literature, translation finds itself not in the interior of the mountain forest of language (iminnernBergwaldderSprache) but on the outside facing the wooded ridge; it calls into it without entering, aiming at the unique place where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the work in the alien one.’ Walter Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923)

16. ‘the history of the wild boar’s freedom Is ours if it is to be found in forests what is shouted into the forest the forest echoes back throws its terror cry against crumbling ultimates of law’ Eric Mottram, A Book of Herne (1981)

17. ‘La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliersLaissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symbolesQui l'observent avec des regards familiers. Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondentDans une ténébreuse et profonde unité,Vaste comme la nuit et comme la clarté,Les parfums, les couleurs et les sons se répondent.’ Charles Baudelaire, ‘Correspondences’ (1857)

18. ‘You put the book away and spoke in a language I knew from a long time before. We are entering a forest, you said, whose trees have ears and mouths that listen and respond to every passerby. Everything gets reported back.’ Ciaran Carson, For All We Know (2008)

19. ‘Mi ritrovai per unaselvaoscura– ‘I came to in a dark wood’. That is the landscape in which poetry, and translations, are found. Whose woods these are I think I know.’ Ciaran Carson, inaugural QUB lecture (2005)

20. Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Via’ (left), from Fig: Goan Atom 2 (Salt, 2005), and Chrissy Williams’ ‘The Lost’, from The Shuffle Anthology (2010-11)

21. Rachael Hortom’sEchoes of Epping Forest: Oral history of the 20th century Forest (2004) and Edmund Hardy’s ‘A Forest Set’, from VierSomes 000 (Veer Books, 2012)

22. ‘through green GuytrashPadfoot “down the winter winds” dog-spirit in lanes encounter in Elizabeth Shackleton’s diary 1779 “glided a great dog” close in hazel stems “pretercanine eyes” green man outlawed in a skin Miss Brontë’s encounter with male spirit “as if every tree spoke to me in the country holy ecstasy in the woods who can describe it” words Beethoven commits “if all comes to nought the country remains sweet stillness of the woods” then Nietzsche’s joyful wisdom to chord to stop courageously at the surface hold onto the skin’ Eric Mottram, A Book of Herne (1981)

23. ‘the black Grand Veneur of Fontainebleau tall as Mount Zagros whom kings see before death rustles in the night his reed cloak as George Gascoyne poet who came out of the Kenilworth woods to greet Elizabeth covered in ivy carrying a small uprooted tree to say I am the Green Outcast at your service in my emergence forms alone and backed into thickets the verbal mind Jack in the Green near his animals “The Green Knight’s Farewell to Fancy” delight in deer hunt “all forests knew my folly moonshine my light in frosts no cold a sunburnt hue what dangers deep to dig for new found roots prune water boughs a farewell to powdered bullets on every dish one day’s prison moves to hell farewell into the forest “ childhood a fountain legend now peace far from din hunts tree sounds freed from engine’ Eric Mottram, A Book of Herne (1981)

24. ‘sung through the forest mirror sung through the trees cage sung featherless eloquent sung limed by hunters stopped by wine by trees full of birds by our echoes floated through the grove stopped by angels in print stopped by cover by the scared heart idiot by gardener Atropos a hoot owl they have here in school a branchless bush a fitted leather gown a gag the agent speaks “Look I am King of the Forest” I do not fit the absence a slow timber season I slept in roots birch nights palm nights ate salt fog air sung the holy ghost drifted in named trees’ Eric Mottram, A Book of Herne (1981)

25. ‘pillar of this Hill bile stolen bud of hill rites Cernunnos is related to boar : the Gaulish Mercury occurs with the epithet Moccus • - Welsh Mochpigs - : referring to his occasion with pigs or boars :a hunter : or the pig-goddess Minerva’ • ‘green linden blossom tone grun’Lindenblühweis’ • ‘Ich full’s – und kann’snichtversteh’n • nichtvergessen • never forget and I feel never understand • no rule a sound so old and yet so new’ Eric Mottram, A Book of Herne (1981)

26. ‘wiealr alder place community narrow col water durr colder calder a narrow water community cwic evergreen alder live green place a law’ ‘god hoofs bog bone bock buck god goat the good ghost guide gaidha gutha go to the force bald-faced stag Baldur the beautiful lover bald the horned wine in goatskin the penal skin’ Eric Mottram, A Book of Herne (1981)

27. ‘distorted the I song in the greenwood’ Eric Mottram, A Book of Herne (1981)