A Book of Silence (26 page)

Instead, I began to walk out away from house and garden, and into the wilderness. Silence had already begun to teach me to listen and hear better, but now I also wanted it to help me to look and see better. Fortunately, Weardale was good country to walk in, high and wild, perfect for meditative hiking and safer for anyone who walks alone. I walked in silence and soon came to recognise that although in the past I had walked and thought, I had never really paid attention.

I had begun to notice this first in Skye; one night there were two red-deer hinds just outside the house; my torch caught their huge eyes staring before they moved off quite calmly. After the next day’s walk I noted in my journal:

Like Merton, and probably related in some ways to where I lived, I began with weather – and particularly with clouds. Clouds are wonderful in so many ways: they are beautiful in both form and colour; they are poetic – their shapes suggesting other things, provoking the imagination; they are prophetic, bringing warnings and promises of what is to come; they are created by complex and various processes, which physics can explain; they have beautiful
names, both scientific and vernacular – cumulonimbus, altocumulus castellanus, cirrus, lenticularis, mares’ tails, thunderheads, mackerel skies; above all they
come
, day after day inexhaustible, never two quite alike, appearing over the horizon and marching in long, solemn or playful procession across the sky. They are yet another of the silent forces around us, announcing in their passage that silence does have meaning, does have shape and purpose and something to teach me.

From clouds and other weather phenomena it was not a long step to insects and flowers. I slowed down enough to watch spiders spin their webs, although never yet to watch a caterpillar through the whole process of spinning its chrysalis or a leaf bud unfurl its first gold-green. In the northern dales, as traditional farming failed economically and conservation and tourism offered better rewards, more and more fields were turned back to traditional management and the wild flowers began to re-establish themselves. They were a constant source of both joy and interest. One June I had almost a fight with a good friend who lamented that British flora was so ‘unspectacular’. It was the wrong word, meadow flowers in grass are not spectacular taken one by one, but in their diversity and modesty and rhythm and detail they are magical. I wanted to learn to see and know them, especially since I was without a real garden of my own.

But soon what I began to look at most seriously, together with long views and wide skies, were birds. I became intrigued by ornithology. At first identifying the birds I saw was a discipline, like listening to the silences and learning to hear their intonations. To look for, then to look at, birds I had to be very alert to the present moment, always in the present tense, the now – that stance Buddhists called ‘mindfulness’. Plants, especially flowers, stay still while you look at them, even while you find the right page in a
Wild
Flowers of Britain
book and compare the various possibilities – but with birds it is now, now or they are gone. You have to move quietly and attentively, always be ready to respond to what presents itself to you. You have to wait. This sense of waiting in silence became
even more marked when I advanced to sitting in a hide or under a drystone wall and paying attention to nothing in the hope that it would at any moment become a bird, become something.

Of course, birds are not silent at all; hearing them can be as much a means of identifying them as seeing them. The cry of a curlew on the wing or the insistent two-tone call of a cuckoo can be as penetrating and far-carrying as a car horn, but still they somehow inhabit the spaces of silence. You need to be silent to see them, and they come and go as a silent gift.

I was deeply influenced at this point by Annie Dillard’s
Pilgrim at
Tinker’s Creek
– her silent ‘stalking’, attentive looking and meticulous, beautiful, mindful reporting of what she saw; and what I knew was that I did not look or see with the attentive, open-hearted concentration that she does:

I wanted to learn to see as Dillard sees.

Quite soon, delightfully, birdwatching became not a discipline but a joy. The immediate rewards were wonderful – surprisingly quickly the moor became inhabited not by an undifferentiated mob
of LBJs (‘little brown jobs’ – a collective term for all those apparently identical and in fact fabulously diverse small brown birds) but by an exquisite variety of interesting species; by moments of familiarity and equally of surprise and delight. There is a lot to learn; not simply in identifying birds but in reading about their habits and relationships. Birds, like flowers, change with the seasons: in Weardale it was always a thrill, for example, to see the first lapwing coming up from the seashore to nest and brood in the early spring. They come in flocks with their strangely floppy flight, and because their wings are dark above and white below they seem to flicker as they fly. On the ground there is an odd contrast between the beauty of their green and purple iridescent plumage and their ridiculous long wispy crests, which blow out in the wind. They are harbingers of spring: the winter is over, the lapwing are back again.

And birds – well, they are beautiful, swift and free. They fly. As I mentioned in the opening chapter, I have always had a deep fascination with flying. In my imagination, in my dreams and in my fiction, flying – birds, angels, dragons, butterflies, witches, free and graceful in the silent air – has been a central image for freedom and joy.

In Weardale there were short-eared owls. Unlike other British owls, this species is partly diurnal, so I could sit at my desk or in my garden and watch them quartering the moor in long, slow, systematic circles. Like all owls they have deep down-strokes in their flight, but their wings are stiffer than brown owls’ so it looked as though they were rowing through the air. They glide in long silent swoops across their hunting ground, balancing effortlessly on the wind. Late on a sunny afternoon I would watch one in its silent flight against the sky for mesmerised hours; sometimes it would move so grandly that its shadow would hunt along the ground below it. All owls have very dense and soft-surfaced feathers, so their flight is unusually silent, even close to. When a short-eared owl is near enough to see in detail it has yellow eyes, set in clear black patches within a paler face; even my usually solemn bird book says it has a ‘mean expression’, but hunting slowly and purposefully through a
long hot afternoon it seems more meditative and elegant than mean. This careful slow search on silent wings is the sort of flying I dream about.

It had always been a fantasy ambition of mine that ‘when I got rich’ I would learn to fly a small aeroplane (she was going to be called
The Broomstick
). While I was living in Weardale, one of my brothers-in-law earned his private pilot’s licence. I asked him to take me up, to experience that promised silence and freedom, over the beautiful flat fields of Suffolk. It was great fun; we swooped over his house and waved to his children in the garden, and we saw the countryside from a new and strangely delightful angle, but silent it was not. It was not just that the engine was both noisy and rattling, it was more that the whole experience was hedged round, as indeed it ought to be, with rules and regulations and communication and busyness. I enjoyed it, but the fantasy died there on the runway and has never come back.

I tried a hot-air balloon too; it was in one sense much better – because a balloon moves at the same speed as the wind that carries it there is no sensation of movement. You look over the side of the basket and see that you are rushing across the landscape, but the sensation is entirely that the landscape itself is gliding away underneath you. The problem, though, was that the sudden roar of the gas burner disrupted all contemplation, and there are again a lot of people, a lot of fuss and a lot of noisy activity involved. Perhaps if one was very rich one could have a balloon of one’s own …

One summer afternoon two men came up on to the moor immediately behind my house and spread out enormous colourful arcs of cloth. It seemed an unlikely place for paragliding since there was no steep drop or void to leap out into and catch the thermals rising. I went to talk to them – they were ‘paramotorists’, a new sport, they told me, that added a backpacked motor and propeller to paragliding ‘wings’ so that they were not dependent on the wind and weather in the old way. They were going to fly home to Newcastle, at a level below air traffic control, so they would be free to go as they chose. They looked extremely charming – somehow
old-fashioned, like Daedalus creating wings from feathers and wax to escape from Minos. When they took to the air their legs hung down like crane flies (daddy-long-legs with wings). They circled over the house, took some lovely aerial photographs for me and then buzzed off eastwards; it was the nearest thing I have ever seen to ‘real’ human flight, but it was not enough, there was no soaring, swooping grace and the engines were too noisy. I gave up – perhaps I should have persevered and tried hang-gliding, which looks wonderful from the ground, but I felt old and stiff and nervous; and also poor – none of these adventures was cheap.

I came to feel that flight, in reality, has proved to be one of the biggest disappointments in the history of technology. For centuries human beings dreamed and created myths and stories about flying. Leonardo da Vinci, along with other scientists and artists, turned his deep creative capacity to thinking about how it might be done; enormous efforts were directed towards achieving what birds and insects do with such ease. That free, weightless movement in three dimensions, like the underwater world, and in addition you can breathe and soar. Free flight is one of the most common subjects of sweet dreams, just as falling is the frequent stuff of nightmares. And yes, we learned to fly; we achieved the dream and it has proved dust and ashes. Ironically enough, everything about human flying is the antithesis of what we dream of. Aeroplanes are noisy, cramped, polluting – they scratch the surface of the blue ceiling and break up the silence of the night. Strapped in like children, herded about like animals, deafened not just by engine noise but also by overcrowded airports and a general atmosphere of pandemonium, and bound by sets of regulations that would be condemned in an ordinary prison, you further have the privilege of doing the maximum possible amount of environmental damage and running the risk of deep-vein thrombosis.

I let the dream go and watched the birds fly instead – and have found myself increasingly reluctant to travel by air.

Then, the last Christmas I was in Weardale, I went to Liverpool to my son’s home. Boxing Day was a raw, cold day with a harsh
wind blowing in from the Irish Sea. Nonetheless, after the pleasurable excesses of the previous day we both felt in need of some air and exercise. He announced that he knew where we were going and I would like it. We drove north through the city and up the coast. There was a winter-holiday calm and very little traffic; eventually we turned off the main road towards the sea. We had come to Crosby and
Another Place
. Here, for nearly two miles of flat grey beach, Anthony Gormley’s hundred identical statues stand with their backs to the shore, gazing out towards the horizon. As the tide rises and falls they are submerged to a greater or lesser extent. Because the installation stretches over a quarter of a mile out to sea the furthest away ones may show only the tops of their heads, or they are drowned. Gormley, the sculptor who created among other works
The Angel of the North
, principally investigates and represents the human body as a place of memory and transformation, often using casts of his own body as subject, tool and material.

Another Place
harnesses the ebb and flow of the tide to explore human relationships with nature. Gormley explains: