Landmarks (19 page)

Davidson’s writing often aspires
‘to capture the moment, lost and yet preserved forever’
. His sentences devote themselves to the record of volatile subjects – textures of weather, tones of colour, a fall of light
‘which dies even as
the hand attempts to catch its likeness’ – but they do so in foreknowledge of the failure of their task. The relationship between the fixed and the fugitive is at the heart of his work, and at the source of its melancholy. The inestimable value of the instant is proved by its perishability. The paragraphs of his essays, the verses of his poems: these act as what Thomas Browne in
Urne-Buriall
– his great 1658 meditation on corruption, pristination and retrieval – beautifully calls a
‘conservatorie’
. Yet none of these ‘conservatories’ is quite reliable, none fully sealed. All leak a little light. All are vulnerable to what Davidson calls
‘the predatory loss that shadows all human pleasure’
. Walking the coast of Arctic Finland in summer, he comes upon a cove:

basalt rocks bordering the Baltic
, with the dazzling track of the sun coming straight through the sandbar which sheltered the bay. A young man was swimming there, quietly and alone, swimming breaststroke with barely a ripple – until he moved out of the shadowed waters and his tow-fair head vanished in an instant into the brilliance of the high sun on the sea.

Here, the completion of the scene is also its annihilation: the swimmer cannot stay still, however tranquil his motion, and must move on from the shadows and into the irradiating ‘high sun’, which both illuminates and abolishes him.

Yes, melancholy steeps Davidson’s language, and melancholy
differs from grief in its chronic nature: it is an ache not a wound, it lies deeper down, is longer lasting, is lived with rather than died of. We might perhaps imagine melancholy hydrologically, as a kind of groundwater – seeping darkly onwards, occasionally surfacing as depression or anguish. It is clear, reading Davidson’s work, that he is someone for whom melancholy has been an enduring companion. When in an essay he writes that a
‘black dog flickers
in and out of the shadows at the edge of the lawns’, this is at once a Labrador and a metaphor. His writing has the power to strike its readers with sorrow also, which is among the reasons why, although his essays often emerge out of the impulse to account for art, they are art themselves.

‘We have gathered things
about us which are of the place where we live,’ Davidson remarks of the contents of his house and its garden. So many images in his work are of ‘gatherings’: gatherings of people who must perforce disperse, the gathering up of last things, lost things, late lustres. The
‘moony silver
’ of a ‘double-handed silver cup’ on a table ‘gathers the reflections of the garden and the summer and the bright sky into itself’. A bend in the stream
‘breaks forward into the sunlight
and the water draws the light into itself’. High tarns among peat and bracken
‘hold the dimming sky
’, ‘last light hangs reflected in mirrors inside the house’, a ‘pale yacht steers through the long dusk to far islands in the archipelago’. The act of ‘gleaning’ (a word which carries a shimmer of gleaming) occurs often in his writing – a fossicking after items of value, a gathering that is both a refusal of time’s claims and a dark counting of losses.

Davidson’s relationship with loss also explains the what-ifs, the returns-from-the-dead and the hypothetical dreams that recur in his
essays and poems. One of these, the finest of them, concerns Eric Ravilious, who disappeared in 1942 off the coast of Iceland while flying a search-and-rescue mission for another downed plane. Radar ceased to register the plane’s presence, radio contact was lost, and no trace was ever found of craft or crew.
‘All the years I have been writing
about Ravilious,’ Davidson recalls in a late essay:

I have occasionally dreamed about him: that he will come into the cold hall of a house which does not exist, a house smelling of coal fires; that he will begin to talk at once, shaking the Arctic Ocean off his dark hair as if it were only rainwater after all, as if he had been caught in the storm on a headland, benighted, laughing, painting out of doors.

Optical physics refers to a phenomenon known as the ‘duct’. A duct is an atmospheric structure, born of a thermal inversion, which takes the form of a channel that traps light rays within a few minutes of the arc of the astronomical horizon. Because the curvature performed within a thermal inversion is stronger than the curvature of the earth’s surface, light rays can be continuously guided along the duct, following the earth’s own curvature, without ever diffusing up into space. In theory, therefore, if your eyes were strong enough to see that far, a duct would allow you to gaze around the whole earth and witness your own back and shoulders turned towards you. The existence of ducts has been theorized since the eighteenth century, but their science became more fully understood during the Second World War, when radar operators began observing returns from objects far beyond the normal horizon-limit. I think of Davidson’s what-ifs as versions of the duct: strange spaces in which time’s
claims are stilled – and through which one might see so far into the future that it becomes the past.

~

Both Lopez and Davidson are north-minded – and both are topographic humanists. They see landscape not as a static diorama against which human action plays itself out, but rather as an active and shaping force in our imagination, our ethics, and our relations with each other and the world. In the work of both, place invests consciousness and geography is inseparable from morality. Throughout their writings recurs the idea that certain landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them or live within them. The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a beach, the bent trunk of a wind-blown tree: such forms can call out in us a goodness we might not have known we possessed.
‘In a winter-hammered landscape
,’ writes Lopez, ‘the light creates a feeling of compassion … it is possible to imagine a stifling ignorance falling away from us.’ The north is, to both men, especially powerful in this regard. Its severities bring us to witness the transgression of our own limits; its austere beauties induce both modesty and heart-lift.
‘The sharpness of the morning frost
had cleared the air into a magnifying lens,’ recalls Davidson of a pin-bright Cairngorm dawn. In wind-washed Arctic air that is
‘depthlessly clear’
, observes Lopez, both terrain and mind stand revealed.