Charlotte Stroud

People watching is a city sport. And yet, at a certain time in the morning, a field within walking distance of a countryside village will provide more than enough theatre for the amateur voyeur. The dog-walker is out punishing his whistle, though his ageing retriever can no longer hear it; the man whose wife has sent him walking for his own good lingers near the gate in the wrong shoes; and there is always a woman running, looking as though she might one day keep on going and never come back. It is for this reason that I never go to my field at this time of day but wait instead until I can be alone. Only then, in my experience, will it show me a secret.

Edward Thomas who, like me, walked his green field every day, knew its acreage. He could tell you what kind of hedge separated it from the next, the names of its wildflowers, its berries, its species of fungi. He knew if it was a linnet or a whitethroat nesting in the briars, and when he heard birdsong flung down through the rain, he pictured accurately a skylark and not a song thrush. I don’t know my field in this way. I can only tell you that it swells like a rogue wave from the landscape; that from its crest is a view of the distant Mendips and, on a clear day, of Glastonbury Tor; and that down where its trough meets the edge of the dark wood and the eye loses its vantage, I often get the sense that something else is doing the looking. But when Thomas writes that with familiarity his field ‘gained’ rather than ‘lost its power’, I know exactly what he means. The more I walk my field, the more it reveals. What was once banal brown mud is now a message written in footprints; a story of the night that tells of a bird and a mouse crossing paths. A dead mole is no longer something to be stepped over but like finding the end of a thread, which, if followed, leads to a subterranean world where the root and not the branch dominates, where giant pink paws are more necessary than eyes. When I first began walking this field eight years ago, still cocooned in my city-wadding, I cannot be sure, even, that I would have noticed when one day in spring the field turns silver and millions of young spiders cast their first single thread into the void, reaching, like Michelangelo’s Adam, towards being. ‘Earth’s secrets’, Thomas Hardy called them. They fell on deaf ears and blind eyes.
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We live in an age without secrets. If the Enlightenment was begun by men who held candles up to the dark, it ends with their progeny concealed behind giant searchlights, bent on eradicating shadow altogether. How innocent D. H. Lawrence and Kenneth Grahame now sound, in this era of data harvesting and knowledge economies, in their laments for the mysterious wild god Pan. How terrified they would be to learn of our willingness to relinquish the last vestiges of the dark wilderness – our unploughed, private selves. To live at the tail end of the Enlightenment is to witness it eat its own head. And with the loss of the wild comes a new kind of ignorance. In our civilised comfort, buffered against the cosmos, we live as though our house is built on a rock, forgetting that it is a rock enslaved to an expanding sun, alongside planets and moons that, with their dried-up tributaries and lake-sized craters, are a constant mementomori. That the earth has its own autonomous life, that so much of it is, and will remain, a mystery is an inconvenient truth for a civilisation intent on mastery. But it will also, as we’re beginning to now see, be its undoing.
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Out walking the field one morning, I looked down to see a jellied-pupil staring up at me from the grass. The badgers had decapitated a Canada goose in the night. It looked a clean, almost bloodless kill, as though the body had amicably parted with its head. The eye had the matte quality common to all dead things – whatever small portion of infinity that once inhabited it had now flown – and I thought how it is so often only in frozen death, sickness or injury, that we see more of earth’s secret life. Like when I scrambled furiously down to the stream one afternoon to where my dog had chased a deer, finding it half submerged, fur matted and wet on the rump where it had been caught; its eye, unlike the goose’s, shining blackly. I put my hand on its heaving chest, felt the dense softness of its white undercoat, and then, erecting itself in a single movement, it was gone.

Quantum physics tells us that we only see a stilled version of reality. Under our observation, particles snap into a static place, where before they had been everywhere and nowhere. Reality, in other words, is all waves. To me it seems the only science with respect for mystery. If all we see is the surface of the wave, the bit that rises out of the depths, then most of reality escapes us. What the quantum world implies, then, is an unfathomable number of perspectives on a shape with innumerable sides. But anyone who has found a dead or injured animal, its life either permanently or briefly stilled, will have intuited this for themselves. To find a goose head is to imagine that it once flew over yours, living at heights you will never know; to watch the diamond-shaped tail of a wild deer in retreat is to feel a door closed on you forever.
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In his poem ‘Snake’, D. H. Lawrence watches the creature, which from ‘out the dark door of the secret earth’ has come to drink at his water-trough. Like a ‘second comer’, he writes of feeling ‘honoured’, of feeling like ‘Someone’ was before him. The poem documents a conversion in the presence of a sacred being, a being that Lawrence’s education has instructed him to kill. It is a poem about rational Man discovering that the buffer he has erected against the cosmos, the imaginary circle that he has drawn around himself, has left him in a ‘paltry’ state. For all his education, he knows nothing about life beyond that dark door; in fact, his education has taught him that such a door does not exist. When I walk my field, I see nothing but doors. The mud alone is one vast system of entrances and exits. Where a mole hill bursts up in an explosion of dry earth, there might be thousands of other, smaller openings for worms or spiders. The hedgerows are broken by badger-sized gaps, and all over the field the grass parts in tunnels just wide enough to accommodate a rabbit. And at night, when the stars are out, it feels like a much more ancient door has been rolled back onto infinity, and I think that if encountering something sacred means simply to feel that you are in the presence of the unknown, of a stranger, then this is surely a sacred encounter.

As John Ruskin and the Italian poet Leopardi both knew, humans are never so happy as when they are in the presence of the unknown. We are, as Ruskin wrote, ‘finite creatures’ but with ‘divinely rooted and divinely directed intelligence’, made to seek mystery, to find the greatest pleasure in what Leopardi described as the feeling of drowning in ‘immensity’. Our age without secrets, which moves towards ever greater mastery, is an unhappy one. No wonder: ‘Joy’, Ruskin wrote, is to be found ‘in the continual discovery of new ignorance, continual self-abasement, continual astonishment.’
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Watching my dog in the grip of a scent, his wet nose pulled in zig zags across the field as if by a magnet, rendering him insensible to the sound of his name, to the whistle, to the farmer’s gun, I am happily reminded that much of the earth remains hidden from me. But even Percy – the black Labrador whose superior nose can trace the route of last night’s badger patrol, can tell that a pheasant lay in a thicket some few yards from a fox just six hours before – cannot hear in three dimensions like an owl, or see in infrared like a goldfish. The earth keeps secrets from every species. It does not want to be mastered.
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Charlotte Stroud is a writer and lecturer in English Literature based in Somerset. She is published in The New Statesman, The Times, Financial Times and Engelsberg Ideas.