The Singing Loch and the Spirits of place

An occasional series looking back at my novels, and the themes I’ve explored in them.

Do your local beauty spots still do it for you?. Mine have been robbed of something, or rather something vital in them has died as the result of an unwholesome symbiosis, one in which the parasite kills the host rather like the ivy eventually strangles the tree. This is illustrated no more forcibly than by a bag of dog excrement hanging in a bush.

I don’t know why people do this, no more than I understand why they scatter beercans and fast food cartons. But this is at the level of detail and isn’t really important as details in themselves, but if we take it from a wider perspective all these things can be viewed more simply as manifestations of an urban sickness. The bag of excrement hanging from the tree, the empty drinks carton squashed and left to rot by the kissing gate, the beer-cans in the ditch, these are the focal points, the weapons of the urban terrorist, the blind hoards brain-washed into perpetrating their various atrocities, the release points for a particular kind of toxin that targets the spirits of place, causing them to shrink back, to flee, to seek out those remaining enclaves where such subtle entities as spirits can still survive in this our modern and increasingly insensitive world.

This talk of spirit is not religious, not pagan, not bonkers. The spirit of place is an imaginary concept, subjective, something both you and I might feel when we walk together through the forest at twilight, or mount the craggy fell-side in cloud dappled sunlight, yet we will visualise it, project it out into the world in different ways. It’s about imagination, and the personal story we lay upon the land. It’s a personal vision, yet one that unites us all, and nourishes us in something that is uniquely human.

Now, at the risk of offending most of the world’s population, which is by now gathered into cities and other blighted sprawling urban carbuncles, I see these as dead places and have shunned them all my life, except for quick forays when they cannot be avoided. But I always leave them feeling weakened, gasping for the quiet of trees and wild green where the story is not rendered unchanging and impersonal in cracked concrete, and crumbling for want of that essential imaginative overlay.

Cities kill something in us. Yes, they are supposed repositories of all our high art and culture, but they are also violent places, nurturing a culture of mistrust, of savvy street-smartness, teeming with the existential bacteria of scams and crime and all their futile countermeasures. The population density in such places may be many tens of thousands per square mile, yet no one knows one another. Paranoia is inevitable. They are grey places, void of any colour that is not artificial, and worse,… they spread.

When I was writing the Singing Loch in the eighties, I could still rely upon the occasional stretch of meadow, patch of woodland, or a twist of ancient pathway in and around my locale, here in the North West. But the builders were everywhere too, planting their flags like encamped armies. They were about the King of money’s business, colonisation of the otherwise “useless” green, turning it into labyrinths of brick and concrete and tar.

So I would flee north, to the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. You could still find the spirits of place there, but there was also an appalling loneliness about them, as if the spirits were weeping, result of generations lost, cleared from their rented subsistence farms to make way for more profitable sheep. This is another aspect of the greyness, that it can leak out, manifest itself in far places to begin the process of corrosion, of corruption. I would return from the islands with sheep ticks attached to my elbows and back of knees, evidence the land was sick, and the spirits of place there quite possibly an illusion.

This is another aspect of the spirits of place; they border on the ancient lore of the Faery, need us as much as we need them, but they do not suffer fools gladly. This kind of thinking is very old, perhaps best expressed in the literature and the art of the Romantic period. It’s a much misunderstood philosophy, essentially a search for the sublime, literally something in us that dwells at a subliminal level, but which can be glimpsed by seeking its reflection in the natural world, the world as nature intended, or at the very least as the Daoists of old China would have it, most sympathetically crafted to the needs of mankind.

And when that vision is lost, when the Faery have fled, we are left with only the base animal in ourselves, and the very worst of mankind is manifested. Then the beer-cans in the hedge become the key that opens the door on less benign spirits, and all the shadow creatures that feed despair. Then the world becomes an empty place, a place of concrete and pollution, and money for the few, a world in which the butterflies are killed and pinned to be gawped at in glass cases, as if we could comprehend from such atrocity what it means to see these creatures alive in the wild on a warm summer’s day.

The environment can nurture that which is highest in human nature, or it can erode it, render it unconscious and entirely unfeeling and that we have largely lost sight of such a phenomenon bodes ill for all our futures. In my story the Singing Loch, the spirit of place is represented by the majestic titular loch, a place of renowned beauty, rich in sublime reflection, but a place that has been put out of bounds by corporate interests. In the story I tried to get at the importance of such places, and how their capture by monied interests threatens something vital in all of us. Yet such places are lost to us every day, carved up, quarried, mined, poisoned, the spirits evicted, the people left to rot in hovels, surrounded by piles of detritus, and the few remaining, sickly trees hung with bags of excrement.

The Singing Loch made not one jot of difference to any of this of course. Indeed things are a lot worse now than when I wrote it. But at least I managed to get it off my chest, and through the writing, come to understand a little better what it is I think and feel about such things. I’ve also become a little more philosophical, and sensitive I think to those rare places where the shy spirits still survive. It became long ago, very much part of the bedrock of my psyche, and in writing to understand what it is I think about it, I find I’m still very much in agreement with my former self.