Cove Park, Rosneath, photograph courtesy of Cove Park
A few years ago I spent a week at Cove Park, on the west of the Rosneath
Peninsula, where a flow of visitors comes and goes, each of them working in
their chosen art form. A sense of community settles around Cove, even if the
artists themselves are passers-by.
The character of a residency there is
coloured by the simplicity of the dwellings, homes shorn of clutter, for
thinking and what comes before thought. Cove is no Castle Duino, or Yaddo: the
cluster of innovative buildings and the mix of people staying there defines the
experience. Residents are either cube-dwellers, staying in a compact
turf-rooved converted shipping container; or they are pod-dwellers, domiciled
in one of the wooden structures that Blast architects designed for Castaway, on Taransay, which have put
down permanent roots here.
Along the shore, there is another community,
constant and yet also transient. This gathering is defined by the single task
that everyone who stays there is committed to. As at Cove, the people come from
around Scotland, and across the globe. This lochside community has, over the
years, gathered a sense of permanence; what sets those who spend time
here apart, though, is that they would be delighted if circumstances allowed them to
abandon the site in the full knowledge that their task was complete.
Their dwelling is a vigil. It will end this
June, after thirty-one years.
From the cubes and pods of Cove, the view
over Loch Long takes in the arcuate ridge that stretches north from Strone
Point to Beinn Bheula. Now and then a sleek dark form glides across the surface
of the loch: a nuclear submarine, making for RNAD Coulport, still the main
arsenal of weaponry for the UK’s nuclear forces.
Peaton Peace Wood, photograph Ele Carpenter, 2012
The Peace Camp outside Coulport, the
colourful caravans stationed at the gates of Faslane,
and the make-shift huts in Peaton Peace Wood, are dwellings that flowered from
these fortified ports. They are the tinkerbird on the rhinoceros back.
This locus of intensive nuclear activity, and
the to-and-fro of SSNBN hunter-killers, set a historic dynamic, a skew
symmetry. Militarism and pacifist protest define a cycle, familiar to those of
us who grew up in what is referred to as the Cold War, before the globe was
said, instead, to be warming. The world mind is required to think what hot and
cold mean, in terms of wars and climates, the sun and the atom.
Force begets its opposite, in
counter-reaction; it is only in the complexity of human discourse that these
dualities can be dismantled.
All the artists who stay at Cove Park,
whether they come to write, compose, paint, or dance, further their art while
they witness a daily exposure to massive military force and the prospect of
annihilation. Of course, this is the everyday condition of all our lives, and
it has been so for a lifetime.
While I was enjoying my stay, the daily
machinations between the historical forces of protest and weaponry found their
way into a wry love poem, one that records the daily inevitable bond played out
between these opposed and opposite forces.
Cove
(Kilcreggan)
Known cures for melancholy
a purple thistle without prickles
cloud shadows stroking the hills
the rain finding a new angle
leaving drops like tiny teeth
set beneath the rail
a faint path winding
through each sea meadow
the police launch observing
the peace camp
all day and all night long
l’amour en Ecosse en plein air
love on a blanket under a jacket
avec moon, stars, kisses & midges
During her recent residency at Cove Park, Ele Carpenter made some observations in her blog to a similar effect, noting how
the everyday world of the loch and lochside road cannot help but weave
together what seem irreconcilable differences. The same incongruity can be
witnessed at all weaponised sites:
"The
activists build asymmetrical networks which blockade the weapons and spill over
the fence to make tangible the provisional nature of the base. Their actions
make visible the arbitrary nature of the divisions between things, especially
where civilian and military networks overlap: warhead convoys drive along
civilian roads, protesters reclaim the fence, tip computers into the sea,
submariners wait for the local bus outside the peace camp. And we all watch the
submarines (artists, locals, poets, the mechanics, peaceniks, naval officers,
sheep), everybody watches the submarines."
And, given everyone who comes here watches,
where is that watching best done from, where does one see ‘over the fence’? A
tree top look-out – a shelter which is itself now a kind of historical monument
to the decades in which the watcher was watched.
Combe Haven, photograph Adrian Arbib
It was the poet, hutter, and gardener Gerry
Loose who first helped me to make the connection between Suibhne, these
communities, and tree-shelters. The protestors don’t claim alliance to the
historical figure of Sweeney, but in their tree-dwelling they enter his spirit.
An irruption against the controlling forces of state and law, what they share
with Suibhne is an outsider's urge toward flight, an action that seems a
compound of delinquency, discipline, and courage.
Ele Carpenter tells me Kate Evans’s history of
tree protests, Copse, records that the first
trees to be occupied were in Jesmond Dene, Newcastle, in 1998, in an attempt to
prevent the Cradlewell Bypass.
Gerry has read and kept vigil at Faslane, and
is shortly to publish fault line, a
poetic mapping of the territories around Faslane, Coulport, Gare Loch, and Loch
Long, a follow-up to his Holy Loch Soap,
extracts from which were published in Justified
Sinners. These mapping projects are part of an ongoing nuclear walking
project, one of the most thoughtful responses to the nuclear warfare nexus
around globe, some of which is published in that
person himself (Shearsman).
from
fault line
VI
when
his teacher’s
lecture
was
a flower
between
thumb
&
forefinger
Kasyapa
smiled
I’m
collecting
dead
bees
from
the meadows
above
*
*
notice
there
a
hole
of
quietness
knit
by
birdsong
by
plants’ dormancy
by
submarines’ winches
15
of them
lifting
galaxies
XXV
hunting
mushrooms again
in
woods by the sea
only
black ships slipping
silent
through unspeaking water
* *
today
now we vote
war
lords or
incubi
lines
to cross
Hill
of Dun
tracked
with
who
we are
flowering
gorse
Tree-High
clambering
the
truth
of
the tree
trunk
In terms of built structures, the closest
equivalent to the warrior-king's bed aloft in the glorious disarray of the
thorn tree, is the look-out tree-house, and all of the tree shelters that have
been constructed at protest camps around the world.
In Michael Murray’s
telling of the Suibhne myth, 'As battle commenced the
noise drove Sweeny mad and he leapt from tree to tree away. Eventually he
arrived at Glen Arkin, perched in a churchyard tree.' Given that Sweeney's crime
was committed against the church, in the figure of Bishop Ronan, who he
attempted to kill with a spear, there is an inevitability that his first
tree-high bed should be in a yew, beyond the walls of the church, among the
graves of suicides.
Yew is
the little churchyard tree
and
where the night of wood congeals
the
unsnarled darkness is named 'ivy'
Trevor
Joyce, Sweeny, Peregrine
The yew motif and the exile that follows can be
taken as a summary judgment against a noble who has rejected the conventions of
Christian orthodoxy. Was that proud rebellion enough to make Sweeney appear
‘mad’, or was it the reason he was called insane? Murray again: 'Eventually he arrived at Glen
Bolcain, a place where mad people hid out. For seven years he wandered like
this, he grew feathers, lived as a mad bird-man in the woods.' The glen’s
name tells us that it is traditionally associated with madness, but only because
it contained an ancient well that was held to heal the afflicted.
‘BIRDSONG IN THE CANOPIES / Suibhne’; poem AF, photograph Hanna Tuulikki, 2013
The view we take is shaped by the look-out tower
we choose to view the landscape from.
Is the protesting tree-dweller mad, or is it the
rating cooped up in a submarine who stays his own insanity, or both? And, if
they are mad, what made them so?
‘my
madness finds its congruity
on
the frozen peak of Boirche’
Trevor
Joyce, Sweeny, Peregrine
Sweeney's feathered appearance may signify a return
to shamanic ways, becoming 'aviform', taking on old tongues, bird-like
twitterings, visionary chants, assuming a feathered garb, matted hair, and living
off wild fruits and intoxicants. The strangeness of this figure, even his very
estrangement, may be a projection, inscribed on Shuibhne’s skin*, and written
into his story by the monks who took it down from the oral narrative,
freighting it with disapproval. (*In Gaelic the 'h' is added when the name is possessive.)
At road protests and eco-political struggles,
people have chosen to incarnate a nature-devoted Sweeneyesque shamanic cult,
translating dreads into feathers, and worshipping animism. They thrive on the
ingenuity, courage, and self-sacrifice that is required to live, for a time, in
a hole in the ground, the canopy of a threatened tree, or harnessed to a trunk,
suspended above a net.
Huntingdon Lane
To dwell among trees is to choose a higher, more
exposed, form of dwelling, enacting ethics in a radical manner – closer to
birdsong, chilled, under constant threat of arrest.
The tree-high dwell where the law of property sees
a void. Their occupation of the canopy is a living sign that the place is not nothing,
not to be cleared, or built on, regardless. Their levitated beds would share
the playful sadness of acrobats, if it were not for the forces of the law and the
attempts made to pull them down. The tree folk say, after Badiou, ‘Our lives are nothing, the trees are
a void, let them, and us, be all.’
The tree-dwellers and the police, or yellow-coats,
that drag them from the branches have the same symbiotic relationship as the
protestors and police, or army, at Cove; the powerful and the dispossessed, the
enraged and the entitled. Among protestors
there is a necessary if precarious solidarity, confronted as they are by the
forces of the military, or the law, or, increasingly, private security
troopers.
That said, for some the identification with
the outcast reveals a deeper truth, a dangerous path – the path of Suibhne,
who remained trapped in a cycle of thorny solitary exile, unable to ever,
finally, repair and belong again among his people. Others became intolerable,
for their company made the breach and brang of battle resound in his mind.
Sweeney is fated to mistrust the acts of kindness that come his way. He has no
tree-high friends, only the birds, who he comes to resemble.
There are other books and blogs where you can
read accounts of individual protests, tree squatters, and transient protests
that have settled into communities, tented, bender-shelters, caravans, and even
huts. Here, in trying to think through the form of Bothan Shuibhne, I wanted to
discover what structure most closely resembles his bed among thorns, and I
found it was the wild shelter, where conflict is pursued by other means and
architecture is a state of mind.
The post concludes with a series of
photographs by Adrian Arbib, of the non-violent Solsbury Hill M65 protest, from
his recent book: Solsbury Hill: Chronicle
of a Road Protest (Bardwell Press).
Solsbury
Hill
Solsbury Hill was one part of the protest
movement that influenced Government transport policy in the 1990s.
photographs by Adrian Arbib
for more information on Solsbury Hill:
Bothan Shuibhne | Sweeney’s Bothy
Alec Finlay & The Bothy Project
commissioned as part of Creative Scotland’s
‘Year of Natural Scotland 2013’
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