Robert Macfarlane on Books That Hold Water
The writer and scholar Robert Macfarlane has spent much of his life climbing up mountains and fishing on rivers, and his passion for each extends to his writing. Over the years, he has found an “idiom for mountains” that continues to excite him, but a “liquid language” has proved elusive. “Rivers pose the greatest and most fascinating problems for language. They tumble you, they wear you away, and they dissolve the usual shells of perceptions,” he said. “I’ve had river journeys that have left my senses, of time in particular, more confounded and involuted than any huge mountain expedition.” These are the reasons that Macfarlane, whose new book “Is a River Alive?” comes out this month, keeps returning to these bodies of water—to the physical entities themselves, and to the people who have written about them. He recently joined us to discuss a selection of such books, and his comments have been edited and condensed.
The Epic of Gilgamesh
This book is born of the river: it was first written down in ancient Mesopotamia, which means the land between two rivers, using a trimmed river reed as the stylus and wet-river clay tablets as the page. It was made between rivers, of rivers, and rivers run through the text. In the central episode, Gilgamesh and Enkidu travel to the sacred cedar forest, which flourishes on the banks of the Euphrates. In an extraordinary moment upon which human history trembles, they stop on its edge in awe. It’s almost like the first nature writing, in which the song of the forest—of the birds, the monkeys, and the resin that drips from the highest cedars like rain—is heard.
Inside the forest, Gilgamesh and Enkidu brutally slaughter Humbaba, the forest demon, as they see it, who is also the embodiment of forest life. Then they fell many cedars in the forest and float the lumber all the way back to Uruk, the city that Gilgamesh rules. Unsurprisingly, calamity follows. The story is spine-pricklingly contemporary; it’s a warning, one that we’re still failing to heed.
A River Runs Through It
by Norman Maclean
The clear, highly oxygenated, trout-rich waters of the novel’s Blackfoot River just casts a spell over a ready imagination. I’ve always been interested in rhythm as a property of prose, and here the first rhythm we meet is that of the cast. It’s the rhythm in which the narrator, a fictionalized Norman, and his brother, Paul, are brought up, and it’s prayerful, worshipful, and beautifully balanced. Slowly, you begin to realize that the sentences Maclean unfurls are themselves ideally weighted and deeply rhythmic.
In fly-fishing, the dream cast is the one which lands the dry fly upon the riffle with all the grace and likeness of a real fly dropping onto water. Very often, the single word that completes the thought in a Maclean line is the fly that drops perfectly onto the riffle. In that regard, I think this is one of the most perfect pieces of English fictional prose in the twentieth century, from that celebrated first sentence, “In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing,” right to the very last, “I am haunted by waters.”
Atiku Utei/Le Cœur du Caribou
by Rita Mestokosho
Rita Mestokosho is an Innu writer who lives in the small township of Ekuanitshit, which is at the mouth of the Mingan River, in Quebec. She’s a staggeringly inspiring figure who keeps her language, Innu-aimun, alive in poetry, song, activism, and in her community work. The poems in this collection are heartbreaking and beautiful. She speaks of “the river that plunges into my dreams,” of “the water in my veins,” and of her visions of shape-shifting into a salmon. Throughout the book, land and water are animate, so rivers speak and murmur and remember and address the reader. The poetry itself becomes a river, flowing continuously through the collection without a single full stop. It’s a remarkable document that, in Mestokosho’s words, “speaks the language of hope,” to which water is central.
All of Us
by Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver began with earth, passed through fire, and ended with water in the last decade before he died, what he called his “second life.” During this period, he moved to the Olympic Peninsula and went dry, booze-wise, and then the rivers flowed in to irrigate him, to rehydrate him. Carver published so much watery poetry in that extraordinary phase of his life—“Where water comes together with other water” (1985), “Ultramarine” (1986), “A New Path to the Waterfall” (1989)—and they’re gathered in “All of Us.” There’s an amazing poem that ends:
It’s the last two words that fascinate me. What they seem to gesture toward is a sense of the immense enlargement of being that water enabled in Carver, who had been encircled by the grip of alcohol. Rivers became friends that extended his circumference of being. Carver, in effect, went through a baptism and emerged a different human. Elsewhere, he notes a wonderful line, which I’ve committed to heart, from the poet and Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz: “When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.”
