Word of the day: “inscape” – the essential quality/’thisness’ of a creature, thing or form; its distinctive beauty
– Robert Macfarlane
We navigate the outside world in terms of an inside world. Orient our lives, as thinking and feeling selves, with an individual quality.
Gerard Manley Hopkins invented the term inscape meaning a pattern or design that constitutes identity. Every being ‘selves’ or enacts its identity. Human beings are the most highly selved, capable of recognizing the inscape of other beings which Hopkins called instress.
In his diaries he used the first term with reference to bluebells: “I do not think I have ever seen anything more beautiful than the bluebells I have been looking at…Its inscape is mixed of strength and grace.”
The elemental enjoyment of nature, wild places in particular, is where we are alive with instress impression. We are bigger than a phenomena to comprehend it, containing it within the known. Bergson said the same slightly differently:
To speak of things creating themselves would therefore amount to saying that the understanding presents to itself more than it presents to itself—a self-contradictory affirmation (Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution).
When we can’t comprehend, there is the greatest thrill.
Hopkins also wrote music and tried an ascetic experiment of not drinking water for a week, which reminded me of Coleridge and his mad Lake District wandering. He descended a notorious place (Broad Stand) sometimes described as the first documented rock climbing. I’ve done similar things myself, without opium, intoxicated with hills and mountains.
“You make up your own route?” a companion said to me in the Pyrenees as I went straight ahead while she followed a much longer path to the left. It’s not quite that. More that I see where I want to go, and go there regardless. A year or two later, back in the Pyrenees, descending the same nasty boulders and cutting my leg quite badly I accepted the path was indeed a better idea.
We see wild beauty, untameable meaning, great drama, ultimately as a reflection of inside. We don’t want to be trapped, like the caged skylark in Hopkin’s poetry. If you know Hopkins, you will recognise more of his symbols in my Conceptual Art.
The path by the sea leads into the Black Cuillin of Skye. I’m not a climber and they need two or three days of it with in between camps.
I did however climb up for photographs and the view, on this bright sunny day.
