Clouwbeck (Richard Skelton), From Which the River Rises (Sustain-Release Private Press, 2010)
Richard Skelton’s latest work begins, as always, with the ritual of its packaging. A folded paper enclosure held closed by a vertical paper band bearing, longitudinally, the phrase thug taibhse gu dian an àiridh. At center a fragment in Ogham (an early Celtic form of inscription) that translates, if I am correct, as SRL, the initials Skelton has stand in for his Sustain-Release Private Press. Inside, a separate folded sheet lists the work’s sections:
A. Part One, Come the Aegir (16:30)
B. Part Two, The Water’s Burden (16:15)
Bounding this is a quotation from the Norse rune poem referencing water: “Lögr er vellandi vimr” and on the facing page is Skelton’s own poem:
If I spend enough time by its banks,
could I get to know the river?
Its rapid tracts. Its sudden lulls.
Its changeling colour. Its constant cold.
If you placed me along its length, blind-
folded, could I tell you where, just from
its sound?
Richard Skelton keyed me to the Norse poem, the use of Ogham and the origins of the Scottish Gaelic phrase thug taibhse gu dian an àiridh, translated in R.A. Armstrong’s 1825 Gaelic-English dictionary as ghosts shall issue wildly from the osier meadow. A gloriously resonant phrase and— given how it is printed— one that overtakes the paper in medias res and ends only with the paper’s terminus. Somehow despite my failing memory, I recalled Skelton’s description of this phrase in the appendix to his superb book Landings, in relation to àiridh being an etymological root to his beloved Anglezarke.
He notes the complexity of the landscape surrounding the river Yarrow: “Cross the river and you make a transition. Follow it, and you tread a liminal pathway. Stand in its shallow waters and you enter a place of meetings, the threshold of something.” This threshold reflects one of the key tensions (and therefore beauties) in Skelton’s work: that of preserving the past while creating something new in the present. That the past is gone and our perception ever changing. That landscapes, both physically and in their naming, are both a stable grounding of the past and history and an unstable, continually shifting proposition. The Pre-Socratic Heraclitus felt as much, embracing the unity of opposition and change: “You cannot step twice into the same river.”
Skelton embraces landscape like few artists, seeing in it a source of reflection, beauty, meditation, ritual, but also a troubling crucible: “The landscape itself has answered many of my questions and asked a good many more in return. The redemption it offers isn’t easy. It means the loss of the self, a surrender of those very things that we hold dear. Love. Familial ties. Memories. It can be a form of release and a kind of horror. But paradoxically, the landscape also remembers. It enshrines the smallest and the most seemingly inconsequential in layers of soil. A leaf. A bird skull. A seed” (interview with Jon Mueller in Rhythmplex). In the passage from Landings above, Skelton goes on to pursue the roots of this place through its name. It is worth quoting in full, to see the full force of his process at work:
The second part has a more complex etymology, having both Gaelic and Norse components. The Gaelic element àiridh is believed to be of greater antiquity, from which the Old Norse erg (Middle English ergh or argh) is derived.
Some Irish Gaelic references:
Àiridh (better àirigh), Hill pasture, shieling (airghe, in Lh. for Gaelic); cf. Early Irish airge, áirge, place where cows are, dairy, herd of cattle; Early Irish airgech, herdswoman of Brigit; Irish airghe, pl. áiríghe, a herd of cattle; airgheach, one who has many herds; *ar-egia; Latin armentum? But see àrach, rear. Norse or Danish erg from Gaelic equals Norse setr (Ork. Sag.). This Norse form proves the identity of Gaelic with Early Irish airge; airge=ar-agio, *agio, herd.
This Scottish Gaelic definition is also of interest:
Àiridh, s.m. A green grove; a place where osiers grow. “Thig taibhse gu dian an àiridh” — Ghosts shall issue wildly from the osier meadow. — Oss. Temo.
So it would seem that, like many of those ruined dwellings, the name endures long after the person who named it has vanished. Anlaf’s shieling. A kind of memorial, written into the land. And yet, like the landscape, words too are subject to the same, unflinching processes.
Attrition. Atrophy. Change:
Andeleves arewe 1202; Anlaues argh 1224; Anlewes earche 1246; Anlawes aregh 1246; Anlawes arwe 1246; de Annelesh erg 1246; Anlaseh arghe 1285; Alaseh arghe 1288; Aneles argh 1292; Aneles aregth 1292; Anles arath 1292; Anles aragth 1292; Anlaghes arghe 1302; Anlas argh 1341; Anlaz arghe 1559; Andles argh 1627; Angles arghe 1642; Anleyz argh 1650; Anglez arke 1696; Angles ark 1704; Anglez arch 1731; Angelz ark 1841; Anglez ark 1845.
Perhaps, ultimately, the meaning becomes lost, the person recedes, and the image fades. The Yarrow, for instance, has an indeterminate origin. Just as its physical source emanates somewhere near the hill ridge above the ruins of Hempshaws farm, so its name source is equally elusive:
Yarwe 1190; Earwe 1203; Yarewe 1246;
Yarugh 1276; Yaro 1540; Yarowe 1577.
One possible derivation is from the Brittonic *arwā, in which the first element, *ar, gives us the sense of “starting up, springing up, or setting in motion”. It is also plausible that yarrow shares a common root with the little-used, Modern-English word yare (Anglo-Saxon gearu, gearo), meaning “ready, quick or prompt”. This can be traced through the Old-English word gearwe (Anglo-Saxon gearuwe, gearwian), which means “that which prepares or sets in order”. And if we also consider that curative plant of the same name (The Common Yarrow — Latin Achillea Millefolium), then we get the sense of “to dress” (ie: to heal, from the Anglo-Saxon gerwan).
Another answer is simply that the word is a corruption of arrow, from the Old-English ārwe, and the Proto-Germanic arhwō. A metaphorical description? Flight of the river. And lastly, we have the earthen, prosaic, Proto-Celtic *garwo (Welsh garw, Irish garbh), meaning “coarse” or “rough”. In all, it’s a word with ambiguous origins, but perhaps there’s a clue elsewhere — in the landscape itself? I can’t help but notice the similarity between river and moor — between Andeleves—arewe (1202), and Y—arewe (1246). An incidental connection, perhaps, but it’s one which resonates, for me at least, having experienced them both intimately. Two joined into one.
Key for me: Attrition. Atrophy. Change. — … the name endures long after the person who named it has vanished… — … A kind of memorial, written into the land. And yet, like the landscape, words too are subject to the same, unflinching processes… For Skelton the act of creating a work of art coincides with the creation of various unions, those certainly not incidental connections where he sees two joined into one: performer and listener, landscape and inhabitant, past and present, present and future, stability and instability, living and dead, body and soul.
This simplifies what is happening too radically. Skelton is not positing dichotomies, but something far more complex: layer upon layer of unions. Not a binary world view but a proposed infinitude of connections that one can trace. A lattice of connections. Foregrounds blurred, backgrounds too far to see detail. One definition always directing the viewer to another. One gets lost in these pursuits. One can get lost simply trying to get from one side of the river to the other, but to try and find your way through the depths and reaches of space and time can lead you to a myriad of ghosts, issuing from a myriad of osier meadows. The voices challenge everything one might know, and define everything that one might experience.
No map can lead you out of these thickets though. The traveler’s map only transcribes the rough edges of a silhouette, not the muscle beneath the skin. A recent post to his ongoing Landings journal quotes Graham Bell’s The Permaculture Way: “Maps are not the land itself, only a tool. Microclimates don’t show up, and the contours shown are always a generalisation. You will find the land has a lot more variation than is apparent from the map. For detailed knowledge, you must walk the land. The map cannot show climate and seasonal variation either. Nor will it record all the detailed changes since the map was last reviewed. Notwithstanding these comments, maps are invaluable aids.” A wonderful parting paradox, for sure. One cannot map the contours of Skelton’s music either. It requires entrance and embodiment.
The density of Skelton’s recordings— built of many instruments overdubbed and combined— show the form of this perspective. And in From Which the River Rises, he captures these sounds with perhaps greater detail, dynamism and passion than ever before. Surrounding the four-minute mark of Part One, Come the Aegir, the crescendo gathers the multitude of voices heard to that point in a shattering surge. Every voice peaking, sound waves standing in for an elemental threnody of Aegir, Norse god of the sea. Or is it the Aegir that is the tidal bore that Skelton describes as “a backwards surge from sea up the river channel”? A backwards surge… A similar surge builds again, slower perhaps, from minute twelve to fourteen, and ebbs again.
These sounds are captured sounds, as are all recordings. Skelton has said elsewhere that he seeks the chance moment: “All I can say is that it’s incredibly important for me to make music that brims with life — full of the random, inconsequential noises that tie it to the physical world. I’d never dream of recording in a soundproof booth. So when playing an instrument, I’m more interested in those unintentional, unrepeatable sounds — the sudden, wonderfully expressive howl of a violin, or the rattle of the bass string on a guitar. When you add enough of these sounds together, the music starts to bristle and tremble with life — and I think it’s that collision of textures which stimulates the senses — colluding with our memories to evoke something that we can almost taste, touch and smell…” (interview with Cory Card, Foxy Digitalis).
At the 1:53 mark in Part Two, The Water’s Burden Skelton captured a glorious high harmonic. These reverberant harmonics are captured elsewhere in the piece. They mark the presence of gods and ghosts, of the artist who is not afraid to see beyond the composition into the dark hallows of the wood, beyond the meadow, where, perhaps, a kestrel circles overhead and transcribes time and place. From Which the River Rises is a work of pure imagination, pure thought, pure inspiration, pure gift. Its place in the present folds the past into our incumbent future.
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Listen to an excerpt on Soundcloud and order directly from Richard Skelton.
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