Steve_Bamlett_blog

Considered from the abyssal plain, beaches are but stages of plateaus; ‘raised beaches’ becoming remoter from the sea that defines them, on the ascent of a mountain to an unreceptive sky. Considered from the holidaymaker’s planning efforts they are colonies to go to when the world is too hot from the engine oil of busy-ness being burnt in the polluted skies.

I love the poem On A Raised Beach by Hugh MacDiarmid (the link offers you the full poem). Consider its opening, which every time I read it demands I consult the dictionary and encyclopedia, having forgotten the results of the last time I did so, but which I resist doing so, so beautiful are its uses of rhythm, alliteration, and assonance that make sense of how this poem when it fails to make you see, makes you touch instead, or feel you are doing so, through its textures: ‘From optik to haptik and like a blind man run / My fingers over you‘. It most telling line about the earth studied by being flayed of its skin: ‘What artist poses the Earth écorché thus‘. [1]

All is lithogenesis—or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,   
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,   
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,   
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,   
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again   
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run   
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,   
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles,
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,
An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,   
Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world,   
Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad   
What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?   
What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,   
Pillar of creation engouled in me?
What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,   
Every energumen an Endymion yet?
All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems,   
But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?   
What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?

Its vocabulary is both multivalent across many domains (medicine, geology, religion) and specialist in each. For instance though lithogenesis refers for its primary meaning to the formation of sedimentary rocks and stones, in medicine it is the name for the formation of stones in the urinary tract, clearly an idea of the body’s role in different kinds of creation is present too since lochia is the post-partum bloody discharge from the vagina (another result of birth. And then the whole aura of divine creation drawn into specialist geological terminology – the apple in the Garden of Eden is here a ‘carpolite fruit’ (a fossilised fruit, the Caaba a holy Muslim shrine (transliterate more often as Kaaba, though the use of the ‘C’ helps in these alliterative lines.

Clearly for MacDiarmid the creation of raised beaches – he knew them best in the isle of Jura, where they are legendary, here at Loch Tarbert.

But as the diagram from Wikipedia on raised beaches show, one person’s beach feature is another mountain plateau. How much more the case when we consider that from the bottom of the ocean, raised beaches are little different from steps out of the ocean for the Kraken once it wakes. Consider, for instance, the low-tide cliff or ramp (number 1 in the diagram), which shows that erosional formation of geological features continues downwards – perhaps to the abyssal plain. .

Typical sequence of erosional marine terraces. 1) low tide cliff/ramp with deposition, 2) modern shore (wave-cut/abrasion-) platform, 3) notch/inner edge, modern shoreline angle, 4) modern sea cliff, 5) old shore (wave-cut/abrasion-) platform, 6) paleo-shoreline angle, 7) paleo-sea cliff, 8) terrace cover deposits/marine deposits, colluvium, 9) alluvial fan, 10) decayed and covered sea cliff and shore platform, 11) paleo-sea level I, 12) paleo-sea level II. – after various authors

But surely none of this is relevant? I am asked if prefer ‘beach or mountains’. Asked this my restless mind thought first of raised beaches – for if we extend the idea the illustrate, we see the globe in its formation or flayed back to that as MacDiarmid suggests – we begin to ponder where things are and why, and in doing so what is low sinks to a perspective on the abyssal plain where mountains exist – and perhaps ancient ‘raised beaches’ – before we het high enough to be cast forlorn on a beach.

The truth is modernity rarely asks for oppositional thinking like this – critical of the terms o the question. The question exhorts its own context. It is from a conversation on holiday-making – do you prefer a mountain or beach location, and with the question go lots of assumptions – what constitutes a holiday beach, or a mountain, resort. My beach resort implies transport by airplane to an exotic location, and, even if the image in my mind does not show a luxury hotel and service it MUST be there, as must manicured sand and the creation of an idyll suggestive of the ‘primitive’ that we do not really want it to be in reality:

Airplane travel is probable my assumption in a mountain resort, and again the place must look picturesque – its hotels equally grand if not grander than on a beach, and it must cater to my need for recreation others cannot afford, possibly built on an ancient raised beach platea now lifted high in alitude above the sea by all kinds of earth-shaping forces.

I can’t help then but to refer back to my old theme. holidays commodify the earth, even geological categories, and make them the object of a choice implying demand for that commodity. To fulfill that demand at different market levels, earth-destroying mineral fuelled transport options are spawned, natural environments ransacked to house luxury residence – oft in a place where the paid for servants cannot live in this degree of luxury at all. And think of that abominable dream of Trump, turning Gaza into beach resorts as Lebanon once was for the over-privileged choosers of resources gained at the cost of the earth and lives on it.

Do I prefer beach or mountain? Think again. Life is more precious. Somewhere on an abyssal hill (see picture at top) the bones that once where my fathers, serving the imperial subjugation of the world lie – ”those are the pearls that were his eyes’ – lie. Possibly because he served an imperial ideal that never was meant to benefit him. Meanwhile the cities of the plains burn as an effect of fossil fuel overuse. And that plain is not an abyssal plain but an abysmal one, a word that means the same as abyssal but with negative connotations fully packed into it.

With love

Steven xxxxxxx

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[1] ‘An écorché  is a figure drawn, painted, or sculpted showing the muscles of the body without skin, normally as a figure study for another work or as an exercise for a student artist. The architect and Renaissance man Leon Battista Alberti recommended that when painters intend to depict a nude, they should first arrange the muscles and bones, then depict the overlying skin.’ From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89corch%C3%A9