Other writers told me I should read Robert Macfarlane, who is interested in places and how we humans find ourselves in them. He quotes the Scottish poet Norman MacCaig:
Messages everywhere. Scholars, I plead with you,
Where are your dictionaries of the wind, the grasses?
MacCaig has been quoted often in my own concatenation of notes — but I had missed that later poem. It’s “By the graveyard, Luskentyre.” We leave messages behind in our graveyards, mostly trite and easy to understand, hoping to be remembered. But across the way are shorebirds doing mysterious things we can barely imagine. How do we talk about those messages?
MacCaig watches a lobsterman headed out in a sailboat and asks us to imagine his connection with the natural world, the dictionary it would take to hold his language.
• Sources: Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005, pp. 434-5.
Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks; London: Penguin Books, 2016, p. 17.
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