Kaplinski, impoverished nature, drumlins....

Once again I've brushed against Evening Brings Everything Back, translations of Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski by the author and Fiona Sampson (Bloodaxe, 2004).   [Previous post here.]

It's a book full of ideas, especially the prose piece Ice and Heather. Since I first read it the idea that's lingered most in my mind (I forgot to record Kaplinski's words) is about how the northern flora is extremely impoverished, almost a desert flora, and this is how humans like it. It's a matter of clean aesthetics, but it's also a matter of being able to grasp what's going on. No accident that Linnaeus was a Swede, nor the ground-breaking British tradition of systematic botany: Gerard, Ray, Darwin etc. Contrast the nature of the tropics, so overwhelming the number of species, and the incredible difficulties of identifying e.g. rain-forest trees, which flower at no predictable season (hundreds of feet above the botanists' head) and perhaps miles from the nearest individual of the same species. A thousand square miles of nothing but pine, spruce, birch and aspen: that's much more reassuring. Most of nature is unseen by most of us. We place exaggerated value on the few orders that we can easily see: birds, butterflies, colourful flowers, big animals, trees. It's a humanly delimited vision. Increasingly, if incompetently (for we often destroy the things we love), we shape our surroundings in line with those preferences.

Anyway, here's another extract about the limits of an everyday human perspective.

*

In Alta, on a rocky hilltop, I saw clearly the tracks of a glacier. Probably the ice had pushed along a sharp piece of stone that had left these scratches. Similar ice-drawn lines can be found on limestone in some places in my country, Estonia. Their direction makes it possible to say which way the glaciers were moving here. That can also be guessed from the stones and boulders themselves. If we know where the type of mineral they consist of is to be found, we know from where the glacier broke them off and carried them here. These boulders are pieces, fragments of the ruins of Fennoscandia, the Fennoscandia of the Tertiary period, of sequoias and magnolias.

When I flew from Britain to Canada for the first time,  the Atlantic was covered by thick clouds, and to my great disappointment I couldn't see the ocean. I napped, then woke up and put on headphones where a Brandenburg Concerto by Bach was just playing. When I took a look down again, there were no more clouds to be seen, and the plane was just approaching the Labrador coast. Below us stretched a snowy landscape with frozen lakes, rivers, hills and forests. No trace of human habitation: no roads, now towns, no power lines. Neither the aborigine villages nor hunters' huts could be seen from the height of ten kilometres: I believe there were some below. On this virgin winter landscape I could distinguish -- sometimes clearly, sometimes vaguely -- lines running from Northwest to Southeast (I think this was the direction). These were furrows ploughed by the glacier, the valleys partly covered with lakes, the ridges with forest and bush. From the earth one can hardly discern the regularity of these drumlins and dales, but it becomes clear from a bird's eye view, from high above the ground.

Glacier direction shown by drumlins

[Image source: http://www.landforms.eu/Lothian/drumlin.htm]