nature as enemy, nature as friend

We’re all scared of some things at some times. Whether the threat is imaginary or real. Sometimes the world of nature can be seen as unpredictable and menacing. Other times it can be seen as familiar, satisfying and fulfilling.

In The Pigeon, Patrick Suskind describes a character with a carefully constructed ordered routine life. The unexpected sight of a pigeon disrupts his fragile equilibrium.

He knew every noise on the floor. He could interpret every crack, every click, every soft ripple or rustle, the very silence itself. Then unexpectedly he saw a pigeon. And this is how he perceived it …

It was crouched there, with red, taloned feet on the oxblood tiles of the hall and in sleek, blue-grey plumage: the pigeon. It had laid its head to one side and was glaring at Jonathon with its left eye. This eye, a small, circular disc, brown with a black centre, was dreadful to behold. It was like a button sewn on to the feathers of the head, lashless, browless, quite naked, turned quite shamelessly to the world and monstrously open; at the same time, however, there was something guarded and devious in that eye; and yet likewise it seemed to be neither open nor guarded, but rather quite simply lifeless, like the lens of a camera that swallows all external light and allows nothing to shine back out of its interior. No lustre, no shimmer lay in that eye, not a sparkle of anything alive. It was an eye without sight. And it glared at Jonathan.

Writer Helen Dunmore must be a gardener. Nature for her isn’t some alien threat, it’s part of who she is. Her writing is a world away from the horror that Suskind describes. This quote is from With Your crooked Heart.

The birds don’t really sing in the middle of the day. They drowse away the heat in the jungle of buddleia and bamboo, and sometimes you hear a bubble of song rising in their throats, but it never bursts… Inside the sycamore by the wall, there’s a wood-pigeon. Prr-ccoo, it goes, prr-cooo. You love its hot and sleepy stammer more than anything else in the garden…

There’s smell of cat-piss, and buddleia. A honeyed smell which draws the butterflies. The garden simmers with heat and wasps, cat-piss and cabbage whites. In the little fountain, water wobbles then spurts up.

One day you’ll chop everything back, or Paul will. But you’re at home in London gardens like this one, overgrown, rank and fat with weeds. It reminds you of when you were a child, when you were four or five, tagging after the kids, in and out of fireweed and rotten fencing. You like buddleia and bramble, and jam-jar traps for wasps, and flying ants, and the Russian vine that’s climbed like a wave over the back wall, and swamped it. There’s honeysuckle in your garden, and a stand of bamboo. You pull out the new shoots of bamboo from their shafts and nibble the cold, moist tips.

One pigeon, two interpretations. Paul is uptight, an automaton, alienated from himself, other people and the natural world. In marked contrast, Dunmore’s sensual character Louise luxuriates in her fertile ramshackle garden teeming with plant life and wildlife.