After last night’s footie failure, it seemed we all needed
something to cheer us up – or at least everyone else did; I hadn’t even heard
of the sport, let alone the fact that England were playing inside the world’s
biggest drinking vessel! So here came Michael Brooke, described by his host as ‘a
genuine article of expert’, to talk about The
Secret Lives of Seabirds, what these creatures do when they are ‘over the horizon
and far from our sight’ as he poetically put it. But to know this, Brooke had
to have spent a great deal of time by the sea, and judging by his darkly
frosted hair and tanned, trim figure, he had done exactly that. After briefly
describing the various tracking devices employed, he proceeded to regale us
with the extraordinary travels documented by many well (or lesser) known
seabirds. A father guillemot, for example, had been recorded travelling up to
3000km with his fledgling on its first flight, while gannets off many British
coasts enforced strict borders to their off-shore feeding grounds with
absolutely no overlap. With the help of marine winds, Grey-headed Albatrosses
have been known to travel at 130km/h – breaking British motorway speed limits,
as Brooke remarked – while a whimbrel, encountering a hurricane on the east
coast of the US survived being ejected from the storm at 150km/h! These
recordings, many displayed in colourful lines across world maps, showed just
how habitual – perhaps even instinctive – migratory and hunting patterns are in
seabirds, which might just earn the humble puffin that much more respect.
Continuing the natural theme, my return to The Barn was for
Nick Hunt’s Chasing Winds. While most
people might want to travel the world to follow iconic rivers or see all seven
wonders, Hunt was on a mission to follow winds. As he remarked, it is the names
of things and places which compel us, and in the case of these four winds, it
was the fairy-tale nature of their names – Helm, Bora, Foehn, and Mistral –
which made them seem like characters he could meet, and which drew him to
follow. This began in the Pennines, tracking down the ‘Helm’ whose many tales
were of its destructive power, composed of demons with ‘whispering chattering
voices’. This failed. His second, the ‘Bora’ in the Dinaric Alps, was equally
destructive, yet seen as a ‘celebrity’ in nearby Trieste, Italy where Brooke
met a man whom he described as a ‘meteorological BFG’ due to his collection of
bottles of winds at the Bora Museum. His travels in search of this wind led him
to encounter many strange characters, including a rowdy group of Croatian
mountaineers who ‘enveloped’ him and proceeded to get him drunk. Nonetheless,
this search also failed. His third was the ‘Foehn’ in the Swiss Alps, renowned
for its ‘two-faced’ nature. While good at melting snow, ripening grapes, and
creating the quintessential beauty of Switzerland, its dry warmth started
forest fires and inspired what was locally known in Lichtenstein as ‘Foehnkrankheit’
or wind sickness. This latter effect was Brooke’s reward upon meeting and ‘wading’
through the humid train-like roar of the Foehn, yet, as he remarked, ‘that’s
what I was meant to feel.’ To conclude his talk, he briefly introduced us to
the ‘Mistral’, another celebrity, this time blowing across southern France.
This one, he said, was linked to Vincent van Gogh whose paintings were often of
scenes through which the Mistral blew, which led Brooke to suggest that, in van
Gogh’s ‘Starry Night’, he actually painted the wind. This brought that Pocahontas
song to mind of ‘painting with all the colours of the wind’; unfortunately, the
only colour wind van Gogh seemed to be painting with was blue.
My final talk of the night, however, was one I was immensely
excited for as it dealt with the idea of what it means to be human, something
which simmered beneath the surface on my recently completed dissertation.
Leading this talk was Robert Rowland Smith, whose book AutoBioPhilosophy, used
deeply personal experiences i.e. his own, to try to answer this complicated
question. Several themes arose in this talk, among which was fate and how
changes of fate can alter our perception of ourselves and other people. Smith’s
father, because of severe illness, eventually was no longer able to recognise his
own son, effecting a ‘stripping away’ of the self which left his father with
this ‘naked soul’, and Smith with an understanding of how much of a stranger
our closest companions can become. He then asked us to consider the unconscious
repetitions in our lives and the red voice of our doubt (which, by the way,
should never be suppressed or you’ll end up in a car with a member of the Mafia
– read the book, it’s all in there!) But what he was building to, and what I
was itching to know, was what his idea of ‘being human’ was and it was this:
that, despite our resilience, we are still vulnerable, and it is that
vulnerability (and our response to it) which makes us human. He went on to gush
over meeting his ‘hero’ Jacques Derrida, the ‘myth made real’ (a philosopher I dreaded
during my degree) and how modern philosophy should return to its roots, to the
time of Socrates walking about the streets and winding people up with his
ideas. Smith wanted academics to ‘get out of their ivory tower and do stuff’.
Yet all I could think about for those last 20 minutes was how his theory of
humanity coincided with mine. I won’t bore you with the specifics (though you
can guess I was doing my own ‘gushing over a hero’ in the signing tent), but
Smith helped to remind me once again of just how eye-opening this festival can
and has been.
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