Eye

EYE. It’s a clear day on top of the South Downs and we are playing ‘I spy.’ As we walk along, trying to find a good view, white scraps of rock gleam up at us, smiling through the yellowing grass. There’s been no rain along the coast for a good few days so the ground is bone-dry. They say there won’t be rain for another week at least.

I read somewhere that the land artist Andy Goldsworthy, who grew up in the north of England, once said: “Dig a hole up North and it’s black and stony and earthy. So to dig a hole in Sussex and find chalk, so absolutely pristine [...] was like finding the sky in the ground.” He has an artwork along this path, a series of big chalk stones, and I guess he said that when he was making them. Children like to climb those stones, and I often like to think about that one just past the farm, even when I’m not here myself, even when I’m in the city. That’s one thing art can do, I guess. It’s true, the sky really is all around you up here.

So I say, “I spy with my little eye, something beginning with… I!” And you say, “Aye aye.” I start to laugh, and you begin to look. In looking, you see all around us, of course—the usual right, left, and up, like we have at home—but since we’re already ‘up,’ there’s also a ‘down’ to see. A new way to play the game. Beneath us, birds of prey trace the currents of warm air. We’re still walking, though slower now, because you’re watching the birds and trying to think of ones whose names begin with an ‘I.’ Yes, the skylarks are flying beneath us, and you’re watching them from above, from your own bird’s-eye view.

No, there’s no ‘Ibis’ along the South Downs. Guess again. So, past the birds, even further down, you spy fields of limp wildflowers clambering their way across the slopes. You see buttercups, cowslips, yellow rattle, ragwort, knapweed, blue speedwell, and the occasional pink pyramidal orchid—all keeled over, all facing the beaming ground. Every few years, there’s a huge spray of poppies that come up over Titch Hill, and in those years, you never hear of anything but The War. Yes, the poppies mean boys in Spitfires and Hurricanes, and if you want them to mean something else, you can forget it. There’s a memorial to a Polish fighter at the foot of the Downs, and when I think of this place, and the poppies, I think of him and it. We know his name: Bolesław Własnowolski. He was twenty-three when he died. When I was young, the TV wanted you to hate Polish people, but I couldn’t and I think it was because of him. When I was that age, twenty-three seemed a long way off.

But there are no poppies today, so all of this may as well have never happened. That’s the problem with a day of remembrance, an hour at the cenotaph, a minute of silence. People forget. Walter Benjamin wrote that the ‘historical materialist’ “cannot do without the concept of a present which is not a transition”, that history-writing means locating a zero-hour, a Stillstellung, a ‘standstill’:

For this concept defines precisely the present in which he writes history for his person. Historicism depicts the ‘eternal’ picture of the past; the historical materialist, an experience with it, which stands alone.

Benjamin wrote that in 1940, the same year he committed suicide in the north of Spain, exactly 1 day before the authorities reversed their decision to deport refugees like him, and 36 days before Własnowolski was shot down. We’re making a minute of our own up here… perhaps we can make the poppies mean something else as well?

We’ve stopped walking now. None of these flowers start with the letter ‘I’ so you’ve crouched to take a closer look, leafing through the grass as one might a dictionary. In the past people called the daisy, ‘the days-eye’ – in Old English this was ‘dæges-eage’ and in Welsh, ‘llygad y dydd’ – ‘the eye of day’. They named it this because the flower opens with the sun and mimics its movements across the sky. In The Harley Lyrics, written in the mid c14th one can read:

Lenten ys come wiþ loue to toue wiþ blosmen & wiþ briddes roune þat al þis blisse bryngeþ dayeseȝes in þis dales notes suete of nyhtegales.

["Lent has come with love to town, with blossoms and with birds' song, that brings all this joy, daisies in these valleys, sweet notes of nightingales.]¹

Spring somehow feels far away now, further even than the fourteenth century. At the foot of a slope just north of here, you’ll find a church dedicated to St Andrew, also known as ‘the shepherds’ church’. On the small pamphlets they keep there you’ll read that the building was constructed in the c13th, that the dark oak pew-ends are original c15th features, and the stone font is from a church even older still, thought to be Saxon in origin. The British photographer Paul Nash, who began taking pictures at the age of 41 (in 1930) took a picture of this church, and the lane leading up to it, sometime before his death in 1946.² The photograph shows the church in a state of disrepair, ears of long grass brushing the tops of lopsided gravestones, ivy creeping along the cornices, up to the bell at the small west turret.

‘Ivy’ would be a good guess, but you don’t think of it. No, you’re much more drawn to the colourful flowers, to bruised pinks and blood reds, to orchids, poppies and pheasant’s-eye. In the c19th, pheasant’s-eye – a red petalled flower with yellow anthers – was so common that it was gathered and sent to London to be sold as ‘Red Morocco.’ Today it is endangered, a casualty of intensive agricultural practices. The c18th Carl Linnaeus, ‘father of modern taxonomy’, who formalised the modern system of naming organisms, called this plant Adonis annua after the Greek myth of Adonis, Aphrodite and Persephone. The legend goes that the blood of Adonis, mortal lover to both goddesses, in being mixed with Aphrodite’s tears upon his death, bled into the soil to produce the flower. It is poisonous, generally given as a symbol of remembrance and lost love.

At last you say “Iris”, a little hopelessly. You’re in the soil too now, kneeling in the dirt. All these names have piled up on top of you, like so many of Goldworthy’s stones, like runes. There are indeed irises – ‘unguicularis’, ‘pseudacorus’ – which grow across the downs, but not here, not today. “Sadly not”, I say.

The ‘iris’ is, of course, also the name for the pigmented part of one’s eye – named after the Greek term for ‘rainbow’ and the messenger god Iris who was its representation. This part of the eye controls the amount of light which can enter the pupil, constricting and dilating as necessary, its colour of no obvious biological purpose. The term, or rather the sound, ‘eye’ – meaning the organ of sight – is much older than any possible conception of English or England. It is so old as to ridicule the concept of etymology itself. One of the oldest uses of the term can be found in the Laws of Ine, the first surviving laws of Wessex – written between 688 and 695AD – describing the value of bovine anatomy:

Oxan tægl bið scillinges weorð, cus bið fifa; oxan eage bið V pæninga weorð, cus bið scillinges weorþ.

[An ox’s tail is worth a shilling, a cow’s is worth five; an ox’s eye is worth 5 pennies, a cow’s is worth a shilling.]

The South Downs were a part of Wessex, and now I’m picturing the shepherds travelling these hills, trading eyes in the scattered market towns; big juicy eyes for tiny silver coins. You’re lying on the ground now, on the side of the hill they may-or-may-not have walked on. Perhaps this is an experience with history? The phrase 'frog's-eye view’ is given to describe a perspective ‘from the ground’ or from ‘inside a system’. It is attributed to Gyorgy Kepes (and his 1944 book Language of Vision), but has most likely been influenced by the cybernetician Jerome Lettvin and his 1959 paper What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain; one of the first studies to reveal how specific neural structures in the eye process and filter sensory information before it even reaches the brain. What to make of this system of vision itself? One which can deceive us, make decisions on our behalf?

The door of a church yawns in the distance; a black hole set into an ageing tapestry. A wind has picked up. I lie down next to you, sheltering myself, having forgotten the word which starts with ‘I’. Of course, none of this is happening – we were never on the hill, there never was a word, a wind, a daisy, a skylark, a stone. So, we may as well lay here together on the hill for as long as we feel like it. The sun sets but the ground stays warm beneath us, the soft chalk glowing white with heat.

In the summer of 2016 the South Downs National Park became an International Dark Sky Reserve, the second in England and one of only 16 in the world. Can you imagine a world in which the sky needs to be preserved? A world bursting out of its atmosphere? The earth expands beneath us, pushing us into the stars, into outer space! Andy Goldsworthy, eat your heart out! The farthest thing the naked-eye can see is the Triangulum Galaxy, about 3 million light years from Earth, which is to say 3 million years into the past. Needless to say, I’m headed straight there.

Footnotes

1. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/HarLyr?rgn=main;view=fulltext ↩

2. I saw the picture in a show alongside Andy Goldsworthy’s work ↩