If there’s been less of a gap since Kathleen Jamie’s last prose collection Surfacing (2019) than between her previous (Sightlines, 2012 and Findings, 2006), maybe it’s because there’s a greater sense of urgency.
The pieces in her superb new book Cairn are short – some just a couple of paragraphs – but there’s no sense that these are off-cuts or scraps. These are condensed, distilled “incidents, memories, moments that caught [her] attention”, as she writes in the prologue. Many were clearly written during the pandemic: these are for the most part far more local pieces than her previous writing.
A cairn is a memorial, a passing on of memory and experience, and to a greater extent than before, memory – the act of remembering – informs many of these pieces. Herself as a Primary School child; her parents, both dead but remembered here when they were younger than she is now; and her student years, where she evokes that particular sense of freedom and possibility, with the poignant realisation that an unrequited love would now be a pensioner, unrecognisable. She’s not a writer of nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake, and tries to find out why such memories should rise to the surface now: what’s their significance? It’s a cliché that as we get older, we mourn the lost world of our youth as being somehow better, but in a very real sense that’s now true: people of a certain age (and not that old, either) once lived “in an undisfeatured world”. I love that “undisfeatured” while, of course, being horrified by what it signifies.
Jamie is also keenly aware of her own mortality. Now in her sixties, she writes in ‘The Night Wind’ that “there’s more days past than ahead of you”, which she takes as a wake-up call to action: “now you can begin”. The sense of turmoil engendered in us all by the times undermines this sense of purpose in the poem’s final lines, which only appear when you turn the page: “Whatever we begin (begin again) / we begin lonely.” Yet even that “(begin again)” speaks of perseverance in the face of everything.
The urgency I mentioned doesn’t really need explanation. In the five years since Surfacing we’ve seen climate breakdown in action, with all the attendant disaster and misery that had been predicted for decades. It’s here, it’s all around us. How do we live now? Jamie grapples with this question in almost every piece.
In ‘The Phone Wires’, she quotes Amitav Ghosh who said “the climate events of now express the entirety of our human history”, which to Jamie means that “our time on earth is encapsulated in these uncertain droplets”, making each one that falls “a tiny extinction”. So much packed into a single drop of water!
‘The Mirror’ is a wonderful meditation on humanity’s history of looking at itself, as if leading inevitably to today’s epidemic of social media narcissism. Jamie spins the viewpoint, showing us the contempt with which the natural world – or even an object inanimate as a mirror – would view us and our self-involvement. “Huh.”
In ‘The Summit’, she wants to clear the world of humanity and its mess before realising how self-defeating – if seductive – such a line of thought is. “If [the world] is ours to dismantle, it is ours to make.”
A constant theme in Surfacing was the need to pay attention: notice, observe this world of ours. In doing so herself, Jamie captures the beauty and fragility that we’re complicit in fucking up. In ‘Hawkbit’ there is a beatific moment of transcendence as these delicate flowers “open yellow into the moment – they are the moment – calling us to notice we are ‘snatched from death’, as the papers say, every fresh instant of our lives.” Yet there are times when it’s easier not to pay attention. On turning away from doomscrolling she writes that it’s “not indifference, not always” but instead “a staving off of psychic damage.”
The most beautiful piece is the final one, ‘Webs’: a perfect prose haiku observation of a spider in its web “making running repairs like a sailor sent aloft” as it encounters a trapped thistle seed. The piece shares the three-fold structure of a haiku: the observed moment, the event, and the reflection afterward. Wonderful.
A climate protest in Glasgow forms the backdrop of “The Handover”, the longest piece in the book, where marching with her son’s friends reminds her of the struggles of her own generation in the 80s. Who’d have thought, after the 1990s, that nuclear obliteration would still be a concern, and only one of several existential threats we face? Her son later messages her, defiant in the face of the eternally-unknown future: “I’m going to live through it”, to which her heartbreaking response is “Please do. Please, please do.” But as her own closing words to the prologue show, this defiance is something she has, too: “It’s time to move on, to whatever happens next.”
What else can we do?
Into the Gyre 