Beneath the canopy a depleted waste of ice age erratics. Felled and fallen stumps. Old roads wisp thin and cut across by logging paths. Stone walls marking a mosaic of vanished farmland, meadow, pasture. A spindly little sapling cracking beneath my tread.
Midsummer morning in the shade of dappled streamers
Me and Rebecka walking the ghost village loop, gathering seven votive herbs, crossing seven boundaries, seven slits, tracks, furrows1
Weaving crowns at the crossroads intersecting a rash of red miscanthus, a skinned plantation, a splott of tawny summertilth
A small bundle wrapped to place beneath the pillow at night2
Prospect-refuge is a theory in landscape architecture that posits that humans, like other animals, have evolved to prefer environments where they can see without being seen. Where they can survey (prospect) the surroundings for opportunities and retreat (refuge) for safety.
A hilltop with panoramic views.
A patch of sunlight in a grove beyond a treeline.
A park bench facing an open meadow.
1910, Carl Larsson works for three years on his painting, Breakfast in the Green, depicting the itinerant South Sámi man Jon Johansson fiddling in a grove of white birch and willow-green grasses.
In the painting Johansson wears a dark brown gápta3 and reclines in a wooden lawn chair, on the ground lays his burnt-orange travelling sack drawn with twine, at his feet sits a blonde-haired boy listening intently.
To his left a young woman in a long white dress leans (daydreaming?) against a tree while, in the background of the painting, an upper-class family sets a bucolic picnic spread of flowers, porcelain, silver spoons.
A cave opening or forest alcove.
A hedge maze’s centre chamber.
A seat beneath a pergola or overhang.
I rest in what my friend calls, “the asian squat”, down between two grassways thrumming hummingbird hawk-moth, five-spot burnet, pallas’ fritillary
Feet flat on the ground, hips level with ankles
From below I watch Rebecka through a gauze of flaxy seed heads, standing half in half out the forest treeline, a steady breeze lifting trembling aspen, messy curls and dark skirts
Sub-heading: a voice on the wind.
Sub-heading: the hidden landscape.
After four years on the mountain I’ve come to love her Latin naming
Absent-mindedly crushing a tick as it burrows into a vein on the back of my hand
“Digitalis grandiflora”
“Lavandula angustifolia”
“Vinca minor Atropurpurea”
All lived material with no metaphor or meaning
A clearing of upright stones in ship-setting, a tarnished iron cross, a blasted bindbalk down from vanished rafters.
Set back from the path one freestanding pier stone with rusted metal hoops missing its partner.
Late 19th century, forced by Winter famine into the nomadic life of a beggar, Jon Johansson begins his extensive travels across the Swedish countryside.
Treated with only a modicum of respect on his journey, Johansson is nevertheless recognised in his lifetime as an accomplished fiddler, story-teller and folk healer, widely known for his recording of spells and magical formulae from Sweden’s Sundsvall region.
He is sometimes employed as a musician by upper-class families who view him as a figure of novelty. For his work he is paid a meagre wage in loose krona, schnapps, food scraps.
Hazard is a later addition to the prospect-refuge theory, proposing that landscapes are more compelling when they suggest an element of danger or complexity, but only where prospect and refuge remain available.
An old ruin on a craggy edge with loose footing.
A winding path disappearing into a dark forest.
A raised walkway over a marshy wetland.
Via an antiquarian auction house where I am the only bidder I acquire a facsimilie of Johansson’s manuscript, Signerier och Besvärjelser: Svartkonst från Lappland [Spells and Conjurations: Black Arts from Lapland] alongside its companion, Salomoniska Magiska Konster [Salomonic Magical Arts].
The two slim volumes arrive in purple faux-velvet papers bound with coarse hand-rolled twine, an ostentatious wrapping concealing lurid red covers set with inky black letterpress plates.4
The plates repeat a well known impression of Johansson, a skull and crossbones, two disembodied hands touching fingers.
Included in the wrapping is a small calligraphic note conveying thanks for a prompt payment and a playful warning to, ‘use wisely the knowledge within’.
I open both books with the caution of amulets, charms, talismans.
April 30th, 2021, our first wedding anniversary on the mountain, me and Rebecka build a firepit in the sloe-stricken meadow and polish off a birthday Lagavulin around a sparkling Valborg leye
Easing the passage of witches to Blåkulla5 and back
Valborg. noun. (c.1600). A springtime festival, the eve of May Day on which witches are held to ride to an appointed rendezvous. See also: Walpurgis / Walpurgis night, ‘That Walpurgis-dance of the witches and the fiends’ (Kingsley, 1857), ‘warming himself by the Walpurgis bonfires’ (Tate, 1979).
Leye. noun. (Old English). A flame, a blaze, a fire. (on) a leye: on fire. See also: isel, spark, speld.
Rebecka stokes the fire piled high with broken pine boughs, fungal ringed birch logs survived the mountain’s former occupant, prospective firewood stacks left outside in rain and snow
Nightfall, a tawny owl calls its corners
I look up past the nocturnal bird into a field of star clusters, smokey blue of Pleiades nebula, pink fuzz of Andromeda galaxy
‘Glory be to the improper plot: this acre of hand tilled hibiscus & the dying raven that slants midway, in collapsed grace. I am thankful for everything that lays chaotic. jagged landmass. raked mess of depression’6
Summer storm winds bring the mountain to a deafening broil
I crack my stiff neck and watch the European pied flycatcher family sheltering in their bird box outside the bedroom window
In the kitchen I hunch over the laminate countertop built for hobbits and crunch dark roast beans in a wooden box grinder, working the metal crank and burr and wondering how many times I’ve written about watching birds, drinking coffee
Rebecka clattering amongst unanchored shelves, popping broad beans from pods, bunching up onions to dry
In the newly renovated living room I drink my morning
coffee in the same spot as always, beneath the grey Gotland wool
blanket on the dark olive sofa
The sofa one part of the Skagen soffgrupp set from the 1965 IKEA catalogue
I pull the coffee table close and leaf through both my black book manuscripts, Salamonic Magical Arts heavily illustrated with magic(k)al formulae and full page hexagrams in the grimoire tradition, Spells and Conjurations more restrained with illustrated chapter headings but little else.
Of particular note in Johansson’s manuscript are the multiple records of hexes and maleficent magics7, including several methods for scrying knowledge of the invisible from the bones of the dead.8
In one item, collected by Johansson in 1919 from the cunning man Erik Tornlund of Indal parish, we see a magical method of stabbing a botarkniv9 into a footprint to cast a curse:
’Stabbing a knife in a track.
I heave the knife in the footprint
And there shall you stumble, and there you shall fall
Under a stone in the fire of hell you shall lie
And there you shall wail,
And there you shall moan and whine
And there you shall be tormented.’
Passing piled stones the road reveals some rot of cottage. Tarred wood-tile rooftop held by post-and-beam long worn and gutted. Upturned pans and churns and kitchen clutter. A dry clump of pond upon the outmost edge.
Fields fret beneath a windmills slowing turn.
In the garden me and Rebecka lower the Midsummer Pole to the spongey clover lawn, gathering up the discarded and lilting crowns, the dozen mini schnapps bottles rolled beneath the Ligustrum vulgare
Afterwards Rebecka bikes to the lake to swim while I stay behind to drink cheap gin with bitter tonic in the unfinished greenhouse
Lightness and enclosure over wide dark waters
I lean back on a garden chair in the corner reserved for potting tables, the back legs of the chair digging into the mud floor between the raised edges of tomato beds
I have one Moondrop IEM looped over my right ear playing Low’s 2001 slowcore classic, Things We Lost In The Fire
‘Black, like a forest’
Back to Some Routine Sunday Morning, me and Rebecka at a 2019 Slowdive gig with Low as surprise support, Alan Sparhawk’s guitar strap snapping, Mimi Parker dying three years later
‘a different language’
I watch a solitary wasp — dark segmented body with fine silver bands — flitting around the over-engineered central beam that took three people to lift into place
Eighteen creamy-yellow supports climbing towards the polycarbonate-sheeted gable
‘words soon forgotten’
I rest my left foot on the tip of a granite erratic up from ice ages past and feel a pang of phantom back pain for all the stones I had to move to set the foundation
For long days digging deep below the freeze layer
A crossroads.
A hollow tree.
A wall cavity.
The lee of a standing stone.
An enclosing hedgerow.
A nail driven into a doorpost.
A skull turned towards a running stream or..
Driving home from Rebecka’s parents — some days after Midsummer proper — we detour to visit Grönby kyrka, a typical medieval church dating from the late 11thC
Unadorned white walls housing the remnants of 14thC murals, the painted vaults of the nave only recently restored from later whitewash
‘It was believed that a Book of the Black Art was difficult to destroy […] If thrown into a fire or a lake, it possessed the power to return. If it was buried, no grass would ever grow on the spot again. A proper method of getting rid of a Book of Black Art was to hide it in the walls of a church, sealed well with bricks and mortar. A legend told by Heurgren in the foreword of the printed edition of Salomonic Magical Arts is that of a book inside the walls of Grönby Church in Skåne, in the south of Sweden.’10
Palm pressed to rough stone pulpit, I consider the incongruous parallel that Salomonic Magical Arts was partially written by the priest, Petrus Gasslander (1680–1758), and subsequently kept in the vicarage of his son, Johannes Gasslander (1718–1793), who took it upon himself to continue his father’s magical work
The historical distinction between clergyman and sorcerer, faith and folk magic, frequently blurring into modern contradiction11
When we return to the mountain — just in time for the early dusk, the forest treeline swallowing the sun — I slide my manuscripts onto the bookshelf besides appropriately esoteric titles like, Plants of the Devil, and, The Graveyard Wanderers
Under the floorboards is where I store the hair and iron nails
The withered red berries
And the little pockets of skin sewn like leather
Me and Rebecka drink a pot of Russian Caravan on the bench in our oldest kitchen garden space
Nestled between barn and earth cellar and once a dense knot of bramble and plum sapling
We talk about tidying the area up before the end of Summer
Self-sown geranium and foxglove colonise neglected beds, with weedy cleaver and dandelion, dock and nettle, skirting dwarf sunflower and wormwood subshrub
I place my teacup on the concrete slab at my feet, leaning back into the creak of the bench, the loose screws and flaking yellow paint
I carefully remove the red leather sheaf from the dagger resting in my lap
Found with a string of partially woodworm eaten crossbeam carvings above the threshold to the barn, its handle a polished hardwood with an open grain and dark knots, its narrow blade a tarnished iron set with a burnished copper hilt
With a stubby grey whetstone I begin to smooth and sharpen the dulled edges of the knife while
Overhead cranes migrate, announced by mournful warbling
