“I have of late been moulting: not for fresh feathers and wings: they are gone, and in their stead I hope to have a pair of patient sublunary legs.” - John Keats (July 1819)1
The ‘sublunary’ is the earthly. Like ‘mundane’, ‘sublunary’ implies an inferior spiritual plane, the terrestrial contrasting unfavourably with the heavens.2 For Keats, legs ensure spatial and spiritual grounding to the earth; to walk beneath the moon is to be essentially, uncomfortably human.
On the final pass of Mount Toubkal, I could see no one else. The summit, rising above my right shoulder, was outlined in the beginning of light. The moon decrested in the western foreground, absorbing yellowness from its vantage over the morning, and the foothills of the Atlas ranged into darkness.
I was at the peak for sunrise. At any other place in the sky, the sun and moon may as well hang still, but when they cross the horizon, they calibrate against a spirit line that sublunaries can comprehend. Packaged up in the passing of a day and the distance a human eye can stretch they cross with urgency.
With each upward step, I had become more aware of the earth and of my position on its surface. Of the mountains as deep, compacted time over which I wanted to pass in a morning. It took a life of walking the Cairn Gorm before Nan Shepherd began to say she walked ‘into’ the mountain rather than ‘up’ it.3 Subsiding against the Toubkal cairn I felt no ‘into’ - just an upwards skimming against the surfaces of time and earth. Awe-exhausted I turned away from the splashy pink view of Marrakech, looking instead for altitude’s cage door two hours below.
The next morning I lay on the paved balcony of a mountain gite, restored by lower land. As the day’s first call to prayer issued from a mosque in the valley, I thought of those on the mountain. That patient journey through thinning air. The arduousness of their present moment.
I rolled onto my stomach, away from the changing sky, and listened to Johnny Flynn’s album ‘The Moon Also Rises’ for the first time. Ten songs later, and reaching to start again at one, I recognised the name of Flynn’s collaborator, originally obscured by unlikeliness. Robert Macfarlane is that nature guy: Cambridge fellow, prolific writer, path enthusiast, and mountaineer. Until this reintroduction I had retained one Macfarlane teaching from a long-ago lecture: ‘to learn’ derives from the Proto-Indo-European verb for ‘to follow a track.’
The album’s structure is marked by two horizon crossings. Its pivotal sixth song ‘The Sun also Rises’ casts its light over the moon of the album title and the first five tracks split off into light/dark pairs with the remainder. I know now that much of it was co-written on foot. ‘Song with no Name’ came to be in the South Downs while Flynn and Macfarlane retraced the steps of the wandering poet Edward Thomas. It turns out that Macfarlane has also been thinking about Keats’ legs.
Their work sounds like age-old immediacy. On the third track, ‘Burial Blessing’ the pair said they wanted a sound that could be ‘played by any graveside in the past five or ten thousand years.’4 The final version, which swells with the present tenses of ‘swing and pray, cry and sway’, ‘be’, and ‘go’, was recorded in a five-and-a-half-thousand-year-old burial chamber in Gloucestershire.
My recollection had already trampled on the sun and moon of yesterday’s mountain. Their passing stillness would now be held together by a journey through this tracklist. On a third listen I stood up and walked out onto the hillside.
Note on the Text:
Do I currently have online access to the Oxford English Dictionary and the ability to confirm the nuanced meanings of ‘sublunary’ in 1819? No. But I know love. I know laughter. I have held the world in a grain of sand. I am a daughter and a friend and I am not less worthy because of this. (I miss it every day).
The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (1977)
Interview with Varsity magazine