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Language and landscape — and the conservation of both — provided the subject of Macfarlane’s 2015 Landmarks, a volume not immune to wistfully phrased bucolic nostalgia. Skelton’s fell wall is situated near the River Duddon in Cumbria, once William Wordsworth’s muse. But he is no Romantic. Inner-city Hackney has nothing on this riot of wanton death, destruction and decay. Nature is an aggressor that imposes its arbitrary life-cycle on anyone (and any thing) that gets in its way. Urban destruction has the common decency to crumble around the whims of the market; but rural decay operates by the code of a secretive rulebook which, of course, nobody has read.
Skelton is, in fact, so over Romanticism that he feels able to reclaim one of its base concepts. The original meaning of the word ‘sublime’ — as understood, for instance, by J.M.W. Turner — was a physical beauty so overwhelming as to induce sensations of terror and inadequacy; and anyone foolhardy enough to attempt to conjure up appropriate vocabulary to rationalise this immeasurable force was invariably doomed to failure.
Which becomes Skelton’s starting point. ‘To put down words/ about this landscape/ as if they were stones… the act cannot accomplish/ much beyond mere ornament,’ he states in the first of several aphoristic poems that are interwoven through the main body-text. He resurrects the old Anglo-Saxon word ‘dustsceawung’ as he picks through the bones of a ruined farmhouse — a doleful experience which foretells, he asserts, his own eventual earthly absence.
Composers of electronica are prone to obsess over mortality. Tape and digital recording preserves sound, allowing composers to play God by breathing fresh life through its veins. Beyond the fell wall is the ‘waste’ — a no-man’s-land where sheep go to die, separated from the fertile field. Death is everywhere. That ruined farmhouse becomes a corpse: like the eyes, the roof is the first thing to decompose. Embedded inside his musical structures are out-of-body experiences, as microscopic details of dust and earth are viewed suddenly from the heavens as the perspective abruptly and dramatically shifts.
His book concludes with an equivalent narrative turnaround. In this desolate landscape cold, frost and ice represent an ultimate terror, conditions under which life cannot thrive. But in his epilogue Skelton rewinds back to the Ice Age then marches through history towards the arrival of man. The life-cycle is rebooted.
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