Furu ike ya
Kawazu tobikomu
Mizu no oto
A very old pond
A frog jumps into the air
Splash! sound of water
On the path to Ross Point, a rocky promontory by Loch Lomond skirted by the West Highland Way, there hides an enclosed bay no-one much visits, called the ‘the bay of frogs’ (or toads) from the Gaelic Camas an Losgainn. I am curious about its name as frogs are infrequently seen, let alone named in the landscape – they occasionally cross our paths but mostly we miss their whole amphibious lives. Frogs and toads are quiet creatures that step purposefully but clumsily through the reedy grass and mosses, not wasting energy by jumping unless disturbed by human or heron. We see their signs more than we see them – the frogspawn laid on a warm spring night, or their crushed or withered bodies on a path. Their world is so utterly non-human, their camouflaged bodies and inscrutable golden eyes giving them an aura of stoic wisdom we like to personify as ugliness due for transformation.
The Japanese writer Matsuo Bashō lived and worked in seventeenth-century Japan, in the old city of Edo (now Tokyo), and is most famous for his mastery of the short verse format known as hokku (‘haiku’), the five-seven-five syllable poems which deal with immediate perception and natural, everyday subjects. Bashō was most noticeable for leaving his home and travelling the mountainous north of Japan from 1689 to 1691, walking nearly 3,000 kilometres. His classic account in verse and prose – The Narrow Road to the Deep North – is a profound reflection on life and celebrates the power of haiku to echo the way we are human, how we see, absorb, and reflect on the everyday things we see, especially how they resonate. This well of resonance is aptly illustrated in his most famous poem about observing a frog jumping into a pond. It is deceptively simple, but in the context of the vast ecosystem of haiku-writing, is one of its most joyous examples of what a few words can mean. The poem has been translated countless times into millions of emotive versions, precisely because it gifts us an experience about which we are all capable of caring. It might not be frogs in a pond, but just a moment alone in nature, or a second of pause. All good haiku express this perception emotionally, often through heightened normality as much as expressive obliqueness, and these word parcels give us that resonant space to find integrity and grace amid so much noise, rapidity, and technological simulacra.
Nature writing in the Scottish and Gaelic poetic traditions, has its roots in sound and telling, and its earlier poetry is arguably closer to the haiku tradition of raw perception than our complex filters of digital modernity. For example, there is a frequent sense of realism and poignancy, of the pathos of things – mono no aware – in the naturalistic observations of Scottish Gaelic poetry, a sense of human place amidst what David Abram called the more-than-human world of being.
In Gaelic and Scots locality is everything. Sorley MacLean’s Skye and Raasay are infused with language, and the words infused with place – ‘Hallaig’ resonates violently through its own poetic landscape. Robert Burns’s Ayrshire is a linguistic map of Scots rural landscape, a psychogeography or vision of the goddess Coila with her mantle of green. Couched in the realism and experience of place, the naming of the landscape nevertheless leaks beyond the boundaries of language and carries the linguistic resonance of observing, of being human in a specific surrounding or ‘umwelt’ in the words of the German ecologist Jakob von Uexküll. In this small reedy bay, I am thinking on this capability of the world to carry meaning in name and place both at once. The frogs and toads seem to be key. Something about the emergence of life from underground, from a hiding place of the invisible.
Frogs and toads appear in the simple language of naming but carry deeper resonances. For example, a Gaelic folk term for the bulrush or reedmace, is cuigeal nan losgann, or distaff of the frogs, as though the explanation for this top-heavy reed with its kebabbed seedhead lies in its connection to myth, where worlds merge – where frogs can spin wool and talk just like we do. The woolly exploded seedheads of autumn, with their wispy connective tissue, resemble a distaff or spindle on which wool or flax is wound for spinning. But these are special distaffs, they belong to the frogs, to land/water creatures that labour and exist between worlds, that chat of normal everyday things while winding fibre onto reedy spikes. The more-than-human world of myth is a world of shaping faces from clouds, of extending the observed everyday into the imaginary, a world where animals are human, and humans are otherwise. A young girl, sat on a rock in a quiet watery bay, watching bulrush on a soft autumn seeding day, seeing spinning frogs and hearing voices. Perhaps this is origin of the naming of place.
Scottish folklore gives frogs and toads a mythology of mis-seeing, of mistaking ugliness for poverty and shame, for example in the frog-prince version of ‘The Well of the World’s End’. A cruel stepmother sends her new daughter out with a sieve to bring water from a well. At the well, a frog tells the girl to fill the sieve with moss so she can take water home. She brings the frog home with her and it takes up residence with them. One day, it tells the daughter to cut off his head. Unsure about what to do, she obeys, cuts off the frog’s head and it turns into a handsome and loving prince. Through care and sacrifice, a cruel world is transformed.
Joseph Jacobs collected it as a Borders tale, sourced from the 1549 text The Complaynt of Scotland, though only John Leyden’s notes to a critical edition of 1801 mention frogs in the tale. John Francis Campbell sourced a Gaelic version of the tale from Islay in ‘The Queen Who Sought to Drink from a Certain Well’ in Popular Tales of the West Highlands (Vol. 2, p. 130) where he emphasises the onomatopoeic gurgling and croaking pleas of the frog in the Gaelic original:
A chaomhaig, a chaomhaig, Gentle one, gentle one,
An cuimhneach leat Rememberest thou
An gealladh beag The little pledge
A thug thu aig Thou gavest me
An tobar dhomh, Beside the well,
A ghaoil, a ghaoil. My love, my love.
In his introduction to the collection, Campbell noted how many folk tales included such onomatopoeia as an indicator of how the world spoke through place and how transformative and mythical were the mouths of creatures: ‘they seem also to belong to the language [. . .] when animals speak, they talk in their natural key, so long as they speak Gaelic, and for that reason, among others, I believe them to be old traditions. The little birds speak in the key of all little birds (ee); they say, “beeg, beeg.” The crow croaks his own music when he says, “gawrag, gawrag” [. . .] He then imitates the quarking and gurgling of real frogs in a pond in spring’. Here Campbell is speaking the animals into lore, attaching to them capabilities of naming and skill and knowing, as though they are the originators of language and ‘belong’ in vocality. They ‘say’ things we can hear, and they speak of the same things we witness. They resonate with the same observational depth that Bashō speaks of, as though the frogs know everything there is to know of place and being and memory.
I sit by the loch on a still December day. Conscious thought seems to waver and fold into the landscape. Does the loch meet the mountain, or the mountain the loch? Where the two meet, oak and holly and alder and birch all grow together and dip their toes in the water, which is sometimes fierce and troubled, sometimes glassy and still. It is a place both of much activity and much stillness. It speaks of boundaries being crossed, merging, liminal spaces of transference and transformation. I realise I am sitting by a deep, clear well of things. I light a small driftwood twig fire on the shore, which I will later dowse and cover with gravel, and I am reminded of the local mythologies of frogs and of Bashō’s poem. The loch is stilled and the sounds of light traffic wash across the loch from the west shore’s road, the fire crackles close, and the water laps gently by my feet. I have time and calm around me, the moment swells to a dwam, memories swirl with voices and faces appear. I smile a little and poke at the fire by my feet, thinking about nothing forcefully, just letting the mind be that pond – the frogs jumping in, water splooshing and rippling, outwards and inwards.