On Being a Writer in Wales: Gareth Howell-Jones

Gareth Howell-Jones is the author of Do Not Call the Tortoise (2022) and Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows, published this month.

Tortoise and Hedgehog were born in Radnorshire. These two slender volumes of essays grew out of its inexhaustible hills and the skylarks, ponies, lichen, hares and mosses who inhabit them. Not because of their beauty, inspiring though it can be, but because they are there.

Walking those moorlands, crossing those streams, simply lying down and listening is to be overwhelmed with their sheer necessary reality. They are not doing what someone has told them to do, still less performing for money; they are fully and inescapably being what they are. They have a clarity and honesty which ask questions of our own self-conscious strategies for getting through the day.

‘No gods or oreads’

Up in those hills, clear-eyed with distant views, I see no gods or oreads, nor the tylwyth teg, (perhaps they’re only things we’ve made up) but neither can I see money, property or nations (they are certainly things we’ve made up) – just the seamless spread of life to which I infinitesimally contribute.

The hills, by sheer pressure of their ancient utterness, force open the crack between what is real and the things we merely say are real. While every other organism opts for the former, human society picks the latter. That, the curlews and the badgers tell me, is the root of The Problem (and you don’t need me to explain there is a Problem).

Yet we know perfectly well from evolution that we ‘humans’ are related to them all up there – the sheep, the peregrines and tormentil – we are sprung from the same remote ancestor. I am not a Homo sapiens, Lord of Creation, Master of the Anthropocene or any of the other flattering titles we award ourselves; I am a piece of nature passing through nature, kin to every other part, goaded by the same needs, worked on by the same forces, ‘striving to persist in my own being’, as Spinoza summarised the activities of every living thing.

There are talents I possess – complex self-awareness, opposable thumb, habit of writing little essays – which other creatures, like those pigeons perching outside my window, have not; but there are talents they possess – flight, laying eggs and copulating on a telephone wire – that I am sure I lack. There isn’t any hierarchy. We’re all just here – for a while.

When you descend from the hills with this simple realisation, the town, the office and the flickerings on your laptop take on a hall of mirrors strangeness.

I am not suggesting we should mimic mosses or imitate the action of the tiger-moth. But suppose we could live as directly as they do, without the filters of social and cultural preconception, without the names and categories we slather over everything so that we see them only through our expectations?

This is hardly a new idea. It’s commonplace in Eastern thought and, in the West, it has resurfaced from time to time since Pythagoras. I’ve stumbled upon it in a twenty-first century Radnorshire form – each of us needs to develop a philosophy that fuses with our own bodily experience. We mustn’t take anyone else’s word for it, (and you must not take mine!) STA et considera miracula – Stand still and consider the wondrous things, says Elihu in the Book of Job.

Inner life

I recently listened to a tree – not the swooshing of its branches on a windy night, but its inner life. A scientist had set a microphone under the bark of a spruce. The result isn’t musical but a roar of power as the tree pumps its xylem sap from groundwater up to the topmost twigs.

That placid oak outside my window is raging like the M4 in the morning. The beetles in the bark live with this fanfare of vitality, the birds must feel its stirrings as they perch. Until two weeks ago, I knew nothing of this, deaf to the silent cacophony blared on all sides as I walk through the wood at Cwm Byddog. We miss so much.

I’m lucky that the solidity of the Radnorshire hills is my starting-place, but the same tumultuous necessity – the force that through the green fuse drives the flower – surges through the trees in Roath Park or Hyde Park, through the dog pausing ominously outside my gate, even through the commuter on the bus, however deeply hidden beneath self-consciousness and job-title, business suit and discreet tattoo. She is as much a part of nature as a curlew.

Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows, like its predecessor Tortoise, uses the physical world as a guide to the perennial puzzles of what it means to be us, and what we should be doing with our time. All around us are creatures who answer these questions without intellectual theories and critiques that fence them off from the environment that sustains them. They (our cousins, remember) thrive so long as we do not destroy them, and their success is based, with humbling simplicity, on understanding what is real.

Your Lowly Hedgehog Knows is published by The Cyrus Press and is available from all good bookshops. 

You can read Nation.Cymru’s review of the new book here.