Flat places

Fernando Kaskais

Oct 4

Photo by David Tipling/UIG/Getty

Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless, taken out of my childhood full of painful nothing

Noreen Masud is a lecturer in 20th-century literature at the University of Bristol in the UK. She is the author of Hard Language: Stevie Smith and the Aphorism (2022) and A Flat Place (2023).

At the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust centre in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, children zigzagged between the duckponds like bees performing a cryptic private dance. The sound of children screaming makes my hands judder, in half-remembered horror. But today I could bear it, because there were geese to feed; they ran after me, pistoning seed out of my hand and leaving crescents of mud behind. As we left the feeding area, birdwatching hides rose up from the path: dark and shady, with silence inside and long windows giving out on to the marshy flatlands around the Severn Estuary. This was more like it.

Very quietly, we unhooked the wooden window clasps and let the pane down. My friend settled in with his binoculars, while I, chin-on-arms, watched the flat landscape – the low, ironed green, sprinkled with buttercups; the patches of water like gleaming fallen coins. We'd come in summer: a bad time for wetland wildfowl, my friend told me. In wintertime, godwits and dunlin and grey plovers come in from northern Europe and Russia to nibble on Britain's mudflats. But when the weather gets warmer, many of these nice solid wading birds go back to the Arctic Circle, and leave Britain's flat landscapes to themselves. That was OK with me. I was really here for the bare, stretched horizons of the wetlands. The flat places with nothing much to look at.

So I looked. And gradually the noise in my head got quieter. It always does, when I'm in a flat place. Something in me stills and lines up with the horizon.

Flat places are the ground that my mind is built upon. Wetlands, fenlands, stretches of shingle: I never get tired of their clear, straight horizons. Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless. Without mountains or hills, there's nothing to catch on my vision, or distract me. I'm freed from hindrance. I could rise up, I think, into the air and float.

This isn't a popular view, I know. I'm aware that people often find flat landscapes alienating. They can seem bleak, boring, even terrifying, because there's nowhere to hide, and everyone can see you for miles. There's no landmark to fix your gaze upon, and this makes it difficult to orientate yourself. That's why people tend to prefer breathtaking mountains or lush forests or plunging valleys. Scenes with texture, that steer your vision comfortingly as you move from detailed foreground to rising background. People know where they are in varied, hilly landscapes. And they know who they are.

The experience of elation or awe in the face of a mountain is as old as literature. Gods lived on Mount Olympus, in ancient Greece. The Romantic poets climbed Mont Blanc to enthuse and gush. Loving a mountain means that you join a whole long line of mountain-loving humans, well-documented in novels and poetry and drama. Loving a mountain joins you to something bigger than yourself. I understand those preferences. But I am different. It is flat spaces that make me come alive. The lack of landmarks makes me feel I could do anything, or go anywhere I wanted. Uncontrolled and uncoerced: unsteered by other people's beliefs or priorities. In a flat space, there are no focal points to fixate on, to force me to see some things and miss out on others. Looking out at the flat wetlands of Slimbridge, that summer's day, my mind spilled out across the space like water over a floor: expanding, becoming sensitive and alive again, where life and work and other people had shut it up close.

My life has made me strange. I don't mind admitting that. I was born and raised in an odd house in Pakistan, dominated by an arrogant and grandiose father. He was a celebrated doctor, and he had big ideas: so big that they absorbed us all and left no room for anything else. He was a genius, he told us. Other people were stupid: we should stay away from them. Especially other Pakistanis. He saw them as benighted by religion. My father was a Pakistani in love with the West, with the very surface layer of its cultural touchstones: Mozart, Vincent van Gogh, Gilbert and Sullivan. He painted a copy of The Dance Foyer at the Opera on the rue Le Peletier (1872) by Edgar Degas, five foot by three, which he hung in the living room: the arms of the ballerinas bare and provocative and just a bit wrong in the elbows, where he'd misjudged the angles. Yet my father didn't like British people any more than he liked Pakistanis; they didn't defer to him in the way he thought he deserved...

more...

https://aeon.co/essays/flat-places-are-the-ground-that-my-mind-is-built-upon