Spread from The World to Come by Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn, courtesy of Magic Cat Publishing.
‘Moth, moth, moth, moth, moth, mo, th, mo, th …’ reverberates across the cavernous Queen Elizabeth Hall at the Southbank Centre. Syncopated patting of the cello neck swishes and shushes the word into flight. The hairs quiver on the huge illustration of a brown-grey-blue iridescent moth projected onto the stage backdrop. A sign language interpreter at the far end of the stage crosses her hands and flutters her fingers. Crossed-hand moths appear in the audience as the young children respond with their bodies. Robert Macfarlane (author and Cambridge academic), Joe Zeitlin (cellist), and Emily Sutton (illustrator) are collaborating on stage to bring Rob’s poem, ‘Moth’, to life for this audience of young families.
Joined by musician Johnny Flynn, Rob and Joe staged a multi-form performance at this year’s London’s Literature Festival of Rob and Johnny’s recent children’s book, The World to Come, along with poems from Rob’s book The Lost Words. Set to Emily’s vibrant illustrations, The World to Come follows a father and son as they walk through a landscape to discover together the magic and beauty of the natural world. For its theatrical rendition, Emily’s illustrations are animated as the book’s colorful world is projected onto the stage backdrop: blackbirds perch on branches, owls swoop down from swaying trees, falling leaves twirl to the ground, and the river flows through marshes. First, we listen poetically as Rob and Johnny exchange lines of the book’s verse. Then, we listen musically as Johnny sings the book’s lyrics and strums his acoustic guitar, and Joe draws long, deep notes from his cello. The little girl sitting in front of me accompanied by her grandmother bounces up and down to the beat of Johnny’s soulful guitar. All the while, a sign translator adds another dimension to the performance, gesturally evoking its words and music.
Robert Macfarlane and Joe Zeitlin perform ‘Otter’ from The Lost Words: Spell Songs at the Southbank Centre. Illustration by Jackie Morris.
The book began as a song inspired by the image of a blackbird sitting on a tree branch. During the pandemic, Rob collaborated with Johnny to write the eponymous song. It was the particular silence of the pandemic that let him listen to the living world in a new way and afforded the insight of the song: no longer drowned out by the motorway, birdsong rang clearly.
For the next act, Joe and Rob duetted ten ‘spell song’ poems from The Lost Words. The poems, and the book at large, aim to develop children’s natural literacy, especially in response to the removal of nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary due to low usage. Rob’s Spells conjure the otter, kingfisher, newt, raven, bluebell, moth, magpie, willow, beech, and jackdaw. In conversation with Rob’s voice, the accompanying cello barely made cello sounds: it crunches, screeches, rustles, whispers, shouts, and cracks. Jackie Morris’ majestic, anatomically detailed watercolors projected each natural body onto the stage background. Rob asked ‘what are you?’ to the raven. Giggles erupted from the children in the audience as he lyrically jibed the magpie’s brash belligerence towards all ‘except eagles cuz they’re far too scary’. He chanted again, ‘oh newt, oh newt, you are too cute’.
Once the music and poetry concluded, the artists took a seat on a panel moderated by Times children’s book critic Lucy Bannerman. The houseboats floating on the river flowing across The World to Come’s pages remind Johnny of the Hackney Marshes near his family home. The book’s landscapes are ‘not somewhere out of reach’, Johnny said. Nature is nearby, Rob echoed, adding that he hopes the book develops children’s basic natural literacy by awakening them to the living world on their street and in their park. ‘What happens if we reimagine a city as a nature hotspot rather than a nature desert?’ Rob asked, ‘London is a forest. There is one tree for every Londoner and the city is home to 8,000 species’. The book is part of Rob’s larger project to ‘decompose the city-country break’ and guide children to know where to look to find the natural world in the cities they live in.
To end the panel discussion, Lucy asked the children in the audience for their questions. Shyness at first subdued the room, but once the first child asked her question, too many hands to call on shot up. The children inquired: ‘Which was your favorite animal to write about?’ (Rob: blackbirds, the ‘honey-tongued troubadours’; Johnny: the willows ‘swishing in the river’; Emily: the owl and its variety of textures); ‘Why did you make it a book?’ (Johnny: it opened up the song like a treasure chest); ‘If you could go back in time, would you like to have another job?’ (Rob: a marine biologist studying slugs; Johnny: a fisherman; Emily: a dog groomer or trainer). On this irreverent note concludes the show.
Spread from The World to Come by Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn, courtesy of Magic Cat Publishing.
Outside the theatre, I spoke with a young girl named Esther, who I had seen dancing to the Spell Songs in the seat in front of me. She said that the otter was her favorite animal during the performance. Fiona, the woman accompanying her, explained that they came because she hoped to teach Esther the awareness and openness to nature that Rob’s work encourages. Sammy, another young boy who saw the performance, told me while he was in line to get Rob’s autograph that the performance made him think of the ‘tumbling branches brushing the beach’ in Cornwall. He loved that the world conjured on stage was both real and dreamy. His father, Josh, said the message of hope for the world to come was exactly what they both needed to help them through a difficult period as his wife recovered from surgery. When I asked what the father and son duo’s next walk in nature would be, Sammy seemed to have already internalised Rob’s message: ‘back to the tube station, of course!’
In Cambridge, I had the chance to catch up with Rob about the book and its performance. ‘With the music and the spells we were trying to play in that threshold of space between species, between sensoria and Umwelts,’ he said. ‘Watching children’s imaginations take relational flight into that soundworld. That’s what we wanted to do.’
Spread from The World to Come by Robert Macfarlane and Johnny Flynn, courtesy of Magic Cat Publishing.
The book asks readers to imagine how the world sounds to other observers (like the owl) in the realm. But, I wondered, is it really possible to know what it is to be an animal—as Nagel asks, can we know what it’s like to be a bat? Or maybe it’s children who have a special ability to overcome the anthropocentric perspective? ‘Anthropomorphism has got a terrible name,’ Rob told me. ‘But done well, its adventurous, experimental, and humble forms are a kind of relation-making exercise. Not only do we see that creatures are human in certain ways, but we see that humans are creaturely, so anthropomorphism can actually open up a two way channel of relation and become zoomorphism as well. Children have so little reticence about trying to imagine what it might be like to be an otter. They’re very bodily with it as well.’
Imagining better relations between the human and more-than-human worlds is a project that threads Rob’s work as a writer and activist. The World to Come is no exception. Rob wants the book to show young readers that ‘this is your river, these are your marshes, these are your herons, these are your trees. They’re there and they live among the pylons and the houseboats and the dog turds, but they’re there and they need your care and they will return your attention with their own forms of gifts.’
Rob hopes that the song, poetry, and illustration of The World to Come will develop good ecological citizens by helping children recognize and have empathy for the living world that they are a part of. His aim is also a political one: ‘We live in an era of wicked problems, and time is short. I’ve always felt growing new ways of being is the most powerful and durable way to make change. So-called fairy-dust or magic-dust approach doesn’t really work—where you go in and you astonish and you sprinkle. But the moral work is something that is always ongoing. It’s like a background process which occasionally gets foregrounded.’
Spread from The World to Come by Robert Macfarlane, courtesy of Magic Cat Publishing.
Rob’s upcoming book, Is a River Alive?, brings the imagination, teachings, and moral mission of The World to Come to an adult, non-fiction audience. Starting from the premise that ‘there is not a single river in good overall ecological health,’ Rob explained, ‘there is a failure of imagination as well as of legislation. There is a hope that resides in the irrefutable truth of the recognition that we have to work legislatively and we have to work imaginatively. That is what the arts do. They don’t always work and sometimes they can fail absolutely, but they have the power to shape imagination, and to speak to heart as well as mind. Arguably, the rise of rationalism, with all its benefits and technocracy’s successes, we’ve fallen into a relationship with running water, flowing water, which views it not as life force but as pure resource. The consequences of that are now manifest in the life of rivers themselves. To pull us back from the total instrumentalisation of flowing water as the thing that takes our crap away and the thing that flows clean from our taps is a huge labor, but it’s an exciting one. There’s work to do here and art can be part of that.’
Whether in songs and picture books for children or in non-fiction prose, Rob’s hope for the world to come lies in small but meaningful change made possible by art. He concluded, ‘we have to plant acorns and then we have to nurture them and help them grow, and gradually they become a forest in a world where the landscapers look up and suddenly the landscape has changed.’
By Carmen Vintro
The Camera 