OUTSIDE
Chris McCully
Click here for Chris' author page.
In 2007 Chris McCully, whose roots are in Yorkshire, relocated to the het Hogeland region of the Netherlands. A lifelong angler, he fishes to find his way into the life and landscape of his new home. His fishing rods, ostensibly there to catch fish, become divining rods: they are a way of reacting, fathoming, exploring and understanding. In this series of essays and reflections he writes about seaweeds, about freshwater mussels, about winter starlight, geese, wigeon, small boys catching frogs and exiled Irish noblemen. He writes about forgotten cloisters, coats-of-arms; about ice; about subtlety and owl holes in barns ... And above all he writes about displacement, loneliness, and about ‘not fitting in’ – about being Outside.
Praise for Outside:
'Imagine a Yorkshire WG Sebald, with flashes of wit and briefly allowed lyricism ... The value of these pieces lies in the bleak, grey-gleaming beauty of their prose, the illumination of lowly, unconsidered aspects of the world, and the underlying existential enquiry ... Rather wonderful.'
Andrew Greig, Literary Review
'[McCully] has a miniaturists' eye for detail. He's interested in patterns, topography and the intricate history of words ... [He] writes uncommonly well, and proves a most agreeable companion. At large in the Great Outdoors, he gradually adapts to the unfamiliar landscape of polders and canals, somewhat wistfully concluding: "But wherever home once was, it's no longer there."' Country Life
‘A truly outstanding collection of essays by an angler with his eyes wide open – witty, deft and evocative, this is nature writing at its coruscating best.’ David Profumo
‘In Outside, Chris McCully shares an odyssey in exile. On real and imaginative journeys to wherever “home” might be, McCully invites the reader to witness a delicate balance between nature and culture. The short, self-contained texts which make up the book are subtle, provocative, humorous, revealing the unique voice of the author – a voice that has a classical tone and poise.’ Agmar van Rijn
‘Chris McCully’s observation is exact, his curiosity fathomless, and his prose has a poet’s sensuous exactness, as sharp in focus as his modestly excellent photography. His reflections on language, people and the living world take us, with the lightest possible touch, into what I can only call philosophy. Outside is a book that makes its own beauty look effortless.’
Grevel Lindop
For a review by John Andrews on the Caught by the River website, click here.
About Chris McCully
Chris McCully is a freelance writer and academic who retains strong interests in angling and in the natural world. He has published over twenty books including six collections of poems (Selected Poems will appear from Carcanet in 2011), a memoir on addiction (Goodbye, Mr. Wonderful) and several book-length works on angling. In 2007 he moved with his wife and labrador to Groningen, in the north-east of the Netherlands – and wrote about what he found there.
An extract from Outside
November 16th 2008
The names of the Pleiades
One of the strange and lovely things about being outside and keeping your eyes open is that the very act of looking connects you with the earlier self who was you, when you also looked at the same things or looked at them in similar contexts. In that awareness, even the most apparently casual glance is also full of fragments of personal history. The eyes which are you are memory.
During the past week we’ve had some clear nights when the world has been cast in what has almost been frost; nights when the floodlit spire of Usquert church, sited five hundred yards away to the east, has locked itself into sharp-etched winter shadows; nights when the great winter constellations appear to wheel upwards from the Dollard estuary and then drift high and south. Among these constellations is the group of cosmologically young stars which everyone knows as the Pleiades.
Some constellations, the Pleiades among them, aren’t visible in the summer from the northern hemisphere. That’s because when the world turns it also wobbles on its axis, rather like the gyrations of an exhausted top. When this hemisphere tilts towards the sun, the result is the longer or shorter northern summer; when this hemisphere is tilted away from the sun, the result is winter – and the appearance of those constellations invisible in summer (because at that time these same constellations lie below our horizon). Among these constellations are Taurus (which hosts the Pleiades) and Orion, both instantly recognisable, both dominating the southern sky, and both excellent markers for orientating the eye to other constellations elsewhere in the heavens.
Each time I see the Pleiades rising over the spire of the church I try to count them. On any moderately clear night I can usually count four or five. On exceptionally clear nights I can sometimes count (or think I can count) six. They are all blue stars – still millions of years young, and still burning with blue intensity, unlike the older stars which are collapsing into the red heat of their own age and immensity, and appear yellow, amber or even amber-red. That said, the assumption that ‘blue stars are young, red stars old’ is over-simple. Betelgeuse, for example – there it is on Orion’s shoulder – is apparently even younger that the Pleiades, but is a red giant even to the naked eye, largely because it’s so huge and so fast-burning that it has already consumed itself. It’s dying even as we look at it – but even then, what we’re actually looking at is Betelgeuse as it was 10 million years ago, since that’s how long its dying light has taken to reach us. Before any clocks or telescopes, even before there were any human eyes, what travelled down the darkness was still time.
The Pleiades are also known as the Seven Sisters, who derive from Greek mythology, where the Seven Sisters – Alcyone, Electra, Merope, Maia, Asterope, Celaeno, Taygeta – were the daughters of Atlas and Pleione, from which mythical lady the sisters perhaps drew their collective name. (Atlas was one of the original Titans, later condemned by Zeus to eternal punishment which comprised holding the spheres of the heavens on his shoulders.) It’s also thought that the term ‘Pleiades’ might just derive from the Greek verb pleion ‘to sail’, since the Seven Sisters are visible at night in the Mediterranean. They are the sailing stars.
Even on the clearest night I can rarely count seven of the Seven Sisters. Perhaps that’s because the seventh of the Seven Sisters was allegedly kidnapped by one of the Seven Brothers whose lights make up Ursa Major (which I was raised to call ‘the Plough’). If that’s true, you can look for her adjacent to the star called Mizar, the next-to-last star of the ‘handle’ of the Plough, whose ploughshare startles what Arab astronomers saw as three gazelles – three groups of two stars, each group lying below the Plough’s gigantic blade.
The Pleiades form part of the constellation called Taurus, the bull against whose imaginary rush Orion extends his shield. In this galactic frieze Orion, the hunter, is accompanied by two dogs – Canis Major (who runs at his feet) and Canis Minor (who jumps at his shoulder). Dogs, gazelles, sisters, hunter and bull: there in the winter sky an ancient cosmic drama plays itself out – endless, voiceless, motionless. Nothing is ever quite the same, but nothing ever changes. I watch anyway.
I watch anyway, because every way I watch helps to join me up. I first became aware of Orion, for instance, while I was walking south towards Cashel in Connemara in 1976. It was a bitter March night, and I’d been given a lift to the junction at Recess. From there a single-track road runs south over the bog towards Cashel before turning west and down to the coast. From that perspective, on the road running south, I guessed that Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, lay more or less directly over the cottage. That is, while I knew the names of some constellations, back then in 1976, that small foot journey was the first time I’d been able to use them as orientational markers for a local purpose – much as the boat-fisherman uses a tree, hill or mountain peak to align his way up the lough to the start of a new drift. And meanwhile, as I walked, I dreamed of the fish I would catch that year, and the following day walked back up the same road and caught a little wild brown trout from Lough Lurgainn on a Mallard and Claret. That first trout of the season was a gift from Sirius, whose apparent location in Atlantic space had marked the end of a difficult trip.
There was another night, too, almost two decades later. I had been fishing for early sea-trout in the Till. Again it was a bitter March. I had caught nothing, but had persisted into twilight, and even beyond. It was low water, frost-clear. The evening was utterly windless. In the slow glass of pool-tails I watched the trees become angles of darkness past which the constellations rose, and fished on so long and hopelessly that I was eventually casting a size 4 blue-and-silver Mepps upstream and retrieving it, spellbound, through all the Pleiades.
