Peace, Poetry and Sand in my Shoes

Late last night, I visited the Peace Camp. No: I haven’t joined a commune or become a hippy. The Peace Camp is part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, and is located at eight coastal sites around the UK, two of them at the extremes of the north coast of Northern Ireland. Each Peace Camp is made up of a large number of small tents in a strikingly beautiful coastal location, and the mingling of light, dark, poetry, music and setting make what could seem arguably like a pretentious gimmick into something really quite magical…

I saw the Peace Camp first from above. Walking the stony path to the Mussenden Temple, high above Downhill Beach, as it grew dark at 10:30 at night, seemed surreal. I was half laughing at the oddness of it all, meeting families with children, coats, dogs… everyone chatting, most relaxed, some bearing picnics or travel mugs. The atmosphere was oddly peaceful though I was astonished at how many people were there, and how many cars there were in the car park by the road… who could ever have suspected that, in the northernmost reaches of Northern Ireland, quite so many people would be interested in late night poetry?

Approaching the Temple itself, I could see a gentle glowing light inside. I was thinking, as I walked across the stony path, of those lines from ‘The Merchant of Venice’ –
‘How far that little candle thows his beams –
So shines a good deed in a naughty world…’
as the thought of poetry shone across the darkening field between the Temple and the ruins of the Bishop’s Palace. Night and light and the half light…

That there was a poetry tent inside the Temple seemed the stuff of miracles – that when I approached it, one of my very favourite poems was being spoken seemed more miraculous and fitting still. ‘Prayer’ by Carol Ann Duffy: not, as its title suggests, a religious poem really, but a poem based on the rhythms and the beauty of the Shipping Forecast. As the waves echoed against the cliffs, far below in a sheer drop, and the chill coastal breeze drifted around the outside of the Temple, no poem could have been more apt. It was a moment of magic, gently glowing magic in a bare stone temple, its roof arched high and graceful above the tent’s arched shoulders…

Moving to the windows, then outside, I saw what most people were gazing at in wonder – the view to the beach, far below, and a hundred or more illuminated tents, glowing orange and white as night-time fell. There was chatter, there was laughter, there were flashes from cameras and the glow of mobile phones being held aloft. There were people who hadn’t seen each other for months meeting up and hugging and catching up… there were the private swipes and taps as photos were uploaded and tweeted and sent to friends. There were as many responses as there were viewers… a hundred ways to read a poem, a hundred more to respond to unexpected poetry by night…

From there to the beach, through the busiest night-time traffic this remote seaside outpost could ever have imagined. The surreal moment of struggle to find a parking space on the beach at 11pm… the even stranger experience of queuing for almost an hour, in the gathering darkness and the shattering coldness, to get close to the tents and hear their words. Standing, growing silent, the urge to talk or tweet or text freeze-framed in chilling darkness… deep in thought about life, and death, and the nearby waves and tides and calling seagulls. It was a moment of peace and of strange one-ness, thinking about difficulty, loss and moving time, as time grew timeless in the falling dark…

… and yet the reactions around me were not lost, no matter how deeply I found myself lost in the images of black, breaking waves and dark-grown sand and glowing tents. There was the family behind me who argued, complained, complained again, then left… the optimistic father, the endlessly complaining mother (her tone of voice more querulous by the moment, like a song which modulates to every key in turn), the two adult sons home for a break but tired, with a flight to catch tomorrow. The three couples in front of us, ebullient and confident after a trip to a local wine bar, not seeming to mind the wait or notice how cold it was becoming. Their conversation priceless…
- And what do you do when you see the tents? You know, get close to them? What is there?
- There’s poetry.
- Poetry?
- Aye, poetry. You listen to it, and like… reflect…
- You reflect?
- Aye reflect. You know, you … like, think about things, and stuff like that.
- Aye right. If I want to reflect I look in the mirror in my bathroom. I don’t need… poetry.
- Oh Mike, you’ve got no soul…
- Oh damn it, who needs soul. I’ve got a comfortable bed at home and I’m away to get into it. To hell with poetry. I’ve better things to do. I’m away to reflect and fall asleep…

Further up the queue, parents queued while their small children kept amused – there were races run and cartwheels turned and burials of small people in the sand. Mingling with the arcing seagull cries, the cries of mothers warning their children away from the passing cars. Mingling with it all, the occasional remonstration of the stewards as someone tried to beat the queue by venturing, ankle deep then suddenly knee-deep, into the water… and the cries of anguish as these adventurers encountered the icy coastal waters as the tide went out. What, would the queue stretch on to the crack o’doom…?

Yet in the end we got there – we passed the flags, we turned the corner, we were conducted along the rickety wooden bridge across the bubbling stony stream and reached the tents. It was like crossing the River Styx by torchlight, the ferry replaced by a creaking imperfect bridge, the ferryman replaced by a smiling, patient marshal…

… and then the tents. Walking amid the glowing tents was strange. The anticipation had frozen to a strangeness, from across the stream… the tents, once reached, became almost otherworldly, the music and the poetry issuing forth seeming something from beyond the world as midnight fell and the coastal breeze rose up and danced icily between them. The voices from the tents were ghostly… lines repeated and mused upon, not the standard recitation of the formal reading, more an interpretation of a thought encapsulated in a poem, encapsulated inside each glowing tent like a set of Matryoshka dolls to tell us what poetry is for. What art is for. Words drifted through the cold, notes of music drifted above, below, beside. People drifted among the tents… the dark and cold of midnight united it all in strangeness as, high above, the solitary tent glowed in a tiny dot inside the Temple on the clifftop…

Some laughed – the strangeness and the cold making it all seem at once beautiful, moving, yet faintly and surreally ridiculous. Children ran in a formless yet almost choreographed game of midnight chase among the tents, and parents chased in turn in that endlessly revolving wheel of pride in search of the perfect Kodak moment. Serious photographers who had heard that there were prizes to be won deployed the tripods they had used to lean on in the queue. A young couple locked in a passionate embrace in a quiet corner, the poetry and the music and the sheer drama of the cliffs beyond the tents the picture postcard perfect backdrop of romance. I slipped from one reaction to another like the breaking waves, retreating undercurrents, shifting sands – moved to tears, to laughter, inspired, amused, sceptical, cold, stunned, confused and windswept both in turns and all at once…

But that’s the thing with poetry. Art. Music. Landscapes. There’s no right way of responding for anyone, anywhere, at any time. We want to capture it and remember it for ourselves, so we download its soundscapes onto our computers our into our memories as a train of thought to which we can return. We photograph an image which we want to imprint and not forget. We explore an artistic moment by running around between its component parts, seeing how they measure out a sentiment, burying ourselves in the shifting sands on which it's built or simply turning cartwheels on its surfaces. The incredulity of how art form and setting and time are juxtaposed improbably might make us laugh, or cry, or simply shudder with the cold. It might make us want to talk – to strangers, to companions or to long-lost friends – or retreat into a silence of just thinking, reflecting on ourselves and who we are or could be far more deeply than in the bathroom mirror we avoid…

Poetry – art – the night and light and the half light. The experience of the Peace Camp was one of levelling of life. Walking across the flattened sand of the queues to the precarious wooden surfaces of the rickety old bridge to the soft and rippling sand among the tents, my shoes filling up with sand, the darkness icy with the velvet night-time, I was aware at once of life, and death, and the expanses of a northern landscape. The stars were pinpricked clearly in the darkened sky, echoing the gentle glowing of the tents around me… there were distant flickerings of other towns, of lighthouses, of boats. The voices of the others exploring the installation merged with the lines of poems and the soundwash of the music drifted in and out of the breaking waves and arcing seagulls. The innumerable grains of the sand beneath my feet, and in my shoes, seemed a metaphor of all of us there, or anywhere, deciphering a meaning, finding a course to navigate the light and dark.

At the extreme ends of a coastal map, the landscape slips into the charted depths of water. At the ends of earth lies icy depth of water – the elements meeting, touching one another. At the extremes of poetry, of art, of music lie the light and night-times of meaning and interpretation, of reaction, of stillness and of thought. The glowing tents of the Peace Camp, even when you’re distracted by being cold and by the people all around you, bring just that peace which passeth understanding… that peace to think about the darkness and the light, the sand-grains and the water, the words and what they mean.