I discovered Václav Cílek’s To Breathe With Birds: A Book of Landscapes through Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot, where the last essay, “Bees of the Invisible,” is mentioned. I had read that essay, but not the rest of the book until the past week. What a strange book! Odd and oddly compelling.
Cílek is a climatologist and a geologist as well as an essayist, and these essays tend to bring together the geology of Czechia (where Cílek lives) and the history that’s been influenced by that geology. What’s under the ground influences what happens on the surface. But Cílek is also fascinated by sacred stories and legends (the more local, the better), and sometimes an essay will move between science and mythology quickly. The model for this kind of movement might be Johannes Kepler’s essay about snowflakes, discussed here in “The Six-Cornered Snowflake,” which also (according to Cílek) brings together rational inquiry, imaginative speculation, and theology. B
ut in Cílek’s writing, this mixture isn’t just thematic. In “Places from the Other Side,” for instance, Cílek leaps from a travelogue about different places in the Sudetenland to a reconfiguration of himself as vapour, a rock in a stream, “a green light, a willow above the river,” “beeches on the banks.” He realizes that the bears in the castle moat are actually humans who only pretend to be bears when they’re being observed by people. “We travel to places like Český Krumlov because certain ideas occur only in particular regions and places,” he concludes. Aside from emphasizing the effects places have on us, and we have in them, the point seems to be that the world exceeds all of our interpretative frameworks—scientific, mythological, imaginative—and so we need all of them to comprehend what’s around us.
Cílek also tends to make pronouncements, reminding me of Gaston Bachelard, among others. It’s a peculiarly European way of writing, which one either finds charming or annoying, depending on one’s mood. (There—a pronouncement! You don’t have to be European to play that game.)
Sometimes the essays have a surprising, even mysterious, structure. “Walking Through a Landscape” starts out with a relatively common idea about walking and place: moving through rural places on foot is calming, and we apprehend the land’s “indefinite sanctity” and the history of human connections with it. Then, in the second paragraph, it takes up dwarves (which apparently have a literal existence here) as the spirit protectors of houses. The last two paragraphs (it’s a short essay) argue that gardening creates a community that brings together the human and the more-than-human—including dwarves. But other essays here are less, well, fanciful. The one about the history of asphalt as the dominant modern material is surprising and soberly researched. I wish I’d read it while I was working on Walking the Bypass: Notes on Place from the Side of the Road. Not that one mode is better than the other: the surreal and the straightforward are both welcome. And there’s a lot of surrealism here: “The Standard Central Bohemian Vision”brings together visions, folktales, and dreams about the dead.
I’ve been at a conference on pilgrimage this week, and I’ve been thinking about “Bees of the Invisible,” in which Cílek sets out a series of rules for wayfaring. In The Old Ways, Macfarlane describes similar rules, but he connects them to the notion of “improvised pilgrimage.” What links wayfaring and pilgrimage? An online Czech dictionary provides the explanation: the Czech word “poutník” translates as both wayfarer, traveller, journeyer, and pilgrim. Other essays here consider different pilgrimages: to Maková hora (Poppy Mountain), to a complex of Christian buildings on Svatá hora (Holy Mountain). On those examples, the translator, Evan W. Mellander, uses the term “pilgrimage,” but all of the journeys here, whatever their destinations, could be seen as improvised pilgrimages. When Cílek describes himself, in “Bees of the Invisible,” as “a wayfarer, not a conqueror,” he could also be calling himself a pilgrim. The places he visits are all sacred in one way or another, although he argues that some places are more sacred than others. Their loss—through urbanization, abandonment, the construction of mines or nuclear power plants—therefore affects him deeply. Even the destruction of the geodiversity of the world (the richness of its subterranean strata) upsets him just as much as the loss of ecodiversity. That makes sense: he’s a geologist, after all. I want to return to this strange book and explore its oddnesses. I wonder what else Cílek has written that’s been translated into English.