The Island
... is a flower whose pollen is metaphors
It is June in the Hebrides. Beyond my bedroom window, sycamore rustle their leaves, their sage green underbelly turned upward into the slanting rain. In front of the sycamore stands a row of spruce protecting their neighbours from the wrath of the Atlantic. They stoop like OAP’s, exhausted from a lifetime of elderhood.
Beyond the tree line the jagged basalt islet, Mâisgeir, rises into view, and beyond that, the Isle of Staffa, and beyond that, Iona. White horses rear at their edges and remain motionless in an eternal descent, as if landfall would be the death of them. Above the horizon, the sky travels east with the water while a squall sweeps across the neighbouring isles. It happens quickly, and, forgive the cliche, time stands still. In fact, time does not stand at all. When you are suspended between land, sea and sky, things that are otherwise given become less given.
An island is seen as something solid, stoically holding fast within a medium of chaos and change; the ocean. But what if it’s the other way around? Could we think of the island as a boundless, constantly moving mass resonant with our subconscious? What if it’s the island that fills the belly of the Earth, insistent on reaching every last curve? What if the island rises and falls, ebbs and flows, and is privy to currents, waves and whirlpools? Let’s flip the whole operation on its head and say the ocean is ‘the place’ and the island is what’s ‘in between’. Cartography would have a field day. If the ocean were inverted as though it were land, then an island would be a lake, the part where the map folds into itself and plunges beneath the lattice.
You have to go deeper if you want to make kin with an island.
Islands are metaphorically attractive, particularly to cultures that enjoy separating things. They are alluring because they are (as it would initially appear) contained, boundaried, and easy to grasp. The island is made synonymous with the individual, the isolated, the castaway – there is truth in this, but in the same breath it is true to say the island is the collective, the connected… that which belongs and invites belonging.
An island is not cast away as if it were some kind of topographical jetsam. It is cast among and within, at the centre of things, embedded in a planetary constellation of kin-islands – also at the centre of things, depending on where your two (or more) feet land.
The world is not a homogenised mass of rock and mineral, conjoined indefinitely without distinction. The world is an archipelago. It is joined together in the way the art of Kintsugi joins fractures with gold, rendering them whole through their brokenness. Beneath us, the roiling mantle of the Earth flows like a red ocean, breaking apart its crust and firing blinding light into the cracks.
That is the thing about islands – they complicate linear perception. They defy straightforwardness with their porous thresholds and shifting mirages. I look towards the Ross of Mull, where a fata morgana bends light through fluctuating layers of atmospheric temperature, rendering the Paps of Jura as floating mountains. I take a photo and send it to my friend who lives across the water.
‘I didn’t realise you could see the ocean over the Ross on a clear day,’ I say.
‘You can’t. It’s an illusion.’ The day is not clear after all. ‘A trick of the light,’ he says.
The ocean rises miles above itself while cerulean blue compresses into a thin line, shimmering at the edge of a dream playing out in waking life.
An island makes you ask what is real? It is connected and separated, harmonic and discordant in the same breath; a living expression of contradiction itself. Any ecologist will tell you that an island is a place of gregarious and vibrant exchange and novelty, yet many see it as a hermitage mired in scarcity.
If Mother Nature threw a costume party and told us the theme was paradox, I would arrive dressed as an island.
A few miles in the distance, somewhere between Mâisgeir and Staffa, a ship soars by with sails like plastic bags in a gale, empty and full at the same time. The crew are unaware of my existence but I am aware of theirs. My sight has made contact with the reality of their being here in this landscape, alongside me and the islands and the bulbous clouds that drift across the firmament like weightless Mont Blancs. It is a kind of relationship, no matter how easy it is to say we are apart.
I go outside and overhead a cuckoo, recently arrived from Africa, croons as it glides towards the woodland behind the house, where it joins a choir of immigrant beings who are also at home now. The word ‘Atlantic’ hails from ‘Atlas’ via the Atlas Mountain range in Africa. Africa and the Hebrides, you say? Yes, and, this place is an Appalachian-Caledonian tetris – you just need to peel back the thick carpets of peat or hang out at the foreshore to know identity is a chimera.
Like an iceberg, the body of an island continues deep below the surface. What you are seeing is actually the summit of a great terraqueous mountain whose base wraps around the planet like an enormous geological skin, pockmarked with volcanic and glacial protrusions. We are all connected through this vast terrestrial organ.
An island, it turns out, is not adrift, but rooted, springing forth from the core of the Earth itself. Or, perhaps it is adrift, but like a boat, it is anchored. Without roots, seaweed tethers itself firmly to the seabed through what is known as a ‘holdfast’. Perhaps an island is holding fast. A tectonic shift or volcanic eruption will move an island as though it were a limpet upping sticks.
As I write, I’m sitting on top of time, cast in igneous rock that once flowed as a river of lava from the mouth of Beinn Mhòr, which gapes benignly in the distance. Across the water, on the Ardmeanach peninsula, a 50-million year old fossilised redwood tree stands tall in the very same ossified river. This North Atlantic island was once subtropical.
A large rock (or, an island) is like a museum. It is a record, a history condensed into a cross-section of minerals and elements and creatures whose imprint still lingers today. All of this depth, yet I still feel as though everything here is ephemeral, including myself. One day, my bones will become island soil.
I look to the west, where Bac Mòr flanks the horizon. Known as the ‘Dutchman’s Cap’, the island resembles a gargantuan sombrero. The ocean wears many hats, it’s true. My eyes cease to see beneath the surface, but my imagination takes a deep dive. What lies beneath the Dutchman’s Cap? Am I late for the costume party?
Islands are an expression of the layered logic of life. Beneath the crawling waves, cephalopods descend through the pelagic zone into the abyssal zone. Above the dome, guillemots, puffins and razorbills patrol the troposphere. Meanwhile, spindrift descends on the foreshore in a dance with gravity. An island is a flower whose pollen is metaphors.
The world forever iterates itself at the shoreline, rarely on time, never quite committing to its own identity, and here I am, perched atop this blossoming rock, witnessing the metamorphosis of our salt-licked existence as it transforms in front of my eyes.