I have a favourite walk between Scarborough and Robin Hood’s bay, on the Yorkshire coast. It’s about fourteen miles, mostly along the cliffs. It’s a good walk for thinking, because you don’t have to worry about losing the way and it’s not so varied that it drags your thoughts constantly into different registers. It’s more or less of one substance from beginning to end. What variety there is tends to fit into a rhythm: high, undulating cliffs separated by deep ‘wykes’, or valleys. You have to walk down into them and then up again.
The cliffs, especially near Scarborough, are boulder clay. Their whole substance is heavy, unstable and fluid. If it has rained, then you labour through deep sticky mud and try not to slide down the cliff. You have a sense of the land slumping into the sea. Change is rapid: the land might have slipped away to leave a knife-edge of clay standing. Next time you visit, it will have gone. The mud is red.
Somehow, I think, the mud is like thought. Thoughts can trip along freely, but, if you are mulling something over, they can be heavy and viscous, like you are trying to shape clay in your mind. Or, the act of walking through the mud can be like thinking. The mud resists, sticks and causes you to slip. You make progress, but it presents always the same face; it is the same. It’s a distance to cover, but it’s more like wrestling. Reaching the destination is the end of the bout. And the mud remains: what form you have managed to impress onto it is just waiting for the next rain or heavy sea to change again. It’s always there the same.
I did the walk recently. When I reached Robin Hood’s Bay by bus to start the walk, it was raining steadily (pax the forecast). By the time I reached Boggle Hole there was a thunderstorm directly overhead, so I sheltered in the Youth Hostel cafe. I had no mind to be the tallest object on the top of a cliff in a thunderstorm. The thunder passed, but it rained torrentially after I set off again. By the time I was up on the cliffs again it had eased. There was clear sky above the horizon out to sea, but a smudge along the horizon meant another squall rolling in. You could see the mechanics of how they manoeuvred about: one out to sea and coming in; the thunderstorm now away off inland to the north-west; another slab of raincloud wheeling round over the high clifftop at Ravenscar ahead of me, to the south. They don’t come across in straight ranks, but jostle and wheel around each other, like giant cogs. You think you’re going to get soaked; then you don’t; then you think the next one’s going to miss you; then it catches you head on.
So it went. So much rain fell so quickly that the path was ankle deep in water and I gave up trying to step round it. The water roared as it escaped downhill in waterfalls hidden behind blackthorn and giant horsetails. It was the same colour as the wastewater from a washing machine, soapy and greasy. The rain filled my bum-bag up like a toilet cistern and the water trickled out all in one spot and soaked my backside. When the rainstorm I’d seen out to sea arrived, it was impossible to look into. Out to sea, you could see it as a blur. When it closed in, it enveloped you and it hurt your eyes to try to look into it, like staring into a grey angry sun. It made me aware of inhabiting myself like a set of Chinese boxes: me, my thought, my body, my coat, the squall, the world.
I’ve been reading the book of Job. I can see why God appears to Job in a storm. A storm somehow envelops you; cuts you off; locks you inside yourself, but also locks itself inside with you. It’s all around you, but you can’t look at it. It forces you to look at yourself. It is simultaneously everything, something and nothing. It can roar and whisper at the same time. It’s a bit like being hit by a juggernaut which turns to mist the moment it hits; like a falling dream.
I thought about Job as I walked along. I can’t get my head around what’s going on in it. It seems so full of paradoxes. God appears in the storm at the end of the discussion between Job and his friends, in response to Job’s request for an audience with God, but he doesn’t inject any new information into the discussion at all. Instead, he reiterates the one thing Job and his friends already agree on: that mortals can no more hold God to account than explain the natural world. The God who orders the cosmos is beyond human accountability. God says to Job: “Who is this that darkens my counsel with words without knowledge?”, but then later says that Job was right. However, lack of knowledge was a major aspect of Job’s problem in the first place: he didn’t understand why he had to suffer. Similarly, God says that Job’s friends are wrong about him, but a lot of what they say is correct. The friends tell Job that if he pleads with God and confesses his sin, God will restore him. In the end, Job does this and God does restore him. The narrator says that Job didn’t sin by “charging God with wrongdoing”. In the dialogue that follows, Job does exactly that: “Though I cry, ‘I’ve been wronged!’ I get no response”. A further problem resides in the pretext for Job’s affliction, namely the Accuser’s implication at the beginning of the book that God’s judgement of Job as a righteous man is faulty and that Job will curse God if pushed to it. Job has to vindicate God by his response to his suffering.
You can push it this way and that way, and it slips through your fingers. Things fail to connect and slip by each other. The sin Job appears to commit by his tirades against God isn’t sin that disqualifies him from vindicating God’s judgement of him as righteous (in contrast to the conventional piety of Job’s friends, who are required to present a sin offering to God at the end). God says that Job both lacks knowledge and is right, but without specifying the content of the missing or present knowledge; presumably they are different. Or does Job say what is right without knowing it’s right? God’s self revelation to Job as an almost amoral orchestrator of a tumultuous, chaotic nature (symbolised by the monsters Leviathan and Behemoth) slides past God’s initial accusation that Job lacks knowledge and seems to corroborate what Job has said about him all along. (Or is the accusation of lacking knowledge directed to the friends? Or does God have a twinkle in his eye? A genuine invitation to speech?) Job’s impiety wins him a slap down from God which is nevertheless the encounter with God he has longed for – a slap down which is anyway very ambiguously a slap down. The violent mood swings of the grieving Job somehow set off the whole push and pull that threatens the logical cohesion of the whole book.
I thought about all of this whilst being battered by rainstorms. By the time I reached Ravenscar the rain had stopped, but it was misty on the cliff top. The water was still ankle deep. Gradually it cleared and got out sunny. My bum dried (not my shoes). At Hayburn Wyke, the water in Hayburn Beck was impressive and terrifying. In the last half of my walk I thought about a painting I’m working on, without resolving its problems.
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