Lyall Watson - Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind

LYALL WATSON (n Malcolm Lyall-Watson; 19392008) was born in Johannesburg, South Africa, the oldest of three sons of a Scottish architect father and a radiologist mother who was descended from the first Dutch governor of the Cape Colony. Raised in part on his grandparents farm, he attended boarding school in Cape Town and at the age of fifteen matriculated at the University of Witwatersrand, where he earned degrees in botany and zoology. After receiving a doctorate in ethology at the University of London, he embarked on a wide-ranging career that included writing and producing BBC nature documentaries, leading scientific expeditions to the Amazon, serving as director of the Johannesburg Zoo, presenting sumo wrestling tournaments on British television, and writing more than two dozen books, including the best-sellers Super-nature: A Natural History of the Supernatural (1973) and The Romeo Error (1974). In the late 1970s, he was appointed the informal Commissioner for Whales for the Seychelles, where he was instrumental in creating the Indian Ocean Whale Sanctuary. Watson spent time in the United States and England, but lived his final years in West Cork, Ireland.

NICK HUNT is the author of Where the Wild Winds Are: Walking Europes Winds from the Pennines to Provence, which was a finalist for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year. His other books include Walking the Woods and the Water and The Parakeeting of London. He also writes fiction, and works as an editor for the Dark Mountain Project. He lives in Bristol, England.

HEAVENS BREATH

A Natural History of the Wind

LYALL WATSON

Introduction by

NICK HUNT

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright 1984 by Lyall Watson

Introduction copyright 2019 by Nick Hunt

All rights reserved.

Cover image: John Constable, Study of Cirrus Clouds, c. 1822; Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Bridgeman Images

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Watson, Lyall, author.

Title: Heavens breath : a natural history of the wind / by Lyall Watson.

Description: [2019 edition]. | New York: New York Review Books, 2019. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Originally published: New York :

Morrow, 1984. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers:

LCCN 2019012599| ISBN 9781681373690 (alk. paper) | ISBN 9781681373706 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Winds. | Atmospheric circulation. | Ecology. Classification:

LCC QC931.W29 2019 | DDC 551.5/18dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019012599

ISBN 978-1-68137-370-6

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

Sailing back from the Trojan War, Odysseus and his men land on the island of Aeolia, the domain of Aeolus, the Keeper of the Winds. Aeolus gives them an oxhide sack that contains the captive winds of the worldapart from a gentle westerly to waft them safely homewith strict instructions not to open it. Believing there is treasure inside, the greedy crew do just that. The opening of the sack unleashes a chaotic gale that hurls their ship upon the waves, out across the wine-dark sea, blowing Odysseus madly off course. His adventures last ten years.

The book in your hands is that oxhide sack. All the winds of the world are inside. If you open it, you will be blown to places you never expected.

Lyall Watson is a modern-day Keeper of the Winds. His natural history of the great, invisible forces that shape our planetfrom the sand dunes of the Sahara to the serotonin inside our brainstwists and turns, uplifts and surprises like the subject it describes. Wind is defined as air in motion, he tells us early on, then explodes this apparently simple statement in every conceivable way. The reader is propelled back through recorded history into deep time, from the formation of the universe, through physics and mythology, biology and psychology, religion and sociology, in and out of an extraordinary diversity of cultures. We are blown from the macro to the micro, often in the space of a single page: from the planetary scale of the solar system to the infinitesimal particles that flow into us with each breath.

For wind, as Heavens Breath reveals, is much more than moving air. It is one of the great circulatory systems of our planet, connectinglike the book itselffar-flung climates and cultures. It ensures the spread of life, distributing pollen, seeds, and spores over vast distances, accompanied by a tidal soup of floating microorganisms. The atmosphere above our heads, far from being empty space, surges with windborne life, from thermal-surfing spiderlings (arachnauts, in Watsons playful term) to the living rain of tens-of-millions-strong butterfly migrations.

Wind also shapes the Earth, sculpting the land beneath it. The sand dunes of the worlds great deserts are the most obvious example, pure creations of the air that mimic the oceans rolling waves, and abrasive airborne particles scrape and erode like sandpaper, creating fantastical rock formations millennia in the making. Godlike, wind gives with one hand and takes away with the other: the loess landscapes of China are composed of aeolian silt deep enough to carve entire towns from, while in the dust bowl of the 1930s, topsoil from the American Great Plains was whipped away in vast clouds, skinning windhollows in the land up to fifty meters deep.

The influence of wind, however, is not only physical. With a polymaths panache, Watson plunges from natural history deep into the spiritual, for wind has always blown inside the human imagination. From the earliest times, this mysterious powerinvisible yet tangible, existing nowhere yet everywherehas been central to the origin myths of many cultures. In the Judeo-Christian story God breathes life, in the form of a gust of air, into lifeless clay, and numerous other religions place wind at the beginningand sometimes at the endof all things. Wind gods and spirits feature in belief systems from the Maori to the Mayan, often linked not only with creation but with procreation. Of the ancient Greek wind deitiescollectively called the Anemoi, which derives from anima, soulZephyrus, the god of the warm west wind, was associated with fertilization, while Boreas, the god of the frozen north, was believed to be so lusty that mares grazing with northerly-facing hindquarters could be impregnated; an example of aeolian immaculate conception.

One of the greatest delights of Heavens Breath lies in the sinuous journey it takes through the worlds multivarious cultures, exploring the ways in which people have attempted not only to understand windand to translate its invisible language into portents and predictionsbut to defend their communities from its more destructive urges. Watson relates how a New Guinea tribe fixed spears to the roofs of their houses in order to pierce the winds belly, and how, in South Africa, a Xhosa priest-diviner would climb a hill to spit potion into the eye of the wind. In other cultures, malevolent breezes were assailed with rocks, seaweed whips, gongs, lances, flaming torches, urine, and even (in Scotland) left shoes. These different tactics are all part of the same ancient and common code that Watson returns to time and again, drawing connections between scattered points that seem, at first glance, unrelated. Wind, unconstrained by borders, is the unifying thread between them.