I have been staring at the eastern horizon, watching the curved line of sea as it changes from silver to gunmetal grey, depending on the disposition of the sun, moon or clouds. No phone signal, no mains electricity, no road. Here are three watery meditations to tide us over, while I attempt to wrangle my grey matter into something of a thinking-in-words shape, rather than the amorphous estivating entity it currently resembles. See you next week, with an essay, hemispheres permitting.
Photos this week of the moon over the sea from this August in Dorset; blue skies, ash tree and a Norman castle keep from 2016; and lichen on limestone from a trip to the Burren, Ireland 2017.
Shoals
Muse in me is at once like a guest, a meal and a wolf; consumed and consuming. At times hunkered down like a prepper with protein bars and weaponry, sometimes loose-limbed and striding out speaking in tongues to trees. Other times he is tight as wind-knots in fishing line, the hard place that will not run smoothly through the eye of life.
He likes (me) to fight, to fish, to wrestle, to draw, to write…
I cast this line out. At next spring tide of the August dark moon will the soul shoals come near shore? Will they chase their young up the shingle to devour them, as they must? My whitebait thoughts are beached and flickering. Mackerel soul-fish eat them up and turn this mental energy into fleet bars of feeling, with purple ochre blood and guts full of mangled thought-fry. Then, way behind, corralling them into the cove: the bass. The ones who navigate the depths and eat both thought and feeling, the unconscious motives.
And behind this, the sometime seal, wide dark-eyed fish-herd, whiskered mischief. Inscrutably bright dark creature: the dreaming body. Turning over in the luxury of long kelp over white sands to face west, inland, to catch my eye. To bob up quizzical, to go under for answers. At home below, breathing-in above. Even when I do not see her whiskers, I know she swims near shore by how the fry, mackerel and bass are moving.
When all three leap -
I know the dreamer is hungry.
Whitebait are easily gathered as they flap on the strand. Mackerel are caught with shiny hooks. Bass require skill and a skilful cast. Seals belong in the sea.
July 2019
Don’t Reflect
for months un-swabbed decks bespoke spider poo cascades fox chewed lamb bones made a good needle case topped with a cork to care enough for this vessel would mean keeping faith with life threw a small spider overboard and destroyed its web a passing perch is fed by my unkindness seek clarity? don’t reflect upon the river
July 2018
Sky Mother
How I get stronger is by being more flexible. By containing more, opening around the aches, engulfing pain, eating it, making it food. There is nowhere that a tsunami is not soft, if you were to put your hand into the still water of it. But when it comes down upon you it is all improvised knives and devastation. I hold to the watercourse way. How I do not smash my head on the rocks is not by wishing it so. Neither does swimming technique help. Loose, loose and firm when necessary, that's all.
Sky mother gathers stars together, her mantle, her brooches.
Earth father lies deep and waiting, lions walk on him and say: 'There is a reversal, and we are the harbingers.' I love him with songs but I speak to her with candles: beeswax, shells of sidestepping crabs, iridescent rose borer beetle wing-casings. For him: melody, chanted repetition of thought forms, in paired words, bonded with paradox and humour: hey ho earth pa, granite oaf, slab lever, loose leaf, barleycorn-born, all to the tune of 'Kings of the Wild Frontier', or 'Stripped'. The twelve year old in me first saw his head and shoulders, horned and pelted, she melted and swooned, and so she picks the playlist, makes the mixtape. She says, 'Meet me in the woods', and he does, being a granter of wishes as well as a taker of prizes. In Windsor park he hunts down the deer, in the Long Mynd he lies snoozing, awaiting the tickle of the seeds as they burst from their pods, giggling into light after the long night and intoxication of not yet having been born. We are not yet born and we are dying of laughter, we are rolling on the floor, burst from our pods, oh shit, we are taking root! And so the earth father makes us part of himself again and we turn our little faces up to the mother as she drags her chariot above us, golden. Now we must daily turn to face her, whether we will it or no.
She says: 'Do as I will'. Ah, we say. Okay, and we rub our kickers in the dirt, and scuff them up a bit.
Sky mother, dressed head-to-toe in blue-black and draped with stars, offered me a pen-dagger, on a converted bus, in a field, near the River Stour, in a time before and after all that had happened up until that moment. She called me down from where I was engaged in what felt like very unrealistic passion, on the top deck. She was the intimate reality, the future, if I would accept her present. I told her to call me, I said I'd left her a note. Some lovely man was hands all over me and outlined like anime, but the real was downstairs, and I knew it. She was patient, in the way only a mother can be. She knew I hadn't been where I said I was. She was also not disappointed, or at least, not glaringly so, when she told me she had waited two years, and that I must come with her now. A few months later, and I know I have her pen. I am writing this with it.
I am asking for more of the right kind of pressure, under which I will change my crystal structure. My bones will become denser, like the left arms of archers, like the long-bowmen of Henry V. Even when we dig them up we know what their work was. The rich calcium deposits of killing the French by the thousand. Under this weight, likewise, I will get denser. This is the transformation of particles, flocculating, constellating, aligning with the 4 universal forces (as yet un-unified), and finally becoming no-thing. Nothing you could tell from my surface would inform you about what was really going on inside. That is due to how much I have borne and what I am prepared to bear.
Light reflects, yes, but not off what cannot be seen.
March 2018.
This week’s three good things: The joy of reading novels has returned after being absent since the start of the first UK lockdowns. I am so happy I could, and did, cry. The two books that burst through my fiction block are these beauties - No Season But the Summer by Matilda Leyser, an enthralling, ragged-edged modern day / ancient myth retelling, and Nick Hunt’s Red Smoking Mirror, with characters bright as turquoise and sacrificial fires, in this counter-historical rendering of ‘Mexica’ and its Moorish conquerors… I cannot recommend them more, and for once, you can judge these books by their colourful, well-designed covers.
And in even more good book news, Dougie Strang, who was for a long time part of the Dark Mountain Collective, has finished his first book The Bone Cave which will be out soon. It launches Wednesday 11th October 2023 at 7.30pm at the Scottish Story Telling Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland. Tickets are free but you need to book here. Dougie is the best story teller I ever heard and he transformed my perception and experience of the art form. He opened my ears to the mythic landscape, to how the land speaks, one evening in the Highlands of Scotland, as wild swans flew overhead, at the very same moment they appeared in the tale of Ossian he was telling around the fire…
This made my hair stand up
“I know I have her pen. I am writing this with it.” Wow!!