Girl of crimson ink / High Hopes

Has it been so long? Are those straying thoughts no longer mine? What has changed in me and where is the girlchild who wrote in crimson ink by candlelight? Sometimes I can feel her there – like Lyra and Will in separate but parallel worlds, touching for a brief perfect moment, each others’ soul. And I revisit this yearning – though desire and ambition rule adult life – and I remember the enchanted evenings when snow lay upon the garden and the bedroom sill shone white at the height of summer.

The Scottish stream; storm by yellow afternoon, clear by night. The steeple in the misty dawn, almost ghostly, but beautiful; glowing, reaching, forever young. Legend in the present; a portal to an immortal land that cannot now be found, except in story, except in memory – that imperfect of things. And there was a brightness, leaving a trail like a fading footprint on the air – the high air where absolutely anything was possible…I know it…how long will I know it? Will it fade with time, with desire, eroded by ambition? I still look now, but when will I cease to look? – when it has been gone so long I approach it again unknowing? And only then would I be able to step into that place, only then, for I will not recognise it, and in my innocence I will dwell there forever, until another adulthood comes to take me away.

Girl of crimson ink – you live in me still.

Wordle!

‘West of the moon, east of the sun’

There is a world which stands on the edge of time. A distance that is crossed only by transcendence. The far mountains call to me and I long for their story – the story they have told since the edge of everything became as sharp and focused as life. Beyond my sight there is a great adventure, eternal, mortal in the way we have come to perceive things. I may glimpse it when my spirits are low; when they stray, bleak and closed. The wind carries it to me: that far world. It is beyond wonderful; it is Truth I yearn to touch; to be held by the distant height above the pines. A scent and my heart lifts, running with the winds.

The sun is hot, searing my skin, but these winds are cool – cold and pure – they live within themselves, rushing against me to cool the sun’s heat. They blow from the place I see beyond the horizon. Of all the things nature offers, this is the greatest: this promise of adventure, eternal youth – it is linked to being alive.

For now I sit, head aching with human anxieties, which are suddenly so unimportant when the wind blows from the direction I cannot find the way to. There are no maps to guide me, save for the one imprinted on my soul.

Animus?

Who are you strange presence – there behind my eyes? You were dark and masculine – a strong and angry thing like a storm, but calmly wrathful, sneering at others’ plans. Who are you? Are you me? Or was I falling brief-asleep and dreamed you? You were there for a moment when the sun shone on my eyes, and its warmth was a cocoon of sleep – a gateway to a world of dreams whose realness could not have been in question.

You are not there now when I think of you. Are you the prince? I know you are there. But here is too much noise and the moments are not joined seamlessly. There is so much unreality – a great land I can sense behind my eyes, peopled with things which are me, and not me. I have only this inadequate language with which to express you, lest I look at someone wordlessly and wonder whether they might see it in my eyes.

How it recedes. It is too real – eyes open – too crisp and bright and real – I am almost suffocated by it.

Beach days

It is warm here today, listening to the waves turn over the pebbles in a constant pleasant grinding; feeling the wind soft against my skin, but blowing up in sudden gusts, sweeping hair into my eyes, forcing me to pause in my recording. I sit here listening then and watching a blue ball being carried out to sea. A boy throws a stone at it, but falls short – perhaps it is his and he is too scared to  reclaim it, bound perhaps by parent-laws, which he knows are right. It has passed beyond my sight now, swept by the sea in some vague direction; vague but purposeful, for the current does not cease – it flows, ebbs to a rhythm hidden from me and the boy in the sun. The ocean has acquired a new relic, a souvenir of the dry land it laps. The waves reach further up the pebbles, eagerly desiring another conquest, a greater share of the earth. I do not doubt they will have it in the end.

Deep almost as life

And I could be sitting beneath that lone tree in the corner of the summer field by the horses. Except where is the sun to warm me as I write? And I would not have written at all, disturbed as I was by childhood and the shouts of something young and all-living. There was nothing truly to fear then; no death, no love, just endless immediate play. Maybe I would have sat beneath a tree – the lone tree – like this, holding one of the books from the school’s tiny library. But would I have read it? I cannot remember myself any more, trapped as I am in adulthood; here I sit with the light taps of spent buds falling on my shoulders, thinking why can’t I know that self – that child-self who laughed and sulked and cried and worried child-fears, which cannot claim the fearless Immediate. For that is where I lived; as Wordsworth writes, that is where all children live. I have come to see it now and that sight has proved its undoing; the moment you become conscious of it, you cease to live it.

What strange irony is life? What strange wonderful being do we experience; it goes beyond contemplation, it is perfectly imperfect: this oxymoronic symphony reaching into vastness –  a structure of the infinite and the little, perceived by minds given over to flight. Deep almost as life. And what creature am I? A walking piece of hypocrisy – for I too claim human weakness: retreating from the brink, finding solace in inadequate things. It saddens and comforts me. But I will not dwell far from this edge – this pinnacle on which one can almost touch -

I return, for the wind blows, carrying the scent of great beauty –  this nature that sweeps me up in memory and thought; the chimes one hears from a bright island floating somewhere inside the mind, just beyond grasp but not beyond sight.

Truths that yield to perish never

Today is a day of all-summers; of the years gone by, similar days, breathing in the same smells: that fresh summer tree-scent; cut grass and laughter; the plays to come. So close today that I may reach out and touch them – a strange and unreachable time.  These memories are not mine surely; I have only the vaguest remembrance, like a breeze that blows gladly through a day, pressing its insistence against my cheeks. But it is wonderful: an old that tells of some life already lived, maybe a multitude of lives: snatches of memory from other times, other worlds, make us multifaceted creatures, alive through centuries of life. We are other people, other enemies, we are nature, the material world. And on a day like this in Connaught Gardens or on the root-humped river bank, I seem to recall what is hidden from my consciousness. Hidden perhaps because it is too great to bear, knowing we have lived before. Even my own childhood is subsumed into these living memories, so that it too could have happened under a younger sun when the sky looked to be upon us in a single burst of insight. Memory: what are you, why do you haunt us so with truths that yield to perish never?

Ulysses

I exist for the beauty and the overwhelming magnitude of life.

Ulysses

It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink
Life to the lees: all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved me, and alone; on shore, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Hyades
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!
As though to breathe were life. Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains: but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this grey spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

	This my son, mine own Telemachus,
To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle—
Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil
This labour, by slow prudence to make mild
A rugged people, and through soft degrees
Subdue them to the useful and the good.
Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness, and pay
Meet adoration to my household gods,
When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

	There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:
There gloom the dark broad seas. My mariners,
Souls that have toiled, and wrought, and thought
	with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;
Death closes all: but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.
The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:
The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

- Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Twilight

The feeling of twilight on tear-stained cheeks reminds me of the years that are gone; vanished into the gossamer past like once-bright ships sailing westward. Those sails the colours of dreams; the ugly puce of nightmare; the ebon decay of sepulchre-visions; the indigo of setting dreams. And the ones that came to me on flights of golden ideas – they had wings so full of feathers that I would be lifted up, scales raining from innumerable pores. Those liftings are so rare. Difficult to recall at a time like this.

It is twilight though, and tonight I remember the ships with their billows of crimson, all the material of life strung out to catch the wind. I once wrote about sailing the seven skies. How many have I sailed, how many have borne me back on a splintered mast, lacking the deck I thought I’d built. But I have sailed, yes, and seen wonders that few could contemplate without a terrible fist closing on their awe.

There was a hillside today that I knew didn’t belong in this world. It was a bank of trees, a dun mass speckled with new green that glowed uneasily when the sun shone. I knew then – in that sinister exciting light – that I saw a piece of something broken away from another world; a strip of rigging a storm had ripped from an eager ship. Why it had blown and settled on a slope outside my house I will never know. But today it existed as surely as I, and the sails by which I move my life.

Sidmouth

 From this little height granted by the bank of shingles, the crashing sea is muted. Things have softened and individual giants are heard only in the trances of the blast. These waves are a bare hint of the ocean’s power, but their roar is enough to command respect. The named cliff catches the echo in its hollowed undercutting; erosion has created a natural amplifier – a conical shell which the sea inhabits like a hermit crab. This human-scarred cliff cups the waves, holding them close as it backs inevitably toward the land. As if to say -

No, I cannot leave you sea: murderer and companion, friend and foe. The land is dry and empty, devoid of sighs, moving to an unseen cycle which does not include me. I belong to the coast, to the restless shifting tides of the moon; I know them well, for we have grown old together, shared the secrets of sky and sea. These are what we know, have served, guarded and directed, withstood for aeons. I have no love for earth, unless it be beneath the deep, or pounded by the surf, or encased within my red being.

These shallow cliffs behind me are friendly with grasses; green stems grow linear along their feet, contrasting verdancy with desert. Those other higher cliffs, of which I wrote, lie further, after three-quarters of a mile of shingle; they grow, reaching higher, diminish, then higher still. I do not know these cliffs; they are red monolithic spines – the backs of amphibian raiders long dormant. Will they wake? Perhaps soon, perhaps never. It depends on stories, and whatever I have the power to tell.