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.

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?

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.

R Moore: The Future

His Eminence, R A Moore, has invited me to share in His grand Vision, a vision that may well result in my early and mistakenly enthusiastic death. (More on that later). As a technocratic communist, drunk on the power of scientific progress (“it’s function over form, dammit!”), He is intellectually and ethically placed to assume total control. If you thought Tzarist Russia was bad, it will be nothing compared with the autocratic rule His Emine—no no Sir no I meant sorry Sir no not again Sir please Sir—His Mightiness! His Mightiness is preparing to assume.

As spokesperson I am only able to reveal a hint of this future glory. Genetic experimentation will of course be actively encouraged (with a whip) and soon He shall know the deepest of the earth’s biological secrets. As will the scientists who worked for Him, but they won’t be around long. Armed with this new knowledge, He will create what are presently termed Giant Cats. These cats will be your ordinary neighbourhood cats—tabbies, gingers, Persians—genetically engineered to massive proportions. Excellent. To give you an idea of their size, let’s say that the kittens will be as large as houses and the cats as large as Founders Building, for those of you familiar with it.

These creatures will have added intelligence in order to brainwash them to the…um…Master’s cause. (Phew). Then they shall be used as our first defence against marauding foreigners. It’s very simple. However, we know that kittehs must have excitement. Therefore we also manufacture Giant Balls of Yarn. Preferably of the pink variety. With the yarn comes the necessity of food. This job looks set to have the highest mortality rate of any job, ever. And this is why we employ chavs.

Well you can’t argue with the job satisfaction. Who doesn’t like playing with kittehs? Just that these are a little bigger. His Majesty sees it as killing two birds with that one extremely useful stone. Chavs with food bags are deposited inside cat bowl, overseer rings bell that sounds like a box of biscuits, kitteh comes running, chavs open food bags, skid on jellied meat, scramble to avoid large pink tongue, claw at slippery sides of bowl, fail to get out and are lapped up—ASBOs and all—by aforesaid tongue. What a perfect solution.

Despite all this, I know how I will meet my death:

Look! A kitteh! Kittttteeeeehhhhh! Come here Kitttteeeeehhhhh! You’re such a good kitteh aren’t you? You’re licking me, that’s so sweet! Do you have any friends? I’ll be your friend, kitteh, do you want to some milk? I think the nearest swimming pool is that way, shall we go together? Awwww kitttteeeeehhhh, i love—–NO kitteh, what are you doing!? Kitteh put me down! Ahhhh, you’re dripping funny smelling water all over me! No kitteh no! My legs! Oh god! But I can’t be mad at you. No! My arms, my arms!

And so forth.

If you think kittehs are excellent, you will appreciate this cartoon.

I am afraid I must report to His uh Highness now. He is not all tyrannical—well he is but He doesn’t like to brag—and has made a facility for comment available to you. Speak wisely, He values the truth, as long as it’s His truth. Peace out.

 

No Sir, I would never think to warn them, I made it out like you described to me, I followed your advice, I swear it, I am a dedicated serva—slave to you Sir. I would do anything for you! Anything! I have always been— what? Well uh when I said ‘anything’ I didn’t mean—oh Sir no what I meant was—you can’t make me Sir! No! 

Dad’s Thought for the Day

I’ve noticed that human beings are at their happiest at the local re-cycling depot. Sorting their rubbish and putting it in the correct bins. They love it. You’ve never seen such expressions of contentment and joy. As well as using cognitive and coordination skills: the right colour bottles through the nominated holes. There’s also some aesthetic judgements to be made; gently drop them, just inside? Eerrrr. Or throw them to the back in quick succession, whilst there’s no one else there? Or leisurely; savouring every shattered bottle? And then there’s the light physical exertion in climbing the stairs of the skip etc.

Sometimes I think we try too hard to find the things that make people truly happy or discover the essence of our beings, but it’s fun trying. love dad, XXX

The Road to Mandalay

She held out the small square of money, tightly folded. I knew there had to be a note inside, scrawled across the Queen’s forehead: ‘The elephants know the answer’.

And so they do, but they have left! I saw them march into the noon.

Well I must waste no time. I must pack my trunk, bid suburbia goodbye and follow the road to Mandalay.

What or where is Mandalay? Is that a child, running ahead, clutching its immediacy? I am that child, or was, once. Now I’ll only watch, and follow till I can go no further.

This is a purple road. It looks smooth, but there are loose stones. Easy to trip over. It is a figurative road, and it leads to all pasts. As Pullman says, we have all the time in the world; all the time the world has.

I can reach only my own past. But in reaching, there are more possibilities. None that will change the future. None that will breach the fourth dimension. I will follow, though, because Mandalay sounds like truth.