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.

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.

Can’t sleep

Sometimes I feel I am alone in a vast darkness I cannot comprehend, am not in any way prepared for. Shadows press on me from all sides clamouring, devouring what innocence, what ignorance I had. Now I must face them all, armed only with a dream, a dream of what I want, one that lies beyond money, family and love. A dream of self-purpose; the fear of it not coming true, the loss of motivation, of giving in to the things which are not me.

These I fear more than anything when the light is gone and I am left alone to think. I have never had to confront these – these issues of life in all their social terror – they are so much outside me, so far from the child I am, crouching confused and alone and self-pitying within. Where will I go? How will I dance to this country’s tune - this world’s? Why is life so huge and fearful, like standing on a knife’s edge: one side is the awful fall into death, the other is a shiny surface – a mirror – showing all the daily hints of life; the smallness of people; the magnitude and seeming majesty of humanity. and pain, in whatever form it takes.

Happiness is there too, but the way to it is hidden- we create the path as we go, laying each brick just so. Maybe we will make it straight and true; maybe it will meander through forests and dry places before it finds its way; or maybe for some it ends abruptly and brokenly and is not rebuilt. I do not know my path, but I will build it. And it will be straight, though I wander now, searching for the bricks.

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.

Sea

     Sidmouth

Some description I wrote whilst at home, getting used to living on the coast.

The sea is strange today – late afternoon sun making everything yellow-tired, and it is quiet except for a few disturbing passers-by up above on the promenade, or crunching through that narrow duny shingle that rises between me and the ocean. There is wind but no waves, just thousands of ripples intersecting, individual, but all moving to the left, to the east. I can see currents, different classes, moving distinct…and then a sudden exhalation from the moon raises the waters momentarilly, like our occasional sighs, full of longing, discontent, even comfortable weariness. There – another of those heaves, very human in its suddeness. I feel I could – while burying my feet in the stones and letting the clear, cold water push them deeper in the earth – stretch out my legs and run across the ripples, using their inexorable direction as a raft; movement creates a certain solidity, and movement on such a great scale creates an illusion almost powerful enough to be real. When I despair about reality – that only its prosaic stream is true, and is all I am and have – I raise my eyes to see this alien, calm, unexpected blue, and wonder whether there is something other than reality, and it exists in my perception of this beautiful world.

The 19.16 to Basingstoke

       A train journey from Torquay to Honiton.

I like this piece of writing. It’s so unlike my usual ultra perfectionist style, which is so difficult to write. This is full of dashes, as I tried to capture everything as it was happening. That crucial need not to miss any. I’d like to try this more often. Writing at speed can generate images that’re impossible to conjure up hours later on a computer. I hope my description gives the reader an impression of that evening. I’ve left most of the original grammar.

This is like something out of a fantasy novel – the train running past the estuarine waters of Teignmouth – announcement that this will be our next stop. Water birds picking at submerged hillocks – an aristocratic Atlantisian maze! Then – ah -the houses across the river! No, the sea itself: alive and dark, heaving twilight. This curving headland – a solitary stack far from the cliff – now a tunnel, and back to the water, 4 green lights in the distance, tunnels, now Dawlish. Boys stand fishing on the slim coast – this station is right on the water! I see the sea from my stationary window. Slim nets – people in a line on a stone jetty ending in cold, cold water. Provincial Dawlish girls: “I haven’t been to London for ages!” The sea looks alive with creatures, or rain pelting its heavy surface, writhing, I see people walking the narrow land line beside the high tide. Everything but the brown wall is blue – deep, grey, beyond sunset, before night. Great hills, then low stone again. A light on the headland, amusements blaring out their fun – come, come! But the fair is closed, the children are home at dinner, and this is Dawlish Warren. And it is 19.45 on the 13 Sep 07.

I must write of Teignmouth while the sky beyond this dimmed window gets darker, and it seems I am leaving the River Exe. I still recall the lights across the water, not beckoning, just existing, and that was enough. And then – a bright orange flicker: woodsmoke rising in a column lit beneath by fire – how domestically it spiralled, signifying more profoundly than the lights, human presence. The first mark of man. That column enticed observation – aesthetically rather than physically – I did not feel bound to shelter in its heat, and breathe its fragrance – I was content to observe. What is happened? I have lapsed into self-analytics. No good. But I will tell of the boats – those small fishing vessels floating placidly on the mingled waters, sails reefed for night.