Thursday, November 4, 2010

Lording It Over Time

When I think back to that day, before it had all started, it seems gloriously boring. I feel like I could revel in the mundanity of things as they used to be - shopping for dinner, washing the dishes. Of course I know that I didn't. Revel in it. That afternoon I was so monumentally fed up with life the walk from my flat to the supermarket was a feat in itself.
The ground was moving under my dragging feet, it must have been. I had been walking... oooh, hours - years perhaps - and still hadn't reached the trolleys. I felt old. I've always felt old. I started a gradual decline into midlife crisis when I hit eight. I remember contemplating the years then past and thinking, 'they won't come again.' Of course, at the time I speak of, I really was old. Thirty-three. Every morning I hunted age in the crackle and fall of the soft skin above my eyes. I tracked the dainty footprints of crows who, for reasons best known to themselves, came in the night to stand on my face. I like crows. They are respectable, and intelligent, and loving to their spouses, but - why did they stand on my face? Did they realise the effect it had? They must have done. They weren't pigeons, they knew what they were doing. Why did they mean to harm me? I passed one at the entrance to the carpark. I glanced at him, worriedly. He ignored me. Pointedly.
I decided to make a detour to the library before doing the shopping. The library is beside the market, at the back of it. It's an undignified place for a library, now I think of it. There are usually a few empty orange crates lying outside, sometimes cabbage leaves, that purple moulded foam used in apple packaging: random detritus from the business of grocering.
The library itself is almost deserted. There will be two librarians, looking exactly as they would appear in the least imaginative imagination. I do not know that their names are Agnes and Neville. I do not know that. The most depressed person I ever knew was called Hope, so the librarians' names might be Shazira and Jet, but they are not. Agnes and Neville have the genes of long-descended librarians. They are not rebelling against hippie parents.
They will be inexplicably sorting books back into shelves from the 'returned' trolley. Inexplicably, because no one ever visibly checks any out. If they are not doing this, they will be having a furtive conversation about something which, judging by their expressions, they disapprove.
About four o'clock there will be two or three teenagers fidgeting outside. They are not hankering after literature: the library, as the least-visited corner of this town, is a good place to smoke, and hold clandestine meetings with equally-fidgetty members of the opposite sex.
Apart from that a dog occasionally strolls up, sniffs about the supermarket debris in a business-like manner, seems to consider for a long while whether it is worth the water to urinate but invariably decides that it is, and then strolls off again. He is unmoved by the friendly advances of a schoolboy, but that is because he is a Jack Russell, and they are independent creatures.
The library itself is small and the architecture is from the 1970s and has no beauty in it. There are no very noteworthy books but there are enough harmless detective stories to get you through dismal Mondays and soul-destroying Tuesdays. In one corner is a temporary display, installed in 1983. It is a small and unrepresentative collection of minerals. It was to this that I, ruffled by my encounter with the crow, fled for solace that day, the day it all began.
I found those rocks so soothing. There was an austerity in their presentation: white box; glass; small typed label. Typed, on a type-writer.
Porphyry, fluorite, malachite, serpentine. Serpentine, from a place called Lizard, in Cornwall (it's all true). Dark green, like a treacherous sea, with bloody red and white like a dragon tearing the waves into flays of foam.
As I stood there, my mind relaxing into thoughts of the cold Irish Sea, harsh words broke the habitual silence of the front desk. I looked over anxiously. A tall, angular man - untidy grey hair, long coat, drumming, twitching fingers - made an impatient gesture and scanned the room, ignoring now the muttered protestations of Neville. His gaze seized on me, I thought, and he stormed towards me. I flinched. He came to an abrupt halt, coat whirling forwards for a second and then settling. The man bent, hands on knees, and glared at the rocks.
I wondered whether I should dash away. He didn't seem to have noticed me yet. What an interestingly mad person. It was all reminding me of the time I lived nearer the city, near a ... I don't know what you're meant to call them - an institution? It was an asylum. The people who lived there, those who wandered abroad in the day, were intriguingly mad, rather than disconcertingly so. One man shouted at litter but beamed gloriously when you greeted him; another man was the very double of Stanley Kubrick, and appeared perfectly normal apart from his habit of plugging his ears with his fingers whenever he passed you on the street. This man was like them.
He had tapped one long finger on the glass case, just over a sample of porphyry I liked. It was dark purple of course, with paler markings that made it look like a tinted photo of space - a galaxy, you know, all the stars clustered centrally and scattering outwards into the darker depths of emptiness.
He glanced up at me. "Very sorry," he muttered. "The fools have lost the key."
Then he took a screw-driver (how did he happen to have one?) and eased it between the wooden frames. With a crack, he had levered them apart, and now he opened the case, greedy fingers stretching towards the beautiful porphyry. Well, no-one else ever looked at the rocks, no-one else even comes to the library. I felt that, really, they were mine. With a little indignant gasp, I had slammed the glass top down on his hand. He yelled, grabbed my hand, drew his own out (porphyry clutched) and turned to me. For a moment I thought he might wring my neck but, although it is likely this was his inclination, he instead screwed up his eyes and exhaled furiously through his nostrils. I tugged my hand in his grasp but he did not let it go.
Eventually, he opened baleful eyes on me, and raised the porphyry between finger and thumb.
"It is mine," he said, slowly and definitely, almost reasonably. I just stared at him, my breathing quick.
"I left it here for safe-keeping," he continued, "and now I need it."
"You left it here in 1983?" I asked disbelievingly. He was mocking me, probably; I just wanted him to know I was not a fool. "And now you suddenly need it?" Who needs porphyry? I looked at it. "It's just a pretty stone."
He shook his head irritably. "It is not just -" Then he sighed. "Yes," he said, nodding. "It is a pretty stone, and I want it back." He pushed his hair back and looked around, about to leave, I could tell.
"What is it really?" I asked, tentatively. I might have asked because I suspected he was delusional, and I was humouring him. I might have asked because I wanted to know if this was some trick - if a peurile TV producer had set it up to record my and the librarians' reactions. But I asked because I looked at him and I no longer believed either of those possibilities.
He cradled the stone, looking at it, and then at me. And then, he showed me the porphyry, and I saw. It was not a stone at all. I sighed to see it. His expression changed too.
"Do you want to come with me?" he said.
"There will never be enough years," I said, thinking of light-years and Einstein and the vastness upon vastness of the universe.
He smiled, like a Doctor assuring a patient of a simple cure.
"Time," he said, "we have."

Monday, November 1, 2010

All Souls' Day

Will o' the wisps wreath through these trees
Unnatural weather falling over their leaves
And the prayers of the dead, and all they ever said
Hang in the air on memory's threads

November nothings sigh the sweetness of May
From the dark of the grave, buds break into day
Rising to lay shades over dusk-coloured stone
While dining on those who are laid out below.

Friday, September 10, 2010

The Sea

It's 2 am. I think I had three cups of coffee today. I read somewhere that there is no real connection between coffee and sleeplessness, but sadly that vague half-knowledge is not making me any sleepier.
Because I couldn't sleep I reread 'The Kraken', by Tennyson, which is one of my favourite poems. Here it is:

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides: above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber'd and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
Tennyson was some ridiculous age, like eighteen, when he wrote this.


A few years ago I happened to be in London when there was a lecture in the Natural History Museum, on giant squid. The most remarkable aspect of the lecture was the dearth of definite knowledge about the subject. Most of the questions put by the audience were answered with a genial shrug and a laughing 'we don't actually know'. It was, in the end, a very informative hour, and an interesting one, illustrating how mysterious the ocean remains.


The sea always seems to me like the outer-space of fantasy - scattered with multi-coloured stars, peopled by aliens. Ctenophores must be Martians, after all. Even the common jellyfish has two heavenly names: 'moon-jelly', presumably what star-men eat on their birthdays; and 'Aurelia aurita', which is the sound a comet makes when it whirls through the planets and whips its tail against the roof of the sky.


Emblematic of the ocean's quintessential strangeness is the sea slug. Slugs are its beauty-queens, its haute-couture cats; feather-boa'd, be-frilled, exuberantly coloured, and as carnivorous as any fashion guru. They quaff endangered coral and boast of their poisonous natures. If they had feet, they would chop off their toes to squeeze into pointy shoes. And if you can have beautiful slugs, it's no great surprise to find other fantastical creatures: shape-shifting octopus, narwhals with headgear nicked from unicorns, triffid-like anemones, and tiny jellyfish that seem to have cracked the code for eternal life.


I don't feel like going into the depressing side of things - the EU fisheries commissioner will be presented with a petition this week asking that the new Common Fisheries Policy guarantees sustainability. Maybe things will get better. Maybe we'll replace petrol as a source of energy, and avoid future spills. Maybe we'll abstain from tasty but endangered treats like tuna and cod and calamari for a while, and fish stocks will recover. The ocean is stately and grand and spooky and wonderful, and will hopefully remain, in the words of James Elroy Flecker,


The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea.

Thursday, February 4, 2010

A Trunkful Of Jacks



Raw stripped January, needle-sharply cold. The chill had choked the birdsong from the branches.

You had walked through the drier paths, and then on into quaggier copses where no one much ever went. The branches above were black and harsh as crow-caw against the nothing-white sky. Ears grow on fallen bark there – purple jelly-fungus it is called in books, but it is definitely babies' ears, tiny and soft and almost velvet to touch. This is why babies sleep so much; they are listening, with their other ears, to the crackle and hunt of the Outside.

Do you remember when I was a student I found a giant ear in the damp kitchen, behind the stove? I never found out who was listening through it.

You knew you were going the right way when two jays suddenly flashed out in front of you. Had you seen a jay before? I have the urge to describe them as 'splendid' but without a handle-bar moustache or an Eton education I can't quite work up the courage. Seeing a jay unexpectedly, in a dreary copse like this, feels like that time when you were waiting in a grey-green office where the very air was heavy with forms to be filled in triplicate, and a man who looked like a butcher suddenly broke into magnificent song.

The jays are pink-gold with wing ornaments of blue, stolen from kingfishers. There is black and grey and white to be seen on the jays in books and those stuffed in museums, but in the air they fly so fast and are so shy they show nothing mundane, and are all colour, like their cousins the Birds of Paradise, and their great-aunt, the Phoenix.

You peered up through scratching branches at the top of the tallest tree, where a smudge of gold showed the two jays resettled. Jays are said to be uncommonly noisy, but these were silent – a sign, you knew, that this place was Odd.

You turned to see a hooded grey crow crouching on a low branch, who watched you with unsettling intensity. You hurried on, and soon there were no live things at all.

In the silence, and the sky so white, you felt as if some comforting layer had been stripped away. Your fingers hurt with the cold, jammed in your pockets though they were. The ground grew wetter and you could feel the seeping creep of freezing puddles edging at your feet. Perhaps – the tea rooms; soup; a warm corner. But suddenly you heard a cacophony of squabbling birds, though no birds were visible. You halted. They were too loud to be ghosts.

You looked about, and two jackdaws erupted from a hole in a tree, locked together in fury, falling to the ground like a tattering, shrieking handkerchief.

A second later three others flew to rest against the tree, and fought to enter first. It was a strange tree, apart from its invisible tongues. It had not one limb and was apparently completely hollow. At the top it was a jagged crown, open to the sky, with crenellated ramparts and two jutting, valiant strips of bark that formed respectively a North and a South-West tower.

These were look-out points, manned by couples. The battlements-opening, leading down into the trunk, was used only by those on guard duty. As you stared, two auxiliaries flew out and settled in the boughs above your head where you leaned against a neighbouring tree. They tried to shoot you with lilac-coloured droppings, but you had guessed what they were about and moved in time.

There were three civilian entrances roughly midway up the trunk. It seemed etiquette for returning birds to wait a minute or so, clinging to the bark to the side of these, before trying to enter. But from the sound of the incessant mêlée within, perhaps it was just necessary to wait for a space to appear into which one could squeeze. They really were never quiet. They sounded like spoilt puppies, high-pitched and petulant.

Jackdaws, you know, have a rigid social hierarchy, worse than Jane Austen's England, and with comparable intrigues and romances. Low-born females have married well and lived to snub their neighbours; precedence and rank are all the rage. In that trunkful of shrieks and feathers, in that bristlingly cold mire of the Phoenix Park, was novelty enough for all the Thackerays who ever fancied flight.

Later in the tea room, and since then on Monday-morning bus-rides, and in fluorescent-lighted queues, you have felt as if you are that strange turreted fortress. You close your eyes and see the broken-open sky; you hear the scuffle and scrape within, and you listen to the politics and gossip of a hundred fluttering souls.