Changing Landscapes
Romney Marshes
A shallow place, a thin place, fathoms sounding place. The waves mesmerise: long observing, listening, the soft spray, the deep green aura: the atmosphere of the waves envelops, drowning all senses, rolling in over, back out, again, again. The waves come and go.
The ocean is still, fathoms sounding; deep. I wonder what is down there. This is where I go. The ocean. It is beyond comprehension. It invites me. There it is. The ocean is there. It will never cease. It is the ocean.
The waves are not the ocean.
Dunwich Beach
What is this below? What has been called and what is it that is coming? Is it possible? Although it’s easy to say, what does it take to do? There’s a sense of drift here, something of a slipping ideal, wherein intentions and potential can so easily dissipate in the tricky shift from inclination to manifestation without a construct to sustain the delicate waves becoming particles becoming energy becoming manifest . . .
Little Gidding
There is a fire and a rose. At a cremation, I read about the place; tears didn’t come. Wouldn’t. I wondered why it is “Little”? Is there a big one? Death and the trivial. Unavoidable, even seductive. Inviting. Calculated stupidity in the face of enormity. Horror and jokes. The pound shop by the Elizabethan (1st) pub off the High Street is selling oil of cloves which is surprising and very useful; I’d cracked a molar on an olive that was supposed to be pitted and it hurts. Although the flavour combined with a triple gin and double Campari (an improvised Negroni) takes my breath away.
Saxmundham
I am here in a dream. Looking back. Sometimes you can rediscover things you’d forgotten, or lost. These things are a joy, often illuminating a way forward, reigniting, or simply the chance to complete unfinished business. Sometimes there’s absolutely no use whatsoever: with insight, you might realise you understood so little then, that the chances of fresh revelation in going over old ground are zero: what you once considered so important and probing was actually assumption and misperception.
Holywell Bay
A face, eyes closed, finger to lips, ‘Shhh’. A man in his garden, pottering. The garden is large: it is obviously a back garden. The man notices his fence begin to shake. He stops for a moment, staring. The fence moves again as if someone has hold of it and is shaking it for all they are worth. It happens once more, harder and faster, and the man, worried, steps up to the fence to investigate. He peers over it, looking right, looking left, and seeing nothing. It shakes again while he is peering, and to the far right, at the corner, he can see a hand clutching and shaking the fence. Carefully, quietly, he approaches the corner, dragging his rake. The shaking stops again, and everything is still. The man crouches behind the fence, waiting: then he darts up, rake poised, looking over. There is another man there, crouching by the fence corner. He gives a strange, twisted leer, holds his fingers to his lips ‘shhh’, and darts off over the hill, towards the tree. The man stands, stunned. He drops his rake. He takes half a step forward, stops, takes another little step: by now, the “shhh’ man is behind the tree. The tree starts to shake, really violently, as if something far bigger than the little man is doing it. The man jumps over his fence, and starts to walk towards the tree. A face peeks out from behind, and makes his ‘Shhh’. He scampers off towards the trees. The man follows, running now, moving faster down the hill towards the forest. The little man leaps through the trees, taking longer and wider steps, looking back over his shoulder. As he does, his eyes light up green and green and red, shifting colour as he smiles and grins. The garden man still follows, his steps growing wider and wider, too, and soon the little man’s steps are out of all proportion to his size: he is bounding through the forest, arms pumping, eyes blazing, taking 6ft, 8ft, 10ft strides that launch him 10, 15, 20 feet in the air. As he does so, his arms and legs seem to grow, lengthening impossibly as he moves. the gardener starts to catch him up, and he is propelled higher and higher by their great strides. Now, their leapy, boundy running takes them up to the treetops, shining, twinkling. they run on and on, the leaves their pathway. Now, they are running, leaping and soaring across the treetops, up into the sky, and they leave trails of green and gold and red behind them, filled with joy, laughing and leaping, higher and higher until till they run on and on, the leaves their pathway. now, they are running, leaping and soaring across the treetops, up into the sky, and they leave trails of green and gold and red behind them, filled with joy, laughing and leaping, higher and higher until they are passing the stars in the twilight sky and all of a sudden they both pop out of existence with an aurora flash over the trees, the colour folding back on itself into two bright new stars, shining, twinkling. One of the stars fades out of existence, and in the other you can just see a face, winking and holding its finger to its lips, ‘Shhh’. In the man’s garden, over his cabbage patch, a little aurora shines out, and the man pops out of it, falling back to earth. He opens his eyes and they twinkle, green and gold and red.
Wells-next-the-sea
Uncharted; which way leads home? Living the dream: in those days of sunshine and success it seemed so simple, clear. We could all share in the joy of achievement. The momentum of fulfilled ambition. Winning, not losing. The collective high of mutual support. A singular goal. One pure aim.
When the circles ignited, it was a culmination of almost two thousand years of preparation. We don’t know why, who or how it began. Not for certain. We had the faith, the doctrine, the institutions; but not the reason. The five tableaux (the hand emerging from the earth, the frozen face, the terrified man, the hopping thing, the flayed creature) have seemingly no antecedents yet once pulsed through our culture like blood. They were just . . . present. Everywhere. We learnt the stories from infancy, we traced their evolution through time and place; how they became represented by the five circles is a story found in every culture, blossoming simultaneously as evidenced by the remains of the altars and temples raised in homage to them. Their disappearance was equally synchronous, a lost train of thought — a cultural amnesia as sudden as it was absolute.
When those circles flared, that lost race memory flared with them. It shattered through our collective conscious, awakening long forgotten notions, behaviours . . . as the circles rose skywards, watched by near everyone on this planet, the answering light in the heavens seemed unsurprising, expected. There was no fear as we raised our faces to the haemorrhaging atmosphere, only wonder as we waited, expectant, for what was coming to answer our wordless call.
Black Park
The mist creeps in the trees. The previous day had worn grey-brown by twilight, the rainfall so heavy it filled the sunken garden near halfway. Dark birds had bathed there, dipping their wings then holding still, their beaks turned to me. My mood had been grim, wrought by last nights sleeplessness and into this bruising twilight I came, seeking the comfort of my own particular preferences among the alleys and the street lamps of the city in the night.
I had never heard of the house i sought until a recent acquaintance had mentioned it with the highest of recommendation. Only on certain days, and under certain conditions would it be open to newcomers, and then only by invitation. My acquaintance had promised his endorsement and furnished me with the date and time of the next gathering. It never occurred to me, the strange manner of our initial meeting — a shadowed corner, so many mutual interests, a glass of a sickly sweet iron tinctured draught — indicated anything other than the brief twinkling of serendipity, at least until now. Now i understand, of course. Chance had no hand in it, only design, engraving me in this ancient fresco that holds only the chance of retribution.
Signs. Signs and portents. As I crossed into that street did it seem as if the sky became overcast, if only for an instant? The muddy path seemed deeper, sucking hold of my boots for a few moments longer than it should. Why was it harder to breathe? As if the air were being removed from my lungs. Perhaps it was due to these conditions that the door seemed to pulse with a silent rhythm, a low throb emanating from the street beneath my feet.
