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A LAND COVERED IN DARKNESS.
(DISPATCH I).
A land covered in darkness. A land grown over with swarths, swards, swads. Remnants of yellow rattle and foxglove beardtongue haunting the meadow, the leasow, the mædsplott, suppressed by tussocky matt. Thistle, nettle, ragwort. Half-buried a broke plough gone to moss and mildew. A ghost pasture. A farmland gone fallow decades prior. The family hung on longer than most. Mosaic ecologies becoming bramble, scrub and tree.
Rough stuff that wears down wildflowers.
///
In the attic under the eaves, writing desk tucked between collar beam and window
I feed a sheet into my Olivetti Roma, manufactured in the 1980s by Olivetti Do Brasil
A travel typewriter with smooth keys, 13pt micro elite typeface, grey case with eye-catching red trim
A detail that recalls the best known works by the architect Lina Bo Bardi
In a cafe across the North and Baltic seas a chronically ill poet reading from a collection of body horrors offers the advice: “Write what you know”
I check the line spacing, the page margins
Lock the paper in place
///
Countryside patina collects unevenly. Falu red, yellow ochre, weathering down to raw wood. Green algae blooming where gutters spill rainwater. You feel similarly exposed to the rough of time, as if gathering moss on bones. Fermenting a forest mould beneath skin. Your self wears a skeleton of old timber that no longer quite fits together. Warped living like doors swollen in frames.
///
I take up very little space inside my hollow
My catch-cold October chamber
Can hear downstairs Rebecka scraping oats from breakfast pan, crackle of kitchen fire, pump refilling with water from the well
While upstairs I'm wrapping woollen blanket over woollen jumper, pantomiming the asceticism of monastic scholars
St. Guthlac in his Crowland Abbey
His hermitage in a fen of immense size with immense marshes, black pools of water, foul running streams, and also many islands, and reeds, and hillocks, and thickets, and with manifold windings wide and long ⁕
And far far older than this two-hundred-year-old cottage
Rebecka shouting, “I'm making second coffee. Do you want second coffee?” and me hunching down the stairs into the warmth, into the smell of saucepan coffee brewing atop iron woodstove
///
Awake to a deep root world of dark beautiful bogs like peat. You breathe in spores. You are a fragile husk of petrified bark. You are tree sap and fungi and sunlight succulent through your tender flesh glows. You are slowed vestigial, reduced to spines. Your stomata transpire to the dawn coo of chorus.
///
699AD, St. Guthlac builds his small cells and oratory into a ransacked burial mound on an especially obscure island
Uninhabited on account of its many horrors — a host of spirits ferocious in appearance and terrible in shape — filling the whole space between earth and heaven ⁕
He endures the loneliness of the wide wilderness until his death in 714AD
He produces no written works in this period and is survived by several Old English poems
///
Still dark mornings
A foundation cold that penetrates several pairs of socks
Several pairs of socks strategically layered, heel to toe, so that none of the holes line up
I touch match head to tinder, igniting a stack of birch and juniper
The latter venting an earthy spice with a hint of berry
I pull my chair close to the kakelugn, kick my feet up on a box of kindling
Opened on my lap the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English
An ex-library tome with one-thousand-eight-hundred semi-transluscent pages leafed like those little bibles you used to find unloved in hotel dressers
I'm reminded that language can work like a spell
A spelling
See also: conjuration, incantation, fascination
Leaning on my chair back Rebecka asks how my writing is going
I tell her I've unearthed a dozen new synonyms for marsh and mire and mud
Enough to cover all four corners
///
Slobber, slubber, lutulence
Malm, turbary, sletch
Muck, mull, mor
Cess, slake, sleech
///
In the garden blue scilla spread among mossy rocks and rotting tree stumps, cross-pollinated tulips swirl vibrant splashes, the horizon a pale swell of cherry blossom
Instead of writing
I weed around paths, around planters, around floriferous mounds bordered by birch trunks
Most of the papery white bark peeled away
Getting lost in days of dirty nails and muddy knees, gardening gloves thin at the fingertips, a little irritable skin poking through
Rubbing one sunburned spot the size of a rice grain
Pearl hyacinth, hellebore, pasqueflower
* * *
References.
⁕ Life of Saint Guthlac, Felix (c. AD 740). Translated by Bertram Colgrave. Collected in: Chronicles of the Dark Ages (Folio, 2008).
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SOME ROUTINE SUNDAY MORNING.
(DISPATCH II).
Abbey Asceticism Atop Attic Bark Beam Beardtongue Best Between Bibles Black Blanket Blooming Body Bogs Bones Bordered Burial By Catch-cold Cells
///
Some routine Sunday morning — oily breakfast in my belly — fried eggs and potatoes with a mix of drying beans tossed in tomato slices, green onions and herbs
A kitchen garden meal to bolster against my still cold attic chamber
The roof awash in rain sounds held back by wooden beams and tiles
Enveloped in fuzzy white noise — me and Rebecka at a 2017 Slowdive gig in an intimate venue with church acoustics — my typewriter rhythm section backing a chorus of reverb trails with loooooong decay
I run my hand over a knot on my scrap wood desk, an unsanded patch, a splinter in my pointer finger
A small intrusion jammed inside for the rest of the week
///
Channeling a state of “apophatic wuness” ⁕ the Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard, wearing dark glasses and habit, hunches over his Olivetti Lettera 22, his quarters loud with the clack clack clack slide clack clack clack slide of a craftsman's keys
Constructing a radical architecture of shimmering letterforms
His great work performed at a simple desk with a simple chair, his room furnished with a simple bed befitting the austerity of his monastic order
Around him the stone walls of Prinkash Abbey erected in 1520, supporting a brace of shelves that bough under a collection of theological, philosophical and modernist importance
///
Chair Chamber Coffee Collects Conjuration Downstairs Dozen Earthy Eaves Endure English Enough Especially Exposed Farmland Fermenting Floriferous Forest Foul Foundation Fungi
///
An unexpected spell of warm November weather
Me and Rebecka throw off jumpers, hats and gloves, take our daily walk along the old road lined with leafless birch
We check the time before we dart across the tracks, clambering up a verge of gold and copper seed-heads — Deschampsia flexuosa, Hypericum pseudomaculatum, Trifolium arvense
At the top we side-step a stone wall tumbled where the railway line bisects
A hollow cut across farmlands and pastures long since converted to spruce plantation
///
By no means a hermit dsh arrived on the scene like, “a beatnik from the Middle Ages time-transported to the delirium of London's avant-garde”, “full of the language of beat poetry until, in 1962, concrete poetry emerged and under his hand became a symbol for demolished boundaries” ⁕
In the two weeks it takes me to shit out this piece I read essays by dsh on the intersection of poetry with
Art with
Meditatory approaches to writing
“GIVING UP ANY POEM-PRACTICE DEPENDING ON LIVING INSIDE THE STRUCTURE OF LANGUAGE – ON WORDS AS THE MEDIUM OF CONSCIOUS BEING” ⁕
I am surely producing my own words all the while but where they go in the days afterwards is a mystery
My attic study converted to a fattening silo for false starts — I write on a post-it note that, “This Machine Kills”
Stick the post-it to the detached travel lid of my typewriter
“nothing is getting written, but I think that what I do is write. I think this because I have fragments all around, and I am sure that I have not written them, yet they keep showing up, and I keep meaning to but never do turn them into something.” †
///
Garden Gathering Ghost Glows Gone Grey Gutters Haunting Heaven Hellebore Hermitage Historical Horrors Host Hyacinth Igniting Immense Incantation Kindling Land Language
///
I try to drink less coffee
Try to fold myself into the materiality of the house, the way that poets try to fold themselves into landscape in pursuit of the sublime
Starting at the attic window at an angle framing only treetops and
Working my way down
A crooked doorway, a sunken threshold, a misaligned frame measured in famnar and tum by rough farmer's hands
“how can words keep anymore their mindstab meaning outside our dissolving thought-outlines & loss of contact with long ago million years & more extinct 20th century as proved by potassium argon analysis of recent dugup bits of poets?” ⁕
///
Half-way down the road, mud-suck splattering my battered assault boots, we stop outside the increasingly derelict cottage
The fourth of four houses on Sofie's Mountain — two of the four abandoned to time
Uncommon white facade decorated with colourful mosaics depicting native tit species, the garden a collection of marshy ponds, self-seeding Cox Pomona apple trees, escapee Spiraea salicifolia
We look for the telltale signs of roof collapse, the slough of tiles, the sag and sink of wood rot
Over condensing breath Rebecka asks,
“How many Winters do you think it has left?”
* * *
References.
⁕ Notes from the Cosmic Typewriter: The Life and Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard, Ed. Nicola Simpson (Occasional Papers, 2012).
† Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, Jenny Boully (Coffee House Press, 2018).
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I SIT BENEATH THE SHADIEST TREE.
(INTERLUDE I).
I sit beneath the shadiest tree in Peckham Rye Park
Oak canopy reaching twenty metres in diameter
Full leaf boughs ornamented with noisy parakeets
I'm dressed all in black despite the sun
Across the lawn three generations of friends and family chatter in contact fusion, barbecuing beef and catfish in sticky brown glazes
Everyone marinating together in the fragrant smoke
I watch as X____ stretches her arms around the two-hundred-year-thick trunk, enveloping as much of the knotted stem as she can
Blackberry lips reflected in the fridge-freezer section. Our something at first sight superimposed over a packet of tofu. A dozen oranges tumbling down the market aisle. A tributary of citrus orbs confluxing with a delicate phalanx of phalanges. The performance of her femur and pelvis in orchestration with these appendages. Bending and scooping. Flexing. Extending. Rotating. The fruits passed in sleight from hand to hand.
Heat ripples from the dewy skirts around the burst of ornamental beds
Azalea, magnolia, rhododendron
///
I sit in the recovery lounge and, if you've seen one, you've seen them all
The same clinical sterility with an underfunded NHS grubbiness collecting in the cracks and crevices
The click slurp of antibacterial gel dispensers
The paper half-cup of cooling vending machine coffee
X____ sitting next to me with the woozy indifference of general anaesthetic wearing off
Waiting for a taxi because nobody in the city owns a car and certainly not us
To pass the time X____ tells me everything her doctor told her about idiopathic disease
Which is, any disease with an unknown cause or mechanism of apparent spontaneous origin
click
I peer down into that still black coffee pool
slurp
///
In the park everything blurs in diaspora
Everyone converging on the Summer
I watch X____ with her arms still wrapped around the oak
A young William Blake who, in the year 1766, was rapt by a Peckham Rye Common vision of, “a tree filled with angels with bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars” ⁕
I lay back on the grass and indulge my pareidolia in the clouds, daydreaming about leaving the city
Clouds as forests, as lakes, as mountains
///
“So I remained with him, sitting in the twisted root of an oak; he was suspended in a fungus which hung with the head downward into the deep.
By degrees we beheld the infinite Abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning city. Beneath us, at an immense distance, was the sun, black but shining.” †
///
In the Clock House overlooking the Common I order an overpriced house white
To distract myself from the maximalist etsy grotesque interior I read about how oak trees have evolved to hollow themselves out as they grow, to conserve energy and stabilise their massive weight
How populations of oak stag beetle are declining globally due to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat
Even in cases where oak woodlands remain they are often broken up into smaller, isolated fragments. This fragmentation makes it hard for beetle populations to connect and breed, reducing genetic diversity and species resilience.
I run my wetted fingertip around the rim of the bulbous wine glass until the sharp whistling gives way to a hairline fracture that splits the glass from stem to rim
I get up and leave the pub
///
Somewhere in the maze of vaults I pass my card to a Nico fringed bartender wearing vintage Mary Quant
I'll be your mirror stuck in my head while I run up my tab on vodka mixers served in crunchy plastic cups
“I'll be the wind,
the rain,
and the sunset”
I try to focus on the rumble of the railway over the arches indistinguishable from sub-bass, the steady drip drip drip of porous London Stock Brick
My right boot in a puddle where a loose slab slups rising groundwater ‡
Viaduct. An elevated structure consisting of a series of arches or spans, by means of which a railway or road is carried over a valley, road, river, or marshy low-lying ground.
Elevation implying its opposite — a depression, a downland, a basin
(abyss, chasm, trench)
Shaking off a wet jean cuff I push to the front of a stage where a billowing opium fog obscures synthesizer and pedals and reel-to-reel tape machine
For the next hour I watch as X____ channels her spook acoustics through a crowd that sways as if
windgrass, rush, reed
“The light on your door to show that you're”…
On the rainy bus ride home my black hoodied head slumps against the dirty glass of the upper deck window, I have ambient bedroom drones playing on my headphones with the volume dialled low enough to hear the tinny 2-step rhythms and clipped soul samples ⚳ leaking from another passenger's phone speaker
I watch two tanned women under an umbrella smoking and drinking espresso outside a Turkish café, a tall pallid man in a suit pissing up the shuttered window of a Poundland, once a busy pub where the magician Austin Osman Spare exhibited his portraits of working class locals
That night I dream about
sinking down into
rooty subterranean spaces
///
Jerusalem, plate 76 †, “a few white lines indicate the tree’s roots; some jagged lines form triangles (trees? mountains?) center right” ⚴
The inscription etched in the lower center confirms the identity of the figure crucified on a fruit-bearing tree, though there is debate over which of several trees named in Jerusalem are to be associated with the one pictured
Possibly the plate is a merging of the tree's of “Life”, “Good & Evil”, and deadly “Moral Virtue”, with the trees of “The Oak Groves of Albion”, the most terrible form of the oak assumed by Blake's prophetic visions
Covering the whole Earth with, ”'dark roots' and the 'stems of Mystery' upon which the Druids sacrificed their victims” ⚴
///
Down to underwear me and X____ give the bedroom a chance, suffering the viscous humidity of an attic conversion in a Victorian housing stock
Draughty rooms somehow mouldering year around
After half an hour we're voiding an over-cautious contract and making our escape through a hallway window, climbing onto the flat extension of X____'s partitioned townhouse
We take turns flicking lit matches off the roof and counting the seconds before they blink out, picturing a rural night sky dark enough to watch trailing rock and dust ignite in the atmosphere
Kids shoot a grime video in the stairwell of a newbuild up the street, our neighbour sits in the gutter playing guitar
He croaks folk songs in familiar Brazilian Portuguese and we decide he misses some part of something he used to call home
While writing this I have the not-entirely-unpleasant sense memory of melted tarmac fumes
Me and X____ talk until late but I can't remember a single thing we talk about, and looking back I can only imagine the things we might have talked about, because the whole point of memory is the forgetting
In a photograph I find on a usb stick our faces are obscured by digital artefacts conjured by a phone camera struggling in low-light
I remember that, “technology has made us all ghosts” ⚵
The night curls up around us like a ribbon, the roof floating on updrafts, on steam
///
Gilchrist, his first biographer, relates how, “Blake was diagnosed as a sufferer of extreme and persistent visual hallucinations, a man who 'painted from spectres', and had lost his grasp on reality. 'His may be deemed the most extraordinary case of spectral illusion that has hitherto occurred.'” ⁕
I follow the synchronicity present on the final page of his 1793 work, America A Prophecy †, in which Blake depicts a colossal white-robed figure bowing to the earth besides, “three lightning-scathed oaks, each of which, 'as if threatening heaven with vengeance, holds out a withered hand.'” ⁕
I begin to notice frequent holey imagery appearing in my notebooks, journals, drafts
Holey as in foraminous, perforated, full of gaps or breaches
Nothing pertaining to the Divine
* * *
References.
⁕ Gilchrist on Blake: The Life of William Blake, Richard Holmes, Alexander Gilchrist (Harper Perennial, 2011).
† William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books, William Blake (Thames & Hudson, 2008).
‡ “Tread carefully over the pavements of London for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day.” — London Under, Peter Ackroyd (Chatto & Windus, 2011).
⚳ “the kind of album I've dreamt of for years [...] a 'near future South London underwater.' [...] very London Now – which is to say, it suggests a city haunted not only by the past but by lost futures. It seems to have less to do with a near future than with the tantalising ache of a future just out of reach.” — London After The Rave, Mark Fisher (http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org, 2006)
⚴ The Cambridge Companion to William Blake, Ed. Morris Eaves (Cambridge University Press, 2003).
⚵ “Electricity has made us all angels. Technology (from psychoanalysis to surveillance) has made us all ghosts. [...] It suggests that nowadays we are all speaking voids made up only of scraps and citations... contaminated by other people's memories... adrift...” — Black Secret Tricknology, Ian Penman (Wire Magazine, Issue 133, 1995).
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