Fired soils crack as ancient stoneware. Amputated boughs slump to heat-kissed orchard, pale dirt. Each day another scorched earth policy. The garden blooms its pallid clumps. An open wound of chronic maladies. At least the rugged weeds in fervour and by god the all fermenting stench. You shrug off blistered skin but

Words cannot convey your faith in ruins.

///

Getting to Sofie's Mountain takes us one full day in a rental van across seven countries with no room to pick up the friendly anarchist hitchhiker at the Netherlands services

We eat uninspired sandwiches and marvel at the monotony of Western European motorways, repeating the same Fugazi and Lungfish albums, pulling after one-thousand-five-hundred kilometres onto an old road emptied of traffic

Norwegian spruce flanks interrupted by farmsteads with bell crowned barns, falu red with white frames

Gotland sheep pastures penned by zigzag roundpole fences, built from saplings, tied with peels of bark tightening as they dry

Buzzards perching atop the tallest posts

///

“At last we reached the hills, just at nightfall of the next day. We were past caring — we came over the flat, open land at owl-time. I don’t know what I’d been expecting. You know how you let yourself think that everything will be all right if you can only get to a certain place or do a certain thing. But when you get there you find it's not that simple.” ^⁕

///

Heat makes the roof of the cottage crack and pop, the timber frame contracting as humidity wicks away to zero

Every day a drying day

In the kitchen Rebecka complains about her bandaged knee while I tense and untense my right arm overextended from a weekend chopping logs

We small talk solar showers and the routine threat of scarcity, shallow sink ablutions, saving and recycling every drop

(I truly understand how much water a person wastes in a day)

I pour morning coffee into Höganäs stoneware (coffee is never a waste of water) and duck through the sauna panelled bathroom adjoining the back porch, brushing past mosquito netting and last Winter's withered wreath with its red berries pecked away by tits

On my phone I check and re-check the precipitation map, swipe spin refresh, watching the promising clouds break around the mountain and shrug off over the Baltic

///

A few months before leaving London Rebecka buys me a second-hand copy of, The original soundtrack to the film, Watership Down ^†, familiar since childhood

A black silhouette of a rabbit baring white teeth dominates the cover art. The foreground tangled thistle and sharp blades in subdued cyan-blue. The background a wan sunset overcast watery indigo to slate. To the left of the horizon, atop a grassy hill, a single steely-blue coniferous tree.

Unwritten submissions to indie art journals — an eerie naturalism that evokes the burnished sublime of Turner, the haunted moors of the Brontë sisters, the rural horror landscapes that span M.R. James to The Blood on Satan's Claw. The cover art supporting the themes of the novel, the film, subverting the romantic myth of the pastoral as a site of bucolic sentiment. Capturing instead a marginal territory that is not so much idyllic as indifferent. Potentially outright hostile.

Hazy memories of tracking on TV recorded VHS tape, interlaced rivers of blood, the psycho-pompic Black Rabbit of Inlé guiding the displaced warren through unsettled countryside

Fast forwarding through Memorex interruptions

“Is it real or is it...”

Rebecka's voice telling me that for the Swedish release of the 1978 film the title was translated to, Den långa flykten

The Long Escape

///

Two months of wildfire warnings has quieted the machine crunch of scorpion harvesters, a too large patch of charred black miscanthus near the railway line, the future cracking the present

In the garden I try to ignore the bone dry water butts, bone dry IBC tanks, slowly replenishing piss puddle in the bottom of the well

Rebecka early harvesting stressed potato patches, lifting allium netting to check for signs of the newly arrived leaf miner fly, sticking fingers into the dust dry soil two trowels down

Come sunfall we're swatting horse flies in-between gulps of box wine in the meadow, sitting on a bench of scrap wood sanded and hammered into two old stumps

We talk about the self-seeding yellow rattle ^‡, the return of the six-spot burnet — a black stealth shaped moth with bright red wing spots — pollinating purple field scabious flowers

We talk less about the wheaty leaves on thirsty birches turning early, the accumulation of dehydrated patches of pasture, the brittle grasses bent double

We talk about nothing, watching dusk bloom the canopy of a tall forest oak recovered from a suffocating tomb of evergreens

Listening to the metal whine of a distant freight train and waiting for the sparks

///

“Bluebell had been saying that he knew the men hated us for raiding their crops and gardens and Toadflax answered, “That wasn't why they destroyed the warren. It was just because we were in their way. They killed us to suit themselves.” ^†

* * *

References.

^⁕ Watership Down, Richard Adams (1972).

^† Angela Morley (1924–2009), the composer of The original soundtrack to the film, Watership Down, was born Walter “Wally” Stott. She transitioned in the early 1970s, shortly before her Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song Score for her work on The Little Prince (1974). She was not only the first woman to be nominated in this category but the first openly transgender person to be nominated for any Academy Award. Much of her work remained un- or under-credited.

^‡ Yellow rattle (Rhinanthus minor) is a hemi-parasitic wildflower often referred to as the meadow maker. Once introduced, the small structural plant attaches to the roots of nearby grasses, weakening them by drawing away water and nutrients. This action aids in the suppression of the dominant growth that overtakes meadow ecosystems. Helping to reduce the overall nutrient levels in the landscape, and allowing for the establishment of meadow wildflowers which thrive in acidic, low nutrient soils.

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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 pedal board and reel-to-reel tape machine

For the next hour I watch as X____ channels her spook acoustics — somewhere between Grouper and ghost orchid but more like the intemporality of unlimited time — through a typically dour London crowd that sways as if

“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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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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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.

^⁕ Iron oxide red — known as Falu red if the iron oxide pigment is sourced from the Falu copper mine — is a recognised Kulturkulör. A traditional Swedish linseed oil based paint used for timber surfaces and typical of the wooden residences dotted throughout the Scandinavian countryside.

^† 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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