1.
A mega bus injects me into
the heaving mass. We all pile off to impregnate the city with our hopes and
dreams. To poison it with our failures. You see my instinct for meaning is
malfunctioning me, I am desperate. I am surrendering to entropy like many
around me. I desperately want to snatch at some short cut. The spark with which
I’d fight for complexity, for the joy of the unlikely. I don’t really know
where I am heading. A friend’s sofa for a bit, though they haven’t yet got back
to me. Just two weeks back in the country and things are collapsing around me.
Most of the certainties in my life dissolved in the time it took for the whole
world to be gripped by disease and a slow kind of fear. The rest of my
foundations crumpled last week.
I’d been travelling for
years, meandering, breeze full. Propelled by whim, home was on my back. I’d
seen a thousand unforgettable sunsets smashed against foreign skies, I’d seen
waterfall after waterfall and every curiosity gossip would bring me. I’d seen
the smiles of most major languages and wept for strangers, ate with strangers,
gone with strangers until our protracted partings, I had laughed and loved and
lived with strangers. Lockdown happened about the time I was beginning to
confront a persistent gnawing background of a thought, that I had no home. That
I couldn’t name one beautiful place in my own country nor quiver with longing
for any bit of it or anyone on it. By the time I could fly again I’d convinced
myself I was still in love with my first love. That those lingering looks over
my shoulder and all that followed, all that never happened even, had imprinted
within me an abstract homing device of longing that I could only possibly
satisfy in reunion. By the flight home I had constructed a full on fantasy,
sure no replies to any of my messages but nothing a face to face meeting
wouldn’t fix.
The restraining order came
through just as shock gave way to an acceptance that most of what I had
conjured had been a fiction all along. That realisation was painful, a journey
through a certain kind of grief, nostalgia wrapped in barbed wire. Contact was
fleeting, there was no reminiscing only an unforgettable screaming admonishment
‘what don’t you understand? it is like you speak another language’ she had
said. The fantasy began to crush its hardest in its death throes. A week later
and I’ve arrived in Bristol. I don’t know it yet but the person I’m here to see
is waiting by a lonely oak tree on a hill looking over the city.
I’ve hired a van. The
friend of mine I hope to stay with has asked me to collect a sofa for him. We
haven’t seen each other for years and he has asked me to arrive with a sofa. In
a muddle amongst ceaseless roads. Torrents of cars dictate my flow. All feelings
of being lost find fulfilment and surface. I face the literal expression of my
existential doubt. Frustrated, impotent, scared. Increasingly trapped, thick
rain streams down whacked at windshield, steamed up noise in the van, I am
enveloped in sensations. I am trying to find home. I am forever at odds with the
sadness of being, wheels winding under form and fortress. The digital glare of
office landmarks remind me I am pathetic. Distinctive steel glows and groans in
giant indifference. I travel down arteries; their tightness takes my oxygen. I
am squeezed to urgency endlessly. I am stopped in my tracks by a man sat in the
middle of the road in his wheelchair. It is a standoff between him and the
traffic trying to come the other way. One by one the fat cars edge past him. He
listlessly uses a leg to push himself into the way of my route. Scowling at me
as I slide past him on the wrong side of the road. His face that place. We
haven’t seen each other for years and he has asked me to arrive with a sofa.
Preoccupied with being an acted upon thing, fleeing responsibility, fainting at
the thought of having to be someone. Having to be as physical as the heavy
dashing lanes amongst the many houses. I am running the gauntlet down the thin
spaces, pressed on both sides by cars, faceless lives contained somehow in this
just one place. Largeness looms, the scale cripples me. Those lucky luminous
glows in high ceiling bay windowed proximity to the chaos around them. Ordered
chaos I remind myself, somehow these white lines mean something, if seen soon
enough. Only I am trying to find, everyone else knows all and is underwhelmed.
I am anonymous, my worry silent and unshared. Behind the panic loneliness
lingers, distils things for me. When did the brave maker melt. When was the
chancer and believer moved over, left breathless in the squeeze of the city.
I have headed the wrong
way down a one-way street. My wind mirror smashed. Driving a car can be a
decapitated outer body experience, a senses stopped cotton wool unreality. Driving
a van even worse, and I haven’t driven for ages, and I was always rubbish and
I’m in a city. Fuse that with the sudden realisation of the force and hardness
of dominion and the jeopardy of unfeeling shouts madness. Before I made any
kind of impact on anyone else, which is the cardinal crime and implicit stress
of driving, I try to escape by reversing harshly into a moped. I must get out
the van to be human. So I do. Leave the prison in the street, feel alive and
able, pick up the moped and turn to Incredulous Man. We have a pleasant
exchange in the end. I feel better for having my limbs and thought back.
2.
Air is full of city
madness, no freshness. I look to the wind, wet face this my saving grace. I’ve
left the van. I never made it to collect the sofa let alone sleep on it. I am
walking behind a man on a bicycle, he cruises at walking pace. Whenever anyone
passes him its ‘spare possibly any change at all’. Nine say no, experience it
as drive by and turn a blind eye. Ten is the charm; she chats with him too. I
knew what she didn’t, to arrive there he had wheeled his way through rejection,
fearful glances and indifference, and something else too. The people he passed
transmitted more than a hint of helplessness. Number Three and Seven both
wanted to but doubted it would help anything. Tried to give everything in a
glance but passed with no money. He cared not for such faint impressions.
Helplessness, I saw it in their eyes and the way they dithered, turned their
heads and bowed, for he was their master they could not please. Number Six, she
wasn’t asked, did her headscarf protect her? Either his prejudice or respect or
something else altogether not mine to know. Two, Five and Nine all made a
beeline for the other side of the street, his words went the way of the wall.
Sometimes we eddy round heads down. Each one heard the creaking wheel raised
their heads and bucked in an obvious sign of panic. They scuttled out of the
way before bloke and bike could croak another line, Nine even walked through a
puddle to do that dance as he tried to rush back to his inner reality, crudely
raided by the out there world. Ripples ushered a muddy puddle reflection, more
than one person degraded. Eight was interesting, she mechanically dove for
cover, swallowed her knee jerk jump and moved back in. No money. Yet
uncomfortable with her message she craned her head and scanned for eye contact,
stringing her bow with smile and kindness trying to show she wanted to see him.
To show that she had noticed her own reaction and now disowned it. Four, he was
visibly relieved, thankfully felt he got away easy, he didn’t even have to hear
the tailing off tongue for help. Which I did hear. Me, what about me! Number
what? Number none, not counted, hanging back, glad to observe, waiting,
inactive, adapting my step to stay out of line. Doctoring my movement and
prescribing cures.
An inbuilt ticking bomb of
guilt gnaws at my sense of identity; I have not made peace with my own
privilege. I do not embody gratefulness and generosity in this life rather I
fret over whether I should be teasing the Tories or calling out their rank
policies. Perhaps something else altogether, perhaps I should be looking cold
in the mirror and purging, weeding, owning all that in me which creates injustice,
indifference and division. It was the same across the pond a few years back,
squash him down, vomit him, ban him as he banned and try to exterminate the
threat. And the billionaires killing the planet and duping us into doing the
same in servitude to them, enthralled by their visions of decapitated happiness
plugged into the metaverse on some other planet. What happens when we believe
in the redemption of all these monsters, usher them in only to change them at a
protest or banquet or love in. The tussle of either or catches me out. I am seeking
to hold the tension, create healing and harmony for everyone and the heavy
weight of hubris bends the small of my back into a hunch.
I don’t want any sympathy
for this, no way, that would be unbearable and ludicrous – I am processing
privilege to see if once I’ve passed it like a stool I might be able to find
some meaningful way of helping someone out. Which is the mist and wank talk of
someone addled by un-earnt confidence, drowning in milk and honey, riddled with
luck. I have to look beyond the immediate circles of what is known and safe to
meet a person with a tangible need and too often it ends up being for myself,
which I guess doesn’t matter when you consider the drops that make up the ocean
and all Theresa stood for. The cumulative drops
gather and build in waves all the same. I am not complaining in the proper
sense of crying out, this burden of nostalgia is probably self-inflicted.
Lashing out against the unfairness of this pale blue dot when I am on the happy
side of it. What do you want? For me to just revel in it and join in with
Sunak, manipulating the masses, trying to keep things my way as I fall
pirouetting into the utter glut of my own medieval gout- a king
dragging the whole world with me as the dripping fat of the lands tears spill
down the rut of my chin. An unhealthy obsession with being right reduces the
prospect of me helping at all. I remember the honesty of that naked man in
Zambia. He sat in the dust road rolling his eyes into the back of his head. He
threw the apple I gave him with a brutal wail across the street. My love didn’t
amount to much, stable change needed more than a one-off action to relieve my
sense of brokenness, of uselessness in the face of suffering. Why am
I so reticent when it comes to giving blood? For surely there is a pure act of
giving.
3.
I am heading for the tree
on the hill. It is the only thing I can think to do. There are a few hacks to
calmness and serenity, to oneness even. Manic breathing followed by holding
your breath followed by meditation, though there is a lot of straining and
desire involved in that. Or humming at the same frequency of your heart, till it
vibrates and that is all you can think of. Or, there is what I do when I reach that
old oak tree, so generous in its presence, a waiting friend to listen. I will
tell you in a moment my technique, but first a little about the tree. They stand
alone, once part of an old growth wood. Now no longer able to hold the roots of
their friends (who have been chopped down) they have absorbed the collective
wisdom and life of the whole forest. This emanates from gnarled trunk and the
crooked low hanging branches that sweep any visitor up into the crown of the
tree. From there countless Bristol souls have asked the hard questions and felt
a softer response. The oak tree is a place of pilgrimage. I arrive and begin my
technique. Basically the technique, that
surely exists but came to me only from my mind, is to spill out your heart and
soul in gibberish, lay to one side any words or sense of control or need for
meaning. Christians might call it talking in tongues but then they might not
for that matter, certainly they would be in some disagreement. Trust that in
your making of sounds a new truer language will emerge that will heal you and
connect you, throw in some dancing and shaking for good measure and you will
express a truth that I’m sure the trees will hear, and the trees well they will
tell mother earth and she will let father sun know and their talking will
wake God. That is what I was doing when she arrived, waking God. In full flow,
head pressed against the flank of the trunk, earthy smell and blood pounding in
my head suddenly a hand on my shoulder and I am pulled to the present moment
through a short circuit of electricity. A face with the kindness and texture of
the tree bark. Her eyes stars, knowing portals, the sites of miracles. We talk
for hours.
4.
Before the pandemic she had
aimed to visit exotic places in answer to her arthritis and its limits, two
fingers up to it, and to her worried children. It was going to be Asia first.
Four trips a year she reckoned fitted around work at the corner shop. Things
had changed over lockdown. She had visited the oak tree every day. A vigil. A
two way listening project. One thing had led to another. Before she knew it she
had smashed the window of Shell headquarters, convinced a jury of everyday
citizens it was entirely reasonable. It was reasonable in the light of the
corporation’s crimes against the whole of life on earth and the potential that
has been crystallising in the universe since the big bang. The jury judged her
innocent. Next to an escalating climate crisis which calls to each one of us to
be part of something better what is a window, but grains of sand on the beach
of time.
Only once that night did
lace clouds reveal the silk of the moon. The sky was secrets, not drowning just
subtle whispers. A soft body hum of cold that matched everything just right
pervaded the two of us. Awake, alert we leant on that tree and talked. We talked
of her children. One, an oceanographer, spent lockdown collecting whale poo
just as they had before it began. They are able to monitor stress levels in the
shit, what they found was over lockdown there was a dramatic reduction in the
levels of stress in the whale population. Why? Quieter oceans. Less cargo
ships. Maybe easier to commune with one another, and their own hearts, for the
heart of whale is a mighty instrument of knowledge. That got us onto the 52hertz
whale,
‘once you hear about them
you’ll never forget them’ she said. Adding how it reminded her of her second
child, a poet. The whale sings in a frequency the other whales don’t
understand. Like an ancient language. Or a new emergent one. Their call is the
only one of its kind detected by humans as it lunges through whole oceans from
place to place. I speculate openly. Perhaps the whale is omitting a frequency
out into space as a message to aliens. Or different undiscovered species in the
depth of the sea bed. Or like the birds do in cities maybe it’s having to adapt
its call over the catastrophic noise pollution of the oceans. I’m no scientist
I remember, getting carried away. We pause. We look up to the interlacing
branches making shapes, spectres dancing on the sky. We leave, not before she
thanks the tree, touching her forehead to their trunk just as she does each day
at that time. We go, slow and awkwardly, we walk together back to her home. She
makes me tea and helps me sleep. In the morning I am invited to stay a while in
her family home. Everything is speeding up in my mind and she can tell. It is
my perception that all things are connecting through the barrels of my brain,
stories converging and I have a seismic role to play.
5.
So I sway on to city rain
that breaks free of concrete and chants for the sea. That breaks free of those
strong model straight jackets. That binary cold face thinking, mind shrinking
sense that value is bought. Struck again, between the murmurs of an engine, by
the tiny revelation and would be revolution. A kernel of me swells up and
proclaims that nature always extends beyond our structures. Social, economic
towering structures that so often miss the in-between beauty and subtle
qualities of quite worth. Structures which themselves are part of nature’s
dance, somehow part of a universal consciousness, summoned by the human brain
from the stars. Only we are out of step, clumsy feet clobber a rhythm that we
will not relent to. The way a man with no skill still feels the need to lead
her at the dance, that is if he will concede to try and move at all. This rain
holds me, cleans me as it does the seeping streets. Gutters house the flotsam
of litter that will outlast natures goodness, the plastic will never die nor
give back. Fettered shrivelled bags of brown cling to corners against the flow
of water. Yet that which is wholesome returns to the hummus, if
allowed. Keep on dancing, that which is good must perish. The rest just floats
predatory in our sea. Oh, the head back abandon of rain lives in life’s
flourish and glint. Everything will float to the sea, all must be swept up and
carried. Water seeks to preserve its freedom in salt. I hear its song and
liquid focus and it gives me hope even as I stand clothes clinging to skin in
longing. Listening to waters pragmatic council under the flickering orange
letters of the bus stop.
Tilt my head at the
shadows, softened versions of brut city shapes flash and flutter and grapple
with form. The shadows are natures last word amongst the din of machinery. This
is the ritual of the everyday, to induce a state of city living. I slouch past tree
wisdom, a sycamore covered in graffiti squiggle has fungus for feet, one of its
bowing lower limbs is growing horizontally, held up by a metal girder. I watch
the pigeons feed off my indifference, energised they rise and animate the
graffiti with winged movement. Yellow dandelion dashes in the cracks. Roots
straddle the pavement with gleeful shock I see them emerge and burst through
the road. I scuff through the catkins pressed to the tarmac more numerous than
fag butts. The air and unreal, fumes of the unfair. Lynmouth the
trace of waters breakthrough, Melrose and watercress fresh, these road names
cling to the eye on my worried way. I want to hide in the countryside away from
rubble bags and moulding bins. Away from the engine on a flint edge soundscape.
Gradually I am going tornado. Inconsolable longing is not answered in flight.
Must stop unpeeling the layers of meaning in infinite regression to find the
hard bottom ground that pulses with something other than me. Position myself in
the foetal position and wait. After several hours I become aware of the cold. I
need to run, I head for the Oak Tree on the hill, again and again.
In streams of diamonds my
head hosts an angular dance of colour. I watch a conveyor belt of destructive
thoughts pass by. The critical self lords it over the present tense and digs
beneath the surface, digs away my ground. Hammer and axe pick away at anything
precarious enough to predicate faith in myself, that might offer traction on
meaning. Lasso that thought to another part of the brain and feel fresh
territory animate, flecks of light glitter massive in the mind made new. Flick
out of there and into the body, diffuse downward into many tiny pieces of
awake. Shake out and thank the arms and wrists, sense the ground speed at my
feet. Cycle through each body part in gratitude and solid tongue, rest my full
attention one by one freeing my mind to feel the truth, that it is everywhere
and not head alone. Fleshy parts form a consciousness that presides over the
cognitive, each cell in my body is part of this eco system laced together in
common function bigger than my ego-system. I now rejoice for life is here, true
here and true everywhere, the mycelium network of nature is a web that includes
not only mushrooms but every creatures brain and body, cumulative knowledge
ever swelling experience that we must not dull or shrink from by taking
reality’s name in vein.
They said they could tell
I wasn’t right at that party the week before when I held that baby on the sofa
for too long, just gazing at them, their eyes, imagining light years of
distance had bought us to that point and the baby had a knowledge that had
travelled across caverns of space to manifest on the earth at that exact time.
Now I am in hospital though I think it a spaceship. Refusing to have my blood
checked let alone give it to another.
As this story closes think
then about those whales. We don’t ask - is the stress justified? We accept the
evidence for it and the stress they experience. I hope we will listen and adjust
our lives and societies accordingly. Think too about that lone whale
broadcasting an auditory film to the world and beyond. Ask what is that
message. A message of love, a ballad for connection, a call for healing. Recovery
is the business of another story but the tone and frequency of the message in
this story is a thread that has always been there.
