Easter, a stone rolled away

Dazzling Spring Aurora over Hudson Bay by NASA Goddard Photo and Video is licensed under CC-BY 2.0

The note of hope is the only note that can help us or save us from falling to the bottom of the heap of evolution, because, largely, about all a human being is, anyway, is just a hoping machine.

Woody Guthrie

Red cosmos poster by Biodiversity Heritage Library is licensed under CC-CC0 1.0

…I want to propose an existential creativity. How do I define it? It is the creativity wherein nothing should be wasted. As a writer, it means everything I write should be directed to the immediate end of drawing attention to the dire position we are in as a species. It means that the writing must have no frills. It should speak only truth. In it, the truth must be also beauty. It calls for the highest economy. It means that everything I do must have a singular purpose. 

It also means that I must write now as if these are the last things I will write, that any of us will write. If you knew you were at the last days of the human story, what would you write? How would you write? What would your aesthetics be? Would you use more words than necessary? What form would poetry truly take? And what would happen to humour? Would we be able to laugh, with the sense of the last days on us?

Sometimes I think we must be able to imagine the end of things, so that we can imagine how we will come through that which we imagine. Of the things that trouble me most, the human inability to imagine its end ranks very high. It means that there is something in the human makeup resistant to terminal contemplation. How else can one explain the refusal of ordinary, good-hearted citizens to face the realities of climate change? If we don’t face them, we won’t change them. And if we don’t change them, we will not put things in motion that would prevent them. And so our refusal to face them will make happen the very thing we don’t want to happen.

We have to find a new art and a new psychology to penetrate the apathy and the denial that are preventing us making the changes that are inevitable if our world is to survive. We need a new art to waken people both to the enormity of what is looming and the fact that we can still do something about it.

We can only make a future from the depth of the truth we face now.

Ben Okri

Black and white photographic print, showing the emission of beta-rays from radio-phosphorus (black-and-white print – photograph) by Unknown photographer is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0

staying in the blood beat

of the don’t know

faciebat

(I am still making)

Scourings from an old notebook

April 2022

Sentences on Ecological Awareness

Ecological awareness consists of infinite ongoing strands.  These include close looking, close listening, close touching, close smelling, close tasting – close sensing between and beyond all the conventional senses familiar to human bodies.  Close might also be slow or deep.  

Ecological awareness is an art, a creative act, a commitment to being alive, and therefore dynamic, transformative.

Walk outdoors and after half an hour point to the place where you end and the weather begins.

Nowhere are any of us alone, nowhere are we not part of the biosphere, or abandoned by the imagination.

In our climate, why would you not begin each day checking your own internal weather and preparing for what the coming hours might bring?

What we call Nature is a fiction, a wild and muddy one that won’t stay flat or still.  It will not be contained on a neatly labelled shelf in the bookshop.

Left to the wind, the dried pods of honesty (Lunaria annua) shed their skins and spread their seeds before glowing with the light of many moons, true to their word.  Bring the night sky indoors to remember the year’s passing.

Being in Nature suggests you were sometime out of it, perhaps in that mythical place Away.

Not looking at the clock involves not looking at your phone, your computer, all those other contrivances that divide your attention and devour your time.

The art of ecological awareness asks you to let there be a space between things and sensing and language – and to choose to live in that space.

A day without a tree in it is no day at all.

Whitman asks you to come, speak; says if you are large, if you contain multitudes, you will contradict yourself: will you prove already too late?

The space outside our walls is ready to give us what we have been waiting for; whatever time of day or night, a special kind of light.

Thinking with Timothy Morton and Ian Hamilton Finlay.

By Heart

I went to one of Sofie Layton’s wonderful workshops around this work and ended up contributing a poem to the exhibition.  This is not it…but a sideways take I found during my research.

His Heart

The earth is suffocating. Swear to make them cut me open, so that I won’t be buried alive.

Chopin on his death bed, 1849

 

Smuggled by his sister

back into his homeland

past Russian guards

sealed in a jar of cognac

interred in a Warsaw crypt

conferred on an SS officer

who admired his music

returned to the Holy Cross

examined for cause of death:

pericarditis, chronic tuberculosis.

 

 

 

Happy Easter

Daffodils

They bring this hint of something startled in them –

the dreadful earliness of their petals

against dead earth, the extremity of their faces

suggesting a violent start –

dumb skulls opening, overnight, to vehemence.

Their lives are quicker than vision,

their voices evade us.  And as

water tightens its surface in vases

and sharpens its glass, slicing their sticks

in half, these funnels clatter on their bent necks,

like bells for the already dead.

 

Catriona O’Reilly

From The Nowhere Birds (Bloodaxe, 2001)

 

I’ve spent the past few weeks writing about what women poets are writing about when they write about flowers (snowdrops in particular) and now I look up, the daffodils are nearly over.  Never my favourite flower, I think Catriona O’Reilly has caught something interesting in them – that vehemence.  It seems to be the case that women poets (and possibly men too, but in a different way)  write about flowers either as a strategy for addressing an actual Other or approaching what they experience as Other inside themselves.  All flowers seem to lend themselves to reflections on death, they last so short a while.  A good place to consider impermanence.

My own wild daffodil poem from over ten years ago (part of a collaboration with the ceramicist Sue Dunne) was nudged into being by the death of Julia Darling.  It’s a different sort of grief when a friend dies – at least it was for me, tangled up with my own mortality, the sheer lostness of loss.  Those brave yellow flowers have some of Julia’s radiance about them.

 

After all that Easterish death maybe it’s good to think about all the Easterish rebirth…so here’s some daffodil-inspired handiwork and humour in an installation in Hull, UK City of Culture – 1700 flowers made out of nearly 150,000 lego pieces.  I wonder what sort of poem might these be a muse for?

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Pennycress, Willowherb

Because it was a sunny day and I’d just missed my connection – watching powerless as my homebound train pulled out of the station without me (always painful, much worse than missing it by ten or even five minutes) – I walked on to the end of the platform where sun struck stone paving unimpeded by canopies or walls. A row of advertising boards, brash inducements to buy the latest ‘Number 1 Crime’ books, each with their own moody picture, intimating the gruesome and forensic, gradually petered out. I was happier looking at the stone underfoot, the grid of moulded rectangles harbouring sweet green creases of moss the further along I walked.

A tiny pennycress grew out of nothing, no visible earth, valiant among the coming and going of trains with their strident livery and their harried passengers, noses in novels, fingertips stroking screens, ears plugged against the outside world – I knew this because I’d just been one of them.

At the very end the platform sloped gently down until it met grey-blue clinker. I could see some plants with red leaves growing among it, sturdy against the sharp stones. Deep-veined, prolific, possibly a willowherb. I ambled slowly down the ramp scanning for any other plant life that might be thriving in this apparently inhospitable setting. The toothed leaves of an unfamiliar thistle wrapped themselves around a discarded bolt, rusty and large enough to be missed.

I eased the rucksack off my shoulders and placed it on the ground at my feet; knelt to look more closely and touch the veined leaves I’d seen from a distance, fiery in the sunlight that warmed my face and shoulders after such a very long winter, cramped and flowerless.

I dug in the pocket of the rucksack for my camera to take a picture in the afternoon light, all the lovelier for coming unannounced, unexpected. I crouched down again to focus close enough to catch these low-to-the-ground, unostentatious plants.

Come away from there, now, step away, step away.   Please return to the platform.

A loud voice, with worry in it, a man’s. I lifted my head to see a bearded young man in a lilac uniform carrying a walkie-talkie. He repeated his instructions as if it were a matter of life and death, staying at the top of the ramp some distance from me. Until proven innocent, clearly I was dangerous.

Come up now, come back to the platform.

Another man, shorter, navy blue jumper, stood beside the first, twitching slightly. If he’d had a gun, he’d have his finger on the trigger. I could tell how much it cost him to say nothing. The tremor in his shoulders gave him away.

I had a choice: to argue the toss and claim my freedom as a citizen, my fundamental right to look at plants in the sunshine while waiting for a train; or simply let it go and reassure them – for I could see they were anxious about something and were in dire need of reassurance – that I wasn’t a terrorist, or suicidal, or a flagrant destroyer of railway property.  Though what they were reading into my grey hair and best black coat was a puzzle to me, a disguise impenetrable even to myself.

I’m just taking some photographs.

Forced to confess, it sounded like a crime. To persuade them it was true, the only sin I was committing was photography, I lifted up my camera and the shorter man started bobbing from foot to foot. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had told me to drop it and raise my hands above my head. 15.34, a Wednesday and Central Station was suddenly an action thriller. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for these men, looking down at me, chests puffed out – so keen to do their duty, or be seen to do their duty, on high alert where there was nothing to be alert about. How exhausting it must be to wear a lilac uniform, carry a walkie-talkie and suspect middle-aged women of unspeakable crimes, a threat to the common good and trains running on time.

I made my way up the ramp slowly, with dignity I hoped: the only way I could express my deep disappointment at such misdirection of human energy, a senselessness that seemed to becoming more and more familiar, not just to me but everyone I speak to. Resistance burned at the core of me, political, existential. The willowherb remained unphotographed.  Had it come to this – that a person was no longer able to look at flowers growing in a railway station when the weather coaxed them in that direction? Would it have been different if I was a man writing down the number of a passing train?

The two men looked disappointed too.  Perhaps that I’d proved such easy meat and offered no further opportunity for their heroics. The drama had come and gone too quickly. I wanted them to be embarrassed but no one apologised to anyone else. Not I, nor the men, who turned on their heels and scurried back towards the main body of the station, disappearing in the coolness of the shade.

South

Images from the wonderful Antarctica exhibition at Palace Green Library in Durham.  The poem is by Dr Wilson who was part of Captain Scott’s last expedition.

 

Solstice Blessings

 

Be branching bone.

Strip yourself of yourself.

A silver bell rings in the quietness.

Let your tongue become that bell.

(After Rumi)

Wild at Heart

Love is a wildness that has been falsely domesticated.

Pico Iyer

I thought of the bypass patient’s chest being closed, the message being: You can’t see this wild place again, you can’t witness this beauty. But the moon was hidden in there, and the sun, and neither of these would rise or set, and the birds that flew up out of it were planets and constellations because the chest was really an aviary, too full of fluttering, and when it was closed no avian life would be seen again.

 The thoracic cavity must have been the place where human music began, the first rhythm was the beat of the heart, and after that initial thump, waltzes and nocturnes, preludes and tangos rang out, straight through flesh and capillary, nerve ganglion and epidermal layer, resonating in sternum bone: it wasn’t light that created the world but sound. And the sewing up of the man’s chest was like the closing in of a house with a roof and walls: where would passion erupt? How could the spirit fly free?

Extract from Gretel Ehrlich’s ‘A Match to the Heart’ (Penguin 1994)

Photos from Cragside, Northumberland

YESTERDAY, WEST OF HERE