Anciently Young
I first heard the call in the sea-whisper of new leaves on the poplars at number twenty-three. This is a voice that I trust. When I hear it I feel calm and sure. When I think about human voices I doubt everything about myself, that whatever I’m doing or want to do is wrong.
The poplars say I am a creature of the world and just where I ought to be – in my portable body, responding to the voices that do not judge. Or perhaps it’s the wind that speaks through the new leaves. Wind, water and light must speak through a translator; they contact my imagination with urgency. Here in the connecting hub where all things are equal, the elements communicate within a dried autumn leaf from the sweet gum tree that grows on the street near the primary school. The leaf curled as it dried on my desk; it hugs a figure that has since slipped its grasp. Pointed lobes curve around the dark red spine, empty body rippled in its curling. If I tried to straighten the twisted points, the entire structure would crumble. I should have placed it face to face with the other. Instead the two leaves embrace air, separately, in shapes which ask to be held but are not.
The other leaf is a pinky-brown face. While drying, one lobe threaded between two others and shaped a pair of eyes. The larger eye reveals the space behind; its colour is the beech of my desk, and now the pearly grey of a sea-worn oyster shell.
What does it mean to observe another person’s experiences transubstantiated, and to do so through their own eyes, filtered through their values and opinions about the world? To see such an interior view of someone else, to see what you might not want to acknowledge in yourself, that you try to avoid yet is there in such abundance it threatens to swamp you in a mucky deluge if you look even a little bit. Fear, desire, petty resentments, humiliation and shame. Immerse yourself in someone else’s deluge, then. But do you know how far inland it washes to deposit its debris, how the fragments of another mind sink into your soil, how intricately the ruins join with parts of yourself in ways you can’t predict?
Only sometimes can you admit there’s a part of you that wants to be swept away. You can’t face your own deluge, not yet, maybe never, and so you bring on another’s quickly, intensely, by consuming without thinking about how the debris will complicate your own dead occurrences until you no longer know what is yours and what is not. But the truth is none of it was ever yours. It all came from the outside through your perception of events and entities that are themselves nothing more than processes of becoming and dissolving. The only thing that is truly yours in this whole big tangle is the way you combine your experiences; the way you complicate, compact or release them; the way you impose them upon other people.
*
You must sit with your dragon until you see how it is beautiful and strange and cannot be anything other than itself. This dragon came to me from a dead poet when I needed to hear that all we are told is unnatural is just another form of life.
In a stand of conifers on an upland hill, I found this monster. The forest floor was soft with dry needles and forsaken cones. A dancing dot of light woke the beast. I flicked my wrist and the sun rebounding off the watch-face reanimated the forest debris, stirring memory and folklore with my present state. The dragon’s ragged snout was once the flare of a tree trunk into shallow roots. Two stumps of branches were its horns. Along its length broken-off limbs were spines. All green with age and damp. Outside the wood, sheep bleated on the sunny slopes. Always the chatter of other voices when you’re trying to have a quiet moment with your dragon.
On the new bark between the scales of a living tree, horizontal cuts swelled into lips, millions of tiny mouths poised to talk all at once. Even here I struggled to hear my own voice. The green dragon slept, its nose in the needle bed, waiting for me to recognise it as beautiful and brave.
No, not asleep; sad, ashamed. Of what it is. It doesn’t yet know it is beautiful and brave. It needs me to tell it. But I’m not ready.
Nearby a blackbird flings needles with its beak. If anything dwells in this eerie wood of trees grown too close in the name of profit, then I’m too blinkered to see it. Beyond the plantation a plane approaches then recedes. The sheep bleat. That’s all they do. I stroke the shattered horn of the dragon. I like being here and being strange. I feel happier than in town.
To live in the city is to be immersed in social reality – the systems of concepts that hold the city together. Shared ideas, manifested in the layout and architecture, enable millions of people and their differences to live alongside one another. Out in the green, physical reality is more apparent, assuming you do more than slide from heated home to car to office and shop and pub, then back home again. You don’t need a public face when you walk in the woods. The pretence falls away; it won’t help you here. It might even be a hindrance, as in a storm when you have to be where you are so as to remain in one piece. Though you’re not in one piece – you’re always breaking down, breaking apart and rebuilding as you walk through the woods and across the hills into the mountains, shedding pieces of yourself as you go. It’s just how it should be. You’re always falling apart so you can remake yourself from the pieces you gather along the way.
Nobody told me to be aware of what I collected.
The social reality wants my breath – to perpetuate the ways in which we enclose and restrict ourselves. I can’t help what I inhale from the collective airwaves, but my out-breath, my voice, is my own. At the end of every expiration I can pause, to die over and over. In this way I reclaim my autonomy, then choose to incorporate myself into the bubbles I saw in a river rock pool.
In the Southern Uplands, a narrow stream cut through turf then widened into a rocky pool. A slab of granite parted the flow, diverting a ribbon into a stone tub of three inches by two. The falling water whipped bubbles into existence. Nothing special, easily overlooked, which was why I wanted to study these tiny spinning entities, subjugated by forces into relationships which endlessly evolve.
Water molecules are attracted to one another and when bonded create a skin, a membrane that here in the pool contained pockets of air. When the bubbles collided, their protective membranes broke and they joined. These bigger bubbles revolved and bounced around the rock pool until the next encounters that terminated their individual existences.
Sometimes micro bubbles circled a big one, seed pearls in a brooch fitting. Beginning as little rafts of foam, contact with a big bubble selected a leader, which drew the tiny bubbles one by one into a line. Then this thread of bubbles surrounded the big spinner. And off they went in their new configuration, bouncing from rock face to face. The frantic dance spoke to the particles in my body that also wanted to spin, bounce and join. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since I allowed myself to dance. Then I noticed how each spinning dome reflected the sky. Proportionate to the size of the bubble, the sky was mottled cloudy and blue with ragged edges where the banks and trees etched the frame. Along the lower edge: my silhouette.
I was in every bubble; the canvas rotated yet the picture remained the same. After I’d been observing for a while, my mind let go of logic and blurred the dappled reflections into silver eyes. I really did believe that thousands of eyes watched me from the water. Each mercurial iris perceived the whole truth or nothing at all, depending on the permissions I gave myself.
From my cosmic vantage point in the sky, I captured the magical observers and made them carry the burden of my image. Through them, I too was in the pool, dancing and colliding. I could almost feel my cells responding. With each pop of air I expanded and became a bigger silhouette on the silver membrane.
*
If I’m trapped in a small city flat, can I release myself another way – remodel my groundless form by surrendering the stories that carry my character from yesterday to today? The descriptions, anecdotes and justifications that make me feel continuous, a coherent entity through time.
What if I could replace my knotted memories with new fictions of my own choosing? If I simply refused to keep rehearsing everything that has gone before, and accept as part of myself only that which I decide to notice and weave into my synaptic fabric. I wonder also at my grandeur and whether this is how compulsive liars succumb to their own lies, whether I’ve already succumbed. But how true are truths about myself when memories and even emotions, recent neuroscience suggests, are constructed by the brain upon demand? Beyond the physical reality of my body that walks and swims and climbs, which parts of me are real when memories are unreliable and I live so much in the shared fictions of social reality? Or is it simply that the drive to conceptualise creates a question which can’t be answered?
The lichen on the twig is itself and that it is all. It has value to me because I picked it up in an unlikely place: a service-station car park on the way to Scotland. It’s a dark, thin twig a little longer than my black pencil and shingled with flaky grey lichen and the lurid green type. Unless they’re the same kind but at different stages? Scales lift off the twig. Between and around them: little green-rimmed holes at the ends of tubes. Something alien – tendrils, feelers, suckers. Inside the tubes, orange. Up close, if I had a magnifying glass, I would discover the surface of an enigmatic moon. I’d love to shrink myself and become proportionate to these mountainous flakes and craters.
A lichen is a symbiotic creature – part alga, part fungus, together able to survive in environments that are too harsh for each alone. I’m looking for symbiosis. Must a new partner have a brain? Lichens have no mind that we would recognise. But we’re limited by our faculties, too. How can we judge something so different from us? Which criteria would enable a fair assessment? Maybe this need to evaluate and judge and find everything wanting is only important because we pride ourselves on our rationality. Everything must be arranged in sequences and hierarchies. Before or after. Higher or lower. There is no ‘just different’. Everything must have a purpose. Utility is our obsession, quickly followed by the ability to be transmuted into money. And as your price tumbles, you must convert yourself or be dumped.
Lichen feels like a marker of something ancient. When I see it on trees and rocks I break through time and the social reality which says when you’re past a certain age you have no value. On the other side of the human tapestry I enter the physical realm of things that exist independently of imagination. In this way, I’m unburdened of the baggage that I know to be nothing more than constructions but can’t in the city escape. In the woods where lichens grow, furring and feathering trees that will outlive me, I’m free. I’ve always walked in these woods – today on the edge of a town in the Borders and tomorrow, which is now the past, alongside a row of lichen-crowned fence posts holding barbed wire taut. So much privately-owned land, which animals must also respect. On the moor, predators are controlled in order to protect the baby grouse, a sign in a national park informs us, so that later the grown babies will be better shot for sport.
I’m ancient and though this is my first visit to these uplands, I’ve walked this path many times. But I’ve forgotten how long always is and so I believe myself to be very young, unencumbered by memory. On this day I walk along the forestry tracks and touch the new clusters of larch needles, spring green and soft. I remember larches golden in November, so I’m not a completely new cluster of sensations. I recall scattered moments, but not all I feel that I’ve known.
When I see lichens and fresh larch needles I am there only; I’m not aware that I’m seeing or that I have eyes. I don’t have a concept for the way in which I recognise the lichen and the larch, but I know we’re the same and I belong in these woods, as I don’t belong in the city. I’ve lived in cities all my life and the weave is so familiar it can masquerade as home. I see the invisible structures, the imaginary lines connected into webs, as if they’re visible in the air like telegraph cables. They’re as tangled and alive as those I saw in a city when the sky darkened before a tropical storm and I wondered how the inhabitants hadn’t yet been fried by their power source. I know the invisible structures hold the fabric of the capital together. This many people could not live side by side without complex systems uniting imaginations, bonding, restricting; keeping them close and compliant, or compliant enough that the city can live.
I believed in it once, that it was everything – urgent, permanent, necessary for economies of scale, if this is a desirable goal. When I’m with the lichen I know the city to be so much fabrication I don’t understand how it endures. Imaginative connections manifested in steel, concrete, brick, tarmac, glass. Without humans it would merely be a jumble of syndromes. I know I’m an alien on the loose.
Selected for a reading at Words to to Change the World, an evening of environmental writing in Fittie Hall, Aberdeen, October 2022, produced by Open Road