Long-Shadow Time
At long-shadow time, when the light is grainy and sticks to the bulbous horse chestnut buds: this is how you’ll awake when dead, still clutching your end of the yarn with which you’re weaving and unravelling your life and death, here with the others on the wrong side of the tapestry who are stitching and unpicking their lives, their deaths, and the lives and deaths before and after them.
There is mischief in magical things and all things are magical when you see what the world is made of. Droplets contain upside-down water worlds suspended from larch tips beside the swollen beck, which fizzes down its rock drop, racing to flood the lake. Mouths of liquid mud open around the pillars of a footbridge that emerges from the flood to arch over water and back into water, taking all those on the path to the submerged further down, further in.
Earlier that day, because on the right side of the tapestry there is an earlier, a sequin curtain of rain in rose-gold light froze into hail and halted your heavy progression up the hill and, with your back turned to the driving wind, in budding heather two feet from your two feet, the hail converged on this spot, at this inexact time, only because of your perspective. And now you wake into a mist that picks out every web and stray spider thread. The world is suddenly full of spiders doing their spider work, connecting this leaf to that twig to these iron railings that enclose nurseries, schools and care homes. The woven world is visible only when you pay with your attention.
Other elements are at work, too.
On frost day, ice needles on crimped hornbeam twigs compact into blades, ice knives grown from the long night for twigs to cut the wind, slice it up, shred and chop it, so the wind weaves more gently through the youngest. From chestnut trees, webs hang in tatters, long threads of ice beads solid to the touch then dissolving in the heat of your ungloved fingertips.
Water worlds, converging hail, mist webs, ice blades: all swallowed, all taken in to open up the inside space. Bubbles and drops expand. Frost needles thread these beads as you walk, recurrently in memory, above the iron lake where boats shine and rainbows grow and birds drag arrowheads. Later, apricot clouds light your descent into night and hunger, as you walk beside the lake invisible now. Through night you walk to wake in sleep, into long-shadow time and grainy worlds of light and water, and all matter, all time, all space.
Into grainy timespace you wake, beyond the separate pieces arranged like this, arranged like that and mistaken for reality.
Beyond the sequin curtain in driving wind, beyond these parted threads woven into the agreed pictures that create the world through which you walk in one direction only, secret fibres reveal their grains. Strings of grains from which all is spun. And now you see the tiny crumpled dimensions hidden within the three you must live in because of your size. Within the folds, beads are threaded onto invisible strings and not fused, not joined, but attracted and held together by forces you feel but never believe. Everything you see on the right side of the tapestry is woven from these filaments.
In the dreamtime the ancestors are alive with you, weaving the pictures in discontinuous weft, tamping down the threads so only the images are visible. But when you are a threadweaver you see the secret warp. First you watch and then you do. As at a lace day, when aged eighteen months you sit on your mother’s lap while she lifts bobbins over and under each other on the lace pillow. No, don’t touch, she says, when you reach for the faceted beads on the wire through the bobbin tails. If you touch, then you get down. Quietly, not touching, you sit and watch the bobbins knotting threads into a repeating yet open meshwork. Later, aged five, you’re making lace on your own pillow with bobbins loaned, gifted or bought with pocket money. You’re making the design that is held together with tiny spiders which will be put inside a plastic wallet to become a bookmark. Maybe the spiders are white, maybe yellow on this occasion, or it is blue purple pink apricot green thread that is doing your spider work on the day that pixelates you into the newspaper. There in the photo on the right side of the tapestry you sit beside your spider work, into which you later wake when the mist picks out every spider thread and connects you with the others who are here. We weave in and out of the secret fibres of the world, so at long-shadow time you can come alive again.
Among grass blades bent with upside-down water worlds that will descend to flood the lake, submerging the submerged to make it rain again, here in your grains you play.