The bark is the excrescence of the tree recorded as biography. Its living sap and cells have coagulated into hard armour against the weather. But the trees themselves are a separate expression - the antique stale essence of interminable years of staying put. They are a living growth of the spirit of the forest - its existence always demands the unknown. Where did it all come from? What are we, in the nature of things?
I was not walking anywhere. This patch in the forest was, as it were, the place to arrive at, and I, the only arrival. When I moved on, each new place became in turn the only place to arrive at, too. As if time and motion had ceased. What started in this dream-filled space will die of course. By its own hand, as you will see. But here, for the moment, time was denied its future, denied transitions. That stand of still verticals stretched above me to those endless fan-vaults.
The stillness of the colours in this 'thing' we call the forest. Its brown hues and decaying yellow leaves are the deadness of it which pours the gentle still tones into the space around. These browns give the atmosphere to the life of this place. Those darks are shadows that make shapes in this place. The dark which gives the silent stillness is an absence of light, but the conditions of peace and inspiration. Nothing is flat beneath my feet; no path wanders in front of my slow passage through this undergrowth. The sun I left outside, juggling and playing with the clouds in the sky, is only a filtered essence beneath these trees, a flickering glow like the damp of a long-squeezed orange.
I was not rambling, hiking across a route of well-trodden vistas, as I might at other times. In the midst of this silent growth, I had entered the confident silence of another living entity. I was life entered into another life, its livingness and its deadness was the proof of itself. To be an organism is to be not alone.
Just as that silent stillness seeped monotonously by me, there was movement amongst the big trees. Had I myself moved so that the dark lines of vision between the trunks had changed – some closed off, some opened a way through? No. Distantly, a figure crossed one of those deep chinks. Momentarily a glimpse of faded colour that was not of the forest. I cannot, in that darkness, say it was a flash of blue. It was a soft pulse, a sky colour blended with the surrounding brown.
She – I say the movement was a ‘she’, because she passed much closer – came through the trees, gently swirling the ferns underfoot. She did not pass close by. But I could see her fair, ruffled hair, a fresh blue summer dress, a light burr - a determined tread, a similar enjoyment of the same lights and darks of our forest. I did not move, so as not to spoil the motionless shadows for her. She may not have seen me, seen only the solid trunks I had melded with. We seemed together for ever in that soundless presence. As she moved across my vision, a dozen trees away, the flecks of blue, and of pale hair, of a noble chin and (perhaps, if I had truly seen her) smiling eyes, youngish trip in her step as she trod over the foliage, and a pert confidence in the set of her shoulders, as she moved in and out of the forest pillars, there was no motion. Her movement had joined the stillness in their own marriage. Till, inexplicably she faded like light, and was gone. A clump of trunks huddled and blocked her from my view as I watched. A simple lingering rustle joined the silence.
What remained was the trees, their forest organism. And a pattern burned there in my memory system.
* * * * * * *
I saw her again. Not that day, not that year, but later still. I recognised her by the quiet of that forest which she carried wrapped around her as a cloak might have been.
There was a bustling this time, people. They moved each way as I stood to watch. I was on holiday far away, and offering myself, once again, the chance to swirl in this melee as if a swimmer entering a torrid stream. I could stand my ground in the swirl and watch (no, listen and feel) its relentless life. Its continuousness suggested a seamless eternity. Without community, people interweaved an endless pattern. No contact, no words, only the noise of movement. The noise of feet, stepping with purpose, as the crowd slid unknowingly past each other.
I first became aware of a patch in the crowd that exuded an unusual warmth. She moved more slowly than the rest, a kind of spot of silence standing out in the hectic press. I could sense the peace of that forest on her, or rather as if it wafted like a delicious scent to my senses. There was that still eternal quiet we had had together. I saw the light trip of her movement and recognised her instantly, the strong features of her face as she passed where I stood. She barely looked ahead of her. Eyes, calm with reflections, saw little around her. The breeze ruffled her fair hair in the sunlight and smoothed it with one hand in an infinite slowness. She was closer to me than before and I thought her on this occasion smaller than I had remembered. Her movement through the crowd created a pocket, an unfilled people-free space of her own sunlight and prettiness. I knew once again as I watched that it would go on for ever. Once again burned into my mind. Her infinite presence with me.
Even when she was gone I knew it would last for ever. As if she had no body, no substance, she left her presence within me – a presence as solid as my flesh, a presence that I believed once again I had been seeking for ever.
To understand this ethereal proximity a second time, entails divulging those in-between months – or years. If I open my heart to you, you may, I fear, enter with less respect. I require you to visit it as a temple, a hallowed ground, a place to treat with chastity. That dew that looks like quicksilver, or even fresh, sprayed silver itself, glistens over the surface of the place inside me, where she is kept.
* * * * * * *
After the first serene moment of blue, I had held that freshness, a permanence all my own, which my soul concealed in a secret hiding place. I had a quick ‘fling’ with Gwen, a rough struggling student of physics who also ran the students union welfare fund. She told me I was regarded as creepy but I relaxed and became quite normal after she had let me have it with her. So, she blithely said. She was from the north of England and never more often was a spade a phallic object than with her. Though I never told her that all the while of our feverish, over-humid wrestling in bed, I was preserving in the business end of my mind, that drifting angel of the forest I had captured in a wood.
Had I remained faithful to that sylvan sprite, things might have been different.
Gwen led me astray. Students in those days were prone to demos and sit-ins in the offices of those in power. Because I went along with her and her council members I lost my lecturing job. Oh dear. I knew I should have stayed with the flitting pale blue shadow. I had betrayed it. I had lent my passions – no, only lust – to bouncy Gwen.
I had closed over that place in my mind, which had been burned as it were with that sacred peace. I had sealed it with cool dew. I intoned to it passionately as to a tomb, as if to a bare altar, an eternal being that has been.
Later Gwen, having cured me of my creepiness perhaps, dropped me for a burly Australian surfer. I drank a bit, and still without a job, agreed to form a business with a friend, grinding lenses for opticians. Unfortunately, to find my share of the business funds, I was forced to perform a theft from the museum of scientific instruments at the University that had sacked me. They fetched a lot on the second-hand market and it did us well as a share of the company. But another museum that had scraped around to buy from the dealer, discovered they were stolen property. I was forced to travel – as far as possible. You will not credit how difficult it is to set up an export trade in prescription ground lenses.
How could I descend to such a corrupt base, though it is my nature. But she was there to see I rose above it. The silver film I had wrapped her in became a gold filigree capsule untouchable by one such as me. Those memories remained untouched, embalmed in adulation, removed from storage on a daily basis and polished with love, and then stowed in the softest tissues again in the secret heart that I had protected from Gwen and others. It was a true home she had made me. A biography of blue I held within.
* * * * * * *
The third time I saw her, it was back in my hometown, thousands of miles from both those virtuous previous sightings. It was in fact truly just around the corner from our workshop. I saw her getting out of her large car and disembowelling from it two small children. The vigorous tension of her movements, the proud set of her head on determined shoulders, the light spring of her legs. I knew every sign so perfectly – as I had preserved them with such accuracy and relish from that frail glimpse all those years ago. I could have touched her as I walked past. But so engrossed was she with landing her precious little cargo that she never noticed my passage sliding by. We did not touch, but it was one of the two little ones, probably twins, who brushed my legs. Its little arms were so stretched from its minute body by over-weighty clothes that he turned like a slow top into my path. I felt the real presence of substance – nearly her substance. She squealed a little to bring her young one to safety without a glance at me. Then I was passed – with new pictures: of her calm and broad eyes, the openness of her face, and its natural skin.
* * * * * * *
Regularly, I, that still creepy man, sauntered down that road, round the corner from my workshop. And from time to time, I would encounter a radiance in the vicinity. The air pulsing with electric forces, when I saw her there a pulsing vision (I had become a battery, a capacitor, an accumulator). Sometimes I strolled past, maybe quite close and she would float as if unconnected to the mundane - and oblivious of me. Sometimes I would shelter at a distance and watch from between the shoulders of other passers-by, as she fussed with her schoolchildren, walking them forward, or strapping them into the safety of her car. And later I would see them stumbling around, as a strong boy or a loose-haired girl. Both children so actively busy with life in this world, they could not see the aura of gods around their mother’s being.
Later they were independent finding their own way round the streets, through the neighbourhood. Though her family grew and her substance changed, I found her presence as identical as ever, haunting, magnetising, eternal.
On one occasion the little boy, probably coming home from his first school, in smart grey flannel suit, short trousers, dropped his lolly – a vigour of green and lemon yellow. It landed, plop, on the pavement in front of their house. I picked it up quickly. The boy startled by the presence of this silent man, stopped. He had started to go for it, pick it up. Then froze. I explained to the child he should not have it now, it was dirty and he should not suck it. A sullen quiet stare preceded the beginning of fear. The nanny took charge and agreed as the little boy’s stunned panic changed to protest and anger at her. She smiled and bustled him on into the house, to mummy. I was left, as it were the street cleaner following up the holy family.
Back in my own home, I peeled the sticky lolly from the folds of my pocket lining. I pinned a large piece of paper to the wall – the back of a poster. With pins and cotton thread I attached the lolly to its middle. With a felt pen I drew a red circle around. A perfect circle. How could it turn out a perfect circularity! Without being an artist. It was the reach of the goddess in my soul.
On another occasion the young daughter suddenly came out of the house as I passed. She had a friend behind her, a tense ferret-faced thing. But the daughter with the flaxen hair and in her pert pre-pubescence, was alive with light and grace, a little wand of vitality, enough to make spells. She rushed past me as if I were street furniture. The firm virgin vigour of her body rubbing momentarily by me. The material of my trouser leg she had slid beside, smouldered all day, its burning had been scented by the loins from which she had come.
And finally, the young lad, now healthy, his reddish hair cropped short in a bristly fuzz came down the road towards me and swung into the gateway, his sports bag covered in logos in one hand and a meek crumpled-looking girlfriend in the other, appearing as decoration to his soon-to-be manhood. It was summer, perhaps the year he went off to university. His features were now distinctive, a tall broad forehead that rose in dignity above the small but perfect features of his face. He would remain thus, a reminder of her perfect poise, until in middle-age perhaps prosperity would fill out his jowls and his paunch above the belt. It was merely a glimpse, a momentary portrait to be frozen with others in my feverish and foetid memory.
* * * * * * *
Then, a few years later the house was for sale. On one occasion a slim distinguished woman gazed from the window as if expecting someone to arrive, someone to look over the property. Her calm eyes, open natural face, pert confident set of her shoulders (I could see the silver and gold I had wrapped her in). As I glanced at her the light shimmered, the earth itself vibrated with untracked energy. The pane of glass in front of her melted. The intensity and temperature of the sun and the moon thrust through the gap that was left. It grabbed at my heart. It almost got me, as if there was, for a moment, a truth and worship located within the distance between us. Was this the first time that she had let her eyes glance actually upon me? I looked back, riveted in a horror as if a vile defiling might have occurred, as if a hope had come too near to being real. Time itself wrinkled in the heat. But, in reality, I walked on, frozen in a continuity of pace and stride.
One day the new people had moved into the house, clad it in scaffold, and imprinted their own obliterating mark upon it. She, the divine, retreated once more to the immaterial shrines of memory.
* * * * * * *
I had lost her to an oblivion I could not even remonstrate with. She was gone, and left me with the imprints and shadows, and stains on the sheets. I could only struggle with their agony. There were times when imagination was more terrible than the real.
I caught my flight from London with time to spare and more. Her large eyes hauntingly followed me – every inch of the taxi journey. They reproachfully hung in the air before me , a landmark in my psyche, a spirit manifest in ectoplasm. My live soul too vulnerable to resist, began to swallow in the frail wafts of hers. I imagined, as I slumbered in the aircraft cabin’s seat that she was concealed in me. No, I determined, not so.
In my baggage, secreted in the icy climate of the aircraft’s hold. She would shiver, gasp at the slender air pressure. Two hours to half freeze the life from her. She would crawl from the hold when we arrive, grey with a deadness flowing in her skin, her joints stiffened to unbending, her large eyes shrunk into a smallness inside her head where a half-awareness still flickered groggily. A body as cold as iced metal, she would be too painful to protest, only to grovel forwards for help.
I was familiar with these contents of my mind, familiar as child’s toys. She had entered this unseemly area and laid a new responsibility upon me. A voltage too intense to use – a discharge that could only rend and twist and suffer.
When I visited the slight rim of the volcano, she was there to be pushed forward, screaming and clinging to the crumbling edge of earth, and then turning over in a gathering fall as if given up to a rape. The bright glowing ponds of fire below, her limbs a slow turning wheel as she spun with force towards the cindering surface. Only my eyes, only my own eyes, as if the line of my sight could be reeled out as elastic lines to offer any safety. At the last moment she could clutch them, and as if my concentration were a spool I might winch slowly up, little by little, her seared skin, now white ballooning blisters in some places, and wet tatters and shreds in others. Should I heal her with a caress?
Did I have one left?
* * * * * * *
On my journeys I never knew if it was to the hinterland of these obsessed fancies, or to the brutality of real occasions. But she now accompanied me, her thumb in her mouth as if a knife, her degradation to be worn as a permanent mourning garb. If I had sought all that time to purify her, she had now seeped corruptingly into me, as the cesspool pollutes the well. I could no longer exorcise that mouldering stench from myself.
She was chained to a black rock, this bleached girl with beauty like an arc-lamp. The tide rushing forward had already engulfed the strict elegance of her ankles, her calves. The monster was leaning forward over the cliff-edge above her, its teeth snapping for more than hunger, for pain and blood itself. My sharp sword snick-snacking, steel through butter. Her bonds and shackles succumbed to its whistling sweep. And she was free, freed by her hero’s hands. I had rescued her purity and her sublime being. I carried her as a radiant-skinned trophy, free from the dragon’s snarling jaw, the foaming tide.
I was wide-awake in this dream. I savoured lost youth.
* * * * * * *
A number of years later, I was in trouble for the second time in my life. I had for some while been a leading figure in the local history society. So when an impoverished provincial museum decided to sell an Anglo-Saxon battle harness they came, discreetly to our society, and it was me that dealt with the request. I found a buyer, a handsomely rich buyer. But one on the other side of the Atlantic. It was me, as agent, that the customs and excise pounced on when they intercepted the export of this priceless national treasure. Ironically, I would in fact have given all my fees on that occasion to the benefit of our small society. Ironically, the only beneficiary of the whole deal, in the end, was the British Museum who got the glittering object for a much reduced price.
But worse than this, the customs and excise decided to prosecute – their one-in-ten decimal policy. And it was me they picked on as the evil go-between, the middle-man, who had fooled two innocent little organisations – the museum and the Society. I was tried in court and, without much ceremony, I was easily convicted.
Well, I was spellbound by the prosecuting barrister and admired his articulateness enviously. He was young, a child to my generation by then. After this short trial, I sought him out in the corridors of the courthouse, and approached him. I asked bluntly and without preamble how his mother was. I noticed the tall broad face, like hers. He had those small but dignified features, reddish hair; and as I spoke, a wrinkled surprise crossed his pleasant expression – just as it had when his lolly had dropped. He was uncertain about my approach, I thought. As if an opponent in court might be an opponent for ever. I might be seeking a perverse revenge.
He was noncommittal at first, “I don’t think we have much to say to each other,” he started. “Were you a friend of hers?” he continued, nevertheless. He wished to remain polite as well as cautious, but I picked out a secret hint of curiosity, even alarm.
“I have tried to look for her over many years,” I admitted, choosing candour and, maybe, recklessness.
He stared at me. I had a sudden premonition that the light had gone out. That she had died.
“My parents had divorced,” he said simply. “I don’t believe they were really in love.” He retained his poise. But I had troubled him in some way. He had abandoned his haughtiness in favour of being frank. The corridors bustled with people, and the echoes redoubled the numbers as if a crush of humanity was escaping. The walls were stone, regular lines of vertical piers reaching high above the humanity like an arching sentinel, a bland fan-vaulting of plaster stretched over us. All magic was leeched from this pale imitation of a holy shrine.
“What was she lacking?” I asked anxiously, “What was she looking for?” Blurting it out as if choked to overflowing.
“She was always looking for something.” He talked absently but continued to look at me intently. Suddenly he swallowed and looked briefly at the toes of his well-made shoes. “I have no intention of talking to you,” he said inconsistently as he started to tell me something about her. “But if you want to know of some reason why it happened, she never knew what she searched for. I think she simply gave up.” He looked up, at me, taking in my ragged and defeated image. I saw something in the young man’s stare. Something in me. Perhaps it was my sacred shrine I kept her in. “Were you one of her lovers?” he asked without suspicion. I realised he was fond of her, troubled by her purposelessness.
“Perhaps,” I said – I lied, in fact, “that is the problem.” I confirmed it to myself. Then I wanted to know, “Has she died?”
His head bobbed just perceptibly.
He opened his mouth to speak and I knew he was going to tell me darkly. I turned on my heels and walked away. The corridor filled with a cloud of thick blood, a thunder. So, I would not have seen him, heard him if I had looked back.
This thing I am looking for, it is a stale essence of interminable years of staying put. Like trees themselves are each a separate expression. Those barks are the brown biographies the trees leave upon themselves. This forest has abandoned itself to those gentle brown hues, the yellow-green dust of ancient leaves and lives. Where is that new blue haze? I stretch forward, looking for it. I do not see it. And I will not look back at him, her son. It is the forest that shelters her remains. Cast out from sacred ground, she would silently drift to our own brooding forest. I believed that the method she had used was to hang herself from the branch of a tree. It was the only symbol that would make sense. The only way she could have found me at last.
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