understand this, these chance observers, these frequent trippers, these earnest tourists in Avignon and Turin, the Holy Land and Sinai, where a wily Bedouin, wrapped in a keffiyeh, gives them a ride on his asthmatic camel to the monastery of St Catherine which holds behind its stone walls Moses’s ‘burning bush’, the first images of Christ and an original handprint of the Holy Prophet of Islam. The only thing they’ll really remember is the camel ride, because they paid for the ride. Only very rarely will one of this mixed crew look up and feel with the trembling heart that they all, so different, are inextricably connected to each other by the common air of the world, our one atmosphere, that looks from space like a soft blue haze above this planet of people in which each of who, you must remember, Mozart is killed …
People, people, nameless as the wandering clouds that shine so brightly in the heights of love above other spaces where live the northern, the sick, the grieving, the Russian – spaces for long uninhabited and careless in their vacancy, spaces where now and forever reverberates the chaos of shrieking hatred and its strident echo: the unctuous teaching of lies.
And in these spaces, vanquished people, tired of passive flesh and of the heart that alone can vanquish the fear of death in life – this is what it comes to.
Sur le Pont d’Avignon,
L’on y danse, l’on y danse
Sur le Pont d’Avignon,
L’on y danse tous en rond
Any river has two banks and the wind blows above each. And what can we do if we do not dance on the bridge that leads to nowhere but to and fro – dance like the dessicated plane-tree leaves whisked through Avignon’s cobbled strets, dance like the mistral – and smile to your beloved, and try not to think but to live ….
I could walk straight down from my house to the abandoned tunnel, but I chose other paths. If you go right, say, after just five minutes, you find yourself on a meandering track, curling through the twittering of goldfinches and the fluting of red-breasted robins, between young hornbeams and ash trees entwined with mistletoe and honeysuckle, past early spring flowers – pale bluebells, anemones white as ivory, anemones like tiny stars peeping from the tangled grass, violas and foxgloves – digitales with their fleshy, geranium-like leaves and crimson bell-shaped blooms.
You can then climb up to a Cedar of Lebanon, so ancient and tall, that spreads a tent so broad and dense that nothing grows beneath, not even the most tenacious bramble. In this bare space, exposed sandstone is blanketed in fallen needles.
In the thick base of this great cedar, nestling deeply into its tough bole and knotted sinews, is set a bench for contemplating the dark pond below, a pond which even in spring is short of water. So this place is not a happy place, but filled with melancholy, like any place that does not fulfil its purpose. At first, I came here often to sit on the bench and think, but the sight of the exposed mudslime and seeps of the pond bed brought only dreary thoughts, so I gave up draining my imagination and heart here, along with the duckweed and water fern – and followed other paths through the wood and found other benches, some set up in memory of English people who had loved these places when they were alive. On the copper plates screwed to the bench, I read Gus Berger, Phillip Heath, Brian Seymour …
Then the path winds further on, under the shady canopy with its flashes of sunlight, past constellations of snowdrops and wild garlic with their lanced leaves, past blackberry and raspberry bushes, and ferns with fronds still curled in yellow spirals like a bishop’s mitre, and then after a while emerging past what seems like a ruined chapel where rocks fused into a gothic arch.
And everywhere in the gloom of the trail beneath the trees, it seemed to me there beckoned the deceptive scent of bird-cherry blossom. I looked for it with my eyes, but it wasn’t there – only the faint scent, bitter, brusque but beloved, drifting past – but where from?
Maybe it was the mingling of moist morning air and whiff of muddy puddles with the fragrant bouquet of flower scents – the pinky froth of hawthorn, fluffy rosettes of rowan blossom, golden showers of meadowsweet, subtle jasmine, wild garlic and lily-of-the-valley invisible amid the grass. Maybe they all conspired to compose for me that longed for breath of pure happiness.
Gus Berger, Phillip Heath, Brian Seymour (vanished descendants of the Victorian imperial era), Cedar of Lebanon and artificial ponds with small oak islands, wide, grassy banks with bluebells and angelica, dandelions and fireweed and thistles, and English birch trees and may alders with their sticky seedpods primed to fluff up and fly over the glades where are bedded lungworts (pink but turning purple), glades which, after the moist gloom under trees … all of these suddenly stir a marvellous thought in the passerby’s mind: this isn’t just for me to wonder at snow-plumed and pink starry flowers, nor even to foster my contact with the Unity, but for those working hard on the Earth – for Gus Berger, Phillip Heath and Brian Seymour, the walkers of the many paths, the black-wet paths with the staccato signature of dog-runs leading into thickets and the dry sandy paths in spots of sun, the paths on which I could as easily go astray as I do in these letters, yet, glory to Allah, always find my way out. Let peace be with you in the truths of the Father’s spring, where the memory of you so carefully ministers today to the regular visitors and chance passers-by to this ancient English wood, who, sadly however, have no idea that in the world there exist entirely different kinds of wood …
…where also in the beginning there was silence, undisturbed by a single memorable sound, and only later did the sun pierce the deep blue and gold gaps in the clouds to break the chill – drip-drop, splash, little by little – and suddenly a stiff breeze stirs the uncaring leaves, and sunlight flushes glittering gold from birch and aspen in clearings still spread with white, and sparkles the pearly frosted webs that in autumn glimmer through the tall grass – in autumn, filled with taiga briar, gangly pink honeysuckle, dizzy elder, as well as copper-rusty angelica, yellow-eyed tansy and marvellous magenta fireweed …
…in autumn, when helpful fatigue forces you to find moments of midday repose – the blissfully stretched out body with no sense of its final shape, lying supine on the grass and merging into one with the season happening around, and just barely, out of the corner of your eye, you glimpse moments of your life flowing by – a gun and backpack; fresh animal trail winding through birch glade and past pine windbreak; flash of sunlight on dragonfly wings; sun-baked mushroom umbrella – but even those visit only vaguely before again comes, drip-drop, honest, sensitive, wonderful silence, and you soon can’t tell what was, what is and what will be, and events swap over and over in the undelineated reality of memory, happening before and after, after and before, flowing in and out, joining, transposing, stretching and shrinking …
…just as this onflowing sentence which, like a dream, can only be broken by waking …
…and will slip again, slithering through brown shadows under pines over the mesh of crimson cranberry and emerald taiga mosses to the capercaillie lek, where amid hog-hued shadows, a trio of capercaillie cocks flurry from boughs to view the brace of hens that squat on silvery needles strewn on the close-compacted sandy forest floor – and the old grey cock perches on palings, sprinkled beak to tail with beads of icy, autumn dew.
It’s so good to doze in the last heat of the autumn, so good to feel the whole day open before you, open to impressions, amongst which will be the forest river Ilet, with its confined channel, sandbanks and deep pools, running smoothly past trees that plunge in their roots and trunks, and bifurcating into three limpid streams that quietly murmur in sympathy with the whispering wind and the soft rustle of glowing-in-the-sun leaves.
If you gaze from the bank or, mayhap, the knotty bole of a pine where it drops to rapids: shoals of dark-backed, double-edged ide, riding the current on scarlet fins, head upriver: the flicker and glitter of silvery roach; a deep hole where the novice might be seduced
