Night Walking (Infinitas)

I lifted the latch and went out into the night to see what I could see and discover in the darkness what the darkness would disclose. And I went to the place where the air was heavy with moisture and dripped with the dewy sweetness of night-time flowers and there the waters ran silently, as dark as scriveners’ ink. Above me, Cassiopeia and Cepheus danced their slow dance in frozen silence and Banbury town stained the sky above Sunrising Hill with its amber glow. And as I stood, I listened for a voice, but none came and there was no song upon the breezes of the night.

sicut in caelo…

And so in the faint penumbra of my lantern I turned my eyes to another lonely circle of light glinting in the world of darkness; Andromeda, riding high on the wings of Pegasus. Its flaming glory traduced to a tiny blur diminished by unimaginable distance. Its light had taken 2.3 million light years, the entire evolutionary span of humankind, to reach me. Through what icy darkness had this speeding speck of light passed? This dim smudge that danced in the liminality of my vision contained the mass of one trillion stars in a whirling Catherine Wheel of ferocious light, each astral blazing furnace streaking outwards on its own path to the ever expanding tidal edges of the Universe, just as we on our spinning rock hurtling around our yellowing sun are also on a cosmic voyage into infinity.

The brief flash of our life-spans freezes this speeding moment into the illusion of timeless and motionless solidity, as if this is how things ever were and will ever be to come. The high speed shutter of our perception captures the drop of milk exploding into the cup of tea and, to us, that moment will last unchanging forever while our children and then their children’s children are born, live and die.   

… et in terra

And so in that howling blackness of infinity, I lowered my lamp to the solid security of this world of grit and mud and stone. There, around my feet, glittered a spangle of starlight as dew globes glistened in my lantern’s light. A tiny watery orb balanced and quivered on the whirled ridges of my fingertip. As I looked closer, the world opened up. The world that makes up our world; where spinning electrons circle in wide sweeping orbits around their nucleus in their infinitesimal universes. Solid became no longer solid. It was as if my hand should pass through the brute mass of the tree trunk beside me as if it were a wisp of vapour. And I found myself teetering on the precipice of another infinity; another eternity of space. If I were to fall, I would fall, endlessly tumbling, through fractal chaos, a kaleidoscope of complexity. A world no longer trapped by the rules of physics… or even our minds.

Our world, the world of rock and ice and fire, solid and unyielding, is made from a chaos of freedom; a reeling, floating enigma dancing in infinite space. A world of ‘charm’ and ‘strange’; of coloured quarks, strange attractors and quantum entanglement. A space where the events upon which our world exists last for just a fraction of a chaotic second. But my perception is too slow to hold it; like an ancient oak that tries to glimpse a fork of lightning.        

Here I am, standing on the frail skin of this spinning globe, caught between two infinities; one above, one below. I am a being who is bound by time in a universe of eternities. Is it therefore not surprising that, when I look up into the night’s sky, my heart hears the roar of eternity?

In aeternum

                           

And in this dark breathing night, I feel lost, adrift, in this foaming vastness. Perhaps I am the one of whom Teilhard de Chardin wrote that “the world had disclosed itself as too vast”. In which case he was wrong, for I feel no desire to close my eyes and disappear, to crumble before the brute vastness of the Universe. Its vastness affirms in me a singing, dancing energy that I am more than me and folds into its velvet blackness my heart-song of ‘Why?’

It might be a bad reading, but perhaps the NIV translator of Ecclesiastes 3:11 was right after all, that the divine has indeed “set eternity in the hearts of men.” If so, he reveals so much more of himself than he does of Quoheleth’s god. A mistranslation? Perhaps, but it was the one phrase that kept my faith in the bible, when everything else blew away like threshed chaff and clung in my mouth with the taste of death. And now those words come back to me, resonating in my soul like a struck bell. I am a man locked into temporality and with eternity set – no, burning – in my heart.

Balanced on this thin line of time stretched between eternal infinities, is this why we look so longingly into the bowl of the night’s sky for that which we have yet to recognise? Is that why our hearts sometimes sing to us strange songs and we yearn for that for which we have no words?

Is this why, when I sit alone with the wind and the untamed things at an ancient place, that my eyes fill with water and it feels as if my heart is about to break?

Is this why the glow of amber fills me with hope? Or why the new buds of spring are so very potent? Is this why we repeatedly fail to come to terms with the concept of our death - because, at heart, we are the children of infinity? 

SHE looked AT me ACROSS the...

... dining-room table, her name, written in felt pen on a sticky label, that peeled and curled like a dying leaf on her lapel. In front of us lay plates filled with lunchtime fare and the corporate clattering chatter of a corporate building, boxy, concrete and glass and ugly in its sterility.

Outside the sea rose and fell in thick grey slabs upon the shingle and the sky was low and restless. A small knot of people were sheltering under the iron work of the pier and a gull hung upon the wind.

We talked about the papers we'd heard. We politely laughed in the way that two strangers laugh together. Her eyes were as bright as forget-me-nots and her relaxed smile enchanting. She told me of the session she had just run, how, at the end, some of the people attending cried. She was touched, but not surprised. She then told me about the times she had cried and I could read each tear in every line of her face.

After awhile, she looked up and smiled and asked me my name.

I looked at that smile and into those eyes and with an ice-cold realisation I understood two unshakeable truths:

1. I had no idea what my name was.

2. That the next (perhaps last) stage of my life would be to find it...

On WASHING Days...

Free Electronic Press Kits template from ReverbNation.com

... particularly on April washing days like this; when I stand at the sink, hands as red and furrowed as the antique faces of babies, and I can look up to a sky so heavenly blue that if I were to reach up and drag it down and were to bury my face in it I would smell the wax crayons of God; and amidst that sailor boy blue the proud castles of cumuli, boil and bluster, cauliflowering the almost spring heavens. It is on days like these that I hear loudest the call of the my childhood imagination - so real I could have dreamt it only yesterday.

Perhaps it is the sight of washing billowing before the galleon-ing wind and the walks I had with Mum, down the Green Lane that squeezed its way between the long narrow strips of back-garden terraces and allotments. A silent no-man's land; a furtive quiet place from which other worlds could be spied through gaps in fences. It smelt of compost heaps and midday lunch being cooked and the smouldering bonfires of weeds. It was filled with the sound of dogs barking and their wet-nosed snuffling and most of all, the wild tear-filled wind played among the washing, pegged and propped, like a clipper's sails.

Mum was never happier than when she had pegged out her beaten but clean army of washing on the line after a morning steaming in the kitchen, until the condensation ran down the windows and walls like rain and the air was sliced by the sharp smell of boiling handkerchiefs and washing powder. And I was never happier than when, tilting like Don Quixote at the ballooning sheets and bedspreads, I raced through them feeling their coldness trickle down my face and Mum calling me in so as not to get her washing dirty and we had jam on our bread while the radio played.

But for some reason, what calls to me the most is a couple of pictures from a book I have long since lost. They are of towering clouds in a powder blue sky (a washing day sky) and in those clouds was a whole town, with shops and lampposts and a sun that shone yellow. It seemed to me that all the men in it were avuncular uncles with bald heads and wide smiles and they wore old fashioned Sunday suits. The type of uncle who made sixpences appear from inside your ear, even when you knew that there were no sixpences there, because you had checked. And the women all looked like the Queen, when she was young, and wore long dresses that swept along the red-bricked pavements. There was a friendly red dragon in the picture too. I assume he was friendly; he had big smiling eyes and a head shaped like a Labrador.

I say assume, for, as I recall, the book had no covers. It was just a few stray pages and so it had no story. It was like me, without beginning or end. Just as I, one day, found myself alive in a world of sun and colour, noise and scent, this world within these few pictures, just was. And it was those pictures that captivated me and it was in them that I found my stories beyond words.

From 3 to 30 I read very few words, I immersed myself in the pictures. I inhabited them, I explored behind every wall, every hedge, and over every beckoning, windmilled, church-spired, horizon. I played with Janet and John, and Dick and Jane outside their world of words. Lanes were adventured and streams raided for sticklebacks and pirated treasure. I read pictures with the skill of a textual critic and hours could be lost over just one page. Sometime ago, I bought a secondhand copy of one of my most favourite childhood books, a Ladybird book about a mountain adventure. I opened the cover and began to read the unfamiliar story that lay beside the oh so familiar pictures. A little while later I found myself, once more lost in those pictures. The story remains unread, but the pictures await for more adventures.

Easter SUNDAY Morning...

Sell music on itunes at ReverbNation.com

... quite early, and the street was as still as the ghost of sheep on the high hill. But dawn had broken. Oh lord, how it had broken, sending splinters of light into the victorious, ringing, bird-carved, air. Even though snow still lay as white as sea foam on Sunrising Hill and lay under each hedge, ribbed, like the bare, bleached bones of ship-wrecked schooners, the sun had risen high; higher than the turbulent rooks and higher than the breath that billowed in clouds of steam from my ragged body.

I walked abroad in the slumbering village, and as alone as a blushing, rib-full, Adam, beneath a sky of thrush egg blue; as blue as the cornflowers of summers past. Down Main Street, past Quo Vadis. No curtains twitched, though the garden hedges bristled with song. The occupant of each house slept warm and deep under the soft hills and folds of their duveted wildernesses. Jackdaws wheeled and laughed among the sleeping bones of the old oak on Fourways Corner to see the sun beams of that beautiful morning trying to prise their honeyed fingers through the neat, new shutters of the Old Shop and its cymbal playing tin monkey. A blackbird stood as proud as your mother (should she see you now) in the middle of the road. The sun warm on her back. She watched me pass with beetle eyes, a harmless spirit in her eternal eden of sun and ice.

Only two other souls were awake. The vicar who, with knitted brow, played with whirling fingers the organ of the braying heating pipes in the village church. Climbing down from one of the Jacobean, dark oak pews, he fussed some dust into the morning air as the sun poured like Eucharist wine through the great east window and stained the altar cloth crimson and blue and, oh, such golds. Does he know that, when no one is looking, the faded saints and the firemen in their smart blue serge climb down out of their stained glass windows to ring out the hour on the faithful old tenor? Or that, in the church tower (made of rough brick and cobwebs and prayer), the stone angels play hide and seek with the umbrella-winged bats, piping and squeaking, in the belfried dark? Or that, behind his back, at every Pentecost, the yews in the churchyard burst into flame and that tongues of fire dance upon every shaggy branch?

The other is the runner who outruns the dawn, red faced and breathing out dragon's breath, down past the village hall (built in 1929), newly painted, and then past the Post Office, bursting with wool and flowers and unlicked stamps, and on past the shuttered tearoom. But not even he can outrun my nose in this impudent north-easterly wind that has been sharpened by the claws of polar bears, and the clash of icebergs, and carries down these whistling streets the sound of Saami bells, and shamanic gongs and the deep green waters where the blue whales sing. Past the Peacock, smelling of booze and laughter and last night's ashes. Down Saddledon Street to blow on my fingers and the sweet smell of the cattle barn on the frigid air. The old dog at Herbert's Farm snuffled where foxes loped, loose-limbed and laughing, under the frosted thatch and snow and dreamt of the days he ran wild and free over Orchard Hill. A woodpecker drummed out his exuberant life among the sighing trees. The morning whistled and trilled.

As I returned home, my hand on the garden gate, the Park Keeper opened his front door and roared out his approval to the triumph of the morning.

The DAFFODILS are COVERED by...

... frosted crusts of yesterday's snows. Smooth rolling folds of white with the trace of green beneath; thin plumes of Spring's green fire. I have come here to wind the church clock. To climb those dusty steps that smell of old stone and the rough prayers of older days. To turn the windlass whose cold metal scorches the palms and fingers. And all the while the rhythm of my thoughts turning and turning...

I am on my to way work. I've been asked to take an evening lecture on the resurrection in the New Testament. For the last three or so days my head has been full of it.

But now, as I stand in this darkening churchyard with clumps of snow lying blue and cold in the shadows, I do not want to leave. I look at the ragged rows of gravestones and memorials standing slant and hag-like beneath the heavy sky. Each grave holding safe one who was buried with the promise of resurrection. Did they die with that hope in their dying hearts? That same hope that we will be dissecting and scrutinizing? Did those standing around the torn earth on that day ache with longing for that day of resurrection? Did they sit in kitchens, now forever quieter, the favourite cup ownerless and never more used, a chair now sitting empty, nurturing the hope that sparks when even tears have long since dried?

I do not want to leave. I want to hear those stories of the long buried and the dead. To hear what they knew of the resurrection and how tears might turn to laughter... and to know... to know why I, at times, find it so difficult to comprehend. My notes on cognitive dissonance and the enervating words of Bultmann await me in my car. My lecture feels too much like the 'strange fire' of Nadab and Abihu. Not because it contravenes some pale orthodoxy sealed by the machinations of synods, but that it tramples on something far more sacred - the last hopes of those in need of hope. There are times when my work wraps around my head too tightly. I feel that sense of disconnection and alienation from all that I hold precious and then I need to remind myself that I must come here. That I must stand beneath this shaggy yew and listen to the ancient stories that matter.

Darkness falls and it grows steadily colder...

Beneath the snow there are daffodils.