Is it the grief? The gut-wrench loss of M, the weight of her absence like a black hole which everything and all of me is being pulled down into?
Is it the anniversary of J? Five years he got off and I missed the stop. (Should I have jammed the doors and blocked the exit? Or alighted with him?)
Is it the lack of nature-bathing? The aridity of the desert-town? Throat parched, my city circulates stale air, the perennial inhalation of CO2. The fetid air of desolation breathes into my lungs in this portal-pocket of dead space; that occupied by the torpid and turbid: ripe for the Langoliers to feast on the immediate past’s scraps; its dropped litter and remnants of malevolence and benevolence both. It makes no difference to them.
Is it the concoction of Venlafaxine (when I remember to take it and when it hasn’t run out) and Zopiclone? Is it too much or not enough of either or both? Ditch it all, a twisted logic rasps at me, I should have – Thrown it All Away – throws up that song XH wrote when twenty years ago I did just that. That sudden memory; the earworm coils tightly, perforates my drum.
(And I am spaced, on Venlafaxine Dreams, pulled from the epic and the fantastical with an alarm-jerk, back to the flat of the bed and the glazed-eye adjustment to the dust-string dreamcatchers: their grey-fluff feathers trapeze-swinging from the mottled ceiling).
Or are the two cancelling themselves out like Sominex and ProPlus?
Is it the HRT patches? Those glossed stickers with their proclamation of being Mini-Meno-Messiahs, translucent plasters that skim the skin, so discreet, with their placebo or poison -(But when you peel them away for replacement – you find a tattoo of toxin tar-black residue).
Is it the damp and the mould and the cat’s-piss-marked rugs and the wax stains on wood and glass and lino and bath enamel?
The scorch-black pinholes made by a dropped incense cone on the down-clung nylon carpet?
The dsypraxic splatter of melted wax-melt where it fell onto my best punk-spike boots would have once ignited a meltdown of my own. Now, it’s a mild irritant at best. It matters not.
(Ghosts don’t dance in heels).
Is it the clutter? The hotchpotch jumble of dead houseplants I can’t revive and strewn papers and books and files and CDs and DVDS and cuddly toys and discarded cat playthings and candle jars and tiny ornaments I collect like rows of Matryoshka dolls that form jiggly, uneven rows (one is always missing and the others all precariously balanced as though on a tightrope) that teeter on crammed shelves?
Is it the memories? The spectres that gather in the shadowy corners where the light never gets in? Like rats they’ve been drawn from the dark into the warmth and light where they can roam freely, pissing and defecating over everything that was once my home, was once me.
I flounder in a not-space, in the Langolier-zone. Purposeful and aimless both. Displaced and misplaced and everything I thought I knew and was and wanted turned on its head, with the flip of an hourglass swirl, a snowstorm stampede. But still encased in glass.
Have I become one of the ghosts too? My dérive a drift through the concrete ruins of my head?
(I am a spectre, haunting: the façade of my own body, the simulacrum of home.)
The Langoliers are the titular main villains of the Stephen King story The Langoliers as well as the television mini-series of the same name, they are sphere-shaped monsters with immense appetites and the ability to travel through time: they are described as timekeepers of sorts who devour those who are displaced in time, destroying remnants of the past as a kind of temporal scavenger/predator.https://stephenking.fandom.com/wiki/Langoliers
Today I’d planned to finish some local history research notes and head to the library to exchange books, then start making inroads into my next chapter.
So far, it hasn’t worked out like that, so I’m ditching the plan.
The day after the day after the night shift. I awoke groggy after a Zopiclone-induced sleep in an attempt to overthrow the associated insomnia and half-self, zombie fatigue where you’re too awake to sleep and too tired to do anything else. A quick uni zoom meeting (I’d planned to go in person) and then a double-whammy of rejection emails saw a mini-meltdown ensue.
Two terms I never knew I existed until receiving my provisional ADHD diagnosis and doing some related reading.
Two characteristics which have long been unwanted companions.
Two conditions which I’d always believed were just me being rubbish at most ‘life stuff’, which were kept in check most of the time, but would raise their devil heads, horns like two daggers butting into me, during times of tiredness, yearning, overwhelm, anxiety. Upon receiving unwelcome news, a let-out, an interruption my emotions would suddenly charge into activity like an overloaded socket about to blow.
When this happens, when it starts, I can’t control my impulses and behaviour. Like Tourettes, I kind of erupt. In private or public, witnesses or none, it matters not. In these moments I am a Fury. A madwoman. I cry and shout and curse and pace furiously if I’m outside and type frenziedly if I’m indoor or on my phone or laptop. I have thrown things and broken them. I have walked miles, not knowing where I’m going or when I’ll be back. I have ripped up sheets of paper and whisked objects off shelves, hurled rubbish outside and thrown it into the garden, strewing crap everywhere. The chaos builds into there is only chaos.
When calm eventually comes, after short-circuit and the power is dead and there is darkness, I am drained, like a battery that has been trying to recharge a surround-sound HiFi system or black-charred and ragged like a match trying to light a burnt-down candle. But when the calm spreads and I am still, growing accustomed to the silence, I feel the clearing.
After all, when you unravel, what else is there left when all of it, all of you has unspooled and there is no more yarn?
Today is one of those days.
I received what reads as a standard rejection letter for a job I’d applied for, a content-writing role that I was excited about, which would fit in perfectly with my uni schedule.
From a second job which I’d interviewed for last week, nothing.
Then an even more basic and ambiguous notification from the Arts Council Develop Your Creative Practice application. The one I’d spent weeks contemplating, preparing and writing. Although I’d mentally geared myself up for the rejection, knew the Arts Council receive thousands of applications, it was, nonetheless, a bitter stab when it came.
As I write, I’m still seething. The lack of specific feedback or constructive criticism so I can address where I went wrong and look to reapply. The bog-standard response,
Your application didn’t clearly show us how your activity meets the aims of Developing your Creative Practice. gives me no indication of this.
The thought of having to carry on working nights shelf-stacking, while juggling as-and-when cat sitting and working on my PhD thesis whenever I can fit it in, after daring to hope there might be a chance to change this is akin to ripping off a plaster over an unhealed cut. This path sometimes feels never-ending. Every time an opportunity twinkles in the horizon I try to follow it until I realise it was only a mirage. Sometimes I feel that there is only desert.
All the emotions, all the chiding, scolding, mocking voices a resounding cymbal clash until your ears are ringing with it and there is no escape from the fallout. You want to run but you can’t, because you can’t escape from what’s inside your own head.
All my problems loom larger than life I can’t swallow another slice Seems like my shadow mocks every stride I learn to live with what’s trapped inside
I, I can’t Escape myself
So many feelings pent up in here Left all alone, I’m with the one I most fear I’m sick and I’m tired of reasoning Just want to break out, shake off this skin
(The Sound: I Can’t Escape Myself, 1980)
In the past, during such times I’ve occasionally taken extreme measures to get away from this cacophony of dysphoria and chaos. I used to drink. At first, it was a place of refuge and a placebo of joviality, brushing off the difficulties in a simulacrum of reckless fun. But as many of us know, once you’ve crossed the invisible threshold where ‘just one more’ becomes one too many, you’re toppled into a never-never-land where the devil is real and you’re trapped once more and suicide is the only way out.
Twenty-two years ago, several times when in this realm of extreme intoxication, I took pills. Once I almost walked into the sea.
In such vulnerable spaces, you’re almost hypnotically pulled towards the sea; it is as though she is calling you to her. Join me in eternal undulation, slip off your human skin and become selkie. Become free. Leave the wasteland and become water and sea-creature.
But of course, this is also a simulacrum. This is an ephemeral space, is only meant to be so, and not one which should be your final crossing. The place of desolation, intoxication-aided is supposed to be a liminal place only: a transitional place like almost all others that we can physically and psychically come back from. A two-way crossing that we pass through forwards and backwards like a bridge or a railway or a ferry.
When I realised that with habitual drinking I was subconsciously propelling myself further into the zone there’s no coming back from, along with other reasons, I decided I would not drink again.
Doing so, four-and-a-half years later, I still find myself, on occasion, stumbling towards that familiar path to the no-go zone, but I always stop short before I reach the crossing. I’m halted by many things, not least the reopening wound of a person dear to me who did cross that threshold and never came back.
I write this, five years after his death. The wound has healed, but like a phantom limb, there are spasms of pain that twitch by a sudden jolt of memory. There are moments when the scar is an incessant itch, scratched into a new bleed, triggered by an anniversary, a Facebook photograph, a song we both loved. The fallout was huge, scattered noxious particles still swirling in the ether with a hit of recollection. It affected so many people.
Despite myself, despite the sea throwing me into her depths and spitting me out, flinging me back onto the hard land, despite knowing the times I was close to freefall into her ink-black opaqueness, I know I will not again teeter on that ledge, swim far from the shore.
Instead, I choose to write. Write out the dysphoria and dysregulation, rage and despair and fuck-it-all-ness. I will choose the way of the sea turtle. At times I am encased in my shell. It gets wind-battered and sea-blown and I retreat. At other times I float, I swim. I swim words with every stroke. I will let the sea carry me but not claim me. I will try to move with the tide, accepting the ebb, enjoying the flow, not fighting, but facing each wave-crest, pulling myself back up each time it knocks me over.
And now, I turn back to the book I’ve bookmarked with Post-Its, back to the page filled with notes and I carry on.
She is myriad and multiform, she is grounded in the earth, her roots fused with those of her ancestors in deep time. Through those roots, she renews, replenishes, regenerates, so She is interconnected with all beings. Her branch-arms extend in all directions: skywards, overhanging water, brushing earth. In winter’s barrenness, She is sinew and skeleton but stands strong still. She recovers greenness in spring, bearing fruit and flower, nourishes and nurtures, from tiny bud to full ripeness. She is all colours and textures and exuberant, always.
With the storms of time, she may become misshapen, knotted, whorled and gnarled, but Her hollows and nests continue to provide food and shelter for others. If She becomes ‘too much’: too prominent, taking up too much space, growing in the way of structures that came after her, She is cut down, pared back, green hair shorn and branches severed. But she refuses to go away. Left to her will, she grows, flourishes. She knows when to let go and does not mourn every fallen leaf or each shrivelled limb, knowing death is only part of the eternal cycle: that She IS the eternal cycle. #internationalwomensday #awomanisatree
On the cusp of spring, post-Imbolc, winter-emergent, we straddle a border, unseen but for the tiny signs. The days slowly drawing out from an earlier dawn to almost-evening dusk. Outside: the thaw, the drying out from a wet but mild winter. The time of the nesting: rooks’ nests caught high, high on trees, while tiny buds start to burgeon on their branches if you look closely enough, scant brown ivy tendrils regaining greenness. Tiny peony crocuses, sprouting on lawns, parades of daffodils splashing the muted grey canvas with bright colour. The greening has begun, sunlight pushing through the wispy clouds, parting them with a bursting through white fuzz. But a chill lingers in the air when the sun pulls back, the grass muddied and waterlogged, the wind still exhales winter’s ice-breath.
I too, feel as though I’m in a state of in-betweenness. I have crossed the precarious threshold from first year PhD student, via the swaying, creaking footbridge of the major review process, gripping the rope on either side, emerging, a little dazed and relieved, on the other side. I have passed this pivotal stage, my footing now secure on firm ground but ahead and to my left and right, there are boulders and footfalls to traverse, in the form of courses I must take, applications I need to write, people I need to contact and engage with. Sometimes it feels as though the terrain ahead is mountainous or a field of contaminated earth which is peppered with tiny mines: one wrong step and I’ll be slip off the ledge or be blown up and flung into the ash and debris of the charred land
I am encased in a tomb of books; they are wedged in the cracks and crevices of the land around me and are piled in heaps on my floor, spill from my shelves, protrude from drawers and cupboards, gather dust on the coffee table, in storage boxes. My digital library on the hard drive of my laptop is a chaotic outpouring of half-written notes and quotes, a badly-organised filing cabinet of folders and documents and bookmarked pages of online sources and links. My own thoughts and observations and personal accounts seem to be lost somewhere amongst the great bibliography that continues to amass at tumorous rates. I am both excited and fraught by this. The wise and wired and wondrous words of those writers before me, so far ahead of me in their cartographic journeys, who’ve helped waymark my own, are a burst dam in my already-crowded head. Constantly, lines of poetic verse, lyrics, statements invade my brain, their poignancy and insightfulness consolidating what I know already, what I am finding out. It is both stimulating and exhausting. I wonder, where are my own words? What more can I add? What landmarks and pathways can I etch onto an ever-sprawling map?
I am not sleeping properly, not sleeping as I want to and need to. Sleep is fitful, when it finally comes, then wrested awake abruptly from the snatches of an epic, jolting dream, before the realisation I am still in the same place. What follows is that limbo, usually in the pre-dawn hours, of not being quite awake enough to get up, write or read or start about house jobs, but too awake and aware to ebb back into a tide of sleep. Eventually, perhaps several hours later, when the rest of the world have started their day’s activities with purpose (or resignation), I feel the call of slumber more urgently and I’m too tired to resist. When I wake again, another 2 or 3 or 4 hours later, there is a sense of disorientation. That in-between place again. I’m perhaps restored, my energy levels replenished and focus rehoned during early to mid evening – just as most of the lives around me – my neighbours, partner, friends, parents, peers – are winding down. I realise at some level, this is partially due to my twice-weekly night shift working. And working night shifts means you are always existing in shadow, in direct contrast with the movements and phases of the Earth’s rotation and its moon’s gravitational pull. To be a night worker is to occupy liminal space, always.
My steps are laden at times, my progress along this labyrinthine path slow, with much already-traversed ground being retraced and retrodden perennially. Sometimes I feel as though I’m marking tine, moving, moving but neither forwards nor backwards, but with each pace, reobserving, re-examining, reevaluating. Only by moving away from this spot on the ground, will I notice what inroads I have made, what grooves and marks my feet have made, whether the traces I’ve left are firm and clear.
This can be a frustrating process: patience always a virtue alien to me, I’m unused to playing the long game. Instant gratification, my neurodivergent brain wired to demand immediate results, instant progress, lest it become my harshest critic when it doesn’t appear to follow. I am used to giving up, stopping when the journey becomes too perilous, too demanding, too tiring.
But one of the themes of winter is of slowing down, however much this has become lost to us in this age of constant stimuli, perpetual busyness, the omnipresence of artificial light and the ping of phone notifications and app monitoring.
Wintering, traditionally was about paring back, going to ground, returning to the darkness and focusing on restoration, reflection and contemplation. It was about resting and nesting. Making the hearth the centre of being.
Katherine May, in her 2020 memoir Wintering, writes reflectively on this lost practice, comparing it to the trees’ life cycle:
‘Plants and animals don’t fight the winter; they don’t pretend it’s not happening and attempt to carry on living the same lives they lived in the summer. They prepare. They adapt. They perform extraordinary acts of metamorphosis to get them through. Winter is a time of withdrawing from the world, maximising scant resources, carrying out acts of brutal efficiency and vanishing from sight; but that’s where the transformation occurs. Winter is not the death of the life cycle, but its crucible.’
We are part of nature inexorably: we forget this and separate ourselves from nature’s cyclical, nurturing and renewal processes and we become lost and detached as a result. We need to remember we are not so different from the trees. May writes:
‘The tree is waiting. It has everything ready. Its fallen leaves are mulching the forest floor, and its roots are drawing up the extra winter moisture, providing a firm anchor against seasonal storms. Its ripe cones and nuts are providing essential food in this scarce time for mice and squirrels, and its bark is hosting hibernating insects and providing a source of nourishment for hungry deer. It is far from dead. It is, in fact, the life and soul of the wood. It’s just getting on with it quietly. It will not burst into life in the spring. It will just put on a new coat and face the world again’.
Except that capitalism in its advanced globalised, digitalised state, does not allow us to take time out to ‘winter’: to contemplate, hibernate, rest, sleep, reflect, heal. We are expected to be busy and productive all of the time. We are deemed lazy, selfish, idle if we spend ‘too much’ time wintering. There is a huge profit being made from so-called wellness platforms and apps and programmes and groups which is all about us being kept active and busy, even if we are not at work. The devices and their artificial lights and sounds and vibrations remind us of this, keep us trained to check them and keep them near us, even at the times of night when we were meant to be in deep sleep, when night is at its coldest and darkest. We can never really switch off.
Despite this, we need to accept and ruminate in this in-betweenness, unsettling though it may be. I need to accept this. And trust that, though the wayfarers that have left their indelible traces on the writing and research path I’m taking, no path is ever exactly the same, we all make our own derives and deviations, fall off and loop back, retreading, at different times and in different places. In this sense, some part of me knows that in doing so, I will forge and leave behind my own waymarks. I must now slowly emerge from this place of reflection, as spring draws closer, embark on and embrace the unwintering by taking the steps into spring, guided by the natural light that paves the way forwards. However veiled it sometimes seems to be, concealed by overgrowth, obscured by spikescape towers, opaqued by thick clouds, I know that it is there always. It’s just about remembering that during the times when it seems furthest away.
Already it is fading, its grip pulling away as I reaccustom to light. Each sleep-phase like the moon is a new visual experience, a new life or a return to the beginning. Dreams too real to be like ‘normal’ dreams. Too surreal to be real. But it is like entering a cave of pitch black where you know you’ll find some kind of light, however distorted as you make your way through, but not knowing where that light will happen upon you. Not premonitions exactly, not reminiscence exactly, but a new place that sits somewhere uneasily in between. A plane that straddles the realm of the recurrent dream, the anxiety dream, the lucid dream but one that is neither and yet somehow embodies all of those. The dreams are hyperreal, vivid, unsettling. But not terrors. They feel like places I’ve been to a long time ago and places that I’ve not yet been to. Places that exist on the cusp. Imagined or subconscious crossing places.
They fall away so quickly, the elaborate, epic details into a lost memory. But the feeling of the unheimlich lingers, its particles filtering through the stale air of my bedroom. I exhale them out as I breathe, breath which is returning to normal as I acclimatise to full waking.
The last three weeks have been full of these chemical dreams. Yet they’ve not felt artificially-induced; moreover, the experiences have felt real in some way. It’s as though the drug has pricked the furthest-reaching dimensions of subconsciousness – those outer regions that normally die dormant, rarely provoked, rarely traversed. Can SNRIs trigger these dreamstates?
‘Dreams arestories and images that our minds create while we sleep’
Kerri ni Dochartaigh
I need to write them down. This one. Maybe I can make this into a flash fiction piece or even a longer story?! I quite fancy trying a coming-of-age meets folk-horror. It needs work, a lot of work. But this dream might reignite a return to writing fiction again. I have still yet to finish The Morrigan Cave, which I always intended to. But the nonfiction project (plus the odd poem here and there) has kind of taken over.
In the dream, I was at the Rye Harbour caravan, yet it was somehow more remote. An small island. To leave or reach its site, you had to rely on boat crossings at specific days or times. Two next to each at the site. Hardly anyone around. Out of season. H there, as she is always omnipresent in my dreams. We were young again. And yet not. I’d come to write, as I always do. But H being there would put paid to that. She would need to be kept entertained, unused to her own company, not having made peace with it as I had. I liked a blond boy. Scott, I think I heard someone call him. An islander, I knew: he had the flush of elemental love and fare, the easy, graceful way of moving around the pitted, unyielding land, the fluid strength in the way he expertly tethered the boats and bound them into fixed spaces against the high sea winds. As only one who knows the sea and island could. I found a novel way of meeting him and another, I’d posted notes through letterboxes of the sparse cottages, the ones still occupied. The tone casual (oh, so casual), friendly, not too desperate (I hoped). Invitations to come and hang out with us, have some fun, H and I only here for a few days. We’re on our own, would love to meet people! We’re staying at pitch numbers E21 and 22 – come and find us!
The other boy, I wasn’t sure picked up the note. There were so few of us on the island in January. Had I even seen him? He might have been a mirage. Or another passer-through, like us.
It was the day after the note deliveries. Mid-afternoon, the sun already low in the sky, setting the desolate shore into a canvas of grey. Scott appeared first. He looked a little vulnerable in his slight bemusement. But his face was open, relaxed. His skin smooth, wind-flushed but unlined, unweathered, he reminded me of a foundling. My fingers twitched in a Tourette’s-tic to stroke his face. Instead, I jammed them into my jeans pockets and tried to keep my manner in the same casual, what-may-care easiness as I had in my note as I greeted him.
‘Hey! Thanks so much for coming over – sorry, if the note was a bit weird’.
‘Ahh. No that’s cool. Yeah, I’d love to hang out’ he sounded intrigued, attention caught. He ran a hand through his ruffled blond hair and I wanted to put it to my lips. ‘So I thought I’d come along and say hi. I can’t stay today though’ he said, apologetic. Genuine? I think he was. He gestured awkwardly towards the direction he’d come from, the marina. ‘I’ve got to help out at the yard. But –‘ he looked as though as he was going to say something else but couldn’t find the right words or had changed his mind. ‘I’ll see you soon’, he smiled shyly and backtracked off. A half-wave. Perhaps he might come back. I hoped so.
I was still there, rooted staring after Scott, trying to suppress the urge to call out after him, when I felt the sense of a presence. It was the other boy. I didn’t know his name. I hadn’t heard him walk over, hadn’t seen him until he was suddenly there in front of me. Lean, dark-haired, though dressed in nondescript faded black jeans and tee, a sense of unease crept over me. He was still., unwavering, his expression blank, masked a wary impatience, a restlessness sizzled beneath the still of his demeanour. He raised an eyebrow at me, gently kicking sand and dirt from under his trainers. ‘So…this?’
He held out a copy of the note. He smiled but his eyes cold, mocking. I went into self-consciousness mode, gabbled as I tried to explain. I felt myself squirm under his casual scrutiny, sweat beads on my forehead. His eyes fixed on me, I couldn’t meet them. When I eventually did, he looked amused, his features softened. He extended a calloused hand. ‘Ryan’ he said.
Somehow my sweaty fingers locked with his for a moment. ‘Claire’. I said. ‘Sorry! You kind of startled me there’.
Luckily I found H. Pottering in the caravan, she emerged in a mist of jasmine scent, blonde hair tousled in the way that suggests she’s just fallen out of bed and would be equally happy to be pulled back into it. A vest strap sidling off a tanned, toned shoulder, she clattered out onto the decking. ‘Hiii!’ Big smile and huge eyes, which widened as she took in Ryan. Thank god for H then. She, the silent instigator of our honeytraps. Me the mule, doing the frontline work. Of course he would be interested. They always are.
Right on cue, his eyes drifted towards the fizz of her glowing presence and unabashed zest. His manner didn’t change as such, but it was clear that I was off the hook. My frivolities now dismissed, his watchful eyes strayed to her and he wandered over. Naturally, they gravitated to each other during the initial introductions, the ‘so where are you from’ and ‘how long are you down here’ and ‘what shall we do’ until, after about twenty minutes, after getting us cans of lager from the mini-fridge, H sidled up me to, somewhat apologetically and whispered, ‘Erm. Ryan wants you to bugger off’.
I wasn’t entirely taken aback, but a little irked it taken such a short time. It was only four o’clock and darkness had almost entirely wrapped itself around the caravan park, the shush of the sea, a distant murmur. What would I do now? Part of me hoped Scott would return, but I knew it was unlikely.
‘Okay’. I gave her a quick hug. Ryan lolled in the doorway, watching. ‘I’ll just be next door. Give us a shout if you need me’. Was it my imagination or did he just smirk at me as he pulled the door to?
As I fumbled in the dark for the key to my trailer, dead twigs crunching under my feet like snapped wishbones, I let myself in and braced myself for the chill of the unheated room. I’d not wanted to come back in so early. I felt cold and alone. While I knew realistically that my vision of the four of us huddled around a campfire, drinking and messing around, the tenuous bond H and I have recemented; or Scott leading me through a night walk across the island’s ghostly seams, hand firmly gripping mine, was improbable, it didn’t stop me from aching with disappointment and yearning. It was going to be a long night. I would just have to get the books out and work after all, like I’d originally planned.
But as I wrapped myself in the duvet, propped up on cushions, my books and papers spread about me, I couldn’t concentrate. I cracked open another lager. A niggle of tension was gnawing away at me. It was the same feeling of unease that swirled inside me when Ryan had appeared from nowhere. I kept checking my phone for texts and WhatsApps, despite knowing there was barely any signal here and no Internet connection at all. Every fifteen or twenty minutes I got up and wandered into the kitchenette, scrying the window. My ears were trained for sounds – cries or shouts, slams or thuds. Anything that was not the usual gull cry or owl hoot or undergrowth rustle from other nocturnal creatures.
A light was still on in H’s caravan, though it was dimmed. A lamp perhaps. I couldn’t hear anything but as I watched, trying not to appear voyeuristic, I occasionally saw a shadow pass across the room, a flash between the partially-drawn curtains. A glimpse of a face at the kitchen window. When I did, I immediately sprung down to my knees in case I’d been seen. I imagined Ryan hammering on my door. ‘Oi, stop watching us you sad bitch’. I imagined him slamming H’s caravan door shut, locking her in. Instinctively my fingers reached for my own keys, wedged tight in the pocket of my jeans.
How long would he stay? Irrationally, an image of H, wrists bleeding from rope-burns, purple shadows starting to blemish her brown legs. I thought of the carnage the caravan would be in. Crushed cans strewn everywhere. Carpet stained with wax and fag-ash. The coffee machine lying in a mangled wreck on the floor. A tangle of upended TV wires and cables. I shook my head firmly, wresting the vision from my head and shut the books with a slam. Instead, I retreated into the tiny bedroom, duvet still wrapped around me and turned off the light. I thought of the comfort of Scott and his simplicity, his gentle unsophistication and I imagined his strong arms around me.
But in bed, under the cover, still I listened. For a window-creak, a door-rattle, an echo of shattering glass. I had never felt unsafe here and still I knew that on some level there was no reason why I should feel unsafe now. I had been here, the caravan a rocking cradle against storms that had almost rolled it off its plinths, felt the hailstones hammer on the prefab roof, the wind howling louder than any wolf and I had not felt unsafe. I had only felt concern for the reserve birds, the goats on the craggy downs, any seafarers who may have got caught out in the storms. Tonight was a soundless night, but it felt one swollen with an imminent danger, precipitous with an unseen menace. One I had not sensed the likes of before.
As morning broke, and with it the rousing cries of the peninsula geese, the features of the land starting to form into familiar shapes under the dusky-pink glaze of island dawn, I wondered what I’d been worried about. Sleep had come only in short fits and bursts and I felt exhausted, the beginnings of a hangover kicking at the back of my eyes and throat, but the roll of the slow morning start to lull me back into a dreamless sleep.
It was creeping into mid-morning when my phone violently erupted into a frenzy of juddering as it whirred on the dresser. ‘Fuck’, I stretched over for it, knocking over a glass of water in the process. Bleary-eared the caller ID came into focus. It was H.
‘Music won’t change the world but it makes you feel like it can’. Billy Bragg to the Portsmouth Guildhall crowd, 15th November 2023.
Billy Bragg’s 40th anniversary tour could not have come at a more appropriate time. November 2023, exactly forty years after his debut album (or rather, EP) Life’s A Riot with Spy vs Spy, and almost 18 months since I last him perform at Blackpool’s R Fest, to sum it up: I fucking needed that.
In fact, we all did – we all do.
The songs that epitomised massive political working-class anger back in the early ‘80s when Thatcherism was running rampant, destroying lives, livelihoods and futures have come full circle as anthems such as There is Power in a Union, Which Side Are You On and A New England have never been more relevant. His words and lyrics, humour, banter, compassion and anger have not been muted with age and his between-song speeches are as vital as the music itself. During and afterwards I thought to myself on the bus home, and now, as I write – *this* is what matters.
This. A reactive and alternative collective consciousness and conscience need to survive – and thrive in order for activism to exist and hope for the possibility of change.
I’ve been preoccupied over the last couple of weeks thinking about the nature of depression and apathy, hauntology, convention and conformance, amid the Israel-Hamas war, suicides, mass floodings and the wider context of the global climate crisis. Through reading Marx, Derrida, Deleuze & Guattari and Fisher, I realised that it was, during my time studying sociology way back in the mid-late nineties – and in particular Marx, Engells and Bourdieu – that I became depressed.
And that this depression was not just down to unresolved past personal trauma, feeling misplaced due to numerous childhood and early adulthood house moves and feeling ‘different’ to other people. It was that my depression was also exacerbated by my clearer understanding of the capitalist system and feeling lost and hopeless in a socio-political system that, even then, despaired, scared and overwhelmed me.
Despite Labour being the party in power at that time, despite meeting and befriending various libertines, eccentrics and radicals; despite coaches from Swansea Uni being laid on for protest rallies and marches; and despite the omnipresent eager-beaver Socialist Worker reps lurking, it seemed, on every corner of the campus, I could no longer envisage a future for myself. I could not see what my place would, could or should be in this alien adult world. A world I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be part of.
Over the next ten years I drifted. I didn’t stay on at uni for a masters or teaching course. I didn’t feel ready or confident or deserving of a writing or reading-focused career in journalism or librarianship, that I’d previously been interested. I stopped writing. I drank. I shrank. I lived for the short-lived highs of instant gratification. I lusted after unsuitable men and spurned decent ones. I had numerous short-term, low-paid jobs. I was a nomad, desperately seeking belonging and security but did not know how to find it – or believe that I deserved it. Ironically and unwittingly, I had become an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When I moved to – and eventually settled in – Portsmouth in 1998, I told myself I had to pull myself together. I needed to find secure accommodation, a steady job, one with prospects. I need to settle down, be in a stable, loving relationship, get married. Stop engaging in self-destructive behaviour and endless bouts of procrastination. Sort myself out and start adulting.
I tried to do all of those things, but I had been socialised, since early childhood, that these were the things I had to do or have in order to have a happy, settled, and ‘successful‘ life. I had to tone myself down, iron out my flaws, cover my scars and smooth my jagged edges into a ‘normal’ life. I tried to do all of those things and I failed in many respects. For years I felt bad about this: guilty, hopeless, a failure. It is only now, in midlife, after being in a cog in the perennially-turning wheel of the profit-seeking and corporate workplaces of retail and the council, that I realise my identity had become lost. That my inner self – my essence, my core values, my id had become almost completely detached from my persona. A divided, self, one so disparately that I didn’t even know – or trust – who I was anymore. But I knew that I was deeply unhappy and I masked it by succumbing to the modern, instantly-gratifying ‘people’s opiates’ until, fleck by fleck, the façade started to crack open, flaking into dust.
Even now, over four years after making the life-decisions that I did: leaving the council, selling my house and moving, and returning to academia, do I feel that I am beginning to collect and reform all the little lost particles of myself that I thought I’d lost. I am slowly putting them into place, piece by piece, but like a complicated jigsaw, many are still displaced, missing; the pieces not all fitting yet. But I also know that I am part of this wider, great tapestry of the alternative consciousness. Even though I often feel displaced or misplaced in it, I know that somewhere down the line, my misshapen form will be sewn into the fabric.
As Sharon Blackie writes, in If Women Rose Rooted, we can accept the Call to adventure, embark on the Hero(ine)’s journey, but we cannot return to our old form. Instead, we become shapeshifters, Selkies shedding off the old skin before returning to the water we came from – even though the seawater has since become polluted. In doing so, I’ve had to learn and make new observations about myself, the world and my place in it.
This has become infinitely more challenging. How do we live in a world of wars, of chasmal inequalities forged deeper into the existing fault lines as capitalism becomes globalized and digitalised? Most importantly, how do we live in a world where the natural environment – the only environment that exists outside of capitalism – has been ravaged and destroyed by the same system that claims to preserve and protect or transform it?
Even though I know my often-at-odds psyche and persona, my anxieties, depression and frustration have been shaped by capitalism, how do I change it? Even though I am starting to understand that depression and anxiety, guilt and frustration are a symptom of capitalism, how do we learn to accept it, whilst not resigning ourselves to it? How do we fight back?
By starting small, I think.
So, my innate sense of justice and empathy and activism has been reignited tonight by Billy Bragg’s words and music, in the same way that NMA’s Justin do too. I will try to live my life by this mantra:
Let me use my one tiny voice to do good:
To spread word and take part in nature celebration and preservation and eco-activism.
To join and show solidarity with unions and support and activist groups.
Tell (or write to) myself that I am part of an alternative collective consciousness that abhors capitalism and elitism, violence and venom and I am far, far from being alone in this.
Write and keep writing. Don’t ever stop.
Share knowledge, support positive communities and spread the activist word
Keep going to music concerts and keep the fire burning.
Speak to at least one other person each day in a positive way.
Tell myself I am allowed to feel depressed, apathetic, frustrated and worried about capitalism and globalism and the natural environment as these are natural responses and feed into the culture of capitalist realism. Mark Fisher wrote extensively on the direct correlation between capitalism and depression. He may have understood this phenomenon (and proposed new ways of thinking), but his death was a direct consequence of this understanding. Let his work map new political and psychological territories.
Fuel these thoughts and feelings into a slow-burning anger: remember ‘Anger is an energy’ (John Lydon, Public Image Ltd)
BUT:
That I must accept these thoughts and feelings but channel them into positive behaviours and in doing so, adopt an empathic, community mindset. Reach out to others, even if it’s the last thing I feel like doing, when all I want to do is sleep or hibernate.
Share knowledge and experiences. GET PEOPLE THINKING, QUESTIONING AND CHALLENGING the very foundations our houses and lives are built on.
Know that my behaviours and responses are learned and that capitalist realism is largely pathologized. We are given drugs and symptom-treating therapy – antidepressants, beta-blockers, sleeping pills and CBT because they treat the symptoms of our anxiety, our depression without treating the underlying cause – capitalism. And that capitalism is strengthened by the profits of the wellness and illness industries.
It suits capitalism and the ruling elite for us to be kept pliant, quiet and medicated.
CAPITALISM AND INEQUALITY THRIVE ON BREAKING DOWN COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS, FRAGMENTING AND DIVIDING COMMUNITIES AND RENDERING THE MASSES SILENT BY MEDIA PROPAGANDA, GASLIGHTING AND PROVIDING ‘PEOPLE’S OPIATES.’[i]
[i] Post-modern capitalist examples of these opiates include Netflix and other digital media streams, social media, Amazon, Black Friday, alcohol and drugs – whether prescribed, recreational or otherwise.
Sykes (words) and Netter (illustrations) take a tour of 21 seaside towns in England, exploring them, with a psychogeographical eye, against the wider context of a 21st-century UK, post-Brexit, post-covid, amid a global climate emergency. These seaside towns, they discover, epitomise in-between, liminal and uncertain places. Spaces where they encounter faded grandeur, deep-rooted nostalgia, conspiracy theories, confused identities and communities in conflict. And – quite literally (or in this case littorally), Sykes and Netter take it all in their stride. Sykes’ wry, sometimes ironic and often very witty observations are recorded without judgement with a certain empathy and a strong sense of moral, ecological and political conscience – which makes this all the more relevant (and essential reading) for a first-hand tour of English seaside towns as they are in the third decade of the twenty-first century. In some ways, Netter’s incredible caricaturist illustrations perfectly depict the tinges of the ridiculous and the grotesque that are perhaps more amplified in seaside towns than anywhere else. It adds another dimension to the ethos of the book, which leads me on to noticing how this is also a delve into the unique characteristics of each seaside town – and the characters that Sykes and Netter encounter. This is especially evident in their trawls of Bournemouth/Boscombe, Jaywick and Blackpool showing how much these seaside towns have been impacted by austerity (and, I would also argue, thirteen years of Tory rule) – but also how a sense of community still prevails in many ways. When it comes to the south-central towns of Portsmouth, Southsea and especially Hayling, Sykes recalls personal memories evoked and there is a sense of being pulled into his own psyche. This book achieves the often precarious balance of weight and wit, the personal against the wider context of the philosophical and the socio-political. And in this, it’s a hugely enjoyable, yet deeply thought-provoking read – and perhaps heralding a new era of coastal psychogeography.
‘Seaside towns too, are liminal spaces given their hazy situation between land and sea, metropole and periphery, home and abroad. This “in-betweenness” makes for contradictions between wealth and poverty, frivolity and misery, familiarity and alienness, past and present, fact and fantasy.’
I simply devoured this beautifully-crafted novel: there are so many interweaving strands – like ribbons of seaweed – running through the ocean of this story. At first, I wondered if there were too many wavelets, too much ebb and flow. But I knew I was reading something special and that in order to understand the main protagonist Scottie (and the other characters woven into her unknown past and uncertain future), then I needed to let myself be drawn into the depths of the story and the folk tales that help set the scene. I was glad I did – the more I read, the more I felt drawn into these intertwined stories and the more I felt that I wanted to be by the sea and travel to the remote island of St Hia as Scottie did. In this wonderfully-visualised novel that viscerally and fearlessly explores motherhood, womanhood – and what happens when your identity is all bound up with this and becomes lost. I fell in love with Annie Kirby’s sea-world and islands and folk tales and felt the deep love and awe of the ocean; so many rich, metaphors, so much poetic description. In ‘The Hollow Sea’, she has created a kingdom of unfathomable depths. And I cannot wait to see what comes next!
There are places – like this one – which are so thin that you meet yourself in the still point. Like the lifting of the silky veil on Samhain, you are held in the space in between. No matter the past, the present or what is yet to come. There is nothing you can do but listen for the gap in the silence, the change in the wind. The right moment, when it comes, calls you up, up; calls you into a wind that lifts you. A wind that carries you with it, on its tails’. From ‘Thin Places’ – Kerri ni Dochartaigh
It is All Hallows Eve, Samhain, Halloween. I am alone at the place I have come to know as a home from home, a little sanctuary. I’m in Rye, which edges close to the Sussex-Kent border. More precisely I’m at it’s harbourside nature reserve. A place of wetlands and water, shingle, sand and sea, meadows and marshland. A haven for many UK and migratory birds and waterfowl. I come here every 3 months or so and stay at one of its harbourside caravans for a few days, though I always wish it were for longer. It is a place I come to retreat from the buzz and busyness of the city, to relax away from the routines and little rituals that bind us, the duties and responsibilities we bear, the reins and restrictions of ordered, clock-time. I come here to walk. To read. To write. To watch the birds and hear the call of the sea. For me, it has become a place of refuge, of unwinding and reconnecting with nature.
But I have never stayed here at Hallowe’en, during this day that is, in itself, a crossing place: a spiritual threshold straddling two worlds, two planes. This world and the Otherworld. A thin place. Samhain, as this day is still commonly referred to in the pagan and druid calendar marks a new year of sorts, a new phase. It is a time of year steeped in history and folklore and myth. Deep in autumn’s throes, the life and death cycles of nature are never more prominent than they are at Hallowe’en. It is a day of the weird and the eerie and the unheimlich – and these days it’s big business. From Halloween parties, ghost stories and trick or treating, you can’t escape the dark side, so why not celebrate it? And to people who lean towards the more gothic persuasion in terms of music, literature, art, dress, décor and attitude – Hallowe’en easily trumps Christmas for the biggest parties and social gatherings and the most beautiful time of year. Thanks to the masses cottoning on, retailers peddle Hallowe’en tat (in varying degrees of quality and price) in earnest and as such, it’s never been a better time to be a Goth.
This year for me, is a little different. While I enjoy scrolling through the parade of photographs on Facebook of the most exquisite costumes and regalia, the elaborate displays of creativity of outfits, hairstyles, makeup and homes, perusing the pictures and videos of the parties and the gigs friends have been attending, I’m happy to spend Samhain here, alone, in my reflective peaceful space. It’s been a busy and testing year in many ways and I’m relishing the quiet enjoyment of my own company, my books and the nature around me.
After I’d finished some writing I planned to go for a walk around the harbour, starting from the caravan park, all around the wetlands and the bird hides and down to the shingle shoreline to the sea’s edge. I decided to do it in the gloaming hour: dusk, twilight, the liminal zone between day and night, light and dark. Symbolically, it made sense to do this today, on All Hallows Eve, the day that marks the crossing between earth life and afterlife. The day before the Day of the Dead.
I start down the gravel track that forks its away over a tiny stream footbridge and seawards. It’s just after four-thirty and it’s been raining heavily over the last few days. The ground is damp but hardened, flattened with peppered shingle-stones. The nature reserve wetlands areas on both sides of me has pooled into lakes, the meadows waterlogged and spongey. The sky is a grey mass of opaque clouds, with just a few showing ruffled edges. They are low, looming down to soak up the land’s borders. If I did not know this area so well, this could be seen as an air of menace. Colours are muted, but green still pervades the land. Grassy mounds ascend deep mud-puddles and flooded fields. Bramble-shrubs line the path in clusters, but the twig-limbs of the teasel are brown, brittle bones. As I walk, the sea becoming more audible against the gull-cry, more shingle appears, crops of still-flowering sea kale too.
I reach the main, flat concrete path that starts from the caravan park main entrance, extending all the way to Winchelsea. Across it, a narrow, wooden boardwalk that looks not unlike a model steam railway track extends across the spread of the shingle shoreline towards the sea. I follow its rickety path and step onto a great carpet of shells and pebbles. I listen to the crunch my feet make along the beach, scouring the ground as I always do for unusual stones and shells. There’s razor clam husks, slipper limpet and oyster shells, pieces of driftwood, hagstones and smooth, flat pebbles. Under the dying light, it’s more difficult to beachcomb, but I find a flattened shell-piece, a sea-eroded hole in its middle. A hagshell, I’ll call it, as I pick it up.
It keeps eternal whisperings around Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell Of Hecate leaves them their odd shadowy sound from ‘On the Sea’ -John Keats
I walk further towards the sea. The tide is out, but the sea is restless. Despite the 100 metre distance, despite dusk’s dark cloak wrapping itself around the shoulders of the land, she (and I do think of the sea as female) is writhing, rolling, sending great white foamy crests into the air. Her voice is urgent: she is roaring and the two-dozen or so wader birds herald her as they line the narrow, sand-strip which she has not yet submerged. Without binoculars, in this light, I can’t identify the birds, but still their gait is discernible from say, gulls or terns. Their movements are slow, jerky, almost mechanical, as they probe the shallows on long, spindly legs, beaks protruding downwards to the wet sand.
I stand there on a higher ridge of shingle looking out at the birds’ silhouettes and the sea’s undulating dance, then stride across the shingle and a shallow pool of water to a little sandier drift, slightly closer to the sea. The sand is damp, dappled but firm underfoot, several tiny stones and shell-pieces caught in its runckles.
There is no one else here on this beach. I witness time folding in on itself as the borders of the land blur into a dark-grey haze, the edges of the sky merging to unite with the swell of the sea. I think of the words of writer and activist Jay Griffiths, ‘Water represents time – the words tide and time are etymologically related – and rivers are metaphors for time all over the world’. It is only during the times of sunrise and the gloaming that you can observe the changes in the landscape around you so markedly, in such a short space of time. In this short hour (or even half-hour), you notice aspects of the surrounding land and its feature you may not ordinarily do in daytime walking. The flipside is, of course, that the poor light will mean there’s also a lot you miss. But what you do obtain is a very different perspective of the familiar.
Here, metaphorically too, it is a space of boundaries falling, an overlapping between the different versions of the self. Memories rush in like the tide, then ebb back. You’re pulled away from the trappings of normal life and further into the zone where land and water meet and overlap, where the sky and sea are not separate beings, but one flowing entity, one lifeforce above all others. And here in this space, it is a crossing of crossings, an intersection physically, psychically, emotionally and metaphorically. Places such as these also have the same capacity for reflection, refuge and renewal. Thin places yes, but thick with possibility and hope.
I swing and look around. To my left, a parapet, like a mini-pier marks the mouth of a rivulet of the Rother, separating it from the sandier beach of Cambers Sands. A lighthouse-like construction marks this point where the river mouth flows into the sea. At this angle the only light I can see now is the furnace-red glow of its flashing beacon.
Back on the path, I pass the fuzzy edges of one of the pill boxes, then it’s wetland territory again. I’m nearly a bit freaked when I see a shadowy figure emerge from the periphery of my vision. But it’s only a latent birder, exiting Gooder’s hide, one of the largest bird hides on the reserve. Gooder’s Hide is perhaps the largest one, often used for group talks and watches. Stilted, its raised wooden legs support a platform high above the lakes, extending into their openness. This path passes the distinctive, red-roofed shed of Norton’s Hut, a landmark of Rye Harbour. I have a tiny miniature of it which stands on one of my bedroom shelves. I pass the Discovery Centre too and I realise it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it closed, cast into darkness. It’s a modern, impressive, but not imposing building which offers a welcoming café and birdwatching space from the warmth of the indoors, an array of informative and interesting displays and exhibits, a shop and art gallery. The views of the reserve are amplified and enhanced by the huge glass panel windows that frame the centre’s exterior.
The dark blood of night-time Foams among the ivy, And leaps towards the lunelet Of sea-chawn ivory, And nowhere finds an outlet. From ‘The Nocturne’ – Louis MacNiece
Nearing the caravan and harbour lights, I turn left onto an embankment gravel path that’ll rejoin the point where I started the walk. The streetlamps and lights emitting through undrawn curtains cast the ground and the surrounding marshland into exaggerated shadow-shapes. I can hardly see the ground I’m walking along, but the marshy fields and wetland lakes seem to be misty, almost mirrorlike. 80 metres or so to my left, I can see my doppelganger, my shadow self archetype, walking to my pace, mirroring my gait. It’s a little eerie how clear the silhouette is. As the trail peters out to the little footbridge, she disappears into the murky waters. And then it’s just me. Grounded again, back on firm footing. On reflection, it seems a fitting end to my Samhain twilight walk. I get back and all is quiet, except for a couple of pensioners walking their dogs. I doubt this site will be engulfed by trick or treaters somehow. I settle in and flick the heating on as a torrent of rain is unleashed from the swollen sky. It starts to hammer and pound on the caravan roof, the wind whips up pace, howling, rattling the prefabricated frame of the park home, but it is secure and I’m cosy and warm. How apt. I ponder on which on which horror film to watch tonight. I will light a candle and give my thanks to the sea; she who restores balance and exacts her fury and bathes nature in her healing water.
Rachel C Birchley 