Song

 

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me:

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree:

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

 

I shall not see the shadows,

I shall not feel the rain;

I shall not hear the nightingale

Sing on, as if in pain;

And dreaming through the twilight

That doth not rise nor set,

Haply I may remember,

And haply may forget.

 

- Christina Rossetti

A Pair of Wings

The church sat in the countryside, bold and brown and shearing shut the faded corpse road she had followed from the nearby village. The sun was shining, but it felt cold for early Spring. She pulled her coat closer around her shoulders, shuddering thrice as she drew near.

It was the kind of church she had seen many times: a signpost to the sacred for a rural community that had dwindled, since the industrial revolution called its inhabitants to far away places of smoke, dirt and metal with the promise of possibilities. She was saddened by the emptiness of these past migrations, feeling sure that any hope for a better life had been slowly bled from those crammed into rows upon rows of tightly knitted houses as they fed and drank inside a growing swell of smog and disease. But then, she had grown up in a large city, and she had hated the noise, and the stench, and the claustrophobia inflamed by having to travel in prisms of strangers. Her urban friends had mocked her, deemed her difficult, and she'd spiralled in a cocoon of isolation until escape appeared in the form a handsome, countryside dwelling young man encountered at a late summer garden party.

To the left of the church, separated by a narrow path between an untidy garden and the edge of the graveyard, was an abandoned cottage that might once have been considered pretty. Time had dulled its whitewashed walls, which now peeked subserviently between the thick coils of ivy that seemed long since post health. The windows were all greasy, with slivers of white amid the gloom like clumsy snail trails. An aura of neglect pervaded here, and she felt a flicker of regret for this forgotten home that had been abandoned to emptiness and the greed of second rate foliage.

There were clusters of gravestones that had been eroded by an equal dismissal. The memorials - these last stamps of name and lifespan - were all but lost, the dead beneath them slumbering as their identities gradually faded into illegible indentations. Most indeed were unreadable now, and she hoped a parish book of some sort remained, some more permanent token of these lives now long over. The fear of forgetfulness had been with her for many years, prompted perhaps by the absences pasted across her own family tree. Her parents, both only children, had shared a dislike of their own parentage, and hadn't minded that they knew little of whence they'd come. As she had grown, disjointed in their shadow, she had craved some kind of familial foothold, something memorial with which to position her surname as a connection to those whose genes were her ontological legacy. Perhaps, she thought bitterly, she'd hoped to find someone she could regard as family who she might actually like. But there was nothing, just the barely recalled names of her grandparents, and the suggestion that many of her maternal ancestors had been killed in the first and second world wars.

Only the flora seemed alive and present in this patch of the contemporary world, only they seemed to belong to the here and now as more than a memory. And then, on a patch of grass a metre or so from a church wall, there, something that made her pause, that caught her attention as though a passing breeze that stirred an otherwise balmy day. A pair of wings. A pair of neatly severed pigeon wings, parted, torso-less, fresh.

 

The wings were of a carcass not long dead, and free from infestation. As she leaned closer she could smell hyacinth, surprisingly strong though no such flower grew nearby. There was a clot of wine coloured blood near the tops of the wings, neat, accurate, as though painted there by a professional whose pallet was almost dry. A sudden burst of music pinched the air: organ, decadent, baroque. It drew her to the church, and to notice that the oak door with its rusty iron hinges was slightly ajar: a reluctant invitation. She accepted, stepping carefully inside, and as she did so the music stopped.

 

The church smelt as other churches did: like old books in antiquarian libraries when you press you nose up close to the yellowing pages. It was not particularly large, and not overly ornamental save for the odd memorial plaque in marble or grey stone pinned to the walls, and a smattering of Christ images and crosses. At the front of the church was an altar, on top of which lay a red blanket and simple bronze cross. She stood before it, tempted to reach out and touch it, to make contact, but conscious of some imprinted aversion from trespassing with fingers when it came to sacred things.

 

Standing near the altar, her eyes were drawn to a near hidden group of statures positioned near the back of the church. They were of angels, their faces raised toward the sky as though in agony or ecstasy or a moment of complete surprise. In the middle stood a figure that appeared human at first glance, kneeling with its head in its hands. She moved closer, curious, and saw that the figure was not intended to be human: on its back were two rough stubs, one each positioned high on either side of the back: in places where one would expect the wings of angels to begin. This time she could not restrain her desire for touch, and reached out tentatively to stroke the edges of those peculiar abrasions. They were not part of the original design, she could tell, for their spines bore the sandpaper grooves that suggest a break. She could smell hyacinth again, hyacinth arising from the places she had touched.

 

The mobile phone's sudden beep broke her reverie, and she skimmed the message that called her back. Turning on her heels she alighted smoothly, suddenly eager for the secular comfort of her boyfriend's flat. The wings on the grass made her pause, and then the cooing of pigeons drew her eyes to the neglected cottage, upon which waited a legion of such birds. They eyed her seriously, she thought, and without understanding why she bowed her head in solemn greeting.

 

As she neared the village where her boyfriend lived, she drew out the map to survey her journey's landscape. There was no mention of a church, or a cottage, and she was sure she had not walked the full three miles it suggested the corpse road ran. Disconcerted, she by chance stopped a man she recognised from the local pub as her feet touched the dirt track that led into the village.

"What's the name of the church, about a mile or so north of here?"

"Excuse me?"

"A church, you can see it when you go over the hill."

He paused, his face scrunched up by the wear of remembering something mentioned a long time ago. In a moment, it came to him. 

"Oh, sorry, but its such a bare ruin I forget that it was once a church. There was some violence there, a couple of centuries back, and the local priest was killed in the ruckus so it was abandoned. I'm surprised you could tell it was a church actually, although I'm not so into my history as most I suppose. There was a village around it, well, more a hamlet really. But that all came down after the priest's death, and those that didn't go to the city went north." 

 

She dreamt that night, of a flock of pigeons migrating, chased away by some terrible thing that had destroyed and violated the sanctity of their home. Their flight was haphazard, as if these creatures knew how to fly but were unaccustomed to the limits of their bodies. She could smell fox, and dog, and things raising hungry faces, growling to be feared as their wet snouts caught the scent of flesh. In the midst of it all she felt a sudden stab of grief, a falling, a wrenching of skin, and muscle, and bone. Falling feathers, and with them, falling grace. A wingless white shadow drifted beneath the anxious kit. It whispered, softly: "these birds, these fragile mortal things, what strange avatars for the divine they are." 

 

Unknown artist

 

 

--

Inspired by the chance discovery of a pair of pigeon wings the lay in the graveyard of a church in Newcastle.



You, and I, and Rosabelle believe

Houdini, the scourge of the Spiritualists, disappointed by his own delvings into spirit communication, is resurrected and immersed into a darkened room in Kate Bush's Houdini (taken from her album The Dreaming). In this track Bush explores clandestine romantic secrets and declarations of devotion shared between the escapaologist and his lover; a hidden passing of the key that would ensure his escape from death through the hidden intimacy of a kiss. The context of this shared expression of love and hope is played out in parallel to a seance where the immaterial desires of love and hope seek reaffirming via the release of spirit from their non corporeal nothingness into physical phenomena and messages of love.

Edmond Jabes, who has entered my poetic thoughtscape recently via a reference in a Max Richter piece, has similarly suggested the need for the dead to be contextualised in language as a means to escape nothingness. He wrote that:

"It is very hard to live with silence. The real silence is death and this is terrible. To approach this silence, it is necessary to journey to the desert. You do not go to the desert to find identity, but to lose it, to lose your personality, to be anonymous. You make yourself void. You become silence. You become more silent than the silence around you. And then something extraordinary happens: you hear silence speak."

Justine Picardie, in her moving account of the aftermath of her sisters' death (recorded in the 2002 If The Spirit Moves You) noted the agony of silence, of forgetting what her sister sounded like. Such silence erodes memory, as though it wishes to deny a sensuous link to somewhere beyond the here, the now, the physical. I can empathise with similar pangs when unable to recall the voice of a friend of mine who died three years ago. Starting with catchphrases, I push at the walls of my memory and call to her, pressing against silence with balled up fists.

When the silence breaks and a voice speaks from beyond the veil, the dead roll out from the woodwork, surrounding the seance and its bereft participants, filling the aether with hope, with love, with their own campaign against the suffocation of memory.



 

 

'And Red All Over' - Scott Hunt



 

 

Are all ghosts unhappy? Is Hunt's figure rejoycing in the sudden liberation of her death, its release of her confinement from a regimented social role, its offering of freedom from the contraption trappings that carried her through cosmopolitan journeys (symbolised by the car, and the distance between them)... Or is she celebrating the fates that have spared her injury, emerging from an accident unscathed and alive. Perhaps she is offering a prayer to a sacred cosmos, conscious of the danger life sometimes veers us into, knowing that moments of miscalculation may so quickly send us into to the irrevocable embrace of death.

A child said, What is the grass?

 

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it
is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe
of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps,
And here you are the mother's laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.
 

- Walt Whitman

A Cloud of Witnesses

Upon discovering that the hyena caves of Kirkdale were not too far from my flat, my partner and I set out amidst the fading sun to seek out this hidden cavern, and to attempt to create a bridge between our imaginations and this resting place of African animal bones via a reading of Kenneth Grant's Hyena poem. Despite our hope to catch the sunset, we were engulfed by the night long before we reached our destination. His sat nav denied the existence of Kirkdale, but we perservered and came to a halt nearby in the car park of St Gregory's Minster, an Anglo-Saxon church dating back to the 11th century. Neither of us were familiar with this place, which rested patiently at the end of a rural, tree bracketed road made all the more uncanny beneath a canopy of bulbous nocturnal shadows. St Gregory's has a large graveyard that weaves around the building, punctured with thick headstones bunched tightly together. A few lights emitted from the windows of the church, and from the doorway which met our movement with a beacon of warm invitation. It was almost enough to see by, but did little to penetrate the solumn cloak of darkness that coveted the graveyard. The place was deserted, save for us and the dead. The silence was heavy, but free from malevolence.

 

 

It was so dark, and the tentacles of civilisation's denial of darkness were far behind us. When we looked up, the sky was illuminated by stars and the milky way. These ancient pinpoints of dead stars seemed poignant, serving as a reminder that even in death there may be a lingering essence bright enough to plot the course of one's life by. I remembered holidays in Greece, on a boat at sea by starlight, free from the competition of man made light, the night sky unveiled by this drift into the wilderness of the natural night, naked and luminous. Such a sight was a great source of comfort and wonder; a vision of something so often lost to city dwellers, thoughts accompanied by satellites.

 

My brother's favourite story as a child was The Owl Who Was Afraid of The Dark. It chronicles the quest of dark fearing Plop, a barn owl, who searches for placation amidst a sequence of conversations with those who have found a joy in darkness. One story in particular involves an old woman, who tells Plop that darkness is kind, that it covers the body's evidence of old age. In the darkness, she can be quiet and sit and rememder fondly what it was to be young.

 

 

 

 

A sign on the church noticeboard mentioned a 'cloud of witnesses'; the impressions of all those who had come to this site for over a century, to praise and rejoice and find sanctuary via a place designed to remind us of God's eternal presence. Whether you believe in the Christian God or not, there is something deeply moving about the memories of churches, these gathering places for those who sought meaning in a sacred context. If there were ghosts here, they were content. I couldn't help but hope that witnesses do indeed come in a cloud, united in the afterlife, conjoined by their memories of living and loving and wishing and dying in a community's nest.

 

The concept of a 'cloud of witnesses' reminded me of some of the images incorporated in John Harvey's excellent tome on spirit photography. One line of enquiry taken by Harvey has noted the incorporation of several spirits in certain photographs, comparing it to similar religious iconography and art.

 

 

 

 

The Spiritualist concept of the spirit world seems kindly orientated to a premise for clouds of witnesses. In the spirit world, we exist collective: we may merge into spirit, the boundaries of flesh no longer a barrier to intimate connectivity. From that we may then emerge individiual, temporarily reaching out from the vistages of our past living self, lining up in queues for a medium ready to speak of our witness to our beloved kith and kin who we hope will find comfort in the clouds we will continue to resonante, with which we would fill the painful absences of severed connections. Even in darkness, they whisper, we are with you.