Isle

        

  "I will leave behind my terraces and my walls... They will be enough. 

              They will be more than enough."   - Cruso in Foe by J.M. Coetzee.

           It’s Narda. It just won’t get better, the cancer has really charred a hole through his jaw. Probably shouldn’t eat his meat. Good job I don’t have to milk him either. Still, I let him continue grazing with the others on the slopes. Can’t see the benefit in killing him. Maybe it’d leave more grass for the others, but not very likely. I feel the rest of his warm, short coat for ticks and lumps before sending him on his way for whoever I grasp out of the herd next. I often find wounds from play and tease among themselves, or from when they’ve gotten too far into the woods, among thorns and denser brush, or maybe something jagged washes ashore. Ten. I always make sure there are just ten of them. I don’t need any others.

            There wasn’t much more when old da was about. Back then counting the goats was his job. He did it with rough hands and force; the goats would bleat and spring away in confusion renewed daily. It was to feel the meat he said. To feel the bones. There were even more goats when mother was there too, and even more back when the old terraces and the old huts were just the huts and the terraces and people skittered and roamed the Isle completing constant tasks in smiling groups. The goats would skip and tumble about the terraces and be found in the huts. They shrunk the woods with their trampling and munching and browsing. It’s grown back now. It’s even spread.

            The goats have complete free roam of the terraces, no longer filled with rich dirt and crops, but grass and stubble. Gale’s pregnant, so soon I’ll choose an old one to bleed out. Still unsure if Narda’s flesh, hide and bones will be consumable or usable. I don’t like putting out the goat’s sparky little lives, as I find myself openly chattering away to them, treating them as my brothers and equals. It’s not often I have to kill one, though. Just to keep the even ten. There’s the fish of the sea and beach, the birds and their eggs which they lay in crevices in the Northern cliff face, and the leaves and roots and berries and mushrooms of the woods. A good crop to top it off, mainly hardy root vegetables and perpetual greens. I collect the rainwater when it comes, and there’s the stream that comes through the woods around the old huts. There’s a well, too, but I don’t always trust it. Too old. Too underused. I’d go down and clear the tunnel, but I don’t like the thought of the dark, small space. That was old da’s job too.

            I can still talk mother’s language. On stormy nights when the wind and rain roar at the hut an I can hear the sea blast the shore, I whisper some of the things she might say to me, out in the air as it goes from humid to a crisp coolness in the eye of the storm. After storms, the beach is filled with some small an large treasures, and a decent stock of driftwood. I hear my mother’s language in the lapping of the waves of the post-storm morning, a calm swash forever up the bay.

            Old da tried to beat the language out of us. Re and throbbing, he’d scream that on the Isle we talk the same tongue, we have to be part of the same group, we must all be the same. The others would go silent and sad. I remember their voices warbling old un-understandable songs out in the fishing boats coming back in to the bay. Mother would sing her own tongue’s songs when working the terraces, and everyone admired them. Slowly, after old da’s first explosion, the Isle became emptier and emptier, until we had to slaughter more than half the goats and burn their corpses before they rotted. The woods swallowed the huts, once populous, and the terraces got riddle with weeds. Soon, the well started to become untrustworthy. It was just old da, mother, me and the goats. The goats knew nothing. Gleefully, they explored the territories opened up to them. I’ve seen the stories and histories painted on the walls of the old huts. Their colours and patterns once soothed me but now they make me sad, as they are written in some other language that some of the other Islanders brought with them. Somehow I felt their language and writing was much more ancient than I’ll ever truly grasp.

            The goats congregate around old da’s grave, as it makes a sudden and unnatural change in the otherwise naturally sloping topography. When he died, with just me and him on the Isle, he smiled, weak and feverish, rook my hands, and whispered “It’s all yours. I leave it all for you, my lad. The Isle is your inheritance.”

I do not count the seasons as I should. I understand the changes that happen over a year, but no longer have anyone to share the significance of time with. I wait for them. Mother told me about them, the groups, and their many names; “coast guard,” “army,” “police,” “government.” Strange, nonsensical names. They will come, and they will be people, as I am people, and we will finally share the Isle, just like before. Just as it should be.

On National Animals

(image via http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/files/2013/11/Julie-Larsen-Maher-5816-American-Bison-in-wild-YELL-05-05-06.jpg)

Bison will wake up everyday from now on across the U.S., they will take the hard hits from sun, snow, wind, rain, they will duel with wolves and hunters, because finally, fine-al-lee, they’ve done that thing that they were born for, they were made for, their ancestors took knocks from tusks and spears and fangs for; they’re now the national mammal of the U.S. of A, my friends; they’re the proud hairy beasts of God’s own freedom country.

            But they won’t. They’ll snuffle mounds of each other’s faeces, they’ll bray strangely at slight sounds among the woods. If they saw a flag, maybe they’d try and eat it, but more likely it’d be an annoyance, a brightly coloured occurrence in a day’s plan of eating, crapping, roaming territories and, at some point, shagging.

            Glancing over the fine people’s at wikipedia’s list of ‘national animals’ I see a bit of a weird trend; migratory birds and sea creatures are ‘claimed’ as some nation or another’s animal. The animal’s feelings asides (sorry about that, Hawksbill Turtle through to peregrine falcon.) How can these animals represent a nation when they’re busy thinking of the next place they need to get to? Some countries have gone with safe bets; Australia’s national bird is the emu, which can’t fly, so it has no choice but to stay in Australia and be the Australian national bird for all the Australians.

            I’m choosing to look at this globally because Britain is a bit embarrassing. A lion. England’s national animal is a lion. Your friendly neighbourhood lion, spotted waiting for the bus on Lewes road, having a pint at the harbour in Falmouth, humming to itself on the Victoria line. Yes. Lions. The English kind. At least Wales and Scotland have got this thing right; the Welsh dragon and the Scottish Unicorn, both as equally real and palpable as a national identity should be.

            What I really want to talk about is what making an animal the representative of a nation means. What does it mean to the animal? This is obvious enough; nothing. An animal sees none of the borders or details of cartography that we have coded out over the centuries. They have no way of understanding or appreciating any facet of a nation’s unifying identities. The bison will join the bald eagle in having no feelings either way on the Iraq war, on George Washington, even on Donald Trump.

            The creation of a national animal reverberates with the same distraction that a zoo or mass conservation effort holds; some animals are allowed to live. People will congratulate the bison while fellow bovines are churned through the slaughterhouse. The bison, if killed, will join Cecil the lion in the list of animals that we’re going to get upset about, that we’re going to fight for. Chicken no.4587’s neck is broken, and the sound is unnoticed, while everyone screams at markets for dog meat for being inhumane.

            The national animal can be filed away; it is safe. Another corner of nature is made clean and shiny, part of the booming mirror we like to see; a world of humans, and symbols for humans to appreciate. The bison is no longer a bison; it is an aspect of human patriotic thought, feeling & national identity. Yet again, animal silence is not translated, not appreciated; it isn’t even interpreted, just conflated, painted over. The national animal now speaks, and its voice trills with the vibrant colours of the flag of the human nation it now symbolizes.

The Same Scene 6 Times

For some reason, I have many pictures of this one scene. These are just the few I managed to find on file; I used to see this field every day, any time I stepped outside my front door. Maybe I took the pictures forgetting I had already taken the predecessing ones, or maybe everytime I saw it from a different angle, under different weather conditions, the trees at a different stage of growth, it appeared a whole new setting.

Feeding the Buzz

most of this penned some other time, found it in a notebook of mine recently, some edits & mistakes made in typing up. Thought you were due another affectionate ramble. 

Where the hell did Buzzfeed spring up from? Which internet fad had to die for Buzzfeed to come screaming out of the ashes? Cheezburger cats? (or whatever the devil calls itself) Memebase? Not 4chan or reddit, no, those will continue long after humans have vaporized themselves off planet, I'm sure of it.

Something about the very name, the peppy, white-toothed smiling name that leaves me unhinged. People need their 'feed,' their news, celebrity gossip, treend rants and the rest, fast; in a buzz. People want an exhaustive condension, from events that unfolded over days, months, reduced through planning, editing and posting into hours of labour, to produce a light-hearted list that can be ingested in seconds.

Saying that, there is an extremely unexpected clash in Buzzfeed's publications; there are weighty, thoroughly researched, well-considered historical narratives with pleasingly placed & relevant historical imagery and artistic illustration throughout, and in a click you'll hurtle away to a drenching of gifs relevant to the emotions you remember going through as you watched Friends or Seinfeld or The Simpsons or ate a biscuit or a shoe or a vegan hot dog.

Buzzfeed 'community' is a strange invention within a strange invention. A few attempt to revel in contemporary and memorable pop culture, like the actual staff of Buzzfeed, importantly referencing as much Simpsons as possible and spoiling every major plot line in Game of Thrones. A large chunk of posts just appear to affirm scopes of different identitys, and in subtle ways affirm an us/them discourse. 'You'll only understand this list if you are a carnivore/ a head in a jar/ a hundred year old baby/ from Xville in Y county in the realm of Z. Now I've ranted that out, let me tell you that I am magnetically drawn to these posts. What nuances and everyday experiences do the American offspring of El Salvadorian immigrants go through? What's it like to be a Nuclear-submarine repairman? Worlds that would otherwise be far away from you are (perhaps unwillingly) bare to your gaze.

I am knackered and my feet hurt, so there's probably not much tone to reverberate here... I mean, there are definintely worse things on the internet (the poor editing and general aesthetic of this post probably one of them) but I thought it necesarry to cast a wide-eyed, bleary stare into what I think of Buzzfeed, as history will one day doubtlessly trudge on, from what was just becoming familiar to what is beyond current speculation.

Now, to sleep, unfed, unbuzzed.

The Last Fisherman

(click to see The real-life last fishermen)

Each knot of the net is another nobble in his history, swimming in his memory unwittingly; the moments where his father would come home, cold and wet, cracking the knuckles of his index fingers with his thumbs, standing in the threshold dripping & huffing while he warmed up to greet his family; those same beaten & burned fingers pointing out the carving at port, marked 1604, a crude picture of a boat, which the fisherman's own hands, a child's hands back then, traced out by the freezing beach. Unbeknownst to him, as he methodically counts knots, he counts the details of himself; the view he breathed in of the village from the slopes; walking past the huge Captain Mickey Morton to work on his boat, fresh-faced & wearing new boots; hauling his first catch, being coerced quickly to disentangle and release the young fish back into the ocean; the storm that overturned Morton's boat, sprawling the fisherman into the twilight depths while cruel waves swashed above. He tosses the net overboard.

The knots of the net scrape the deck as the net returns. Husks, shells, the odd wee fish, and a boatload of plastic. If only it were edible or useful... Ha! If only it were non-existent! He empties the net, folds it, ties it up, and puts it back in its place on deck, where it will never be touched again, save by the slime that will build up over time as neighbouring empires of microorganisms duel for the rich nutrients the net has captured from the sea.

When the ship comes ashore, it will sit upon the beach, giving way to splayed ribs, like all the other hundreds of boats already dwindling away; once, those ribs held together a vessel that clogged with barnacles and bumped with sharks. As the fisherman sees the dull glint of his village in the distance, he eases off the engine of the boat, allowing it to coast, and then finally be tugged dimly by the current. His mouth gaping with silence, he imagines his life from the moment he touches shore; his boat unfolding and rotting; the sea turning black, riddled with flotsam; his hobble-backed shuffles to pick up the dole; his face becoming blotchy and red as he wears out a seat in the pub, telling tales of storms, catches, fish and gulls, knots he once tied, an ocean that brought the village and himself into being.

Silently, amid the reel & writhe of the ocean, the great booming womb of the sea, robed with ice, carressed with sand while dancing with rocky cliffs, the last fisherman exhales, and falls over the side of the boat, leaving it to drift in fog at dusk, mooring itself alongside old fridges and washing machines on the rocks down the way.

Hurtling into the end times: How to do it properly, and maybe start again.

Everyone seems to have adopted a pretty nihilistic point of view towards the obvious collapse of the environment. We are falling deeper into the clutches of massive fetishistic disavowal, acknowledging & fearing the visible downfall of the world & all within, but blindly continuing to fuel that degradation; the phrase of the anthropocene era, a band of time revolving around the actions of humans, appears to be ‘oh dear. How sad. Never mind.’

            Several times a week I hear people claim that ‘it’s all fucked,’ that we’re living in the end times, that the future is layered in ancient plastic and bones. Our media and fiction reflects this rather well; countless films come out every couple of years portraying an Earth literally tearing itself apart; a vast swathe of fiction, in no way new, consistently portrays the times after some catastrophe as bleak, unavoidable, and entirely our creation. Commercial news reels off imagery of socio-economic collapse alongside freak weather and quirks of environment, (saying this, one of the largest environmental disasters of our time, the Indonesian forest fires, has gone largely unnoticed, despite its immeasurable effect on people, animals, trees and the land, not to mention it’s origins in the illegal clearing of land by global businesses) encapturing us in a nervous chatter of doom, gloom, doom.

            This is all in spite of the fact that it is human mechanisms, completely within the control and minds of humans, that allow this sort of thing to continue. This appears to be contributed a fair amount (read: a huge amount) to by the workings of capitalist, materialist culture. The pressure to earn just enough to afford to live invokes people to choose the rashest, most damaging option; driving everywhere. Clearing land with petrol. Killing animals that endanger crop. Using harmful pesticides to guarantee crop survival. As well as this, the desire for an aesthetic product ignores the uselessness of wrapping and landfill sites awash with greasy swathes of indigestible plastic, settling on the surface of the sea, at the bottom of the seabed. Education plays a large part as well; people who don’t think to recycle or compost probably aren’t fully aware of the implications of their everyday actions; or, they are: see phrase ‘oh dear. How sad. Never mind.’ This mindset appears to revolve around the idea that humans are big & clever.

            If that is the case, then why are we not saving ourselves? (saying this, we’ve caused enough problems among ourselves to start righteously declaring the environment ours to save.) The basic equations are thus: world ends. We are in world. No world = no us. A very reductive argument, but how do you convince someone that can’t be bothered to walk to the post office down the road or recycle small items that the planet, largely owned by bacteria and microorganisms, is worth saving?

            Whether or not everything is ‘fucked,’ we could at least give it a shot. Think of it this way; if the world is slowly ending then the best that we can do right now is alleviate universal suffering. We should take actions that solve environmental and human concerns; relieve the oceans of pollution and start fishing sustainably and the ocean recovers, and people will have access to fish for many more years to come, as well as an ocean environment that is not toxic. Solve issues of packaging & waste; people will be paying less for items, and the environment will not suffer more bulk waste. Encourage permaculture, organic farming & fair-trade; people will be working in healthier environments across the globe, they will be allowing natural habitats to flourish, avoiding the current cost from commercial farming, and the consumer will be healthier & better off. These are only a few examples that I, a mere literature final year student with a part time job and a broken pair of shoes have managed to fumble together. They’re probably not the best examples, but the technology for saving the planet is flourishing, the means and ideas are there, people just need kicking into gear. If we do solve universal suffering in the face of the end times, if the world is free from the burden of human stupidity, then there is a greater and greater chance that it will not simply be in preparation of entering the dark eras with a clean conscience, but that our actions will have a positive and rejuvenating impact on the planet at large. So the simple statement I’m driving at isn’t ‘why bother?’ but ‘why not?’

Green; Blue; Grey; Black

All photos taken in UK (largely Brighton & surrounds and Gloucestershire, from a period of 2010-2016. Camera used varies as does film.

Selected Dreams

8.07.2012

            I am walking home from work, and am very close to home, at the top of the hill after Gastrells School. A boom echoes across the valley, and I turn to my left; where usually there is a drive leading to an orchard and a few more houses, I have a clear view of Stroud & Stonehouse in the bottom of the valley, and a huge orange and black mushroom cloud emanating from there. I run home, tripping and struggling against the blast wave. When I get in, the house is bare wood, with rain coming through the roof, inevitably radioactive. My parents are slow and solemn. I look out the window at the field opposite my house, and see the sky turning orange, the mushroom cloud reaching the wood atop the hill there. A family from down the road are scaling the field to the woods, where they probably intended to survive. I racked my brain for somewhere to shelter, and conjured images into my dream of white painted tunnels and basements underneath the place I worked in at the time. I suggested this to my family, but they said there was no point; at best we could live a few weeks more here, at the bottom of the hill.

23.09.2012

            I am in an old sea town, all cobbled roads and old pubs. It is a secret place, and I immediately feel under threat as an outsider. I can’t remember how I got there, or how anyone could; I had a sense that it somehow existed underneath the sea. I tried to escape, and was apprehended by an enemy that I couldn’t see or grasp in the dark, but every now and then I’d feel my outstretched hand touch warm flesh. A larger threat froze me in suspense as it loomed out the water.

3.02.2013

            I am a Vietnam war veteran, struggling with Post-traumatic stress disorder. I stroll around my large garden, with an old war buddy, both of us smoking cigars, drinking brandy, wearing lumberjack shirts, blue jeans and pork-pie hats, rolled up sleeves.

            Later, at a ceremony or some event, I keep seeing things differently; dancers suddenly appear as a black man in an evening suit, perhaps an adversary or even comrade from the war. I have outburst and collapse. The whole event stops, with people staring. I am taken to hospital.

            This NHS hospital has green, peeling paint on the walls. I am upstairs, and look down on a street corner in Stroud I’ve known all my life, but know it looks like a 1700s German fairy-tale city, but somehow modern.

27.04.2014

            Maggots cover my glasses but I pour some potion over them to get rid of the maggots. There is a town in Turkey regularly visited by a troupe of giants, which has become a tourist attraction. It culminates in a ritual needing to be enacted to save the town, maybe even the world. The ritual is complete apart from the last part- an “open man.” Upon hearing this, a man stabs himself, and throws himself at the feet of a giantess. She picks up his corpse, and holds it to her face like a telephone, and she gains an expression of soft understanding. The giants leave.

12.05.2014

            A virus spreads across a seaside town. The infected go mad, and attack each other, spreading the virus more and more throughout the town, which is a mixture of St. Ives and Brighton. A fair few infected simply fall ill, and eventually die. I am in a hideaway with four ill women, trying to survive the entire ordeal.

            I have now travelled to the town pre-outbreak. I befriend a child, and remember some underlying mission I have, and discretely prick him with a needle without the child or anyone noticing, trying to hold back my obvious sadness; the needle contains the virus from whose results I was earlier hiding. Before this, the virus was caused by a wasp-like insect with slug-like larvae that came out of the sting.

31.06.2014

            A zombie-like creature follows me from room to room. At one point, most of his body is missing, leaving a bloody, gory hole. People call him Bob.

13.09.2014

            A horde of T-rex like creatures devour all life on an alien planet. I survive by hiding in my friend’s bathroom.

25.01.2016

            A very posh woman down on her luck in a musty, useless vintage shop on a cold and rusty beach creates short-lived and fanciful perfumes from animals. She assesses the animal almost hypnotically, automatically, the knife in her hand becoming more elaborate and long and beautiful, until she finally kills the animal slowly, as it lets a horrible, human scream cry out of the animal. The perfumes become more popular, and people queue up along the beach with unsuspecting animals to be sacrificed, the air filled with the constant screams of dying beasts.

05.04.2016

            I enter the black door of 10 Downing Street. Behind it is another black door, number 38; behind this one, a yellow door, number 68. These numbers appear logical and related to one another, multiplications of one another. I enter an L- shaped hall filled with pairs of people, the same person, a young self and old self, interacting, playing. I approach a pair that are me, young and old, but now there are three of me; a fourth version of myself enters, aged seventeen, confident and angry; I feel pathetic against the old, wise me, the child me, gleeful and innocent, and the younger self, cock-sure and coolly glazing over the world.