The machine is my enemy, but nature is my enemy, too. I want to plead for nature, but nature will not plead for me. I have turned away from the god because I see íts cruelty. I can no longer follow the god, so I turn from ít, and I should turn from ít, destroyer of cities and variants. But I accept the tyranny of nature; I applaud it. Yes, I shake my head. Ah, well. I can worship this god.
It is.
The place I walk was once a sea, and the surface of the sea was fifty metres above my head. I walk at the bottom of a dead sea, the swaying place, my feet wading through the chalk. I had never thought too much about the chalk. Walk through a field in midsummer and the field is white, as if a snowstorm had fallen there. Run your finger through the earth and your finger shines. The downs, on certain days, glare with rifts of chalk throwing the sun back at you.
Chalk is armour, domicile, the shell-fragments of prehistoric plankton fractions of a micron in size. A micron is a millionth of a metre. A human hair has a width of 70 microns. The calcite fragments that make up the chalk hills of North Hampshire range from 0.5 to 100 microns in size. The Weald-Artois Anticline is 37 miles wide and 64 miles long, and the thickness of the chalk before it was exposed to the withering air and began to erode was 460 metres.
Still grey water, white ashes falling through it day and night. Shafts of light reaching down through the surface, then the dark and the slow dense snow I will walk on falling; that I will be blinded by; that I will bang from my shoes and hands in a puff of dust, saying: Hwaeshu!
Hwaeshu!
Earth: necropolis. Eternity: not endless time, but no time, place of absolute stillness.
‘And I saw God in a poynte.’
The field maple burns through the snowstorm, I am destroyed by its beauty.
The birds I track are like fish swimming through this sea, now grown light as air. They have lost their scales and substituted them for feathers in drastic colours. There has been an evolution. The rich midnight blue of the blackbird offset by a rim of orange fire wheeling round its eyepod, the sparse flecks of the goldfinch. Red kites, buzzards, kestrels and, maybe twice a year, sparrowhawks. The kites are huge with double banks of feathers. They flap raggedly across the fields and mew. The buzzards, when they catch a thermal, spiral to such a height they are lost to the naked eye 7 or 800 metres up. You find yourself outstared by the shining vertical deep and lower your eyes meekly. The kestrel scythes, then stops in mid air, then scythes, then stops. The sparrowhawk flounders through the hedgerow like a battered schooner.
Something stalks us in the little drokes.
We love each other in this glittering, you touch me, our bodies rise like anchors.
Our fingers wander into each other, burnished with spit.
I had whooping cough. One day in the recovery phase I opened up, sprinting across the field and as I drew a breath – nothing. Like being in a vacuum; in space. I tried again – nothing. Everything brightened, displayed its aura. How my heart thumped in me! My eyes were so wide! The light poured into them, a great white flame consumed the ring of trees. I heaved and sucked – nothing.
Jon, eighteen years is like a day; a day is like eighteen years.
Simon.
The seneschal of Hainault in white harness, field scattered with cries and money. Né,
two babies, two roses.
Wórd says: Ego sum eclipsis mundi. I have come to lay siege to something precious to you.
I turn back to the god, sometimes, not because I love ít on íts stark hill, abandoned and forlorn, but because, weeping, ít will disembowel the world. Because ít will take from the bowels of the world all the things the world has seen
& eaten.