The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees

Tags

1967, alder, almond, amethyst, apple, armchair, beech, blossom, branches, breeze, cattle, change, cherry, children, chimney stacks, church, clock, common, cottage, economics, elm, enclosure, Essex, evening, eyes, fields, fir, fire, flame, forest, garden, gate, grass, green, hedge, Henry VIII, history, knowledge, landscape, lanes, laughter, leaves, London, Michael J Redford, mind, noise, oak, orchard, passing, past, pink, pollen, poplars, progress, red, rust, shadow, ships, silence, sitting, sky, smoke, society, speech, Spring, summer, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, tiles, time, trees, village, walls, war, white, winter, woodland, writing, yellow

Trees

Spring’s tonic has risen within the trees and hazel catkins have swollen in greeting to the first warm days of the year.   Elm and alder are soon to follow heralding beech and oak and in a month or so the firs will show their new cones, green and full of juice, and their catkins will dust the ground yellow with pollen.   Throughout the villages cottage gardens will soon be filled with almond blossom and orchards will froth over with cherry white and apple pink spilling an aperitif to summer upon the living fields.   The hedgerows and woodlands become en-veiled by the diaphanous greenery of a million tiny leaves, an amethyst haze so tender and tenuous that I fear for its safety lest it be borne away upon the passing breeze.   I become aware of a restlessness within me that calls with increasing persistence to forego my writing and step out beneath the cavernous spring sky.   The pageant of the trees has begun.   Field and lane alike become heavy with leaf and only a section of red tile or a chimney stack, like flakes of old rust within the foliage, betray the presence of human habitation.   The blanket of summer affords us a privacy and seclusion that is unattainable in naked winter when one’s every move can be discerned by the neighbour’s critical eye, but here in the depths of summer, we can take our thoughts into the quiet of a woodland glade, we can be silent and be within silence for a little while and rest your eyes upon the shadows of the dancing leaves above.   And how restful the colour green, and how restful to the eye and through the eye to the mind that blossoms forth green thoughts.

This spring evening upon which I write is a decidedly chilly one even though the day itself has been full of warmth.   Thus I am to be found sitting in an armchair, putting my thoughts on paper, gazing between sentences into the dusty red glow of a log fire.   It is a funeral pyre really, the cremation of the last remains of an old local cottage that has long died, having fallen prey through disuse, to the vagaries of our climate and the onslaught of the village urchins.   I gaze with half closed eyes at the sawn up piece of beam that was once part of the skeleton of the old house, and see it burn with clear flame and little smoke.   In accompaniment to the ticking of the clock upon the mantle shelf I hear the old log’s tinsel murmurings that sound like a piece of screwed up silver paper, tossed aside and left slowly to expand, and as the pure white ash falls without sound, I feel myself drawn into the distant past and fancy I hear the laughter of children as they play beneath the boughs of a tree which this dead piece of wood was once a living part.   Whose children are these?   From what age do they come?   Perhaps they are the offspring of Henry VIII’s generation, the irresponsible youth of the day who cared nothing about the great cultural and religious upheaval taking place about them as they played handball between the northernmost buttresses of the old church wall.

It was at about this time when the monasteries had just been dissolved that the first enlightening book on agriculture by Fitzherbert of Norbury had just been published.   Was this historic pioneer of fertility indirectly responsible for the downfall of this old tree?   For the seas of knowledge flooded the land and split the forests into arboreal islands and many fine examples of the medieval forests became the battered flotsam of progress.

Certainly this old piece of wood never witnessed an act of enclosure, for the open field system was predominant right up until the late eighteenth century, when round and about the great open fields sprawled the commons, the scrubland and marshes, creating through their wastefulness and their infertility, a barrier to agricultural and therefore economic progress.   Although enclosure was a costly business, required finances could be supplemented by felling timber which, during the Napoleonic wars commanded a high price.   Also, in order to fence off enclosures, what was more natural than to plant more timber which, unlike normal fencing that needed constant and costly repair, increased in value as time went by.   The first choice of timber was naturally that which was most valuable such as ash and oak.   But the oak was slow in maturing, and where the ash spread its roots, no crops or grass would grow and no cattle would graze.   It was thus that the stately elm made its appearance and stamped the English hedgerow with a character all its own.   Being able to grow, and grow quickly in all types of soil, made it a very desirable timber to grow.   Also, the elm allowed grazing beneath its boughs and, due to its durability in water, it was at this time much sought after by the Navy Board for its ships.   Water mills, lock gates and drain pipes were of elm, and at the turn of the century, London alone still had over four hundred miles of mains constructed from its timbers.

Caught upon the ebb flow of time, I see the trees’ ancestral giants, the calamites, that reared two hundred feet into the sky.   They heard no child’s laughter, neither did they hear the buzz of insects nor the songs of birds, for they existed in the dim distant dawn of the carboniferous age millions of years before the birth of man, when even the birth of the first blade of grass was aeons in the offing.

They grew long, long before man, mute sentinels surveying the changing landscape, witnessing scenes that no mortal has ever gazed upon.   Then when man came, they furnished him with food, shelter and fuel; they gave to him the means of traversing the oceans.   They have been instruments of both war and peace and have featured in mans’ writing, music and art.   They have been made gods and devils and have bought good luck and bad.   Man’s long and close association with trees is evident from his desire to wander beneath the green boughs when time and toil permit, and from picnic parties who would sooner travel an extra mile to spread their chequered cloths within their shadows.   Perhaps it is because a tree expresses continuity, a security that mankind through all the ages and searched and worked for.

Although not a native of Essex, this ancient county endears itself to me more and more as time rolls slowly by, and time does pass slowly in Essex, for to plumb its highways and byways is to plumb history itself.   It has been slow to change through the centuries and there are numerous back lane hamlets which, even to this day, have experienced virtually no change for many, many years.   One lively youngster or eighty five who lives on the borders of Chignal Smealy and Chignal St. James (what delightful names are these), told me that the only difference he could see in his village was the height of the poplars at the end of his garden which, when he was only “knee high to a goose-pimple” were only a “stack an’ ‘alf ‘igh”, even the cottage gate that was propped open on one rusty hinge was the very same one his grandfather had made.

Having been one of the most heavily afforested counties in England, Essex is rich of fine examples of man’s utilisation of wood.   It can be seen in his architecture, in his tools, farm implements and vehicles.   The men of Essex are very conscious of their affinity with trees, and go to great lengths to preserve the more eminent members of their arboreal population, and I find it hard to believe that there is another county in the whole of the British Isles that can boast a greater number of ancient trees that have been propped up and strung up to cast their humbling shadows upon the heads of men.   Most of these old trees are of course oak, for Essex was noted for its oak forests, but as farming spread, so the forests disappeared, and the elms lining the fields and lanes now outnumber to oaks and are a far more familiar sight.   It is these old isolated trees that afford us a tangible link with the past.   They disperse any feeling of isolation in time and give to us instead a much needed sense of continuity, of that which has no end.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blossom wormhole: BLUEFLAGS by William Carlos Williams
branches & mind wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – old George
breeze wormhole: A Solitude by Denise Levertov
change wormhole: Bridgnorth
church wormhole: TO A SOLITARY DISCIPLE by William Carlos Williams
evening & sky & thpought wormhole: space for probing thought
eyes & passing & shadow & speech & walls wormhole: ‘… plane is upright …’
fir wormhole: Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes
garden wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Pigs
green & Spring wormhole: LIGHT HEARTED WILLIAM by William Carlos Williams
hedge wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – With Cows
history wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call
knowledge wormhole: ‘a blacknight fitted perfectly …’
leaves wormhole: SPRING & LINES by William Carlos Williams
London wormhole: London refugee march – 120915
oak wormhole: behind / glass walls and wan and hooded eye
pink & time & white & yellow wormhole: THE LONELY STREET by William Carlos Williams
red wormhole: SPRING STRAINS by William Carlos Williams
silence wormhole: despite that
sitting wormhole: getting fat in me old age
smoke wormhole: cross-section
society wormhole: raised brow
trees & war & winter wormhole: What You Are by Roger McGough
writing wormhole: JANUARY by William Carlos Williams

 

to arms, then;

Tags

1907, 2017, 8*, attention, Bodhichitta, Bodhisattvacharyavatara, body, carelessness, eyes, fate, fields, fire, focus, hell, ideals, identity, inner-self, karma, kleshas, laziness, Louis de la Vallee Poussin, mind, mindlessness, monster, mother sentient beings, narcissism, opportunity, over-reaching, phantom, practice, rebirth, resolve, smoke, staying, suffering, superhero, surprise, talking to myself, torture, translation, war, Warrior

                but there are plenty of opportunities
                to shave off indolence

                there are too many surprises
                to meet-off heedlessness, and stay;

                no use wailing and whimpering
                enfeebled by narcissism,

                when being unremittingly tortured
                of body and mind

                it’ll be way too late,
                I shall have nothing left but bad fate;

                the thing is, they don’t plot, they don’t
                manoeuvre and they

                hardly ever show
                themselves, so how is it I walk eyes-

                wide-open into each of their snare and
                realm; there, monsters

                slavering astride horizon cower me to
                craven identity, fires

                hot to match all my defences, afflicting
                me without notice

                or even much effort
                fires of the sun, fires of the atom, I’ll be

                engulfed but not
                consumed to blessed oblivion … oh, give me

                a break! – I’m
                ongoingly consumed even now, as long as I

                continue endlessly playing
                this solitaire, hitting the ‘new game’ button

                again and again
                until I … stop; but the cleverer I get

                with them the cleverer they already are,
                like shadow-boxing –

                these ancient enemies
                of mine; … to arms, then; not super-

                heroically, trying all the more better
                than I only am and

                then finding myself (on acrid fields –
                the smoke of fallen

                ideals and bombed aims) wanting, but
                inwardly, with

                attention and focus, the Way of the
                Steely Warrior; I shall

                be `ard with suffering, I can take it,
                I shall wear my

                oozed bowels and fallen head like medals
                in this, the War

                to End All Wars, not Mr Redfordman
                who is or isn’t

                good enough, but the wish and drive to fight,
                as long-suffering as mothers …

                … nothing to do with Mark Redford;
                ‘Je ne garde qu’une

                passion: celle de détruire les passions!’,
                these phantoms

                that stir the entire world; ‘dépouille-toi donc’
                the best translation prescribed

 

Bodhisattvacaryavatara IV, 43, French translation by Louis de la Vallee Poussin, Introduction à la Pratique des Futurs Bouddhas, 1907

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

attention wormhole: travelling // arrival
eyes wormhole: animus rises – powieview #37
identity wormhole: stuck in lower realm
mind wormhole: circuitry
practice & talking to myself wormhole: the turtle and the yoke
superhero wormhole: the quiet whale
war wormhole: looking ahead

 

olive trees

Tags

2016, 4*, blue, fields, Granada, grass, green, olive trees, passing, shade, trunk

                olive trees

                straw fields and
                blackened trunks

                always under
                their own shade

                edged with puffs
                of greenblue grass

 

part of a passing melange: Granada & Other Poems

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blue wormhole: with all love released
green wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay
passing wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Making Hay

Tags

1967, blackbird, branches, breeze, chaffinches, clouds, cuckoo, echo, fields, grass, green, hay, June, land, lark, linnets, Michael J Redford, scythe, silence, smell, soil, sun, talking, the Boats of Vallisneria, thrushes, tits, trees, wagtail, weather, work

Making Hay

“You’ll have a nice cut o’ hay here,” said George.   The wizened little old man, long since retired from the land, stood beside me in the gateway of Garden Field.   He has come to remove the debris that had fallen from the trees to prevent damage to the mower.   Like most retired land-workers he is unable to keep the soil of the fields from his boots, and one can find him in every village throughout the British Isles hedging, ditching, clearing odd corners of scrub with scythe and sickle and caring for the vicar’s garden.   To these men, there is an attraction so binding to the land, that to continue working thereon has become essential to their very existence.   It seems they draw the very essence of life direct from the soil, just as the unborn infant draws its life direct from its mother, and if this contact, this life-line is broken, so also is his life.   One has merely to talk with these old men for an hour to sense their affinity with and philosophy of the land, and I am convinced that it would quite literally kill many of them if they were to be taken from it.   An acquaintance once questioned the economics of employing these old ‘jobbers’ and suggested that it was merely a charitable act that enables the old men to feel useful, and I thought of old George ambling around the perimeter of Garden Field picking up dead branches and stones.   In the first instance the old man had given me half an hour of time to attend to other more pressing matters.   Secondly, his action of clearing the land of obstructions was quite possibly instrumental in preventing a broken mower knife or con-rod, and when taking into account the precarious weather conditions under which hay is made in this country, any delay could mean the difference between a field of good hay and a field of bad or maybe even a complete loss, and with good hay sometimes fetching £15 per ton and more, this could result in a considerable saving.   So what price an old man’s labour?

There is a great satisfaction in using a clean cutting tool, be it a pen-knife or a scythe.   Now unfortunately, the less harmonious clatter of a power driven mower has long since dimmed the sweet song of a scythe and men in the hay meadows no longer sway to its rhythm.   Nevertheless, there manifests within me a great sense of well-being each time I see the graceful stems fall into neat swathes as the mower encircles the ever diminishing island of standing green.   The pollen lifts and the wagtail follows close behind feeding upon the moths and gnats that are started into flight upon a day sweet with a green aroma. Soon comes the last sweep of the mower in the centre of the field.   It is an act full of purpose and symbolism that makes me hesitate before felling those last few stems.   It is I think, that the finality of the last cut brings about a sense of completeness, a completeness that is magnified by the silence when the mower has ceased to clatter and the tractor engine is switched off, when the only sound to be heard is the song of a lark out of sight, high above the dust laden air.

The following day, when the June sun has lifted the dew from the fields, the grass can be shaken up to let in the drying breezes, and it is towards the end of a good drying day that the green harvest begins to ‘rustle’ and emanates that exhilarating aroma of ‘making’ hay.   There are many jobs to be done on the farm some of which are dull and monotonous, and I must confess to a tendency of leaving such tasks to the very last minute.   But hay-making is not one of these jobs.   Even at the end of a hot, dry day of turning, tedding and windrowing, I reap a great deal of pleasure from strolling alone between the dry, fluffy rows, inhaling the richness, listening to the linnets, tits and chaffinches close at hand, and the distant echo of the cuckoo in the woods.   Also in the woods the Blackcap, much mistaken for the nightingale, sings sweetly at this hour and is a welcomed guest upon my solitude.   There are many such enchanting moments tucked away at odd intervals throughout the year, sandwiched between the bustle, toil and noise that nowadays fills most of our lives, and too often they pass unnoticed and without appreciation.   The baler is the transgressor that ends these few hours of peace at hay-making.   It is a great red monster that crashes into the calm, scaring the blackbirds and thrushes and littering the fields with bales of green, just as the child litters the nursery floor with his building blocks.

If there is one task on the farm nowadays that demands sweat and aching limbs, it is the pitching, carting and stacking of bales of hay.   No time can be wasted in bringing them home for should the weather change, the feeding value could be washed right out and hay made fit for only bedding.   Under a blazing July sun the throat becomes parched and the palms of the hands become calloused and shiny from gripping the pitch-fork.   Hasty swigs from a brown bottle concealed in the cool shade of a hedge ooze forth seconds later as sweat.   Hay particles stick to the body and gnats and flies buzz and bite. At times (if, for example, in a race against approaching storm clouds), the pace becomes so hectic that the sweat runs and blinds the eyes.   Seeds and pieces of hay fall into the shirt and make their way down to the trouser belt where they stick and prick and scratch each time the body is bent to life another bale.

This work, weather permitting, continues day after day, and to those involved it seems like eternity, but sooner or later the very last bale is heaved upon the trailer, and the last, slow journey home is made with swaying load and creaking ropes.

Last year, Garden Field was put aside for the cows and old George was helping me move the electric fence.   It was almost dinner time when we finished and we sat upon the headland whiling away the minutes in idle conversation.   He had removed his jacket and was picking out the fluff from the corners of a pocket.

“It used to be my brother’s,” he said of the jacket, “he lived in Shropshire but passed on a few weeks back, and as I’m the only one of the family left, I had all his bits and pieces sent here.”   He studied the jacket ruefully.   “Didn’t find no pound notes in it though, just a bit o’ fluff and a few hay seeds,” he said flinging them into the wind.   Now, as I stand staring at the bales stacked under the dutch barn, I find myself wondering how many stems of Shropshire grass there are within, and if left to ripen, how many seeds they would have produced.   I often stand and stare, much to the annoyance of those around me, and think my little thoughts, for little thoughts quite often lead to bigger ones.   This is, in fact, just how this essay came to be written.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

blackbird wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
branches & green wormhole: Sheffield Park Gardens
breeze wormhole: 1964
clouds wormhole: and ‘naerrgh’ a mention of a seagull’s call
echo wormhole: with all love released
silence wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working
smell wormhole: travelling // arrival
sun wormhole: tremule
talking wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
trees wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – reaping
work wormhole: next unexpected step

 

Sheffield Park Gardens

Tags

2016, 9*, air, black, blue, bluebells, branches, Buddha, Carol, children, contemplation, copper beech, creation, daffodil, dandelions, discovery, duck, eyebrow, face, family, fields, flag, future, garden, gem, girls, glance, green, hair, Have, humanity, India, kalpa, lake, land, life, limbs, living, mauve, May, name, passing, petals, plants, pollen, primrose, promise, rhododendron, seeing, serendipity, settlement, shade, Sheffield Park Gardens, sitting, society, stone-chat, talking to myself, transluscency, tribe, voices, walking, water, yellow

                Sheffield Park Gardens

                we walked
                upright
                across wide fields

                in scattered groups,
                family and tribe,
                private longing

                under shaded
                brim for a land
                of silk and money

                8th May 2016, with

                only childrens’ voices
                we walked into
                the garden

                dispersing to
                our hides to make our own
                discoveries

                by happenstance
                and peripheral glance
                held cold and fresh

                before name:
                that stone-chat
                that makes the

                copper beech
                transluscent;
                the cool stretch of branch

                yet to bud
                before the haze
                of dusty pollen;

                what to make
                of the solitary dandelion –
                butter yellow life –

                amid
                fain clusters of primrose; and
                there in the shade,

                mauve-bells and
                daffodil stalks make in-
                visible a steely blue;

                bluebells
                like raised eyebrows, relaxèd
                to see a future;

adult voices pass, now, talking ways of life; young girls practise handstands and routines in the fields;                

                let’s sit by the lake awhile:
                where a duck’s
                head

                sits
                just out the shade of exotic plants
                (let’s say, from India)

                the water lapping
                anywhere (let’s say, oh,
                 two thousand

                 five hundred
                 years ago), tucked
                immaculate

                black
                letting nothing out
                but the feint

                of blue
                or green that will form a gem
                in kalpas

                of contemplation;
                across the water a willow rests
                like a flag

                (girl’s hair
                 recovers from each upswing from each
                 hand-stand);

                turning home
                Carol stooped
                to smell the rhododendron flower

                “oh, …”

                pushed her face
                into the petals with lust
                was it

                because I’d
                said the branches
                were an orgy of slippy limbs

                or was it just me
                making things up
                as we walked along?

 

I know, I know, it’s mid February, and the poem was written and set in a May; it’s not seasonally right, but this was the next in line to be printed: them’s the chops …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

air wormhole: Batgirl –
black & blue & Carol & passing wormhole: travelling // arrival
branches & voices wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
Buddha wormhole: om muni muni maha muniye soha
family wormhole: out
garden wormhole: slightly / uphill
green wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working
hair wormhole: two profiles
Have wormhole: Coleton Fishacre
life wormhole: sweet chestnut
living wormhole: ‘still …’
mauve wormhole: snapshots about Totnes
seeing wormhole: glide
sitting wormhole: amid
society wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
talking to myself wormhole: ‘God, who am I …?’
walking wormhole: loss
water wormhole: without any buffet at all
yellow wormhole: greedy

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – reaping

Tags

2018, 7*, change, constellations, elm, fields, fire, gale, harvest, hills, letter, night, production, rain, reaping, sheep, sound, stars, sun, thought, time, trees, valley, vista, windows, writing

                Dear Pat and John,
                and then the rain came

                for weeks, now, making
                havoc over fields of

                trampled trees and
                drowned sheep; rain

                against the windows
                as I write, rain carried

                on the gale that
                bounds up the valley

                gust over gust up and
                over the leaden hills;

                the window rattles
                a log slips, sparks

                disperse and resettle
                like time; the view

                has changed outside:
                metal beasts across fields

                nodding idiotically, no
                further need of pitchforks

                under the sun, now just
                production, churning

                moral thought to mud,
                no distribution

                where fields of ignorance
                lay; last night

                the engines switched off
                one by one across

                the fields and
                Pegasus shimmered

                gazing long on the
                southern elms

                standing about
                with hands in their pockets

                reaping their own
                and individual harvest

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working; “Pat and John” were friends of Mick from his London days, I think; he wrote occasional letters to them talking about the ‘countryside’

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

change wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
hills & sun & thought & time & trees & valley & windows & writing wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working
night & rain wormhole: river
sound wormhole: Batgirl –
stars wormhole: the silent night of the Batman

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Working

Tags

1967, chimney, clouds, corn, cows, dusk, eggs, elm, farming, fence, fields, flood, food distribution, future, gale, gaze, green, grey, harvest, hay, hills, identity, leaf, letter, machines, meadow, meat production, Michael J Redford, milk, morning, oats, poetry, rain, sheep, silence, summer, sun, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, time, tractors, trees, valley, weather, wheat, wind, windows, work, writing

Chapter 4

Working

A Letter of Two Parts

Dear Pat and John

I thought it high time I dropped another letter from the country into the post.   Looking back over the past summer months seems more like looking back over a bleak and stormy winter.   The weather has of course played havoc with the haymaking and harvesting.   I hear that at one time, medium quality hay was fetching nearly £20 per ton, and taking into account the wide-spread flooding that has occurred, it seems there’ll not be enough oat straw to feed in place of it.   With this drastic shortage of hay and straw, the outlook is black indeed.

Even as I write, the rain is beating alarmingly against the window panes, borne upon a gale that roars like an express up the valley, each gust falling over the next in its haste to wreak havoc on the exposed hills.   As I gaze through the window pane distorted with rivulets and splashes, I perceive a hazy image of grey hills shouldering leaden clouds, and every few minutes the wind rattles the frame and comes sighing down the chimney.   The whole house shudders a little and a log in the hearth slips, sending up a shower of sparks to meet the confusion above.   The fields are in a sorry state.   Most of the corn has been lodged as if trampled by some strident giant, fences have been breached by falling trees and many sheep throughout the country have been drowned in the spreading waters.

There was a period two weeks ago when the tempest eased a little and allowed a little watery sun into our eyes, but this lasted for only seven days, after which the rain set in again and eased up only occasionally for an odd day here and there.   We have managed to stack about half the oats, but the remainder will probably have to be written off.   The wheat would have encountered a similar fate had it not been for the three hired combines.

Now here once again are the winds and the rains.   A dead leaf, too sodden to absorb any more water is whipped across the window and trembles for a brief second on the sill before joining the hosts that cling to the chicken coop wire.   Incidentally, I’d better put this letter to one side for a moment in order to collect the eggs before the half light fades completely.

                                * * * * * * * *

Dear Pat and John,

I’ve had to restart this letter.   Owing to this sudden bright spell we’ve been working like mad trying to catch up on the backlog of harvesting and general repairs.   I started this letter well over two weeks ago but I’m afraid I’ve not had time to finish it until now.   It is remarkable how the view has changed outside my window.   The country scene these past few days has been one of violent human and mechanical activity.

Implements of all shapes, sizes and colours have erupted from their unusual passiveness and are droning, roaring and rattling over the soil.   A combine harvester, like a metal monster from a Wells novel, trundles ponderously across the field, digesting the grain and vomiting the residue in its wake.   Tractors career madly through the lanes, heave with throbbing effort towering loads of sheaves and haul balers which follow on, nodding idiotically like inane sheep.   Men race fervently against time commanding machines, pitching sheaves, building stacks, their pitchforks leaping and flashing under the sun.   Farmers and farm workers alike are conscious of the urgency of the hour, but no clock watching for them, they are eager to see the culmination of a years’ hard work.   To these men, their work is not merely a means of earning a living, it is something far more than this, something far more personal and important to them as individuals.   These men work not so much for their employers but with them, and it is through this combined effort that the tempestuous vagaries of the past year have been overcome.

If a machine breaks down, there is a curse and several pairs of hands are immediately locating the trouble.   They may not be expert mechanics but farm workers are masters of improvisation and no machine is standing idle for long.   It is this knack of ‘making do’ that is the seed of many weird and wonderful machines that have appeared on the agricultural scene, and it would indeed be difficult to find any industry which has produced in such a short period of time a greater range of impossible machines to tackle such improbable tasks.   No doubt to the layman it would appear that with all these modern innovations, the life of the farm worker today is almost as idyllic as the sentimentalised conception of the pseudo-bucolic poets of the seventeenth century:-

                “O happy life, if that their good
                The husbandman but understood.
                Who all the day themselves do please …”

Whenever a new acquaintance asks the nature of my work they are, on being told, shocked into silent disbelief.   Apparently I neither look like a farm labourer nor do I sound like one (how does such a person look and sound), and henceforth I am re-introduced either as a farmer or, by those who are more sensitive towards the truth, as being ‘in farming’, thereby implying that I own vast acres and hunt every Tuesday and Saturday.   A wistful ‘back to the land’ look then enters the eye.   “I’ve always wanted to work on a farm” they sigh.   No doubt there have been insuperable obstacles in ambition’s path for many people, but surely not all, and I have yet to meet the person who doesn’t bemoan his lot in town and gaze longingly at the green hills.   And just as a point of interest, I have yet to meet the person who doesn’t have an uncle somewhere who owns a farm.

Their conception of farming today seems even more idyllic than that of their fathers’.   Machines, they say, have taken the hard work out of farming, all we have to do is sit on a tractor all day and press buttons.   Perhaps they would like to spend a day stacking bales of hay under a sizzling hot roof of a Dutch barn, or perhaps after a sixteen hour day during harvest, [perhaps] they would like to sit up all night with a cow who is having a difficult time calving and work another sixteen hours the following day, and the day after that.   Unless a farmer specialises in a line for which a particular machine or implement has been designed, then it is not economical to purchase that machine.   For example, a man with just one house cow would find it uneconomical to install a completely automatic milking unit, but even where this is justified, as in the case of larger herds, the farmer or herdsman still has to rise at five o’clock on a bitterly cold winter’s morning seven days a week.   The advent of the machine has not necessarily lessened the amount of hard work to be done, it has merely allowed us to do more work in a given amount of time.   In fact, it is because of the machine that the herdsman’s lot today is becoming an increasingly intolerable one.

An old friend of mine once milked twenty five cows night and morning with two machines.   He know his cows and his cows knew him.   Although he did not rush things, he was efficient.   He would stand aside as the cows came into the shed and cast his eye over each one, and as he milked, he ran his hand over their coats and looked at their droppings.   Old Charlie could tell immediately if one of the animals was off colour.   Then his employer retired and a young, progressive farmer moved in.   Fortunately he ask Charlie to stay on as cowman.   Now, Charlie milks sixty cows night and morning with four machines in a well-parlour.   On being asked how he liked the new system, the old cowman sighed.

“Well I dunno.   We gets the milk, that’s fer sure, but ‘tis like working in a factory.   There’s pipes, tubes, valves, taps an’ switches everywhere.   The animals go through the parlour like a dose o’ salts – you’ve ‘ardly got time to wash their bags.   All you can see of ‘em is one side, their guts might be ‘anging out the other fer all I know.”   His addendum, I think, summed up his real grievance.

                “Trouble is – I ‘ent got enough time to get to know me animals.”

What could once be classified as a pleasurable occupation was now, through the advent of the machine, become a tiresome chore, and as mechanisation infiltrates more and more, so true herdsmanship is disappearing.   The reticent paragon of tolerance, that slow, amiable patient being that was once the cowmen, is now being pushed aside to make way for the impatient, ulcer-ridden milker of high speed conveyer-type milk production of today, so much so in fact, that on some larger farms, milkers are already working a shift system to break the seven day a week monotony.

I can foresee in the not so distant future, a herd of a thousand or more cows, zero grazed, moving almost continuously through a system of yards and parlours twice every twenty four hours.   In the parlours, shift work will be in progress with round the clock milking.   The milk will be pumped through to the distribution.   The organisation will manufacture its own concentrates, will employ its own veterinary surgeon, accountant and secretary and will have a resident Ministry Inspector equipped with his own laboratory.   And of course the whole concern will be owned by the big industrialists of the day.   This is not such an improbability as may at first appear for this has already happened to a great degree to some of our poultry farms.   There are now vast empires where eggs are fed into one end of a building and emerge twelve weeks later at the other as pre-packed chickens with their giblets frozen into little polythene bags inside them.   Then there is the abomination of the sweat box and battery systems of meat production.   Agricultural evolution has reached a point where farming, as we know it, is slowly but surely plunging into self-annihilation and dragging down with it the responsibility of moral thought into a morass of turpitude.   We are entering an age of hydroponic systems where an agricultural technocracy permits controlled environment and mass production of living creatures to an extent unparalleled in human history.   It is as if we have forgotten that we are dealing with life itself and not inanimate lumps of putty waiting to be moulded into any shape by the current market.   Yet if the farmers of today do not keep abreast of [the] latest scientific developments, they would find it almost impossible to feed themselves let alone provide food for others.   Even so, despite the fact that agricultural efficiency and production have increased beyond the wildest dreams of great pioneers such as John Lawes and Sir Humphry Davy, people are still dying in their thousands for want of food.   Despite the fact that there is enough food produced throughout the world in any one year to supply mankind with the essentials of life for the next twenty, the bloated belly of the beggar is still a common sight in the greater part of the world.   It is not, therefore, research into agricultural production methods which is urgently needed, but research into the distribution of those products.   It is in this sphere that the great fields of ignorance lay.

But let me rein back awhile for I have digressed too far.   This letter to you was intended to be a portrait of the countryside as I have seen it during the last two months, so now let me gaze upon the pastoral scene beyond my window.   The cows have finished grazing and are lying in the meadow cudding methodically.   The sun falls upon their backs like a warm blanket and a faint breeze fans their faces.

It was nine o’clock last night that the last load was brought home.   Engines were switched off one by one across the fields and, as the evening star faded, Pegasus shimmered the in the warmth of dusk and gazed upon the southern elms.   As the last sheaf was laid upon the stack, the year ended, our year, that is.   George stood, hands on hips.   Harry leaned upon his pitchfork.   Alf and Arthur sat upon the trailer and Jim stood with one foot upon the wheel hub.   In silence they gazed at the stack, each man with his own thoughts, each man reaping his own spiritual harvest.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

^{————w}(O)_{rmholes________________________________|—–}

chimney wormhole: the missing chord // the now-silent seagull
clouds & identity & time & wind wormhole: travelling // arrival
green wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
grey wormhole: for / the first time
hills & valley wormhole: volcanic rock
morning wormhole: forgotten anything
poetry wormhole: Pilot 125 … // … being excursion in the interludes
rain wormhole: when the rain has settled / the dust
silence wormhole: without any buffet at all
sun wormhole: is this it // all the time
thought & writing wormhole: Christmas 2015
trees wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
windows wormhole: river
work wormhole: I am not yet ready

 

travelling // arrival

Tags

2016, 9*, arrival, attention, awkward, black, blue, breathing, calves, Carol, clouds, co-ordinate, ears, eye, fields, groundlessness, hedge, horizon, identity, karma, leaves, letting go, notice, passing, sky, smell, teeth, thread, time, travelling, white, wind, wind turbines

                travelling – no theme

                when the wind blows
                leaves turn and follow like
                dislocated jazz-hands

                everything is parting
                and passing all around
                … me (is that the theme?)

                I can’t find what to
                think or notice; in the
                corner of my eye a

                small black creature
                keeps pace, stretched in
                leap over field, through

                hedge, unspite, imhindered,
                depossibly, gathering
                everything in disregard;

                bit between molars (for
                weeks, for days?) wedging
                teeth slightly awkward

                has just worked loose;
                there are skies, there,
                certainly, high, silky

                and whipped, and then
                blue-coagulated drifting
                like a fleet, like calves

                crossing fields ears
                waving, as wind blades
                heave beyond hill horizon

                I conjeal            myself
                in notice, relieved with a
                thread and co-ordinate

                where for to breathe
                again but having lost
                so much more that I

                never had; Carol shuts
                the Kindle and leans; I
                smell her warm head

                for miles – arrival

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

attention wormhole: before any writing
black & blue wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
breathing & groundlessness wormhole: is this it // all the time
Carol & clouds & sky wormhole: Christmas 2015
hedge wormhole: free
horizon & white wormhole: looking ahead
identity wormhole: without any buffet at all
leaves wormhole: Batgirl –
letting go wormhole: “I need help”
passing wormhole: I am not yet ready
smell wormhole: St. Edmund’s / Parish Church / Castleton
time wormhole: looking / ridiculous
travelling wormhole: Tara mantras
wind wormhole: after all

 

looking ahead

Tags

2015, 20th century, 8*, age, attention, cypress, dark, daughter, dress, duty, eyes, facade, father, field, fields, green, hair, horizon, house, jaw, land, left, lifetimes, medals, mouth, portrait, Remembrance, sienna, sky, smile, standing, war, white, youth

                                                looking ahead

                at 18 he peered frightened and gentle –
                the high forehead and round jaw of all
                his youth, but that his mouth held duty

                faintly pursed on the left, in reserve and
                to attention, although the epaulettes were
                (the wings of a choirboy) – at the strips

                and strips of field and fields of umber
                and sienna and the deepest darkest green,
                as high as the land was wide, and it was

                wide, to the white-washed house perched
                on the higher horizon flanked by European
                cypresses, at home in the fields; at three

                she looked above the horizon, hair in all
                direction to the sky, the purse to the left,
                in attention and wan smile from above

                the ruffled dress (soon to be outgrown with
                every crumple-ene); the medals were worn
                on the left side, the eyes up to the right;

                they stood together to attention, in profile
                before the wet facades of eleventh hour,
                eyes forward, eyes down, pursed and still

 

three photographs in the house of an old friend: her father when newly enrolled in the army shortly before World War II – he served in Africa; herself in her then-best dress in the very early 1960s; father and daughter standing on a wet street collecting for Remembrance Day …

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

20th century wormhole: ‘God, who am I …?’
attention & smile wormhole: dear Lucy
daughter wormhole: mother and daughter
eyes wormhole: addictive
father & lifetimes wormhole: granny
field wormhole: walk from Castleton to Hope
green & white wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 220211
hair wormhole: immeasurable love
horizon wormhole: Bexhill 140215
house wormhole: slightly / uphill
mouth wormhole: over-pink cagoule
sky wormhole: low afternoon
war wormhole: memorial

 

this time

Tags

2*, Charlotte, driving, fields, houses, identity, openness, passing, time, trees

                this                time

                in the back seat
                driven by Dot
                houses through trees
                open fields turning

 

 

 

^{————w}(O)rmholes_________________________________|—–

Charlotte wormhole: love and precision
identity & time wormhole: dream I // dream II
openness wormhole: such such potential
passing wormhole: pass and / fro
trees wormhole: a nice grey woollen picnic blanket