Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – pageant of the trees

Tags

5*, alder, almond, apple, ash, beech, blossom, breeze, cherry, clock, elm, eyes, fir, fire, flame, garden, gaze, green, ground, hazel, hedge, leaves, oak, orchard, pink, shadow, silence, sky, sound, Spring, step, thought, trees, white, wood, writing, yellow

                pageant of the trees

                spring’s tonic rising
                and hazel catkins swell
                to greet the first warm days

                elm and alder to follow
                heralding beech and oak
                and later the firs will show

                their new cones, dusting
                the ground with yellow;
                the gardens will fill with

                almond blossom and
                orchards will froth with
                cherry white and apple pink,

                aperitif to coming summer;
                hedgerows become en-veiled
                in diaphanous haze, a

                million leaves on the
                passing breeze; stop
                writing, now, step out

                beneath the cavernous sky,
                deep into the quiet of a glade
                to be silent within silence,

                eyes open like shadows
                in dancing leaves and thoughts
                greener to the underside

                                                                —–

                                                gazing between sentences
                                                into the fire

                                                the beam from the
                                                old house burns clear flame,

                                                tinsel murmurings between
                                                the ticking clock,

                                                until pure white ash
                                                falls without sound

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees

 

 

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

blossom & breeze & fir & garden & green & hedge & oak & shadow & silence & thought & writing & yellow wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Trees
eyes wormhole: ‘… and yet I think I am so modest: …’
leaves & pink & sky & sound & trees & white & wood wormhole: La Route de Louveciennes, 1870
spring wormhole: SPRING AND ALL I by William Carlos Williams

 

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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

 

behind / glass walls and wan and hooded eye

Tags

2017, 6*, abdomen, avenue, being, boundary, doing, eye, frame, glass, gold, heart, hill, house, Knole Park, nude, oak, sky, sound, stone, thought, vista, walls

                there was the house on the higher land
                with vista up to avenues of higher sky
                and generations of oak rolling downhill

                the rough stone frame between thought
                and act, the lattice glass through which
                to understand where we are

                then the oak crack plank and creak
                that bridge the languid nude that
                curves all known boundary

                and the chiselled abdomen and arm
                that built between what is always there
                and at the heart the restored crushed

                gold tumbling about event that never
                happens and continues not to behind
                glass walls and wan and hooded eye

 

Knole House

 

 

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

abdomen wormhole: AT-tennnnnnnn – waitfrit waitfrit – SHUN!
being wormhole: so where have I got:
doing wormhole: polystyrene / boulderscape
glass wormhole: green and / luminant / to behold
gold wormhole: the too big moon
house wormhole: looking ahead
oak wormhole: walk from Castleton to Hope
sky & sound wormhole: chuckling
stone wormhole: is this it // all the time
thought wormhole: stuck in lower realm
walls wormhole: ‘when travelling astrally …’

 

walk from Castleton to Hope

Tags

'scape, 2013, 5*, beech, Castleton, field, hill, holiday, leaning, leaves, mauve, oak, passing, red, river, shadow, shape, time, walking

                walk from Castleton to Hope

                                magnificent
                oak grown into its own shape
                mid-field and backdropped
                completely over and rising
                                in hill

                                then later
                walking lightly beside the
                top leaves of the beech leaning
                effortlessly over the river from the
                                other bank

                                eventually
                up ahead out from under the shadow
                a perfect red and mauve –
                … no, a couple in their holiday
                                t-shirts

 

 

 

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

Castleton wormhole: St. Edmund’s / Parish Church / Castleton
field & passing wormhole: prelude: // travel
holiday & leaves wormhole: lesson from watching two crane flies work the evening / skating across the panes flying and pushing legs grappling / the glass crossing repulsive over themselves and clinging akimbo / for a rest until lifeless just to get their stickly bodies through to the light
mauve wormhole: 1968
oak wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – A Sign of the Times
red wormhole: greedy
river wormhole: south horizon
shadow wormhole: that comicbookshop … // … in dreams
time wormhole: wakeoutofadream
walking wormhole: garden

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – A Sign of the Times

Tags

1967, 3*, air, autumn, blackberries, blackbird, branches, brown, change, chestnut tree, childhood, climbing, clouds, cottage, countryside, cows, echo, elm, Essex, field, grass, green, grey, hawthorne, hedge, hill, ivy, lark, leaves, life, memory, Michael J Redford, mist, oak, path, red, RF Hilder, rook, running, seagull, signpost, silence, singing, sitting, sky, skyline, snake, summer, sycamore, the Boats of Vallisneria, time, tits, trees, vista, walking, wind, woodland, work, yellow

A Sign of the Times

Things are changing around us all the time and when one lives with and through these changes it can be very difficult to tell when they occur.   Changes are more evident and in many cases more startling when one returns to a scene of bygone years, and this has never been made more clear to me than now as I sit beside a signpost in an Essex lane.   It is a contrast so shocking that it has left me quite numb, and it is difficult to understand how not only the facial character, but also the spiritual character of the countryside can be altered beyond recognition.

Some five years ago, I holidayed with friends who lived in south east Essex.   One morning I crossed the meadow at the rear of the cottage and entered Ten Acres which sloped gently to the woods below.   The full heat of the summer had abated to the mildness of early autumn and great mountains of cumulous, creamy topped, towered above me, their shadows coursing silently over the yellow-grey stubble.   Two glistening sea gulls above the oaks did verbal battle with a colony of rooks quarrelling in the elms and, far above, it seemed a thousand larks were singing.   Blackberries, some bright red others over-ripe and heavy with juice, shaded themselves in the hedgerow, and beside a weathered bale of straw, forgotten perhaps or left too wet for carting, a grass snake basked in the sun.

Gazing down the green slope, there came within me a sudden desire to run, to stretch my legs in great leaping strides, to see the hedgerows flash by in a blur and to feel the mild air stream about me.   I wanted to race the wind that went tumbling down the hill to the woods below.   Twenty years earlier the desire would have been satiated without further thought, but time passes and the unconscious brakes of inhibition condemn these simple pleasures to the memory’s store.   For one brief second I was a young boy again about to satisfy a desire, but then all too soon, I was a man again, and grown men are not expected to behave in such a manner.   To see a child walking along the road in an orderly fashion one moment and then break into a mad gallop the next is an occurrence accepted without question, but many an eyebrow would be raised if I were to do such a thing now.   Such are the many simple pleasures we must perforce leave aside as we grow up.   There are of course many other pleasures which take their place, but even so the illogical, spontaneous desires of childhood every so often burst within the heart and flood the mind with memories.

I had reached the wood and was a boy once more.   Gazing above, I felt a sudden desire to reach up and haul myself into the green branches.   One can climb a tree a hundred times and go up and come down a hundred different ways.   I think perhaps it is the additional dimension which gives tree climbing that extra fascination, for if one explores an area of ground, one has but two dimensions to contend with, but up here in a green swaying arbour, one has a third.   In the fullness of summer, high up in the sycamores and the chestnuts, there are green caverns to explore, and the diverging paths that disappear into the foliage above lure one on to the very top where, in green shrouded secrecy, one can survey the surrounding terrain.

To me, and no doubt to a large number of other adults, these things still hold a fascination and most of us are able to fulfil these old desires in one way or another.   It may be by toying with model railways or messing about in boats; it may be by dressing for the local amateur dramatics or taking part in a sport.   On the other hand, it may be by casting a furtive glance over the shoulder and climbing a tree.

After walking for an hour or so, I came upon a signpost beside an open gate and, finally bowing to the truth that I am no longer a boy, I sat beside the gate to rest my weary legs.   The foliage of the countryside had turned a very dark green, almost brown in fact, heralding an early autumn.   The grass between the drills of faded stubble would not grow much higher now.   It had been an early year altogether and quite a large number of farmers had managed a second cut of hay.   Now the harvest was done and the good earth awaited the plough and the frost.   Hawthorn berries were an abundant red across the headland and a distant skein of Friesians grazed their way slowly across the skyline above.   A tit leapt across my view and into a thicket close by and made the shiny red rose-hips dance.   All around was the gentle yet positive movement of life.   It was something to be not only seen, but felt.   Little did I realise then how all this was to be changed.

Now five years have passed and I am once more beside the signpost, but this year the summer has been short.   Already the trees are bare and possess that clipped appearance of a Hilder autumnal study.   The tall grasses in the leafless hedgerows bend stiffly beneath the chilly winds which have been noticeable this past month.   Gone is the suppleness in their sway, gone is the living green from their stems.   Soon a wintry gale will snap and blow them into the ditches to join the ghosts of previous years.   The lanes are filled with dead leaves, but no longer do they echo with the laughter of children as they wade knee deep through them, for nobody comes this way now.   The gate hangs askew on its rusty hinges and needs to be lifted and torn from the coarse grasses which grasp the bottom rail.   Such action however, is not necessary, for although the signpost once read ‘Public Footpath’, no one walks this way now.   The letters are illegible and covered with green lichen, and around its rotting base a small ivy begins to reach for the sky.   The footpath which ran diagonally across the field is no longer to be seen, not that this matters either, for the tiny lane bears no traveller save that of the drifting mists of autumn.

(R.F. Hilder (1905 – 1993), an English marine and landscape artist and book illustrator).

I gazed at the signpost and thought of the sweat that went into the making of it.   Strong backs bent to dig the hole, strong arms lifted the stout wooden post.   A craftsman’s eye morticed in the sign that is as square today as it ever was.   The painted letters have peeled and left but a ghost on the woodwork.   It doesn’t matter anyway, for no one passes this way now.   But it used to lead somewhere.   For someone the sign pointed to journey’s end; once cows scratched their necks upon it and children used it as a target for throwing pebbles.   But now it merely points to the wind.   There is a strange silence in the sky.   No rooks, gulls or larks can I hear; no animals rustling in the hedgerows.   Never have I witnessed such an empty land, a land so void of life and feeling.   Although the wind is cold upon my neck, I cannot hear it in the trees and the dead leaves, sodden from the wandering mists, make no sound as they fling themselves at my boots.   The ditches have filled with rotted vegetation and the water has spread.   Marsh grasses and wild flock have appeared for a brief spell of life.   And brief it will be, for six months from now, the new town will be born.

                Once I worked among green hills
                And as I worked I sang, oh yes
                I sang mid the trees, in echoing woods
                And o’er the dewy fields.

                I sang with the rising lark, whose voice
                Cascaded from above,
                I sang always a joyous song
                Of those things that I love.

                My orchestra came from the wind,
                From trickling brooks and rustling leaves,
                From earth below and all about,
                E’en heaven’s lofty eaves.

                But now my green hills lay beneath
                A glaring concrete face
                And where once sang the blackbird’s heart,
                Ten thousand people pace.

                So now accompaniment have I none,
                Nor reason for to sing.
                My heart they buried ‘neath the stone
                When marched the new town in.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

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

air & branches & seagull wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – gull circling out at sea
autumn & hedge & leaves & trees & wind wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J Redford – Simon Upon The Downs
blackbird & childhood wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – from arm to nature, doing nothing
brown & grey & path & red & silence & yellow wormhole: hello, luvvey, do you want a cup of tea?
change wormhole: reaching branch
clouds & sitting wormhole: and smile / like a bud
echo wormhole: fresh destiny
field wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – I suddenly / remembered
green & sky wormhole: through the pane – poewieview #34
life & mist & time wormhole: AT-tennnnnnnn – waitfrit waitfrit – SHUN!
oak wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:
skyline wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
walking wormhole: trying to focus / on walking
work wormhole: travel

 

Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – the soft canticle of the gourds:

Tags

'scape, 1783, 1967, 2016, 8*, balloon, beginning, Bois de Boulnogne, breathing, circle, clouds, colour, creativity, dark, death, distance, earth, end, Eternity, eyes, fate, glass, gourds, green, growth, heart, humanity, identity, letter, life, light, line, machine, Mars, meadow, Milky Way, name, now, numbers, oak, orange, pattern, questioning, shape, silence, solar system, song, space, speech, speed, stars, table, the Boats of Vallisneria, thought, time, toad, uncle, universe, windows, wood, yellow

 

 

 

a bowl of gourds on the dark-wood table
before the window before the paddock to the
piggery, unadorned, and cultivated through
chance and heel, forgotten beside the trellis;

a bowl of colour and varied shape: Bishop’s
Mitre, Red Turk’s Cap; one looks like the
old orange toad who lives behind the
water butt and likes to be called Bebe;

but the Montgolfiere balloon of yellow
and green took me up through slated
cloud in 1783 from the Bois de Boulogne,
so came the silence on the way to the stars

such a time away at ions of eyes per hour,
rivulets in tributary down the inside of the
flask by letter and equation far beyond my
jiggery and pokery, round ticket through

time …   I breathed in back from the mass
so distant that its light would never return,
back in through milky way and system,
faster than any quantum of backward light,

back past giants and Mars, back into
Earth’s sweet atmosphere and the waiting
bowl brimming with the circles and undulate
trajectory of every plot surmised beyond

my paned windows; where meadow fescue
curves like blackened oak and manual
labour, abhorrent of vacuum and straightened
line (those harbingers of discontinuance):

they almost screamed at me, “This is now,
this is NOW;” mind confined by time grades
eternity by linear thought which always
misses the soft canticle of the gourds:

                                                                      “So man, upon his world so great
                                                                      Has always wanted to create
                                                                      Machines which, started once will never
                                                                      Cease but carry on for ever.

                                                                      Yet all the time O foolish man,
                                                                      You’re merely part of that great plan,
                                                                      A tiny part, hast thou not seen
                                                                      This wondrous universe machine?

                                                                      This motion so perpetual
                                                                      Is the universe and all
                                                                      That lies beyond in time and space,
                                                                      E’en down to us, the human race.

                                                                      There’ll be no end, there was no start,
                                                                      There is no shape therefore no heart.
                                                                      And to create it doth aspire
                                                                      To use the debris of its ire.

                                                                      Poor mortal look deep in your heart
                                                                      And realise that you’re just a part
                                                                      Of that which knows no boundaries,
                                                                      Heeds not your trivial quandaries.

                                                                      Servants of the cosmos vow
                                                                      To play your part and take your bow,
                                                                      Or servants you will always be –
                                                                      Until you die, ‘tis then you’re free.”

 

read the collected work as it is published: here
this is an appliquiary to : The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds

 

 

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

breathing wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
clouds & creativity & green & life & oak & orange & silence & space & stars & thought & uncle & yellow wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
death & windows wormhole: the policies came to nothing
eyes wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
glass wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
identity & light & time wormhole: tired
speech wormhole: constant hummm
wood wormhole: Michael Redford: triptych

 

The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds

Tags

1967, balloon, black, blue, buildings, clouds, colour, cottage, countryside, creativity, distance, earth, end, garden, gourds, green, heart, herbs, humanity, Kent, life, light, line, Mars, mathematics, meadow, Milky Way, name, nature, now, oak, orange, pattern, poem, shape, silence, slugs, solar system, space, speed, stars, start, sun, thought, time, toad, uncle, universe, valley, vow, wind, windows, yellow

A Bowl of Gourds

On the kitchen table in front of the window that looks across the paddock to the piggery reposes a bowl of gourds.   I had always associated ornamental gourds with the exhibitionistic bric-a-brac of Victoriana, something which I could well do without in my small cottage.   Then one day a friend gave me some seeds among which were those of ten gourds.   Having never before imposed censorship on any form of life, I heeled them into the soil beside a trellis and forgot them.

Now, here upon the table is a bowl of colour, a bowl of shapes so varied that it seems quite illogical that they should all come from the same type of plant.   Their names also are just as demanding for attention: Bishop’s Mitre, Ohio Squash, Red Turk’s Cap, Squirting Cucumber and numerous others.   In the centre of the bowl is a warted gourd which, despite its bright orange colour, reminds me of the old fat toad who lives behind the water butt in the yard.   We call the toad Bebe after the initials of her species Bufo Bufo, and if the sun is particularly fierce, I water her retreat to prevent her becoming dehydrated from loss of water through her skin.   After all, one must take care of a creature such as Bebe who appears to be more effective of clearing the lawn of slugs than a hundredweight of poison and who knows, if it wasn’t for Bebe, perhaps I might not be gazing at a warted gourd at this very moment.

My thoughts are diverted from the toad to a Montgolfiere balloon of yellow and green vertical bands, and soon I am rising gently through slate coloured clouds into the deep blue beyond.   What were the thoughts, I wonder, of the Marquis d’Orlandes and Pilatre de Rozier as they saw the Bois de Boulogne slip smoothly from beneath them in 1783.   As the cheers faded, so came the silence.   For the very first time man had lost all tangible contact with mother earth and the first step on man’s long journey to the stars began.   The stars?   I questioned the thought, for it would still take all of three thousand years to reach Proxima Centauri, the star nearest to Earth (apart from the sun, that is) should we travel at the impossible speed of one million miles per hour.   Even at optical velocity it would still take four years and four months to reach our destination.   The problem then is not so much one of distance, but one of time.   Theoretically it is possible to condense time, and if we could condense it to a sufficient degree, man could circumnavigate the universe within his own lifetime.   A paper by L.R. Shepherd, Ph.D., read to the British Interplanetary Society in 1952 explains through the medium of mathematics far beyond my comprehension, how a time distillation effect is produced at near optic velocities.   If, for example, an astronaut makes a round trip to a local star and records a journey of three years, on his return to Earth he will have found that twenty one years have in actual fact passed.   All the mathematical jiggery and pokery in the world however cannot possibly reverse the procedure; nature still gives us a one way ticket through time.

My mind came back slowly from its extra-galactic wanderings, back through our own milky way, through the local cluster to the fringes of our solar system.   Thoughts travel faster than any quantum of light.   Out there beyond the human eye, is a mass so distant that it is hurtling away from our own island universe at such a velocity that its light will never reach us.   Yet the mind can flick to all corners of the universe in a second.   Back come my thoughts past the giant planets, the asteroids and Mars, back into Earth’s sweet atmosphere, through the slate grey clouds and so once more to my bowl of gourds.

It is a bowl brimming with curves and circles reminding me of the rolling countryside beyond my window.   It reminds me also of the time I stayed at a friend’s house in Kent.   From his garden, heavy scented with herbs, I could see but one building across the small valley.   It was a modern house of straight and severe line, not at all part of the natural scene.   The lines of the countryside are soft and moving as the blue distant swell of the undulating hills; as the stem of the meadow fescue curved from the prevailing winds like the archer’s bow; as the blackened oak beams that rise from floor to gable of the labourer’s cottage and indeed as the back of the labourer himself whose broad shoulders have borne the weight of many years’ work.   Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so does she abhor a straight line.   But for that house across the valley time would not have existed.   Its rigid lines cut across the flow and caused discontinuance.   They shocked the mind back to the present from its meandering in eternity.   They almost screamed, “This is now, this is NOW,” imprisoning the mind in the confines of time.   We can release our minds into space, we can cast our thoughts out beyond the constellations and beyond the faintest nebula where time is meaningless, for the patterns above have altered but little since the dawn of man but we cannot plumb the depths of time with the same freedom.   The mind is confined to now; always there is something to remind us that this is the present.   Time is a gradation of eternity by conscious thought, therefore it is only when our bodies decay and conscious thought is no more that we can be truly free.

So man, upon his world so great
Has always wanted to create
Machines which, started once will never
Cease but carry on for ever.

Yet all the time O foolish man,
You’re merely part of that great plan,
A tiny part, hast thou not seen
This wondrous universe machine?

This motion so perpetual
Is the universe and all
That lies beyond in time and space,
E’en down to us, the human race.

There’ll be no end, there was no start,
There is no shape therefore no heart.
And to create it doth aspire
To use the debris of its ire.

Poor mortal look deep in your heart
And realise that you’re just a part
Of that which knows no boundaries,
Heeds not your trivial quandaries.

Servants of the cosmos vow
To play your part and take your bow,
Or servants you will always be –
Until you die, ‘tis then your free.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

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

black & blue & green & light & orange wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
buildings wormhole: constant hummm
clouds wormhole: being in love – poewieview #26
creativity wormhole: the both passive and transitive / non-presumptive pre-conceptualist attenuation of being
garden & life & sun & uncle wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
oak & silence & time wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
space wormhole: Saturday – poewieview #3
thought wormhole: ‘on second thought …’ – poewieview #27
wind wormhole: furl-reach
windows wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
yellow wormhole: between thoughts

 

The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts

Tags

1967, Africa, afternoon, air, Apollo, autumn, awakening, beans, bees, beginning, birth, blue, book, bracken, bronze, caterpillar, child, colour, cottage, crickets, dark, death, digging, earth, emerald, end, eyes, face, field, flowers, forest, garden, generation, gold, gorse, grass, hazel, hedgehog, hill, hive, honeysuckle, horse, house martin, ivy, January, journey, joy, lambs, land, lawn, leaves, life, March, memory, migration, mind, moorhen, moorland, morning, mother, nemesia, Norway, oak, plough, poetry, purple, reading, redwing, sadness, seasons, seeds, silence, sitting, sky, skyline, sleep, smell, sound, spiders, starlings, sunlight, the Boats of Vallisneria, thistles, thought, time, transition, trees, uncle, valley, web, wheat, winter, woodlark, work

 

Chapter 1

The Wandering Mind

Autumn Thoughts

I sat in the garden one autumn afternoon reading an old poet.   The sky was unblemished, clear and pure as the face of a child and starlings were deep in conversation close by.   I had mown the lawn that morning just before lunch and turned over the plot where the peas had been cleared.   After this exertion and a good meal, I felt no pang of conscience as I turned my back upon the many other chores that cried for attention and took my book into the garden and relaxed in the warm soporific scent of honeysuckle and freshly cut grass.   After an indeterminable period my thoughts were lifted from the page upon my knee and I drifted across the valley to the hill opposite.   There the grade was steep, too steep for tractor or any other mechanical tool.   A horse therefore was leaning from a plough, moving slowly, almost imperceptively towards the skyline.   The cottage in which I then lived was very old and the hills opposite even older; no doubt at one time they were covered with forest, but many men must have witnessed that same scene before me, many men and many generations.   To them it was a common sight, but to me it was a rare and beautiful sight that spanned the centuries. The scene was timeless.

I felt my head nod forward quite suddenly and I came awake.   The book fell onto the grass and the starlings flew off more in indignation than fright.   In the silence that followed, there filtered through the warmth of the valley the faint jingle of the traces, and as the plough turned upon the headland, a spark of sunlight leapt from the polished harness; it was an impish child of Apollo that danced upon the horse’s back one moment, then without warning, leapt the great expanse of the valley and entered my eye within the same split second.   I realised then that here was a beginning; here, before the old year was done, was another just starting.   Here the earth was being opened up to let in winter’s icy fingers so that she might the better prepare the seed bed for next year’s crop.   Then as the mind’s awareness expanded, I felt that this was not the only beginning taking place, there were many more throughout the changing land.

Visitors were arriving, flowers were blooming, animals were being born.   All about me, as I sat half asleep in the quietude, a great movement of life was in progress, and I thought of another great movement of life that had occurred the previous autumn.   It was an invasion of our fields by the linyphiids or gossamer spiders.   We were drilling wheat at the time and as I crouched low on the footboard of the drill to clear a coulter that had clogged up, I beheld a silken counterpane of gossamer stretched between the faint ridges of the harrowed earth.   The effect, if the eye was held low enough, was that of a thin layer of water shimmering in the early morning sun sending off sparks of individual colour selected at random from all parts of the spectrum.   So taken was I with this scene that all thoughts of clearing the coulters left me as we rattled and jogged across the field, and when harvesting the same field this year, there, as a reminder of that small moment, was a strip bare of swaying gold a hundred yards long and twenty inches wide.

I retrieved the book and placed it on the seat beside me.   The starlings had returned and were even noisier than before and the bees were hurrying to and fro among the nemesia in the hope of collecting and storing that little extra for the months ahead.   Soon they will end their toil; soon they would maim and expel the unfortunate drones and retire to the centre of the hive with the queen in their midst.   The day was magnificent, more like mid-summer than autumn, small wonder indeed that the careless cricket continued to ‘sing’ unaware of the imminent peril of winter.   Many small lives will be lost in the approaching days of darkness yet, through it all, just enough will be saved.   Beneath the apparent calm of autumn is a restlessness; and urgency sweeps through the fields and woodlands as the wiser creatures prepare for flight or lay in stores for sustenance through the long twilight of winter yet to come.

Autumn is a season of transition, a season of intense activity; of flowers flowering and flowers dying, of drilling wheat and cutting beans.   Autumn is a time of birth and death; a time of awakening and a time of going to sleep.   It is a time for the young and a time for the old, a time of both joy and sadness.

This is the time of thistle-down upon the air and goose-grass burrs upon the stockings; when the gorse and broom crackle and pop beneath a March-blue sky and scatter their tiny seeds among the dry stems of the sapless grass.   Now the moors are stained a deeper purple, bracken becomes bronzed and the tree tops dipped in old gold.   In the derries the young caterpillar of the Purple Emperor wraps itself in dead oak leaves and sleeps until the great awakening.   When gossamer fills the air and hazel nuts turn brown the young swallows start on that amazing flight to the shores of Africa, a journey undertaken by their parents a year before who, curiously enough, do not show their offspring the way, but follow on some days later.   How many thousand autumns have witnessed this exodus?   Yet to what blocks of logic and fact can we in all our wisdom attribute this common thing.   The redwing and fieldfare arrive from Norway urging on the lingering house martin.   The woodlark sings, the ivy flowers and the honeysuckle blooms again.   And as the somnolent hedgehog rolls himself in his blanket of leaves, the last brood of moorhen is hatched.   Something sleeps, something awakes; something dies, something is born.

There is no real beginning or end to the year.   Even on the first of January the lambs are growing; leaves are forming within the bud and the young wheat carpets the bare fields with emerald.   But for those whose minds cannot accept the existence of that which has no beginning and no end, then let the division between the years be drawn through autumn, for the onset of winter is really the beginning of the year, not the end.   The young year is born into a cold and sometimes frightening world just as the infant child is released from the warm security of the mother’s womb, and like the child, the infant year begins its life before it is born.   It begins in the womb of autumn.   It is here then (if anywhere) that one thing ends and another begins.   It is here In Sese Vertiture Annus.

 

read the collected work as it is published: here

 

 

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

1967 & garden & life & mind & thought & uncle wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Introduction
afternoon wormhole: “walking …”
air & sound & time wormhole: constant hummm
autumn & gold & sky & smell & trees & work wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
blue & reading wormhole: between thoughts
child & sleep wormhole: 1968
death & eyes wormhole: too late:
field & skyline wormhole: impressionism
leaves wormhole: work
morning wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
mother wormhole: and that’s where I are
oak wormhole: dog bark
poetry wormhole: after all?
purple wormhole: 1967
silence wormhole: the missing chord // the now-silent seagull
sitting wormhole: zero
winter wormhole: 1963

 

dog bark

Tags

'scape, 2014, autumn, clouds, disappearance, dog, leaves, notice, oak, pink, sky, sound, writing

 

 

 

                                                              pink
                                              vapour trail
                                in the turning sky
                which descends to mingle amid the dark oak leaves
                                has disappeared
                                              by the time I check
                                                              to write it

                                                              dog bark

 

 

 

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

autumn wormhole: purple and mauve
clouds wormhole: clouds
dog wormhole: ‘discution poli / d’orage …’
leaves & oak wormhole: London Park in Greenwich town – poewieview #5
pink wormhole: three musicians
sky wormhole: bamboo-green boiled sweet / with soft purple filling
sound wormhole: 1966 … actually sic // of it allllll-bsssssssh – poewieview #8
writing wormhole: seventy two, perhaps – poewieview #9

 

London Park in Greenwich town – poewieview #5

Tags

1966, 2016, boundary, Bowie, death, earth, Greenwich Park, history, iron, leaves, London, lost, love, oak, sycamore, time, walls

                London Park in Greenwich town

                somewhere under oak
                amid drifts of fallen sycamore

                lay the boundaries of iron and tumult of
                leaning wall historically

                drawing the mounds of centurely death bevelling
                the crowded times when

                lost was almost love
                and love was almost possible

                needlessly

 

Rubber Band, 1966; ‘I hope you break yer baton’

Read the collected movements in David Bowie: Movements in Suite Major

 

 

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

Bowie & London wormhole: London Hearts – poewieview #4
death & walls wormhole: development
Greenwich Park wormhole: school uniform
history wormhole: finding my own true nature – Plumstead, Woolwich, 190915
leaves & love wormhole: poessay X: soul love – poewieview #2

oak wormhole: Brugges April 2015 – looking lost
time wormhole: sixty four sixty five – poewieview #1