Day 14

Why should a book tell a tale in a dull straight line? Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats and slip like cats. They should murmur and scream and dance and sing.Sometimes there should be no words at all. Just silence. Just clean white space.

David Almond

Oh Goddess. How could I have let so much time pass without the energy, without the words, of David Almond in my life? I used to devour his books like a starving person, high on their beauty and the way they turned everyday life into a wonderland of magical possibility. Skellig remains the only book I have ever managed to read in a single sitting (mind you, I was ill in bed at the time). I love the way his books make me feel. He challenges me to look more closely and then look again, because nothing and no one is as they seem. There is no “dull”, only ways of seeing. Even the books I didn’t like as much still drew me compulsively. I remember there was one character he created who pretty much did nothing except play computer games all day, with barely a word to anyone. He only had a tiny part in the book, and yet he is burned permanently into my mind? Why? Because the way David Almond drew him, there was an absolute intensity to his focus and absorption. To the outside world, he was nothing. He did not interact more than he could help and he served no useful purpose. He was no one. A non-being. And yet he continued to sit there, not blindly or dully, but passionately, with enormous amounts of energy all drawn into the activity on the screen before him. In his passion for his “work”, he gave off the impression that everything he did was of vital importance. And who knew? Perhaps it was. Perhaps his skill, passion and knowledge would one day make an absolutely enormous difference to the world that no one could possibly foresee. Or perhaps, by being always there, the very predictability and reassurance of his presence would one day matter. Or maybe, no one would ever know why he was there. But he was there. And he mattered. It was of no consequence whether anyone ever knew or understood why. The universe knew. And the universe was all that needed to know.

The time came, however, when I had read everything I could find. There was nothing left. I mourned, but moved on. Eventually, absorbed in other books, other writers, other worlds, I forgot. Not forgot exactly, but forgot to check whether there was any more. David Almond became part of my past, like a beautiful dream. I forgot that he still existed in the present moment. Until yesterday. Yesterday, for some reason, I decided to check again. I wanted something that would not only absorb me but would really get inside me and come alive. Only that’s not true. That’s the story I tell myself about it now. At the time, as I scrolled through all my book samples, they were like messengers from the past, revealing what I once thought I would one day like to read. Only yesterday, everything looked too heavy. Too serious. Too important. I needed play and lightness. Silliness and frivolity. And yet something I could care about all at the same time. That is how I made my discovery. Through the need to let go of being important. A new David Almond book!

So much time has passed since I last read any of his work that I actually wasn’t prepared for the way his opening lines rushed at me in greeting. It was like being knocked over by an over-exuberant puppy who doesn’t know his own size. Everything is at a run and a jump; this puppy doesn’t know how to simply walk. And wouldn’t see the purpose of the activity if he did. Now, as I began to read about Mina, I found the words dancing across the pages in a wild celebration of life. Even the font would not stay still, but would unexpectedly shift to larger text. It is all short staccato and exclamation points. If it were music, it would be an uneven, ragged skipping rhythm, with the drum beating time. Only, even the drum would be a little too exuberant, not always keeping strictly to tempo but following its own fancy of the moment. As I read, I became consumed by its wild energy and found my own heart racing in response. I could not have chosen better. With David Almond I am truly alive in ways I otherwise do not even see.

I’m not sure why Mina’s story should tell me this, but as she declaimed to her journal, I made a connection in my own mind. Why, I have been wondering, have I not looked up what really happened all those years ago in Canberra? Why have I not found out whether there really and truly was a Satanic cult in operation or whether it was simply an urban legend, much passed-around? For all I know, the girl in the wheelchair I saw at the doctor’s surgery that time may have ended up in a wheelchair for some completely different reason, and it was merely malicious – or thoughtless – rumour that painted a completely different picture for her and dictated what others saw when they looked at her. Or maybe hers was a completely isolated case, with no connection at all to a dark and hidden coven. Wasn’t it my responsibility to find out? To know the facts? But I’ve never seemed able to persuade myself to dig further, to “know”. Any more than I have ever found the true energy or motivation to look up other names, facts and categories of logical information. It would help me enormously, for example, if I could share with you what I see by being able to tell you the names of the plants and other things I see from my window, but I cannot. So you will never know what I am seeing and will have to imagine it for yourself. You can only ever know what it feels like to see what I see. If, of course, I ever find it relevant to describe what I see from my window.

Mina has helped me to see that I am like Francis Spufford, finding myself in the world around me and declaring that it has found me. It is, in the end, not facts that matter. It is our perceptions and beliefs that define and create our reality. The facts of what occurred in Canberra are ultimately irrelevant. The “truth”, for me, is in how I respond to what I hear and see. In what I choose to believe and how those beliefs shape my thoughts, feelings and actions in the future. I look at the other and find myself looking back at me. I use the world, not as a window, but as a mirror. A little like The High Priestess in the Raven’s prophecy tarot, except that I am not usually consciously aware that I am looking inwards, subscribing instead to the illusion that I am viewing the external, “objective” world. But Mina won’t let me get away with that. I imagine her holding a neatly-ordered tarot deck. Instead of carefully shuffling and laying out a spread on a special, sacred cloth, in my mind she scoops up the cards, looks into the sky and laughs. Her arms shoot upwards and release, and the air is filled with flying cards, blown on the breeze and spinning, tumbling in all directions. Some will land face-down, some face-up. Some will land in the dirt, others on grass. Some may even be lost or accidentally trampled. But Mina, in my imagination, is not worried. Instead, finally, she looks directly at me and there is absolutely no malice in her, no sense of having risked damage or loss of property. Instead, she smiles eagerly and pulls out a card that has happened to fall close to her foot. “Choose,” she implores, as she leans forward earnestly and confidingly. “Choose your meaning!”

This morning I therefore decided that that is exactly what I would do. I would choose my meaning. I did something I have been meaning to this month and yet for some reason had not done. Today marks two weeks of my self-imposed hermitage – two weeks! How is it possible that in all those days, I have not found time to create artwork? The only answer, of course, is that at some level I did not want to. Either I was not ready or it simply wasn’t what I needed at the time. But this morning I pulled out my paints and sketch book. I should tell you right now that I cannot paint. Or draw. I did recently have one lesson in drawing and the teacher surprised me by telling me that I have a good eye for proportion. Seriously? That is something I have never believed about myself. In fact, it was my proportion – or lack thereof - that made me give up in frustration at school. It took very little effort to look around the classroom and realise how much worse, how much more baby-ish, my work was compared to everyone else’s. If I wanted to learn to draw, I was going to have a very long path to walk.

But the teacher I had for my outdoor drawing class said that my proportions were good. I just needed to be less hesitant once I had created my outline and show more confidence in building up the depth of shading, rather than barely touching the page with my pencil. She urged me to choose points at which to gradually build up the layers, so that the drawing could become 3-dimensional and live. The difference was, I guess, that I had an entire hour to do nothing except concentrate on a stick (I chose a stick because it was the least complicated thing I could imagine to draw!). There were fewer distractions and I wasn’t trying to create a masterpiece straight up. All my attention was on the stick. It’s a bit like handwriting I guess. Mine is usually a dreadful scrawl, even if I try to be neat. It can be quite painful to write, with my hand seeming not to want to follow the commands of my brain and my mind chafing at the slowness of it all. But, when I stop thinking ahead about what I want to write, and concentrate only on the individual letter, then the next and the next, I really can write neatly. Drawing, apparently, is much the same. It doesn’t help to see the finished picture in your head and madly command your hand to cooperate in the process of realising it. You have to breathe into each moment and forget the outcome. Concentrate only on the very next stroke of the pencil. Then, something may – or may not – happen.

That kind of objective precision was not, however, my aim this morning. I haven’t tried that surprising, careful drawing exercise again because, disappointingly, I find myself becoming wriggly with impatience. For someone who likes stillness, I seem to have an awful lot of wriggles in me sometimes. This morning I didn’t want to worry about anything looking “good”. I didn’t want to aim for my usual (failed) attempt at the neatness, precision and objectivity my mother so encouraged and tried so hard to instil in me. So I got out the water colours and wet the page. I wanted a completely black, heavy background. First obstacle: I didn’t have any black paint. Improvisation was to be required of me. I chose instead deep purple, it being one of the darkest colours available to me. I washed the paint over the page, again and again and again, building up the depth and heaviness as much as I possibly could. Only, it would not be dark and heavy. It was beautiful, all swirls and shadows. It was, I was startled to discover, very like my favourite quilt cover, deep and soft and inexpressibly reassuring. No matter how I tried for heaviness, I could not achieve it.

Finally, I abandoned purple. It took a while, not because I was frustrated with my inability to express what I wanted, but because, to be honest, I became mesmerised with the process of the colour going on the page. It felt like a universe was being created and I was part of its birth. Not its creator or even its facilitator, merely its companion and witness. At last, it was done, and, when the page had dried a little, I placed, in the very centre, a tiny white dot (it was meant to be pure white but of course wasn’t quite) with outstretched wings. I wanted it to be a bird, a bird lost amidst all that emptiness. All that nothing. It was meant to represent engulfment and despair; I wanted to depict sadness, fear, isolation – even loneliness. Why loneliness? I do not know. But the grief and fear were everything as I tried to paint my feelings onto the page in front of me.

But they would not go. And it wasn’t a technical failure or a fault of self-criticism on my part. The “problem” was that the more I painted, the more the feelings were transformed. The vast emptiness became a great sea of welcoming reassurance and comfort; isolation became beautiful and expansive solitude. I found myself lost and drawn into its beauty. My very “lost-ness” was no longer something to be feared but instead something to be celebrated. Only in being lost could discovery be made. If I were to ever explore or find anything, I must first lose all that I held on to. I must allow myself to be lost and to be embraced by that vast, listening, welcoming emptiness.

I put the paints away and pinned up my transformative darkness. Then I went to the rocking chair on my verandah, oblivious (impervious?) to the risk of being “seen”. I sat in the rain while I rocked and rocked and rocked, getting wetter and wetter, and all before me was an endless sea of purple and possibility.

Tiny. 

Insignificant. 

A pinprick of light against 

a sea of dark. 

Darkness without end. 

Fear has brought me here. 

Alone. 

There is no room for breath, 

or thought, 

or being. 

Fear extinguishes all, 

but the sea goes on.

And it is beautiful. 

Beautiful and deep beyond words, 

reaching out with soft, dark tendrils of infinity 

to encompass the tiny point of light 

that is my beating heart. 

I feel the darkness enter me: 

To suffocate? 

Or to release? 

Even as I lose the capacity for breath 

I find myself retreating. 

Escaping. 

Slowly, slowly 

I recede, 

until I can see the tiny point 

of light 

I call myself. 

Further and further away 

it becomes 

and I am one with the shifting purple depths, 

one with the ever-rising, 

ever-spiralling cloud. 

I am Emptiness 

and Light 

and Being. 

I am the dancing rhythm of the night. 

I do not need to breathe 

for I am Breath itself.

There in the far distance, 

Breath washes over that tiny point of light 

and I watch as it grows more luminous. 

I allow myself to see, 

faintly at first but ever brighter, 

light upon light upon light. 

A river of Being 

connected through the 

dark emptiness of space.

I am the tiny point of light 

and I am the Breath, the 

darkly beating heart of 

Silence.

I am Nothing. 

I am All.

I reach out with the 

soft fingers of Night 

and hold my own 

tiny, beating heart 

in Love.