Words or pictures?

Words seem to be wriggling out from between my grasping fingers at the moment, so for the past few months I have resorted to making images instead of writing.

I've always dealt in both words and pictures, and sometimes a single idea is easier to pin down as a drawing: one picture that says more than enough. When words threaten to reveal too much, pictures offer something to hide behind. Creativity is a hot potato that I have to put down somewhere, in order to blow awhile on my burning fingers. The page is where things go, and it doesn't matter whether what burns its way through my fingers and onto paper is hieroglyphics or images. There is a time for both, and since last summer it has been the time to draw and paint and photograph.

Therefore, to celebrate the newness of 2013 my blog has some nice new hand-drawn buttons for my Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr links - but for the time being there will probably not be many new words. These I am keeping tucked away in my notebooks until the year is a little older, and I feel a little bolder.

Forge

Brunhilde - December 2012

The rock is an anvil and her raging heart the white-hot fire.

Her breath is the bellows; her fist the hammer; the pulse at the base of her throat is the rhythm she works to.

The instructions are in a book of tattered and patched parchment; the leaves yellowed, crackling like autumn leaves as she turns them; the crabbed lettering faded to sepia; the diagrams and drawings spidery sketches, jewel-bright miniatures. She reads the instructions aloud: draw-out, anneal, forge-weld, temper, indurate, quench, bevel, file, flux and hone.

What she carries on her body is the metal she works with: the rose-gold wedding band; the clamorous silver bangles; the enamel locket; the amber earrings; the garnet pendant on a heavy gold chain; the ring of iron keys; the belt of Scythian coins; the gleaming copper boot buckles; the brass buttons from her father's pea-coat; her mother's silver darning needle and golden pen-nib.

She rolls up her sleeves, ties back her hair and stokes the fire. She makes ready the mould, turns up the heat.

She sets to work.

In everything I create

In everything I create there is: 

the walk home from school,
the grey road,
the church,
the graveyard,
the butcher, the baker, Mrs Brown's old curiosity shop,
the bus stop,
the copper beech,
the kerb,
the crossing,
the calico cat sitting on the wall,
the tub of fuchsias,
the telephone box,
the postbox,
the corner,
the hill,
the hedgerow,
the shifting light,
the tunnel of trees,
the driveway,
the blue door,
the golden key

When you speak to me

When you speak to me, you are speaking to your will.

I try to imagine where I might have left you:

A gull's white feather folded beneath my pillow?

A pair of horn rimmed glasses under a bedside table in an Ealing boarding-house?

A tarnished dime left in the saucer of my coffee cup at the Yonah Shimmel Knish Bakery on East Houston Street?

I try to reassure you, to coax you out from your hiding place, but you sit tight. It is almost dusk when I finally find you tucked away, small as a nut, deep within the hawthorn hedge; dark eyes, dark hair, the only bright is the gleam of your red Wellington boots.

I take your small, cold hand and lead you home.

Oath

I promise to use it.

Giants

The Wilmington Giant, Eric Ravilious, 1939

You see a figure on the horizon and mistake it for a standing stone or a squat church steeple muscling its way out of the chalky earth. Then it moves and these two things happen: eyes and brain finally acknowledge that this is a figure, monstrous-huge, only the torso yet visible over the brow of the hill; and your heart skips a beat.

How to proceed:

1.  Most likely it is your common or garden variety of Downland or Melancholy Giant (giantus melancholius). Luckly for you, much less dangerous than his cousin, the wily Wealden or Terrible Giant (giantus horrbilium). The Wealden Giant you should avoid at all costs: their grasping hands the size of 7-bar gates, their filed teeth and taste for sweet human flesh, their cunning brains working overtime behind far-seeing eyes and a super-sensitive nose.

2.  The Downland Giant is, by comparison, a lazy, avuncular fellow. He eats sheep, rabbits and hares, and likes to lie among the cowslips on a south-facing slope of downland, weeping quietly in the early summer sunlight. This is probably what he was doing when you disturbed him, tromping past with your dogs and children. Or perhaps he was nestled into one of the many shell-shaped coombes he has carved out of the hillsides around Lewes, his spine curved against the chalk cliff, his head resting on a hay bale.

3.  Do not approach giantus melancholius. He is less-dangerous but still clumsy-fingered, feckless in his immense stupidity, and (worst of all) curious. You do not want to be picked apart by those gatepost-sized questing fingers.

4.  He is (unlike his cousin) phenomenally short-sighted, so stay downwind of him and all will be well.

5.  He has a wolf-keen nose.

6.  Do not ask him to build a wall for you, let alone a house. The price will be too high, no matter he is stupid he will hold you to whatever you agree, and you will find yourself surprised at the bargain you have struck. He will take all you that is most dear to you, and there will be no wiggling out; the contract will hold.

7.  Instead, admire him for what he is: a walking monolith. And then move away, circling the hillside around him until at last he disappears from sight.

(From Walking the South Downs, by Zina Ultika, 1923 - revised edition)

Ring

She gave her ring to the river on the day a certain anniversary crept round again. The ring was gold, bright as her hair; she pitched it high into the air and the river swallowed it with barely a sound; the ring vanished in the silty, wandering water.

The river carried the ring for a while, puzzling it against rocks, the muddy bank, a rotting wooden quay. Then the river gave the ring to a fish; the fish was swimming along with its mouth open, and it swallowed the ring absent-mindedly. The gold gleam was lost in a deeper darkness.

The ring gave the fish a stomach ache. It saw a hook, a worm, near the cloudy surface of the water, and forgot it knew better, bit down hard. The fisherman sliced the fish open, found the ring, tested the gold between his crooked teeth, and tied it in a knot in his handkerchief.

The next day the fisherman gave the ring to his love. Her hair was red gold; she had a freckled nose; had just that moment nicked her thumb peeling potatoes. (She was making chips to go with the fish.) She was surprised how glad she was (felt her heart would explode with joy) when the fisherman pressed the ring into her hand.

"It's nothing," he said. "The river gave it to me."

She tossed the chips into the deep fat fryer, and the oil hissed like a flock of angry geese. When she slid the ring onto her finger it fitted perfectly, lying snug in a shallow groove just above the second knuckle.

The chips were just right: crisp, golden, and perfectly seasoned. But to punish the fisherman she overcooked the fish. Later she tossed the skin and the potato peel into the river.

That night a fish swam back and forth in the silty water beneath the woman's house. It sang to her in a voice that was crisp and golden; she had never heard anything so beautiful. The song filled her head, flooded her room, the house, poured through the deserted streets and out into the surrounding fields and water meadows.

At last, in the darkest hour, just before daybreak, the woman left her bed and walked down to the river bank. The tide was flooding in, the river as high as she had ever seen it. There was the thumbprint of a ghostly moon above the rooftops. Hitching up her skirt, the ring glinting on her finger, the woman waded into the cool, silty water; let the river hold her; and let it sweep her away.

Contract

If I give you my favourite conker, will you give me your blue cat's eye marble?

In exchange for this cup of tea (strong, two sugars, just how you like it), I'll take a blue Rizla paper and a pinch of tobacco.

You offer me a half-eaten apple (a Hitchin Pippin), assuring me it is the sweetest, juiciest apple you have ever tasted. I take it reluctantly, and in exchange I give you a water-stained prayer card -- St Dymphna, a lily in the crook of her elbow and  a fettered demon at her feet.

I give you a sock puppet with button eyes and a red felt tongue. You put a mother of pearl brooch buckle into my pocket.

For a still-warm oatmeal and raisin biscuit wrapped in tinfoil; a milk bottle you found in the stream bed, packed full of emerald moss.

A notebook -- blank now that the first four pages have been ripped out -- is swapped for a string of fake pearls and a diamanté brooch shaped like a lizard, with red glass eyes.

An iron file for a forked hazel divining rod.

A bone lace bobbin for a pack of old playing cards - on the back a bottle-green mermaid chases her tail through a forest of water weeds.

We shuffle, cut the cards three times. I draw the queen of spades; you the knave of hearts.

You hand me a pen made from a goose quill and a bottle of black ink. I sign my name with a flourish; give you my hand, palm facing up, trusting you will take it.

You offer a rumba; I counter with an American smooth foxtrot.

In exchange for your great-grandmother's wedding ring -- old Welsh gold, peachy as a California sunset -- I hand you a plane ticket, for anywhere in the world, economy class, one way, non-refundable.

Fury / longing

If I had a hammer

I'd hammer in the morning

I'd hammer in the evening

All over this land

(from the Hammer Song,

by Lee Hays and Pete Seeger)

I think I understand Wotan; how the urge to create and the impulse to destroy exist in the same shadowy place.

I understand how it is possible to make something breathtakingly beautiful (Valhalla, for example, an artful palace with the plushest marble bathrooms in the universe) and how the awareness of what you had to destroy to make this beautiful thing (selling your sister to giants, tearing apart the world ash tree) means at the end you can't bear to inhabit what you have created.

You wonder what you did it for. How you had the audacity. So Fricka could see her face reflected a thousand thousand times in those gleaming bathroom mirrors?

The moment the job is done you itch to take a little hammer and tap, tap, tap on the mirror's bevelled edge;

and the unseemly joy when you see a hairline crack appear and know that this thread of a fissure will in fact shatter the world, bring the whole show down around you.

"Idiot," you say to yourself. Grinning like the feckless idiot you are.

The river's daughter

She takes them
But they burn her
With their heat and passion and inconsistent longing
The fret of betrayal she sees each one wear
Slipping across his face like a mask
And so with her cold kiss
She damps their human fire
Plugs their mouths and nostrils with dark green moss
Then leaves them
(She never loved them)
For the river, the wind, wild animals to disperse
This goes on for long years - centuries, perhaps
Although now the interruptions are few
Three or four a decade and not entirely unwelcome
The first beloved died so long time past
That she has forgotten his name, face,
The warmth of his impatient hand upon her breast
Only something essential lingers
As light as the musk of perfume on an ancient piece of cloth
At first the ache of his loss kept her vital
Grief a strong brash branch she clung to
And those that followed him to her dismal shore
They heard her sad, sweet song and came
In a steady stream to lie, die in her arms
What changed she does not know, but the stream was stopped
A trickle just came through, and so she took up hobbies
Stitched a death's head quilt, unbuttoned kittens,
Contrived butterflies like kites and wrote maudlin songs
She accompanied on her ukulele
But rare cold nights, frost-bitten in her shallow bed
She still takes his red shirt and with it she lies down