If this land were a sea, 2016
To the left and below the men have abandoned their vehicles for the woods with their guns. While squatting to examine the breaking pressure of chalk, shots start to fall across the length of the woodland. Following the established track downwards, the shattering sounds fall on anxious ears that now begin to register the tribalistic calls. Calls made in ways far exceeding their purpose of unconcealing and frightening birds. Feeble efforts are made to record their cries and responding shots while in retreat from the hillside.
A windmill to the west, a fox skirts a hedgerow plunging into the thorny shadows. A siren calls over the distance to the next embankment. The brittle echo of a train across the shuntings, or a shooting range filling the gap. A dog answers indifferently.
‘You can’t go any further down there. You used to be able to cross, but now...’, gesturing with an arm to the submerged fields lying below the embankment. The fences are bone like, bleached by light and sharpened at both ends. Between these wooden limbs the ground is edged with a milky sediment; the heavy liquid forming a patchwork of unsubstantial territories of sodden ground tending toward river bed.
Just keep your eyes to the ground, ignore the fences, the dikes filled with reeds moving in tremulous chorus, the glimmering blade of water at the mouth of the river. It is imperative that you keep your sight fixed on the ground before your footfall. The water lies across everything, churned with the sediment and grass to disguise its depth. If it weren’t for the colour you could walk straight off into the body of it; a sharp jolt and the blood tilting in the skull would be the only signs that you’d made such an unfortunate mistake.
The tide tightens its grip through the cleft of the river, causing the strained surface to move in a coagulated writhing; becoming overcome by the weight of the sea’s motion, it directs a gaze away from its end along a new reversed trajectory. Sight is now drawn towards the two Falcons dancing in the side wind, pursuing a pigeon into fatal impact on the grass of the embankment. One plucks feathers from the underbelly, ignorant to its partner’s ridicule by a passing crow, pursuing the comparatively small falcon until the crow’s attention seeps elsewhere.
Gulls rise and crest over one another rippling their wings from the backwash, as others rise over to fill the fore wave, chanting from their encampment within winter floodwaters, in time to the clatter of stones being pulled back from the shore. Three bends in the river and a small flock of starlings have replaced the presence of the gulls; their wings are beating frivolously, yet making no sound at this distance against the wind. They need not converse as they maintain a following distance to the figure edging along the embankment. With eyes still too wary to lift from the carved impression of a path in the sodden mud, to admire the complexity of their presence among reed beds amongst pylons. The starlings maintain a seemingly graceful serpentine tumbling throughout the duration of gusts, while I am left to stumble when pulled into a bow to strike this figure hunched against the cold.
Through height comes orientation, remember this. Between the far hills you can see its whitened blade, indistinguishable to the sky except for the fine wrinkles plucked out of the surface. Keep this blade to your side and you’ll never lose your way. Facing it points the glare too close to your sight, it becomes the destination, a softened line of longing, navigating now by what will always be distant, will always defeat your longing before giving way.
The wind that pours from it has pulled my body into a submissive curve along the top of the Down, pulling my hair taught into my eyes and mouth; so that I am forced into a constant cycle of reclaiming composure and being humorously overwhelmed instantly. Its sound is a pulsating mass punctuated by sporadic lulls, tripping the rhythm of my strides with its contorted motion.
With hearing obstructed, the plunge of the crows becomes all the more sudden and fearful, as they twist from a glide to fall into a stream that robs silence and bearing and safety; expelling them out amongst the recesses of the downs, where the currents can fall to lower fields inland.
Bodies stumble into one another. The gulls rise and fall amid flooded pools; starlings tumble gracefully while following my path from the fields; the head of the tide pushes the sediment laden river in great billowing movements against its will; sheep are forced to move across the corners of fields by man and dog.
What is it to attempt to trace the arc of these motions through walking, always stepping across some unnoticeable source. Cement the failure by completing the circumference without understanding the reasoning behind such an action. Returning again and again, to repeat the walk Woolf never could draw to a close, remaining an ever fading fractal. This replication only disguising the failure of having to turn away slowly, in a jagged arc across hill and field robbed of light. Forced to head back, there below, to the grey fire continuing to cut through the valley, drunk with the thickening of dusk.
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