Apr 25
© Jarek Kisieliński
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© Jarek Kisieliński
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Bridge
The island is filled with the sounds of the sea. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, the metaphor of the ship was used as a token of movement and of composition itself, the narrative becoming a vessel which had to be driven across the face of the deep. The ship also became the frail form of the human being tossed on the ocean of life, with faith and hope and charity as its three anchors. King Alfred continually resorted to nautical imagery, and his own experience of the sea in peace and in war informs his writing; he declares, for example, that ‘a good steersman, by the raging of the sea, is aware of a great wind ere it come. He bids furl the sail and sometimes lower the mast, and let go the cables, and by making fast before the foul wind he takes measures against the storm.’ He uses many compound variants for the sea—egorstream, hronmere, laguflod, fifelstream, merestream—as if its reality could only be understood as shifting and multitudinous. It rises, too, in other Anglo-Saxon prose: in Byrhtferth’s invocation of ‘the salt sea-strand’, for example, and in Werferth’s description of ‘the person who approaches land in a frail ship’. In The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle we read of ‘the tossing waves, the gannet’s bath, the tumult of waters, the homeland of the whale’, this fervent litany calling up the spirit of the deep. The poetry of the sea is deeply implicated in the Anglo-Saxon imagination with its ‘sealte saestreamas ond swanrade’, the salt sea-currents which are the swans’ path, running into all subsequent English verse. The sea is also ‘calde waeter’ with lines which vary ‘the emphasis on the “depths” to “space” to “terror”’ suggesting the English fear of the ocean. In Anglo-Saxon poetry it is as if the island of Britain were truly the home or harbour. This in turn has informed the pastoral dream of England as a calm and tranquil haven. The exile or wanderer, in contrast, in customarily depicted as surrounded by ‘the sea booming—the ice-cold wave’.
Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (2002)
Red Seats
Seeing Red
Boston, MA
Nikon D750
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Long before I’d ever read any Discworld novels, someone told me that Pratchett had described them as “inspired by the writers who were inspired by the writers who were inspired by Tolkien” (a quote that ideally I would have tracked down to its source but I am not quite that person). Most of those writers are, indeed, painfully bad and fully deserving of Pratchett’s satire. But Discworld has more in common with The Lord of the Rings than most of the writers that exist on the continuum between them: Tolkien and Pratchett are both moral storytellers, and they are both, in a big way, writing about Britain; although Tolkien is writing more from a mythic landscape angle, and Pratchett is writing more from a social history/folklore angle. (Folklore being, of course, part of social history.)
The best walks happen at the edges.
Not the centre of town, not the places designed for comfort, but the peripheries.
Where the streetlights grow uncertain. Where the factories fall silent. Where freight trains sleep behind fences and graffiti outlives the buildings it was painted on.
There is a peculiar freedom there.
A sense that civilization has loosened its grip just enough for the imagination to start making bad suggestions.
Nothing ever happened to me.
But every shadow looked capable of filing an appeal.
And perhaps that's part of the attraction.
A pleasant evening stroll, accompanied by fresh air, moonlight, and a statistically insignificant yet emotionally satisfying fear of death.
(Photos d.)
There's something oddly liminal about being in places at times outside of their intended use
It's like being backstage at a show and seeing the reality beneath the crafted performance. The set with no actors
Recently I was in a movie theater that has the emergency exit into a neighboring mall. Walking around that mall at night, completely empty of people and any light save what night lighting from outside comes in the glass roof panelling is otherworldly eerie. The space feels bigger and in a way eldritch. I can feel my monkey brain drawing conclusions and reaching to make connections between unfamiliar voids of shadow and uncanny feeling retroversions of known areas as certain danger, fight or flight resting just beneath my surface level awareness.
It's a very existential moment realising that so much of our familiarity with the world we've built around us rests on things behaving and presenting as expected based on prior or normalised interaction.