Keith Perkins – The Graveyard Man

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Keith Perkins
The Graveyard Man

It is a misty November morning and Danny Brennan has already consumed two shots of Irish whiskey. He approaches four graves in the centre of the Kilcrohane Burial Ground to begin his day’s work and is attired in sturdy, knee-length mud boots and a hooded raincoat. His sole adornment is a large plastic bucket with assorted tools. The cap on his whiskey flask peeks out from one of his pockets.

His first grave of the morning bears the name ‘addy O’Mara’. On tender, aching knees and with arthritic hands, he begins by scraping and brushing the moss and dirt to allow the ‘P’ to gain its rightful place. Wilted flowers still bathe Paddy’s tomb in a carpet of muted reds, yellows, and blues. The small plot has only just begun to sprout grass. It was a brief illness. The few dozen family and friends who attended his recent internment spoke of a warm, vibrant, and loyal family man. His widow Mary chose the epitaph now etched on his freshly-restored tomb:

Paddy O’Mara
A loving father, husband, grandfather and farmer
Tender nurturer of both the Irish soil and our hearts
1907-1984

Danny turns and winces mildly.

‘Blasted choices,’ he declares irritably.

He drags his bucket to a second mud-covered grave adjacent to Paddy’s. The words continue their mild echo:

‘Father, husband, grandfather and farmer’.

As Danny’s brush makes contact with the tomb, he whispers:

‘And best friend.’

For Paddy and he were unofficial village twins and classmates some fifty years earlier at the Kilcrohane National School, only a scant kilometre or so up a lonely Irish lane from where he now toils on moist, ruined knees.

They sat next to each other in this intimate schoolhouse, a nondescript, one-story building that opens to the village church. They chuckled in unison and sometimes earned an angry rebuke or stern glare from the imperious schoolmaster. On Saturday, they took to the pitch with a stable of locals followed by a game of road bowling in the village center. And in the waning light of a Saturday evening, exhausted from the day’s sport, they would sink to the damp grass bordering the rocky edge of Dunmanus Bay, still laughing and panting while recounting a missed shot or friendly tussle.

Before returning home, they often shared a pint of Guinness carefully lifted from a forgotten crate behind one of the two village pubs. Bounty in hand, they would run with a wild, reckless abandon that only youth can inspire until they arrived breathless in the cover of a small patch of nearby woods.

‘That was a close one,’ Paddy said, exuding a youthful giddiness that saturated those carefree Saturdays.

‘Too close,’ Danny shot back.

He wore a mischievous smile and stood slightly bent, his hands resting on his long, nimble legs.

Those same long, yet aching, spiritless limbs now carry him to his third grave of the morning. Danny meditates on that brotherhood, that easy laughter, that youthful innocence. His meditation includes a third generous gulp of whiskey from his weathered flask.

‘Blasted choices,’ he spits out angrily.

At 18, Paddy’s eyes bent towards America. With farm jobs scarce in Kilcrohane, he turned to New York’s Hudson Valley for work. The peninsula, already a remote, windswept, forgotten place with Paddy on it, became more oppressive, more dark, more lonely in his absence.

A fourth sip of whiskey does little to erode the ache of that vacancy.

‘See you Danny,’ Paddy said solemnly on his final day in Kilcrohane as the two fiercely embraced outside the general store.

‘It’s your last chance to join me,’ Paddy said, his fair, curly hair whirling rebelliously in the gusty winds off Dunmanus Bay.

Leaves pranced across the empty street in the village center. A light, early autumn rain fell.

‘The Kilcrohane lads in America?’ Paddy added, smiling meekly.

‘I can’t…I just can’t,’ Danny said. ‘Good-bye Paddy…Slainte.’

Danny’s eyes moistened. Taller and thinner, he bent slightly in order to better meet Paddy’s embrace. His three-day growth of whiskers pinched Paddy’s smooth, crimson cheeks. There were hasty pledges to write, a few final best wishes, and then, the ‘twins of Kilcrohane’ were separated.

Now tending to his final grave of the morning, Danny still feels the raw, steady wind off Dunmanus Bay as it blew across the village street on Paddy’s final day in Kilcrohane.

‘Ah, blasted choices,’ he says forlornly.

He reaches for his flask, twists off the cap and takes another quick sip. It is barely mid-morning.

A steady flow of letters from Paddy trickled to a rare Christmas greeting. What Danny did learn before news became scarce was that Paddy had found a farm job in New York. He also met an Irish girl named Mary and after a brief courtship and marriage, a brood of five O’Mara’s swiftly followed.

Danny remained alone. He was bestowed by locals with the title of graveyard man. A friendless, isolated bachelor, his only companion on those long, solitary nights in his tiny flat was his cheap Irish whiskey and a frayed, tired copy of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man.

After eight years without news, a brief letter arrived from Paddy. Danny retrieved it one early afternoon upon returning from the burial ground, his mud-splattered bucket in hand and flask of whiskey in his side pocket. Exiting the post office, he rushed up a nearby lane and sat down on a boulder under a small cover of woods. He ripped the seam impatiently, took a sip of whiskey, and read its contents with alacrity:

Dear Danny:

I hope this letter finds you well. I just recently returned to Ireland and have settled with my family outside the village of Clifden. The lads and Mary are all thriving. We’ve purchased a farm near Mary’s childhood home and are quite busy tending to all the daily tasks. We feel blessed.

Impatient for some news.

Warm regards,

Paddy

Danny rallied his stunned faculties. He never expected that Paddy would ever return to Ireland, yet now that he was securely on Irish soil again, he might just as well still be living in America. The distance to Clifden was nearly as unbridgeable. Danny didn’t have the resources or the time for that multi-day journey to the far west of Ireland. He earned only a Sunday reprieve from his daily work and his meager stipend gave him scarcely enough money to pay the rent on his dreary, one-room flat and to buy basic food supplies. What little remained he spent on cheap Irish whiskey.

Disconsolate, Danny tucked the letter back in his pocket, the sole unsullied corner of his muddy, damp clothing.

In the glow of a cozy fire later that evening, a heavy rain buffeting his window, he sat and lingered over the final line in Paddy’s letter:

‘Impatient for some news’.

He understood why. For Danny had never written to Paddy with any consistency. A few times he sent a missive with vague news touching on life in the village or a failed romance with a local girl. The few Kilcrohane girls that he did briefly court soon tired of his drinking and couldn’t foresee a future with the village graveyard man.

He still held the same job at the burial ground that he had secured shortly after Paddy left. It was a favor granted by the town postmaster, who, seeing the directionless youth, put in a good word with the village vicar. The few local lads who he did befriend soon married, started families and became heavily cloaked in all the variegated fibers of Irish domesticity.

His only surviving relative was an aunt who raised him from childhood after both of his parents were struck down by pneumonia within a year of each other. He rose each morning in the pre-dawn blackness and quaffed a shot of whiskey with breakfast. He then worked until early afternoon at the burial ground before stopping by the village church to tidy up the small yard and sweep the front steps. If he could spare a few coins, he would stop by the village pub to sulk over a whiskey by the fire. His evenings were passed in perfect solitude consuming a small dinner at a worn, uneven wooden table. He would linger over a whiskey, or perhaps drift through a few pages of The Last Man before falling into a fitful slumber in a corner cot.

Danny’s thinning, greying hair, advancing arthritis and a slight bending of his once tall, supple frame were the only evidence of time’s imperial march. The daily whiskey and the exposure to the winds of Dunmanus Bay had conspired to form deep lines across his red, hardened face. To dress in the morning became increasingly arduous. Decades of brushing and scraping on the damp burial ground grass had reduced his hands to a throbbing mass of misery. His fingernails wore a permanent inky black coating after a lifetime of labour in the mud and muck. His bucket also bore the stamp of time. A long, thin crack ran down one side and a thoroughly rusted handle flirted with annihilation.

Danny rises to his feet and turns for home. It’s a short walk up the gravel lane, across the village street and up another brief path to his flat. As he approaches the sparse lighting of the village, he sees the ‘Open’ sign affixed to the door of the general store. Paddy’s absence was always felt most acutely when passing that place. He very often turned to his whiskey here.

As he neared that same village road just a few months ago while returning home, he saw a bespectacled, grey-haired man. His hair was neatly cut and he was standing before the door of the general store. Unlike Danny’s filthy clothes, he wore clean slacks and a yellow sweater over a button-down shirt. Black shoes completed his casual, yet dignified outfit. Such a refined–almost regal–presence was a rare sight in these parts. His countenance gained clarity with each step Danny took until the ‘twins of Kilcrohane’, stripped of youth’s fair brush, were standing before each other.

‘So nice to see you,’ Danny said, as the two embraced warmly in the shadow of where they bid farewell 58 years earlier.

‘Likewise, my friend,’ Paddy responded, flinching slightly over Danny’s shoulder as the penetrating odour of liquor filled the space around their merged bodies.

Later, under the soft glow of Danny’s fire, each bearing a glass of Irish whiskey, they reminisced about Kilcrohane and their childhood. They also shared details of their lives since that bleak, windy autumn day in 1925.

‘You should have joined me,’ Paddy said softly, dredging up the open invitation he extended to Danny in 1925 as the two mulled their respective futures.

‘You know Paddy, I, uh, couldn’t leave my aunt on the peninsula,’ he responded solemnly. ‘She begged me to stay. It’s a choice I, uh,’ he said somberly while shaking his head slowly.

‘It’s a choice I,’ he repeated falteringly, his voice dwindling into a pained silence.

‘It would have been nice to have you nearby,’ Paddy said, his yellow sweater emitting an ethereal glow before the crackling flame. ‘The lads never got to properly know their Uncle Danny.’

That same flame cast a soft orange glow over Danny’s copy of The Last Man, which tilted precariously against a vase on the table.

‘It hasn’t been easy,’ Danny muttered. ‘The peninsula can drive even the strongest man to, well…’

Paddy offered an acquiescing nod.

Danny glanced forlornly down at his half-empty glass of Irish whiskey.

His crimson cheeks gained an added fervour before the dancing flames as he told Paddy of the unstirred monotony of the last half-century. It was a quotidian routine made more oppressive in the wake of his aunt’s death in 1935. His drinking intensified, leading to his permanent expulsion from one of the two pubs in the village after the owner found him lifting a pint of Guinness from a crate in the rear. It was an act he had pulled off many times with Paddy under more nimble legs, but his arthritic limbs betrayed him. He tripped, noisily tumbling into a collection of discarded beer bottles. Locals began to avoid the graveyard man–a development that only tightened his noose of isolation.

An extended silence hung over the flat. The greying, wrinkled, fragile pair sat opposite each other, whiskies in hand, as the final cracks and whistles of the fire expired. A few months later, Danny received a letter from Paddy’s wife Mary:

Dear Danny:

It is with great sadness that I must inform you of the death of our dear Paddy. He passed away last night surrounded by his loving children, grandchildren and me.
He spoke often of you in the most affectionate terms–both in America and here in Clifden. His interment at the Kilcrohane Burial Ground will take place next Thursday morning.

With love,

Mary

Danny crosses the village street, bucket in hand, and heads home. Later that evening after supper, his whiskey on a side table and the fire bathing the room in a gentle orange, Danny marks the two-month anniversary of Paddy’s death in the same fashion he’s spent nearly every night since 1925–alone with his whiskey.

A heavy squall erupts. Fierce winds rattle the windows. Danny settles in his chair, mulling the vestiges of Mary’s final letter announcing Paddy’s death:

‘He passed away last night surrounded by all his loving children, grandchildren and me’.

As he scans his vacant flat, the only object Danny’s heart can warmly bend towards is his volume of Shelley’s The Last Man. It was the sole item of any value bequeathed to him by his aunt after her death.

‘Blasted choices,’ he mutters testily.

Suddenly, a powerful urge wills him–almost lifts him–out of his chair. He heads to the old wooden table near the door. Never has he moved with such a singular purpose after a day’s work at the burial ground. He picks up the half-empty bottle of Irish whiskey and walks resolutely to the kitchen sink. Slowly, he unscrews the cap and empties the contents of the bottle down the drain. He watches with avidity as the last drops of that demonic liquid swirl into nothingness. He walks to the front door of the flat and opens it briskly. He braces himself against nature’s wild riot and places the empty bottle outside.

‘Free,’ he sighs wearily.

Face now aglow before his modest fire, the words return:

‘He spoke of you in the most affectionate terms…’

He crosses his legs and eases his head back against a small pillow.

The storm rages into the night. His breathing softens.

‘He spoke of you in the most affectionate terms…’

Then, with fading images of Paddy clinging to the narrowing corridors of his mind, the peninsula relaxes its grip on Danny, the fire withers, and darkness settles over the village of Kilcrohane.

***

Peter E. Murphy – Open

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Peter E. Murphy
Open

The SS United States was the largest, fastest and most luxurious ship to cross the Atlantic. It served between 1952 and 1969 when cheap airfares made it redundant. Stripped to the guts, it is docked by the Walt Whitman Bridge in Philadelphia waiting to be scrapped, or with a billion-dollar investment, to be repurposed as a museum, hotel, or small city. ‘Open’ is from a series of photographs called Beautiful Decay taken onboard with an iPhone 6s on a sunny day in December 2017.

Open, Peter E. Murphy, photograph, 2017

Liz Robbins – The Good and Terrible Stars

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Liz Robbins
The Good and Terrible Stars

On a night, strong, like the bright scent of lemon: how wrong-headed
my obsessions, the need to be alone.

And how utterly necessary, otherwise, why live in a divided country?

I’m the detective and the thief: pulling in people, then hoarding space.

Standing, squinting at the distance: how much to acquiesce? To defend?

Standing in a burning field that’s also a tiny room. Even explaining
the conflict’s a rabbit trap, an ungrateful alibi.

Everyone’s tired, in different ways.

Everyone, driving in loops.

On a night, you might find yourself outside, away from the brightly-lit
party for a time. Inside, a door

about to shut. What clears your brittle path: looking back to the group,
or up?

Pat Seman – Paska

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Pat Seman
Paska

Easter. The biggest festival of the year in Ukraine.

It begins with Willow Sunday and the ceremony of the blessing of the willow, a practice that stems back to pagan times when the willow with its healing properties was a holy tree and one of the first in Spring to show signs of life. People believed that by tapping each other with a freshly blooming willow branch they could draw upon its energy and strength.

There was no sign of tapping at church that morning, simply an enormous crowd of people, everyone clutching pussy willow twigs and pressing forward into an already packed church. Once inside, standing squeezed like a sardine and peering over a sea of shoulders, I could see nothing of the ceremony. But the singing was sublime. One voice emerged in what felt like the crescendo of the service, strong and deep with an ever greater sense of urgency, till at its peak it melted into a sea of harmony, one with the rich and sonorous tones of the choir. Then abruptly, the service over, the crowd turned and I was carried with them as inch by inch we shuffled and stumbled our way out into the pouring rain.

Holy Week or Willow week as it’s called in Ukraine is a period of cleansing both spiritual and physical in preparation for Easter. In my street the women were out sweeping the pavement in front of their houses, scrubbing doorsteps, cleaning and polishing the windows till they shone. In courtyards and gardens, carpets were hung out to air. Caught up in the general fever of spring-cleaning I cleaned my flat from top to bottom. After such a long winter it was good to open wide the doors and windows and feel the first balmy breath of Spring entering. At school my students and colleagues, their figures trim from weeks of dieting and fasting, were all talking about their trips to the ‘bazaar’- an enormous market on the edge of town – and the new clothes they’d bought to wear on Easter Sunday.

The girls in my groups told me that they were making ‘pisanki’, the beautiful traditional painted eggs for which Ukraine is famous. Decorated with stylised symbols from Nature they were said to contain powerful magic, a protection against evil and natural catastrophe. Once they were painted by women only. They would gather together in secret when the children had gone to bed, singing and telling stories as with wax and plant dyes and a special stylus they created the delicate patterns of the pisanki. For centuries the tradition was handed down from mother to daughter only to be banned under the Soviet regime. It was the Ukrainians in the Diaspora that ensured its survival. I know my grandmother took this skill with her to Canada.

Now the girls have lessons at school in dyeing and decorating pisanki. In the weeks before Easter you see these decorated eggs everywhere. They come in many colours – orange and red, yellow, green and deep blue. Often the patterns are geometrical or with spiral motifs, but there are also motifs of birds, flowers and animals. One, which I saw amongst a cluster of colourful pisanki in the local market, was encircled with a chain of young women dancing.

Pisanki represent the gift of life.

At Easter they’re placed in a wicker basket of food, which is taken to the midnight mass to be blessed. In my cousin Masha’s basket: pisanki, ham, sausage, horseradish, butter, cheese and rye bread, all covered by a white embroidered cloth. And a ‘paska’, or Easter bread, a round, sweet loaf, decorated again with motifs of plants and flowers formed from dough to celebrate nature’s rebirth.

The paska must be made with great care. When preparing the dough and during the kneading you must keep your thoughts pure and the whole household quiet to ensure the bread bakes properly. This means that no-one, not even friends and neighbours are allowed to come in during its baking lest they make a sudden noise or cast the evil eye, causing the paska to come out flat.

We arrived at the cathedral about an hour before midnight. Masha gave me a candle from her basket, then we both put on our scarves and joined a throng of women jostling to get in through the door. Inside they parted to leave a clear passage down to the altar, placing their baskets on either side of it ready for the priest’s blessing. We stood on the cold stone floor amongst the crowd of worshippers listening as the deep voices of the priests and choir intoned the solemn liturgy. The sequin-sewn white scarves of the congregation glimmered and glittered in the soft candle light, while over their heads, in the shadows near the altar hung a life-size figure of Christ on the Cross surrounded by a mass of deep red carnations.

A stirring, a murmur of expectation. Heads turned as some men entered carrying banners. Masha, checking her watch, muttered that it was now gone midnight. Still we stood waiting patiently as the priest continued his incantation. Then all at once the chandeliers went on in a blaze of electric light. Red neon letters spelling CHRISTOS VOSKRES flashed above the altar and a procession of nine priests, resplendent in white and gold followed by the choir, led us out of the cathedral with the bells wildly pealing. Out into the cold midnight air as the Easter flame was passed through the crowd from one candle to the other, then in a rambling procession we circled the cathedral three times, singing and stopping every so often to roar out a reply to the priest’s call ‘Christ is risen’, ‘He is indeed risen!’

At 6 in the morning I ate with Masha and her family as they broke their fast. All the food from the basket, which had been blessed by the priest at the cathedral, and more, was spread out on the table. We each had a hard-boiled egg dyed red which we had to hold firmly while tapping everyone else’s trying to crack them. Masha’s husband, Vasili, was the one who came out victorious; the last with his egg intact, his face creased into a big smile. As I walked back home through the early morning mist, the streets were still full of people carrying home their baskets and flickering candles. The aim is to bring the flame safely home and with it to trace a figure of the Cross on the lintel of your house. Mine had gone out in a gust of wind within minutes of leaving the cathedral.

Later in the day the mist turned to bright sunshine and the unpaved road to Vasyliv, my family’s village, was shiny with puddles and mud. Fields stretched on either side of me, empty and grey. But in the village the freshly dug earth in the gardens was a rich, dark brown covered here and there in a haze of fresh green. I arrived to the clanging of bells, drove past a group of boys taking it in turns to pull on the rope in the small bell tower by the church gate.

Masha with her parents and Vasili, their son, Pavel and Masha’s brother were all waiting for me, bunched together on two beds around a small table which was crammed to overflowing with dishes: hard boiled eggs, salads, fish fried in batter, meatballs, salami, cold pork, cheese and a sweet, creamy macaroni-like pudding. Vasili told us that he was going easy on the vodka as he was saving himself for the next day, the first Monday of Easter or ‘Wet Monday’, when he and his friends would hit the streets to douse the women passing by with water. Yet another old custom rooted in pre-Christian rites of purification and rebirth, and one which, according to Masha, is practised with an unbridled enthusiasm. ‘Never mind’, she said, ‘on Tuesday, it’ll be the women’s turn’.

Masha then told me that when she was young, on Easter morning, she and the other village girls would dance and sing in front of the church, round and round in a circle in imitation of the movement of the earth round the sun, to encourage the Spring to waken and bring them good luck and a plentiful harvest.
 
 
An integral part of the of Easter ritual which follows Easter Sunday is the honouring of the dead, when families gather at the graves of their loved ones and ancestors bringing food for them. Often they stay and eat together next to the grave, so that the dead too may take part in the celebration, the joy of Easter; the idea being that the ghosts of the dead are always with us, that the border between life and death is as permeable as a cloud.

Driving out of Chernivitsi towards Vasyliv the next Saturday I saw heaps of plastic purple and pink wreaths for sale at the side of the road and people walking along the verge with these large wreaths slung over their shoulders or on the handle bars of their bikes. In the countryside I stopped at a cemetery just outside a village where so many wreaths had been laid or propped against headstones you could hardly see the graves. Between them wooden tables and benches had been set out as for a party. The sky was sullen with dark clouds threatening rain, the cemetery empty, except for a man and a woman and two children who were sitting at a table next to their ancestor’s grave, quietly eating and drinking. Out of respect I kept my distance, but as soon as they spotted me they sent over the young boy with an Easter bread and a pisanka. The bread was ornamented with a cross made of dough, the four arms curved at their tips as if about to spin into motion – an ancient symbol of the sun and the wheel of life.

In Vasyliv the cemetery lies at the centre of the village, a large field full of stone crosses, many of them ancient, some all but toppling over in the long grass. There were no wreaths and no tables and benches laid out when I arrived. All was quiet. A football match was going on in the neighbouring field. Every so often there’d be shouts from the small tribune alongside the dirt path skirting the graves.

I trudged through the mud and wet grass in search of Masha and her family. She’d promised to take me to our great-grand-parents’ graves and say some prayers for them on my behalf. She was at the edge of the cemetery with Vasili, their son, Pavel and Vasili’s mother. They were gathered round Vasili’s father’s grave. His mother was in tears. Vasili came to me and solemnly handed me an Easter bread, an orange and some chocolates in memory of his father.

The spot where my great grandparents lie buried is marked by two stone crosses. They stand side by side, leaning slightly towards one another, not far from a border of tall, sheltering acacia trees. My great grandmother Vasylina’s cross stands on the left, and on the right, that of my great grandfather Vasil. Their surfaces are so worn that it’s impossible to trace an inscription. The arms of each cross are decorated with flower patterns, and at the centre of Vasil’s is another pagan symbol of the sun: a circle, from which branch out four short arms like rays. Clearly engraved within the circle is a wreath of flowers, symbol of Mother Earth.

Masha and I stood silently at the graves of our great-grandparents. It started to rain. We returned to her parents’ house where her father and his family were waiting for me to join them in yet another feast.

When I left, Masha gave me one red carnation. It had been blessed in a service of remembrance of the village dead, my Ukrainian ancestors. It hangs now, dry and drained of colour, at home above my desk.

Meryl Stratford – October, Sailing the English Channel

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Meryl Stratford
October, Sailing the English Channel

I watched it again today,
a grainy, black and white movie
filmed almost four decades ago.
Like a ghost ship she sails along.
The camera focuses on self-steering gear:
a wind vane and a tiller that steers
without the help of human hands.
A long line, drifting astern,
measures speed in nautical miles.
The camera looks up at the sails, forward
over the life raft and coils of rope.
It observes waves rushing toward us,
surging away in foam. It studies
lightships in the channel
and the famous white cliffs.
It lingers on the sheen of light.
It goes below to show us galley,
bunks, bins where sails are stowed.
It suggests someone is there,
but no one is seen.
Only a wisp of windblown hair.

Bob Ward – Touching the Surface

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Bob Ward
Touching the Surface

In Felbrigg Hall, a National Trust property in the east of England, there is a statue of an urchin examining the sole of his foot to remove a thorn. As usual in museums, you are not allowed to touch but, if you were, the sensation would be of cold smooth marble unlike that of a real foot roughened by trotting around without shoes.

The way things feel to our hands, feet, or tongue is an important part of human experience. That impulse to reach out and touch whatever seizes our attention is very strong and similarly we speak of ‘being touched’ by poignant events. We stroke friendly dogs; the physical contact creates a bond. When people are buying clothes, they finger the fabrics to judge what they might be like to wear. After all, the word ‘texture’ derives from the Latin ‘textura’ for weaving. A couple of centuries ago an ancestor of mine was apprenticed to a cloth-dresser, a specialist in improving the surface of newly woven bolts of woollen cloth. In the City of Leeds there were fifty tradesmen practising that craft. However, should you ever be wracked with remorse, one garment you won’t find on an outfitter’s rail is a hair shirt. Fashions change, even among penitent sinners.

Upstairs at Felbrigg the four-poster in the master bedroom is adorned with sumptuous hangings. You need to restrain an urge to let your fingers flirt with the tassels that dangle from the fringes. At a humbler level you might recall that Rupert Brooke in his poem The Great Lover celebrated both

. . . the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss / of blankets . . .

These days we have created a culture of tactile keyboards and touch-screens that makes us even more ‘hands on’. Through our finger-tips we enter the world. Just now my right hand rests on a mouse that controls my computer. But as a photographer I have long enjoyed recording the visual quality of different surfaces beyond what textiles offer. In my pocket I carry a small camera capable of taking good close-ups wherever I go. Etched by salt-water the blistering paint on a fisherman’s tractor can be revealed as an abstract masterpiece. Or I might see the spiky hoar-frost edging dead leaves, or a discarded viper’s skin, part of a creature you otherwise would not dare to contact.

Tree trunks bear close study and appreciation for their subtle variations between species. Scots pines have bark that breaks into islands, richly coloured especially when wet, whereas the bark in sweet chestnuts is incised with dramatic swirling ridges. In my garden there is a kind of birch where, as the trunk expands with growth, paper-thin bark peels off in curls tinted green by algae. In the creviced surface of trees lurk spiders and beetles, often the prey of small birds. Springtime snails venture upwards across this rough terrain in a search for the succulent fresh leaves in the woodland canopy. Ivy, of course, constantly exploits trees as a passage-way towards the light. Even when torn away the ivy’s clinging roots get left behind as tracks across the bark.

Walls too are worth inspection. In the area where I live, East Anglia, bricks were in short supply and those made in the region weathered badly as time passed. So many buildings were faced (and still are) with flint cobbles dumped by retreating glaciers at the end of the last ice age. The resulting walls are full of character, supporting small ferns, moss tufts and colourful crinkly lichens.

Text itself literally acquires ‘texture’ on the spines of leather-bound books, where the lettering may be embossed in gold leaf. However, you could say that a printed page assumes a virtual texture arising from the nature of the typefaces used in all their different forms, serif, non-serif, italic, bold . . . Contrast ‘Impact’ with the refinement of ‘Palatino Linotype’ or the eccentricity of ‘Crazy Loot’. As you read, let your eyes, as it were, caress the words. For the non-sighted, they are trained to feel words through the medium of Braille. But in doing so, I wonder, can they ever hear the surfaces they touch by the process of synaesthesia? That’s an attribute known among small children but mainly lost in adulthood, whereby a stimulus to one sense raise a response in another.

By analogy, music may be described as having texture. Performers touch their instruments with their hands or lips and we talk of being touched. How running your fingers across harp strings evokes the ripples in the surface of a lake. Composers meld complex layers of sound, fabric for the ears. Harmony relates to smoothness, discord to rough edges. The ‘minimalists’ Steve Reich and Philip Glass arouse one’s feelings with repeated phrases in constant variation that manage to haunt the soul.

Human sensations are richly textured. Do keep in touch.

Four-poster bed hangings, Bob Ward, photograph, 2017

Jasmine Nihmey Vasdi – Shoulders

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Jasmine Nihmey Vasdi
Shoulders

rising with sun, a low liquor
choking on lemon pulp lips
      long belly hairs
a country with its own onion of corruption
only privacy is in the hallways
or windowing down roads
no limits
            simply
       everyone is too tired to gaze over this still town

AQ22 – Texture

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Bryan R. Monte – Artists in Uniform

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Bryan R. Monte
Artists in Uniform

           Brown University, Autumn 1984

Four women in two days
the same red-black dyed hair;
five men in three days
the same black leather jackets.
It’s hard to be an original
in ‘The Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.
If you don’t get around fast enough
you lose currency
and everyone is so overinflated
they’re just dying to be spent.
Buying and selling go without saying:
lie, lay, laying, laid.
They’re not the same word,
but maybe they should be.
No one ever gets them straight.

Simon Brod – Tree of Plenty

/in