Under a Canopy of Trees ('Your word')

JOURNAL ENTRY

18th August, Monday

“Rain in the night
 Woke up to streaks on the windows.
 I take the rake off the cabin roof
 And lower it into the water.
 Still a good rake handle's worth of water.

The levels have now dropped by almost 9 inches.
 Somehow, it feels more.

The skies brood,
 But no more promises of rain.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

The night is still – without wind, without breath, sheltered under a clouded sky. Nothing stirs along the bank ghosted with willowherb mist; no reed, no rush. Only, from time to time, a gentle flick and wash as a fish turns centre stream and a faint rustle in the old oak, as a pigeon twitches and shuffles in her sleep.   

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into the moonless darkness of still August night to you wherever you are.

You’ve made it! How are you? I hope you’re okay. It is so good to see you again. I put the kettle on hoping you would come, so come inside and make yourself at home. The water level is low, so watch your footing as you step aboard! Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS

Last week, the Canal and River Trust sent out, what they describe as, a ‘Canal network water alert for boaters.’ In it, they referred to much of the UK now experiencing a ‘Nationally significant incident.’ Clearly, the word ‘drought’ seems to no longer be enough to catch people’s attention or convey the serious implications of a very dry late spring and summer. Terminology, aside, the consequence has been, as of a couple of days ago, we received an advisory notification that the stretch of canal we are on has such extremely low water levels to make parts of it unnavigable and today we were informed that it has now been closed.  

The water level has dropped significantly recently – by nearly a foot. Currently we’re floating in a rake handle’s length of water. The other day, I measured it at just under 4 ft. We can float in just over an arm’s length of water. Our draft is just 2ft 2ins. 3 ft is ample. Unlike many on the navigation, we have it good here – assuming that there are no big boulders hiding underneath us. But it is strange, stepping down onto the boat – watching the muddy banksides getting higher and higher. 

Even on sunny days, there’s a strange light. The sky, to the north and west, heavy with deep Prussian blues and dusty greys. The colour of thunder and torrential rain. But the forecasts doggedly insist no rain. The parched pasture fields are bleached to the colour of demerara sugar, only clumps of bird’s foot trefoil and ragwort hold onto the green. Even the nettles have succumbed. The oaks are dropping their acorns early, shrivelled nubs of brown – like deeply pitted ancient thumb nails – lie within young emerald cups. There’s a spot along the canal where Maggie always leans down and has a drink (even if she doesn’t really need one) or blow bubbles in the water with her nose. Once she found a nice thick stick floating there, and has never forgotten. But now, she can no longer reach the water.    

The rooks thermal in the dry air. On hot days, sometimes diminishing into tiny gothic-shaped dots. Below them, swallows dip and swoop. Willowherb fuses burn low and smoky. Magpies cackle and pick through the leavings of the sheep. August slowly rolls on.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

UNDER A CANOPY OF TREES (‘YOUR WORD’)

The shimmer of sun filtering through the thick canopy of alder leaves has a powerful and mesmerising beauty about it. It is captivating in every sense of that word. The shifting dance of light and shade turning dark leaves into translucent green glass.

For the last four or five months, I have felt so creatively super-charged. It’s been like a never-ending flow. Ideas, images, words, sentences, phrases. All pouring out through my fingers, down the pen or onto the keyboard.

It’s a strange sensation, this feeling of knowing I can sit down in front of a blank page and all I need to do is to start writing, and watching words form like clay between a potter’s hands being moulded out of shapeless nothing. It is not necessarily good – but it does feel good to feel the weight of words in my hand, that act of creation. It feels good when something inside leaps out and connects with a spark on the paper. Cathartic. Therapeutic. No! It’s more than that. It’s more than restorative, it’s essential,

Art is about the creation without thought to its consumption. Few people have written better on art and the artistic process than Darby Hudson. In fact, few people have written better on anything, than Darby Hudson. “Money buys you a roof,” he writes, “Poetry buys you a floor so you don’t fall through the nights.” And that’s it! The sheer profound importance of poetry, art, the creative act, caught in 17 words, 20 syllables smoothed and rounded by an Australian twang and urban grit.

Nuggets of wisdom hewn from the bedrock and seams of the broken places; witty, dry, wise. In the introduction to his tiny collection of writings, he writes:

[READING]

I guess that is it. The perfect summation of the creative process and its importance. Nothing flashy, nothing about cultivating huge audiences, surfing the vacuous heartbreak of popularity, amassing wealth; finding in the jigsaw pieces of words, images and ideas patterns and forms that help us to make sense of the brokenness and lostness of our worlds. Creating poetry that stops you falling through the floor into the darkness of night.  

Sometimes, when the sun is in the right place, the canal shimmers through the alders’ leaves. Lighting the underside of the leaves casting rippling patterns that dance with reflected sunshine. For a short while the leaves know what the moon feels like, bathing the world below in reflected light. Often, at those times, the leaves turn translucent, so that you can see the veins, herring-boning out from the midrib. Tiny patterns of the tree within the tree.   

I love that one time, Darby took his mother to this spot beside the railway lines. Later she wrote to him this:

[READING]          

Why do I sit and write down so much? For this podcast? I don’t think so, not really. Without it, I would still feel that overwhelming urge to find music with words and dance with the strange rhythms they create. And certainly not to be famous, to be rich. I once. Once long ago, had dreams of being an author – The waste paper bin of my memory, is filled with crumpled plotlines and characters who have long ago lost their way along with their voice. But the dreams fade and become irrelevant, sitting awkwardly in the attic of my past, so when I scrape my ankle on them in the half-light, I can’t help but ask, did that once really belong to me? Racing car driver, mountaineer, award-winning investigative journalist, author.

The end point of creation is not consumption – sometimes, if you are lucky, you might be able to draw upon its consumption to fuel the fire of the pure acts of creativity. As in Buddhism, the journey is the destination, so in art, the fulfilment is in the messy, ugly, painful, beautiful, exhilarating, destructive, affirming, glorious magical process.

That’s what the champions pushing the use of AI in creativity don’t get. It’s injurious impact on the consumer market for art, music, literature, aside (and it’s a very serious point), trying to sell me a quick, easy way to create a poem, a song, a book, a piece of artwork, is like trying to take the very point of doing it away from me. Sitting at my desk – desperately hunting for the one right word that somehow keeps to the shadowy penumbra of my thoughts, and then when I do glimpse it, to realise that it too doesn’t work.

“Writing is a listening
 To the shapeless silence within.” – Darby Hudson, again.

AI cannot do that. It can never know the shapeless silence within me or within you. That is why it will be nothing more than a diverting, but ultimately dissatisfying entertainment; a glittering bauble to distract us for a few more minutes from our potential to touch reality. But even more than that it’s the struggle to find ways to articulate and express that shapeless silence that’s important.        

Dylan Thomas wrote about his “craft or sullen art”, Darby Hudson writes about “If you can smuggle your 3am self into all your 3pms, you’re an artist.” This is not about temperament, or artistic ability. We all have a self within us that through our very existence is creative. You are, by your very nature, creative. As Darby Hudson beautifully puts it:

[READING]

That’s the creativity I am talking about. Nothing grand, nothing flashy. We all need that. That thing we do that keeps us falling through the floor into the night. Just the joy of creating something wonderful that wasn’t there before (even if it is just a smile, a word to someone unexpected – these are all little miracles of creativity). Taking the ugly and the hurt and making something beautiful.

“Make something beautiful,” Darby Hudson says, “And it will kick away and outlive the trouble from which it was created.”

This year the alders have sung with sweeping wind-songs of symphonies, that have wept catkins and cones. They rattle upon the cabin roof and scatter crispy confetti on the grass and pathways. From times lost, trees have been one of the wind’s first voices. Trees tell us the secrets of the wind. Be careful – the man that you have made king, has donkey’s ears. 

And so, for much of this year, it’s been a time of creative flood tide. Spring tide, marsh tide. Elemental alchemy; turning land to water transforming the world where the line between water and sky dissolves into mist and imagination and gull cry. After dry seasons, creative flood tides drench and satiates the burning thirst deep within my bones.

My notebooks fill up. Files proliferate on my laptop.

Even then, I knew, it won’t work. It doesn’t work like that. Pinning the emerald magic of a dragon fly to a collector’s specimen board. I haven’t even bothered yet to look back. To flick through the heart-racing exhilaration of the floodtide. Since a small boy, selecting a pretty shell or pebble on the beach, wrapping it in my grubby handkerchief to take home with me, to hold onto that one stolen moment on holiday sands. The strange dullness of disappointment. In the collecting and the carrying it transformed from something enchantingly beautiful to something drab and mundane. The sleek gleam and slippery glisten of seaweed, bladderwrack, kelp. Sea urchin, mermaids’ purses – dry, desiccated, brittle.

We thought we could cheat, my sister and I. Covering our treasure trove of pebbles and shells with varnish, so that once more the colours gleamed and the light shone. But even then, it wasn’t the same.

Darby Hudson is right: “You can’t write a poem by setting out to write a poem, I the same way you can’t see something in the dark by looking directly at it. It must appear from the side of your vision.”

You can’t artificially recapture wonder.

Notebooks are like that. The dried exoskeletons of thoughts, ideas that swirled like catherine wheels and galaxies in the darkness of the alchemy of the creative act. The transmutation of λόγος ποιητικός into a desiccated carapace of a husk. A fossil of what once was. What once, for a short while, flashed and danced, flaring with such a potency that it could turn my night into day or could topple giants. Plato, for all his faults, understood the infuriatingly paradoxical nature of writing well. Not surprising he called it a pharmakon – both the remedy and the poison.

Oh, I will keep all – or at least some – of my notes. They will have a use. I might not be able to recapture the living spark that flared so magically in my head, but it will remind me that of the experience. It will take my mind back to that time – and a memory of the feeling (sometimes not always pleasant). Who knows, one or two may even find their way into future episodes.  

Some of it has already made it onto social media, most, the ones I feel closest too, I keep in my notebook – stamped and sealed. Some are too precious to lose to the chaotic and turbulent scrutiny of the digital world.

The problem is that we have become fixated with the idea of artistic worth being quantified and valued by measurements that have no right to even touch artistic endeavour; it’s price, the number of likes, downloads, comments, views. Fixated by the spotlight. Darby Hudson, again, “Spotlights rarely highlight greatness, they’re mostly designed to cast the many in darkness.” 

Don’t let this obsession with spotlights and audience reach rob you of the joy of your creative spark.

Just for fun and to stretch me a little, this year I have been experimenting with writing haiku: 17 syllables, 5:7:5. One of them was this:

“Poems like prayers
 Are best written on water
 The way of the heart”

The creation rather than the reception is where the joy and fulfilment is found.

I look upward into this canopy of alder leaves. Sometimes when it rains, it sounds as if the trees are sighing. Unless the shower is really heavy, few drops can make it through the dense foliage. I am sheltered. My back leaning against the fissured varnish of their dark bark, a haze of insects around my head, waiting with me, watching with me, the rain fall an arm’s length away. Above us, the leaves shiver, and tremble, passing drops from one to another. It must be fun to be a raindrop, landing in the arms of a tree.   

And now, the marsh tide is over. The time of ebb. The fulness of fruiting is over. And now, my pen lies beside my notebook. The cursor blinks at me on a ghost white page. Nothing. I pick up the pen, I do have two or three ideas I want to write about, but the pen nib remains in the air. A thunderfly scuttles across the notebook’s open page with an eloquence far beyond my mastery. 

I guess, it neatly sums up where I am at the moment. Sailing shattered shards of words, like so many folded-paper swans, out into the river. Enjoying the struggle to capture in the side-glimpse of vocabulary something that is in essence, inexpressible. To enjoy feeling the intangible run through my fingers in a stream of syllables and syntax. It’s healing. It’s therapeutic. Riding the ebbs and flows, the cycles and the seasonal shifts. Once, I would have been worried. Is this it? Is this the end. Have I run dry. Well yes, but that’s all part of it. Out of the dryness and barrenness, beautiful things come.

I delete another email offering me an AI driven service that will transform my podcasting that will take a few spoken notes, create a professional script (tailored to my specified audience) and then produce the final podcast script from 15 minutes to 2 hours (just specify the required length). Research shows that I can be among the leading podcasts and accrue an income in the thousands of dollars.

The page of my opened notepad remains blank, but I am happy. In times of creative ebb, that is as it should be.   

And so, I find myself sitting here under the alder trees. Their light filtering through the canopy of leaves. My pen still. My mind dull – or if not dull, at least void of words. A hornet buzzes around my head. I am glad it’s here. Further up, there are wasp traps – a grim yoga of horror – filled with dead and dying bees, wasps, hornets, and anything else attracted to nectar and the sweet. I am glad this hornet is here and not there. Is alive. That we both can look up into the heart of this alder tree as it climbs into the sky. In all honesty, all I want to do is remain here. Wordless. Thoughtless. As instinctual and as elemental as a hornet.

We are alive in a world of miraculous creativity. A world in which everything alive is constantly transforming, changing, creating. It is not surprising we feel that deep within. Creating something out of the nothings – the no-things. We cannot help it.

Darby Hudson:

“Even as you stumble through your own darkness, swallowing nights full of black rainbows, you unknowingly leave a trail of colour in your wake.”

We live in a culture that narrowly defines creativity between rigid margins and then places them to one side as unimportant for the real business of life. A hobby, a relaxation, something to enjoy when the real work is done.

And then it places its own sets of (algorithm friendly) values upon them by which they should be measured. Don’t let the world we have created steal your soul. Buy yourself a floor, so that you don’t fall through the nights.

Your Word

Think of your favourite word
 Just a single word
 Let it roll around your mind
 Feel its weight on your tongue
 Watch how it glows and sings,

Note how it feels –

       the dreams it spins,

           The worlds it opens,

                The memories it conjures.

Now tell me that word is more valuable
 When it is pinned on a page
 Read by a thousand eyes
 Weighed on a balance created by people whom you never knew
 Analysed by people who have never felt –

         those dreams…

                      …those worlds…

                           …those memories.

Now tell me that word is more valuable
 When it is crushed between the pages of a volume
 That is celebrated by women who have torn themselves
 Away from daytime TV to sip champagne
 Through the corner of their mouths

And men who chart their significance
 By their ranking on a list and a plasma screen
 And if they ever heard your word
 Would plan a party
 So they could wear their new suit.

But that word, carved from your soul,
 And set free to glow on your computer screen
 Where it whispers your secret thoughts
 To a deaf world who never seems to hear,
 It was if you handed it to me,
 Gently cupped like a prayer
 In your uncertain, frustrated hands.
               I heard it
                         and saw it fly.
 That is why I stand in the rain
 On this hill
 And whisper it to this silent sheep
 That doesn’t understand what I say
 But seems to recognise all that your word means
 To you and me
          And we watch it flame like a firework in the sky.
                And only you and me and a bedraggled sheep
                        Have heard your word

But it can never be more precious than it is this day.

SIGNING OFF 

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night. Good night.

WEATHER LOG