53: Always – Waiting (2)

Why stay here any longer? Why endure this despair? Such questions have draped them­selves across my daily experiences for such a long time that now they are just part of the furniture, as they say. Simply another aspect of what happens. Especially since my dear wife died, and my mission as her carer ended so abruptly, those questions have grown so large… So I answer them, pretty much every day, when they intrude into my thoughts, I say to them, ‘Let me wait one more day. Something might turn up, something that at last makes real sense of staying, something that will help.’

And I cheat by lining up my projects, for I have to stay here to see them through, and I don’t want to abandon them, or at least I feel I have some obligation to wait and see how they turn out. It’s a sort of trick I am playing on myself. I cannot go yet, because this project, or that project, like an infant, or like my sick wife, needs me to stay to do these things so that it may prosper. And if it does prosper, is that not a sort of prospering for me also?

But there is such a thinness to that reason for staying. I am starting to see through my own trick. And so I introduce another one, by deliberately reading two or three books at the same time, by trying as hard as I may to find them interesting, by underlining phrases and sentences, putting boxes around whole paragraphs, and writing notes all over their pages. I should not go yet, because I have not finished this book, and even though it is not really of any importance … well, something helpful might turn up, and if not proper answers to my predicament, then perhaps something at least comforting, or just interesting, that for a moment shows me a different perspective, from where I can see the sun shining, like it used to, in my dreams.

48: Still – Waiting

As a person passive who waits to see what floats towards me on life’s variable stream, what comes? What attracts my attention? What seems worth picking up and holding to? What follow? What look into? What learn? What throw passion into? For these past few years, life’s stream has seemed such a poultry affair, filled with little things of no value, mostly dross, disturbances, annoyances, difficulties, frustrations, not even a false promise, let alone a promise. For this is the lot meted out to humanity as a whole, the experi­ence of everyone, everywhere, for the whole of time. There is no personal fiefdom of misery, but a collective prison camp where all must gather, from which only the insane and deluded ever think they have escaped.

And as a person active, what do I stride out towards? What prospectus do I examine to weigh my choice? Do I suppose the existence of some­thing, and in blind faith set off to find it, master it, possess it? There is no vantage point that I can reach from whose raised summit I may see that clearly. What to choose? What to choose? And why? It all seems such a nonsense, now … ambition, career, empire-building (oh, such a grandiose notion), making something of myself – for what end? Life’s miseries are not dealt any blows by such egotistical cravings, whether one’s desires succeed or not. Striving, driving forward, taking up, asserting one’s will seem the preserve, perhaps not entirely (I will grant you that) of the selfish, the greedy, the self-opinionated, the cruel and the stupid. No value, then, in ambition for the quietist, for the lover of sunny days in gardens. Either the sun shines, or it does not. Either fate takes you to that garden, or it does not. The man mistreated in a prison cell may conjure in imagination the most exquisitely cultivated curtilage, and place himself there, and the glow that comes through his narrow window from beyond closed lids may be shafts of sunlight scattered by the most beautiful of boughs, laden with sweet fruits.

Where does all this get me? There is nothing to pick up, nothing I can see that fires the chase. All is waiting quietly in such sorrow…

45: Orchard – Drowning

A storm has come today, that throws itself up­on my dark and dismal shore, whilst I cower, huddled in my ramshackle hut at the back of the beach, whilst a wild wind rips through the heaving palms behind, whilst the sea rages and seethes and crashes upon the fluid shingle so that you cannot tell where sea ends and land begins. The whole sea is monstrous breakers breaking, breaking, furious­ly breaking, whilst the wild wind whips foam and spray right up into the atmosphere, so that you cannot tell where sea ends and sky begins.

I am cold and miserable, but I can still remem­ber the sun that I have not seen for such a long time, and I would like it to come back, to light this sorry place once more, as it did before, when there was not sea, but a garden, and I ran, and rode, up and down, up and down the path, from house up here to orchard down there. But that has all been washed away by this furious sea. The orchard lies somewhere under the waves, and I do not know why this has happened, and I do not know how to undo it. I would like to undo it, if only I could.

43: Milk – Swilling

The invisible arc traced by the sun in the southern sky on its daily circuit, day by day, is shifting more noticeably to the north and is lifting itself higher off the horizon as spring draws closer. Although the warmth of the promised season has yet to manifest, this moving sun throws down up­on the world a brighter light, as if it knows this feature of my childhood dreams in which each outdoor scene is brightly lit by wondrous light, as if it says to me alone, Here are your childhood dreams come back again. I cannot bring you peace, no more can I do that than can my sister, but I can bring you this light instead.

And so the bare garden, with its bare and spiky willow branches that finger the cerulean sky, grop­ing, grasping, fills with such a radiance. It is a gift, this light, which I cannot reject, for it would be pre­sent, here, today, and for all those few days past when it has been and gone already, whether I am present here or not. So I will not say, Thank you. I can manage without, even though I could manage without, and even though I do not really appreci­ate my childhood dreams being re-awakened. Such a present should not stimulate, provoke per­haps, such deep despair, yet it does, so I say to the sun, I am sorry for that. But the sun does not reply, unless this light that swills about me like so much in­candescent milk is the reply. Today, it is such a grim light that seems unaccountably out of place.

16: Venus – Rising

I look out of the back door, and by the light of the single streetlight that my grandfather erected there, I see there is a foot of mist carpeting the lawn at the back of the house. A distant owl calls out from the forest and, in the east, Venus flickers through the pine needles of the old trees that tower over the caravan. The Morning Star heralds the approach of dawn, and if we don’t get to sleep in the next few minutes, there will be no night left for our slumber. Did those old stories really take that long to tell?

By the time we awoke, the summer sun had burned away the mist, and Venus, although we could not see her, hung directly over our heads. The big, old gate creaked as the milkman deliv­ered our daily pint, and my grandmother lifted the big, old kettle from the hob as the steam from the boiling water inside made its whistle sing. This was a day when we didn’t have to do anything, but we did what we did because we chose to. Later, away from the oasis that my grandfather built, I found, as did my dear wife, that everything we did was compelled by other people whose business it was to order our lives.

As my years advance, I am trying to resist that domination. See, I have written this, and no one told me to.

15: Grandfather – Sailing

Shortly after my dear wife died, she came to me to say that when it was my time to leave this sorry world, I need have no worries about what to do, because she would come to fetch me to the afterlife. I saw no apparition, heard no spectre’s voice speaking without a body, but I had the most intense sense of her presence and of the unques­tionable certainty of that presence. But I cannot help wondering, as the weeks and months and years pass, bringing me ever closer to that moment of transition, how will she know it is my time? Will she get a phone call? Or a letter? Or in the after­life, do they log on to a different sort of Internet? In waking dreams that come unbidden when my consciousness goes limp, or fades in the presence of sunlight or gentle music, I have seen where I will eventually reside in the afterlife, in an ordinary house, as ordinary as houses are here, only per­haps with less dust, and with paint that does not peel, and smells that do not linger any longer than you want them to. And there, perhaps each day is filled with spring light, bright and clear and cheer­ing, exactly resembling the light that filled every one of my childhood dreams (all those dreams that were located out of doors, that is) until something changed all my dreams to nightmares, in which category they have lodged to this day. So that light is important to me, not least because in reality, the real days during which it really shines, are fleeting and too few … yet despite the light, are filled with troubles that give an unpleasant flavour to exist­ence.

And when my time comes, will she buy a ticket to make that journey to find me? How will she know where I am? For indeed, there is every pos­si­bility that I will not be here any more, not here, at home, in our little house, where for all those too few years we shared our lives.

All through my adult life, I had thought that my grandfather would come to fetch me, that he would beckon me through a sort of portal, onto the cold sand of a beach as yet unwarmed by the sun of the dawning day. And there would be a little boat, painted white and blue, with a white sail, and once aboard, he would sail it towards the horizon, beyond which my new house, clean and dustless, was prepared for me. And the waves would lap at the sides of the boat, and the air would slowly warm, and I would at last feel a glad­ness about things that I have not experienced – if ever I really did – since early childhood. And in some sense, this will be the start of my life, for all that had gone before would now be seen as merely a moment’s preparation for what would be some­how more real than that.

Has my grandfather received a letter informing him that his services and his boat will not be re­quired, because my dear wife has been accorded the task of bringing me to my new life? I hope he isn’t annoyed. For all those years, I had been ex­pecting him, wanting him, and waiting. But it will be more agreeable to have my wife come for me.

Oh, there is so much that I want to talk to her about.

5: Waves – Crashing

Imprisoned on this salty shore where, in my dreams, I bide, I cast a stare to distant star and sigh in my despair. Did ever sun rise on this lone­ly strand? Or was it always grey twilight here? The only sounds I hear come from the surf that surges up the shingle and from the mounting gale that starts to shred the leaves of palms that block my way behind.

I stand and wait and hope to see a light that no star has shed on me, but comes instead from dis­tant lantern swinging on a line, on a boat, far out to sea. For that must mean my friend has come for me, a friend I do not know, who somehow knows my desperate plight, so comes to rescue me.

And were I on a boat of mine, upon those fate­ful seas, I too would sail a course in hope of find­ing souls to save.

But as before, no lantern shines, no friend will come this time. The same shore waits for further dreams, when despair will prod my hope to stir, and I will stare across the waves, and hope again in vain.