Tramps of Amenroad I (Le meurtre de l’agneau et le chien) ebook presently available for free at Kobo here.

A diary entry, Sunday 23^rd May. (Presumed early 1800s. Authorship unconfirmed).

The forest called clearly, with all her secret authority; the trees painted with centuries, the birds that haunted them calling with something of home and ages. They were the sounds and scenes from my nursery, and for my grave-to-be. The shape of dream, a fitting face of the mystery of what we are; maybe the most fitting.

I met it all with great relief; the leaves’ shadows pushing aside the burn of the sun. Restored was the dignity of life’s journey: no more a mere tool of those outside – the people. The people with such dreadful supremacy of skill. I am distant now from their squabblings, beyond their eyes, their questions, and their advice – and them so oblivious to how damp it all was, wet and dripping with tragedy. None of that here. No words to foul the wonder. Only welcome canopies to lift the prickling heat from my back.

I sat, immediately still, and so immediately hidden. I let come the significances that the faces destroyed. Knowers’ eyes read all only in their own language. They cannot see another life but as another creature trying to speak to them in their language. If I pause too long, I am an accuser, a challenger or a pervert. If I move away, it is submission or rudeness… it is all like this. In the face of such, the spirits flee in an instant – they do not tolerate submission to so banal a dominion.

The people say my walk declares this and my step declares that; that ochres are Crownsland, and white Scient. It was people that declared that this is gold, and that is dirt, and we should kill and fear for the one, and wash away the other. They broke every hope I tried to bring – all I brought… bowing, bowed and offering as the most hallowed of relics or gems. The people judge all my allegiances by their own language.

And that is absurd.

That is scrawl on the flanks of Dia, flanks vast, ancient, invisible.

Better to nod politely and run away.

The forest has eyes and faces, too. But I do not fear them. The eyes of the wood are honest. Neither ghost nor beast spreads rumours, nor do they pass exaggeration upon waves of their private agendas. They built their nests and dance the will of life. They built their dreys around love, and the will to see. They looked at me… part of the landscape becoming threat or service. They follow unashamed and selfish; with a self, carved by old wills and evolution. I did not feel fear, though there may be beasts, dangerous and blind to any worth in me. But I have some faith in honesty and song and – I believe the aloof valour of music has some sort of legitimacy. If the songs lie, love falls dead – then what be the point anyway? And whether I believe it or no, it is sure that, with the music, I felt a love with the trees. It is to know their angels. It might be absurd, but assuredly it is experienced so. Who is to know that other loves are any less absurd? Who is to say this moment does not deserve to be called ‘meant’?

The only sensible thing was to sit, let me merge with the grey-green of the place, try to remember that I am part of it. However low, I am still that. And how regal, how terrible a responsibility, how terrible a plight that is. What a relief it would be not to see the fight, with what gratitude I could meet a life – with a garden to tend, and evenings to write verse of mourning upon the trees.

I stayed for hours. Watching. There came the play of the sun, sometimes striking a world crowded with dandelion spores and all the grasses busy with the swaying threads of spiders. And when the clouds hid the sun, all disappeared, all was still, and sombre, and the hawthorn buds looked strange – as embers lingering with colour, long after the flames have gone. And when the sunlight comes, the world is dotted with its shinings; the river juggles them, the leaves glow and the insects carry it as stars and clouds.

I rose and walked a while. Passing the shelly voice of beech trees, and the softened crunch of feet on still-damp grasses and pine needles. A crow call came close, interrupted the rhythm of my steps. I fell quiet, with reverence. I passed my feet as soft’ I could. And how I felt every crush and buckle as I pressed into the earth, and that an earth sculpted only by time without me. The scents were new and fresh and patient, old blossoming of hawthorn, damp soil and bark. 

I looked up, through stretching fingers of countless branches, a thousand-thousand leaves tap and touch in the current of the sky, and beyond, the sky says nothing, waits for storms or stars. This is what we got as life – this place. Forever, in blue, green, branches and excrement. I stood looking up, as lost as any child; as it is honest to be, now and then. I felt a thousand things hanging, pulling – the night would come, the winter would come, hunger would come. But for now, I was strong. I was safe in this place. There were few threats I could not outrun and hide from. A chill night of the woods might take me… but she – of all, she could have me. Here, where the air tastes of bluebell fields… If she should will it so. I could not resent so much, to die on this earth, to die for this earth, for that love so familiar. At least, I hoped to feel so.

I fled deeper, into a secluded alcove where branches hid, but did not obstruct the way. Through shields and curtains, into another realm. And there so dark; an escape from frailty – from bandits and huntsmen and the judgement of civilisation; where the persistent are empowered, and sometimes a love filtered between the trees, an unseen warmth of gaze. I liked it. I adored her. It was worth the risk of her rejection; however callous her dogs, she does not mock. She always respects that much. I sat, offered my patience. At length, she let fall a little more of the veil, with more clarity in space between me and the aeons. I saw the webbed veins of life streaming from design to design, following sustenance, revealing the face of the nothingness. I felt the time of it, felt the great silence into which this had come. And such a space, and such a time, there I saw, between us and nothing. Creeping over the aeons, she found strength in a coiled path, in treading ways new enough, yet familiar enough. How precious that balance of order and change.

I thought of the towns and cities, where life has already written how life is to live. Each loop of the spiral looks at its predecessors – emits signals in rules and histories and stories; they become more detailed – desperately detailed. And the coil of life slows its ascent; it becomes more and more a circle. Repeating the same old failures. The one generation states so sternly its meanings to the next – ‘Home,’ it cries, ‘and law, and wealth, and health and sex.’ And the life, hearing this, seeing nothing new (and with all stated so assuredly), would assume that it knows everything. Such a life would be without a most precious sense of mystery. Even more dangerously, it would lose the sense of frailty in its ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’; it would inherit them so early, it would confuse them with the sacred, it would confuse them with their own love. It would not anticipate the vicious wounds that reason must tear from love. It would forget that the rights and wrongs were nothing screamed in jubilation and pride, but rather things scribed and maintained by a turmoil of betrayals and losses, concessions bought by fatigue and terrifying promises. 

How blind is a life that has not experienced this death? That has not seen our predicament between these absurdities – clinging to that declared loved though the love is gone, and the chaos of change – the futility of trying to change the unchangeable.

What is God, and what is good and what is gravity? To get these confused is catastrophic.

To misunderstand is to assume one’s beloved is the last of the Gods, and to know that she must die, and with her, all meaning too.

How cowed are the Candlebearers of Gowngallow village. So they spend more money to secure their walls. And the more they invest, the more the Crown rules them. And the more they dare not believe its malignancy. ‘Thou shalt not…’ they said. Then, as the village became more complicated, we said, ‘What might they think?’ And, as more Dag’n come, we suffer more, ‘What might they do?’

There is a drawing by Gentileschi I saw at Catharsby Castle. One Candlebearer destroyed my attempt to reproduce it. ‘Violence is not art’, they said, as they went on to ridicule and break every hope I’d shown them. One after another said of my application for a scholarship, ‘It is very important that you do this’; they did not ask if I wanted to die, or if I had seen God that morning, how many people I thought would kill me for fun, if they could get away with it. Yet another Candlebearer asked, ‘Do you think you are special?’ They use the word ‘inappropriate’ a lot.

What relief to be absorbed back into the woods, where souls meet souls. Here, words do not sink by the weight of their connotations. Here, they are not wrong or right, just noises in their own world, a world paved by new understandings between unknowns, rather than assumptions. Here, two might take the time to grow a language for the rare and precious places of unique yet overlapping worlds… on such places deities sit. There is no reason to let the church steal those, as well.

This is why I bow before the dignity of the deer, and the shadow-tails. I think this is why I love them.

And not you – my fellow human. You are layer upon layer of pretension and assumption. 

I felt a certain acceptance, having honoured the trees. I opened my pack and fed on what I had.

I felt the weight and light of ‘why’.

I was stilled by the preciousness of it: hanging, waiting, growing, fighting, blooming and dying; mostly without a noise; colossal doing, and all without any human ceremony.

And then came a fresh pattern of leafy sounds; my heart deepened its throb – already sensing the character, it was no pre-announced acceleration of the wind. I searched the brambles – saw a flitting rodent face, its nose twitching here and there. And what was that? Is that just hunger and fear? – so busy the blood behind those eyes. And what is it? When you really acknowledge another face you see God, do you not? So I saw this thing, as a parent first meets her child from the netherworld. The creature… fresh, stupid, yet ripe with the untarnished knowing of the Gods. Knowing only hunger, not ever looking confused.

The branch-barred lightfall met nervous eyes. I threw it an apple core – oh, and regretted instantly as the creature fled, as the eyes disappeared, leaving only bramble-leaves waving at his absence. I looked around at the unconcerned but beautiful shapes of this place, written in weather and celluloid sun-lust. I paused, a little broken, staring at my unanimated, browning apple core. It looked a little ugly in the leaves, dirtied. 

Then a bustle, and with a fine visceral relief, I saw my fellow come back. It was more than relief even; it was arbiter of this world I’d fallen in love with, and to find those eyes outbrave my indiscretion. It was redemption. Just as stupid as the love of a newborn. Its eyes were black and particular – a gateway to some meaning subdued and forgotten as the old dolmens of our coast and mountains. In these everyday things – the womb of a moment is there, whether we acknowledge it or no. I looked upon the shadow-tail, like I could have been looking at the greatest of beasts; its power was in its vulnerability – sheer proximity showed its trust. We stared at each other, looking through the unknowns and hungers, and started to work out a way to be together. Somehow, it accepts me and rests near, despite the threat of me. I sat for a long while, pinned, bathing in the honour of its acceptance.

My friend weaved timidly through the leaves. It looked up, through its little oceanic eyes, flitting between me and the food. Between fear and attraction. ‘Selfishness and hunger’ are the words of the critic and the priest, ‘the gravity of evolution’ say the others – drawing maps from a cold distance, ‘delusion’ say the tranquil, ‘love’ cry the romantics. The optimists and a few mystics might accept that the mind of the rodent followed the will of God.

Yet here it was, some product of evolution, whatever laws of nature or science that evolution dwelt within, and whatever ‘right’ or ‘truth’ or ‘good’ or ‘purpose’ or ‘love’ haunted the process, as master or victim or both. All of them swam behind the black reflection of me. I saw the love most then. As I needed. An unjudgmental life to the lonely. No wonder, when the threat tightens, parents see all the answers in their dependent child.

The rodent tugged the apple core, raised it with an ease that did not threaten its agility. It hurried away atop a fallen trunk or branch, but then paused, and placed its prize down. I sensed a fear, but a fear matched by other things, it seems. It tore off part of the apple, clutched with fine-nailed hands. It chewed rapidly and tore again. If there was anything being felt in there, it must have been dense with the vibrance of hunger meeting its answer. It meant something, that the outdoors, so bleak and battered and bland with mud and greenery, had also grown hunger. It meant something strong; it was not ‘fascinating’ – that is a term too owned by industrialists, sensing an investment opportunity. It was not fascinating, it was something more to do with loneliness, with the knowing that the numinosity of childhood and love came to us like clouds from the sun… these things drifted and dripped and shone with light from so far away… they cannot not be held like a nugget of gold. Maybe it all started like the wind… a force tugging at earth and branches, urging the coming of meat from the vegetation, and then some myriad of ridiculous somethings stirred and ‘want’ found a nest in the meat, summoned as might witches beg demons from the aether. Was it something new, this ‘want’? I wonder – as a throne suddenly finding itself occupied? Or an aspect more like a dimension – something present in its degrees, even in the finest fragment of dust. Yet hunger and magic carried these things above the surface of the earth, for a little while. Maybe it is well to see us as spinning batons of the great juggler; so there we were, looking at each other. We stared and felt being, each in our own way, in a quiet forest, without the confusion of employment and social façade. Around us, just the hum of mystery and the tragic cascades of decay and idiots.  

At length, the numinosity started to dry. I felt an obligation to do something. I rose from my nest on the fallen log. The place thick with ungraspable sentiments, it shed forgiveness in shape and scent in ways too abstract, for reason to refute (this is to say, it was beautiful). Only authority can achieve such things, so in turn, I wanted to honour it, I wanted to earn its respect, to learn its wisdom, find its secrets. I wanted to stay. Despite its punishing storms and wolves and bewildering nights. Even because of them; they are the trials that keep the wasters at bay. An angry soul prefers a fierce overlord, as does a vulnerable one.