Orion Still Looks Down (On the land my shadow knows)

JOURNAL ENTRY

7^th February, Friday.

“Yesterday’s spectacular
Blood-orange dawn
Has given way to a dawn
Without colour or feeling.

We pick our way between
Rutted potholes of slippery mud
To the Magpie’s scalding laugh.

A wicked wind cuts
In from the north-east
And reminds me that I am,
After all, an embodied being.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

There’s a bitingly cold wind raking across the fields from the north east tonight hurling the sting of sleety rain in its wake. The forecasts are warning of it turning to snow later in the night. Wind blasts slam against the stern and rap against the cabin sides. The worried waters around us slop against our hull in slabby bevels and scallops. The moon is waxing gibbous, been even it has decided that this is too foul a night to be abroad and is wisely wrapped up warm in clouds.  

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into a pitch and filthy February night of sleet and rain to you wherever you are.

Come in, come in, there is a place for you beside a glowing stove aboard on such an awful night as this! It is so good of you to come. The stove has been banked up and the coals are glowing cherry and scarlet. The kettle is singing on the hob. There is a seat waiting for you. Let the cold winds howl outside and the ice and rain claw against the cabin sides. We are safe and warm inside and the night belongs to us. Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

February, when winter’s bite seems to fasten the deepest – not just meteorologically (in fact we have had a couple of gorgeous almost spring days), but emotionally, psychologically. We have passed Imbolc and the days are clearly lengthening, but with that, we are apt to get impatient. To hurry the new year on, the speed the seasons. We are awake. Where is the sunshine and warmth, the colours in field and hedgerow, the rise of new grass and warm earth in which to lie? Of course they are coming. The signs are everywhere. All along the towpath, the greens of new growth are evident, the surge of nettle and cow parsley, the buds above our heads filling out, ready to burst. Dylan Thomas’ ‘green fuse that drives the flower’ is fizzing down its cord. The dawn and evening choruses are filling out, expanding, welcoming back old songs from older springs. It is just that this is more all in the promise, than in the fulfilment.

And so, in their omission, it is sometimes hard not to focus upon their lack: The steely hard grey days without shadows, the thin rain being spat on raw winds, the bald, threadbare greens, turned and churned into mud by horse and human, where tall grasses and meadow flowers should wave and flex on summer’s days.  

February has a beauty if you can search for it. Days when the early sun sets fire the frost with its red glow. The wheel of red kites on their mating dance. Days when the brickwork remembers sun warmth. But it can also be hard time too. For these are days, as the early 19th century poet, John Clare, so picturesquely observes, that send us indoors. And even if the days might bring us a little snow to dampen our fire, it will soon seem “to burn as bright agen.” Days to savour the warmth of home and hearth. And that is not a bad thing at all.

[Reading]

Lately, I have been finding myself leaning against a nearby fence, lost to the world and in the world. The slow movement of ewes heavy with lamb on the pock-marked fields, where the beaks of rooks have fished their leavings. The (seemingly) impromptu meetings of birds – dotted thick along the telegraph wires, or as leaf black clusters on the field oaks. Sometimes jackdaws, sometimes starlings, sometimes rooks. The ducks that huddle together on the brickwork outflow culvert and doze in the fleeting sunlight. You can use a lot of time, leaning on a nearby fence. Perhaps that is why Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’ (written some 60 years after Clare) resonates so vividly with me at this time.    

Thomas Hardy’s ‘The Darkling Thrush’. I first heard it as an undergraduate. It was read to us in one class by my Old Testament Studies lecturer. I have to confess, not much of the poem impressed me at the time. I was still too eager to learn new things, rather than reflect upon old poetry. However, what I do remember and will remain forever with me was this gentle man’s sensitive explanation of it and most of all, the poignant wistfulness of his conclusion – that even in Hardy’s god-less world (a world depicted so vividly in Matthew Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’ which we had just been studying), and even if we have to share this dis-enchanted landscape of mechanisation and cows without names – that there may be some small flicker of hope that in it, we might find something that would stir in us a song of praise and cause something within us, “to fling our soul/ Upon the growing gloom.”   

That one un-notable lecture is probably the one lecture that remains with me the most. Reading it again, I see other things that possibly call even more deeply to me now.  

‘The Darkling Thrush’

[READING]

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

ORION STILL LOOKS DOWN (ON THE LAND MY SHADOW KNOWS)

On the gentle westward slope below the convocation of oaks. The sun had set forty minutes earlier. Sky blood-orange, clouds picked out in desert islands of deep mauves. Lights beginning to spark and flash across the vale. Homeward bound commuters, tracing invisible lanes among the contours and hedge-lines of lanes unknown. And I am here, on a small hill, just as unknown to them, looking out. Out across the half-lighted chequerboard of fields and woodland, village and town. Watching the dart and flare of white and red lights, briefly – oh so briefly – visible and then gone.

Jackdaws circle in sweeping ragged murmurations. Rooks gang around the haggard stoop of the One Oak. Venus pierces deep into the coloured fabric of evening. The air smells damp and loamy.

On some hidden (to me) cue, the rooks lift into the air, swinging across the eastern edges of the coming nightfall – feather-light and piratical leading tattered smoke trails across the darkening sky.

Glow worm of the commuter train rattles across fields of cow and sheep – heading north.

Orion, climbing just above the south horizon, slowly appears through the light-wash of Stratford’s conurbation. It’s the line of three stars of Orion’s belt, ruler straight, that catch my eye. On a winter’s night, they always catch my eye first. Even on a winter’s night like this, with the growling orange eye of Mars so bright, a few handspans to the north from the orangey glow of Betelgeuse, on the hunter’s right shoulder. But my eye is drawn to that familiar belt fading in and out of sight. Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Familiar an anchor point. I have looked up into Orion since I was small. A tiny pattern amidst the jumble of stars that never looked quite like my book of constellations, no matter how hard I squinted. Here and the plough I was safe. Although, it wasn’t until I was worryingly old, did I come to realise that my plough was often, in fact, the Great Bear!

Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Once upon a time I could rattle their names off, and all the other stars that formed the constellation of Orion (including the minor players – visible to the naked eye, at least), and tell you which of them were triple stars, solar orbits upon orbits, and which were gas giants, and which were clusters. But no more. I even had to look up the names of the stars that form the belt. Two of them struck me as being coldly unfamiliar – did I really used to recite those names to myself as I cycled home, lit by the flickering last coaxings of a dying ‘Ever Ready’ battery. But I have no recollection of those names – the shapes the letters form; the sounds of them upon my tongue. It feels a little like accidently bumping into someone who suddenly claim that they used to know you twenty or thirty years back. And you stare blankly back and say things like, “Well, well! Who’d have thought it.” And, “My, doesn’t time fly?” And you can see that they are suddenly full of the warmth of friendship and shared memories, and you are left feeling strangely tilted and disoriented.

But stars… stars might be different. I have long since stopped chanting to myself stars names as I raced on my rattling bicycle under the night skies along the roads and lanes of Hertfordshire. I stopped not because I no longer was looking, it was just that my looking had, unknown to me, opened newer ways of seeing that took me beyond a need for a naming of names. They were becoming part of my life too fully to be constrained by a name. Staring into the night sky was an encounter too personal, too intimate, too primal. They were becoming part of me and I of them.  

[READING]

For a long time now, Orion’s Belt, the three fishermen, or the three runners, has sufficed to contain my lifetime being under its gaze. And my night sky is shifting too. Looking different. The bleaching effect of light pollution is playing a part. However, I also suspect, it is the effect of age on my eyesight. Whatever the cause, it has been a long time since I have properly seen the Milky Way in a way that is more than being just a vague mist that could be real or could be imagined. And I can’t remember the last time I saw the Pleiades. I would love to stand on a clear night and play games with that enigmatic smudge of light – trying to count all seven – or were there even eight? I was intrigued by the way that they only really appeared when you were looking away from them. The five you could clearly count were joined by another two – flashing into existence the moment your eye turned. Over the years, the numbers decreased for me, until the whole cluster would only flit in and out of my peripheral vision. “The one who made the Pleiades and Orion” spoke Amos. “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?” [that is untie the belt of Orion] asks the Israelite God of Job. It seems what Job cannot do, a human span of years can.

My old constellations becoming emptier, missing stars – jumbled. Familiar friends become gap-toothed and faded. I look into the night sky and see some haphazard throw of lights. But with Orion I have always been safe. There’s no mistaking it. The familiar friend in a crowd of strangers. We go back a long way, Orion and I. Time falls away and I am back in the garden of my growing up. The large fir tree towering above me. And there is Orion’s belt – unblinkingly looking down at me – filled with mystery; bringing all my science books to life and enchanting my world in new ways. Orion who has always been there, looking down upon the land in which my younger shadow walked and played. Accompanying me on my cycle rides on winters’ nights, forever scaling the horizon, before sinking back down in the spring. It was all I needed to navigate my way through the clutter of stars in my night – even if, I were to find out later that, in places, I had got it hopelessly wrong. But then, after all, it was only MY night sky, and that is the only one really worth finding your way around. Even in later life, when I have fallen out of love with the stories behind our constellations’ names – it did not matter, for by now, it was deeper stories that I could feel when I look up, the ones in which my story too is inextricably entwined.

Yes, my night sky is shifting and through its changing it is preparing, guiding, schooling me, in further paths that I must find and walk. And if I feel the slight shock of lostness or disorientation when I look upwards. Look to the south on a winter night. Orion still looks down on the land that my shadow knows. 

SIGNING OFF

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

WEATHER LOG