Tag: visitations

I had a visitation last night from Dabberlocks and Furbelow

The dream

I like to think of Dabberlocks and Furbelow as invisible friends; but in reality, as solicitors for my superego for my whole life, they’ve hinted, adjudicated and occasionally forbidden my wilder flights of fancy. Occasionally they’ll issue a non-disclosure order on one of my ideas but mainly they just sit in silence and I know what’s required. I call it censorship but they refer to it as discretion and normally they win.

The visitations come in occasional dreams and their names and faces are never visible to me but I always know they mean business even if their language is completely opaque and I struggle to understand what they’re driving at. Once I had a dream about a very large and menacing dog clutching a beautiful ruby in its teeth which I think I was supposed to remove. on Saturday night I had another dream in which the words were said – “you can’t argue with a blackthorn” in the context of winter flowering plants. It usually takes a lot of imagination to turn the key in the lock but this one immediately brought to mind a long abandoned project about a character I’d invented called Barnacle. I wrote a kind of CV down for him at the time, along with a quite detailed description of his appearance. Beard, huge greatcoat with deep pockets and that kind of thing. But as soon as I recalled the word “blackthorn” I knew that he would have carried a blackthorn stick representing both the peaceful rambler and the belligerent cudgel known in Ireland as a shillelagh. Two of his multiple temperaments in a single wintry stick that flowered like snow in the hedges in the worst and coldest season of the year.

Then I had him. I’d kept him secret for twenty years and it was time to let him out.

I learned something unforgettable from Sister Enid many years ago, and it helped me to weave some random threads into a thick cloth.The first time I met her was on a Catholic retreat. This was no pious weekend, though, because the La Retraite house in Bristol was, a beacon of radical and practical faith. I took part in a number of retreats there – they were pioneers in bringing Myers Briggs to the UK – but on that particular occasion there was something else going on. The point here is not so much what went on, but the fact that until 48 hours in, Sister Enid didn’t speak a word. She sat in the corner silently and, being young and arrogant, I assumed that she was an ancient, probably half senile sister who had been propped up in the room for a bit of company. We were a strange mix, but amongst the retreatants were a group of sisters from another house who were experiencing – let’s say – interpersonal difficulties. There was something bad eating away at them. 

Anyway, the retreat went on and we talked a bit; shared a bit and did some challenging exercises in small groups and in full sessions. In the last plenary, Sister Enid finally spoke. She had watched and listened from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon – the daft old lady in the corner – and then finally and without notes, she accomplished the most forensic examination of a group’s dynamics I’ve ever witnessed. I learned two important things that weekend. Firstly, never again to stereotype and then dismiss another human being because they were old; and secondly that watching, listening and paying minute attention is infinitely more humane and useful to a writer than spouting smartass ideas and showing off. 

I even invented – conceived – a character who embodied that lesson. The name, I’m afraid, was invented long before the children’s TV programme called the Octonauts so I must ask that you banish any thoughts of the character of the bear in the TV films. My Captain Barnacle – without the final ‘s’ – is a darker character and – to be honest – he’s part of an alter ego that I created for myself twenty years ago.  Here’s the CV I wrote for him – or perhaps it was me all along.:  

A wintry story at Christmas

At the edge of the River Severn in the month of December you might stand in the freezing cold one night, with the moon sitting low in the sky and the wind rattling down over your shoulder from the Northeast, driving the clouds across the sky like sea foam.  And if you stand until your fingers turn white and brittle and wait and wait as the tide flows and foxes go about their business, you might wonder at the sheer size of the sky above your head.  And you might, as you scan the sky, think to yourself – “this is the point in the film where the geese fly over, honking, and my blood freezes” – you might also begin to see the millions of stars above your head and among them you might notice the constellation of Orion with his sword and his belt.  And you might also think to yourself that this dark sky reminds you a bit of your Dad’s huge black overcoat then you wouldn’t be far out.

And imagine if you could search in his deep black pockets for sweets, and breathe in the familiar sharp smell of his armpits, and the smell of the bus, and the smell of the rain and the pub and you would feel very safe indeed perhaps and you would know that asking whether such a being as Captain Barnacle exists is a silly question.  When you have seen the stars that line his greatcoat stretched over your head in the dead of night, then you just know it, and the teachers, pharisees, inquisitors and pedants as usual, know nothing. 

As to the facts, there’s not a lot to be said.  He’s a weaver of meanings, like an angel or possibly the weaver of a unique form of cloth.    Some people have argued that there may be a hierarchy of Barnacles and such a thing may be as true as any other thing.  What I know for a fact is that he lives on a hill near a seaside town – hence the name and rank – and he drives a yellow Morris 1000 van with stars and a crescent moon hand painted on the side, and he has a more or less scandalous and very intermittent liaison with “Astral” who is an “International Clairvoyante” and whose visions regularly transcend the parish boundary. 

 It’s said he spends the day at a huge loom in a wooden shack, and where he weaves a sky cloth from fragments he has harvested during his journeys.  Anything from a ship’s manifest to a small advertisement could be woven.  A tiny piece of conversation blown in the wind is not too small to escape his attention.  He might be arrested by the arching of an eyebrow or the faint flush of the skin in a chance meeting between two people who do not yet know that they are lovers.  A dog’s bark, a small joke or even a road sign might inflame him.  A particular favourite of his are lists and catalogues which can easily be unravelled and used again.  Memories, sounds and smells are the warp and weft of the cloth and if he can lay his hands on the glint of the sea he can weave it in judiciously so as to bring the whole fabric to perfection. The cloth which he weaves descends only at night which is why you can’t see it in the day time.

The promiscuity of his means is a source of continual irritation to the town, and especially to the deacons of the local church who, being both strict and particular as well as Baptist, have only the one story which is completely threadbare. 

This last factor may be the origin of their assertion that “Captain Barnacle is a creature of the night” – a phrase that has a peculiar resonance for parish councillors and deacons.  However it may be that the simple fact that he is, in reality,  out and about more obviously during the night, is enough to remove the inverted commas and turn the criticism into an observation.

Some refining of the idea might help.  Captain Barnacle is especially a creature of the warm summer night.  On such a night, the sea-town is held in the air by the force of dreams of faded seawashed driftwood spars; frames; orange-peel;

Delabole slate; terracotta tiles; Paynes grey skies, windworn rocks; sea worn pebbles; scrubbed sand; lichens; quoits and dracaenas as various as silks in a cabinet or an artists’ colour chart.   Then, as the sun sets and the pasty shops clean down their shelves, the soft warmth of night insinuates its seductive aromas around the harbour.  When the scent of hot tarmac, wallflowers, fish and chips, cigarette  smoke and stale beer hang in the salt air like pheromones to the young men and women gathered like moths beneath coloured lights . When Pasties, suntan oil and peeling shutters shriven by the summer heat gift their perfumes to the sky as it turns from pale blue to indigo. When the people refuse the cadence of night and day and they try to stretch the day as if they could hold the tide at the rim of the horizon by sheer effort of will.  Then Captain Barnacle will leave home and drive down the winding road through the town. 

Captain Barnacle is also a creature of the winter night, of the harvest night, of the night of mourning.  He is both Captain of the Feast and solitary figure at the graveside.  “Amen to that!” he cries, and the deacons and the parish councillors murmur damp threats and plan horrible revenge. They will whip him with scorpions, they say, and Elder Bell keeps a whole nest of them behind the shop where he keeps the flick knives and condoms for the local lads.

Truth to tell, I think Captain Barnacle is a bit frightening.  The smell of his armpits and the acrid greatcoat speak of other adventures and happenings that aren’t so good.  In fact they’re everything the deacons say.  Sometimes he puts his hands deep down into his greatcoat pockets and you can hear things scurrying around in there. 

 Some say that the Captain is exceedingly old, even as old as Adam himself and others maintain that he drifted into town in the nineteen sixties and never left.  He might be some kind of extraordinary deity or he might be a beach-bum entrepreneur. 

The beard is a nice thought.  Nothing goes with a greatcoat like a beard, and a pipe.  But this beard is different;  so dense you could not hack your way through it with the sharpest billhook.  A beard to occlude the sky and the clouds.  A beard full of thorns and small nesting birds and fugitives hiding from justice.  A beard full of things you tried to say and couldn’t.  A grey beard with a golden stain that might come from poems spoken out loud or from roll-ups. It is impossible to imagine him without one and so I will give him one without fear of being accused of not really knowing him at all – and the length of his hair? Flowing, naturally, and long …. somewhat wavy and a tad greasy for some tastes.

And his stick? Why of course it’s a blackthorn shillelagh. Dark with age and cured for a year in a dung heap wrapped in oiled cloth to make it harder and more resilient and made by a man called Rex who’d scoured the hedges near the riverside for exactly the right conjunction of root (for handle) and shaft; donned his thickest gloves against the thorns and sawn it off – unique and precious; polished it to a glow and weighted it with lead so that it balanced at exactly one third of the way down where – if needs be – Captain Barnacle would hold it in order to administer stern correction if the deacons came after him on the heath, in the dark.

There must be more!

Returning to a visitation at Damery Lake

My religious upbringing began in a Primitive Methodist Sunday school – don’t get hung up on the primitive word, it was anything but that, but it’s been a long road to escape the pervading sense of imminent punishment for inadvertently breaking one of the many and mostly unwritten rules. It didn’t seem to trouble some of the members much that they broke the rules themselves when it suited them. One of the leaders was outed in the local papers for selling flick knives in his shop (his defence was that if he didn’t sell them someone else would). Among the close families of the devout faithful were more black sheep than you could shake a stick at. Jack, the local baker, was OK as long as he drove a horse and cart after he stopped off at the Foresters at lunch time for a few (no, a lot of) rough ciders because the horse would take him home. In an electric float he was a menace. In fact alcohol was the principal demon that needed exorcising. I even once saw Gilbert the grave digger sitting swigging from a bottle with his feet dangling in a half-dug grave.

The Sunday School was tucked in, up an alley and next door to a small slaughterhouse behind the church and so we could hear the sheep being driven up the lane and then listen to an endless sermon that always involved a lot of smiting and the sacrifice of lambs. There was even a very large image of a lamb – more of a tup, I’d say, waving a flag and with a rather smug face that regarded us from the big window with a superior glint in its eye. The smiting often had a surprisingly modern set of references; mostly outing everyday sins which, although we were children, made us understand that an infinitude of suffering in the fiery furnace was all there was to look forward to. Amongst the eternally damned, it seemed, were any number of local people who’d pissed off the minister. Later I discovered that many of the congregation were predestinarians who believed themselves to be saved whatever they did. I never had that confidence. Once, when one of the local shopkeepers died in the night I just thought he must have had it coming.

Then there were the worms that would surely consume us; although I was never sure whether we would be eaten alive before or after the fiery furnace bit. I’ve spent much of my life trying to find a kinder way of understanding God. This post isn’t entirely off piste even for me. If I need to find an explanation for my occasional silences, one reason is that the Calvinistic silt at the bottom of my subconscious occasionally breaks out in a debilitating fog. Well furnished dystopian visions come easily to me, so be warned about what follows.

“Hell is full of amateur musicians: music is the brandy of the damned.

George Bernard Shaw

I think Shaw was being a bit unfair there. We might remember that one of the stories told about Robert Johnson was that he’d sold his soul to the devil in return for his prodigious talent as a guitar player. Music gets a bad press but we only get really good at it by going through the really bad stage first – like gardening and cooking; but what sets it apart is that at any level it has such power to move and inspire that it almost invites occult explanations.

After thirty years of complete immersion I gave up making and listening to music when I retired, because at some unconscious level I thought I could purge myself of it. It scared me; opened doors I wanted to keep firmly closed. Bach felt like the mind of God and – to level the metaphor just a bit – so did Patti Smith and countless others. A falling cadence in the Paolo Conte song “Max” felt so good it was like pressing the button on the excessive pleasure machine. So after five years of abstinence I decided it was time to risk it once again, and so – once again – the Potwell Inn is full of music.

Which is how I found myself listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams 3rd, aka Pastoral – symphony. It was as if I’d never heard it before – so full of darkness, loss and foreboding; enough properly to stir the mud in my pond. I did a quick search and discovered that even the composer had thought its presumed association with lambs gambolling in the fields was truly off the mark. What it did for me was to remind me of a strange visitation I’d once experienced in Gloucestershire. I was standing on a narrow packbridge and looking up through the woods towards Damery Lake when I became aware of an invisible presence. Specific as these visitations always are, it was an army officer – a captain – who was both in the midst of a first world war battle somewhere in Northern France, and simultaneously standing next to me. These were his woods and in particular this was his lake, and his remembrance of them in the hell of the battle had imprinted themselves upon the place and revealed themselves to me almost a hundred years later. By an almost Jungian coincidence, Ralph Vaughan Williams had first conceived of the music that was to become the Third Symphony – serving as a medical orderly in Northern France in 1916.

In this past week, waiting for the results of the US elections that sense of foreboding was everywhere. Thank goodness there’s been a chink of light at last, but in darkest Sunday School mode as I was by then, I have been fighting off the feeling that we’re not taking this crisis seriously enough. Yes of course we’ve been busy on the allotment but it somehow feels that our frantic horticultural activism is a form of displacement activity. Writing about the seed order or making stock seems such an inadequate response to what’s happening.

Populism as it’s become known is like bindweed – it can’t be eradicated by covering it with a bit of plastic or an old carpet. There are no nostrums, no easy ways or short cuts because the only thing that will remove the infestation is the slow careful removal of every fragment of root. Empty blowhard patriotism needs to be called out for the dangerous fraud it’s become, because the bridge back to any sort of imaginary golden age has been blown up for ever. Even Elgar hated the way that ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ had been hijacked and pressed into service as a jingoistic anthem to British superiority. There’s no point in pretending that with a few minimal alterations and a couple of byelaws we can go back to our old comfortable ways. It’s over.

Suddenly it feels like the autumn of 1939 all over again. I’ve mentioned here before that I’ve been reading Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal and that seems like a poetic reprise on the theme of Ralph Vaughan Williams Pastoral Symphony. Then yesterday I listened to a recording of Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl”. Even as I write this the radio is trumpeting a successful Covid vaccine and I can hear the cheer going up across the world.

Let’s get back to the good old days and buy some Pfizer shares. Let’s crack open another bottle of champagne and do some deals; fill our barns with chlorinated chicken and soya beans and build more walls – walls against disease, against migrants, against starvation, against rising tides, and let’s throw that communist Jeremiah into the pit again.

But it won’t do. The awful fruits of our greed and – let’s be honest – stupidity are slouching towards Jerusalem once more and the sky is dark with (organic) chickens, coming home to roost. Years ago, late one evening just before Christmas I went to Temple Meads railway station to collect one of the waifs and strays that occasionally crossed our path (she still owes me the twenty quid I loaned her to buy a ticket back to Ireland). I was standing alone on the empty platform, when a drunk man approached out of nowhere (I must have that kind of face) and ranted at me for fully half an hour about his perfidious and about to be ex wife and her unreasonable behaviour. Every few minutes he would interrupt his torrent of hatred and ask the time. I would tell him and he would rejoin his bilious monologue. Eventually he said – “How come you always know the time without looking at your watch?” I replied that if he looked up, he would see that the station clock was immediately above his head.

The facts of our dangerous situation are directly in front of us – we just need to pause and look.