Salvador Dali, ‘Landscape with a Girl Skipping Rope’, 1936

In the middle of life, I awoke. If not that then I slumbered into a very real dream, more real to me than my own childhood — one of dreams, and play, and flights of imagination. 

Either way, I came to with an awareness of four things: overexposure to the sun; a superabundance of water rising above my ankles; the pull of gravity dragging me down from the high lands where the vantage point had been vast; and a keen sense that I was being pursued. Conditions for growth, when pondered too long, appear as instruments of oppression. 

I never once looked back, though I questioned every step forward. And soon I arrived at the shore of impassable nature. 

Before me stood the sea, calm and still and much more frightening than it had seemed from high above where I was accustomed to seeing it. 

Goaded by the sun, discomforted by wet feet, dreading my shadow behind me, and in thrall to the terrestrial pull, I uttered a prayer of bargain to that which had power to listen and I pledged a new faith, thinking myself ruined and the world doomed...

I threw myself headlong into the sea
And found there a mouthful of mud.
Worms, like teeth, squirmed, fell and landed heavily
Where the world crumbled into crud.

Through shut eyes, the sunlight passed a dull red —
A red legion of dullness
That drilled to the drum of dust around my head
And plucked the hairs from time's fulness.

Behind me, phantoms of forgotten foes
Gave chase. Their hearts were set to stone
By a lament that knew far greater woes.
With each footfall their fates were sewn.

I saw water quiver into solid form
And the sea broke into two walls
Of tiny droplets in a compact swarm.
So I swam where the mole crab crawls.

I burrowed my way deep to the far shore,
Cooled, dryshod, untethered from the earth.
Here, there was no foreboding anymore
of death, nor memory of birth.

Crusting and withered as wishes,
One by one, all evils, all woes, all pain
Fossilised with the fishes.
All things, both bad and good, all things were slain.

I watched the withheld waves explode —
Horse and rider of my fears eaten whole —
And could scarce explain the new load
Of discontent that weighed hard 'pon my soul.

The expiring bodies of my
Darkest dreads washed up lifeless on the dirt.
There, seen for the first time, they died,
Entangled with bodies of joy and mirth.

"Rejoice!" said my saviour, his face was twisted
By a triumphant snarl; "Be glad! rejoice!"
He pointed to my dry feet and listed
All they had trod, with an infernal voice.

I find myself in the barber’s chair perhaps four times a year or so. I’m by no means a regular, as a quick glance at my typical hairstyle throughout the year will confirm. This is how I would describe my hair on an average day: brown; medium-length; parted at the front a touch right of centre; sprinkled with grey; fairly curly (a mixture of obedient and disobedient curls); thinner at the back; gently receding at the front in the shape of a U. It’s not a style that requires too much maintenance and my only requirement is that if it must look bad it looks intentionally so.

Yesterday I approached the barber’s with a slight sense of apprehension and weariness. I’ve made bookings with the same person since Covid, more or less, and the comfort of having the same person tending to my hair has gradually teetered into being a reminder that my life has landed in quite a static pattern which periodically numbs my imagination.

I left my house and parked the car in a nearby car park in inch perfect time to make the appointment at the very minute it was booked. No time wasted beforehand, no need for embarrassed apologies at being late. But the timing was too perfect. I noticed that this routine was too well etched in my mind. I didn’t even look at the time when I left, I just mechanically went to the door as if I had been summoned by a greater power.

Between leaving the car and entering the barber’s I put my earphones in my ears and listen to a song I’ve listened to possibly every day this year. The song is three and a half minutes long which meant that I’d hear almost all of it before I reached the threshold awaiting me. In this song, a reassuring but increasingly desperate voice sings the line ‘You can change’ nine times before reiterating its point a final time — this time with a hopeful suggestion that change doesn’t have to necessitate giving something seemingly precious up: Baby, you can change and still choose me. The ambiguity of the voicing and the tone of this song leaves open an array of interpretations, but on this occasion the sense of being stuck under a comfort blanket rang through strongly while I wafted through my hometown where I went to school many years ago.

As I drew closer to the door I had a quick peak inside. There was no one there besides two barbers: one sweeping up old cut up bits of hair that no longer belonged to anybody, and the other standing at the counter waiting to be called into action. It wasn’t a great endorsement for the barber’s to be so empty at midday on a Saturday and — my pace slowed to a sort of respectful procession, and, having removed my earphones, the music that burst past the curls sitting on my ears was of a dirgelike quality.

I sunk into the chair and stared gormlessly at my reflection while I made small talk with the barber. Being an infrequent visitor, it would be wrong to say that we have a relationship that picks up where we leave off, or indeed that I am remembered as much by the barber as I remember her. There’s always a social imbalance with a barber because there’s only one of them but there’s dozens of us wanting to get our hair cut. In any case, it wasn’t lost on me this time around that the reasonably light-hearted humour shared on former occasions would have to be earned again rather than assumed. This was bad news because the length of my hair and my mealy-mouthed quip about it not having been cut since September soured the mood like a bad smell.

Thinking that sticking to a posture of joviality would win the day, I cheerfully asked how often normal people (i.e. not me) get their hair cut. Every six to eight weeks was the uncharacteristically short reply. I restrained the urge to ask out of genuine curiosity why? (perhaps my learned readers could explain to me why six to eight weeks is the rule of thumb). Feeling that it was now necessary to apologise and come up with some excuse as to why I had not visited sooner I began to babble on about how it hadn’t initially been my intention to wait so long but that during the course of my hair growing again I had quite liked the way it looked or felt and I started to imagine that it mightn’t look so bad with a bit more length.

She nodded knowingly, allowing her brow to unfurrow just enough to make me think forgiveness might be on the horizon. Well, yeah, it’s always like that ennit, she said, pausing her snipping and looking at herself in the mirror alongside me looking at myself, whenever I book myself in for a haircut I always have a day or two where I think it looks perfect and it would be wrong to cut it. Then she looked at my reflection. But now I know the best time to cut your hair is just when you think it looks great.

I was pleased that some common ground had been found and felt ready to relax a bit. But while she proceeded to clip and spray and comb and snip, I felt myself turning over her opposition to mindless optimism in my mind. What she said reminded me of one of my favourite poems, William Carlos Williams’ ‘Death the Barber’:

Of death
the barber
the barber
talked to me

cutting my
life with
sleep to trim
my hair—

It’s just
a moment
he said, we die
every night—

And of
the newest
ways to grow
hair on

bald death—
I told him
of the quartz
lamp

and of old men
with third
sets of teeth
to the cue

of an old man
who said
at the door—
Sunshine today!

for which
death shaves
him twice
a week

I admire this poem for two reasons mainly: 1) because it has a testy attitude towards attempts to deny the natural passage of a mortal life, and 2) because, in its own deceptive simplicity and baldness, it too has been shaved down by a poet-barber or editor. Attempts to cheat the barber with the “newest ways to grow hair on” or to be blind to the barber’s existence by dreaming of “sunshine today!” merely results in the barber now having to shave “twice a week”.

The poem conjures up precisely what I find so fascinating about hair and the experience of sitting in the barber’s chair. From this vantage point, the mirror is the convergence of reality and fantasy. As both a social signifier and a signifier of passing time, hair simultaneously tells us what we wish to be and what we are. The barber’s chair is the seat from which we examine ourselves or flinch. And in this sense I realise I’m in the barber’s chair a whole lot more than just four times a year.

This anecdote is quite anodyne but every time I sit here I ask myself why I take so long to take action and have my hair cut. I think a key reason is the discomfort I have explaining what I want the outcome of this encounter to be.

When I was younger and playing football and rugby every day of the week on muddy pitches, I picked up a recurring injury at the end of weekends that some internet research had suggested might be an adductor strain. I remember eventually visiting a physio about it to see if I could get some help figuring out what it was and how to look after it. The experience of trying to communicate to another human being where the pain was, what the pain felt like, when the pain occurred etc. stunned me. Once I realised that the person examining me could not understand my experience because it was particular to my embodied existence, I lost my confidence and spoke increasingly incoherently about the injury. Needless to say, the encounter didn’t help with my injury and, besides this, it made me aware of an unconscious scepticism and anticipation of isolation I have in situations where it’s necessary for me to express directly what I’m experiencing.

Instructing the barber how I want my hair to be cut falls into a similar category — this person is intimately close to my hair without having the slightest conception of my experience with that hair so how can I trust that they understand what I want and am I even capable of explaining what I want? How do I translate what I am into what I wish to be into a common tongue for someone else to understand? Usually I’ve reached the point where a change of any kind seems preferable to more of the same and a bad haircut is relatively low stakes because time will take you back to the start eventually. Still, I have to stop short of answering the question So what do you want doing with your hair today? with the response up to you (which happened once before, and never again, when in an unguarded state of follicular pessimism).

I left the barber’s with my hairs on the floor waiting to be swept up and binned and myself quite impressed by this little wisdom about when to get your hair cut and when to embrace change. The best time to cut your hair is just when you think it looks great. I don’t agree with this wholeheartedly because it’s patently wrong and at odds with our relationship with time — prioritising present pleasure comes more naturally than forgoing present pleasure for speculative future pleasure.

However, and I’m speaking more broadly about growth and change now, if embracing change in the first place is what allows a person to appreciate a sense of satisfied completion then perhaps it is precisely at this sensation where that person is best positioned to step into change again. To be thankful for the self they became and to be open to the possibility of surpassing their past selves again and again. To choose to live, and live, and live, and maybe weave an unending comfort tapestry, rather than a small comfort blanket.

"Baby, you can change and still choose me," sang death the barber.

Immersion 4: Grande Plage, Biarritz

The sea has a rage like no man
Or girl
Some say it has no rage at all.

There is no great truth to unfurl
Or scan
In the way the waves buffet a fool.

Was it not some hidden wrath
It was surely hidden malice
That rolled me in the bone-white froth,
Trapped me in a bone-white palace?

What I know now
Dislodges what went before
When I sunk into the quiet slough
Which I'm a stranger to for evermore.

Waking up from a deep, deep sleep is not as pleasant nor as fortifying for a morning as words on a page would make it seem. The depth of sleep is proportional to the severity of the shock of waking. Those who live or work in environments with very low levels of sunlight, a cave for instance, take a while to adapt to environments with very high levels of sunlight. This is akin to waking from very sound sleep.

These are the mornings when most I wish to preserve the seclusion of my dreams and my sleepworld — they try harder than ever to ingratiate themselves with my other lives that I live when I awake. Perhaps it's a peculiar kindness, helping me adapt to the light.

Since a lot of life is sleep, since a lot of life is being told that sleeping soundly is essential and healthy, and since, euphemistically speaking, a lot of pre-life and post-life is sleep, this is a problem. Sleeping makes living hard and vice versa as darkness makes light hard and vice versa. One new experience sweeps away the feeling of the experience preceding it like declarations of love written in wet sand before the approaching wave. And this appears to unsettle the rhythm of things. 

I must sleep well and live well. I must not get too attached to either. I must make the opposites cohere. My eyelids must close and open with the same gusto.

How can they devour the light who rummage so deep for their sequestered roots?

Where to begin? — that was the question; at what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the cliff top, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs, and foaming crests. Still the risk must be run; the mark made.

— V. Woolf, To the Lighthouse

I sit myself down. Beyond the reach of the sea's salty breath. It foams at the mouth and hasn't cleaned its teeth for days. It smiles furiously at me as I bring a small camera to my squinting eye.

In the little window that displays the scene I am groping to capture, life plays out with uncommon artfulness. Don, my dear companion, my Virgil leading me through the sun-kissed inferno of appearances coating the southwest of France as Winter greets Spring, steps towards the sparkling blue with more heroism than the naked eye can discern. The camera's eye modulates how much light this moment may be exposed to and deploys heavy shadows where the hero and his surfboard entangle themselves between sun and sea.

I have a need for light, but how much light am I willing to expose myself to? Will I accept what that light shines on me in the same way I run to what that light shines on the objects of my desires? And when I see the light that draws me out will I try to trap it in the darkness of my clenched fists or will I greet it with an open palm?

For a time I watch Don. He steps above the waves, sometimes momentarily, sometimes for a series of moments, and sometimes he misses the beat altogether — never steps above at all. Always though, he looks back to shore to see if I am watching and to see who else is watching.

What the camera lens does not say, but the squinting eye distinguishes as plainly as black contrasts white, is that in the thick of the waves the hero feels exposed to the whole world. Maybe no one but me is watching him, but that isn't how it feels — not when a disobedient tuft of wave jerks the board out from beneath the all-mastering feet, unrooting the hero.

In the most selfish kind of solidarity, I leave my litter of possessions on the beach — a towel, a book, a pen, a notebook, the camera (eyelid now shut) — and feel the sand change in firmness as I get closer to the monster's jaws where Don dances with hope. Over my shoulder, the distant rumbling of petanque players saunters down the cliffs and I can distinctly imagine the old-aged hollering and whooping as one metal ball thunders into another, fizzing it out of the arena forever. Now just in front of me, the waves cheer and clap with the same kind of glee I just imagined. Two of them converge on Don's hitherto untroubled board and the applause drowns out the plop of the hero's sudden submergence.

How can they find their way who have never faced the need to alchemise land and water?

The plage and its sea collude in a fiendish plot. Lured to the place where, together, they are most potent I find out my folly too late. Up to my waist in the restorative blue I turn to inspect the aspect of the shore as one might look at Earth from the moon. Quickly the tide empties until there is only a small puddle splashing about my ankles. I have been stripped of something, I stand naked in front of the beach, exposed to all and sundry. Checking to find the source of this moment of shame, I partake of the feeling of horror all earthlings experience in the face of certain death. The shallow water and the sand scurries and sinks across my feet and looming overhead is a mass of the sea's great heft, oblivious to the morsel it is about to consume.

Shock opens the mouth wide. Very wide. Wide enough to permit a volume of water that isn't enough to drown a person but enough to make a person wonder if drowning might be a more pleasurable option. It's also enough water to knock a person off their stable footing. And this is where the waves can have their play. I flip onto my back in an instant, not that I know it, having my tummy tickled by a counter current at the same time. Underwater, the push and the pull of all these excitable forces do not leave me stretched out how I expect them to, but rather they intimidate me into a foetal ball of protection — they return me to a childlike state.

By and by, the sea vomits me out. It may be less than a minute, or it may be a lifetime of uncontrollable rolling, before I regain my feet unsteadily and crawl back to the safety of the shore. This time I am glad. Glad for the ephemera. Glad to know the sea only enough to know its inexplicability. I am glad to witness that to know things as they are requires exposure to a painful, and inhuman, degree. Above all, I'm glad to know that awe is the thrill of finding myself exposed to the parts of reality that are resistant to my thinking.

What have they grasped whose thoughts fit smally in the dark of their clutched fingers?

To get here, I have walked so far believing myself to be mired in the most unnavigable slough, far below the smooth pavement of my peers. But this has never been so. 

This was a single photographic exposure I took to be in a condition of living and it demented me, shouldering me out from my own instant. 

The pause in the symphony is not the absence of sound, nor merely a precursor to what comes next — it too is its own kind of voicing.

The exposure, the pause, the immersion — a million of these aren't enough. Like a cheese sandwich, like a kiss, these are endlessly recitable moments that never get boring.

Feeling dry, soft sand beneath my feet once more, the terror of the sea begins its slow dissipation from my body. A pinprick of colour dares to surface on my pale cheeks. The camera only shakes lightly in time with the aftershock of my trembling hands. There isn't time to notice these things before I am conversing with my fellow earthling:

"Did you see me out there? We came at the wrong time of day for the best waves. Oh well, time for a late lunch I think — fancy a cheese sandwich or something?" asked Don.

Conclusion of the fourth immersion

A few weeks ago, in the 2026 World Darts Championship Final, a distinctive moment struck me as being unusually evocative of the self-cancelling nature of playfulness.

After the 6th set, with darting virtuoso Luke Littler romping to victory over debutant finalist Gian Van Veen having extended his lead to 5-1 in sets, the match took an unplanned pause as the referee inspected the board. Against the pale backdrop of the single 5 scoring area, a spec of blood from Van Veen’s pinky finger stood out like a form of stigmata. The contrast of the colours and the unexpectedness of its presence was unsettling even through the flawed medium of a television screen. It was symbolic of the unique kind of suffering endured by the playful parts of our identities as their life force dwindles.

While the referee and his board master (I don’t think there’s an official title for this role given the rare need for its services) erected a new dartboard, Van Veen had time to compose himself and mastermind an unlikely comeback to beat Littler to 7 sets. But his composure had gone. He responded to Littler’s relaxed small talk without eye contact, his point of focus in another realm — the same realm perhaps as the dartboard that had just been dismantled before his very eyes. He fidgeted and muttered to himself, doing all that one can do in front of a crowd and television cameras where slapping your own face as a kind of reset is likely to be frowned upon.

The next time he stood up at the oche to throw, his body was rigid, tense, and brittle. He didn’t throw badly (he gave himself the chance to check out 110 to take the first leg), yet the conviction of defeat had nibbled its way through his being like a rat. Duly, Littler took out 40 and the first leg and play resumed as it had done for the previous few sets.

It was at this point that the Canadian darts player and commentator, John Part, observed:

“he wants to throw well but there’s no spirit behind it”

Once spoken aloud, this remark shattered the tenuous remains of hope for a turnaround and seemed to encase Van Veen in a prison of repetitive, mechanical movements without intent or meaning. His throws were the equivalent of a night bus pulling into a stop on its prescribed schedule and flinging open the doors with no passengers to pick up or drop off.

Darts might seem too prosaic a form of play to draw out meaningful conclusions about the nature of playfulness — if this is how you feel, hold back your wilful ignorance for just a moment and allow yourself to consider the poetry of this play. It is a game of rhythm that relies night to night on the thrower’s ability to control the timing of their body which acts as a living trebuchet. Mastery of darts involves the capacity to syncopate as well as unsyncopate as the rules, that are themselves inherently playful, demand that the dart can’t just aim for the same spot every time to win a leg.

Unlike other forms of play that I can think of immediately, the technique used to achieve victory varies as much as the very fingerprint varies from player to player. No two throwers throw in the same way which, in the age of gaming the game through meticulous data and statistical analysis, is quite astonishing. Nor is there an ideal physique or weight of dart or mode of release that, as yet, produces the best result. If you watch closely, you’ll also be amazed at how such a seemingly simple act as throwing a dart can be interpreted and executed in such different ways.

No. Rather, it all appears to depend on how much a thrower can lose themselves to their own unique expression of being. In this sense, darts can be remarkably exposing.

What I’m getting at is that the thrower and the dart, at the elite level, have a relationship akin to music and dancing. The thrower must create the conditions for the dart to dance. And for that, the thrower must bring down the spirit and play through it.

What on earth does that mean and how have we got to this point? I’ve been lightly thinking about this most days now for three weeks. Why is this moment so lodged in my mind?

I think this particular moment was so evocative to me because, momentarily, it laid bare a truth that to play well in anything we are required to somehow forget that we are playing at all. Does the moment in which we become conscious of playing serve as a poison to play? And can we only play fully when we have surrendered to the objects and conditions of play to let them impose their will on us? If this is the case, then winning is merely the subservient by-product of the greater part of play, which is (extremely simply) just playing.

Does that make sense? Maybe not. But let me think of it another way. It is often said that 10,000 hours of practice is necessary to master an activity such as throwing a dart. This creates a straightforward input-output formula for darting success. But north of 10,000 hours it seems that the line of progress on the graph hits a question mark - another 10,000 hours will not see a rise in progress that is proportional to the first 10,000 hours, so what then?

Thereafter, a surprising amount depends upon the intangible things that set up the perfect conditions for play. You might be better off throwing 3 darts a week in training if that allows you to take care of all the things that make it possible for you to lose yourself to the spirit of play when it matters — although throwing darts and losing yourself are likely to be connected pursuits.

I think what was so emphatic about Littler’s victory — more than the scoreline — was the fact that his complete immersion in the spirit of play eventually made it impossible for Van Veen to play at all. Instead Van Veen was consigned to the torturous punishment of repetitively throwing in time to a quiet, forgotten beat, knowing it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference to the final outcome.

Van Veen “wants to throw well but there’s no spirit behind it” — the darts refuse to dance for the mute symphony.

The sound of waves crumpling to the shore does not get boring. Why is this, are they not all the same? 

How does a person return again and again to the same din, the same utterance, untired and ready to listen? Is it something in the listener’s world that makes the repetitive unrepetitive, or is this the nature of things per se? Something apparently resists monotony — some internal or external condition. Maybe both. Each wave, it seems, is more than another wave. Each fresh wave brings with it the memory of its predecessors.

The sea is old and knows unspeakable things. Returning once more to listen to its utterance is to learn that each wave participates in — and animates — an ongoing performance, reconstructing as it deconstructs what goes before with each improvisational recitation. The listener understands this voice. 

When the Old Testament Syrian army commander, Naaman, found himself afflicted with leprosy, his desperation to be rid of the skin disease, and the stigma it carried, led him to the prophet Elisha. He left behind his homeland, where his victories in combat had made him a hero, and presented himself in Samaria — a destination that would not have been held in high regard by his kinsfolk. Elisha instructed him to dip himself in the River Jordan seven times to restore his flesh to the state of a little child’s flesh. Naaman eventually does as he is told, but he distrusts the Jordan and doubts its supposed restorative properties. Why would this mucky old river in Israel be any better for him than those he knew and loved in Damascus? Within seven dips Naaman was healed. 

What thoughts crossed Naaman’s mind as he washed himself for a third time, seemingly no closer to a cure than before? Did the repetition seem pointless? Did he stubbornly persevere to prove his point that the Jordan was an inferior place to bathe? Or did the experience of diving beneath the surface again and again start to cultivate a peculiar anticipation of change in his person? Because it is not the number of repetitions that matters in this story of healing. It is the nature of hopeful, maybe desperate, acts embodying doubt that matters.

How can they be re-born who dwells always in their native waters?

I place my face in front of the breath of the sea once more a few months later. The day directly follows that which marks the 23rd year since my birth. It is November now but in the coastal outskirts of Porto the sun allows for a brief stint of short-wearing. Open grills audibly sizzling the big-bellied fruit of the sea line the promenade that runs parallel with the shore, encasing it with the waft of molten fish skin and steaming citric vapours. 

I consider the prospect of eating while watching the shadowy specs of surfers being tossed hither and thither by the sea’s foaming tongues. At this distance the movements appear so choreographed and slow that it seems implausible for any of the surfers to really be unbalanced by the lolloping undulations of the water beneath them. They ought to have played with the waves long enough by now to know its secrets.

I buy a large orange from the market behind me and take slow, lugubrious steps towards the shore for closer inspection. I am steeped in a mood of impatient listlessness — the kind of entitled mood where complaints are vented without any intention to listen to solutions. As the orange peels mechanically in my small, busy hands, what looks like millions of miniscule eruptions happen at once. The orange belches forth a succession of oily clouds. They swirl before me and attach themselves to whatever they come into contact with.

This, too, I watch with a certain tiredness of mind. The growing stickiness of my fingers and the light orange hue hugging my white tee sheet are enough to distract me today from the twinkling dance of the orange’s last exhalation. Each droplet refracts a ray of sunshine before sinking to the sand. Spitefully, I plough on.

The further I walk, the more I disturb the world. Three dozen birds of a dull colour and personality peck at the beach — more in hope than expectation of nourishment. They do not interest me, and I am a nuisance to them. I do not deviate from the quickest route to the water’s edge which means coming within a yard and a half of the flock. No one is pleased about this — many shoulders hunch — but we stubbornly press on as if intent on our aimless journeys.

At last, I can bend down and cup the grey water. It is keeping its distance a long way from the promenade at the end of the beach. Around my feet it foams rabidly but in my hands it is tame and passionless. I inspect my hands after running the water through my hair; little dark hairs cling here and there and my fingers very gradually pale to account for a drop in temperature I do not feel.

I wade in then, oblivious to what I am wading into. I wonder why it — the moment of moments — is not happening anymore.

Who can apprehend beauty who expects it, who demands it?

The water dunks over my head and I grind to a halt. Each step underwater has made me more aware than before of how a step is completed. Against all that force and resistance I feel each activated muscle strain, feel each toe untether from the sand and entangle around clumps of seaweed as my lower torso slowly edges forward. Now I meet the water at the point where my shuffling is cancelled out by firm pushes back. There is no forward, not with a future.

Virtually immobile, I look up through the surface for as long as my eyes will let me before the seawater forces them to blink. A crouching form appears there above the frisky water, cutting into a wave, then cutting away, cutting in again, cutting away again. The observable moments pass by slowly but too quickly I am joined by this plunging figure whose laughter is still audible as the water vainly consumes its tickled mouth. 

Underwater, where sound travels like lightning, I hear the rhythm of laughter, so long forgotten while I listened to the sea’s lonesome roar. I hear it and I lift in the rising tide of the waters covering the sea. I think I am ready to stay — just a giggle or two more. But the salty brine vomits me onto dry land once more, imploring me to improve my taste.

Homme libre, toujours tu chériras la mer!

Conclusion of the third immersion.

Hush your mouth
Don't interrupt this

He speaks
His eyes sparkle
Glint like the silver 
On his wrist
Round his neck
In his ear
Yeah
And his teeth too
They sparkle
When his tongue clicks against them
As he starts to laugh

Hush your mouth
Don't interrupt this

He points
His fingertips stretch
Extended like a ballerina
They speak their own language
An enchanting one
That covers the surrounding area
As light from the recalcitrant sun
When it emerges from the cloud
Yeah
His hands wave
And shake
And articulate
Before they grasp
An enchanted tongue
As he starts to laugh

Hush your mouth 
Don't interrupt this

He listens
His question pleases him
But he knows
The answer might please him more
So he waits
With a furrowed brow
And a grin
One for concentration
The other for mischief
Or both for both
He waits
Yeah
Because waiting is also playing
And he is a sportsman
Who likes to win
But prefers to grow
Like the volume
As he starts to laugh

Hush your mouth
Don't interrupt this

Now I can see him
Speaking pointing listening
All at once
In a brilliant blaze of laughter
Yeah
The gesture is repetitive
But like a kiss or a cheese sandwich
It does not bore
It does not switch off
It cannot be interrupted

Hush your mouth

In loving memory of a man of infectious jest, intensity, and laughter. Your curiosity is an undimming thing that I hope to keep aflame - thank you for sharing it with me.

Remember who commended thy yellow stockings, and wished to see thee ever cross-gartered. I say remember, go to, thou art made if thou desirest to be so; if not, let me see thee a steward still, the fellow of servants, and not worthy to touch Fortune’s fingers.

— Twelfth Night

The Lord of Misrule seems to have been a popular subversive figure in Tudor England — and an enduring motif besides. These were said to have been festive figures appointed by those in positions of power at special celebrations to assume authority for a finite period, their chief duty being to bring merriment through the abuse of their dignified position.

Undoubtedly, there is an unpleasant undertone to this revelry. It rests on the assumption that power transferred to those not born to it is inherently amusing. At the same time, thought should be given to the fact that the later decline of this character in Puritanical England came about through the banning of such customs that were deemed socially disruptive — that is, caused confusion about hierarchical class structure.

So, the revelry also seems to rest on something else. It feasts on that unthinkable thought that the Lord of Misrule is not merely performing, that his tenure is not finite, but that in appropriating the role he has assumed it.

A scene that thrills and horrifies me in equal measure in my favourite Shakespeare play, Twelfth Night, is that in which Malvolio — a Puritanical steward of the noble lady Olivia — is tricked into believing he has won Olivia’s love and that she has requested him to wait upon her with an uncharacteristic grin and decked in yellow, cross-gartered stockings. Malvolio unwittingly plays the Lord of Misrule and is humiliated for his transgressive desire for power.

I’ve seen this scene played various ways but it always manages to be as disturbing as it is amusing. Cathartic it isn’t — even if Malvolio is drawn up as a dislikeable character. The moment appears to weigh up, before the audience’s eyes, the nature of power and play and whether play of power can amount to a power of play. Ultimately, the moment wins laughter at the physical comedy of Malvolio’s transformed dress and behaviour, but the laughter also has an edge of anxiety to it — the laugh of a child reassured by its parents that the nightmare isn’t real.

I think a performance in which Malvolio convincingly seduces Olivia, even if momentarily, would have a very interesting impact on the audience — which leads me to share a miniscule snapshot of Jean-Claude, AKA JC…

Turning left onto the ‘2’ an hour or so south of Montréal, where New York State tenderly kisses the forehead of Vermont, the traveller and his band of jesters erupt into some frenzied song. Their campsite for the night is close at hand and this provokes that vagabondish spirit of delirium to which all are surely susceptible in old company and strange lands.

So, with the light waves of Lake Champlain chuckling to the shore under the sinking sun, these four unburden their excess tenderness for the moment by crooning their respective parts to Mika’s ‘Happy Ending’. Each knows his role and performs it admirably, with just the right amount of reverence to the original but no shortage of stylised appropriation.

Time scurries on eagle’s wings in such rapturous sequences. The car’s wheels say goodbye to the asphalt and lower into the dewy embrace of the evening grass in hope of finding a spot to rest. A chill air has built up and the proud vocalists become no more than lightly shivering juveniles as they exit the vehicle and look for the guardian of the campsite. Through the chattering leaves of the trees and the muffled sounds of elderly residents wrapping up their conversations before bed, something hisses gently like wind off long grasses or a quickly moving chain.

The traveller follows his friends to a house nearby where it is presumed a figure may appear who might be charmed and prevailed upon to let four hapless pilgrims from across the Atlantic set up a tent for the night and kip under the infinite canvas of stars. It happens that just such a one emerges, takes kindly to the politely phrased enquiry, and arranges for a payment to be made at a more convenient moment on the morrow. Addled with gratitude and perhaps the echo of Mika’s rather sad song, it is wordlessly agreed that here stands a landlady of angelic proportions.

They turn to go back to the car and set up their abode before nightfall but, as they look down the drive from which they came, a figure of inscrutable age rounds the bend on a bicycle with the urgency of a guard dog. At closer quarters, they see that it is a man, and not just any man, but a gentleman sporting a pair of very finely patterned knee-length socks that seem incongruous with the rest of his attire.

“Oh boys, this is Jean-Claude” — gestures our hostess.

“JC” — perhaps Jean-Claude says in correction, or maybe it was the traveller’s natural inference of JC’s cool demeanour that made him think he said this.

As must happen in the meeting of four young men of sociable forwardness and an apparently older man of inestimable youthful vitality, enthusiastic hand clasping ensues. In establishing a grip that a python would be pleased at, JC contents himself that, should the worst come to the worst, these young men could be easily subdued with the mere crush of a hand. This dynamic asserted, everyone feels ready to harmoniously coexist.

JC is a dreamer. As the sun drops behind him, he hatches all kinds of plans to ensure that this night is one that the boys entrusted to him will savour. He remembers his youth as he cycles about the site frantically, pulling up his socks every 50 yards to maintain firm placement over the knee. He shows the boys the beach huts — “hmm but the mosquitoes, you don’t want them” — before hurtling back to the opposite end of the site to point out a secluded nook — “a beauty. You won’t be disappointed, not here”.

It dawns on the four that they have stumbled across the Lord of Misrule who dared to touch Fortune’s fingers and make them his own. This weather-beaten fellow romps around on his carbon fibre horse all over his estate sketching before them all the merriment that can be had on these very grounds, never ceasing to dispose of a half-spun idea in favour of a new one.

Where his energy comes from or how it sustains itself is utterly mysterious — it running counter to time’s overbearing presence on his face and his hair and his brakes. He could at once be the hostess’ grandfather or her son in this twilight frippery.

JC bids them goodnight, returns moments later at speed to remind them that they should want to get the tent up before it gets dark, stops to speak some French — all too pleased to note that a few of the young guests have this capacity — before vanishing again into the night.

Who knows what to believe about a fabled figure flickering in a fantastical night, surrounded by waters that make their way right across to the other side of the continent, and below a severe vault of curiously peeping stars unimpeded by artificial lights?

The four guests awake to a sunny mid-morning and enjoy some mutual tittering over shared anecdotes and the mutual feeling of venturesome satisfaction. Besides the humming of winged creatures and the far off lapping of the lake, very little sound disturbs their little corner of paradise.

Then comes the encroaching sound of handlebars traversing little speed bumps on a small road. The boys see his socks first, up over the knee in dignified fashion. There again, rejuvenated from a night’s misruling, sits JC with an expression akin to Malvolio’s goofy grin as he yells to Olivia “And some have greatness thrust upon them”.

The traveller fails to recall if JC’s stockings were yellow or indeed cross-gartered, but what he does remember — and of this make no mistake — that this was the first man to make a virtue of elaborately coloured compression socks for herein, surely, lay the source of his unquenchable power and Lake Champlain’s future prosperity.

Immersion 2: Crackington Haven, Cornwall

Something peculiar happens when you run downhill for too long. 

No, it’s not that your muscles start overextending and eccentrically contracting, although that is what they do. What happens is that a strange lightness overtakes your being. You forget your weight. A part of you awakens to the possibility of hiding, of being deliberately left behind, of watching yourself fade off into the distance — never to come back. Maybe Milan Kundera once ventured from the Parisian streets to see a runner wheeling down a hill in la forêt de Meudon and ponder that her movements were as free as they were insignificant.

I trickle along the severe Cornish cliffs a couple of months after my first immersion — a timid droplet delaying the inevitable plunge back into the ocean. I weigh less than before and an age has prematurely fallen on my flesh, bringing my skin out in fresh, ruddy irritation. I run because walking is no good. I run because gravity acts faster than my thoughts.

How can they avoid suffering who trust their feet before their eyes?

The last kilometre to the shoreline drops suddenly like a grandfather's eyelids on a warm afternoon in July. The prospect thrills me. I begin the descent with measure, the cadence of my stride starts consistently and my posture remains upright. I stare ahead at the sea which sparkles unusually under the early Autumn sun — there is not as much recognition as before in today's pebble-hard eyes.

Before long an untethering begins. The animated self becomes detached from the sea-bound entity as if from a shell and cowers nakedly among the scrubby bushes above. I, meanwhile, carry on, my legs further akimbo with each footfall and my perpendicularity to the road increasingly under threat. My body cries out for help with an inaudible shriek, a voice returns —

Where are you?

My voice has shied and not made it down with me.

Senseless and dumb I seep into a cove where the retreating tide exposes some sand further on down past the rocks. Against the low reflected sun, the figures bobbing around me are little more than silhouettes. Nothing distinguishes these shapes but, still, I see them bristle as my red and sweating skin comes into view.

I creep upon a pillowy wave and lie myself down on my back as a child does in their parent's bed after a nightmare. I sense the meeting of salt — oceanic and perspirant — and close my eyes to better notice the slowness of breath and heartbeats.

How can they be seen by another who is already fixated upon themself?

I watch the coastal hills erect before me, amphitheatrical in shape, and follow busy specs zig-zagging across trodden grass pathways. Seeing the reflected light from this angle as it bursts towards its destination gives the scene a projected quality. Life over there is a postcard — mere light material for me to etch a whimsical thought upon.

Nestled among the browning greenery is my animated self, preparing to hibernate and spying the water guardedly. I see him how you see the same person waiting at the bus stop at the same time every day — I do not see him but know that he is there.

The Atlantic is just as I left it, cold and reassuring but unready to consume me. I float back and feel my weightlessness in the diffident waters: I am here. Time is not interminable but it feels most this way when you look as far as you can into the profundity of the sky — it can hurt your eyes looking too far, and it makes them produce little puddles of water as the vast space sucks all the moisture from them. But the sea does not seem to suffer from this.

Even the sea must run home for tea. It bids me goodbye with a playful shove back to the foot of the hill. I move my slow thighs and examine the ascent before me. As the darkness drops I slouch my way forward...

per la citta' dolente
per l'etterno dolore
per la perduta gente

Conclusion of the second immersion.

Immersion 1: Bojo Beach, Accra

You might call this the state of innocence — so long as you don't believe in the idea that innocence resets after every 8-hour sleep, or after each blink of the eyes. In this state, a person bears no visible blemish nor perceives any wounds that require attention. The tears of a person in this state, James Baldwin might have said, would likely be those that betray an inability to feel and an aversion to experience — tears betraying a fear of life and that person's own as yet arid heart.

We push from the land's edge in a canoe, leaving behind the tall grass, the palm trees, and the exuberant firefinches (red bills aflame).

In sore time, the vessel's superabundance of love will make itself known to me — only in ghostly fashion. But as we cleave through the still waters I think little of its  seaworthiness and bask underappreciatively in the care of its precious cargo.

Soon, we land at a spit of beach. The man in front of me disembarks and ushers the Atlantic's salty breath into his nostrils with a hum of satisfaction. He smiles and peers out at the sea in a manner suggesting he has seen something. I smile, his being infectious and delightful to me, but when I follow his gaze I see nothing between marine and sky blue.

What can they find who do not care to be found?

This man is touched by something I do not understand, something gently amazing, something for which I still await the hour of understanding. Save this — this I understand very well: whenever a voice asks Where are you? he appears and says Here I am.

How to follow the example of such a man — it's a question I wordlessly ask him. He responds in like kind, nodding to the shoreline where the waves greedily eat the footsteps of those who dipped and immersed themselves there before.

He sits by the beach under an umbrella and orders a large fish. He eats with deft articulations of thanksgiving and casts his eyes over the blue horizon — his eyes sparkle softly as a calm fire playing itself to a slow-burning sway. As he speaks to us his fingertips stretch in full extension and his large hands look capable of holding whole worlds if they wish it so.

His wisdom tickles, teased from its holdings by his indomitable chuckles. He laughs and giggles until the hand of wisdom lands on the very heart and it trembles with fear and with life. The hand knocks at various doors, patiently waiting to be let in — but not all the doorkeepers are at their posts, not now, as they scour the parched land for something to slake their thirst.

What doors can they open who abandon their posts?

Reassured and complacent, I walk into the sea. It foams up my shins in exasperated groans. I walk further. It rushes up me, finding my form obstinate, my posture unyielding, my skin unaware of its own appetite. I walk further. It consumes me then it spits me out — pride is not to its taste.

I fuss over salt-encrusted hair, dampened clothes, and the setting of the sun. Something glints just once where the sun will finally descend and an intrusive thought scurries across me: I am here.

My host is waving to me from his perch under the umbrella. I wave back, his enthusiastic gesture evoking in me calm and contentment. And he continues to wave, cheerfully, as if there is someone else emerging from the water behind me.

Conclusion of the first immersion & in loving memory of Uncle Frankie

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What do you call it, call it?
- A tulip
What to do with it, with it?
- Nothing. Just love it.

— Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

I long lost count of the time-eating days
Beached there, brained, on the balding blue rock,
Senseless to its charm, senseless to my stock.
I far forgot the vastness of your ways —
Until! a roaming shade lanced through the rays,
A giggling storm renewed the face of the earth
And it boiled, and it boomed, with sprouting mirth.
You renovate the world after I raze.
But who is your shade — how could I lose you?
Was I so drawn to Truth to let Awe fall!
Good your shadowy depths that no eye sees through,
Good your wild music, its resounding call,
Good your varied face where old waits upon new,
Best your tresses — in a single hair is all.

Ma qui la morta poesì resurga

But here let dead poetry wake again

— Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio

The Sunday hospital car park
entices a little rain
and electric buses whisper by 
don't disturb the peace, don't disturb the pain.
The world is not on fire — all could yet be well —
long, slow, and flameless pockets smoulder
with a babe's first breath and a patient's final sigh.
The crucible is warming but its contents are getting colder.

This is not how I envisaged it.

How is it now that you are here
in my flesh and in my blood
— you, my friend, my treasure,
you, roaming, exceeding every measure —
receptacled from the abstract sphere,
delegate of dust, mind of mud?

This is not how I envisaged it
and all could yet be well.

I push the hair out of the world's sleepy eyes,
asking her tenderly what she sees:
she has wandered her way deep
to the place where wizened phantoms boom
that there can be no home
through the extreme interior caverns that she leaps.

This is not how I envisaged it
and the world is not on fire.

So I lay the world back down to sleep;
I leave her as I found her,
dreaming subterranean dreams.
In this moment I know both lives:
she is a summerlong seed that none can reap —
yet they germinate who sequester,
gleaming a subterranean gleam.

There was once a frog. His name is not important. When he wasn’t hibernating he dwelt in a little pond beside a well. On sunny days he perched on the sparkling surface and called out to all who would hear. His voice wasn’t particularly special but there was something unique about the air that he breathed in and about the way his vocal sac inflated and deflated. It produced a voice that was inimitably his.

This frog was ponderous and wayward. Though one of the first of his pondmates to refine his call, he was not apt to use it very often and grew to dislike his early bloom. So while the other frogs battled through the discordant sounds of their adolescent larynxes, he went roaming astray.

One day in particular, he gave up on his calling exercises before the sun had even reached its highest point in the sky. Distracted and wondering where his choicest companions had got to, he dabbled towards the pond’s edge. The water was warmest here and there was always something to see, and he always felt safe as long his feet were wet.

In the young afternoon, where shadows are but thumb-sized pricks of darkness, he saw a friend of his sitting on the wall of the well and basking in the smile of the sun. As he watched he thought to himself that that must be the height of sensate experience: to be optimally warm — able, at last, to think with clarity. The calling of his pondmates around him suddenly seemed stupid, a gangrenous din. And the closer he looked at his friend the easier he could see the light puffing of his vocal sacs. Losing himself in the spectacle, he began to hear a song of sheer joy — not happiness, nor overcome sadness, but joy. It was faint at first; then, like laughter that consumes itself and germinates more laughter, it grew in strength. The melody was unlike anything our frog had heard before.

Unbeknownst to him, our frog — listening and watching — had started to attract a crowd. The others had stopped their calling and had turned to see him there at the pond’s edge, dancing and perspiring and sobbing and cheering. It was odd definitely, no doubt about that, but it wasn’t especially out of the ordinary — not for him anyway.

Oh, there he is, mooning away again!

Doesn’t he know he’ll only catch a toad prancing about like that?

He’s in love with himself that one — always has been since he was a froglet.

Eventually they grew tired of the sight and pressed on with more important things like honing their calls. But one frog was especially curious and excitable. She had never seen anything like this before. There was something frightening about him leaping around on the edge of the pool on his own like that but she wanted to know what it was all for so she paddled a little closer.

The look on his face was surprisingly peaceful given the way he was thrashing about. She had not seen that look on his face before — a face she had always considered dopey though not unpleasant. In fact, she had always admired his eyes — much more than his call. His eyes had a way of pre-empting the unbroken sound that streamed from his vocal sac, of articulating that sound before it was even born.

Her grandmother had told her once of a fellow who she met when she was a froglet and who was born without vocal sacs. He had mastered the art of calling with his eyes alone. This had scared many but not her grandmother. She used to see him wade out at night and gaze at the moon to perfect his vigilant song, and every now and then she crept out too just to be a little nearer, to sit on the edge of his song-world. He, though, had died young. The cold of the night had bitten into his very core and nibbled away at every last corner of him until he was silenced and never heard of again. Whenever her grandmother spoke of him to her she always concluded by vehemently warning against romanticising the story — He died because he was foolish. He retraced his steps and went back every night trying to recreate his song. Always the same. Chasing a memory. Do not pity him because he embraced the cold without a fight. He was a — Always some combination of these sentiments and always, always, her grandmother finished in the middle of a sentence, unable to continue.

She was quite close by this point. But she saw that his eyes were closed, gazing inward, projecting that chord within. What did it mean? What was he playing with? She scanned the edge of the pond and looked up at the well a little distance away — was there a form sitting there? She couldn’t tell from her angle and her sight was obscured by the shimmering wall of reflected sunlight dazzling up from the pond. In any case, it was perfectly still and silent, she was sure of that.

In the course of her wandering she had trickled right into the centre of our frog’s orbit and after a few near misses they eventually collided. His eyes rolled open and a blast of this inward song was expelled. She was astonished. She attempted to compose herself but her limbs were shaking and a blanket of warmth was stretching itself across her back. For a moment, the very water they were immersed in seemed to evaporate and swim around them, bursting into heaven-bound notes — an unbroken song of joy.

He, for his part, was thunderstruck by her presence. What had been his own, his private reverie, had taken on amphibious flesh. He was baffled. He knew, or thought he knew, where this joy had originated. But when he looked from his friend to this familiar stranger, and from this familiar stranger back to his friend, his memory unravelled. Where had it all come from? Was the new song of joy a powerful continuation of the first, or was it something else altogether? Who was it that was enchanted: him, his friend, or the familiar stranger? He had frogotten it all, so to speak.

He was a frog who liked to know things — even things that cannot be known and that the knowing of has the effect of limiting a thing’s power. With an effort, he pulled himself out of the pond, over the swampy mud, and onto the wall of the well. He had never been this far before and with each leap the pond looked smaller and smaller. He looked for her but soon she was only a spec and her dance could not sustain itself — she turned her back. Indeed, his own dance had started to give way to trembling and fear. Feelings of loss and remorse started to seep into his being.

On the wall of the well he could not find his friend. The sun had made galloping progress across the sky. There was a nip in the air and the shadows uncoiled their tendrils with menacing abandon.

Perhaps he had ventured back to the pond. The thought brought our frog relief for he had started to worry that there was no way down from the wall back to his home. Relaxing, he decided to stay in the sun awhile just to see what affect it might have on him. He felt that warmth return, embracing every part of him with its nourishing glow. He could feel the clarity of thought rampage around his being, intoxicating him with wild optimism. He concentrated on arousing the rumbling of joy through his body, closing his eyes and focusing on the air passing in and out of his vocal sacs. But every time he seemed to be on the cusp of recreation she flitted across the moment firing a pang of cold anguish through him.

He went on in this way, wrestling hot with cold, retracing his steps, never willing to compromise or deviate from the song he had heard his friend sing. He too would sing it, if he just cut her out. But she had become a part of him — a part he could not part with. The new song awaited his command. His command never came.

As time meandered on, a great cold came. A long fingered hand cast its reaching shadow down upon him, transfixing him in its suffocating chill. The hand was attached to a long arm of grave intent, lowering the hand down to be closer to him. It grabbed his midriff. Plucked upwards, he found himself face-to-face with a woman and was made to dangle precariously in the thickening air leaking from her lips. He glanced in horror at the shining crown that glinted on her forehead, reflecting his own face back at him, coldly.

Although they stared at each other for no more than a second, it felt like morning would come before it broke. It broke with a kiss — planted on his forehead with the dead fizz of stagnant water. In a matter of moments he transformed into a man. Disenchanted, he could not look at the pond, his home, again. At the bottom of the well he saw his friend sleeping and softly singing to himself. He turned away.

He took the woman’s hand in his and slowly made his way up out of the valley towards her castle looming far above — a ceaseless cold anguish burning through him.

A little while ago I had the pleasure of being joined on a Zoom call by a charming mustelid-clad transcription software called otter.ai. Unlike otters — creatures remarkable for their powerful tail which makes them very strong swimmers — this software was struggling in the habitat it was designed for: the online conference call.

For those unfamiliar with otter.ai, once installed, this cutesy software will dutifully attend all your meetings (whether you dial in or not) to transcribe conversations and offer a precis of the discussion, powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. In theory, it removes that awful faff of actually listening and looking and engaging with other participants so you can get back to what really matters - installing other softwares to relieve you of all of life’s inconvenient burdens perhaps.

On this occasion, otter.ai was up to its usual dastardly tricks. I was the first one onto the call and, anticipating a nice minute of calm before others joined, I was humming and singing in between a sip of coffee and connecting my charger to the laptop. However, to my discomfort and chagrin I was interrupted by the beady eye (singular) of otter.ai. This impudent fellow had scurried into the virtual meeting room — ignorant of the fact that its installer was out of office and would not be interested in the contents of this call — and was noting my every move.

Speaker 1 sings the chorus of ‘Sailing’ by Rod Stewart. The meeting is silent for a moment.

The other participants joined and, after about 7 minutes of jokes and banter at poor old otter.ai’s expense, we get on with the rest of the call. Just as its designers had intended, otter.ai became easy to ignore and was anonymous for the rest of the meeting. It never butted in, never corrected, never giggled (or even smiled) at various well-deployed quips. It professionally observed the game of language performed by these 10, boxed-in figures, just as I might sometimes observe a game of football between two teams I have no love for — present within but firmly speculating from without.

The call ended and everyone prepared to act on what they vaguely promised to do. But not so otter.ai who promised nothing and was only interested in ‘actions’ as a plural noun uttered 12 times during the course of the call (once by Speaker 1, three times by Speaker 4, and eight times by Speaker 10). Instead, otter.ai distributed its summary of the call — a call it never unmuted itself or turned its camera on for — to the participants.

While amused at this inane efficiency for someone who was on vacation, it managed to provoke my vanity so I scanned the summary to see whether otter.ai had portrayed me in a good light. I was nervous that my good-natured ribbing of the software at the top of the call would be exposed by this sensitive creature.

The team discusses the need for X to be online, and there’s a brief humorous exchange about remote working and AI tools.

Fortunately there was nothing to worry about.

Was otter.ai programmed to detect jokes at its expense and censor them, I wondered. Or perhaps its interpretation was intentionally impertinent - I don’t remember the exchange being brief nor merely humourous. It was long-winded and very funny. Most plausible, it seemed to me, was that (without actually participating in the experience of joking, bantering, and wisecracking) analysing what happened linguistically became an insurmountable task for otter.ai. It’s like attempting to comprehend the sun by looking at it directly with the naked eye.

I try to curb my interactions with generative AI products such as ChatGPT as much as possible. I’m fearful of their intensive use of energy and water. But, at the same time, Large Language Models (LLMs) are fascinating to interact with. As this short piece on ChatGPT 4.0’s failure to generate well-formed, nonsense sentences like Noam Chomsky’s famous ‘Colourless green ideas sleep furiously’ explores, LLMs highlight the sophistication of linguistic intercourse that we participate in as unconsciously as breathing.

Still, it strikes me that we’re not born with language. At some point in our lives we have all gone through the process of learning or acquiring it in order to take part in the system of communication we grow up with. It might seem like second nature, but really it takes us an incredibly long time (as earthling lifespans go) to get anywhere with the subtleties of language.

LLMs don’t experience language in an embodied way. Humans do, however. A recent encounter with a baby reminded me again of this. Though this is obvious enough to say, it is also quickly thrown out the window when it comes to analysing language as if the product of a mind and not of a brain.

I was walking the Camino de Santiago with my friends (as I now never tire of saying) and we met a couple of pilgrims along the way who were carrying their dear little babe. He was less than a year old. He was an icon. Crowds flocked to greet him. Many pilgrims came forward simply to be in his presence, to be gazed upon by him. Baby Peregrino won people to his heart, and sent them away with a piece of it.

He was a little boy with marvelling blue eyes, ever-swivelling, ever-scanning to make sense of each new environment. He was partial to a broad grin, particularly at sounds he liked and at flickering images that tickled him from time to time. He liked to dance. When life, as it does, became overwhelming, or his senses were overloaded with new faces and new scenes and new questions, he performed a restorative jig that would bring him back to himself. And he didn’t suffer fools — baby talk a moment too long and a dull look might cross his eye, a warning that he didn’t care to be patronised.

How much of the above can really be true? It’s what many of us felt to be true. This characterisation of Baby Peregrino is but a small collage of the many testimonies I heard from those who came to do him homage, plus my own observations too. You could explain this as wish fulfilment or as collective delusion or suggest that, in the void of language, anyone might find any evidence to justify what they’d like to believe.

But, by the same token, it would be difficult to argue that an experience of communication hadn’t taken place. Not one person who interacted with Baby Peregrino could resist drawing an interpretation of communication from his facial expressions and bodily reactions. And there he was, noting and watching and playing and processing all his conversations at a frightfully intense speed. Watching first-hand how energetically a baby converses, it makes sense that they shortfuse and need to sleep so often — they’re not just learning language, but they’re experiencing it, they’re enacting it, incessantly.

What caught my attention most here was that language was not the tool that was connecting him with people — Baby Peregrino being without a language. In fact, I thought, the very moment that he acquires a language, the communicable world might actually get smaller for him: his words will come with definitions, etymologies, histories, pre-histories — rules. We might conceptualise ourselves as possessing a language, holding it in our dextrous hands — we grasp language, that’s what we say, with our tongues acting as thumbs — but for that to be so we will have made language small, possessable, graspable. So what is it that is doing this connecting work?

If I trust what I saw, Baby Peregrino’s method of connecting relied on that which (in all of us) predates language and our use of it. I’m not sure what it is that bodies wordlessly communicate, but I’m learning to see that what Baby Peregrino evoked in me, and what he distinctly evoked in others, is but a branch of a tree of evocations stemming from embodied interactions with others. Unlike otter.ai, our interactions are evocative and, as many an otter would testify to, this sense of surfacing from the deep is exciting and laden with creative potential.

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Others have tried it and will try again
To finish that which they did not begin:

— W.H. Auden, 'Venus Will Now Say a Few Words'

So I turned away from the midpoint of nowhere,
an orphan of the past and of the future,
willing once more to play the game of the familiar stranger
surrounded in the chaos of perennial night.

As I scuttled my way deep past scattered ragged claws —
drowned in a silence I had come to know as my shadow
and forgetting whither I had come
and losing the way before my feet —
I came to an aged cabinet, dusty and in irregular use.

Its mechanism bled orange rust across my fingers;
the frail hinges howled in anguish at their opening.
Centuries of stale air burst from its flimsy prison
and fell upon my face —
as if the dry beach
could propel a sandy wave
back at the blank sea.

Inside: two trays of ink and a carimbo.
I clutched my breast —
my sweat cold hand a stone dead thing 
against the livid thump of my heartcage.

That stunted creature —
so prone to song and dance
so alone, so long in its trance
scribbled away with impudent flicks
ecstatic to return to its lifelong tricks;
but the zag and the zig
(its old sophistic jig)
fibbed so far it came back to the start,
Did that stunted creature — my heart.

My life's scroll, pushed through the bars,
unfurled between my ribs.
It came out whole — this script of the stars —
and I pressed against it the carimbo's lips.

On that scrawling page 
(I remember how it trembled with glee)
the carimbo kissed a violet sage —
a figure who spoke to me:

The end of spring begins with a passing —
the Gardener at the window leans too far.
She wishes to smell the rose — the magic it is amassing
in that embryonic bud, singing la la la.
She flies so soon, before she has wings —
so does she never hear how the blooming bud sings?

The beauty she was promised
is found along the way
and lives in all her steps.

The beauty you were promised
is found along the way
and lives in all your steps.

Vagabond Peregrino! Mark this and mark it well:
the path you seek is thorny and steep 
with brooks and cobbles you'll have to leap
and those that do begin, begin at last in hell.

Vagabond Peregrino! You have a burden you cannot hawk —
Only this, homeless one, make the world your home.
Only this, roaming one, allow your aim to roam.
Only this, Vagabond Peregrino, walk — walk — walk.

At about 7.30pm, the Peregrino walks out of his albergue into the declining Galician sunshine that fondly, but not so warmly, coats the town of O Porriño. He leaves behind him a smattering of pilgrims who have pulled their respective curtains across in their quest for sleep. He’s puzzled and not a little disturbed at this show of contempt for the industrial municipality that is, after all, as much a part of the Camino de Santiago as any of the more salubrious stops along the way. Fatigued and not feeling quite himself, he jolted out of his bunk woodenly and, as he tottered out, he wondered at the scene behind him: to be so fixated on the destination as to miss out, even discard, the way there. Odd. He vowed to count himself as part of a different number.

Where to go though when the only objective is going, and when one goes not for the joy of moving but because the feeling of propulsion justifies one’s thoughtfulness? Where the Peregrino thinks of himself as strolling, those he goes by observe him pacing. A leisureless man. A man in a rush. A man who has seen a wanted poster with his face on it a mile or so back. He squints at the sun and babbles inane testimonies to friends, garbles mumbling apologies to locals, and utters no word of thanks to his feet that have carried him here. He has turned walking into a sedative, calculated to numb the mind in a distant, comfortable realm. His dream, so far as it differs from reality, is to become somnambulant. And so he walks as in a kind of wet cement that hardens him, weighs him down, and prevents him from moving forward.

Having bored down to his waist in the slough of retraced and criss-crossed steps, the Peregrino stops. His legs can no longer wriggle free. He drops onto a bench perched on the decking of a nearby café. Twenty metres away, a teenager in a black vest practices free throws in front of a basketball hoop. At a casual glance his technique is fine. He has poise. He has suppleness. And his recitation of the shooting action is fluid. But there’s one aspect of his performance that brings the ceiling down on his success: he is too often in a hurry.

The young man trudges slowly after the ball as it jerks off the rim or cannons off the backboard. His head is slightly lowered - not in a way suggesting resignation, but instead feigning a sort of nonchalance. He is visibly corralling his body to control the situation, his pace, his sense of time.

Each miss urges him on more quickly to collect the ball and make amends. It isn’t long before he is walking after the ball as if watching it cascade down a ski slope. The more he rushes the worse he shoots. Then he fiddles with his technique - which time-won experience ought to tell him is fine, good even.

Two young children zoom into his orbit now. They fling wild one-armed throws in the vague direction of the hoop and clap their hands as they watch the ball plunge down through the net. They chuck and hurl and swing from various angles with none of the refinement of practiced skill or dedicated application. They even stop noticing their success, it no longer being a surprise to them.

He does though, he notices they are outshooting him. His nostrils flare, forcing hot, exasperated breath onto his upper lip where sparse, juvenile hairs have been ordered to make a faint moustache. In this moment, the pre-set routines, the disciplined body, and the focused mind all seem like unnecessarily cruel accoutrements of development.

The children occupy their sense of time admirably - it does not frighten them. The ball practically releases itself as its weight overmasters the strength of their grip and they willingly yield. These are all moments they gladly usher by without trying to repeat or race through to the conclusion.

The boy in the black vest brings his play to an end and, shortly after, his demeanour eases as he treads into an unruffled stride. He thinks of other things: fixing tea, seeing friends, the end of weekend doldrums. He’ll come back ready to play again - but his ability to lose himself in his time (to forgo rushing or falsely delaying) will depend upon remembering to forget this day. It will depend upon him bagging up the crumbs of his misses and feeding them to the pigeons. It will depend, ultimately, on entering his sense of time: either through himself or by way of the path guarded and straightened by those he loves.

With nothing to do but watch, the Peregrino finds himself slowly eased of his burden and prised from his slough. It is as though he had been playing that childhood game of trying to breathe consciously and had finally put it to an end as the struggle to breathe properly grew. He looks at his watch but the low-hanging sun glints off the face in such a dazzling way that the hands are illegible. Rising, he hears the sound of live instruments, music, and revelry a street or two away.

He trickles toward the sound like a young spring gushing over parched earth. His steps become lasting - left, as they have been, until last - and they lead him to the brothers and sisters he thought he had left sleeping. There they all are - cooing, giggling, telling stories, sloshing drinks, and fussing over a darling babe who reciprocates their smiles. The Peregrino embraces them as they sing a song of thanksgiving:

Welcome him, welcome him home
Welcome welcome welcome
Ruffle him, ruffle his hair
Ruffle ruffle ruffle
Pat him, pat his back
Patpat patpat patpat

Welcome ruffle pat
For he hurried with his heart
From us did depart
Left his body behind
Another he could not find
But now he is retrieved
And we're mighty relieved
Welcome ruffle pat

I wanted to bring the Lenten Hope series to an end today with a poem that dances off the themes I’ve been exploring and thinking about throughout these weeks of contemplation.

In recent years, I’ve picked up a habit of reimagining the love songs and romantic poetry I have enjoyed all my life as if the ‘her’, ‘him’, and ‘you’ objects of these loving expressions were not strictly people but representatives, in microcosm, of ‘life’ itself. Songs and poems of great artists being in love with this abstract concept ‘life’ through its avatars on Earth who ooze with ‘life’s’ presence — this has unveiled powerful new pockets of resonance in these artistic creations to me. I think, too, it has helped me learn to admire those I love as human beings and not as fantastical, untouchable deities.

This is at play here then.

But there is something else too. To anchor on the pronoun ‘her’ and explode its capacities has accrued added meaning in a week where the UK Supreme Court ruled on a legal definition that makes the word a closed, rotten receptacle. Many lives are fearfully trapped in the dark, oxygenless corners of this receptacle. Lives I love and celebrate.

Bathing her heavy feet

Bathing her heavy feet
	The cloth and the basin sing for me
Bathing her heavy feet
	In defeat and glory, this selfsame symphony!

Making her a garland
	From the light that spills from her face
Making her a garland
	My wonder, her wonders, all interlace.

Admiring her retinue
	The ones who call her theirs
Admiring her retinue
	Following lightly, lighter than their cares.

Pruning her fields and groves
	For a path — wild, kinked, and curled
Pruning her fields and groves
	Among the blossom fuddling the world.

Dreaming of her
	She appears in kaleidoscopic array
Dreaming of her
	Astonishment eternal, should it last but a day.

Pressing her hand
	Engulfed by a fathomless fire
Pressing her hand
	Vast crackles plucked from the remaindered lyre.

I do not know her well
	No better than this:
That deep from her well
	Springs our hopeful bliss.