Them dry bones

'Time in the sea eats its tail, thrives, casts these
Indigestibles, the spars of purposes
That failed far from the surface.'

from Relic Ted Hughes

'Hydrogen peroxide?' 'Yes, that's right.' The shop assistant shook her head a little nervously. 'I'll ask the manager.' The manager eyed me up and down before confirming what I already suspected. 'We are not allowed to sell it any more.' Afterwards I thought how glad I was that she hadn't asked me why I wanted it. I would only have dug myself in deeper. 'Well, you see, I have these bones...'  I discovered later that it is quite easy to buy hydrogen peroxide on the internet (but then what isn't?). It seems rather perverse that something deemed too dangerous to stock in a chemist is safe enough to send through the post. In fact the chemist did stock plenty of hair products containing peroxide but I only wanted to whiten my bones, not condition them or give them a shiny bounce.

When I say my bones I don't actually mean my own, which I aim to keep safely tucked away on the inside for now. I mean the animal bones I have found on my travels and can't stop myself from picking up and bringing home. A few weeks ago I found a seal skull on the Fife coast near St Andrews. It lacks a jaw bone but is otherwise almost complete, even keeping some of its upper teeth. It is astonishing, ribbed and vaulted like a cathedral or a crypt, sculpted with precision for its purpose. I have washed all the sand out of it and it now sits in the bathroom, waiting to be treated. Hydrogen peroxide sterilises and whitens bone without reacting with and softening it as domestic bleach does.

For me, bones are among the most irresistible objets trouvés, rivalling shells in the intricacy of their design. They are things of beauty and curiosity and, cleaned up and brought into the setting of a modern home, they make striking ornaments and talking points. Reactions to my little collection of skulls and antlers vary, as you might expect. Some visitors find them ghoulish, others faintly unhygienic, overlooking the fact that they are far more sterile than houseplants or pets or ourselves! But plenty of folk seem to share my enthusiasm and are a little covetous. Some admit to having collections of their own. 

Gathering bones is as old as the hills. Of course many of their practical uses have been superseded and their decorative uses largely outmoded if not thoroughly outlawed. But bones retain powerful symbolic significances, much exploited and trivialised by popular culture. Their intricate architecture aside, what mostly entices me to pick them up is that strange capacity they have to remind me simultaneously of our transience and our permanance. In Ted Hughes' poem Relic, on the everlasting cycle of consuming and being consumed, the 'indigestibles' - the claws and carapaces and vertebrae that the sea disgorges - 'continue the beginning'.

It is an enviably succinct phrase. And that's what we all do, as we go through our lives, isn't it? We continue the beginning. Perhaps one day far from now, when I have quite done with my own inside bones, some stroller will find one by chance and admire it enough to take home. I find that very comforting.

Moments of light and being

'When one says 'ten o'clock' or 'three o'clock', this is not the grey shrunken time of towns; it is the memory of a certain fulmination or declension of light that was unique to that time and that place on that day, a memory as vivid to the hunter as burning magnesium.'

J.A.Baker The Peregrine

The phrase 'moments of being' was, I believe, first coined by Virginia Woolf in an autobiographical essay A Sketch of the Past written in the 1930s but not discovered or published until long after her death. She describes brief states of heightened awareness of reality, of being alive, in contrast to the humdrum fug of unreality in which most of her life was played out. The stimulus for such a state could be trauma or surprise, something out of the ordinary that jolts us 'awake'.

Unreality is a common enough experience for many of us and dangerously so when a manifestation of depressive mental illness. In her almost unbearably personal poem Lady Lazarus (also published posthumously) Sylvia Plath wrote 'I do it so it feels real' to account for cyclical attempts at dying. Near-death experiences, it seems to me, were the stimulus for the moments of being that she craved but found so elusive.

I have been party to countless conversations during my life where someone has talked of a 'moment of being', likely often without knowledge of its derivation. Very frequently its use has been to describe something in the natural world; a thing of beauty or terror, a rare sighting, something that will dwell long in the memory. I have used it in this way myself, never truly sure whether it is quite what Virginia Woolf meant. But then why not? Encounters with nature beyond the ordinary are exciting. They make us feel alive, even if we aren't sure what we have seen. The unexpected flash of a kingfisher or splash of an otter, the explosion of a sparrowhawk into a peaceful garden, have the power to animate even the most nonchalant among us.

In response to my last post Greg shared a personal story of his own close encounter with a swift. It is a lovely miniature, with a happy outcome, and although no doubt a brief episode it has remained with him years later. Looking back, it is revealing to me how many of my own such moments involve birds.

Some are quite literally moments (an Orkney hen harrier lifting silently from the heather beneath my feet and ghosting away across the moor). They may last longer, long enough for me to be aware of the 'reality-shift' even as it is happening (dusk in a Polish forest after thundery rain, an hour spent listening to the fluty song of a pair of golden oriole). When time allows they may be further extended (a whole day perched on a Cornish cliff watching the comings and goings, the ritual greetings of a kittiwake colony).

For me, time does odd things during moments like these, slowing and spacing out. Visible for no more than a minute, there was time to count every ring in the hen harrier's tail feathers, to note the way her feet trailed as she flew and her lazy, soundless wingbeats . At the same time my mind speeds up, my senses sharpen and everything else becomes unimportant. There are passages in J.A.Baker's unnerving book The Peregrine where the sense of the author as a man blurs into the animus of the falcons he stalks. As the book progresses, Baker's employment of personal pronouns diminishes. The birds are everything.

I cannot put a precise date to any of these events, it is not important. They are all more than a decade ago but they, and many many similar occasions both before and since, are scorched into my memory without a single detail lost. They are testimony to the healing, restorative power of nature to remind us that we are real; moments of being, moments - to borrow J.A.Baker's striking imagery - of the fulmination and declension of light, when we are unquestionably alive.

Making marks

The holidays of my younger childhood mostly involved beaches, usually fairly populous stretches of sand and shingle in busy south coast resorts. But I do have an unplaced memory of a rather different kind of beach, altogether more remote and expansive. I remember the odd thrill, on the homeward leg of a walk, of coming upon my own small footprints in the sand, left some hours earlier. There they were, unmistakable from the pattern on the sole of my sandals, alongside the steady tread of my family and the erratic meanderings of our dog. They were mine and yet not mine. They belonged to a younger me, setting out, with a day ahead of me.

I have had similar experiences since: finding again an entry left some years earlier in the visitors' book of a church or bothy; having returned to me pieces of schoolwork written when I was very young.

All my life I have made marks; traced my name in sand and snow, etched my initials in tree bark and school desks, painted rooms, planted out gardens, written all manner of things. Most of my marks will have been erased by time and tide, most are forgotten and certainly never to be stumbled upon again. But not all. There will be little scratchings here and there; evidence of the passing through by another, younger me.

Several of my friends have recently started or re-started writing blogs, newcomers like me. They have been posing questions: Why am I writing this? For whom? What do I hope for? My answer is simple. I am making marks, just as I have always done. Somewhere out there, a traveller may pass by and say 'oh look, someone has been this way before.' The traveller may even be me. Another me, older and on the homeward leg.