In the Hour of Unease

[Image: untitled, by David McConochie (cover illustration for The Guardian (Books), April 10, 2015). I first encountered this in a thumbnail accompanying the Robert Macfarlane essay excerpted below.]

From whiskey river:

It is getting dark. In the low mists over the hills, an orange glow broods, as if the trees are on fire. Bats are flooding out from the hundreds of caves that perforate these mountainsides. I watch them plunge into the mists without any hesitation, trusting in the echoes and silences in which they fly.

Are all of us the same, I wonder, navigating our lives by interpreting the silences between words spoken, analyzing the returning echoes of our memory in order to chart the terrain, in order to make sense of the world around us?

(Tan Twan Eng [source])

…and:

Sleep Spaces

In the night there are of course the seven wonders of the world
and greatness, tragedy and enchantment.
Forests collide with legendary creatures hiding in thickets.
There is you.
In the night there are the walker’s footsteps the murderer’s the town policeman’s light from the street lamp and the ragman’s lantern.
There is you.
In the night trains go past and boats
and the fantasy of countries where it’s daytime. The last breaths of twilight and the first shivers of dawn.
There is you.
A piano tune, a shout.
A door slams. A clock.
And not only beings and things and physical sounds.
But also me chasing myself or endlessly going beyond me.
There is you the sacrifice, you that I’m waiting for.
Sometimes at the moment of sleep strange figures are born and disappear.
When I shut my eyes phosphorescent blooms appear and fade
and come to life again like fireworks made of flesh.
I pass through strange lands with creatures for company.
No doubt you are there, my beautiful discreet spy.
And the palpable soul of the vast reaches.
And perfumes of the sky and the stars, the song of a rooster from 2000 years ago and piercing screams in a flaming park and kisses.
Sinister handshakes in a sickly light and axles grinding on paralyzing roads.
No doubt there is you who I do not know, who on the contrary I do know.
But who, here in my dreams, demands to be felt without ever appearing.
You who remain out of reach in reality and in dream.
You who belong to me through my will to possess your illusion
but who brings your face near mine only if my eyes are closed in dream as well as in reality.
You who in spite of an easy rhetoric where the waves die on the beach
where crows fly into ruined factories, where the wood rots
crackling under a lead sun.
You who are at the depths of my dreams stirring up a mind
full of metamorphoses
leaving me your glove when I kiss your hand.
In the night there are stars and the shadowy motion of the sea,
of rivers, forests, towns, grass and the lungs
of millions and millions of beings.
In the night there are the seven wonders of the world.
In the night there are no guardian angels, but there is sleep.
In the night there is you.
In the daylight too.

(Robert Desnos [source, in slightly different form])

Not from whiskey river:

[M.R. James’s ghost story “A View from a Hill”] opens on a hot June afternoon, when a Cambridge academic called Fanshawe arrives at the house of his friend Squire Richards, deep in the south-west of England. Richards proposes an evening walk to a nearby hilltop, from where they can “look over the country”. Fanshawe asks if he can borrow some binoculars. After initial hesitation, Richards agrees, and gives Fanshawe a smooth wooden box. It contains, he explains, a pair of unusually heavy field-glasses, made by a local antiquary named Baxter, who died under mysterious circumstances a decade or so earlier. In opening the box, Fanshawe cuts his finger on one corner, drawing blood.

So the two men walk up to the viewpoint, where they stop to survey the “lovely English landscape” spread out beneath them: “green wheat, hedges and pasture-land”, “scattered cottages” and the steam-plume of the last train. The smell of hay is in the air. There are “wild roses on bushes hard by”. It is the pinnacle of the English pastoral.

But then Fanshawe raises the binoculars to his eyes — and that “lovely landscape” is disturbingly disrupted. Viewed through the glasses, a distant wooded hilltop becomes a treeless “grass field”, in which stands a gibbet, from which hangs a body. There is a cart containing other men near to the gibbet. People are moving around on the field. Yet when Fanshawe takes the binoculars from his eyes, the gibbet vanishes and the wood returns. Up, eerie; down, cosy. Up, corpse; down, copse. He explains it away as a trick of the midsummer light…

Eventually the grim secret of the binoculars is revealed. Baxter had filled their barrels with a fluid derived by boiling the bones of hanged men, whose bodies he had plundered from the graves on Gallows Hill, formerly a site of execution. In looking through the field-glasses, Fanshawe was “looking through dead men’s eyes”, and summoning violent pasts into visible being. Prospect was a form of retrospect; Baxter’s macabre optics revealed the skull beneath the skin of the English countryside.

(Robert Macfarlane [source])

…and:

Bar Xanadu
(excerpt)

Close your eyes and then the night turns to coal
seamed with diamonds. Outside, a girl murmurs
her tired price, in pesetas, to passing men.
Irita, the barman calls when she wanders in
to wash at the single coldwater tap. Just a fly-blown

café on your functionary’s street of flats, bedrooms
shuttered around their whispering, the shops that gleam
by day with scaled cellophane piglets, mounded bins
of fruit and olives. Irita rewinds her hair
at the bar, a gilt rosette nestling its waves,
tattered bullfight posters on the wall behind her

and you think of Rita Hayworth tossing roses
in Blood and Sand, the frayed banderilla.
Such a lovely thing to torture an animal with,
the corrida’s exacting choreography
of life and death. Sometimes it’s soothing to evaporate
in this smoke-patinaed air, abandoning

your imposter’s life of embassy files breathing
the military names and numbers, Torrejón’s
precise cold barracks. Your face wavers, oddly calm
in the mirror as the girl talks dancing and
flamenco clubs to the barman, absinthe glass shining
derangement in his hand. It’s the place in the night

where you carve an uneasy confederacy
from vapor and exhaustion, a trio—the alien,
the clownish poseur, the girl with nothing to sell
but herself and straitened, cataleptic dreams.

(Lynda Hull [source])