{"id":17373,"date":"2015-10-30T11:57:30","date_gmt":"2015-10-30T15:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=17373"},"modified":"2015-10-30T11:57:30","modified_gmt":"2015-10-30T15:57:30","slug":"in-the-hour-of-unease","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2015\/10\/in-the-hour-of-unease\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Hour of Unease"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Untitled,<\/a><\/p>\n

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

From whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Tan Twan Eng [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Sleep Spaces<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the night there are of course the seven wonders of the world
\nand greatness, tragedy and enchantment.
\nForests collide with legendary creatures hiding in thickets.
\nThere is you.
\nIn 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.
\nThere is you.
\nIn the night trains go past and boats
\nand the fantasy of countries where it’s daytime. The last breaths of twilight and the first shivers of dawn.
\nThere is you.
\nA piano tune, a shout.
\nA door slams. A clock.
\nAnd not only beings and things and physical sounds.
\nBut also me chasing myself or endlessly going beyond me.
\nThere is you the sacrifice, you that I’m waiting for.
\nSometimes at the moment of sleep strange figures are born and disappear.
\nWhen I shut my eyes phosphorescent blooms appear and fade
\nand come to life again like fireworks made of flesh.
\nI pass through strange lands with creatures for company.
\nNo doubt you are there, my beautiful discreet spy.
\nAnd the palpable soul of the vast reaches.
\nAnd 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.
\nSinister handshakes in a sickly light and axles grinding on paralyzing roads.
\nNo doubt there is you who I do not know, who on the contrary I do know.
\nBut who, here in my dreams, demands to be felt without ever appearing.
\nYou who remain out of reach in reality and in dream.
\nYou who belong to me through my will to possess your illusion
\nbut who brings your face near mine only if my eyes are closed in dream as well as in reality.
\nYou who in spite of an easy rhetoric where the waves die on the beach
\nwhere crows fly into ruined factories, where the wood rots
\ncrackling under a lead sun.
\nYou who are at the depths of my dreams stirring up a mind
\nfull of metamorphoses
\nleaving me your glove when I kiss your hand.
\nIn the night there are stars and the shadowy motion of the sea,
\nof rivers, forests, towns, grass and the lungs
\nof millions and millions of beings.
\nIn the night there are the seven wonders of the world.
\nIn the night there are no guardian angels, but there is sleep.
\nIn the night there is you.
\nIn the daylight too.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Robert Desnos [source<\/em><\/a>, in slightly different form<\/em>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

[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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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…<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Robert Macfarlane [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Bar Xanadu<\/strong>
\n(excerpt)<\/em><\/p>\n

Close your eyes and then the night turns to coal
\nseamed with diamonds. Outside, a girl murmurs
\nher tired price, in pesetas, to passing men.
\nIrita<\/em>, the barman calls when she wanders in
\nto wash at the single coldwater tap. Just a fly-blown<\/p>\n

caf\u00e9 on your functionary’s street of flats, bedrooms
\nshuttered around their whispering, the shops that gleam
\nby day with scaled cellophane piglets, mounded bins
\nof fruit and olives. Irita rewinds her hair
\nat the bar, a gilt rosette nestling its waves,
\ntattered bullfight posters on the wall behind her<\/p>\n

and you think of Rita Hayworth tossing roses
\nin Blood and Sand<\/em>, the frayed banderilla.
\nSuch a lovely thing to torture an animal with,
\nthe corrida’s exacting choreography
\nof life and death. Sometimes it’s soothing to evaporate
\nin this smoke-patinaed air, abandoning<\/p>\n

your imposter’s life of embassy files breathing
\nthe military names and numbers, Torrej\u00f3n’s
\nprecise cold barracks. Your face wavers, oddly calm
\nin the mirror as the girl talks dancing and
\nflamenco clubs to the barman, absinthe glass shining
\nderangement in his hand. It’s the place in the night<\/p>\n

where you carve an uneasy confederacy
\nfrom vapor and exhaustion, a trio—the alien,
\nthe clownish poseur, the girl with nothing to sell
\nbut herself and straitened, cataleptic dreams.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Lynda Hull [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,250,5,50,251,3459,3477,4159],"tags":[4201,4202,4203,4204,4205,4206,4207],"class_list":{"0":"post-17373","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-ruminations","7":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","8":"category-art","9":"category-06_writing","10":"category-language-writing_cat","11":"category-poetry-writing_cat","12":"category-horror-06_writing","13":"category-fantasy-06_writing","14":"category-essays","15":"tag-david-mcconnochie","16":"tag-tan-twan-eng","17":"tag-robert-desnos","18":"tag-robert-macfarlane","19":"tag-lynda-hull","20":"tag-disquiet","21":"tag-unease","22":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-4wd","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17373","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17373"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17373\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17386,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17373\/revisions\/17386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}