#whilst the dark side is fractured and they don’t work together and that’s their downfall

[thepromisedbride]

the fact that the sequel trilogy could have perfectly set up a three v three scenario where the main trio could have each taken down their counterparts (poe against hux, finn against phasma, rey against ren) before they defeated snoke together so you could explore their characters and pasts and show the differences between the dark and light side of the force. and not only did they not do that but they basically screwed over the trio as a concept entirely

[aleburton]

Her lithe fingers folded around the neck of the plastic bottle, a boastful grin unfurling across her lips. It was short-lived. She failed to maintain her balance and plunged to her knees. “Ow,” she griped, theatrical as ever. Alexandra shifted her position to inspect the damage. There were no cuts, only microscopic pieces of gravel embedded into her skin which she promptly dusted away. She lingered on the curb for a moment longer, fixing her gaze upon the warped reflection in the passenger side door staring back at her. It was then that she realized just how intoxicated she actually was. She blinked, trying to recount the last time she had consumed so much alcohol. Had it been high school? Perhaps her senior prom? The memory was faint, but she remembered being tucked into bed. It was presumably Noah who had done so, likely exhausted of trying to keep up with her infantile antics. She woke the next morning in an unfamiliar place, disoriented, very ill, and without her boyfriend.

There were rumors that he had accidentally fallen asleep in the wrong room with the wrong girl that evening. Noah had adamantly denied it. He was in love with Alex, assured her that he was completely infatuated and that he would never put their relationship at risk. Even people in love make mistakes, especially when there was alcohol involved. She knew it all too well. None of their friends would dare confess even if there were an ounce of truth to it. That situation brought on their tragic downfall. She could not trust him, and she also could not trust herself. After all, she did persuade his best friend into taking her virginity. Once they parted ways following graduation, was it possible that she would continue to engage in more vile behavior behind his back? Would he? Just as quickly as she entered the misty, teenage haze, she made her exit. She nearly fractured her neck with how quickly she turned toward him. Her impeccably groomed brows creased together as she warned him, “Don’t say a word.” He reached for her, gently helping her back to her feet. His remark made her laugh, her neck craning back and face toward the inky sky. “Taking advantage of me? It’s not really taking advantage though if I’m offering, is it now? Drunk. Sober. The invitation is always there.” At least she was an honest drunk. Shameless too. Alex followed several paces behind, tottering on one Louboutin heel whilst thoroughly scanning the pavement for her missing liquor bottle. Just as she lowered herself toward the ground to retrieve it, Zach hauled her up by the waist to drape her body over his shoulder. She groused, watching helplessly as another bottle tumbled from between her breasts and ticked down the sidewalk. “Hey! That was the peach schnapps! You big jerk. I wanted that one.” She hung almost lifelessly down the length of his back, dark chocolate curls swaying to and fro as he carried her to the car. “I’m not talking to you ever again, Zach Winthrop. I worked hard for those, and you don’t even care.”

The moment he heard the glass screen splinter over tile, he felt a wash of relief. He turned to Alex, piquing at the sound indeed like an animal at the zoo, his frustration dissipated. He smiled, steering her out under his arm and through the back door. “What? Are you the only one who gets to have fun?” The heavy wood sucked in a heft of air as it sealed them outside, and all of the drama inside. Two perfect goose-pimple sleeves shot up Alex’s thin arms. His arm on her shoulders hauled her in closer - what with only a soaked veil of silk and vodka-rinsed blood for warmth - and she toppled into him. Zach made a small noise in acknowledgement while absently searching for his car. A sudden thought leaked through him; how normal, how right, this all felt. Taking his drunken, flirtatious vixen home with him, not another soul in the world.

“And have them what? Lurk in every corner of the club to keep an eye on me, drawing attention? I’m good,” he countered, knowing he’d suffer an earful in the morning from Amanda for the stunt. “Anyway. Everything turned out fine, didn’t it?” he joked dryly. Alex went on taunting him, but before he could contest that his brief iPhone sacrifice had cured him of all ailments, she was toppling over and headed for two burst knees before she caught herself. “Fucking hell,” he laughed, half-keeled having prepared to catch her. Her miniature liquor bottles went skating across the rubble. Zach shook his head, thoroughly amused. Her sorry, abandoned shoe lay in a dirty puddle, and the sight tickled him so much he felt tears spring to his eyes. “Denver,” he helped, still laughing, unable to stop.

Then she escaped, and he made no move to stop her; he was enjoying his own private show. Gracelessly, she scavenged for her wayward liquor bottles, collecting them like video game currency. “Yeah, and make sure you don’t miss any. If you run up my minibar tab at the hotel, I’m gonna be in big trouble,” Zach taunted. “Jesus Christ, Ale,” he wheezed, taking her by the elbow to haul her up off the ground. “Get in the fucking car before I get arrested for trying to take advantage of you.” He lead her, one shoe on, one shoe off, halfway there, before her drunken limping became too much. “Actually, fuck this.” He looped an arm around her middle and hoisted her over his shoulder, another miniature bottle escaping. “Nope! Leave it!” he yelled, anticipating her tantrum.

[still-finding-our-way]

R5, R6

(SX 540672) 12/12/ 2020

Serendipity, rhizomes and lines. 

On my studio desk I have a number of rocks, stones and pebbles. None are particularly rare or precious, most have been collected locally yet every one is an object of beauty. One such stone is a sharp piece of flint. Small enough to hold in my palm, it has become my go to de-stress stone. I like to let its razor sharp edges bite, just a bit, into soft skin. My teasing wake up call. It has volume and weight, four planes—a tetra. One side runs smooth, curving to meet a granular knobbly surface, bone-like and skeletal, like the indenture of a clavicle or ankle bone. The underside of the stone is cut sheer, sliced through its core, creating a flat expanse onto which it is able to stand upright, before rising into a terraced plane, each step the size of a thumb print, a patternation that reveals the cryptocrystalline formation of flint (‘crypto’ meaning ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’). I found it on a beach in Cornwall. A dark grey stone with a white thread running through its centre. Its shape and size tickles my imagination, and as I turn the flint over in my hand I play with the idea that it was used as a Neolithic arrowhead, chipped away, stone on stone some 5000 years ago. The structure of flint requires a level of skill and expertise to shape; one wrong strike will send fracture lines through the stone rendering it useless as a tool. Our early ancestors were artisans and makers. Over and over, I have drawn this stone, feeling it’s texture, the sharp edges and definite weight in my palm. It does not take up much space and yet every time I draw it, a different angle or plane opens up. It is never the same. A small rock, inert and fixed, offering infinite possibilities.

You think you know something, someone, some place. A line on the horizon, a spit away from the sea and moor. Clambering over rocks, swimming in icy rivers and streams, climbing trees and making dens. 'Whence cam'st thou, mighty thane', pronounces Duncan in Act 1 of Macbeth. The utterance of such a question now comes with a cautionary red flag, one that implies exclusion and ‘you are not from here’. Too bad, coming from a white working class background, where histories and lives are lost, undocumented and unrecorded, I have no idea where my roots are tangled. I cometh from nowhere, no fixed abode, shallow rooted, spun together by frail relatives that can’t, or don’t want to, remember. To remedy this unknown, I was gifted by my eldest daughter a DNA test for my 50th birthday. The results from my spit reveal a blueprint that aligns with peoples who cluster around the North East of England, with a smattering of Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Scottish and Irish. Farmers and seafarers I suspect, a web of people who somehow managed to survive hunger and disease, violence and brutality, the lustful fumble in the hay and the traumatic birth. The odds were not good—about one in 400 trillion chance of being born according to the boffins. In staking a claim on the improbability of existence we got lucky, very lucky.

Where we come from and who we are. Layers of paint, fresh applications, still wet bleeding into others, making new colours and new pictures. Blending and binding. Some work and some don’t. It seems so arbitrary how we come to be. I should make time to salute the stream of past people, winding all the way back to the bones of dear Lucy, 3.2 million years ago, and her mother and grand-mother, all coming and going, doing their time. But, I won’t, it's enough to breathe in the noise of now. One heart beat, a blink of the eye and we are gone. Serendipity, luck, random, the throw of the dice. The cells didn’t bind in the correct sequence and the possibility of life just slipped down the toilet. Is it any wonder we seek out patterns to create order and structure, finding comfort in numbers and story; assigning value in the unexpected, and agreeableness in what wasn’t sought. Ones and zero’s, lines and dots, giving shape to all things. Artists do this all the time. Seeking opportunity in the accidental and unintended. Any stick, stone, door, book, conversation opening up new creative possibilities. The rhizomes seeking out a good place to settle, a place to nourish. The patterns, whether real or not, helping to make sense of the intensity of the here and now. 

Jennie’s story is fascinating. Her blue eyes, flaxen hair and Bridget Bardot pout might have you thinking she is of Swedish heritage, whilst my dark skin, hair and black eyes has in the past suggested Mediterranean roots. Not so, the paint palette is muddied. I will let Jennie tell her story. One thing to note here though, Jennie is an adventurer, she has travelled all over the world: on her own, through work, with friends and lovers. Occasionally I have joined her but mostly I skirt the edges of Western art history, moseying around European capital cities, museums and galleries. Both of us are wanderers in different ways. Parallel lines. The same but different. I am amused to read that women of ‘a certain age’ partake in what Jennie and I are doing—walking and exploring local history. I also note the term ‘a certain age’ is often used to describe middle-aged women, usually accompanied by a roll of the eyes and a double-fingered quotation sign. It is basically code for women no longer of a fertile age—post 40 and therefore deemed unattractive, and given age tends to gift experience (though not always) they carry a certain confidence i.e., speak their mind and know what they want.  

A simple stone. We are breathing, blinking and unstill. 

We ask ourselves how did we not know about this walk? It is literally a stones throw from Jennie’s parents village, just over the hill yonder, where Jennie spent her teenage years and part of her adulthood, and where I lived for awhile whilst homeless and lovelorn. Of all the places on Dartmoor this is an area that I would confidently say we know well, and yet here we are discovering new trails, hidden valleys, different perspectives and layers and layers of history, a thread of which connects with Jennie’s recent travel’s with her son to the other side of the world. The walk begins in the small Devon village of Meavy on the southwest of Dartmoor, a place I have cycled and walked through many times, enjoying a sup or two at the Royal Oak on the way. The route follows the river Meavy upstream to Burrator dam not far from Down Tor, where Jennie first set this adventure in motion as we glugged champagne and watched the setting of a glorious October sun. From Burrator, the road winds through Sheepstor village and into the woods where earlier in the year, at the height of bluebell season, I waited with my children for the badger's to come out. Hunkered down amongst bramble and fern at dusk, quiet as mice, hearing the birds hush and darkness settle. The children were not scared but reverent and awed by being in the woods at night, a time and place synonymous with the darker side of fairytales: of wolves, witches and being lost, and where the unknown and the unformed lurk. We whispered and signed to each other in the darkening gloom, until we no longer needed words and laid back in a bed of fern, faces turned upwards, watching the patchwork of sky between the canopy high above turn from indigo to midnight blue and then merge dark into the tall trees, the cool air lulling us to sleep. 

The ax strikes and life reclaims as swift as the blade can cut. My hand brushes the damp surface of a lopped off tree stump in the woods down from the reservoir, and I stop to observe a platter of squirming, burrowing, scuttling, squirrelling, decaying life; three empty acorn shells evidence a previous luncheon. I have set the objective to notice more when I am on these walks, to seek out habitat changes and to learn and know the names of things. But always I surrender to just being, breathing in the light and air, the atmosphere. I feel happy on these walks, a sense of euphoria and lightness washing over. It feels good to leave aside the cerebral and to let the physical, the motion of walking awaken a realm of sensing and scanning. She doesn’t say but I know Jennie has arranged this walk pre-Christmas because she is aware I am struggling with sadness—a sadness caused by my natural melancholia and tendency to ruminate, and a much bigger life crisis. Battle hardened to general romantic crisis’ I am not so experienced with career rifts, and so I have withdrawn and pulled down the blinds. But it won’t do and I know, as Jennie does, that the moor will help to alleviate the mental muddle I am in, and even if the effects are only temporary, it will store up the memory bank, to plunder and remember during the times when I get locked in. 

Ten minutes into the walk Jennie spots a Heron standing stock still in the woods by the river Meavy. Camouflaged against the bare trees, charcoal grey and ochre, we watch it rise and drift across the valley. Great grey wings, near 6ft in span, pulse slowly, its head and neck arrow-like thrust forward piercing space. It has a primordial presence. In mythology it is linked to the sacred Ibis, a bird revered by the Egyptians as representing Thoth—their god of wisdom, writing and magic. I take it as a good omen. The wood is dazzling, ice cold water tumbling down from Burrator reservoir. Wood, rock and foliage glisten from the early morning downfall, the ground water-logged from weeks of incessant rain. The element of water is strong here, 4210 mega litres—enough to quench the thirst of a city and the surrounding hinterland—held in check by towering granite slabs that form a 23.5 metre high gorge. Completed in 1898 and extended in 1923, the reservoir pools run-off from the surrounding moor and water from the river Meavy. Standing downstream from the dam in the wooded valley I hope the granite wall holds strong. The sun breaks through and turns up the volume on colour. Saturated greens: acid, moss, lichen, pine and fern. We watch a man on the other side of the steep valley, oblivious to our presence, pissing freely, a spray of urine forming a perfect arc; glinting golden droplets catching the sunlight.

Having learned nothing from our previous walks we decided not to take the obvious path and instead followed the course of the river upstream. This meant having to clamber over rocks and fallen trees, until we reach the imposing dam wall and are forced to scrabble up the steep bank, thick with mud, to get back on the road. Jennie leads the way, an experienced hash runner not deterred by the muddy terrain, she turns into a sure-footed mountain goat, while I, slip-sliding, defy gravity and somehow fall up the slope. Walking over Burrator bridge we pass the man we saw pissing earlier and beam broadly, making sure we hold eye contact for a bit longer than comfortable for him. We then follow the road up to Sheepstor village, and—given we are women of ‘a certain age’—we are keen to nosey round St Leonards, the C15th village church. But sadly, the door is locked so instead we admire the Lych gate, a covered over a double gate with a lychstone to rest the coffin before entering (‘Lych’ or ‘lich’ meaning corpse in Old English). At the time I did not notice the foliate skull carving above the main door, only a little while later when we sat for lunch under a massive oak tree, which we reckoned to be near on 500 years old given the size of its girth, do I undertake a little online searching and read to Jen a short history of the church and its whereabouts.

So intrigued by what I find that I go back a couple days later, this time with my dog and younger children in tow. In particular I wanted to see the foliate skull above the porch. In recent years there has been a growing interest in Pagan symbology such as the ‘Green Man’ and the ‘Three Hares’, several examples of which can be found in churches across Dartmoor. The ‘Green Man’ is usually represented as a carved face with foliage growing from the head, mouth, nose, ears and eyes. It is presumed to be a pre-christian Pagan symbol representing renewal and life—from death comes life—that has been absorbed into Christian ideas of resurrection and life after death. Often found in churches and cathedrals across Europe, its more macabre cousin, the foliate skull, is said to have appeared after the Black Death in the 14th century. The skull at St Leonards church is carved with ears of wheat sprouting from the eye sockets above an hourglass. The suggested date of its making is given as 1640 and it is suspected to have originally been part of a sundial. Now it sits behind glass in a small recess above the porch, and on this particular day was partially obscured by condensation so I could not see the inscription incorporated into the sculpture: ‘UT HORA SIC VITA’ (As the hour so life passes), ’MORS JANUA VITA’ - (Death is the door of life) and ‘ANIMA REVERTET’ (the soul will return).

As a motif representing vegetation, rebirth and resurrection, the ‘Green Man’ archetype is found in many cultures across the world, including the ancient Egyptian God Osiris, the god of fertility, agriculture, death and resurrection, who is often depicted as green skinned, alongside several green figures found in Nepal, India, Iraq and Lebanon, the latter dated to the 2nd century. I wonder how far the Green Man story goes back? As a cross cultural archetype it suggests a commonality of belief about the life cycle that is interconnected with the land. Whilst its incorporation into ecclesiastical architecture alongside other apparent Pagan motifs, points to the fluidity and evolution of belief systems, which subsume and build on pre-existing ideas, even when the incoming authority seems most rigid and contained. Most of the what we know about the ‘Green Man’ is based on speculation and supposition, as we have no historical evidence as to why and for what reason they were made. Instead the ‘Green Man’ motif has been reclaimed and remoulded at various points in history from Romanticism to Neo-Paganism and most recently as a symbol for the environmental movement.

A little village church under the shadow of the looming granite tor on the southern edge of Dartmoor, connected through culture and shared beliefs with a much wider world and history. If the Green Man does not provide enough evidence of these interconnections, then the large sarcophagus, protected by iron railings in the churchyard, and housing the remains of James Brooke, First Rajah of Sarawak (29 April 1803 – 11 June 1868) alongside two other White Rajahs should affirm the connections without doubt. It was whilst peeling the shell off hard-boiled eggs, freshly laid by my chickens that morning, at the foot of the big oak tree that Jennie realised that she had previously encountered the story of James Brooke whilst travelling through Borneo with her son. A sultry jungle, 7,000 miles away on the other side of the world tied by empire and colonialism, violence, power and trade to this peaceable village. I find out a little more about James, the questions concerning his sexuality and love for men stick with me more than the dates, titles, skirmishes and conquests. I go back again to the church on new years day and with fresh snow on the ground, sipping steaming hot chocolate on the bench overlooking Brooke’s slab of a tombstone, I retell the story of what I know to my children. They hang off the iron railings and argue over the remains of the Christmas chocolate, I don’t think they were listening.

SC

Reading: Lyon, N., (2016) Uprooted: On the trail of the green man (London, Faber & Faber).

https://www.legendarydartmoor.co.uk/sheepstor_church