Archive
By Frances Jackson:
There is nowhere
to go
on holiday,
so they swap
which side
of the bed
they sleep on.
It is his idea,
but she has
the better night's sleep.
The pillows
on the left
are,
it transpires,
superior to the right.
She may
refuse
to leave.
***
Frances Jackson is originally from the UK, but now lives in Bavaria. Her translations and poetry have appeared in places such as Asymptote, London Grip, Panel and Your Impossible Voice.
By Mary Cane:
Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell,
Angus is here with dreams to sell.
Hush now wee bairnie and sleep without fear,
For Angus will bring you a dream, my dear.
– Scots Lullaby
Scotland had Dream Angus before Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant. Angus is the Celtic god of dreams who goes about the country with four birds flying around his head, delivering unsettling dreams of love. Most of us receive dreams that fly higher than our ability to wrestle them into reality. Leaving a rather large office and workroom-tidying job, we drove to Bennachie the other day for a spot of daytime dreaming. We hadn’t been there for a while. Normally as you know there is a breeze, at worst a cold driving drizzle but on that day we were lucky.
There is a devotional aspect to a summit climb. On Mither Tap cloistered trees open up to a long pious walk. Then over the brow comes the reward of the high altar summit view. Then there is the submissive plod up the slope our heads bent in supplication. While I walked, I was thinking of a friend. From Australia, she came to stay with us along that well-trodden path of forbear searching. A keen reader at home, she like lots of other people, she had discovered the books by Nan Shepherd. She was captivated by those tales of grit and glitter up on the high plateau and dreamed of seeing the place where Nan Shepherd had walked and to feel in a poetic and lyrical way where she ‘entered into the hills’. When she arrived, our friend enjoyed seeing the new slippery five-pound note with Nan’s head on it, but that’s as close to Nan as she got. Knees that so enjoyed reading about the Cairngorms in Melbourne, were completely unable to climb any of the paths to the actual Cairngorms. She could not make her dream of Nan into a reality. Reaching the sanctuary of the barbican entrance to Mither Tap’s inner fortress, I looked back to the west. There was our home parish in the far distance, and if I squinted there were my overcrowded shelves and my worktable. The height gave a better perspective, so they didn’t look so cluttered from up there.
Lately I have been outwitted by my own things. Travelling can muddle one’s memory and it can take a while to recalibrate. It’s hard to remember the location of the stapler/grater/leaf-blower or even recall what they look like after our long time away in America. This was witnessed by one of our children and I didn’t like the look I saw in his eyes, a mix of LOL and OMG as his mind jumped to a possible future unravelling all our stuff.
Maureen from the Balmedie library has found me a philosophy book where the ‘thingness’ of things is explained. Things or ‘tings’ from the Scandinavian are what we can experience with our physical selves… a doorway we can go through, a spoon to be touched by hand and lip, or a Balmedie sand dune the grandchildren can slide down. Objects on the other hand, the book ever so quietly confided to me, are things that have ceased to be used. In my home surroundings, objects have accrued and accreted, on floors, on shelves and even in doorways. I leant closer to the book all the better to hear and understand. The ‘thing’ that once beckoned, the philosopher continued as an ‘object’ now blocks… Ah-ha.
Sitting up there on the volcanic granite plug with tea and cake in the fresh air there was nothing that blocked.
From that high vantage point none of the A.W.P.R. could be seen but there are stretches that are now linked into a curving pale gash across the county. On the way back down the Devil’s Causeway, I realised that we can be nourished by other people’s journeys so by Hosie’s Well I picked up a small stone to take with me to Melbourne next year. At that moment four black grouse whirred out of the heather, and that’s when we knew Dream Angus was near.
***
About Mary:
Sticks and stones have always held a poetic resonance for me. The first occasion I felt that cock's comb of interest we all have in our heads rise up, was when I was opening a gate. I was at home in Cornwall and helping to bring the cows in one afternoon. The prop I used was covered in dried accretions of small farm muck. 'That's a tine from your great grandfather's 'ay turner’. said Dad, 'It's made of Canadian Redwood’.
'Goodness me' I thought to myself (or words to that effect) ‘things are not what they seem. They have history and character, a story even’.
In a lifetime of creative work since, I have preferred the material to the flesh and blood…but shh, that’s a secret I don’t share with everyone. I am drawn to pathetic fallacy, to keeping things, to mending, to protecting the materiality of my world... family things, tools, objects, furniture and their stories. Where was I? Ah yes the bio. Sixty years later, you find me living in Aberdeen, a PhD student at the Elphinstone Institute (Folklore and Ethnology) researching the part grandmothers play in the passing on of family story when their families live far away. That redwood tine back in Cornwall would be pleased.
By Paul Scraton:
From dawn until late into the evening, long after dusk, they gather on the street beneath our hotel room window. They come for the famous view, the one that adorns the front covers of guidebooks sold in a multitude of languages in the town’s souvenir shops; the one that features on postcards of the town in spring sunshine and winter snows; the one that provides the backdrop for an early 1990s computer game. It’s the view of the town that appears at the top of the town’s Wikipedia page and is the number one sight on Tripadvisor.
It is also the title picture for this piece. To the outside world, this view is Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and beneath our window visitors to the town gather, waiting patiently for their turn at a safe social distance, to take their own version home with them. Only, as our hotel receptionist could tell us, this summer there are far fewer amateur photographers than there might normally be.
The world doesn’t need another piece of writing about how strange this summer has been, but on a long trip south from Berlin to the Alps it was actually possible, on the high passes and hanging valleys, on the ridge line and down by the lake, to feel as if nothing was actually happening. Walking in the mountains it was possible to pretend, if only for a while, that the world was as it was before. But in between, in those places that form the highlights of many a grand European tour – Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Neuschwanstein Castle, the Rhine Falls – it was clear that this was a summer like no other.
Perhaps in any other summer, right in the middle of school holidays and the peak tourist season, we wouldn’t have even bothered to brave these places. Because of course, like all travellers, we like to think we are different to those crowds of tourists who follow the well-trodden trail through the checklist sights, ticking them off before shuffling back onto the air-conditioned coach. Indeed, these are the places we strive to avoid, even though they have become wildly popular for a reason, whether for their beauty, their location or simply the stories and the place in our culture they hold.
We are tourists too. We travel to escape the everyday and to see new things. This is our chance. In Rothenburg ob der Tauber we walk the city walls and soak up the atmosphere of the old town as a thunderstorm rolls in. At the Rhine Falls we follow a group of Dutch motorcyclists, sweating in their leathers, down the steps to where we can see and feel the power of the water rushing by in front of us. In Neuschwanstein we realise that even a pandemic cannot stop of the lure of this fairytale castle on the hillside, as all the tours are booked up and the only option, the friendly young man in a facemask tells us, is to join the queue at six in the morning and hope for returns.
But the absence of crowds is unsettling too. These are places that live from their visitors. What happens if they don’t come back? We cannot know what travel and tourism will look like in the short to medium term, let alone further into the future, but in Rothenburg ob der Tauber empty shop fronts on the main street tell the story of businesses that haven’t made it out the other side of the pandemic. And what we also can see is that it is not just about coronavirus. The clues were there on higher ground. Beyond the current situation, the climate crisis requires that we rethink all aspects of our lives, including how we travel. In the mountains it was possible to feel like none of this was happening, but it was only if we refused to look closer.
A guesthouse called ‘Glacier View’ has long been a misnomer, as the ice has retreated around the corner. It’s out of sight and will soon disappear entirely. Local newspapers write of dangerous rock falls on the high peaks, of unstable ground caused or at least exacerbated by climate change. And as the cable car carries up higher than our legs or mountaineering skills could ever manage, we can’t help but wonder what a ski season looks like without any snow?
We might have been able to escape the pandemic by climbing ever higher on the trails, but the feeling that up there things were as they ever were is just an illusion. We can’t go back, even if we would like to. The real question is – where do we go from here?
***
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).
By Anna Evans:
By the water’s edge, the monument to the immigrant, looking back at the city, looking out across the wide and muddy river. Situated at the point of arrival, the old port of New Orleans, marking the point of embarkation, the journey’s end and the start of crossings and travels, hopes and dreams. A two-sided statue, a decorated figure, like those carved on a ship’s prow looks out to the water; an immigrant family look towards the city. The crescent city lies at a bend in the Mississippi River. A city haunted by its migrants, by their comings and goings, the history of these streets and those who walked them.
I remember our arrival. Crossing the Lake Pontchartrain causeway and losing sight of land, as if the train travels an endless bridge to nowhere. New Orleans is a surprise to me, a last-minute change to our plans, an unexpected part of our trip. And like the surrounding Louisiana swampland, it is like a new language, one I had never learned but feel I should know already.
We have travelled 1300 miles across the land, thirty hours, half in sleep and half in daydream, and it is as if our souls lag behind. From our arrival at sunset, darkness quickly descends to shroud the streets in mystery. We are hushed and excited on arrival, caught in a tangle of new places and new impressions that makes this place feel curiously flat and enclosed, and we wonder what it will look like when daylight comes.
In the morning the sun is caught behind deep overcast skies, waiting to break through. We spend hours mesmerized in the pattern of the streets and the architecture of the old French Quarter. The city of music leads a dance in circles. The vibrant buildings with their elegant shutters, iron porticoes and ornamented balconies, the graceful sweep of the trees above. There are wooden verandahs and carved iron railings, with intricate patterns that take the solidity of iron and give it a careful fragility.
In the square a group of musicians assemble, playing of impossible dreams, laying their heads beneath the stars of a thousand nights in a hundred different places, drawn to New Orleans from far and wide. Sleeping under the stars and dreaming of boxcars, of all the miles that went before. Something about this place grips and calls them back, the struggle and the sadness. City of roamers, the restless, or those who never had a home. The place to settle if you don’t wish to settle.
Out on the street the rain comes again as we walk, at a distance from each other so that you are crossing the road while I am standing still staring fitfully, as if the answer could lie in these elegant streets of the French quarter. The rain descends, gallops down from the sky, and we watch from a corner of the street, sheltered by balconies and trees. The skies have darkened, and the rain still comes. For a moment we walk through and it soaks our clothes, water grows in puddles across the streets. The balconies and verandahs make a passageway through and we continue our walk entranced by the rain. Reflected in the pavements, in pools and rippled water forming, are the shadows of the pillars that are everywhere. A place of shadows, the rain brings out the shadows.
The rain in New Orleans. Hurricane season. Rainbow flags and cocktails, and dancing, sprawling tourists, visitors to New Orleans’ spirit of intoxication. Some with a hand on their money, others unguarded, out on the lookout for reckless times. And those elongated souls who look as if they had spent a day too many street wheeling, freewheeling, they forgot where they came from and where they were going.
The French Quarter is like a film set framed in black and white with the tension of a thriller. The restless fans and fire escapes, in all those old detective movies where the private investigator sits late at night in his office, nursing a whisky tumbler.
We widen and lengthen our walks to the outlying districts, long streets of bright-coloured wooden houses, each one different from the next. It is slow progress as we stop to look at every house, on the way to Frenchmen Street, where the sun has broken through cloud, and shines powerfully through the heat and skies cast over.
Next to the painted elegance of the dark turquoise green and white house, dark red doors, with its balcony under the sweeping shade of the tree; is a tiny pink house, with a small pointed roof and large windows and doors, green and purple shutters, its steps and iron railings besieged by trailing plants, ivy-covered like something from a story.
There are pillars with overhanging roofs and lanterns, steps out onto the street. We walk the pavements through trees and plants, depth and shade, and flowers pink and red. Looking down the tree lined street, pillars next to the trees, and shutters purple and green, blue and white, yellow in the streets beyond the French quarter, in Marigny and Bywater. A play of light and shade, shade and light.
The streets make a poem to the transient. Trees in flower everywhere and hanging baskets with ferns or lanterns decorate the houses, each one taking on new colours and depth, a beautiful façade of permanence claimed back at night by shadow, the deep shadow of darkness that covers the streets when night falls, changing them back.
Here the pavement is brick and uneven, the roots of the tree below the surface, deep cracks in the road. I always knew the earth was moving but here is the proof spread large. Living on borrowed time, borrowed land, propelled by its legends – the new and the ancient exist side by side - as if this city reveals its faults and its truths like the deep cracks in the road. Life is uncertainty, the roving spirit says it best. The feeling that life is closer here, that it is right at hand, to be lived; the tenuous and unsettled feeling, the one that doesn’t put down roots, or none too deep. For the roots of trees lie just below the surface and erode the stone above as they spread outwards, upwards; as if they might uproot themselves and walk away.
I want to piece it together, to work out if I belong here. So, the saying goes, the legend tells, the city will let you know if you were meant to stay, meant to leave. And I want to be the one the city welcomes, but I know also that there is something here that unsettles, that displaces me deep down.
Under the bridges, the tent cities remain. New Orleans evokes this sense of wandering – for those who choose it, those who don’t. In the faces of those who pace back and forth, day and night, up and down, for a dime, a dollar, a nickel, in the patient, hunted faces of those who lost everything, those who never had it, those who go looking.
They make paper monuments now to honour all those who were forgotten, unrecorded. You can find them at street corners, down by the water, if you’re looking. From where we cross by boat, to Algiers, on a deserted ferry, to deserted streets between the heavy showers of rain. Heat-steeped, sleepy Algiers, where we trail around, looking for something we never find.
New Orleans wears its history in layers, like the paper ghosts standing on corners. The city haunted by the spectres of all those who passed through. I float through the map, tracing the streets as I go. I can only write the poem of a stranger to this city, another visitor entering its spell, city of illusion, of powerful emotion. New Orleans you keep on returning to me, keep calling me back. I walk along your streets in shadow.
I walk along your streets in shadow, watching the changing light, remembering how darkness falls like a cloak, changing the streets, calling them back.
***
Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.
Photo: Malte Brandenburg
By Sara Bellini
Malte Brandenburg is a photographer based in Copenhagen. In his creative practice he looks for simplicity and symmetry and in the past he has often found them in Berlin buildings. Housing spaces are explored both in their aesthetics as well as their urbanistic context and social value. After the pandemic changed his travelling plans, Malte is now finalising some projects while exploring the familiar streets of Copenhagen with his camera.
What does home mean to you?
That is a tricky question for me as I left my home town Berlin almost thirteen years ago and moved to Copenhagen. I still feel attached to Berlin, but at the same time the city becomes more and more foreign to me. And vice versa Copenhagen was for a number of years just a city I lived in, without the feeling that this is my home. It was somewhat in between, which was strange. However, after a while I found the right corner here for me and finally clicked with Copenhagen. Strangely though, I also feel more independent from where I am, as long as I'm with my family, it's difficult to describe. I guess they are my own little biotope :-).
Which place do you have a special connection to?
I have a very special connection to a place in Berlin called Gropiusstadt, a settlement of various tower blocks designed by Walter Gropius in the south of Berlin. I grew up nearby and had a couple of friends there and also had to pass through to get to the local swimming pool, which is why I spent quite a bit of time between these tower blocks. It always felt like a very surreal place to me, because of the sheer amount of concrete reaching into the sky.
Photo: Malte Brandenburg
I could not fathom that almost 50 000 people lived there. Also from a sociological point of view it's a quite interesting place and how it has changed within a relatively short period of time. This place was one of the first topics I was drawn to when I started to focus my photography more and more on urban architecture. I still return to Gropiusstadt on a regular basis.
What is beyond your front door?
Beyond my front door there are friends, a nice park and the beach, which I appreciate a lot. About 40 meters away there is also one of the best bakeries in town with shelves of sourdough bread!
What place would you most like to visit?
I would like to travel through Eastern Europe, all the way to Russia. I am fascinated by the culture and especially the food.
What are you reading / watching / listening to right now?
I am currently reading Agent to the Stars, a novel by John Scalzi about an alien race on earth that hires a PR agent in order to manage the revelation of their presence to humanity - it's hilarious! I also just finished The Last Dance, the Michael Jordan documentary. One of the best documentaries I have seen. I might be biased though, as he was a bit of a childhood idol. In terms of music, I listen a lot to Moi Caprice these days, a Danish band I discovered by accident, because the lead singer's daughter goes into the same class as my son.
*
Find out more about Malte Brandenburg on his website and Instagram.
By J. Miller:
Standing atop the dunes of Echoing Sands Mountain (鸣沙山). At the dunes’ base sits Crescent Moon Lake (月牙泉), where some say that at some point in history flying dragons paraded around the shadowy pond where hidden dragons lurked in the depths. That nearby, a monk translated and hid thousands of religious documents. That it was at this geographical point where Christianity and Buddhism mixed. Some might say that it is speculation.
Off into the distance, an ancient-looking portico unburdened by a building directs its gaze northward towards Dunhuang (敦煌). Camels jockey at the portico, and off-season 4x4s await riders that never come. Snow blankets the dunes. A narrow path leads up the tallest dune. A rope ladder, a staircase that lifts travelers and tourists up the dune. These dunes composed of grains of sand appear sturdy yet transient. The traveler, a temporary pause. A footfall compresses the sand, leaves an indefinite footshape, and sand granules tumble down the dune leaving sunken lanes.
Coming here from faraway I sink into thoughts that travelers’ desires shape their experiences, that experiences can become a form of folkloric experience, and that writing about these experiences is a chance to grasp dead time, or the past.
I find myself unaware that my feet were sinking into the shifting sands. I find myself imagining others that visited here before, who let their feet sink into the sand. Shifting like the sands, the landscape is recontextualized by a traveler’s desire. Wandering throughout the buildings attached to Crescent Moon Lake – a history museum that reminds the viewer of the lake’s impermanence – is a reminder that through these shifting sands the dunes act as a natural barrier for Dunhuang.
I am grateful that I have the museum and park mostly to myself, and that I can come from faraway to visit Dunhuang, if even for a moment.
It’s imaginable that some of the sand also came from far away. That sand was carried through the thin desert air, and it is imaginable that the crescent lake is always threatened. Most of the time the threat comes from some unknowable force. For a time, I tried to let the dunes speak for themselves. Some might say Echoing Sands’ name comes from the sand that whips across the dunes. What language can they speak, where human-language does not factor into the conversation? At one point in time, Dunhuang along with three other cities were frontier garrison towns. Jiuquan (酒泉), another of the garrison towns, is neighbor to a fortress called Jiayuguan (嘉峪关), which some point out has a gate where the exiled and the travelers passed through on their way into the Gobi Desert.
Exiles that passed through this gate carved a note as ritual commemoration, an attempt to internalize the place while at the same time casting it out from memory. The Gate of Demons or the Gate of Sighs. I could not find it. Some might say that it is the gate wishing not to speak with me; that it is an attempt of the fortress to maintain its secrets from an outsider. Checking every gate and tunnel for etched farewell notes, and desiring to interpret contemporary scrawlings for ones thousands of years old [1], I reached an impasse. As one of the travelers visiting a site and trying to create their own narrative to a place, I was a traveler attempting to navigate the fortress’s physical space: the building, arrangement of rooms and entertainment theatres, the angle and height of its ramparts and bastions, and the labyrinth of its corridors reconfigured for a tourist. At the same time, this fortress contained the secrets and shadows and imprints interred in the building.
Writing down my thoughts in a coffeeshop turned barbecue lamb restaurant, a sense of disquiet pervades me. Pictures aside, this written document is the only tactile item that I intend to bring back from this trip. Even then the pictures are just digital relics on a memory card. It’s proof, like a selfie posted on social media, that at one point in time I visited this place.
I went to a place that on the map said coffeeshop, but instead it sold different variations of the popular Chinese grain spirit (白酒, baijiu) and the owner told me to turn the corner and walk 200 meters, and when I arrived at that location, the restaurant advertised barbecued lamb and served hot water infused with white sugar and soluble coffee-powder. At some point this document will be an attempt to reclaim something, to resuscitate my immediate present with an experience already passed.
Sitting in the barbecue restaurant, the religious grottoes and fortress’ architectural designs protect their secrets in different ways. Thinking about the material and imaginary facets of places: why do certain facets take precedence over others with some aspects of a place declared irrelevant [2]? What makes my search for coffee in a once-garrison town irrelevant compared to looking for scrawlings in stone by exiles? Each place and person is a relic grasping at the tendrils of dead time. In a time of mass consumption, it is imperative to remember that through consuming articles about place, the writing is an act of commemoration. That commemoration is an act of bidding farewell. That it is a ritual practice to forget, and to welcome that place in folkloric history.
The tourist is not content to let things lie as they should. An imposition of personal narrative always shines through, where the tourist transforms their experiences into an experience that defies any process of linear time. Each traveler reorganizes geographical space and dead time to co mingle with a sense of commemorating the past and leaving with a sense of relevant story, to share with friends, family and other loved ones.
***
J. Miller is a bicyclist and educator based in Wuhan, China. His writings can be found on A South Broadway Ghost Society (2019) and A Dozen Nothing (2019) with a broadside from Chax Press (2020). J. Miller is a lecturer at Central China Normal University, where he is constantly clipping branches from the Osmanthus trees. He is the founding editor of Osmanthus which has collective focus to publish reflexive poetry and prose chapbooks and related objects. As tea drinker and bicyclist, find him in the Osmanthus branches, or here on Twitter, @yawn_sea
Notes:
[1] Cable, Mildred. The Gobi Desert. London: Readers Union Limited, 1942. pp.13-14
[2] Mbembe, Achille. “The Power of the Archive and its Limits.” In Reconfiguring the Archive, eds. Carolyn Hamilton, Verne Harris, Jane Taylor, et al. 19-26. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002. pp.19-26.
Photo of Shio Mghvime by George Melashvili, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0
By Gurmeet Singh:
Above Mtskheta the air is hot.
It is not thin.
Our taxi driver, tells us Batumi—Batumi is really hot.
At least this is what I think he’s saying. We—my partner and I—do not speak Georgian, and he does not speak English. Many Georgians also speak Russian, and we don’t speak that either. Only the younger people tend to know English. This is what abstract political events look like in real-life: the Soviet-Union falls, so the young people learn English, while their parents speak Russian.
“Horrorshow” I say, Nadsat being in part, Russian-inspired: “good”.
“Batumi”, he nods.
We’re heading to the the Shio Mgvime Monastery, which we’re told is on the left bank of the Mtkvari river, on the southern slope of the Sarkine ridge, but there is no sign of water.
Shio is honoured as one of the 13 Assyrian “fathers” who came to Georgia in the 6th Century to strengthen Christianity. Under the guidance of John of Zedazel (‘Saint John’), the group lived in Mtskheta, and then on Zedazeni mountain, where they founded a monastery.
Shio left after four years, and then inhabited a cave on Mount Sarkin. The monastery was founded literally above this cave, and grew over the next several centuries, evolving into six or seven buildings, experiencing growth and decline as the country was invaded, at peace, taken over by Christian powers, Islamic powers, the Soviets, and now after all that, offered as a tourist destination.
Shio is buried in the monastery complex.
Pathetically, I am feeling nauseous. The roads through the low mountains rise and fall. They are winding, winding. My partner tells me: “you look green”. I close my eyes. My brown skin, so beautifully evened out and darkened by the late Summer heat here, looks green. How pathetic, can’t even take a few winding roads—even a few good winding roads.
“Batumi”, he says again. “My brother, in Batumi. My brother.”
“Horrorshow”, I say.
He nods.
I press my hands against my stomach and close my eyes. Pathetic.
Motion sickness occurs — they say — when there is a discontinuity between visual and proprioceptive information. Your body expects one kind of motion and experiences another. Your eyes expect gentle slopes, your body experiences long, harsh ones. Your inner-ear and eyes argue. Your brain asks your stomach to regurgitate.
The advice is to keep your eyes closed. I try to do this but it’s hard to not look out the window. A dry, orange, almost Australian landscape passes by. Australia with hills, and where mountains shimmer in the distance. The outback where greenery occasionally blooms.
By the side of the road, there are the bones of a cow or buffalo, mostly intact. It gives the place an atmosphere.
I should not have eaten those jellied peanuts in Mtsketa.
“Batumi”, he says. “Batumi khorosho”.
I close my eyes.
*
What does the world look like to a person like Shio? To someone who believes in God so much that they are willing to leave society and try their luck on a mountain?
The mountain is dry and seething and the air hot.
The footprints of animals. The sound of breaking twigs. There is no wind.
The limestone cliffs surrounding the monastery are bright and pitted with large holes which could have been the caves of other ascetics. Is it hot or cool in them? Stuffy or fresh? Do you sleep in one, bitten by insects, barely able to breathe, and in the morning, emerge into the hot sun and say ‘thank you God’?
TV sound buzzes: taxi drivers are assembled outside the gates of the complex, just waiting, watching Youtube on their phones.
You walk up a dry, brown path to the buildings.
Some of them are ruined, their interiors broken, their walls dark and the images of Jesus are faded and fragmented. Some of the buildings do not allow cameras inside. Their frescoes are daunting and huge; God and Jesus together looking down onto the sinful world, the super-ego itself enthroned in red and gold and aquamarine.
The stones are hard underfoot. There is no matted grass. Dark shrubs, blue sky.
Does someone like Shio not see ‘mountain’, or ‘cave’, but ‘creation’?
What would make someone spend two years in a cave?
*
Inside the Church, a few people pray loudly.
Some touch the glass containing holy relics.
For at least the third time in Georgia we find a relic which claims to be from the shroud Jesus was wrapped in.
My partner makes the ‘can you believe it?’ face. She rolls her eyes.
It just so happens that today is Diwali, the Hindu and Sikh festival. Hindus celebrate the festival to mark Rama and Sita’s homecoming to Ayodhya, after their banishment to the forest. That’s not the whole story of course, there’s a war, a monkey God, a ten-headed demon, a giant who sleeps for years, magic herbs. There’s loads more.
Sikhs celebrate Diwali, or as it’s known, Bandi Chhor Divas, to mark the release of the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind from prison in the mid-Seventeenth Century. There’s more here too: the Guru helped secure the release of several dozen other political prisoners.
Both Sikhs and Hindus light divas or candles in celebration.
The Church in the monastery of Shio Mgvime offers candles to light.
Having left the Sikh religion some years before, I do not celebrate the festival. But I also do not participate in the kitsch or sentimental renewal or display of faith by lighting a candle ‘just for fun’. I especially do not confuse the various traditions by lighting a candle in the Church to mark an Indian festival.
And yet, the world offers these possibilities, with traditions overlapping, with meanings reaching over one another, pulling each other inside out, so that if I wanted to, I could join the schoolchildren and pilgrims in lighting a candle in the dark incense-filled Church to honour Shio, and also Rama, or the Guru’s release.
This is what abstract events look like in real-life:
A discontinuity between what you see and what you experience.
*
Outside, large sheets of shade cast by the brick buildings are occupied by Russian tourists. A family, it seems, and they sip water from plastic bottles and sketch the dry, intensely bright landscape around them.
The limestone cliffs resound with the hum of sunshine. Dark birds fly overhead.
My What’sapp buzzes: photos mum sends of her lighting candles in the Gurudwara.
We walk back down the hard stone path to our taxi.
My partner tells me some monks were back there working with power tools.
Small, violet-tinged pigeons pick up the bread the taxi driver crumbles for them.
He wipes sweat from his face with a cloth.
***
Gurmeet Singh is a British writer living and working in Berlin. He writes non-fiction about art, politics and culture, and is also currently working on a novel. He tweets @therealgurmeet.
By Anna Evans:
From the train, drifting through the land, America endless passes through windows. We are travelling from New York by train heading south. Long distance train travel foregrounds the journey itself – the hours stretch ahead of us and time passes differently. A whole litany of travel, of escape, of distance. This is travel for its own sake: departures and the unknown destination, the one yet to be arrived at.
From New York we say goodbye swiftly, disappearing into a tunnel and emerging in New Jersey. Time passes easily: the names of the stations before us like a list unfolding. Counting the states as they roll by … New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Washington, Virginia …
The landscape filters through the windows. Watching the outskirts of cities becoming central, immersed in the view from the window. Each place is a destination for someone, and at each station we await departure, glad to remain on the train with everything ahead of us, still a plan, an idea of travel; the onward pull of the train tracks.
Windows frame the scenery, flickering still life by. To be in motion, like so many images coming together as a moving picture. Sitting still on a train this movement is entrancing. It is when I try to catch a moment of stillness and enclose it, that I get some sense of the speed we are travelling. Trying to read a sign at a passing station or recall someone glimpsed from the window. The view from the train is partial; momentary and suggestive.
Stepping out of the train at Washington, feeling the heat, feeling a difference. Sensing the unfamiliar, of places I have imagined but never seen. The names of the places resound through the announcements of the train conductor, coming up and down the carriage . . . Culpepper, Manassas. Small town America, picture perfect, while below the surface history crackles with tales of power struggles and the defeated. The railway tells stories of crossing a continent, of a means of leaving and becoming fugitive.
As we travel it is hard not to think of all the unknown souls who laid down the tracks, lost to time. Immense bridges and river crossings connecting those vast expanses of land. All the images of pioneers and immigrants, wagons and horses, galloping across the horizon and as far as the eye can see, fabled legends of exploration myths and map-making. The iron road laid out as if to tame the land and mark out its boundaries, to fix and make permanent the story of a new world.
Shortly before our stop in Virginia, just as darkness is falling, the train comes to a stop. The storm has blown trees on the line. We wait in the middle of another huge forest, darkness outside, for news, for updates. Imagining great trees laid across the line, small figures scurrying around them. The falling night brings with it change and uncertainty.
America feels too big to begin, and I know that it makes no sense to think like this when I can track the progress of the train as I go. When it is restlessness that brought me here. I feel far from home, and the two impulses battle within me; my travelling spirit stretched to its limit, to the end of its comprehension.
As the train travels through the night I am aware that we have barely scratched the surface of what lies beyond the next tree, the next horizon. Now I just feel lost. Is it possible to be lost when the train track winds onwards through the land, laid out piece by piece, when everything has been explained and laid to rest?
Except that no one really knows what lies beyond the measured miles, the boundaries of loss.
***
We continue the journey by night. Our route passes through Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana … People get on and off at stations along the way which I fail to wake at, pulled under by sleep, lulled by the movement, the sound of the train. Dimly aware of change, but cold, too cold, sheltering under the thin blanket, looking for a pillow to rest on.
The fingers of sleep crept in stealthily and covered your eyes, tousled your hair, pushed you ever downwards, downwards. Sometimes you resurfaced and were crossing cities above like darkened shadows.
Train dreams are the ones that vanish through your fingers like the names of the stations while moving at speed. The train guards walking up and down the train. Good morning! First call for breakfast. Shifting, waking, looking out at the dawn, drifting again …
Onwards through the landscape, small settlements scattered through the tall and unending trees. Cities strung out in-between like troubled dreams. Passing, half imagined, the land divided into counties and marked out by rivers. Gatherings of houses and lights, the city like a dreamscape.
Train dreams are the falling stars, the sleep that comes suddenly and takes over, the drifting and the sudden call back. The long and convoluted dreams that can only last a moment but that lie in infinite parallels circling back.
From the window, glimpses, snapshots, fleeting: time passing like something remembered you can touch. Travel makes you a stranger everywhere continually seeking for and casting off the sense of home. From the window impossibly long trails of freight cars. I picture the track that runs behind us, spooling away endlessly, lost into distance. The forlorn sound of the train, the sound for which the word was made, stretching outwards for-lorn.
Somewhere in the night we cross over to a time and space that feels different. Where time expands, and space widens. Overnight, recognition becomes replaced by a feeling of disassociation. That sometimes time reels out like so much track laid across the distance, when you try and picture the end of the line.
Waking to the morning light in Georgia. The train conductor passes calling out the names of the stops. Atlanta …
The railroad, the train track, always travelling, always moving on.
***
Travelling across America by train is like every song you ever heard that was melancholy and floated through you … in the telling of travel, departures and long distances, the lack of control over your own destiny, the loss of identity. The railroad reaches on into the distance, like the track spooling away behind, just out of view around the next bend.
Train songs, the names of destinations far away, connected, ever-connected by the railroad. The same music that America has been running from and tracing its way back to ever since. In these songs, departure and longing, distance and loss. Leaving the south, like exile and captivity, the weight of the journey and all those who dreamed of escape.
The longing of train songs; even if after roaming all those thousands of miles brings you to another place where things might be different, might be the same.
The forlorn sound of the train approaching, like something remembered, already known.
For a while in Alabama, the train follows the course of the river, a wild and overgrown bridge. The track winds off in the distance to vanished routes.
As the hours and miles go by, distance starts to overwhelm us and we look out of the window, speaking less and less. The train travels through Alabama and Mississippi, deep and far away. Sitting in the buffet car, listening to the train staff talking. Apprehension comes with the falling of the light, the lengthening of afternoon, and the building clouds across the sky. We lack the words to explain, they hang between us, like the storm beginning to build outside.
Train words are the ones that fall between the ones we say, the ones that float between our window reflections and out into the trees like dandelion seeds; tiny parachutes looking for a safe landing.
Lost railroad tracks leading off into the trees. The lonely cry of the train through one track towns, passing once each day going south and once in the other direction. Long straight roads, white chapels and the highway out of town, past boarded up buildings and lone walkers. Leaving, becoming ghost towns, out on the road beyond the view from the train. The road that runs alongside the rail tracks. Becoming lost in distance. Lonely road, broken down town, marooned.
The perfect vista as viewed from a train. Flickering sunlight from above, clouds on the horizon. In the viewing carriage of the train you can sit immersed in the landscape, and skylights offer a view of passing skies. I sit with book in hand, unopened, listening to the talk of other passengers, where they are going to, and where they have been. The way the light falls on the trees making some a golden yellow.
Evening comes, and then night falls with a formidable darkness. Something overcomes us, a deep and unending weariness we are unable to explain. Words fail us and we look out to the fading light as if to a great wave. My suffocated soul begins to accept, to comprehend the unending distance, to frame the land as a recognizable space.
I carry it with me so that I know it will always be there like a longing.
***
Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.
