The Long Watch

For the past couple of months I've been talking to a friend in the North. We were lovers briefly once and parted as friends many years ago. Selfishly, being where I am, I was delighted to hear from her, someone to talk to, a buffer against the loneliness, someone who had cared for me.

She has a partner, all going well if dull as far as I knew, so puzzled as to why the call. It soon came clear why she needed to talk to me. Her mother was dying slowly and painfully and she had moved in with her, to try to mend what had not been a close relationship and to help her Mum leave with as much dignity as she could give her. While her partner and family were nearby they were little help (partner scared of death, family squabbling and 'busy'), and the messy circumstances of her mother's illness were not what she had expected.

Her mum was, sad to say, needy and waspish, and the nearness of her death had not been acknowledged by her, making it difficult for my friend to connect and forgive and to gain the reconciliation she craved. She would call late at night in tears, pouring out her anger and fear. She too was frightened of death and watching her mother die so painfully, increased that fear. Because I was apart from it all and we had been close once meant she felt she could talk to me about her anger and despair without being judged.

So tough for her.
I seem to have seen more of death than most, been to too many funerals, seen bodies torn and crushed. Doesn't help. Other than to know I can get through it. I had sat once with a friend who was dying a similar death, but he was brave enough to make me go away, to take my memory of him intact. A gift beyond price looking back. We said our goodbyes, honestly and with love, eventually there was nothing more to be said and he had the grace to know that. In Pace Requiescat, Mick.

That wasn't to be for my northern friend. Or me. I wanted to help and think I did, listening, reassuring, through a crackly phone, time after time. Hate talking on phones, through texts. Big things, important things, love and concern can only really be expressed face to face, hand to hand, eye to eye. You should be there.

If I'm honest (and I am) I wanted it to stop, for her mother to die. There seemed no resolution possible without death for either of them, I could hear my friend ebbing and crumpling with every call. And, selfishly I know, I would put the phone down feeling darker, she having no idea how down I had been before she rang. Nor should she; it really, really, wasn't about me.

Finally, last night she called to say that her mum had died. They had managed an ending of sorts, she had been able to talk to her mum alone while she was (she believed) still concious without any of the family around, for a while. I'm glad for her, she had stood a long and hard watch, maybe the longest any of us can take, glad that she had at least that thin release.

Like many people I think she hoped that the dark glamour of the approach of Death, the Death Bed, as in so many books and films, will spontaneously produce solace, resolution a neat ending between the two of them. It rarely does of course, there is no third entity there, only two people with all the potential for misunderstanding and confusion there is between any two people at any other time. And there is no end, you go on. It can change those who see it though, the survivors. Apart from the impact of grief, if they embrace the true meaning of the event it can give them a fierce commitment to love and life, and to those they love who remain.

I hope she gained from it, but am not sure she did in my heart of hearts. As at sea, some people shouldn't do the long watches, not without someone who can standing by them; they are not for everyone and there is no shame in knowing that of yourself. Give what comfort you need to or can, be wary of the cost to your self and the people who rely on you, and expect nothing back.

My friend was generous in her thanks to me, said she couldn't have done it without me being on call, but that didn't make me feel any better. I don't think she should have been there on her own and feel bad about enabling that, if I'm honest.
And I am.

Don't expect to hear from her again.

Schadenfreude, sweet schadenfreude

The Wolf and cub went camping for the first time this year at DiveFest, the annoyingly fonted diving beano, held for the first time in the SW. The Wolf's cruel masters decided that the project he works for should have a 'presence' divers being one of the 'stakeholders' the project needs to 'engage with'. This 'fucked off' the Wolf who spends his time talking and arguing with these groups for a day job. Handing out leaflets to disinterested passers by over a weekend, like the poor cow who hands out rum flavoured cheese samples at the local Tescos, is not 'best practice', is not a 'targeted' use of his vast, cold, intellect.

Still, the firm paid for the Wolf cub and a hog roast ticket, so he could sell the trip to the cub as a camping trip at least.

Arriving at the site with White Zombie blasting out of his decrepit Disco (trying to drown out the ubiquitous acoustic drones of this weeks trendy surf croaker from the tents), the Wolf was unsurprised to see probably half a million quids worth of gleaming steroidal 4x4s, over-powered dual engined ribs and vast and complex polygonal canvas structures. These people have serious disposable income issues he thinks. While they like to present themselves as half-Jacques cousteau half-Attenboroughs piratical adventurers, mostly they are middle-class people who can't play golf, but still need A Life Style to reflect and display their status/credit access. Diving will do nicely. You need serious STUFF for that.

The Wolf spent a while diving himself in the past and loved the diving, but not the posturing and gear obsession that went with it. Most of the people he met were determined to tell him how much more their gear cost than his, and at which long range destination they had recently patronised the locals at. Underwater, to the Wolfs fishing conditioned eye, they were nervous and panicky, or operated at levels of idiocy which could potentially leave them and the Wolf dead very quickly in the event of an occurrence outside of the BSAC manual. Not all, to be fair, but most. Back to the woods for the Wolf.

The forecast looked satisfyingly grim, so Wolf and cub spent some time making sure the tent was well-pitched, muttering powerful Ray Mearisms, channelling his pudgy powers as they hammered in the pegs and twanged the guy ropes. They then sat in their luridly cheap deckchairs sipping a Guinness and a lemonade respectively, watching the newly arrived yuppies and their larvae began the construction of their yurt next door. The Wolf knows how expensive these yurt copies are and how they take an age to put up, even if you know what you are doing. Not having the benefit of computer designed mass produced frameworks and modern fabrics, they are neither as weatherproof or as stable as the Wolfs bargain bucket Halfords special. Fun to rent maybe thinks the Wolf, but buy? Presumably they are attractive because of their cost and the statement they make about you? Which from where the Wolf was sitting was screaming TOSSER, in an array of ersatz ethnic fabrics. Once up (a long way from erect in any sense of the word in the Wolfs opinion) the yurt was filled with an array of efnicky-looking stoves, folding divans and throws. Yep, throws. As fine an example of 'Glamping' as the Wolf had ever seen.

Later that night the first of the weekends succession of howling gales hit the raggle taggle middle manager gypsies-o. Nothing to the Wolf and cub, it's what happens every time they go camping (to the point where his son thinks wet weather is camping weather) so no drama. Suddenly, his sensitive ears picked up a blood curdling shriek of pain and loss from next door in the yurt "Do something Charles DON'T just bloody stand there, the salad is EVERYWHERE". The badly pitched yurt had begun to attempt to fly back to its ancestral home on the Mongolian steppes, leaving garlic crushers and drolly patterned wellies everywhere. "I am NEVER coming with you in this bloody ethnic hovel again Charles, what were you THINKING"
Of course the Wolf went to help, he's like that.
Can't stand by and watch a tossers tossed salad tossed...

Running for nothing

I'm about to go running again.
It always feels like I'm about to go to the dentist. And seeing as how I have been running every other day for a couple of months now that's a lot of angst. I read, and hear from my friends how much real runners miss it if they don't go, how much happier it makes them feel, but just don't get it. Feel good when I've finished yeah, but not when I'm doing it.

I'm not running to lose weight as don't need to, to look buff (any attempt to look good is doomed by the inherited arrangement of sensory organs on the front of my skull), and I'm plenty fit enough, but tell myself it's to keep from sinking into sad too easily. On average I guess it must be working as could easily imagine feeling worse - a sure sign you are not at the bottom of that particular well, no matter how lonely.

There is something about running that is just un-enjoyable to me. It's not the physical effort, tougher at my age than for most of course, but then I've worked far harder in my life and for far, far longer periods and didn't feel this kind of trepidation. I suspect it's partly where I run, either round and round a couple of football fields (boring), or up and down (but mainly up - 65% according to Google Earth) some steep hills on local roads (equally boring). Or it might be that I'm purposely running up hills because mentally I really don't like doing that, treating it as more of a mental test than a physical one?

Current scientific opinion seems to think that for the longest part of our existence as humans, we would have evolved partly as chase predators, hunting down, killing or wounding game, then chasing it down if necessary. There are even some reports of hunters literally running animals to death, by tracking them, disturbing them, tracking them again, disturbing them etc, until they collapse in exhaustion, without physically ever being able to keep up with them. We would then have to carry large amounts of the kill back to camp or whatever, which is why we (or maybe just the Wolf we's) respond so quickly to weight training. This would also explain our capacity for fast burst sprinting and for long distance running too. This is reason enough to use our bodies in that manner, and why we suffer over the long-term when we don't. And anyway what's the point of owning the killer-primate version of the V8 if you ain't going to floor the fucker every now and again?

So why not enjoy it? I used to run across the high moors near where I worked and enjoyed that far more. Every single step on the terrain was different, running through a many-coloured landscape that changed seasonally and every step of the way, felt far more challenging and rewarding. Even though the vast majority of the route had even more and steeper hills in it. Perhaps it was an atavistic sense of being in the right place that was being satisfied, and could distract me from the repetitive action involved? There was definitely a weird unconscious zen-like focus in action, deciding where your next step was going to fall on the uneven ground, which presumably occupied more of you head.

Hmm, maybe I should treat my self to the occasional trip up there again. On the other hand, if I started to enjoy it, wouldn't that reduce the mental toughening benefit? Maybe slip a sheet of sandpaper down my shorts. That should do it. On the other hand...

Sorry, got to go. The Wolf has just pointed out that I'm prognosticating and that I should shut up and get outside. Now it's bastard raining. Time to meld with the inner Wolf.
Running, more complicated than you think...

Time out

The wolf is sitting on a rock.
High over Hugh Town on St. Marys, looking over Crow Sound, across to other Scillies Islands, watching the sun set.
Thinking.

Nothing unusual about that. He's starting to think he should get one in his house, he spends so much of his time sitting on them looking at horizons, stars, pasts and futures. Why not sit on one and look at the TV? Well the dust for one thing. Shows up really quick on laminate floors. And them tiny little red mites than run around on them (they do, look real close), not sure about them. Wouldn't work.

It's not the rock that attracts the Wolf of course, it's the height they are at.
The height gives the Wolf an emotional distance, a breathing space, a meditative pause; time out.

The thoughts? Concerned.

The Wolf is involved in an extremely complex and important project that involves him convincing people he likes, respects and knows, the local fishing community, to work with people they consider, well, enemies really. And working to convince them to let go of areas, grounds, that are as important to them now as it was to their predecessors. The worst thing is, the Wolf knows exactly how much what they stand to lose has cost them in money, work, lives.

So many groups now lay claim over land- and sea-scapes that they have not proved or tested themselves against, have risked nothing for. Their claim is, in the Wolf's opinion, aesthetic. A genuine (but particular) appreciation of the beauty and intricacy of the environment, or even the half-arsed 'nature good/human bad' discourse, so common among the Children of the Supermarket Age* is considered enough to grant a superior, a higher claim on these conflicted territories. So many of them too, want to abstract the human from these areas, considering them un-natural destroyers, killers. These same groups of course, who really understand and appreciate these environments, should be allowed free access and any benefits that may accrue from that access. Of course. The New Enclosures, driven by the same moral righteousness and spurious confidence that "stole the common from under the goose".

These arguments are of course far more nuanced than the Wolf has allowed here, he is as guilty of the second as anyone else on landscapes where people have left or are scarce; the moors, the hills, mountains. But these are not places which communities harvest for a living, producing distinct and special cultures, one of which the Wolf once counted himself proud to be part of. Those communities matter, their difference is part of the hybrid vigour every culture needs, to be able to adapt and survive what the world throws at them. The Wolf believes with all his heart the potential loss of these sub-cultures to our larger society is as damaging as the economic loss will be the communities at risk.

As a society, we praise and nurture the multi-cultural (and why not where it genuinely enhances), the foreign and the exotic, and yet demean and demonise those indigenous sub-cultures that existed way before, and evolved in parallel with the rise of the modern consumer hegemony; the stroppy working class, the soldier and his love/hate garrison town, the farming communities, the fisher, the miner, the quarry man. Especially the ones which kill things for a living. This always makes the Wolf smile, as all animal life kills to live (all flesh is grass), and nothing dies of old age in the sea, ever. Not all animals are lucky enough to have others do it for them of course.

So why is the Wolf involved in this righteous (or wrongeous) campaign to 'nicen up' the idea of The Sea, one of many seemingly determined to emasculate this brawling, pugnacious, awkward and brilliant land? Well, he thinks there's a chance, just a chance maybe, this project could slow the erosion of the communities he loves, could maybe get people to mentally locate fishermen back into their rightful place as part of the marine environment and not just a blight on it, top predators along with the other big brained killer mammals out there. And that maybe, during the process, he can explain that world to those who who buy their fish in packets and risk nothing but a parking fine to earn their living.

But to do that he has to tell people that he likes, things they really don't want to hear, again and again.
And listen to people who he doesn't like, whining and fretting about a world they nothing of.
Again and again.

*The Wolf is a child of the Atomic Age. Way cooler....

Searching

Bunch of us went treasure hunting Saturday morning.
Me, a slightly hungover friend and our two very 'cited kids.

We were seeking a geocache, the altogether modern and less sinister version of the cold war 'dead letter box' or the blood gold of the unclaimed hoard. Geocaches are small containers hidden in distant carns, public buildings, crossroads, dead ends, secret gardens, derelict factories, galleries, ancient woods and lay-bys and...you name it. They are everywhere, probably one near you, but you will never find it, unless you are the sort of person who looks under things just because they have an underside. Or unless you are child.

Once hidden, their exact location is published on-line, on specialist sites, recorded using the GPS NAVSTAR Satellite system. This is used because the containers can be spectacularly small and inaccessible. They contain trade goods; social detritus, stories, gee-gaws, key rings, knick knacks, keepsakes, shiny things, poems, notes and chocolate. You can take anything you want from them but must replace it with something of equal or greater value, and you must not let any civilians see you. Cool eh?

Pause:
We were playing with a constellation of 30 odd satellites orbiting 20,000km above us, managed by the fucking United States Air Force 50th Space Wing (nope didn't make that up), picking up time signals accurate to within trillionths of a second on a tiny and cheap hand-held GPS receiver, giving us an accurate three-dimensional position fix to within a metre. To find a plastic lunch box full of the stuff that falls down the back of a sofa.
I love the Modern World.
Play:

So we crossed the moors, following but oblivious to the invisible lattice spun around the world by brilliant and unsung sorcerors, laughing and pointing and enjoying the beautiful May day, the molten yellow gorse and sparkling white hawthorn. We climbed one of the two loveliest hills in West Penwith and almost forgot what we there for. Around us, a turquoise horizon, defined by the Atlantic, above us, an endlessly deep and heart-breaking blue sky, pierced by swallows arcing across the many-coloured land, blacks, ochres, greens, dark reds, all the earth's shades; the shattered crumbs of the granite substrate, dragged to the fields edges and into a silicate lace across the moor, echoing the invisible web we followed here. And quiet, quiet enough to hear a cuckoo calling far across the hills. Can air taste, can it smell as blue as it looks?
Felt like it.

So yep, we found the cache; notes and poems were written, small goods weighed, examined and traded, all hidden from the eyes of the Real World and buried again with smiles and hopes, given meaning and worth by the quest and the act. All fun. But we also found the real treasure. Peace, beauty and the company of our friends in the sun, for a while.

And you know what? I really don't care how trite and commonplace that might look or sound, because it's true.
And worth searching for.

Wastelands

Being no stranger to wastelands, as poem, insomniac mindscape, metaphor or childhood playground, the Wolf is looking forward to seeing the new Wasteland exhibition at the Newlyn Gallery, by students of the first Curatorial MA at the University of Cornwall. A busy opening night, crammed with people mwaahing each other like it's 1999, is good for the gallery and social cohesion of the local art world, but not so good if you don't know anyone to mwaah with and can't see the art.

What he could see made him wonder what the claimed connection with the Eliot poem was. The Wolf has an intimate connection to the poem, having a line or two tattooed into his skin and loves it almost as much as he struggles to understand it. He first read it while at sea in an old copy of Eliot's collected work, which is when he realised that unlike novels, poems could be read again and again, without finishing them - a real boon on the 10 day trips he was enduring at the time.

The poem is famous for being Eliot's reaction to the fracturing of early 20th Century society and the absence of spiritual cohesion, desolate and multi-voiced, hopeless. And yet the Wolf (knowing no better when he first read it) paradoxically found it forming a coherent narrative, a gestalt. He also found much solace and instruction in The Wasteland, it's bare and broken terrain enabling him to gaze at himself without distraction and to try to work out how to get from Here to There. It's inclusion of the many voices, voices he recognised, he saw as a positive. The inclusion of the arcane symbolism of the Tarot, the mediaeval elements Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit allowed multiple personal interpretations, its unblinking reminders of death and loss implicit in life and it's final message of acceptance ("Shantih, shantih, shantih") fitted very well with his outlook as a fisherman. Many voices yes, but not a cacophony, all from one consciousness, so maybe not so much fractured as diffracted.
But, then he’s a Wolf so what does he know.

An easy hook to hang an exhibition on thinks the Wolf. If you are going to curate a show around the poem, you have a range of potential themes which you can use, other than the traditional God's Dead and We're All Fucked mantra/whine of the last 100 years. Disappointingly the theme used is the obvious one; fracture, alienation, collapse and of course the loss of the spiritual, which most of the works echo in some way at least.

The Wolf cannot understand why people think the modern world is devoid of spirituality, it’s chock full of the stuff; half-baked new-age energy bollocks, after-life millenarian schlock, Secret Lore paperbacks, anti-science medicine, nature worship, and all the global mono- and pantheistic religions, crushing women, dividing schools, tearing bloody chunks off of each other across the globe and still trying to tell the Wolf what he can and can't say about them. Seriously, that’s more than enough fucking spirituality for the Wolf.
Humans eh?

The Wolf takes a turn around the show again, without the crowds and without reading the notes - unless he draws a blank. He has three favourites, i.e., those which provoke the most reaction in him

The first Redressing the Balance is a ruined cardboard city emerging or subsiding into the sands, which works brilliantly. The Wolf thinks his son and his friend would love to wage war with their Space Marine models across this broken, desolate town. It also resonates with the endless images of real marines fighting and dying in dusty mud walled towns such as the Wolf sees nightly on TV. Seen like this, from a god-like perspective, hard to think it's worth dying for. And yet it could also represent the skeletal remains of a once vibrant and beautiful civilisation, something to be explored and re-imagined, that could enrich our present with exotic images and different perspectives if we could know it, something worth years of struggle and research perhaps. And, of course, the image of the ruined city, the fallen towers implies the end of all our works, ultimately. So what, thinks the Wolf, suddenly resentful. That's then, this is now. Enjoy. Where is the art that celebrates what we are, what have done?

The second is the Ruths, heavy training dummies lying on the floor and against the wall in positions implying attitudes of helplessness and vulnerability, but which are truly disturbing to the Wolf. Not so much the lazy half-arsed fetish reference (red and black latex [?] instead of canvas) but the inert 70kg dead weight, the mass of them. The Wolf has horrible memories of dragging the real thing up through several smoke-filled pitch black decks in a fire-fighting exercise that almost went wrong. An immense and hateful load that you cannot let go, but which could potentially destroy you. All sorts of resonances there for oppression, toxic relationships, memories of past pain or abuse, servitude etc, take your pick. The Wolf shudders. But can that sense of menace be experienced by anyone who has not carried a Ruth across their shoulders and felt that sullen oppressive weight? What do people see who haven’t carried them?

The last is Lucy Willows beautiful and intricate Memento Mori images, black and purple jewel-like glints in the corner of the gallery. The original Memento Mori as the Wolf understood it in earlier times was an artistic device, meant as a reminder to exult in life, to revel in it, bite hard on it, because it isn’t for ever. The later 19th Century ‘gothic’ sensibilities seemed to re-interpret the device as a call to fear death, rather than to embrace life, to walk through the valley in dread until the end, wailing; while those in the 20th referenced it by growing mysterious fringes and wearing black - whatever their complexion. Now that's scary.

There is an acknowledgement of death here, more fascination then obsession perhaps, and yet the pictures seem more concerned with the textured surface of the remains, the rich process of decay, the changing through time of the organic structure without the animation of life. In the Wolf’s mind Death occurs once and instantaneously; the gothic fetishisation of it into a looming presence, a state to be feared long before and after it occurs (rather than a dimensionless event to be avoided and not feared) is not for him, but the pictures fascinate him nevertheless. Sad and melancholic. Beautiful.

Although vaguely disappointed at first, the Wolf came away with an immense amount to think about, provoked both by the art he liked and didn’t like, triggering new avenues of thought and reflection. Sure, a couple of them failed to work at all for him, but still. The biggest failure to the Wolf was in the missed attempt to celebrate The Wasteland in any new or challenging way, which after all was the poem the exhibition supposedly had at its core.
But that’s today, tomorrow he might feel different.
Or he might be dead.

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

-T S Eliot. The Wasteland