The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  Fingers press down into earth, deeper and harder they probe. It is a burrowing animal. Indents for its heels, for its elbows. Strips of woven soil it slips on like gloves. Head nestles back, through dock and leaf, back; through red open pores, back. Until its ears are in the earth and it is conscious of how many animals have better hearing. And it flaps and tilts until its ears are against the earth and what can they hear? What can they pick up? Who has a heart in the soil? Who, a pulse? Who has the ripple of muscle or burrowing root? Grass tickles. Producing ultrasonic sound waves with higher frequencies but shorter wavelengths, the distance between one wave and the next is smaller than with normal sound. If grass has a voice, it is fast and scorns punctuation. whoisitwhatisitsbodyitsechoingspaceisithollowisitrungisitgrassorwomanisitoneofussprungfromusorwhoisitwhatisit Its ear speed-reads the field’s voice.

  And so it comes to live in the carved-out red, in the tangled root hairs, in the scooped-outness. It lives in the opened space. Where a storm uprooted beech and oak, earth blazes. It is a strange sort of inside-outness. It finds it has lost its cuticles, as water pours through thin starch-storing veins. At its heart, a star: the xylem; and the phloem lies between the points of the star. It lies back in the bank, in the crumbled earth, in the dense gathering of organisms, of processes. Living in the soil is thick and raw, and the Grassling claws in the hair of words. The grass’s speech, the birds’ high beep, rabbits’ low feet, churning. Imagine a thickness and a brightness together: hold them there. Add the slowest twisting root. Add the writhe of the worm and the coiling of hair and root and worm, and through all of this the pink licks like an animal.

  24

  Waymark

  It is the time of the black hill. Dark on dark, in the part of the morning that is still night, Haldon Forest is obscured. To my left, Exeter’s artificial lights shimmer like a funfair. But it is the dark that draws. Birds breeze a song along the top line of the night. Invisible lines shift air into music: a bass of blackness; light treble of bird. Hill starts to separate from sky. I look at the woods that have always been the mark of my periphery: the edge of all my movement. As a child, I would see them as I approached my grandparents’ home. Too far to get to, they had seemed an impossible stretch of wildness. Later, as an adult, there were brief visits. Once, I had taken an exhibition of ecopoetry inside, in the converted forest-office building that stood for a time as a gallery. But these were only pricks on the lid of the forest. Now I go on its own time, into its darkness.

  The dead are here. Ghosts. Not just the trees, who exceed our human lifespan. Not just the ground, that exceeds even the trees. Not just the rock or the molten insides. But those spirits that take over the body. I walk with the dead. Always, but more so here. Here they are stronger, or my resistance is weaker, or the separation that guards the self is dissolving as I am walking. I feel that the ways people unravel are tiny. And seem tinier in cities. In rooms. In speech, with the words of only one species. Let’s unravel in big ways. In big dark. In big tree. In big, dark, bark. Let’s lay our ribs out one by one on big ground. Let me do it for you (I whisper through the trees, across the fields to him), since you cannot get out. And I don’t want you to, yet, because if you do, your dissolve might not be big but total and I want to keep some of you here. So let me unravel this way, partway, for you. Let me breathe all this gathered life in, and pass it on.

  Climbing the hill, closer to the bank of mist swirling around the deep blue forest, it is easy to think of stepping into another realm. When the Belvedere’s white ears poke up, it is closer than I think possible, having always seen it from a distance; an untouchable monument. The view from this height is stunning. Rolling fields, nips and tucks of houses, and along the horizon, the long light of the Exe. Clusters of blackthorn glow like snow trees, shaking their soft flaking flowers. As I near the Belvedere, spits of quartz shine up from the ground, reminders of the land’s mining history.

  As I come out in front of the tower, I marvel at how a building with so much grandeur from a distance can be so small up close. I look through the windows. It is a daring trespass, like looking in on a different century; or at myself, thirty years younger, awestruck, from the valley below, egging myself on. A chandelier dominates the main window and curtains are tied back in the upper one. As I scan, left to right, up and down, backwards, forwards, I can only conclude that emptiness is its overriding feature. Where now is the love that built it? That drew Sir Robert Palk to commemorate his friend, Major General Stringer Lawrence, through this monument? Has it slipped through the walls, out into the shift of cloud passing fast behind it, or is that what sweetens the air, that overpowers, like nothing else I have ever been soaked in? Walking around the tower, I spot a song thrush singing all-out from high branches, beak lifted vertical into sky. Tilting my head to follow it, it seems entirely possible that love could rise from any structure – a heart, a throat, a tower; could send its vibration into the air, changing its particles, which mutate into a beating sky that lightens all who move through it, that can never more be contained.

  Moving further down along the road, I come finally to a trail, and move into its rhythm: Scots pine after Scots pine; woodpecker over woodpecker; the same noise, the same tree, the same steps. When I cross a line of pylons, I sense strong static: a throbbing density like a noise too high to hear pulses through. I find it hard to breathe. As I walk through the disused quarry, I don’t know if I’m meant to be here. I feel electro-magnetic, as though I would stick to anything I touched. Dead tree stumps litter the ground like a graveyard, the antithesis of the dense green pines I was in only minutes before, and I want, desperately, to be out of there.

  Then, a sense of another presence. Though it can’t last much more than a second, a thousand things seem to happen at once. Slight danger; danger recedes; friendship; a reaching out; eyes: two, four, six, twenty; fur; fear; reassurance; doubt; reaching out; fear; flight. The deer run. I follow. There are rivulets along the forest floor; pine cones and deer droppings, freshly fallen. I need to keep low to move, as the branches of the pines start lower here, growing wilder, untended. I bend and move forwards, almost doubled over. Every now and then, a pool of gleaming water. I follow, until distracted by a tinkling off-trail. The deer move fast ahead, where I see them cross over the path. They are black. Darker than I have ever seen them before. They blend into the violets in the banks where I let them continue on alone, deeper in.

  If I were an ancient Briton, I would choose here to settle. Along the flitting stream, in the forest that has always marked the edge of my knowing, a dark waymark of the limits of my movement. Passing through moss and water, pine and bird, I could be at the ends of the earth – and I am. The ends of my own earth. But if I have reached here, what then? Like Jim Carrey in his boat in The Truman Show, I have reached the edge of the water. Or the barrier in The Hunger Games. I have moved past them. But what then? Then, you forget borders. Not just reimagine them, but truly forget that there ever were such things. And there is no reason you should not go anywhere.

  I move up, past the stream, higher than I have ever travelled. Past the glinting water through the trees, the estuary, the sea beyond. Everything limitless. Here, I practise being pine. Arms stretched above my head, breath moving up through the body. Tall and thin and wise, straight down the line, truthful, trusted, solemn and knowing. I wave down to myself, where I have been before and will be again. Now, tree-esque, I tell myself to be poised and that wisdom is just a state of mind, or tree. I am filled with the confidence of coils of age and stature. I don’t know why I ever doubt myself or why I wouldn’t always choose to stand tall when I have my pick of postures.

  This freedom is a feeling I recognize for its rare value; that I will try to carry with me wherever I go, out of this forest. In the times that lie ahead, as territories narrow and common borders close, I will think of this forest. The clumps of moss, the cool water, the hills that hold. To remember this: being up, where I always dreamed of being, whenever I land aga
inst something telling me I shouldn’t be there.

  25

  Whisper

  February is the time of the firsts. First snowdrop. First lamb. First sloe. Slips of white in muted days. First feet. A lamb runs to its mother. First knowledge of legs. First speed. First daffodil. First cluster. First field. First prolonged day, as a light turns on its yellow. First cherry. A dust of pink in the branches. First blush. First crocus. First deep colour. The lamb falls. Rises. First cry. First sound from the body. This is what it sounds like in air. This is what it is like outside its body. First baa. First bee. First bud. In the camellia. First flower. First sweetness in the soil, lifted, its clumps soaked in open narcissus swimming over the opening soil, the scent, the deep springing lungfuls. And though cold and though rain and though cold and though rain – a white and a yellow. And through cold and through rain, through cold and through rain – a pink and a purple. A chaffinch sneezes. Colour approaching like a storm.

  Buzzards come. One swoops overhead. Two. Weightless. They cry and pass. Five. Circling, swirling together feathered. Up. One’s wings fold in like a concertina as it plummets down, pumping the air to its advantage. There must be more ways to move the body through air, more ways to play it. It flaps its arms. Grounded, it doesn’t make much difference. But what if suspended? Bungee-jumping while pumping the arms might give some approximation, up to the point of the ping back up. It looks round for a smaller experiment. Flapping the arms and jumping on the spot is just a poor woman’s star jump. Then, as it moves, the ground swells with wind. Air knocks against the back of its legs, whips against its hands and through its fingers. It climbs onto a bench. It jumps and flaps. Conscious of its weak back, it worries and swells. For a moment, it feels fat in the air, fattened by air, p(l)umped. Landing is strained. Its spine ticks.

  Its next target is a tree stump. Too high to climb onto conventionally, first it sits on it, then moves its legs up, one after the other, folded under. In a contorted squat, it ripples up through the body, until standing. The narrowness of its dais is alarming, and even its hip-level height – to one with vertigo – feels uneasy. It takes all its nerve to flap as the wood rocks. It leaps and lands in the knees, forgetting to soften the legs. None of this the buzzard has to worry about, who lands on pillows of air, who drops and floats without a jolt.

  Finally, it reaches the fallen beech, which has been its goal since beginning this buzzarding. Fairly easy to climb and backing onto a river, the beech draws it to its possibilities. But it is impossible to climb in wellies. It takes off boots, then socks. Bare-footed, it lifts itself onto the gnarled wood and wet, trailing ivy. It is stabbingly cold. Lifting up through the body it glances down into the water. Balking, it decides on a dummy run on warmer ground first. It swivels round and starts to flap. Falling this time is softer, into beech leaf, speckled ivy, loosened bark. But the flapping motion is not bringing it the buffeting of the buzzard. It starts experimenting with other movements and discovers that moving the arms forwards and back instead of out and in gives much more dramatic results. As the arms swing, momentum gathers; it could fall off the planet. A sheep watches it through a gap in the trees, bemused. Back onto the beech, it faces the river. Arms start forwards and back, inveterate slalom air-skier. But it feels too fast and risky. It switches back to flapping. It falls. Through water. Through mud. Through mud. Deeper than deeply it falls. It forgets to flap. Arms automatically streamline, ready to brace. It lands, eye-level with the sheep. Its body shoots along the ground. There is softness everywhere. In the legs, in the eyes, in the wool, in the water. In the suctioning squelch of the earth. The sheep pulls a little further in front of its lamb. Protective, against this questionable human behaviour.

  As it makes its way back up the hill, the wind reaches full pitch. It is pushed back down the brow of the hill; as it lifts, arms begin to pump again. It fills with air. Whole body: hollow. Air in the bones. Light channels up and down its body, pausing at the joints; flooding into the space of the knees, ankles, elbows, collarbone. The joints are places of safety, where light pools and a sea pulls and lulls, translucent. Nothing bad will happen here, in the nodes, along the stem. The body is readying, carving out space and flooding it. It is full of cradles. It fills with fir and moss and drops. The softness of caressing wings, of eucalyptus and snowdrops swirling into veins, of the skull filling with daffodils. Hair shimmers and strokes the air where it lands. In these moments, the body is a different thing, and so is the earth. Not so bound into borders, they drift among each other: body and earth; air and body; body and bird. Internal, external; feeling, imagining; sound, stillness. It is impossible to give up when you know it can be like this: less bordered, more scented, less bound, more connected.

  And language, too, is a shifting spirit. All the potential of air in the mouth, the knees, the elbows. An orchestra of bones shuffle, waiting to be touched. The Grassling’s stem, low against ground, rustles where it brushes earth, trailing its pressed-in sound. Rune. The Germanic root of the word lifts. ‘Run-’: a whisper. A way of speaking into rock or wood is rising from the past. The body, a whispered language, falling gently into grass.

  26

  Wills

  It is quite casually that my father reveals, ‘Of course, John Wills was your relation, you know. Granfer Wills your grandfather used to call him.’

  ‘He sounds like quite a character,’ I observe coolly, like a police officer interviewing a witness and trying to remain impassive so as to not lead them in any particular direction.

  ‘Oh, he was,’ he continues. ‘He had a great handlebar moustache. There was a photograph of him but your grandmother threw it out.’

  A pull had come from my father’s History, drawing me to this character’s walks across the Ide fields. From Hayne he would walk to Halscombe across country, crossing the Ide brook, the railway line and passing to the side of the quarry at West Town. Even before I had known of any connection, I had followed his paths and told my father of the places I had passed. It had pleased him to hear of them, since he remembered the routes from his own childhood walks and liked to learn how they’d changed, or what remained. The audacious wayfaring of this walker also appealed. Often he would take his hook with him and if he found it difficult to cross over a hedge, would use his hook to make a stile.

  ‘He must be your, let me see now, would it be … great-great-grandfather?’ It is a delicious moment: a surprise symmetry uncovered, through the imagination, stumbling on fact. When I had read the name Wills, I hadn’t made any connection, as this was a relation through marriage – the father of the wife of my great-grandfather – and so bore a different name. I think about this slipperiness of names. Lately, when close to the ground, I have sensed an older naming: the runes of a forgotten language, still somewhere imprinted. I have felt the weight of these buried words that may only need brushing to be uncovered. And now I know that I must act, must follow the whole of Granfer Wills’ path across the fields to see what more the ground might yield. There is still a footpath, now designated as ‘public’, which cuts across the corner of the field, I read. Opposite Hayne in the direction of Halscombe. Was it John’s hook that laid this ground open?

  When I reach John’s stile, everything stops. Woods, hills, sun spill into every spot of retina, flushing everything else out. Head takes slow panoramic turns, again and again – lazily, not wanting it to end. The word ‘breathtaking’ originated between 1875 and 1880, my father’s notes on John, around 1891. The word seems to have grown in this place. In the winter sun, the woods sing out as sweetly as they ever could, frosted leaves glittering the ground.

  It is a story of work that took John across country, to labour in the neighbouring farms: Halscombe, Black Hat, Mount Entrance and the estates of Culver and Perridge. It is labour of a different sort that brings me, taking my tiny sheep-steps down the hill, trying not to topple over. As I totter forward I’m aware of all the things I am trying to keep from falling; the tension of this in the body; the life I am
willing to keep. Though my father is teetering on this side of the ground, he is here. A moment more, I whisper to him across the fields: and for as many moments as you can.

  A sudden storm comes in while I’m in John’s field. The steep track flattens out halfway down and I sit, protected by the top of the hill, waiting for the rain to pass. The field wraps itself around more snugly than clothing and I let my head fall into grass. The scent at this level is deep and ovine; I burrow deeply into it, surrounded by a nest of grass and hair. Despite excellent peripheral vision, sheep can suffer from wool blindness if they haven’t been shorn around the face. Thickets of hair, always tightly tangled with African heat, now mingle with woollen grass and a beating wetness. I see only rain.

  When it eases, I continue down the hill, crossing the brook and pausing at another stile. As I take a swig of water, I remember John’s preference for a different drink. He was an expert at cider-making. On one occasion he had promised to be home from Halscombe by eight. Eventually his wife came looking for him and found him lying in the orchard hedge fast asleep, overcome by the drink. The water tastes of milk and manure, a potent cross-contamination caused by proximity of bottle and umbrella in my bag. I think he had the better idea when it came to lubrication.