Capitulation And Chalk Dust - Part 2

Waiting under a geometric sound flower for the world to grow

This is the second of a 2 part series (Part 1 is here) about the most powerful relationships we all experience and the forces that shape them. About the decisions we make and the decisions that are made for us. And agency and power and how much or how little we all have. I’m sure it’s advantageous to read part 1 first, so click on the link above if you haven’t.

Photo by Ryan Song on Unsplash

1.

If you listen carefully you can hear a bee approaching, barrelling low over the grass, undercarriage hanging down half praying, droning along at 3/4 throttle, heading this way and that to relay some precious information. You can draw a sound line as the mini-engined insect Dopplers past your resting head and away into the sun. Then another zooms a splicing beeline across the last, laying down an intricate geometric pattern of nectar-fuelled sound lines at tiny altitudes. As if the flowers were using bees as brushes to paint magnificent audio-portraits in an extraordinary celebration of themselves.

Finally, a cow will lower its head, its prawn pink tongue moistening its nostrils as it curiously leans in to investigate my motionless body lying in the middle of the pasture, wild flowers towering over me as I stared at the seemingly stationary cumulus clouds waiting out the day in the everlasting blue. Another cow. Then another. Chewing and clomping as they encircle me with their blundering delicacy. Another bee on a mission increases the geometric audio complexity of the growing pattern in my mind as the cow crossed the rubicon of curiosity and drew its clammy tongue across my forehead and cheek.

I spent a lot of time lying in fields that summer, covered in insects and dung, acting as a cow lure. Inhaling the deep pungent tones below notes of fresh acidic grass and soil. Hearing my breath rhythmically keeping death at bay as I listened intently for the wisdom of the world to reveal itself in the sound of bees, and wind in the trees, and distant engines accelerating, and sometimes voices floating along the path by the woods and hawks piercing everything with their fossilised eerie calls. Lying quietly in perfect stillness, waiting, waiting, waiting.

I can still taste the booming hugeness of the milking machines as they woke us from our slumber. The sheds erected beside the cottage, built so close that the sound of the clanky generator dissolved our walls and exposed us to a tsunami of sound and the pungency of sour sweet milk and diesel fumes at 5 every morning. Hence the affordable rent. It was a farm cottage with the personality of an airport at rush hour.

It was here, in our sparse sitting room, perched on rickety chairs and camp beds where we watched McEnroe flood the world in a wave of petulance, demanding to be seen, to be heard, to be counted. For a boy who often lay silently in the grass like a corpse, barely existing, hiding in plain sight, melting into an internal world of thought and sound, this extraordinary fountain of selfhood and hubris was terrifying. But McEnroe kicked down doors. Nothing was permanent. Things can change. You don’t have to wait. You can have agency.

But in 80’s Britain, agency was a privilege. Being a human wasn’t enough in an amoral system. 80’s Britain was about stripping the last remnants of morality from the social sphere. If you couldn’t buy influence you had none. No one listened merely because you were a thinking, breathing, emotional, experience-generating human. My mother’s dreams of an artist’s life weren’t given the dignity of being rejected. They were simply ignored. She was vanished. We were all vanished. So John McEnroe screaming his head off and refusing to be vanished by the rules and dictates of the day, but instead demanding his view be heard, his experience be heeded, his voice be listened to, was a perversely beautiful and inspiring sight.

Lying in the pasture with various cows tongues slurping my face was a far more beautiful and honest place than the rest of the world. Watching and listening and learning. Between the world of man and the world of nature, it was the loveless world of man that was red in tooth and claw. 80’s Britain was expelling love as fast as it could and the effects were devastating. Exhausted and vanished people were told to get on their bike and use their entrepreneurial spirit to make something of themselves. A rising tide lifts all boats, they said. Except we didn’t have a boat. Or a life jacket. Or even a swimming costume. Rhetoric about rising tides looks very different when you’re already drowning in a deafening, rented cottage. But we were told that was just envy. We were told that we were plagued with small-minded envy for those who worked hard for what they deserved. We were told we were the problem. Surprise, surprise.

2.

When the heartbreaking, loveless 80’s were in full swing our family should have been the canary in the coal mine, a sign of things to come. Someone should have stopped the whole circus and pointed toward us with fear in their eyes. Some did. No one listened.

And still no one listens. The cruel blueprint of the 80’s was used to build our world of today. Our world of inequality, insecurity, aggressive de-humanising, blame, precariousness and amorality where powerful, privileged people claw more and more for themselves as they throw their permanent wild-eyed mega-tantrums. Our world of fabricated conspiracies that divide and pit us against each other. Our world of punching downwards toward the powerless, the lost and the brave. Our world where six deadly sins are celebrated and the seventh too, if you’re wealthy enough. Our world where the bees no longer paint magnificent audio-portraits at tiny altitudes because most of them are gone.

My family learned the hard way that a heart is an easy thing to break. Each time it’s a little more difficult to put back together. Eventually it’s just broken down. It works, it functions, but no one would want it. Some hearts you couldn’t even give away. There’s a fine and delicate line between love and hate, between laughter and crying, between friend and enemy, between sister and sister. A line that’s easily traversed when love departs. A line that was crossed in the 80’s as we were all dragged closer and closer to emptiness.

And now the experience of my family has become the experience of us all. Now we are all becoming increasingly voiceless, ignored and irrelevant unless we have access to power. When John McEnroe once bellowed out at the world because it made a difference, we now scream at the world’s umpire while he utterly and absolutely ignores us.

The microscopic and the macroscopic are illusions. Every atomic fluctuation ripples along the infinite. Every minute human action creates an everlasting unfolding template. When we are supportive of each other, unconditionally accepting of each other, curious and open with each other, when we are forgiving and compassionate with each other, then we paint unfolding templates of potential through love. But we haven’t been those things. So we live with the template we’ve created on a family, a societal and a planetary level. And no one is teaching us how to stop and change paths.

I realised something in the pastures, lying alone, smothered in cow saliva, I realised that there are no words or rules or rituals that are true in the human world. There is only consensus. And that consensual agreements can only be made with mutual respect and equality. Otherwise we have a imbalanced, unstable, pretence of a society fuelled by power and ego.

So, in the end, although it was McEnroe who got me thinking, I was wrong about him. From my extremity he seemed like he was challenging the world of rules and power, but he wasn’t righting the world, dismantling power and asserting moral values. He was just another canary in the coal mine fluttering about in an increasingly atomised world where all of us would eventually be left alone to scream at our umpires to no avail.

I happened upon a pasture of cows a while back. And of course I lay down and waited. I’m still waiting there now. As I’ve always been. Waiting. Waiting. Waiting. What about you? What are you doing?