“With a fountain pen it’s easy to make rabbits multiply.”

Marcel Pagnol’s “The Water of the Hills” Translated by W. E. Heyningen

“[A] fountain pen makes fewer blisters than a pickaxe.” 

Marcel Pagnol’s “The Water of the Hills” Translated by W. E. Heyningen

Letter to Anna from 20X6, September [2X]

Subject: [the second] of Three words.

Anna

There is always the need to escape from the clattering, spiteful refrains of noisy-brain, hums, the fatigue, the clenched withdrawn bones, and the feeling of feeling yourself processing and thinking and contemplating—filling scenarios with the physical need for less tired and a craving for something empty and quiet—of a known horizon, open … desolate, but alive in a different way.

It’s a glitch, but one easily imagined through cold-brine … salts in the wrong place in-place of impossible tides of toasted oats, caramel, cocoa—it’s comedy … it’s tragedy—your domestic comforts invading your place of wild escape.

Do you think it’s in any way to do with the contracts you make with yourself, with me … with the world, to help silence these moments—when you think of a place as more than a place … for what that place will give you, [or us] … you expect but don’t prepare, think in pockets, your memory as trinkets of senses, glitches … our senses are supposed to confirm your escape.

But sometimes they don’t

It’s the noise I think that drives us to the edge of things—it’s not perpetual, we know this, but it sure does hum.

Brains refusing to close, tick on and through, regardless of where we leave it. You desperately want to step out, walk straight and into a space so wide the cold is painful, leaves bruises till thoughts have no recourse but to fall away. It’s this hope that drives the solitary nature of coastlines underfoot … the hope it can mend what you hide—the outside to fix the inside … where sleep has failed, weather interrupts … this cliff-edge might offer what your mind has failed to provide.

You imagines [REDACTED]. You imagines that beach—you know the one—where [REDACTED] stood at the end of the universe, towering limestone-cliffs rising pale-grey—and you find yourself comparing them to books—slabs of something wet, slate-shores stretching the sky’s the colour of something else. You come here looking for silence because it fulfils your need for something brutal … not a cleansing reality, but one of salt and ozone and the raw bitterness of seaweed and damp-stone.

It lends you the illusion of absolute distance.

If only it wasn’t so absurd, stubborn. But it is … I stood alone on that ledge at [REDACTED] wrapped in winds, braced for Atlantic brine, inhaling cold wash—but the grey-foam was not iodine … but the warm, toasted sweet … of Chocolate Hobnob.

I pictured you and saw myself … can you see me, trying to see you as wild seas sprayed golden oats and sugars against the rocks? The smell of butters browning, quiet kitchens, warm milk, chocolate melting, toasted grain … I felt adrifted crests of dark waves trespass on the domestic … the very desolation escape was needed from.

A warm and homely kitchen invading the edge of the world, where you seek isolation from the noise—it felt uncivilised, cruel. A glitch—a cartographic error perhaps? Or perhaps the senses don’t care much for geography?

A mislabel.

It complicated things, my love. Smell doesn’t like to reason with us, does it? It doesn’t pass through our polite filters, or rooms [we] filled with boxes, it just … hits us … wet receptors, volatile molecules … they bypass every guardrail and shield we erect, and dark room, memory-box—we can feel the scraping of the tape before we’ve even had time to name it.

But then the glitch reverses—senses swapped … bruise a stalk of lavender between fingers and you’ll not find peace or quietude or fresh-pressed linen fresh out and laundered, just so, no slow evening glow, no shhhh of promised hushed-pulses … autumnal afternoons. No.

Out [.] poured [.] the [.] ocean—crushing that dry purple spike brought salt-wind and wet-shale and frozen-spray … it brought [REDACTED] Bay into my bedroom … that floral stalk held a tempest, not peace.

I thought lavender belonged to rest, but my memory said no.

What’s to do with such impossible geometry? The beach’d borrowed the kitchen, the flower’d stolen the coast. So, the Hobnob entered my mouth already carrying somewhere else—not the familiar grounding crunch of oats and cocoa and comfort—but of sharp … floral … the medicinal bitterness of crushed lavender.

It’s a strange type of torture to have expectations so purposefully disrepaired. The beach smelled of kitchens, flowers turned to wind, and the biscuit tasted of garden—the sense our senses refuse to stay where we’d look for them, bleeding in and out of one another till longing and belonging became the same.

Perhaps that’s what we’re trying to find when we escape, or pretend we want to—not empty space, not silence, or stone-cliffs, but a way to sit inside confusion, or beside it, or with it, without the need to clean it up … to let toasted oats belong to Atlantic seas, to let them live inside a purple flower, and to know that even when your brain is at its noisiest, there is a quiet letter waiting to be written to you.

—JustD

IPhotography by Hansjörg Neth, PhD.