At the Water's Edge. John Lister-Kaye
a direct product of the sun, that these motes of weightlessness streaming into my childhood bedroom were particles of the sun itself, and that the brilliant stripe slicing across my pillow, searing me into squinting awareness, was intended for me alone. Awakening and forcing my eyes to adjust, I imagined that those sunbeams were a downward draught of bright air silently blowing my way, delivering their gleaming flecks from some unimaginable solar smelter. They burned and then vanished, like sparks. I tried to capture them in a jam jar, shutting them in with a firm twist of the lid. Then I would rush them under the bedclothes to see if they still shone.
It never occurred to me that dust was everywhere. If sunlight was just bright light, I reasoned, why, then, did it have sun-dust with it? The light bulb didn’t issue a visible fallout, nor did the precious little torch I had been given for my sixth Christmas. I was convinced that whatever I had in my jam jar was real – a gift of pure sun. I became a heliophile, a secret sunbeam worshipper. They infiltrated my dreams.
If I braved myself to face the window and opened my eyes, even for a split second, and then ducked beneath the blankets I found that I could take the whole window with me, the frame, its astragals and square encasement, branded, no matter how tight I screwed up my eyes, upon the soft pixel-palate of my consciousness. ‘Why me?’ I mused. And what could be the meaning of this fierce reveille? Was I hallowed? Had I been singled out for one of those epiphanies I had seen in graphic illustrations, Holy Ghost descending in a shaft of brilliance, which were liberally sprinkled into children’s bibles of those days? It seemed I had.
Nipping down the passage to my sister’s room confirmed this beyond doubt. She lay in gloom. There were no heliographic signals of any kind, divine or otherwise, illuminating her room. No, the sun was signalling to me and me alone, and it was private. It had picked me out and I was in no mood to share its favours. I kept my jam jar hidden in my sock draw. When pressed by my mother for what, precisely, it contained, I ducked the issue, knowing instinctively that grown-ups wouldn’t understand.
May 10th ‘Remember that you come to each day anew,’ chides the existentialist philosopher Martin Buber, ‘and hallow the everyday. All real living is meeting.’ That’s where I am; a new day to hallow and some real living to be done. I’ve taken this walk a thousand times, but even after all these years every stride adopts new form, lit anew by shafts of virgin light, another priceless joust with Providence, fresh garlands to be won. On a hallowed day like today I can step out of the present and feel the future roaring at me, seeking me out, careering in to greet me, one more self-propelled plunge into the great ocean of unknowledge in which we all blindly swim.
Desk work dictates that today’s walk has to be in the middle of the day, so I’m breaking free too, springing away to the Avenue with the mischievous gladness of real escape. It’s hard to hallow the day when the phone is ringing. But now I’m out, hungry for some living and meeting.
The sun is high and mine all over again. From 93 million miles away it seems to have a gravitational pull of its own. I feel I’m being hustled along by the glow of the year’s turning. It has spent the morning elbowing through clouds to reward my truancy with a dome of hard, metallic blue. Leaves are translucent, so that once among the limes and chestnuts I stride through a viridescent haze, wading among tiger-stripes of brilliance, breathing deeply. This is it – living again; this is why I come. I’m heading out, hallowing. Every stretched pace is a triumph of living, of just being a sun-struck mote dancing above the awesome planet revolving beneath my feet.
Great tits are insisting. The shrill ‘Teacher! Teacher! Teacher!’ repeats over and over again, refusing to let go. Others answer distantly, all staking claims. The waistcoat of a cock bird, as bright as a buttercup, is split wide by the black stripe which heaves and parts as he throats his pride. His purpose is infectious; today his tiny presence on this Earth is as huge and strident as my own.
There are a few more certainties in life than Mark Twain’s ‘death and taxes’, even in our uncertain world. They are the sparks of recognition riding the sunbeams’ current, the flecks of familiarity that hold us all together and tell us who we are. I know this bird has a mate and at this moment she is snuggled into her ring of moss and felted down feathers, deep inside a nest box nailed to one of the limes. She is fluffed out in her dim hollow, baring her 90°F brood patches to the five ovals of her future, pressed close. Song resonates above her, new life stirs below. I push on, still anxious that I could be called back.
At the wooden bridge over the burn I begin to unwind. I lean on the handrail and bathe in stillness. This is what Yeats meant by ‘peace comes dropping slow’. You can’t rush it; breathe deeply. I’m emptying down, draining dross like bathwater. The burn murmurs confidingly, like inconsequential chatter with an old friend. Wrinkled ripples shine and burble behind the birdsong like a melody constantly repeating. I’m out of hailing distance and, more importantly, no one knows I’m here. I feel like Huck Finn: the bridge is my raft, the burn my ‘big ol’ Mississippi . . . ain’t freedom purdy’.
The sun is strong here and I feel the urge to sit. The grass is friendly – winter’s lifeless mat impaled by bright new growth – yet chill to the touch. The year’s first gnats dance over the pool. Cock chaffinches are bellowing in the willows and birches. A wren trills deliciously. Far away, high over the moorland, a curlew floats its sad notes into the breeze. I need a moment to work out what’s going on here.
I close my eyes and turn my face to the sun’s radiance and the world becomes pink. It’s easy to see why so many pagan cultures threw themselves before it and trembled with fear at the dark gasp of an eclipse. In seconds I am drowsy with the sun’s deception; lying back is irresistible.
Just what is happening does not bring comfort. Everything around me is grabbing its chance for renewal. In that sense spring is a celebration, a triumph of survival of the long winter. But a survival for what? Where are we all headed under this exuberant star we call Sol? The revelations of physics and the assurance that the sun is 93 million miles away, that it is halfway through its calculated life cycle and will one day run out of heat, plunging us all into ice and gas, reveal no more answers than my jam jar. The knowledge that the glow on my face is a magnificent nuclear engine driving life on Earth, delivering energy through space via photons captured by the very green plants I am sitting on and the result of unthinkable nuclear reactions at the sun’s core, consuming 5 million tonnes of matter every second and releasing 3.9 x 1026 watts of energy, hasn’t helped me a jot. I’m still in deep shadow, and I know it.
And survival at what price, and for whom? It’s not by birth and rebirth alone that we survive, but also by the relentless scythe of the Reaper. We inch our way forward over the piled corpses of the dead. No amount of romantic imagery or poetic licence can balm either the fact or the pain. They were right, those pagans, to worship the sun in dread. These warming rays, these beams that seem to ruffle the very essence of the air, that load the great tits’ and chaffinches’ breasts with jubilation, are where it all begins. Deceptive and unimaginable though it may be, the sun’s energy – so vast that we can express it only in a mathematical formula – is systematically sending us out to kill. It is the power source that kick-starts the whole girning, churning conundrum of life into violent alert. We are, every one of us, its slaves and its utterly merciless militia.
I well remember doing photosynthesis back whenever it was so long ago. It gripped me; it seemed such a fiendishly good idea. Beam down the solar energy, fire up the chlorophyll to hang onto the light, suck in the carbon dioxide and water and – Hey Presto! A bag of sugar emerges at the other end. With a wag of the finger and a shake of his bald pate, Tommy Wallace insisted of us languid adolescents never to overlook that this could happen only in the presence of protoplasm in living cells. Ah yes, of course, life – living and meeting. That’s you and me. And what, dear, kind, generous-spirited, eye-twinkling, pipe-sucking Director of Biology, is life? What is it that sparks back and forth in this wonder gel we’ve named protoplasm? And what is it for? Just what is it, precisely, that makes you you and me me? In his book The Immense Journey, Loren Eiseley seems to sum it up:
Through how many dimensions and how many media will