A chronologically fragmented journal written from my home on Sofie's Mountain. Ongoing.
Countryside patina collects unevenly. Falun red, yellow ochre, weathering down to raw wood. Green algae blooming where gutters spill rainwater. You feel similarly exposed to the rough of time, as if gathering moss on bones. Fermenting a forest mould beneath skin. Your self wears a skeleton of old timber that no longer quite fits together. Warped living like doors swollen in frames.
In the attic under the eaves, writing desk tucked between collar beam and window
I feed a sheet into my Olivetti Roma, manufactured in the 1980s by Olivetti Do Brasil
A travel typewriter with smooth keys, 13pt micro elite typeface, grey case with eye-catching red trim
A detail that recalls the best known works by the architect Lina Bo Bardi
In a cafe across the North and Baltic seas a chronically ill poet reading from a collection of body horrors offers the advice: “Write what you know”
I check the line spacing, the page margins
Lock the paper in place
An uneasy relationship with the mountain, the way one has an uneasy relationship with a pinched nerve or abscessed tooth, only
A mountain cannot be soothed with over-the-counter pain medication, extracted, bed-rested into submission
Blue scilla spread among mossy rocks and rotting tree stumps, cross-pollinated tulips swirl vibrant splashes, the horizon a pale swell of cherry blossom
Instead of writing
I weed around paths, around planters, around floriferous mounds bordered by birch trunks
Most of the papery white bark peeled away
Getting lost in days of dirty nails and muddy knees, gardening gloves thin at the fingertips, a little irritable skin poking through
Rubbing one sunburned spot the size of a rice grain
Pearl hyacinth, hellebore, pasqueflower
A night of lashings breaking to heavy mist morning. The mountain washed clean, strung out to dry in the grey dawn. Robed in sodden air I listen to the trickling gutters, the splashing rain-butts. The unbinding ground drinking deep. Sucking at muddied boots. Each step giving with a strain, a slup.
I sit beneath the shadiest tree in P____ R____ Park
Oak canopy reaching twenty metres in diameter
Full leaf boughs ornamented with noisy parakeets
I'm dressed all in black despite the sun
Across the lawn three generations of friends and family chatter in contact fusion, barbecuing beef and catfish in sticky brown glazes
Everyone marinating together in the fragrant smoke
I watch as Z____ stretches her arms around the two-hundred-year-thick trunk, enveloping as much of the knotted stem as she can
Blackberry lips reflected in the fridge-freezer section. Our something at first sight superimposed over a packet of tofu. A dozen oranges tumbling down the market aisle. A tributary of citrus orbs confluxing with a delicate phalanx of phalanges. The performance of her femur and pelvis in orchestration with these appendages. Bending and scooping. Flexing. Extending. Rotating. The fruits passed in sleight from hand to hand.
Steam rises from the dewy skirts around the burst of ornamental beds
Azalea, magnolia, rhododendron
An unkindness of ravens announcing its presence. The first green spurts of snowdrops at the woodland edges. Stretches of bare soil whispering of Spring's arrival. The week beginning with a hint of plus degrees and a light misting of rain. The mountain melting down to icy sludge. The garden and meadow made muddy pools. The forest a dark mire of mulch.
Morning coffee in the meadow
The greensward, the leasow, the mædsplott
I look first for a word that associates with the day, the time, the place
Choosing overswarth, dated to 1649 and used in the description of a grassland
A land covered in darkness, a land grown over with swarths, swards, swads — more grassy descriptors dated to 1400, 1507 and 1877 respectively
I build out the scene from there
Remnants of yellow rattle and foxglove beardtongue haunting the overswarth, suppressed by tussocky matt — thistle, nettle, ragwort
Half-buried a broke plough gone to moss and mildew
Now wondering what this grassland is — a former meadow or pasture long since grazed, the ghost of a farmland sold off decades prior, the family hung on longer than most
Mosaic ecologies becoming bramble, scrub and tree
Rough stuff that wears down wildflowers
I read about how populations of oak stag beetle are declining globally due to the loss and fragmentation of their habitat
I lay back on the grass and indulge my pareidolia in the clouds
Daydreaming about leaving the city
Clouds as forests, as lakes, as mountains
Layering straw where frequent passage gutters the garden. Golden strands soaking up the splashy, muxy mire. Probing the morning's clammy mists. Visibility reduced to a metre or two as the melt-water humidifies. Every step a threshold.
When I arrive it's hours coasting on roads emptied of traffic
Norwegian spruce flanks interrupted by villages with postcard houses, farmsteads with bell crowned barns, falu red paint with white frames
The treeline giving ground to fields of sheep penned by zigzag roundpole fences, built from saplings, tied with peels of bark tightening as they dry
Buzzards perching atop the tallest posts
Almost too cold for my attic desk
The attic with its uninsulated roof and chilly floorboards
My catch-cold October chamber
Can hear downstairs R____ scraping oats from breakfast pan, crackle of kitchen fire, pump refilling with water from the well
While upstairs I'm wrapping woollen blanket over woollen jumper, pantomiming the asceticism of monastic scholars
St. Guthlac in his Crowland Abbey
His hermitage in a fen of immense size with immense marshes, black pools of water, foul running streams, and also many islands, and reeds, and hillocks, and thickets, and with manifold windings wide and long
And far far older than this two-hundred-year-old cottage
R____ shouting, “I'm making second coffee. Do you want second coffee?” and me hunching down the stairs into the warmth, into the smell of saucepan coffee brewing atop cast iron stove
I keep a checklist of documents
Passport / Personal Number / Bank ID / National ID / EU Residence Permit
I notice frequent holey imagery appearing in my writing
Holey as in foraminous, perforated, full of gaps or breaches
Nothing pertaining to the Divine
I self-diagnose, plugging my hypochondriac symptoms into the WebMD clone hosted by migrationsverket.se
I swipe down my homescreen then back up and back down again, colour shifted to monochrome through the accessibility settings, dim glow sponged up by the submarine darkness of the mountain on a moonless night
Heavy cloud and I'm sweating through an old t-shirt marbled black and grey, tucked too hot in two duvets, wool blanket
Cloistered in body contact
I press my nose against R____'s spine, my left hand finding her left hand beneath the covers
I fall asleep thinking about white sheets stained yellow with oils and skin cells and the hours I'll spend hand-washing them in buckets of steaming water
Text message results ping me awake to confirm my suspicions — I am suffering from a disease of chronic disappearances — lived in cracks
Some part of me fights to stay aware of a life before Sofie's Mountain
In journals I try to describe the feeling of two selves parting as sediment layers in a soil test do, the settling of indistinct dirt brown acquiring character, the gradations appearing first as bands of light, dark
Coarse, fineLike tea leaves, like geomancy
All lived material with no metaphor or meaning
Awake to a deep root world of dark beautiful bogs like peat. You breathe in spores. You are a fragile husk of petrified bark. You are tree sap and fungi and sunlight succulent through your tender flesh glows. You are slowed vestigial, reduced to spines. Your stomata transpire to the dawn coo of chorus.
Daily routine — brewing 06:30 pot of coffee — reading over yesterday's notes — searching for another inspired synonym for mud
I pull a chair close to the wood-stove and kick my feet up on a box of kindling, the stone foundations shivering cold beneath the floorboards
A cold that penetrates several pairs of socks
Several pairs of socks strategically layered, heel to toe, so that none of the holes line up
Opened on my lap the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English — an ex-library tome with one-thousand-eight-hundred semi-transluscent pages leafed like those little bibles you used to find unloved in hotel dressers
(I'm sure I've never actually seen one of those little bibles you used to find unloved in hotel dressers — only the false memory from American TV movies)
Thumbing through the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English I'm reminded that language can work like a spell
A spelling (1644)
See also: conjuration (1398), incantation (1412), fascination (1626)
Two thumbs later I've unearthed new words for marsh and mire and mud
Enough to cover all four corners
From the bedroom I hear R_____ hitting snooze, yawning once, rolling back below the covers — a rare morning sleeping in
I practice intoning my new words as ceremony while the wood-stove boils water
Under-lair (1340)
Gog-mire (1583)
Quake-ooze (1898)
Pitch-plain (2024, my own conjunction)Because every intentional act is a magical act
Minus-twenty-degree drifts burying the front steps. In calf-deep digging out the barn and woodshed. The snow easy to shovel, fine and loose like the wash of sandy beaches. Ungloved fingertips numb on right hand clasping phone. Shooting 160fps videos of whiteout mists off rust flecked roofs.
Down to underwear we give the bedroom a chance, suffering the viscous humidity of an attic conversion in a London housing stock
Draughty rooms somehow mouldering year around
After half an hour we're voiding an over-cautious contract and making our escape through a hallway window, climbing onto the flat extension of Z____'s partitioned townhouse
We take turns flicking lit matches off the roof and counting the seconds before they blink out, picturing a rural night sky dark enough to watch trailing rock and dust ignite in the atmosphere
Kids shoot a grime video in the stairwell of a newbuild up the street, our neighbour sits in the gutter playing guitar
He croaks folk songs in familiar Brazilian Portuguese and we decide he misses some part of something he used to call home
I have the not-entirely-unpleasant sense memory of melted tarmac fumes
Me and Z____ talk until late but I can't remember a single thing we talk about, and looking back I can only imagine the things we might have talked about, because the whole point of memory is the forgetting
In a photograph I find on a usb stick our faces are obscured by digital artefacts, conjured by a phone camera struggling in low-light
I remember that, "technology has made us all ghosts"
The night curls up around us like a ribbon, the roof floating on updrafts, on steam
Storm winds bringing the mountain to a deafening broil. The forest bending and breaking. Dead wood stripped, old and weak trees uprooted. Roaring through the evergreen canopy.
Buried beneath. You are the old house smell saturating floorboards. The unscrubbable blackening spreading through beams. A jangle of loose teeth and finger bones wedged out of sight in timber folds.