THE WEATHER MAN

MERVYN LINFORD

THE LITTORAL PRESS

First Published 2005

The Littoral Press

38 Barringtons, 10 Sutton Rd.

Southend-on-Sea, Essex SS2 5NA

United Kingdom

The right of Mervyn Linford to be identified as Author of this book has been asserted by him under The Copyright Designs and Patents act 1988

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data:
A catalogue record of this book is available from

The British Library

ISBN 978-0-954184-48-3 (Print)

ISBN 978-0-957660-81-6 (eBook)

No part of this book may be reproduced Or utilized in any form without prior permission
In writing from the publisher

eBook conversion by Vivlia Limited

CONTENTS

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

‘With all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and the sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean - in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written - with these I prayed, as if they were the keys of an instrument, of an organ, with which I swelled forth the notes of my soul, redoubling my own voice by their power.’

Time has never existed, and never will; it is a purely artificial arrangement. It is eternity now, it always was eternity, and always will be. By no possible means could I get into time if I tried. I am in eternity now and must there remain. Haste not, be at rest, this Now is eternity.’

Two quotes from ‘The Story of my Heart’ an autobiography - Richard Jefferies - 1848-1887.

‘Were we led all that way for Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly, we had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different; this Birth was hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.’

Journey of the Magi - T S Eliot - 1888-1965

JANUARY

Contrast

The contrast of the blackbirds in the snow

Is something that composes in the mind

An icy thought. Of people long ago

Through fields of white - who trudge the bitter edge

Of all they know and feel the bite of hunger -

Far from home. The hunters through the hedgerows

And the heath - who pray to gods unnumbered

In the cold - to warm their flesh. What pledges

Can the deities still keep - when under

Frost’s dominion they patrol the moment

That is ghosted on their breath? The thought’s defined

At last. Blackbirds in the branches strike a pose -

Reminding us through windows in the sun

That winter - comes between us - like a wedge.

He remembered the snows of his youth. How he stood by the landing window watching the veils of amorphous whiteness sifting in silence past the amber street-lamps. He wondered about his parents, how they didn’t understand his fascination and mocked him for his obsession with the weather. It was January, the month of the doubleheaded God, the deity that looked both ways. Was this birth or was it death? He didn’t see the past as in the past, nor the future yet to come. In eternity time was nothing. The blink of the eye of a God covered more than he knew of history, was longer than from Alpha to Omega. He knew that time was timeless. Everything that happened, happened now. All was simultaneous. It was dawn by the River Chelmer, by Ulting church. The snow was crisp underfoot and the willow’s slender branches were locked and leafless in the river’s crystal. He could smell the frost. His living breath, cool and condensing in the still, cold air, hung like an apparition. Everything was ghosted. Trees were wreathed in mist. Gold and blue glittered in the rising sun, but as yet, death was the answer to each frozen question. In the silence he remembered the roses, the wild roses of June, real in the summer of his gilded mind. Truth was his imagination. Earth, air, fire and water; the cycles of the seasons, the cycles of our lives, the correspondences. Truth and beauty, they were fixed, eternal, every moment held all moments. But what were moments? Moments inferred time, sequence. No, everything was cyclic, not linear. The coiled snake devouring its own tail. Curved space, infinite yet somehow bounded. He thought of the galaxies, billions of them, drifting apart on the skin of some intangible balloon, expanding into nothing, into nowhere. He knew that it had happened before, but before did not exist, no more than after. Expansion and contraction. Entropy and organisation. Heat death and the rekindling breath of God. The snowdrops caught his eye. They seemed to him to be the expression of a thought. Energy and matter, two sides of the same universal coin. Each the alter image of the other. The white heads hung in the soundless air. What were they made of? Atoms, and far, far more. The closer you look the smaller the particles. Smaller and smaller, infinitely regressing. What is a wave? What is Energy? He knew that all was thought, intelligence. ‘As above, so below’. ‘What you see you are’. Everything, the individuation of a thought, himself, the snowdrops, ideas in the mind of God. God’s desire to experience the material world, to come to the knowledge of his own divinity. The snowdrops seemed like bells, cast in purity, ringing the changes of a bitter month. Across the frozen fields lapwings flashed like semaphore. Meanings, a code, something to decipher. Plovers, from the Latin pluvia, rain. Rain would be welcome now, now when the ground has a solid heart, when water is brittle, and fish know a torpor that is close to non-existence.

Epiphany. Christ appears to the Gentiles. Gold, frankincense and myrrh. Wise Men and a Star. Portents and possibilities. Literal or symbolic? He didn’t mind. He was a Christian, an Anglican, went to church regularly and partook of the sacraments. Sometimes he was a Gnostic, saw the snowdrops as manifest, the moon as Sophia, the sunlight’s icy glitter in the dawn as nothing more or less than love’s rebirth. And yet, he believed in the Wise Men, the Child and the Virgin Mother. Literally. No room in the inn. Love is like that. The pain of childbirth. The joy of new life. All is duality on earth, there is no pleasure without pain, no God without the Devil. He knew that life was a test, a conundrum, a journey. The Wise Men knew all there was to know about travel. Like the star they’d come hard miles from the east, travelled above the snowline, thirsted and hungered. They knew that revelation was a struggle, that nothing comes to those who do not labour. The snow was falling fast. Between him and the window was the tree. He started to remove the decorations. Baubles and lights, fripperies and tinsel. Outside a fox was barking. He thought of the depth and density of night, of winter’s heartless grip, the darkness and the diamond weight of frost. He put a carol on the CD player. Good King Wenceslas. Hope amidst severity. Warmth in the bitter precincts of Boreas. The festival was over. Spring a distant dream and the worst cold to come. What was the difference, Saturnalia, Christmas? Topsy turvy or boy bishops? Light in the darkness is something we all need. Ancient Rome or modern London, it’s all the same, feelings never alter. He thought of his faith and what the priest would think if he discovered his Pagan sympathies. The evergreen made sense to him. The holly. The thorns and berries commandeered for Christ. Blood and a token crown. He believed in the imagery but knew that it went far deeper. Father Christmas had a prelapsarian lineage. The Old Man of the greenwood. Wild and free with his bounty of ivy and mistletoe. A memory of sacred kings, of blood and sacrifice. Herod was not the first to stain his hands. Blood is our history, death our raison d’etre. The snow had stopped falling. He walked out into the garden and looked up at the living stars. Orion stepped out across the frosty sky. The eternal hunter with darkness as his quarry. He knew that the moon was a Goddess. Rock is the rational mind. Orbits and tides an illusion. He spoke to her gently. She was the giver of poems. Whenever he wrote he felt her presence. Her icy inspiration thawed his mind. He didn’t write the weather, it wrote him. He was an expression of the snow. A manifestation of crystal, individual, and yet whole. He was ready for bed. His bones ached with the cold, his eyes were tired and heavy, and his frosted breath had turned his beard to ice. The artistry of winter etched his windows. The tracery of zero bleared the panes as he closed the curtains; shut out the moon, the reveries of starlight. Dream or reality, who’s to know? Now for the little death that we call sleep. He drifted deep, deep to the frozen halls of the non-living. The Ice Queen held out her arms. Beckoned him to touch her heart’s frigidity, to know the sensuality of death. But he wasn’t dead. Cold, but not dead. Rime enveloped everything. Grass was thickly furred. Mist amongst the naked branches froze into spicules made of glints and glitters. Was he awake or asleep? Alive or dead? He could hear his breath rising and falling in the hoary night. Was it yesterday or tomorrow? No, it was now, always now. Now with the starlight arcing across his synapses. Now with the subtle whispers of the Gods telling the stories that were never told. Zero was absolute, but the heat death couldn’t conquer. He turned in his bed like an ox being roasted on a spit and his cold subconscious flickered and drifted into warm oblivion.

The snow had melted and the wind assumed a southerly direction. By Mucking Church, by the south wall bordering the graveyard, a single daffodil had opened in the sun. Alone among the snowdrops and the aconites without a bee to pollinate its fanfare. He’d never seen a daffodil so early. Could not believe it to be meaningless. Knew that it was a portent or an omen. He must write about this new life, this message from the stars. Why was it here? Why was he here? It was Gabriel’s Horn, receiver and transmitter of the Gods. A Lent Lily, so soon. Why now? Why in the midst of death this resurrection? He wandered further on, under the leafless trees, and out into the vistas of water and phragmites. The sun and breezes shattered the sacred glass. Blond reeds whispered their winter words and gnats convolved in spirals made of air. What could he say? What could he dare on such a day as this? White puffs of cloud powdered the sky’s blue countenance and a deluded lark lifted the intermittence of a song. ‘All’s right with the world’. He thought. Boreas no longer wears his ermine. He is robed in his warm aurora, dormant and distant in some Polar dream. His mind’s screen was haunted by the wings of swallows. Chiff-chaffs sang in his open ears, and time was compressed by the thoughts of swifts and nightingales. Winter was another dream, another time, or timeless. He could see his face in the water, doubled and distant like a look remembered. Who was he? Was he the wings of swallows? Migration or transmigration? A golden rudd lifted from the depths, levitated an instant in mid-air, then smashed the moment’s mirror. Concentric rings radiated outwards, each gold circumference widening to infinity. This was the stars. This was the sun. This was the way the Word had its transmission. Waves that interlink as they expand and then contract in infinite pulsations. He could hear the daffodil. Not a sound exactly, not a voice, more like an intuition. An imagined bee was its vocal chords. Communication an insect. God’s own mind spoken from inside a flower. ‘Intimations of immortality’ carried on incredulous wings. A velvet angel humming its Annunciation. He was alone like the daffodil, out of season, out of place. But his mind was a honeycomb. The bee at the centre, sweetness and procreation, pollen and seed, flowers everlasting. He walked back to the car, got in, and took out his notebook. Every detail must be entered, every nuance. His life depended on it; meaning must be wrested from the seemingly chaotic. ‘Mysterious ways’ indeed. God had spoken through a flower. Why him? Why now? It’s that word again. Now. Snowdrops, daffodils, roses. Purity, gold and the Virgin herself. The Mystical Rose, the fragrance of the soul. He drove home in a daze. Everything was done automatically. He’d been a driver for more than forty years but now he couldn’t remember where he’d been or where exactly he was going. He remembered nothing of the journey and yet arrived home safely. He put the car into the garage, went into the lounge, sat in front of the word-processor, took out his notebook and began to write.

Snow was falling again. Winter had returned. His poem was written but was somehow meaningless. Spring had been overcome. Eight inches of even snow had fallen overnight and was still falling. The garden pond was frozen solid and tits and finches fluttered and scurried for nuts and bacon-rind. The King of the North was back. Winter was ineluctable. Would not release its grip. How can hope become so hopeless? One day, twenty four hours, enough to choke the aconite with ice, enough to freeze the purpose of the sun. Is this living? Will the badger survive, the fox, the hedgehog? Will I survive, he thought? Writing is not survival, words on a page, sequences, moments recorded. It is dead as soon as it is written. Relics for future generations. Myths, memories, memento mori, curiosities only. Why would the living bother with his words? Just ink and paper. Hints of God, no more. But we never die, we’re never born. The snow across the lawn was like an unwritten page. What else could he do? Books were all he had, all he knew. ‘All poetry is fiction’, or so he’d heard. ‘But enjoy the fiction, live the fiction, and who knows you may have a revelation from nature and learn something about the supreme fiction’. Is that God’s story, he thought? Is everything a story? No, stories have beginnings, middles and endings. Eternity can’t be written only felt. His words began to crystallise. His inner field was in contact with the outer. He and the weather were one. A blackbird settled on the pear tree, dislodging lumps of snow. He revelled in the contrast. For him the world had always been a grey area, but now there was definition, everything was black and white, hard edged and concise. He stopped writing and went out into the garden. It was snowing so heavily that separate flakes were barely distinguishable. But it didn’t seem to matter. His blood was cold and every corpuscle six-sided. His skin was white, whiter than a lily. He took off his clothes, stood naked in the middle of the lawn, and watched as the snowflakes melted on his body. This was chastity. A pure and virginal whiteness. His body was not Eros it was Agape. Lust was purely temporal. This was Love, Love of the highest order. A robin started to sing. Sad and melancholy perhaps, but to him it was ‘a melancholy joy’. The robin sings all year, a bird for all seasons. Here in the cold, in the ice, naked as the day that he was born, he listened to the voice of the eternal. Spring or summer, autumn or winter, what did it matter? The song is always warm, the spheres of light commensurate with music. He started to turn blue and his flesh began to sting. It didn’t last. Soon he was numb. His thoughts and the thoughts of snow became a unity. The silence and the snow-vaulted cathedrals of the trees, all conspired to increase his sense of sanctity. If this was death, then it was the death that he had longed for. The sun appeared momentarily through a rift in the clouds and a white dove feathered the air with its thawing pinions. Was this a vision or reality? Truth or a gilded dream? He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He turned from his tomb of ice and walked back into the house. The clock was ticking, but he didn’t hear it. The month was nearing its end. But what month was it? Who decided on months anyway? Why should we turn the timeless into time? Without a thought the robin knows the answer. The snow is aware of summer’s latent showers. His body was starting to sting again and he began to shiver. He looked in the mirror and saw a daffodil, a bee with angel’s wings, a rose and a nightingale. Life was a strange affair. There was more to the world than appearances. A brittle tear fell from his frozen cheek, and a deep, chill sigh, bloomed on the air-waves like the flush of petals.

FEBRUARY

Lost

The woods are dead. Above - the branches etch

A cloudy sky. Below - the mould is mixed

With winter rain. Each root is like a ketch

Beneath its mast - where tattered sails are shaken

By the wind and single leaves are pennants

In the blast. A squirrel leaves its wake

Among the twigs - as like a wave it wends

Across the air - then comes to rest. We take

Our bearings deep within the glade and send

Our subtle Morse between the trees. A sketch

Is all we ask - a mental chart - a fix.

We need to save our souls beneath this fetch -

Where drowning thoughts are sifted through the brake

And aspiration - crippled by the bends.