Halloween, and the day cures into night like the flesh of a pumpkin. The sky is watery as the sun sinks, with a hint of weak blue-green. It mellows through cream into a light yellow which deepens through a committee of oranges to a deep umber bruise where the sun has fallen. The fens fade into blue mist, in the way that the wax of pumpkin skin clouds when you cut it, putting the radiance of the background colour behind a cataract.
This small Colorado town growls with fair-goers, rodeo air-pumpers, monster-truck connoisseurs and foot-long hot-dog wielders dripping mustard onto the hot street as they stream by. My motel is the faded supporting star of a hundred Hollywood movies. Bruce Willis sits and broods in one of the cells. The ghost of Janet Leigh haunts my shower. Men haunt the bodies of the children and hang over the railings, sprinkling ash and acid taunts onto the cleaners below. The concrete landing smells of ammonia and worse. Javier Bardem stalks the swelter from the air-conditioning outlets of the exhausted rooms and taps them in the head, one by one, ching, ching, ching.
Someone in a suit is looking for someone called Louise.
I retreat into the corpse of a hotel room slowly rotting into folk history. The roof is concrete. The sink is chipped. The plugs totter in ancient sockets at odd, tilted angles. The carpet is full of tiny histories. The branded Kleenex tissue holder by the big mirror is worn so smooth by use that it gleams. The late summer Colorado light, low in the thin air, is trying to sweep the thick columns of motes into competing whirlpools. The metal grilled window cannot stop the light, nor the grime of the glass. It lies across the bed, tired and resigned but still the loveliest creature in the room. Where it lies, it turns the quilt to stained glass.
*
The glass is in the panels which glow marsala, maroon and petrol blue with great bossy flowers in faded creams and ochres. There are orchids and crysanthemums, pods of seeds and long, thin green leaves. There is a flower I don't recognise, long and oval split raggedly down the centre. There are holes torn at intervals depicting a crucifixion. A blood sacrifice is revealed in one corner. The surface is scratched and torn and pulled in a hundred places. From a distance it is a window depicting the desert. A faux predator of some kind curls, perhaps a fox. There is a chase, perhaps, in a dry river-bed of ochre and blood red where some small creature of meagre means is persued. There are channels of blue in long lines here and there. The centre bar dividing the two panes of glass is barbed with shadow-thorns or the silhouettes of barbed wire. The flowers make no coherent pattern, as though they lie where they have fallen from a hundred dissappointments. Where the quilt lies naked it spills white and discoloured through the wounds.
There is a pristine bible in the bedside drawer, dated 1985.
*
It strikes me that this room is no faded Hollywood starlet. No, it's the starlet who never made it. Hollywood casts these rooms because Americans know them. They have lain down in these rooms and dreamed of escape, fulfillment, a life and in return had a reprise, a half granted and broken wish. These are the rooms where Death always finds you. His presence is in every stain, every picked at hole in the wallpaper, every chip in the sink, every stain in the bathtub, every cigarette scald in the ancient veneer of the fittings. He works these rooms with promises and grinds dreams like a sandstorm. No this stained glass window to culture depicts a crime scene. It's the aftermath of the bloody execution of a million American dreams.
marsala, motel, stained glass | in Babylon, USofA
In the last two weeks the field has gone from pale embers of amber in the evening sun to parchment,;)
dry and off white. Bleached and dessicated by the constant breeze and the inconstant sun, the sheaves chatter in the breeze like the crowd of a rock concert waiting for the main event.
Among the wheat the occasional poppy glows like a drop of blood. It's easy to look at these perfect flat fields with their rich payloads of grain
and think that it has always been so peaceful. But these fields are hard won. They have been husbanded from the fens. They have been raised on shallow islands carved as much by the waves of militant men as by the ancient fen waters. This is the fen-edge, where a lonely outpost of high ground touches the ancient wetlands. These grounds have been loot, precious as rubies. Our ancestors have died here, as surely as they breathed and sowed. The poppies here, as everywhere in our culture, are memorials.
As I look deeper, I'm shocked at the number of poppies among the oats. There are thousands of seedheads; ghosts among the peaceful crops, waiting for their own reapers who crawl into the fields, as night falls, headlamps ablaze.
There is no sign of night falling in the Night Planted Orchard tonight. The sun is warm although it's late and the air is still thick from the long torrid day. Hoverflies sit in the gellid air like fat fish floating in a stream of hot water. The heavy seed heads of grasses nod in the wind like the heads of lolling dogs. Butterflies flop exhausted from drooping flower to drooping flower. Long streaks of sunlight make buttery stripes across the grass. The new fruit on the boughs hang like great drops of green liquid dripping from a sodden wall. I hear the thud of a hot labrador dropping into the grass but I know that he is a ghost. Mrs Snoutingdingle has taken the dog on a tour of distant friends and relatives because, recovering as he is, he has become listless and housebound.
Like the missing arm of the half-rotten chair that I'm sitting in, I miss them.
The Night Planted Orchard is about colour but as the name might suggest, it's also about the loss of light: the waxing and waning of colour through the year, or the spectrum of colour that we can and cannot see, or even the inner blindness that afflicts us. In the last few years I've become long sighted. At times it annoys me half to death, but then I remember where I am on that spectrum and feel ashamed.
Most humans only have three light types of colour sensor in their eyes. A tiny proportion can see a second range of red colours. Many animals can see fewer colours than us. Cats and dogs have a far richer sense of smell than sight and when a dig sits and seems to stare at a view, as mine often does, it is actually sensing a scent landscape. If that seems strange, imagine having the eyes of a dragonfly. A dragonfly can see far more colours than humans in whole extra ranges and their sight includes the ability to sense the polarisation of light. What kind of vision would that enable?
But there are other darknesses too. I have an aunt and uncle who have both gone blind. My uncle showed me so much of the world, and he can't now see any of it. I remember my aunt's eyes, stern but with the kindest of twinkles and always penetrating. Eyes that could peer into me, now always searching. Another aunt has passed into that even stranger bewildered twilight of dementia where she cannot see us and, through cowardice or unbearable sorrow, we cannot see her either. She is gone now, and so is my blind uncle. Whether it was imaginary pirates through an old telescope or the vision if a steam train thundering past, or bonfires and fireworks, they taught me to see and their passing breaks my heart.
No. Having to find a pair of glasses to read is not blindness, not by a damned sight.
