Heartache and the Loss of Dog

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.

True blindness.

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.

Blind

A little while ago I posted about Tetrachromats. Last week I read an article about the vision of dragonflies who have over thirty opsins in their eyes. Imagine among other things being able to understand the polarisation of light as one of the thirty inputs to blend that makes up a colour in your mind's eye. I spent a sleepless night trying to imagine what that would mean to our perception of the world. For example prey above, on or below the surface of a sheet of water would appear as different tones. Perhaps range becomes a tone. The implications are truly mind boggling and I can only conclude that with such a range of colour inputs, a dragonfly does not simply see the world with its eyes, it feels it, like a textured landscape.Yesterday I heard that two relatives have had to sell their beloved house, a house which fills the memories of my childhood. The news was heartbreaking, partly because because they are both now completely blind. I suffered another sleepless night trying to imagine never being able to see again.

Cathedrals for our only mountains

I heard Jacques Brel's Le Plat Pays and even through the filter of my terrible French it seemed to resonate with the Fenland landscape. Or perhaps it was my terrible French distorting what Brel wrote into something that I thought I'd heard: the half understood words blending into the landscape, like the water and the land becoming mingled and lost in each other. In the last few days, the bitterest notes of winter have begun to rise again. The fens are now more often wet than crisp with frost and so the mornings are thick with mist. When there is early sun, it seems confused, peeking under the white sheets to see if the wetlands are awake. They will sleep a while yet and while they do, the ground dreams that it is the sky, and the sky dreams that it is the marsh, and the long frost has bowed the heads of even the last-standing reeds in sleep. 

The sky is frozen to the Earth

The sky and the Earth are bound together by mist, like thick ice on top of still water. The forlorn wind scours above in twists of snow in tiny hard bullets. Below, whichever creatures are still awake seek small comfort in the dark. All the world is falling into silence, like the still steely lips of a witch whispering a spell.