Mâesgeir - Dark Mountain

Monday
This morning, sculling in Acairseid Mhòr. Following the gigantic rusting chain on the glowing, blue-green bed of the harbour, half covered with drifting sand, to find a row of old moorings which had lost their buoys and sunk. There’s also an abandoned ship-pier, with stone bollards coated in bladderwrack, and a whole system of quays, causeways and water-steps nearly invisible under mounds of glossy black seaware. Above them on the shore, the abandoned houses of a township, set at all angles.

But now, already tired after breakfast, dropping off. And waking drugged, hours later, in this place without electric light, with just time to walk for a couple more hours before it grows dark.

Before it grows dark!

Friday
Mopping the floors, rearranging the furniture I’ve found in deserted cottages. Bolting together the gas cooker I bought in Oban. Stoking up the wood-burner and struggling like an ant up the track with a furry coffee-coloured armchair I found in a barn.

Lighting the cooker at last, and making roast chips and garlic, partly to make the house smell of something other than mould.

The wind outside, barking like a dog.

The telephone down as usual, but ringing and tinkling to itself and when you pick up the heavy Bakelite receiver, making deep-sea donging sounds.

What else? The windows steamed up, and in the storm the house rumbling not like a train so much as a station.

The kitchen warming, slowly. Making cheese-on-toast under my new grill, to go with chips and tinned beans – the unclean scent of raw cheese turning a little more wholesome once scorched.

Monday
Before dawn – just the reflection of this room by candlelight in windows washed a navy blue, the colour of old knickers, almost indiscernible from black.

Last night, winding up the zig-zag cliff path from the harbour. Meaning to shock myself with a sudden vision of my whitewashed home – I live here! – and seeing, enormous, white, instead – the moon.

In Revelation the angel swears there’s no more time.

In Revelation the angel swears there’s no more time.

While Kafka, inspired by the futurist Marinetti to write about the new automobiles, felt impelled to describe a car crash.

Sunday
Walking in the night, and coming back home in the dawn, after the moon had set, feeling sick and trying to find a battery.

Four dead seals and one dying washed up at Schoolhouse Bay with bullet-holes in their faces.

The torch fading, the front door moaning in the wind like a friend, and upstairs something scary cantering round the bedroom. It looked like a boxy black Labrador, hissing then scooting out. An otter.

Through the windows in the dark, white horses going on and off like lights.

When day comes, reading The Gospels and a book about hunting basking sharks. At least we’ve still got Blake’s poem, even when/if there are no more tygers. At least we’ve got Melville’s Moby Dick. We can still read about hunting basking sharks, once the last one’s safely caught.

Now, a chased, silver-gilt sea, under a brown smoky sky alight with a golden smudge of sun. Far out, a ship, all sails set, which subsides like a fountain that has been switched off – it was a wave. The receding scatter of islands, the tiny silhouette of the monastery at Iona, and nothing but slow Atlantic swell all the way to Mexico.

How lucky we were, yet filled with fear.

It’s cold. The trees are dying, the wind never stops. Hardly any birds, given how many there were before. Although, outside the window as I write, a badly stuffed blackback gull, wings outstretched, dangling there as if from the ceiling of a fish-restaurant. Until, looking first left then right, it banks and shears away. How lucky we were, yet filled with fear. In those days famine happened to other people, elsewhere.

And yet we weren’t lucky, because we had this ahead, and knew it – we couldn’t live when we could live, because one day we wouldn’t be able to.

No space now for a good outcome. We’re all barging the queue for the showers. It will be: first there wasn’t enough food for everyone, then there wasn’t enough food for anyone. A time is coming when, if you want your kids to eat, you’ll have to take the food off other kids. Coming? It’s here, for some. Your food may as well be those children, your children. Swift’s A Modest Proposal, once so unsettling, has become mundane and unremarkable. He should have called it Common Sense. Or Cookery.

First catch your child.

Friday
Last night, the rain clattered on the roof, the trees – I couldn’t sleep. Thinking of the sandy harbour, its colour a kind of thick glaze over the point between yellow, green and blue, and so clear it could give you vertigo.

A maritime Walden!

If I used to live, I thought, at the end of the road, now I live at the end of the world. The end of the world. I got up and lit the very fire which I’m writing beside, building an artificial sun from flaring histories of hot, lost summers hoarded up by trees. When the rain stopped, the clouds slid away. Coming outside in the dark, ridiculous quantities of stars were glittering above the quiet sea. Orion, right by my front door, his penis dangling. And then the faintest sliver of a new moon emerging from the wilderness, and the blackout curve of the hills to the north. I’m seeing this and will have seen it, whatever happens now.

But! That feeling when you’ve broken the great big clock and set fire to the curtains, and poured boiling water on the baby, and killed not just your own dog but every single dog, and set a fuse under a universe, and your parents are not yet home. If the future is all there is, then what if there isn’t one? There’ll be nobody left to set alight. Nothing will have taken place, except perhaps happiness, and probably pain.

Tuesday
It’s morning. Writing on the floor beside the gently buzzing fire, with its dove-grey ashes and sun-coloured flames. Through the open windows, a dreaming day. The fields too green for the season and the fizzing sea stained with pools of greenish light from a sun that’s hidden in a solitary damp cloud.

Who wouldn’t want to come at the end of history. That’s a bit like being immortal, though still susceptible to agony.

Then a sea fret rolls in, making me wonder, will I ever see the sun again? A sudden chilled gloom – because everything’s gone dim and wrong. Like an eclipse, it just shouldn’t be.

God made nature and man made the city says Byron, quoting Cowper. But what did the devil make?

Now the sun’s escaped and burned off the fog and it skims the horizon in purplish-white, framed by crisp leaves vibrating in an invisible breeze. The sea a guiltless plain, rising to the edge of the sky. A few singed birds are zipping about. But there’s also a catch in reality itself – time silently hyperventilates. It’s not when I sank the other ships sailed on – but – when I sank, the other ships sank too, and the sea boiled.

IMAGE:

Ian Brooks
Twilight, Tristan da Cunha
Etching
Tristan da Cunha is the most remote inhabited island on Earth. An active volcanic island located in the middle of the South Atlantic, and home to fewer than 300 people. Isolated from other coastal environments, the submerged slopes of the island host a unique ecosystem, threatened by warming oceans and pollution.

Ian Brooks is a printmaker working with aquatint etching on copper plate. His work is rooted in close observation of the landscape, and aims to evoke the sense of place specific to a given location and point in time. He is also an academic scientist working on polar climate and ocean-atmosphere interactions.