Remnant 2

THE PAINTING AND THE SUNDIAL

You are in a painting in a book, an image from the past, a man, in burnt umber tunic and breeches, walking along a sandy beach in the direction of a walled city that rises from the beach and the marshes, in ramparts of stone, behind which fine houses are clustered. Cheek by jowl, they rise to the highest point of the island city, where a grand, square cathedral sits prominent as a head-dress on a bride above the castellated chimneys and the regular streets and gardens.

It is an idealised image, of course. As you will know.

The man is tiny in respect of the city rising above him and which seems to be his destination. Or perhaps he is making for the low, thatched cottage that sits snugly within the walls of its own garden field at the end of the bog road that leaves a gate in the city walls and runs to the beach where the imprint of the man's toughened, bare feet dry promptly on the hardened clay, this glorious June day, as you return from fishing.

For it is you. Oak and stone. Present at all times in the story; there, you carry a wattle or an ash plant, perhaps a pole you use to reach the net you place across the mouth of the Penny Burn to entice and secure the salmon and the sea trout that assemble there. You view the gulls who squawk when you arrive. They flounce away, then confidently return when they see your back recede in the direction of the walled enclosure they know as a source of scraps and thrown objects.

You are oak and stone and it is an oaken switch you carry. Strong and lean, cut from the ground as a sapling, trimmed tight by your blade, now smoothed and oiled by your hands and the fish grease you toil through. Yes, you are oak. Strong and supple. Pliable and firm.

Your tread is purposeful and singular. You are on the advance. There are matters to which you must attend.

There, off the bottom end of the painting, only seen through shifts of space and time, another man stands, on an unused jetty of steel and concrete, astride a sundial, testing June shadows, close by where gulls define abstract line drawings in the air in swoops, hovers, dive and landings. This man, in suede, not umber, checks a pulse on the side of his head and looks sternly at the river corrugating in front of him, where the Penny Burn syrups out to meet the great flow of the Foyle. He stands on the raised metal letters and configurations of the sundial, his own shadow cast obliquely across the timepiece. When he turns to face back towards the city, he sees the quays, the riverside walk, the buildings that press hard to the water's edge. He even sees you, always there, your dark umber tunic a tiny sail in the air, your oak switch aloft your right shoulder. You are wearing a hat, almost a bonnet, to bring focus as you stare through water into your nets, thrashing with river life and sustenance. To garner shade in the June light of an earlier time.

What do you hope for as you progress to the city? Will the city deliver your dreams? Or will it dash them?

Remnant 1

As ever oak or stone was sound

Paulina, A Winter's Tale, Act 2, Scene 3

William Shakespeare

Formed as a rivulet, merely a trickle before that, sprung from a cleft in mossy rocks, tumbling into life on the sky mountains, the river is an artery that flows its sap through the heart of the city it began and causes to grow.

This is a city between hills that are no more than elevated ground on either bank of the river. If you look closely along the river, as it creates its own course, you will find sparse and occasional stands of the great tree that has deep roots in the geography of the city. It has further, deeper roots in two -ologies it runs through: geology and mythology.

If you follow this story you will prepare yourself to sweep along with the river and its -ologies. The landmarks and the myths will be your beacons and your guides, your compasses, sat navs, maps, gps and grid references. You will swim, cycle, walk, rest, run, amble, bolt and pause. As you might in any city on a river, for Bosnians say Grad bez riek nie grad. A city without a river is not a city. And are you all not Bosnians, war-torn, ancient, groping into a future as a grilse breasts a great river, throwing off the salty tang of its birth, droplet by droplet?

You will journey with others, some of whom are not aware that they are on the same journey as you, because they are bounded by the limits of this book. But you, you have no such limits.

Your branches reach everywhere and your twigs sprout green in the spring. You drop sere, serrated leaves when cold, damp nights prevail.

You are oak. If you find a stand of such trees in the Autumn of a year, below your feet you will crunch acorns into the loamy mulch. This is good, provided your tread is not too firm, for the pressing of acorns into humus is the means by which growth is alerted to begin. The seed reservoir of the world – the pitted, hoary nut – is the fraught guarantee that new trees will be.

Your footing of the acorns into the loam is essential. As essential as holding and reading this book. It is your passage through these pages - are they not made from the fibres of trees? - that is the act of generation and growing.

You will know. You are toothless and young; rooted and rootless; reaching and fixed; sheltering and open; resolute and frail.

You are oak, indeed. 

And you are stone. 

Bedded to rock formed by pressures on muddy plains. Aeons of time and material founded an ancient, schist shelving that rose from earth masses that stretched out of an icy north, driven from the round pate of the world by relentless sheets of glaciers moving minutely and resolutely in millennia, then sheared and clashed in plates so tectonic the heavens bellowed with their grinding, leaving rolling hills and meandering river valleys always aching towards the sea, often faltering and bound, but always managing to reach the ocean, in an eye-pleasing topography, edged by gravel and sand pits, their moraine-leavings, the ground from which you formed the mortar of your life. 

You are schist. Laced with mica and feldspar, quartz and hornblende, graphite, chlorite and talc.

You are stone.