Perhaps the reason it was dark so long this morning was because of the rain. It’s been wet all week. Low cloud and mist and everything in the garden looks waterlogged. The hydrangea lost the last of its leaves before Christmas and is a mass of sticks and grotesque salmon-pink heads. Even the siskins and finches on the feeder look damp. I can’t get my washing out and so there are two clothes horses mobbing the fire in the living room – trouser legs, tights, and towels obscuring my view of the flames. But I can hear the wind stirring the ashes, and the logs cracking, and occasionally the steel casing of the wood burner tick, not unlike a clock.
I have been washing clothes all week, and because I worry about having mildew in the old part of the house, I’m reluctant to remove the clean laundry to the bedroom, and have instead been folding it into piles and sitting it in the vicinity of the stove until it is as dry as tinder; there are piles on both armchairs and on the lamp table, so that the far side of the room has been taken over, commandeered, for purposes other than sitting and living, and this serves, even when I can’t see out a window, as a constant reminder of the rain. Frustratingly, I can’t take comfort in the fire because of the garments draped on the horses, but if I look at the armchair nearest the hearth, and at what remains, between piles of folded clothes, of the surface of the lamp table, I can see there reflected, on velvet and polished wood, flashes from the flames.
Wet outside, so that the ground can’t take a breath but drown! And in here, a dryness that chafes the lungs, but I prefer that, would prefer the sounds of crepitus to gurgling and choking on mud. It is better to draw the blinds and not look out there at all. That muddy patch of grass, the roots of the sycamore clogged in its own slick rot, the bloated branches in the hedge. But in here, so many items of clothing, turned inside out, the linings of the pockets wilted, and not enough light at the window, the sun – assuming there is one – diffused through bands of cloud so dense the sky is merely white, its gleam off the jigsaw pieces rendering the puzzle unworkable.
I could listen to my podcast, the philosophy one, with Jonathan and James – which one is the critic and which the professor, or is one the both, and then what is the other? The ownership of the voices blurred by similarities in class and station, but one slower and softer, belonging to the elder of the two, I suspect. I picture wise blue eyes. It was this guy – I don’t think he’d mind the indefinite allusion, or find it crude; he isn’t judgey; he has the great capacity for tolerance that the truly intellectual always have – it was he, who on the last episode was talking about concert pianists possessing a quality, an attitude perhaps, in regard to their calling that is akin to faith. He was saying something about them not getting up there for the applause, that isn’t why they do it, and that probably they would do it anyway, even if there was no audience, because their faith compels them, and when finally, after ninety minutes, the piece concludes, it is its own fulfilment. Or it was something like that at any rate. They sit up there, and they adjust their clothing, the suit jacket, the dress, and stare at the keys, foot ready on the pedal, as silence descends, and have faith that the entire concerto can be rustled up out of nowhere, that they can bring it alive in all its perfection, sweeping what was blank air out of its path, replacing it, second by second, with each right note.
I squeeze between the laden clothes horses to tend the fire, and as always when I open the door of the wood burner and assess the embers and the burnt and unburnt sides of the logs, I hear my father-in-law’s voice in my head – the perfecter of fires – telling me to put another shovel of ovoids on there and not to let the thing go out.
Perhaps it is the pianist’s faith I’ve been missing these last years – the confidence that something can be rustled up, that it will elegantly find its form and space, something that can inhabit.
The vents opened, wind thrums inside the casing – caught.
Some of this washing – the jeans and towels – has been two days at the stove and rigor mortis has set in but still something stops me from removing it from the horse, as though I can’t trust my fingertips. But it is a choice I make, this sitting here, swamped, the t-shirts and jumpers thatching the illusion of dank undergrowth, souring the space. Damp and dark, pervading the bones and the unopened notebooks on my desk.
Can faith be returned once it is lost? It seems to me that the only route back (forward?) requires the doubt to be quelled. The negativity that swamps the thing must be willed away, turned on its head, the opposite embraced. And yet this feels to me, the doubter, like a doctor telling an insomniac that if they let go of the belief that sleep won’t come, it will come. Breathe deeply, count backwards, empty your mind. But if these stratagems succeed does it mean that the insomniac wasn’t a true insomniac?
I must have faith that the clouds will clear and the ground dry up. I must at least believe in the possibility. The podcast has tweaked a vent, and the embers stir.
Open the vent wider, don’t let the thing go out!
Laura Macqueen Morgan 