The Grassling

by Elizabeth-jane Burnett

  34

  Xylotomy

  ‘Does it have a name, this book?’ my father asks.

  ‘Not yet,’ I say. He frowns. ‘Something to do with soil. Perhaps, A Dictionary of the Soil.’ He frowns. ‘No good?’ He shrugs.

  ‘Ask the blackbird.’ A neighbourly blackbird is perched on the windowsill, looking in.

  While xylology refers to the study of wood, xylotomy denotes the preparation of wood for study beneath a microscope. I feel cut open. That each page is fleshy and can’t bear to be touched. Sunlight spills over the table beneath the window, leaving patches on the carpet. I follow the shallow pools: the black flight above, the white light below; the feeling of fast water rising. I hate to talk about the book before it is written. And to speak of it as a detached thing, that can be labelled, when it is a part of me, and of him – that makes the light curdle in my gut, sending chunks frothing along the throat until I cannot speak.

  It is not his question I shirk from but those from outside the window, from outside the fields, outside of the space between us. Those that want to know what it is I am doing, where I am spending my time, what I am writing and why. I think again of William of Camden, that early topographer, answering, perhaps, only to the Society of Antiquaries, where he would meet with other influential topographers of the period – John Stow, Sir John Doddridge, Richard Carew – in Sir Robert Cotton’s home, to share supper and discuss a scholarly paper. Where is the Society of Soil, Mourning and Metamorphosis, I wonder, where people who wander around fields slowly turning into something they don’t recognize gather for lunch and read transcriptions of soil song?

  Mark Brayshay says that Camden’s work as a teacher enabled him to travel and work on his Britannia during vacations.1 I wonder how much he would get done if he was in this profession these days. I wonder if the light slipped along his neck like a tide rising. Perhaps it did. Perhaps it is inevitable, the beam that tracks you through the water. So invasive is the light that probes, that it is a wonder I do not choke and fall, here on the floorboards, or out on the street, to be gathered up by neighbours, asking what’s wrong, and me saying I don’t want to talk about the book, when I mean of course, I want him to heal and nothing more.

  It begins to lose its value. It can feel like work to him too now, I know, at times. What was a welcome reaching to a shared place can now be the worry that he won’t always be able to get there, or his fear that I’m spending too long in this place. And I start to fear it too. That it is taking too much from me, from us. That when the light recedes I will be stranded, a fish on the shore as the wildly lit waves crash into some other body; and what, after all, will be left? I leap and convulse at the barrenness. A shore without a sea. I look from the pool on the floor, across to him and back to me, standing still in the wrack, and throw my head back.

  ‘TrilllalalickwrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrTrilllillaliiiiirrwrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrwurrwurrtrickalickalick!’ The blackbird starts, hops back a little, before flying off. And as we laugh, the sun trickles over us, the last of its evening light; not choking but stroking, as he is suddenly serious again.

  ‘Well, but if it doesn’t have a name, how should I think of it?’

  ‘Think of it to do with soil. Think of it to do with Ide. Think of it to do with your work, your history, the family, and the fields.’ He nods. It is enough. We are coming to understand each other.

  35

  Elk-sedge

  As I move through the grass with her, it is strange to be talking to someone other than the land, or those living inside it. Blackthorn bursts in the Drewshill hedges as Rebecca, an artist, sketches. She talks about Cézanne. ‘He was also interested in the depth of things, the extension beneath the ground,’ she says. ‘Are you concerned with the sky?’ It’s a startling question, and with the shamefacedness of someone realizing they’ve only been looking at half the picture, I reply that I am not. It’s the ground level and deeper, beyond that, I say. Rebecca nods, as though this is a satisfactory answer, though I feel that it is not. After some time spent silently with the grass, I start making exploratory moves with my fingertips. I press into the earth, slowly increasing the pressure. Is anyone in? Deeper fingers, then palms, rocking, kneading the ground. I take my socks off and the wet, soft grass – dandelion and clover – is delicious. I go through the same motions with my feet: first the toes, then the balls, then the rocking back and forth. This is the start, the sounding out, the seeing if the other is open to conversation.

  ‘I’m about to roll,’ I announce to Rebecca, who nods, securing our cameras. But the ground is full of water and I’m already starting to shiver, just from the contact of hands and feet. ‘I’ll wait for that cloud to pass,’ I pronounce, as though it’s of vital importance to the project, that I’m awaiting the perfect alignment of celestial and earthly bodies, but it is really just the small, all-too human need for warmth. As I hover between stillness and movement, nestling into wet grass, sedge, purple dead nettles, I hear the elk-sedge: a rune, depicting an ‘x’ sound in the Old English Rune Poem. Its flowering body calls from the ground,1 in amongst the grass it chinks and chimes, whispering its wetness. The light and water held on the grass-tips reminds me of my blade of grass, and home. Before I spin, I feel afraid of the wetness, of being out of control; of falling and not being able to stop. I feel fear of becoming field, of being swept into its contours. And what will I be when I roll over? A plough? That flattens the earth in order to mine it. But I won’t take from it – only words. I won’t penetrate – only soften. I let go.

  Rebecca makes swift movements, dabbing and scratching the surface of the paper. And depth seems important to the paper too, to our movements over the recording material. I turn and turn into wetness. The plunge of it. The thud on the spine and the speed of it. Weightless. Unable to stop. Plummeting, grass on face, in ears, in throat. The hit of the spine. Were it not for that, I could go on forever. It is hard to stop. At the end I lie prostrate, face down, arms straight out in front. I must flatten in order to stop. Lying there, stretched and wet, I wonder if any of my ancestors lowered in this spot, this Druid’s Hill, kneeling to this earth, in prayer. And I think of my father as I lie there: all body, all slippage. In the tissue of the land and skin and bone and sky, I think of him, across the fields. He is still here, I think, and I rise.

  As I warm up from the wetness, things with wings visit. As if they see me more as one of them now, as a part of the field, or a type of tall grass. A cricket sits on the bottom of my jeans; a black beetle on my hand. A peacock butterfly brushes over my arm for the lightest of seconds. My arms glow. I start to think of my actions as a sort of poem:

  FIELD SWIMMING

  FIELD BATHING

  FIELD STROKING

  And just as with the water, I want to get back in. But I must be gentler on the spine that is already carrying an injury. So this time I roll sideways, a horizontal, rather than vertical turn. Arms and legs stretched, as long as I get, I come to the top of the hill and tip. At the start, the eye is a camera. Blades of grass in the foreground, landscape correcting itself in the back, to form a picture. I try to keep my eyes open, though they keep wanting to close. I want to record everything. Be fully in the moment, yet also to store it. I let go. The same phrase from my earlier action. What is it that I am letting go, when I fling or slip along a landscape? The responsibility of standing up? It is a casual disappearance, this exit from gravity. An absence that can be readily achieved, that I can fit into dailyness.

  As I move, I find I am rotating into the direction of the hedge, instead of straight down the hill. Once more, it is difficult to stop. I pause on all fours and wait for the world to stop spinning, and when it seems to, jump up. But no sooner am I standing than I plummet three, four, five steps down again. The hill is still in me – its incline, its roll. Finally, I come back up and try again. I will myself to remain in a straight line but this requires so much tension in the body that I give up and allow myself to r
oll where I want to – back towards the hedge. My angle is taking me parallel to the church below, in the valley. I wonder about the possibility of some sort of spiritual ley line.

  And here, in land, the body regulates your possibilities, just as in the sea. When the coldness of the water dictates the duration of the movement, here it is the coldness of the wetness of the grass. And if you lived beyond that? In the soil? Are you still subject to the body’s limits? I wonder about the temperature of the soil, and how the worms weather it. In cold spells, they burrow down more deeply. They can even freeze entirely, then be thawed back to life. I think about the tiny resurrections that may be taking place under me, in the warming soil.

  A fly moves along a blade, close by. It has legs and wings, which seems greedy. Though it walks along the grass, at any moment it could lift itself off and into air. It edges along the edge of things – all leg. I try it for a while, taking a long, slow stalk through the grass. As I walk into the hill’s incline, I approach its brow. Where does the field become a hill? Where does the head become the spine? Where is the neck of the hill? Flat becomes curved, spine ricochets into ribs, erupts into breast. I stroke the field, pulling fingers through grass like hair: the soft clover, spider, beetles; the small button mushrooms, the open dandelions. Breast. Stroke. I start field swimming. Again, words come as poems:

  BREAST STROKING

  NETTLING

  DANDELUNGING

  GRASSLING

  Pulling my fingers through, my mouth fills with grass, my toes dig in to propel me. I feel my internal circuitry change: I am plant as well as animal. My blood transports oxygen; my chlorophyll produces it. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, phosphorus surge along tissue, torso, culm, to my blades. Blood blends magnesium as well as iron. I am grass made flesh. Grassling.

  With no malleable water to move through, only fixed ground, I have to use my body more. The push comes from the toes, which are rooted, along my culm to the knees, which repeat the movement, only larger and deeper. Leaved arms sweep out, gathering and spreading wetness and sweetness; the words get tangled: swetness and spreetness; weading and sweeting; all knotting and breathing in and over the tongue.

  Once more, I knead the earth, wondering about its energies. How churches were dowsed and located on ley lines of supposedly beneficial energies. If the land, like the body, can hold a trauma (I think of where he lies, across the fields), it can also, perhaps, hold a healing. I always feel better here, always. When I pull up from the field, it is as if from a spa. Skin tingles with life. I breathe it all in, the moment, and the capture of the moment. The moment where I am closer to my father through being in a space that he has been in. A space where his father has been, and his father too. And I will tell him about the field, though not the rolling and spinning and swimming, but I needed all that to get in. To get close enough to what is here; to what it feels and means to be here. By being here, I become part of his story. Through a shared space and shared narrative, I write myself into him.

  36

  Yeanling

  When I next come to rest, I am surrounded by buzzing things. Their noise and movement seem overwhelming and it is difficult to comprehend so much life in one small space. Light panicles of grass dangle against my lips. In my mouth is something small, hard and round which I suck on; it has the bitter twist of a peppercorn. I lift my head and look left towards the dark woods, then pan right across the burnt scalp of field my father’s map calls Brake. Beyond that, the open ploughed soil of Lankham. Up close, the glistening heads of sweet vernal-grass.

  I shift my legs beneath me, sitting inside my father’s map. The sketch of field boundaries and names, long pored over from a distance, has come to life. A map is a layer of space, but never its force. But now that force is here, and I am part of it. I think of the functions of mapping. If a map is used to prevent you from getting lost, then what do you need when you come to get lost? Or when you come in order to move into the past and into the present combined. When you come to listen to those living there now and also those hidden, below the soil. When you come to listen to them and to live like them, briefly, to roll and to stretch and to stride and to burrow. When you come to do all that presentness, but at the same time to go backwards, into what was here before. When you come to go present and backwards and slant. As you imagine and join, and allow words to bring a conclusion to what before was possibility. What kind of a map do you need for that?

  I think it might still bear the outlines of things. Field boundaries, roads. But within that, how would it capture time? The multiplicity and porousness of the life in the place? And if it did, somehow, manage it, how could it update, rather than staying static? Could there be a way, through brush strokes? Grass strokes? Words? Through both Rebecca’s approach and my own, together? Swetness and spreetness, weading and sweeting, knotting and breathing in the burnished grass.

  The field is a swathe of leaf, only the vernal-grass approaching flower. We wade through, back towards the village, as bright bursts of peacocks, orange-tips, tortoise-shells and commas flit through. We are closely pursued by two horses, breathing heavily at our necks – a supernatural presence. The bank ahead has a covering of lamb’s-ear, its foliage lying under hair so woolly that it looks like a lamb. I remember the one that gambolled a few fields from here, near Markham Cross, trying out its new body. I had envied its willingness to strike out alone on legs it had never known before, carrying its unprecedented load. A lamb, or yeanling, starts to walk soon after birth, only taking nutrients from its mother’s milk for a few months before it can get all it needs from grazing. And though I am closer now to grass, have tasted its peppery leaves and chewed the blades, have felt my own skin become a different thing, splitting open into leaf, I do not feel independent. I feel connected still, by a root, by a thread, to where my father lies. I gather up the soft green strands of lamb’s-ear to take to him.

  I leave Rebecca at the Huntsman Inn where her taxi pulls in, and walk back up the hill. Passing close by the fields I had seen before from a distance, I notice how Lankham field’s soil has been churned; open and wounded yet not necessarily hurting. For humans, to be that exposed evokes pain: a cut, a rupture, but perhaps it might also be a release. A turning out of what has been in, like speech.

  I look at the speech of the field. A lunar landscape, with great chunks of hardened earth rising in boulders beside cut channels where the plough has dug deep. This is the pause in a conversation that is waiting for a reply. These are the sentences, lined along the ground, hoping to be heard. Here is a bank of memories, pulled from the back of the land. There is a hesitancy in their shape, in the space they occupy, the empty furrows. These rows could be an entry-point for the past and for all kinds of present. A vulnerable, intimate opening to the world which might not be painful, but may just be workable, that could even be a perpetual way of being.

  I answer the soil. Belly down, along a furrow. Arms forward. Ground is deep, hard and punchy. Tough, like cement cracked open. As I swim, I inhale manure. Flies gather. I have limited movement, as the soil is too stiff to break. As my fingers push against it, a slight crumbling gives a little, but the huge, hard channels are largely immovable. It is like swimming through rock. None of the pleasure of the wet open grass; here the soil is a straitjacket. How can I answer such hardness?

  I start to panic as I stretch and turn; the furrow becomes a coffin and the flies intensify. I know there are things the earth holds that I do not want to face. I had felt this by the pond near the withy beds. I had felt this in the mulch and the rot and the swallow of mite and beetle and snail. I had known this when the leaf had let go of its lignin rib and the fungi spread across its tip. I had even known this when I met the buck who would lose its antlers, who would feel them harden and the blood flow through the velvet membrane until it peeled away and they fell to the ground, shrouded in moonlight, waiting to be found. But I am not ready to find them. I raise myself up and out to the side, just as a car swipes past. I move unste
adily, as if I am new to feet. My whole body stained with earth, trailing its dusted afterbirth.

  SOIL MEMOIR FOR TEN ACRE FIELD

  Horizons:

  ins.

  0–9

  A

  9–14

  (B)

  14–24

  (B)/C

  24+

  C

  What would you tell the you that was here before this? Or the one here before that? Would you tell it that grief would break from its head like a bird from its shell. That its body would stop, feet buckle, legs cave; that here, in the grass, would be its ending? That cries like squeaks would draw out from it, long and coarse, to creak the air as bows against tight strings. That its gasps would shake the wind which would hurl itself through its leaves, leaving it bent and trammelled. That it would moan. Sustained notes from its belly: pure pain. That air would gutter down its bone. That when it had thought it had found a way to go on, it hadn’t. Or would you say nothing. So that this broken moment, this severance, would cut this cleanly; no hope, no body, no love ever as great as this loss.