The Rebellious Light of Beauty (The last dandelion of summer)

It is easy to feel overwhelmed by the global events of the last couple of weeks. Following the battering of Storm Babet, this week’s episode offers a space for us to reflect on a world that can be often violent and far from perfect. 

Journal entry:

13th October, Friday

“Battered by the winds of the world
 I stop to watch the free-flight of rooks
 Diving from an oak into the full force
 Of a westerly gale.

Gothic wings outspread,
 They surf the blast
 Hanging on its back
 In a rage of ecstatic life.

I stand alone below
 Looking upwards
 And for a short while
 My feet have left the ground
 And I master the gale.”

Episode Information:

In this episode I read Seán Street’s poem ‘Listening with a spider’ from his 2021 collection The Sound Recordist  published by Maytree Press.

I also read an extract from Melanie Challenger’s (2023) essay: ‘Animals in the room: Why We Can and Should Listen to Other Species’.

I also refer to Thomas Hobbes’ (1651) Leviathan, Tennyson’s (1850) ‘In Memoriam’, and Max Richter’s (2003/2018) album The Blue Notebooks. 

With special thanks to our lock-wheelersfor supporting this podcast.

Allison on the narrowboat Mukka
Derek and Pauline Watts
Anna V.
Sean James Cameron
Orange Cookie
Donna Kelly
Mary Keane.
Tony Rutherford.
Arabella Holzapfel.
Rory with MJ and Kayla.
Narrowboat Precious Jet.
Linda Reynolds Burkins.
Richard Noble.
Carol Ferguson.
Tracie Thomas
Mark and Tricia Stowe
Madeleine Smith

General Details

In the intro and the outro, Saint-Saen's The Swan is performed by Karr and Bernstein (1961) and available on CC at archive.org.

Two-stroke narrowboat engine recorded by 'James2nd' on the River Weaver, Cheshire. Uploaded to Freesound.org on 23rd June 2018. Creative Commons Licence. 

Piano and keyboard interludes

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction
• 0:45 Journal entry
• 1:19 Welcome to NB Erica
• 2:16 News from the moorings
• 7:04 Cabin chat
• 9:15 The Rebellious Light of Beauty
• 15:20 Sean Street's 'Listening with a spider'
• 17:51 Exract from Melanie Challenger's essay 'Animals in the Room'
• 39:38 Signing off
• 39:55 Weather Log

Transcript

JOURNAL ENTRY

 16th October, Monday

“Frost garlands the ropes
 And mantles the boat in white.
 Smoke curls upward from the chimney.

Maggie and I breathe with the breath
 Of dragons this morning.
 Two groups of ducks
 Wing in from the north.

For a single moment
 The cold world is lit up
 By the tiny fire
 Of kingfisher blue.”

[MUSIC]

WELCOME

Banks of angry clouds, thick and heavy, roll over us from the west. The damp air is turning chilly. It feels cooler than the reading the thermometer actually gives. Even the smears of light on the water from our windows are shivering.

This is the narrowboat Erica narrowcasting into a storm-chased October night to you wherever you are.

I was hoping you'd come. It's so good to see you. Come into the warm where the stove flickers rosy and the kettle is on. We've saved a seat for you, so come inside. Welcome aboard.

[MUSIC]

NEWS FROM THE MOORINGS  

This week it has been raining. Raining a lot!

Another low tracked across the country whipping up winds and auguring successive waves of rain, from grey drizzles to torrential downpours. We’re ok and kept dry – pretty much. We found we were getting a bit of water ingress in the study here. We’re still not too sure where it is coming in, but a distinct steady drip began to occur from the ceiling. My main suspect is the mushroom vent. These are air vents to ensure a circulation of air -particularly important if, like us, you are using a solid fuel stove. A lot of boats have them. They are brass and in the shape of mushrooms. We were warned that in heavy rain you can get a few drips inside caused by rain hitting the cabin roof, bouncing up and then hitting the inside of the mushroom cap to fall down into the boat. This does happen. It is never any problem, just a few splashes. However, last year, I discovered that the seal around one of the other vents was beginning break down and when it rained it allowed water to seep under it and then channel down the wooden fittings. I think this might be happening here. I have had a cursory look and it looks fine, but need to investigate when we get some dry days. It’s not a huge problem – we put down a container to catch the drips, but it is not good for It to happen frequently.

The thing is, although we had had lots of rain before and some of it torrential, we’ve never encountered such a long period of torrential rain.

As storm Babet passed overhead, the sky and land turned to water – beating upon the cabin roof, lashing the water’s surface into churning mass. The walk to the sheep fields became a shallow lake. Entrances and exits around gates and styles quickly turned to quagmires. And still the rain fell. The hill just above the canal began to gush with water. Three distinct spouts appeared in the waterlogged grass. The largest created a fountain of white water a couple of inches high. Maggie was entranced by it, plunging her nose deep into the ground so that the water flowed up her snout almost to her eyes. A little lower, the whole hillside became a stream before it emptied down a clay bankside and into the canal.

On Friday afternoon, the water level rose by about 6 inches in a couple of hours. We had to keep checking that the mooring ropes were slack in case it rose higher. This is the type of thing that is expected on a river, but rarely occurs on canals. I watched a couple of scary videos tweeted by the Watts on Board of water pouring over the lock gates at Droitwich – which is just a few miles west of us.  

As night fell on Friday more rain fell. Whenever one of woke, we’d check outside, but despite the rain, the levels seemed to be dropping. The canal now is soupy with crema-coloured swirls of run-off soil deposited from the fields. But the water level is almost back to normal now.   

It’s been a full-time job trying to keep Maggie from getting too wet and muddy in an effort to keep the wounds from her operation dry. Even so, one is taking a little longer to heal and we’d been hoping that life would return back to normal this week, it looks like we have another week before she can be signed off.

She’s been wonderful, bless her, and she clearly finds not being able to race around off lead or jump up the steps hard. She is now full of pent-up energy and we long for her to be able to run as much as she does. But the mud and the wet is not helping.

[MUSIC]

CABIN CHAT

[MUSIC]

THE REBELLIOUS LIGHT OF BEAUTY (LAST DANDELION OF SUMMER)

There was something magnificent about the sky of inky blues and greys, and the oncoming night. Rippling waves of alto cirrus, paved a low-water cove of grey sandbanks stretching out of the west, where hints of watery saffron and lemonade weakly coloured the skyline. Behind, banks of cumulus built up and under this dome of metaled twilight the rooks flew high. Much higher than they normally do at dusk. Wheeling and surging on broad wings, two distinct groups, merging into a rapturous chaos of precision before parting again, this time into three, to merge once more. Part ballet, part country dance, part ceilidh. There’s a storm out west and on its way in. Even now there are whispers in the air. The rooks are celebrating. They are so high I can hardly hear their song lifted on the ragged wind.

I look up and feel both lifted and soothed.

Earlier Maggie and I came across a shaggy ink horn toadstool. Its tawny creams ghostly white in the gloaming among the dark green-blacks of the meadow, there was something irrepressibly resolute about the unapologetic alieness of its presence. 'This is the still centre of my universe.' it seemed to say.

So far, it’s certainly been an autumn for fungi. There are places where it is almost impossible not to stand on any. And now by my feet is a solitary dandelion, unabashed in its anachronistic golden splendour. I remember the long-drawn-out cold springs of mud and thin rain when I longed to spot the first dandelion of the year, and how my spirit soared at its warm sunny flowerhead. Who needed the sun when, here out of the mud and stones, an earth-sun arose that fed the world with its nectar? And now I stand at the opposite end of the year, stopped in my tracks under a crow wheeling sky, by the sunshine glow of the last dandelion of summer.

And does it matter? Does any of this really matter? The sky, the crows, the fall of night, and the last dandelion of summer? Is this anything more than an idle distraction, the fiddle playing while a hundred Romes burn, and the Titanic slips once more beneath the cold, indifferent, ocean?

These are questions that I have asked myself at different points in my life, many, many times. Perhaps my voice would be much more effective if I cried aloud with Jeremian heart-break the casual breaking of the planet, the dawn chorus that each year grows thinner, sparser and to which, on some mornings, beats in my ear more like a lament than a jubilant song of welcome for the sun? One of the first ecologists, Aldo Leopold, was right when he wrote, “One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds.” It’s hard to ignore the stabs of loss and growl of anger when I walk the woods and fields.   

And yet, it was the uncontrolled anger that began to corrode into my being which led me to find this joy that can still to be found even in this broken landscape. A quiet whisper of a joy that was the only thing that was strong enough to contain and divert the rage. It was that which led me here: physically, geographically, emotionally, intellectually. Among the wreckage, I see eyes – wine-dark and sparkling with life and intelligence. Even scuttling between puddles and raindrops, a beetle negotiates the obstacles it meets with a spontaneity choreographed by curiosity, experience and understanding. It might not be anything like mine, but I recognise it and immediately I am drawn into a feeling of shared experience with it.

I know I am not alone in this. Chances are, you too have experienced this. It is hard not to, when you drift out of the human bubble and find yourself in a world alive with so many others.

I love Seán Street’s recollection of exactly this in his poem ‘Listening with a spider; from his collection The Sound Recordist.

[READING]

During the short but fairly bitter cold snap last winter, the little wooden ship-lapped shed that houses the Elsan waste point became the home of a huge spider. As the weeks went past her web got larger and more complex, hanging lower and lower until I had to be careful for my hair not to get caught in it. On each visit I expected it to have been swept away and her no longer to be there. I appreciate that not everyone is perhaps as tolerant of spiders, particularly large ones, as I am. But, no, there she was. On each visit I recalled Seán’s poem, running the lines through my head; reliving his encounter and that sense of connection.

In her essay ‘Animals in the room: Why we should listen to other species’, bioethicist Melanie Challenger ardently calls out the fallacy of human exceptionalism by neatly encapsulating this feeling:

[READING]

I know it is true, for I have seen it. I have experienced it. Felt the shift and tilt of boundaries merging. And it is that which sustains me with the stillness of its joy, which makes me want to find words that can sing to reach out into the darkness and say ‘we are not alone.’  

But new storms are raging and a new darkness is falling and once more I find myself asking, what does this matter?

I know that I am not alone in finding myself, over the last couple of weeks, faced with the unfaceable truths of who we are, re-evaluating everything – questioning myself, who am I and what I am doing? I’ve been careful to avoid a lot of social media, but the news still hits hard. Listening to a reporter, his voice shaking, saying how he will never be able to unsee what he has just seen. And then in the aftermath of such unbearably brutal acts, the raging chorus of strident voices – each condemning the other to death. And let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that such acts are isolated. Genocides, ethnic cleansings that regularly sweep across other parts of the globe experience also such trauma, they just don’t happen to capture the interests of our media.

The words of Thomas Hobbes [Leviathan] come down to us ringing through history, the natural state of humankind is neither noble nor beautiful, but one of “continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Is this any surprise when, as Tennyson [‘In Memoriam’] puts it a couple of hundred years later, the reality of this world is not that it runs by the rules of love of a benevolent creator God, but ones of aggression and violence. A nature that ‘shrieks’ and red in tooth and claw. And in the brave new world that Tennyson paints, Hobbes’ depiction of human brutishness (if not constrained by state apparatus) fits perfectly.  

These grim assessments may not be surprising. Hobbes was writing at a time of social unravelling, during the turbulent violence of the English Civil War. He had enough primary data in front of him to convince him that his assessment was right. Tennyson’s world was coming to terms with new sciences, geology, and palaeontology. Archbishop Usher’s neat dating of the Earth’s creation was being swept away by a timeline containing the vertiginous vortex of time that has been populated by a nightmare of horrific monsters who were bone by fossil bone being chipped out of the very bedrock upon which he stood. How can nature be anything else? How can humans be anything else?

And our newsfeeds bear out the truth of those terrifying words of Hobbes and Tennyson. Just look to the Negev, just look to Gaza. How can I sit here in this darkness (both real and metonymic) and talk about the trials that swans face or the glorious wheeling spectacle of the rooks?

Is this not anything more than an indecently offensive distraction? The telling of pretty stories whilst ignoring the broken cries of the truth? What can be more immoral than to turn a blind eye to the pain of others? The unconscionable callousness of turning away to be dazzled by some petty joy?

And Storm Babet has now come, raging in from the west. It comes just in time. Wild, chaotic, destructive, angry. It seems apt for these days. Tennyson’s ferocious nature writ large across the skies. If we humans are brutal than why not our weather?

My outdoor gear is continually wet and I keep finding myself looking for excuses to go outside again. To be battered by the wind. To be deafened by the rain as it beats unending against my hood. I go up to the hill to feel its heart. What is it saying? News of flooding across the country is filtering through. Loss of life, loss of homes. We’ve been out to check that the mooring ropes are slack – the canal is higher than I have seen it. Is this it? The reality of it all?

On the way back to the boat, a large puddle, a worm squirms in its drowning death throes. Instinctively, I bend down and scoop it out and place it on less saturated ground. The action shakes me. Why? Why should I care? But I do care. I do care that – in all this wretchedness – that the worm does not die. I watch it as it wriggles into a thick tuft of grass and I feel something. I don’t quite know what, but I feel something. I think it is that I feel a little bit more human.

Images of the rooks circling in their storm dance and the last dandelion of summer spring to mind. Each acting according to their nature. Simple spontaneous and unconscious act flowing naturally from their simple being. The dandelion has no thought of being the last, nor of the significance of that, botanically, biologically, ecologically, aesthetically, or metaphysically. But it is no less beautiful for that – for the sense of summer warmth it brings to a sodden field; alone among the darkening greens. Neither is its acceptance and welcome by the solitary bee and hover fly, the circling small gnat-like flies for whom it provides refuge and succour any less. Nor does it diminish the joy I gain from spotting it. The glorious rebellious light of beauty that will outshine the gather darkness.

And with all this something still deeper springs to my mind. Something that challenged and changed me in the midst of a maelstrom of darkness. It was a time when I was encountering the fall-out of trying to articulate what I could see as the cataclysmic destruction of nature. It was a time when I felt in very really danger of being totally consumed by an uncontrollable rage borne from frustration and grief. It was at that time that I came across Max Richter’s devastatingly beautiful album The Blue Notebooks. One day reading the liner notes for the remastered 15 years edition of it and I was struck to read how Richter was encountering very similar emotional turmoil during the lead up to 2003 invasion of Iraq. Faced with the prospect of such destructive emotions, he took the deliberate decision to channel them into something creative.

He wrote:

[READING]

Rather than meeting anger with anger, violence with violence and the escalation that will always bring, he took the revolutionary and radical step of meeting violence and hatred with beauty. He set out to raise his voice in the only way he felt he could and create something wonderful, beautiful and joyous. To remind the world of who we really are. What we are capable of. That simple expression floored me and changed my life.

What is it to be human? What defines us as humans? It is our drive, our impulse – our compulsion even – to create. We take our lives, our environments, our natures and with them we become creators. Isn’t that at the very heart of western religions and culture – and the creator God said ‘let us create them in our image according to our likeness’?     

We cannot avoid our creativity; it is our nature. It is in our breath. The tragedy is that we can create harm, and devastation, conflict, anger, bitterness and pain. Our inventiveness knows no bounds. The world stage and our timelines are constantly filled with trauma both unimaginably large and petty. But that does not define us. Neither does the dark, nor the anger.

After reading Richter’s description, I made the conscious decision that no matter the darkness, no matter the pain – the howling strident voices calling beyond – I will fill my part of this darkness with something beautiful. That if I have a chance to do something than I want to do something wonderful. To end each day having worked a little closer to the light that such beauty brings. Finding ways to challenge the darkness with these sparks of joy and life.

Since then, I have found many, many, other people, each in their own way doing the same. Blooming where they are planted. Being themselves. Living as naturally and effortlessly as rooks sky-dancing under tower clouds or a dandelion opening its petals at the end of summer. 

Hobbes’ truth is only half of the truth. He should have gone on to applaud the heights to which those poor and broken people can daily reach. Turning theirs and other’s hells into paradise, lighting the darkness with a stranger’s smile, the offer of a helping hand from one lost person to another. The world – Hobbe’s nasty, brutish, and short, world – is aflame with such beauty, such acts of creativity that turn night to day, the hell into a heaven. Hobbes told only half the story. The full story wouldn’t have fitted his political philosophy of an authoritarian state.

Tennyson was only one more Don Quixote tilting at the imaginary windmill of an Earth invested with a theologised anthropomorphism that can no longer bear the weight of newer ways of understanding the world. And so, he simply replaces it with another of the same, only this one lacks the benevolence of a creator God. Tennyson’s brave new world, dripping in gore and violence, is one that can readily accept Hobbes’ assessment of unrestrained humankind. In it, the worst of human life is not only rationalised, it is – more frighteningly – normalised. Tennyson paints a dark story of the world, but now it lacks even the hope of redemption.       

The voices of Hobbes and Tennyson remains; told and re-told over and over again in our newspaper columns and news feeds, writ in large bleak letters across countless social media posts. And who can argue with them in the light of recent events?

The unspoken, often even unconscious little acts of your living do. Just as do the wheeling dance of rooks, the wonder of the last dandelion of summer, the thrush who stares into the dawning sun each morning – and a million, million, million other tiny moments of being.     

It is so easy – far too easy – to grimly hold to the half-truths of Hobbes and Tennyson and to view humankind as a mass of dangerous selfish brutes, when in truth each one is just trying to find their way fighting their own unknown battles. In all our flawed incompleteness and with all our imperfections we keep going, trying to make it work. Why? Because we are human and we cannot help but make a difference in this world. For good or ill - and quite often it's both - our presence makes a difference. We can destroy and we can create. Our world stands as witness to our terrifying capacity of our drive for destruction. But that is only half the story. Each of us also has the capacity to create. Tiny - sometimes seemingly insignificant - things, small acts of huge consequence. Creating something wonderful, something beautiful. And given the choice for doing something wonderful or destructive with the one life we are given, the overwhelming majority will choose something wonderful. Our prosaic, everyday, often humdrum lives are creative acts. Creative acts of beauty bring a rebellious and disruptive light that cuts through these clumsy caricatures and stereotypes. It is a light that is uncontained and uncontainable. It subverts and overturns the narratives of violence and suspicion. It's a declaration that Hobbes and Tennyson are only partly right. There is more to us than just barbarity and violence. And there is more to this world than just barbarity and violence. Tennyson and Hobbes do not define us. They do not imprison us within the brute terror of their words. We are so much more than that - and each day we prove it in a glittering kaliedoscope of a myriad of tiny acts of humanity. Just remember, you need a lot of darkness to quench a light, but only one tiny pin prick of light to begin to turn back the darkness.

What is the point?

What is the point of me, sitting here, in the face of all the unspeakable barbarities that have and have yet to be inflicted and talking into the darkness? It is because quiet beauty is powerful. Quiet beauties of each little action that flow from just being true to ourselves are dangerous. They are subversive. They say, no. This is not in my name. We are better than this. Stopping to give way to the other car, a smile to a stranger, taking a drowning worm to a safe refuge, stopping under a sky scalded by rooks to revel in the gold of the last dandelion of summer, speaks a better truth. We are more than this Hobbes; those rooks are far better than you could ever conceive Tennyson.

I sit here, because it makes the darkness a little less dark.

The feeling of lostness a little less.

Reaching out into the darkness to another – and finding there, the glint of light. That is what it is to be human and to be alive.

Filling this darkness with the unquenchable rebellious light of beauty. 

SIGNING OFF

This is the narrowboat Erica signing off for the night and wishing you a very restful and peaceful night filled with beauty. Good night.

WEATHER LOG