Ancestral Ground

The victim of an infantile dark age
you sift through shards for clues. Prehistory
reveals an undecipherable page,
its archetypal script – a mystery.

Adrift in strangely convoluted dreams,
abandoned in some dear, familiar place
you sense that nothing now is what it seems,
your precious things all lost without a trace.

Impaled upon a broken blade of stone
the summer solstice sun, bloodied, crimson,
invokes the hopelessness of what is known.
More potent than our mythic risen son
a shaman gibbers in a tongue of fire:
how love was lost, consumed by raw desire.

I posted this up in November 2001, it attracted a bit of comment, mainly technical advice concerning enjambment, though David Anthony noted it was a 'nice atmospheric piece'. In truth, from my standpoint the poem appears anything but nice, disturbed and anxious it seems to me;  'the hopelessness of what is known' is a bleak, desperate notion.

I cannot account exactly how this came to be written; a phrase, remembered no doubt from late adolescent dalliance with R. D. Lang, 'ontological insecurity' springs to mind. Just having googled it, Wikepedia helpfully offers this explanation of the opposite - ontological security:

Ontological security is a stable mental state derived from a sense of continuity in regard to the events in one's life. Giddens (1991) refers to ontological security as a sense of order and continuity in regard to an individual’s experiences. He argues that this is reliant on people’s ability to give meaning to their lives. Meaning is found in experiencing positive and stable emotions, and by avoiding chaos and anxiety (ibid; Elias, 1985). If an event occurs that is not consistent with the meaning of an individual's life, this will threaten that individual's ontological security. Ontological security also involves having a positive view of self, the world and the future.

I do remember going through a phase around this time of waking-up from a dream I could not quite remember except for a terrible foreboding that everything I loved in life was about to be taken away. The second stanza is as good a definition of the effects of 'ontological insecurity' as you might get outside of 'The Divided Self'. As for the sestet, well, there is probably enough in those six lines to keep your average Freudian shrink in business for a month or two at least.

Joking aside, with the benefit of ten years or more hindsight, I can see now that during my mid to late Forties I struggled to keep a mental equilibrium. Unlike my teenage period of psychological wobble, just crawling off into a hole for half a year was not an option, I had responsibilities to others to keep going and with Gill's unstinting love, support and forbearance I did keep going. How much Mr. Wickes helped in this is hard to say, but having a place to 'act out' psychic drama may have helped, whether those dramas were expressed overtly as here, or were sequestered as stories.

The 'broken blade of stone' I think is a memory of a menhir that I used to walk to as a boy on the side of Brizlee Hill in Hulne Park. The place, I recall, had a wonderful panoramic view across the low moors of Northumberland towards Cheviot. One day I'll go back and see if the vista is as sublime as I remember it, probably not, as certainly no image of the place exists on the web. I never took a photograph of it, though the picture I took of 'Whittingham Vale' from Corby Crags is basically the same view from a couple of miles to the west.


The Cheviot Hills from Corby Crags

As for the image of the dark red sun, then that too goes back to adolescence. I painted quite a bit, my unfinished 'masterpeice' from that time. painted large scale on a sheet of 5'x3' hardboard, consisted of a biological cut-through of an eye re-imagined as an octopus afloat above a sky spotted with multi-coloured stars. Over low, purplish hills a dark crimson sun sets, towards it, a straight black road recedes. All things considered, my decision not to apply for a Fine Art degree and concentrate on the History of Art instead does now seem well judged. I do believe, however, that the naive symbols of childhood and adolescence do persist and become part of a repertoire of signs and symbols which unconsciously recur later - our archetypal scripts as the poem says.