Ultramarine

Cornwall is a place of far too many superlatives. The artists, the light, the land. The sea. It conjures, confounds and one never has enough, is never sated from its urgency. The history is tosh. The natives mirror the ignorance and wisdom of humanity everywhere. Here, a cadence of space and time collides in harmony... when the sun shines... when the warmth radiates... when the energies of the ancients expound their significance upon the unwary. There comes a presence not to be understood, understated. Here it was that Brandon happened upon Mariah as she descended the steep side of the path to Porth Veris.

The motion of the body is the first recounter of propensity. There’s a knowledge that can be gleaned from afar which we’ve imbibed into a genetic disposition. It enables the flight or flight apparatus to kick into gear. If necessary. The manner of placing one’s feet, of reaching one’s arms, the angle with which one negotiates one’s head, neck... the amount of turning in the hips, suppleness of knees, ankles,,, are all digested in a twinkling, a million calculations deciphered, sifted, assimilated, to come to a position of knowledge that may, or may not, be accurate, helpful, of some utility. The workings of the body are divine, incalculable. A wonder made urbane through lack of awe.

Brandon looked and saw a woman clambering down the hillside. She stopped and looked at him, smiled. Well.

Some waves shatter speech, tumbling with arrogant joy, unabashed power upon the helpless, stupefied, utterly surrendered sand. Cascading in splendour, disdain of humanity’s silliness to make sense, rationally, of all that is incomprehensible. The sheeting turquoise, green-blue, grey, silver, gold, unnameable miracle of liquid barrels, exploding with mirth, tantalise, call the onlooker to come mingle, splash.

In one such place and day and moment Brandon heard the call. The woman. He knew she was there, knew she knew he was there. Knew they were alone. Both enjoying this moment out of time on a sunny summer’s idyll. A day like no other yet merely a day. An ordinary day in the life of a planet spinning through space. Here it was. The moment to be treasured whatever the outcome, whatever alignment of Saturn and Venus and... the brain vanished. Worries regarding the coming years, University, his relationship with his father, the questions of what he was here for, what his life meant, what he wanted and why... vanished. Woman does this to man. She does nothing and he forgets how to breath, speak, walk. He falls over, becomes innocent, for a while. He looks at her, searching her face. The Goddess. This is her power. This she is and will ever be and he forgets. Forgets this moment in a few days, months, years perhaps. Forgets the space in his stomach, the yearning that makes him a child again.

Two strangers on a beach having a swim.

Brandon frolicked, sported his physique to his best deployment, or so he considered. Yes, an overhead tumble, Aha! That’ll impress. A deep, daring, long, underwater dive to show prowess, manliness, vigour. Ah, yes, vigour. That’s what a lady finds so admirable. Look over and... oh, she’s not looking. She’s actually going further off. Something’s wrong. Okay. Regroup, reconnoitre, redeploy. Hmm. Perhaps a few press ups on the sand? No. Maybe ask the time? No. She's getting out of the water wearing a whisper of a smile. What’s that mean? What the hell does that mean? Is she taken? Is she interested? Is she playing with my heart, my soul, my very being? A wave crashes on an imbecile on a Cornish beach who comes up gasping, falls over twice before gaining equilibrium, of sorts. Okay. Use your head, Brandon. Play the wise man, the worldly man, the educated man of experience.

A seagull drops a message on Brandon’s endeavours as he squints upwards. Some seeming serendipitous calamities are beyond the pale. Jumping quickly back into the water, he comes up seeking his future love. She has vanished. In the minutes of male dancing, prancing, prattling, the bird had flown. Attacking the promontory dunes with a vigour that would have made him tired at the thought a few minutes past, he looks about and there she is on a sit up and beg heading away. She looks round momentarily and the whisper of a smile still on her beautiful face. She waved. Not to anyone.To Brandon. She waved to Brandon.

Men are so different from women. A man can fall in love with a woman in a second, fall out as quickly and fall again with another woman in a heartbeat. Each time he believes it. Each time until he begins to know himself, know his weakness, sickness, his appetite and begins to despise his lust. Yet lust is a powder keg he is unable, seemingly, to master. It rises electrically, at the speed of light, thought, sound, and overwhelms his manly brain, befuddles his rational, reasonable, cunning, or innocent mind and what is he supposed to do? I mean, dash it all and whatnot, I mean, come on, old sport. A man can sum up a possible mate at a distance of a mile and begin to prime his approach, his possibilities. A man may speak of love, yearn for love, know the truth of his psychology and endeavour to free himself as much as possible of the curse of sexuality and yet... and yet it cannot be dismantled by mere desire. It must be known, extracted from the weft and warp of his sinews, molecules and atoms where it's been waiting since time began to eat him alive, spit out any valour, shame, chagrin, honour, replace it with the herd anonymity of biology, propagation of the species. Not my fault, old stick. In the genes, don’t ya know?

Brandon scrambled to follow her radiance, found nothing but unquenched desire and frustration. Even as he crumpled internally, he mused and cursed those two leviathans. They seemed to go hand in hand, forever following and leading the biological map of a God with no sense of humour, or perhaps too much. Or was it merely a Darwinian accident that propelled one mystery into another? Matter into time, form into space, the physics of chance, coincidence, serendipity. Brandon loved nineteenth century philosophers, in fact, he loved them all from Aristotle to Xenophon, right to the present day. Yet those dearest to his heart were Germanic mystics, They who climbed the peaks of the solitary. The loners, delving into themselves far too deeply and came down, after dying metaphorically, to share the fruits of their heroic asceticism with the multitude. They who couldn’t care less, mostly, having little time to listen, being embroiled with the everyday tasks of earning a crust and surviving the slings and arrows of forces, powers far beyond their ken or interest. Brandon was not a man who thought himself better than anyone. Yet he knew who he was, knew he was privileged, set apart. It was, however, amongst ordinary people that he felt most at home. Thus the quandary with pater, the family. How to free himself of the yoke of inherited blood and wealth. It was a beastly burden he’d struggled with all his adult life.

Mariah Devain exploded into the ether. She laughed and danced with the light, the fairies and demons. She meandered along a path entranced by her step, her gait, her essence. She came from another time and place. A mythical substance exuded from her and she knew it. The Devains had been in Suffolk for quite a few years. They came with William in 1066 and gave a hand with the conquering. Like all conquerors they found the most beautiful spots to settle and kept aloof. It’s often the case that guilt has a distancing effect. Surrounding oneself with space is born of an understandable desire to forget that never works. The atrocities of man’s inhumanity are easily justified but never truly acquiesced. Not in the murky depths of that human swamp, the unconscious. There the darling arguments, counter arguments, truths, lies, unfulfilled desires, and, that most damning of monsters, guilt... conflict, ebb, mesh, entangle and spawn a million ugly, unloved offspring. What one hides, is fearful of, has a nasty tendency to sprout shoots in dark, fecund soil, that may at first glance, seem harmless, yet all too often bears vengeful fruit. The ouroboros is a symbol of many meanings and interpretations. It all depends on the observer. Ask a quantum physicist.

A strange symbiosis arises with conqueror and conquered. A layered cake of force and fear, take and be taken, noblesse oblige and grudging obeisance, which after a few generations settles to almost respect, but not quite. Doffing the cap may be an outward physical gesture known universally as a sign of respect. It can also be interpreted as mockery. Think of a circus monkey dressed as a human bowing to all and sundry. Why do we laugh? To show one’s pate as a man is to hold nothing back, to have no cover, face one’s friend or foe on an equal footing. Nothing in our long journey into mendacity and loss of innocence is mere gesture. Everything is cram-filled with symbolism.

The world, it seems, has many mansions. Mariah did her best to manoeuvre through them with all she had been given. It was no easy undertaking. The trouble was she loved life, swallowed it in huge gulps and had no time for anyone who wasn’t agog with the wonder of creation. Notwithstanding her fervour, she was in no way arrogant, self-obsessed, or indifferent. On the contrary, born under the sign of the goat was an omen that seemed to qualify Mariah perfectly with an energy, a zest that accomplished, sought out, discovered. Her love of botany began with a hallucinogenic mushroom at the age of three. The head gardener was fired by daddy and hired back again by mummy. It was no one’s fault but the stars, and they could be cruel teachers, as mummy was fond of declaring when a little tipsy. Daddy loved mummy deeply but could not make her happy, try as he might. So he worked hard, had affairs, and was rarely home. Mummy had been an actress, married in haste the story goes. All romance is heavenly in its sunrise and the madness of love that everyone seeks, dreams of and knows doesn’t last, followed its swift journey into boredom, estrangement and tolerance of varying degrees. The lot of a vast portion of humanity. Why people stayed together after the bloom began to fade was a mystery to Mariah, who decided from the age of seven never to fall in love and have, like daddy, lots of affairs and follow her passion for all things natural and artistic.

Precocity is a trait that is sometimes deemed attractive in the very young, ghastly in the not so young and downright ugly in those that should know better. Mariah was trundled off to boarding school at the age of nine and returned from Oxford at twenty-two with a joint honours degree in philosophy and fine arts. In nineteen fifties England, the wealthy few were still ascendant and the traits of being innocent, naive, were seen to be the acme of feminine sensibility. This was anathema to Mariah who swiftly gormandised the Oxford artistic, avant-garde circles and found her metier as a bohemian revolutionary. It took her a few months to become an ardent feminist, lose her virginity, take up pipe smoking and other dastardly adulterated vices. On her return to the family, she declared her intention of avoiding the obscene entrance into acceptable society termed ‘coming out’. Instead, she went travelling, alone. Lived with the marsh Arabs of southern Iraq, traipsed all over India, Mongolia, Nepal, before coming home in the summer of 1955 and declaring to mater and pater that she was off to Cornwall to paint and start an alternative society.

On the morning Mariah encountered the buffoon on Porth Veris, she had been contemplating the idea. Not any particular idea, but the reality of the idea itself. The idea had at its roots the Id and the movement away from the Id. Out of the pristine point of emergence of consciousness, call it the big bang if you are male, call it primal birth, effluence of the spit of the mother, if female, perhaps, it doesn’t matter, yet that is exactly what it does. It matters. Out of the unknown comes the known and back again ad eternum. Lao T’su came close with his love of the Primal Mother and who can say who that old nobody was? Some apples fall sideways it seems. Nothing is necessarily Newtonian. In fact, scratch the apple’s surface and there might be worms by the million circumnavigating, exorcising, debunking all sorts of anomalous paradigms. God, the image, and his progeny are mere symbols of another idea that has had its time and needs deconstructing, reconfiguring with a language, not of words but symbols and what more wonderful symbol is there than the vagina? Three fingers to the heavens extending from a single point. Upwards to the stars and beyond. The coming together of the trinity, not in a sad, suffering, male cross, a penis pointing downwards and seeming to be hanging around uselessly, painfully seeking solace, empathy, love, full of doubt, fear, uncertainty, ready to fall apart at any moment, crumble at the mere presence, the mere scent of the feminine. Rather, a trident, an explosion of light, the emergence of something other from the point of vanishment, the ‘singularity’, as that rather feminine Swiss psychologist calls it. A radiance of the power of three. Birth, Death, Rebirth. The one made three in Love. How the human psyche split from the essential into the material and why, would confound all but the most willing to seek for that which cannot be found by the rational, male brain. Of course, she had to accept the reality of nature. Half and half. Yet the truth appeared to be that the halves mixed, convoluted, intertwined and were not resolute, never absolute. There was no one who filled the criteria directly as the Logos had designed it. Anyway, vive la difference. It had to be this way to make a world capable of discernment. Otherwise we’d all be robotic seagulls. Which is what we mostly are.

She knew the buffoon. He was the village schoolteacher. An Irishman. Everyone found him painfully amusing. It seemed the game was to see who could extract the most humour without his realisation. Mariah had a desire to know more yet he seemed to fill the criteria of innocent imbecile so well, she feared if she found nothing under the outward façade, it would be disappointing. The thought brought her back to the judgement of others, how often it was wrong, unkind, an ignorance of the self. It was obvious he was interested in her and it would be amusing to find out.

Being one of the few in those times who matriculated from that bastion of male domination, she had found nothing but the usual fear and arrogance behind which the sexually frustrated brothers hid. In her time under the gleaming spires she watched and waited, sought the keys to the lodges of old. They opened easily enough. There were all sorts amongst the family of mostly male, insipid intellectuals who dressed in gowns. Those who enjoyed female company were easily persuaded to spill the beans of secrecy. Thus she spent valuable time ascertaining the corridors of power and how they might be of use at some future date.

Brandon prided himself on few things. The one certainty in his bumbling persona was a foolhardiness brought about by a desire to be different from his father. He wanted to love and be loved, not only by family and friends but anyone who happened to stumble upon his path.

‘Good morning, Mrs Boase and a lovely Cornish morning it is.’ Brandon smiled at the short, rotund woman in her fifties who appeared nondescript yet full of a strange, unnameable power. It mortified him. He tried his best to face her with his usual gusto and bluster. He failed abysmally. The casual shirt and summer jacket seemed out of place in the baker shop darkness, filled with the dense aroma of pasties, hevva cake and saffron buns. The scowl that exuded from Mrs Boase spoke of a palpable distaste only just able to contain itself. ‘May I avail myself of one of your large and wonderful buns?’ He waited with a smile, a grin, a quivering lower lip bitten by gleaming front teeth. He moved on the spot as on a piece of ice, slightly up and down, while his hands fidgeted in his grey flannel trouser pockets.

Mrs. Boase gave him the stare, watched him squirm awhile, then went to work. ‘How many buns?’ The timbre of her Cornish twang was malevolent it seemed to Brandon, and somewhat exasperated.

‘Oh, just the one.’

‘One?’ There was astonishment in the question that desired an answer, an explanation, an apology at the very least.

‘Well, I am a trifle famished... three... perhaps?’ That seemed to satisfy. The proprietress busied herself with a huff and a gruff that made Brandon sweat small beads around his temple, which he duly wiped with a spotted handkerchief, giving him something to do. Dare he venture more into the valley of fear? ‘How does the day find your good self, Mrs. Boase?’

‘Wass ‘at?’ She looked at him as one might a cockroach about to be put to rest. ‘Thass one and six.’ Her hands were calloused, plump. She held out the goodies with the left and thrust the right before Brandon’s face. After paying and assailing his nemesis with thanks in profusion, he deftly turned, almost fell, banged his head on the door frame on the way out, forgetting to duck. Endeavouring to make light of the awful pain, he chuckled, mumbled ‘Silly oaf’ to himself. Gritting his teeth in order not to cry, he placed his lunch in his bicycle basket, looked around easily to see if anyone had noticed his Chaplinesque skit. It was at this moment that Mariah approached from the bench she had been sitting on, next to the village post office. She’d bought ice cream in a tub with clotted cream. She’d also bought one for Brandon.

‘They’re some ansome.’ Brandon looked round as she approached and the sun blinded him momentarily.

‘Sorry?’

‘Saffron buns. Can’t beat ‘em.’ She offered him the tub. Brandon took it without thinking, without actually knowing what he was taking. He couldn’t speak for some reason. He just looked at her and smiled, sort of. The mind and body are a paragon, a dream of creation that cannot be dismissed by some silly theory of evolution. In a wink, a blink, a moment, the machinations of the blood and brain astonish, defy the heavens in their convolutions and calculations. There are more things in heaven, the body, the earth, the ground of existence than can be encompassed by the brain of a brontosaurus. The brontosaurus may be similarly equipped with absolute instinctual intelligence and hormonic programming to populate, yet what does it know of a smile that alights upon the angelic, the light in the eyes of someone, something that has a name, a memory, a faculty for mystery, the desire to know, to come upon, to love, encompass the origin of creation itself?

Mariah waited for Brandon to return and giggled under her breath. He looked at her quizzically. She waited, looked into him. His mouth was slightly open. He gradually came back, awoke.

‘Oh... I say... that’s splendid. That’s so... kind, to be sure.’ He looked again as a sheep might stare at a painting by Da Vinci and chew its cud. He awoke once more, flustered, thought, flustered, smiled, said something. What did he say? He said something like: ‘ Brandon, Bran actually, well, mostly... that is, that’s my name. I mean, I think... you are? You’re the er... the... yes. I saw you, yesterday, yes at the beach, Porth something or other. I say, you shouldn’t... may I.. ask what... what your... who...?’

Yes. That was a good start. Manly, decisive, no nonsense. Show her what’s what. Mariah took him by his free hand, led him to a bench by the post office, sat and started to eat her ice cream. Brandon watched this happen. Knew what was happening, yet his brain seemed to have turned to mush. She pulled him down beside her.

‘I’m Mariah Devain. We are going to be great friends, perhaps more, but that all depends. Now, come on, woo me. Show me who and what you are, Brandon. Why are you a teacher? Every word you say will ascertain whether we become more than acquaintances, so choose them wisely.’ She ate the ice-cream as one might eat gold if it were edible. There was a grace, solicitude in everything Mariah did and eating, it seemed to Brandon, was no longer a necessity but a luxury, a mode of communication that spoke of the road to paradise. Here was someone who had found beauty, a certain aesthetic in everything. Everything? He’d hardly known her more than a minute yet, the simplest of activities can hide a volume of information or be merely automatic, unconscious. Brandon pondered, as was his wont, on the process of eating. It was taken so much for granted that for the vast majority of humanity it was no more than a function of the body that needed no explanation and certainly little attention, other than the most basic. A certain decorum in the niceties of the mouth and its operations during mastication, during the creation of a bolus. The question of breeding, etiquette did enter his ruminations. These were matters of class distinction, a propriety based on culture, upbringing, yet there was more here. In Mariah’s involvement gestation became a treatise upon the Dao. The sequence of this particular orifacular harmony seemed utterly spontaneous, defying the rules of society. Was he being somewhat excessive? Was he seeing more than there was? Did he need to say something?

‘Mariah... what a lovely name. I’m overwhelmed and yet... I sense you’re right. We will be friends. How audacious. How wonderful. I’m the village schoolteacher, the laughingstock caricature of times that have swallowed far too much Wagnerian drama, now waiting for the next catastrophe, cataclysm.’ Brandon knew he had only one chance at this venture. He laid down his sword before the damsel. He cast open his chest, dared her to stab his vulnerable point, his covenant. Did he care he sounded somewhat insane, somewhat vague in his first imposition? No. He rallied and dove into the eyes of Mariah Devain with every gesture, murmur, of the love that is potential in every man, every wanderer, every knight errant. ‘I’m deep into the mystic, Mariah. Yes, perhaps a buffoon when in the mire of society and yet,,, with you, I have no armour. As I am is how I am. What you see etc. I have a love of all things beautiful, mysterious and nothing, in humility, is more mysterious to my sensibilities than the divine feminine. I have studied the Eastern arts, philosophies, from Patanjali to Blavatsky, Gautama and Lao T’su. Yet I have little in the way of worldly accoutrements. Rather, I seek the silence and wisdom of natural creation.’ There. He’d said his piece and waited all a quiver.

‘Oh, Bran. We shall be friends, we shall.’ A genuine warmth exuded from Mariah. Perhaps her fear of Brandon not meeting the mark was assuaged, or at least put aside for the time being. Here, she thought, was material for her moulding. He was charming in a silly sort of way, archaic in his pomposity that was obviously heartfelt and could possibly bear fruit if composted, nurtured. She slid her arm around his, crossed her legs, allowing them the joy of lolling up and down. On her face a smile of satisfaction neither pompous nor insincere but pleasant. She looked at him and he looked away. He was abashed, flummoxed and slightly shaking with joy. ‘Well, Brandon. We must lay down some ground rules.’ He heard what she said and found himself nodding, knew he was nodding automatically to fill the space, the moment, the glory of the moment. He wanted to hold this, to be this, to not forget this. Yet he was aware that in his thinking about this he was outside of this and wasn’t able to simply enjoy this. The very essence of his desire to hold the moment was destroying the essence of the moment. Mariah looked at his face and answered his dilemma. ‘Brandon... it’s alright to not think sometimes. In fact, most thinking is superfluous and unnecessary. Kiss me.’