A DREAM: I was in the field behind the house we lived in when I was a child myself, which slopes up to the high dark hedge, before plunging down the riverbank to the Severn. It’s twilight, quiet and very still, and I’m with a small person, perhaps my niece: in the dim yet somehow energised light we’re hiding in a shrubbery cut and fashioned, vertically and in plan, into expanded Tangrams. We’re not hiding fearfully; we’re waiting for something that might be spooked by us in plain view — just as my sister and I hid in this field with our parents decades ago, to catch sight of badgers. I have with me, awkwardly, a set of old books or magazines, or perhaps sheet music, paper brittle and brown with age — I’ve placed it for safekeeping on a low wall a few yards away. We wait, in tense excited anticipation of we know not what.
Suddenly a wind arrives: seizes my books and whirls them explosively into the air. They burst into separate pages — but then don’t separate. Instead they twirl and wind in the air, long ribbons of conjoined pages dancing like kite-lines. Every page now has the same image on it, a face — a stylised Tangram image of a dragon — and this flows and repeats all across the sky. The wind vanishes as suddenly as it came and every page begins to fall to earth, separate now, each acting as a parachute for its own little tea-light — though by some trick of dream logic the candle hanging below the page somehow backlights it from above.“Is it a scary face?” asks the small person with me, more in curiosity than fear. The field is now full of small people, with their attendant grown-ups, and I can hear the reply murmured all round my, in adult and childish agreement: no, no, it’s a nice face.(I woke from this dream open-mouthed with awe at its visual beauty, and scribbled it down straight away so as not to lose or distort it.)
“Tell a dream and lose a reader”.
Fuck you, Henry James, this is beautiful!
