FAERIE IN THE ALLEY – LY DE ANGELES

The ecology of remembered indigene

EARTH

Sitka spruce! The seed must have blown in from the great plantation across the mountains. They were, as far as I could tell, the only trees on the reserve. They were, as far as I could tell, the only trees on the reserve, except for those clinging to the inaccessible slopes of the ravine. The white plague—or so I thought at the time—had destroyed the rest.
George Monbiot ~~ Feral

Before the Romans invade mountains and fertile valleys and shoreline habitats, I am here. I am Brigant, and the human Brigant children are sometimes called Carvette—the People of the Deer. My current positioning, on a nautical map, is Latitude: 54° 29’ 59.99” N, Longitude: -3° 14’ 60.00” W.

I am Cumbria, and although this is difficult to define, I will say that I am cousin to rivers, lochs and aft-shot off the western isles. I am the waters of what is called the Solway Firth just north of Carlisle, that bring us the stories of smelt, flap-footed seals, basking sharks, blue mussels and curlew; Mona—Ynish Mōn—is known in a modern, shallow, know-less-ness, as the Isle of Man, that Tacitus, buddy to the bitter politician Claudius, writes of as a land of druids. I am standing stones and the first forests of oak and rowan, spruce and grave-dappling yew.

And let’s not forget mo wee islands—named by the Norse—of Walney, Fowdray (Piel), Roa and Foulney, all laimrig-safe, for anchorage, amidst the terror of a beum-sléibhe from the west, on trade route currents, puffing out the main’sls of the big ships and bobbing insanity of the coracle and curragh, by ocean route twixt Éire, Breizh (Brittany) and, well, all lands traversable throughout the epoch known as the Bronze Age. Lands once also called Rheged.

Have I been fought over? Yes. Am I extant? Well, one woman is still here. One man. My children are here (or else otherwhere, by way of fate or tragedy). These grandchildren are living also, so how can I not be present, wherever governments, traders, invaders and deeply entrenched trauma has driven us? Despite over fifteen thousand oceanic miles between some arcane, vast, unpredictable dreamtime island, beneath the wide dark skies of Koodjal Koodjal Djooka and me, this ancestral home.

DROWNER WATER

The spirit who bideth by himself In the land of mist and snow, He loved the bird that loved the man Who shot him with his bow.
T.S. Coleridge ~~ The Ryme of the Ancient Mariner

I am keld and fen. Reed-singing marshland, and I am home to teal, and the Alban grandeur of the little egret, oyster catchers, barnacle geese; the eerie, seelie language—weerloo—of a night-calling curlew. Hence I am bogs and territories of peat, primordial, drowned plant-people cousins, once vast beyond comprehension, gracing earth from some glacial estimate of twelve thousand years deep. The end of a mythic and legendary ice age, or two. Or three. Or whatever.

I am Eden, river of the black fell moss, cousin of Swale, and Isurā, and the journey of salmon kin from spawn to demise. My dawn is high in the Wild Boar Fell and my night is Carlyle, 1,824 feet above the shores of our sister lands. I flow east, then north, receiving lore and fealty from the many becks that join me from along the vast mountain chain known, by some, as the Pennines. We skirt the verdancy of a forest whose name, now, is lost in the dead mouths of my ancestors, stolen by the English to be called Inglewood, in the eleven hundreds.

I froth and blinter, viridescent and storm-tossed, winter-dark and cloud-filled, past Long Meg and her Daughters, to eventually reunite with the sea, amidst the rime and bar’ber—the pirr – all around me. Beneath the lights of an Réalta Thuaidh, tossing a million years of clitter, gritstone and tuff, to and fro along ancient shores and estuaries that summon smugglers and survivors. Soothed by arctic freeze sometimes, sometimes doomed by hob-gob, often an endragoned danger, seldom by calm or fancy.

I am baari-river-stone-carved veins, brooks and burns coursing from Solway Firth in the west to Tràchd Romhra—the Firth of Forth—choking a bit on the abandoned shopping trolleys, condoms, little orange-tipped syringes, cigarette butts, discarded Slushy cups and, occasionally but regularly, the body parts of some bloated, drug-fucked, forgotten, abandoned, mutilated and murdered dead. Dùn Èideann (Edinburgh) with the grand fortress made all of grandfather stone leaning down towards me calling Take me, take me now! On this epic excursion from the Irish Sea, to the shock, and whale-mother-depths, that human people call Muir Lochlainn far to the north where the finnock swim.

I am heard, but not always seen (by the human eye), in the grimlins.

CLOUDLY STARRY SKY

Oh, we are hard to kill. Four thousand years into the long ago is the attributed when of our underearth-ness story but… what about now? Who are those who write about dúthchas (my human children) when most have forgotten the legends of ancestral treedom? Of the hunter and the hunted?

Yet we are dead. Are we? Or so it is written. So. I am confused, and I am confounded because beneath this mighty soil, within the secrets of the mountains and the magic and the mystery of the Northern Lights I am majestic still; enchanted, even, of the sídhe and the nurseries of the cladd. Within the weem, I nightmare, although awake. Roots engorged with life, beneath peat, the heather, the roarie-bummlers, still with sap a-plenty, and ready for man-looking forgetfulness. Waiting until… A thousand, thousand Svalbard globale frøhvelv barrows, of the Celtic human person kind, that nurture unborn forests and foraging memories, that will awaken, in some momentarily unrealized epoch, to the bull-moose trumpet or the wolf-pack howl. In another day, in another century, when liberated (oh, that incessant fear of starvation, of a poverty that forests never cause), by that not-forgotten piping of eagle bone flute, or scream of protest by sister vixen. For Mother to give birth, she needs relax her bothered and relentless rain, release the dormant to be living, instead.

We say, I remember you! as we cut the last lamb’s throat, kindly, holdingly, remembering that once a forest, always a forest, given just enough breathing room to seek the sky, no matter that the air is filled with the detritus of cotton factories and coal mines, and families driven to despair through the greed of some stranger in a bureaucracy somewhere, cloistered and bland, a fact hidden by the façade of whiskey and cocaine; to the violation and carelessness of the dùthchas by thanes, headline-grabbing prime ministers and media, not understanding (or on pretence of ignorance) the rightness of deep-veined ancestry, as though a paper decree holds more weight than a dolmen, a murder of ravens or an ancestral kinship system, remembered long before there were scratches on a page, trapping words into idioms and propaganda.

FIRE IN THE HEAD

These wings are the beauty of the poet’s soul. The songs, thus flying immortal from their mortal parent, are pursued by clamorous flights of censures, which swarm in far greater numbers, and threaten to devour them; but these last are not winged. At the end of a very short leap they fall plump down, and rot, having received from the souls out of which they came no beautiful wings. But the melodies of the poet ascend, and leap, and pierce into the deeps of infinite time.
Ralph Waldo Emerson ~~The Poet

And now I feel the need to sleep for a million years.

A human being, or so, might read this letter and think, What do you matter? What does it matter that you are what you are? And I am confounded that you is not I, or even we. As though, at some crossroads, people stopped singing and meeting. Stopped remembering. Forswore knowing me as family. The grief I experience at having these children’s backs turned away from this love is devastating. This tenderness of family, lost. This memory of elder lore seemingly vanquished.

Well, Voldemort, upstart of faux-wizardry that you hide behind, with your Apple smart watch and your Louis Vuitton running shoes, you cannot set your bedding down, up here. My scarped soul. My moss-breek. You will not be lound from me. No imlioc, no glisk, no fardon and no ystafell in which you can hide. That you choose to call a passage to within the earth, and a place of secrets where only they and I can hear and know, a grave (where no ancestor ever was buried) shows only that you believe some resurrection fiction, and not the mythos birth and death that is that, of seed, to stem, to leaf, to bud, to flower, to fruit. That you call worship, where there is no god but us, and I, and we.

What happens if you forget? If you are forgotten? Is there a reason for the idea of death? Are you so lonely you can’t understand our language? Our zwer? Don’t you remember we are knowe? That we are daal’mist? Lighty-dark? Geal-cauld and the plutsh of walking boots hollow-ringing in the dark, hushed, torchlit barrows of your ancestors, telling of Merlin of the Borders, and Mackerel and Morgan le Fey? Children’s stories hiding a deeper wisdom. Just in case?

I am not forgotten, Carvette; not so drookit I can’t feel the sun or raise my voice in sheepy-silver shine at all. I am no ink-drawn border on Google Maps: no England. No Scotland, Wales, Skye, Man, Ireland, Lewis, Harris, Mór, Ratharsair, Orkney, Scilly or Stornaway. These are names that are written to push me from your insides. As if you could. I am, that’s enough to say we are.

I AM FEY AND THAT’S NORMAL

As if the idea of glittery, painted, winged, diminutive inventions of an invader species could diminish us. Call us “fairies” as though we are not I, as though I am not the whole land, the entire sky, the everywhere who is river and underworld cave. Could warp us into a bit of no importance when, in fact I am, we are, Gentry. We are the Good Folk. I am sídhe and Rob Roy and Sterling. Calgacus, Culloden, Annie Lennox, the Monarch of the Glen and—once—elephants with long straight tusks. Black bears were all killed off to make silly hats for some inntrenger-appointed king, or queen (such pompous titling words, as though one person has more importance than another). I am carboniferous limestone formed about 340 million years gone. I am Pendle Hill. Sandstone and shale and gritstone moorlands. I am drumlins, oh, and I am Emily Bronte. I am cousin to the dyke swarm of the Isle of Mull, 56.4392° N, 6.0009° W, off the west coast of Alba. I am the ill-fated, possible vilified in some propaganda-driven, first century media condemnation: Cartimandua.

History is an opinion with an agenda. Its curse is that it is a story written, not spoken, that of men, of what is taken and who is harmed and who is better than everyone slaughtered, no matter the kindred species, no matter that the land burns because of it. History uses words as though they are flosh instead of a winterbourne, in the wonder and bafflement, and laughter and tripple of us.

I am, we are, here is…

DIVERGENT

I am here.

I was body-born as who I am now, in Australia. I was the firstborn and the only born human child of Celtic ness that salmon-leaps as far back as records are kept. Parents forgotten. Here for just a generation. Dead in some high-walled graveyard, or else ashes that are nourishment for controlled roses, with a hint of christianness to dishonour the fire in their blood.

Have I a right to be here? In this landscape? This person of ancient differences and extremes: long-befossilled desert and Uluru stone? No. I have never been granted permission. Not by the First Nation human people, not by emu people, not by a wedgetail eagle-person or barramundi clan. I am the people of so many Celtic countries I forget, just for a moment, how many.

Until the great white shark, the goanna, the king brown, the jumping jack ant colony, red dust, oceanic rip and giant old growth mountain ash say, Here, here, be here and sing to us of unknown or unremembered being, since Gondwana, child of soil and sun and star… I remain a changeling from the Seelie Court, left in a place in which I should not, really, thrive. For that I apologise with the whole of us.

NOW

I bring stories. I will offer them. That’s all I have. That’s who we are. But who we are is where we belong. And what, of that, we can bring to the gathering. Whether we tell of loch or ffrwd, of decimation or invasion.

Better that, than to merely say, Hi, my name is…

as though that is all.

……..as though that is all.

…

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