The day we met Dream Angus

By Mary Cane:

Dreams to sell, fine dreams to sell,
Angus is here with dreams to sell. 
Hush now wee bairnie and sleep without fear,
For Angus will bring you a dream, my dear.             
– Scots Lullaby

Scotland had Dream Angus before Roald Dahl’s Big Friendly Giant. Angus is the Celtic god of dreams who goes about the country with four birds flying around his head, delivering unsettling dreams of love. Most of us receive dreams that fly higher than our ability to wrestle them into reality. Leaving a rather large office and workroom-tidying job, we drove to Bennachie the other day for a spot of daytime dreaming. We hadn’t been there for a while. Normally as you know there is a breeze, at worst a cold driving drizzle but on that day we were lucky. 

There is a devotional aspect to a summit climb. On Mither Tap cloistered trees open up to a long pious walk. Then over the brow comes the reward of the high altar summit view. Then there is the submissive plod up the slope our heads bent in supplication. While I walked, I was thinking of a friend. From Australia, she came to stay with us along that well-trodden path of forbear searching. A keen reader at home, she like lots of other people, she had discovered the books by Nan Shepherd. She was captivated by those tales of grit and glitter up on the high plateau and dreamed of seeing the place where Nan Shepherd had walked and to feel in a poetic and lyrical way where she ‘entered into the hills’. When she arrived, our friend enjoyed seeing the new slippery five-pound note with Nan’s head on it, but that’s as close to Nan as she got. Knees that so enjoyed reading about the Cairngorms in Melbourne, were completely unable to climb any of the paths to the actual Cairngorms. She could not make her dream of Nan into a reality. Reaching the sanctuary of the barbican entrance to Mither Tap’s inner fortress, I looked back to the west. There was our home parish in the far distance, and if I squinted there were my overcrowded shelves and my worktable. The height gave a better perspective, so they didn’t look so cluttered from up there.  

Lately I have been outwitted by my own things. Travelling can muddle one’s memory and it can take a while to recalibrate. It’s hard to remember the location of the stapler/grater/leaf-blower or even recall what they look like after our long time away in America. This was witnessed by one of our children and I didn’t like the look I saw in his eyes, a mix of LOL and OMG as his mind jumped to a possible future unravelling all our stuff.

Maureen from the Balmedie library has found me a philosophy book where the ‘thingness’ of things is explained.  Things or ‘tings’ from the Scandinavian are what we can experience with our physical selves… a doorway we can go through, a spoon to be touched by hand and lip, or a Balmedie sand dune the grandchildren can slide down. Objects on the other hand, the book ever so quietly confided to me, are things that have ceased to be used. In my home surroundings, objects have accrued and accreted, on floors, on shelves and even in doorways. I leant closer to the book all the better to hear and understand. The ‘thing’ that once beckoned, the philosopher continued as an ‘object’ now blocks… Ah-ha. 

Sitting up there on the volcanic granite plug with tea and cake in the fresh air there was nothing that blocked.  

From that high vantage point none of the A.W.P.R. could be seen but there are stretches that are now linked into a curving pale gash across the county. On the way back down the Devil’s Causeway, I realised that we can be nourished by other people’s journeys so by Hosie’s Well I picked up a small stone to take with me to Melbourne next year. At that moment four black grouse whirred out of the heather, and that’s when we knew Dream Angus was near.

***

About Mary:

Sticks and stones have always held a poetic resonance for me. The first occasion I felt that cock's comb of interest we all have in our heads rise up, was when I was opening a gate. I was at home in Cornwall and helping to bring the cows in one afternoon. The prop I used was covered in dried accretions of small farm muck. 'That's a tine from your great grandfather's 'ay turner’. said Dad, 'It's made of Canadian Redwood’.  

'Goodness me' I thought to myself (or words to that effect) ‘things are not what they seem. They have history and character, a story even’. 

In a lifetime of creative work since, I have preferred the material to the flesh and blood…but shh, that’s a secret I don’t share with everyone. I am drawn to pathetic fallacy, to keeping things, to mending, to protecting the materiality of my world...  family things, tools, objects, furniture and their stories. Where was I? Ah yes the bio. Sixty years later, you find me living in Aberdeen, a PhD student at the Elphinstone Institute (Folklore and Ethnology) researching the part grandmothers play in the passing on of family story when their families live far away. That redwood tine back in Cornwall would be pleased.

Crossing Brooklyn Bridge

By Anna Evans:

And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
– Hart Crane

I have been dreaming I am in New York. Looking out across the harbour to where the bridge begins and ends. With a paperback of poems to carry as I walk, walk across thee. Waiting for the sun to set, I follow the steps upwards to the bridge where time spans like birds in flight. 

From the book an image draws fragile in my hands. Without looking down I know on the cover is the bridge, pastel coloured and simple. The suspension of wires dominates the view, dark lines crossing over. The lines that cross from the centre outwards, to the bricks of Brooklyn. Birds fly distant, the kinds that children draw, shaping the letter m for movement. Through the middle rising upwards a vertical blue like crayon marks, shading to where the sky and water meet ascending; to the blue of distance that throws outwards and upwards. Joining the impossible like a bridge from shore to shore. The city in the distance marked in pink, as it might look in the morning light. It contrasts with the black lines of iron girders, and the steps leading onwards to the bridge. 

I know that inside the book is an inscription that reads To A. neat and precise with just one x to mark the spot. In your room the books in stacks surround us. The books like bridges: we take turns to select one and read out the first line. I pick up the book of poems saying I want to read it. And so, you take the book, write just inside the cover and give it to me. I never read further than the first poem or skim a few lines here and there. Still the words reach out and form a trail I must follow, in endless rivers crossing the land and all the flow of words that clogs them. Books that don’t belong to anyone, that stay with us for a time. 

I sit down and read, imagining that I look to where your arches end and the point at which the shadow forms. I read: Under thy shadow by the pier I waited / Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.

Hart Crane looked out from his window on Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, compelled by a changing view of the bridge. A vision to chase in symbolic form, in language. I look to find the author in its solid lines, in all its transient footsteps. To see him address the other side and set these bridges in motion. And the bridge moves as we walk. Its solid lines make stillness and motion combine. Iridescent, it sets in motion each day past; as though night and the fall of morning were gone already.

Waiting for night to fall, the dark comes quickly, and in crossing the city changes from the red and pink of dying lights, across purple-blue; to see the bridge come alive and the city melt in its shadow. I walk across moving through the crowds of people posing for photographs; there is no solitary view of the bridge, no chance to stand and look across. 

In the centre, two domed arches from which a series of wires are suspended in grid-like lines drawn against the sky. They are not so much imprisoning as uplifting, reaching high across the city. I walk taking blurry impressionistic pictures, city lights of many colours. Buildings that reflect one another, incandescent and blurring away into hazy distance. Becoming ghostly, they question solidity. Walking the bridge, it lives in motion. The wires suspended in black lines to draw you upwards. The view of the bridge that comes from walking. 

With you he walked across, hand in hand, in rapture. From this moment: these bridges in motion. Always crossing, from what is past and present, to what is on the other side. 

⁎⁎⁎

Walking across as sunset came and went. The sudden descent of darkness and the changing colours of the lights; the endless streams of traffic passing. When everything that lies below becomes murkier and more uncertain. The bridge measures out the distance between each wire, and our eyes fix on a series of lines laid out as far as the eye can see across the unfathomable reaches of water.

As darkness falls the wires suspended are lit with fairy lights that twinkle, that dwindle into distance, even as the darkness seems more engulfing. It saturates the sky above and draws upwards from the dark constant of the river below. And above and below are where the bridge remains suspended. Its very tautness and the precision of its measurement are carefully weighted against the depths; yet still the depths remain and seem ever closer. It is there in the way it joins across a gulf, a chasm; by its very joining it projects our thoughts to what lies below. 

In the night you dance exhilarated holding hands. Dancing over the bridge, uplifted. Like the bridge you are indestructible. The bridge is more than just a bridge. The bridge is life. In rapture you seek to say what daunts, what sinks under river water. To look upwards, where wires close in, suspending thoughts from city to city, from river bank to sea shore. So that for a moment you are flying, though you may always believe in falling. 

The water dark and obscuring. The bridge brings a shape and form to what is unfathomable. You must believe that there is a way to say it, that the bridge is possible. That you can write a message in a bottle and throw it carelessly to the currents, in waves. The bridge that cuts you off, unreachable, lost at sea. Your meaning obscured when you wanted to make visible another world just beyond this one. The bridge transports in metaphor, to carry across, from one side to the other. You leave only your words. While somewhere there are those that fall between the gaps, who find the unknown in the measured reason of the bridge.

While I have been crossing the bridge, darkness has come and changed the world as we see it. Each day, the same adjustment. From the solid mass of stone, soar two great arches, the strength of steel wires, thick and twisted, to iron girders bordering the edges, and thinner wires reaching out grid-like, touching the blue true of the sky, the billowing clouds, the coming light. The light that is always coming. There is colour and a sense of the city all around. Impressions gather like scattered lights and solid lines of steel. 

I am always imagining endings. That I might look down to the river and see your message in a bottle, transcending time. The past is there and waits for us to cross. Now the book leads me to the bridge. Crossing over, crossing back to what came before. A bridge to my past self, wherever time has placed you.

Across the vast silences like the river flowing, ever-flowing. When things changed, and each moment was already lost, unreal. 

I sometimes think we were never present; we were already looking back. You once wrote of me as a silhouette receding against the sky. Was it always so? I find you here again as I pick up the book and read onwards. I am free to cross the bridge and look back across the city, that expanse of time that is past. Is there a chance then, that when you read this you may say, that is not how it was, that is not what I said, that is not how it was, at all?

***

Anna Evans is a writer from Huddersfield in the north of England, currently living in Cambridge. Her interests are in migration and literature, cities and movement, and she has completed an MA in ‘Writing the Modern World’ at the University of East Anglia. She is currently working on a project on place in Jean Rhys’s early novels, and you can follow her progress through her blog, And The Street Walks In.

Am I Alone In Dreaming Of Rubble

By David Lewis:

I am walking through a blunt triangle of empty terraced streets, dominated by a long low red brick church, closed and boarded up; a hole in the boards allows local children to once again play in the church porch.  It is starting to get dark.

Twenty years ago, in a period of deep, isolated research, I began to have dreams about Liverpool.  I was studying the city’s churches, curious about how they define the city; how their spires contribute to the roofline, how their architecture dominates a street, how the city is changed on the date of their demolition.  I worked alone, spending weeks in the city’s Records Office poring over memoirs and old street plans.   Days were spent immersed in the stark and beautiful photographs of Liverpool in its Victorian prime, and in the dark and destructive 1960s when many of the city’s older churches were demolished.  I took many long journeys to find the sooty, bruised survivors, only to discover that this destruction was ongoing.  In some cases I arrived only days after the final clearance, to a raw slash in the urban landscape, a sense of wounded stone and dust settling.  I began to see all buildings as temporary, as part of a rolling history of the fabric of the city.  Lines began to blur. 

And I started to dream.  Carl Jung famously dreamed of the city; mine were more prosaic. They have always been short and in black and white, and fall into two categories.  In the first, I can see small details of the city - street corners, ruined walls, unnamed streets reduced to fields of rubble.  Some districts appear time and again; Edge Hill, Toxteth, Netherfield Road, places that have been in a radical process of decay and regeneration since the 1960s. I started to record the dreams as accurately as I could, in a staccato, notebook style.  Sometimes they help me remember more detail; in other cases they are all that is left of the dream. 

Unknown derelict dockland streets, ironwork, weeds, tall closed warehouses.  A steep cobbled street called St George’s Place, behind a railway station. Early morning. 

The dreams were fuelled by the photographs, but I came to realise that they were also reviving memories.  The Liverpool of my childhood was a city partly in ruins, and blitz-memories were still strong.  Older people talked of evacuation to north Wales, of nights in air-raid shelters, of bombers over the city.  The destruction continued after the war, when in a spurt of self-loathing the city demolished with a frenzy, and on car journeys to visit relatives in the northern reaches of the city I saw miles of cleared terraced streets.  In those days all gaps in the landscape were known as ‘bommies’, a word which meant bomb sites but also bonfires; urban folk memory overlapped urban function.  I had a recurring dream of a large square black building in the middle of a demolished city, a composite view of the boarded-up churches and barely-open pubs I saw on the disappearing streets of north Liverpool. 

In the other dreams, I see residential areas associated with my grandfather’s family.  Vincent Lewis was born in 1904, and grew up surrounded by family in the working-class streets of Liverpool 8.   As a child I knew many of the streets with family connections, and as an adult it was these places that began to appear in different dreams; sometimes in ruins, sometimes full of people, sometimes just streets of alleyways and tall brick walls. 

Cockburn Street in the early morning.  There are no cars and the street is deserted but I can see down another cleared street to the Mersey below me, gleaming silver.  Tall walls behind me. 

I came to realise that all these dreams, these blurrings of old photograph and old memory, are a creative response to the demolition of my grandfather’s city.  The books I have written on Liverpool are an attempt to understand and articulate the Victorian city that is gradually disappearing.  Yet the pace of urban evolution is so quick that one day all our familiar places will have gone or been radically changed and everyday memories, however commonplace, will have become history.  I still walk the vulnerable city as often as I can, exploring and recording amputated streets, stretches of cobble and redundant warehouses.  Often after these long walks I dream once more of the city in ruins, feeling now that our rubble dreams tell us more than we know.      

David Lewis has written five books of history/landscape/psychogeography about his native Liverpool and Merseyside.  He posts urban/rural images on Instagram - davidlewis4168 and mutters about the world on Twitter - @dlewiswriter