Sketches of China 05: The Great Wall

Illustration: Mark Doyle

This is the fifth instalment of Sketches of China, a collaboration between the writer James Kelly and the illustrator Mark Doyle.

The graveyard shift, sitting alone in the candlelight as the clock strikes four, the night wearing on, surrounded by the room’s thick stone walls and the damp smell of the salt air, hearing the lullaby of the waves outside and sitting, key in hand, turning it over again and again, the key to a kingdom that lies in ruin, the barbarians camping outside, their advance checked – for now – by the wall, by that enormous structure built of human sweat and blood, marking out the northern frontier, a border running west from where the mountains meet the sea, tracing an improbable boundary across rocky limestone hills cloaked in rich verdure, joining the dots of torch-lit watchtowers burning in the night, a structure only as strong as its weakest link, plunging over the face of a cliff, down into the fast-flowing waters and foaming narrows of a ravine before resuming on the other side, continuing across the vast expanses of scrub and wilderness, across the steppe, before petering out somewhere far in the west, that tormented figure sitting alone in the candlelit room, the night wearing on, meditating on the territory guarded by that immense structure, only as strong as its weakest part, key in hand, turning it over and over, the wall marking out the space where the heavenly empire dwells, the self-sufficiency and sanctity of one kingdom above all, the barbarians waiting outside, key in hand, over and over again, mulling over the decision as Beijing lies sacked and smouldering, the tortured faces of a father and a lover, meditating on their fate, on the price of revenge, weighing up a choice between the lesser of two evils – treason or an empty throne – and intuiting that the decision is perhaps already made, the candles flickering in the damp salty air, the touch of the metal, a key, the key, the key to a future preordained, destiny – or so it would seem – in the palm of a hand.

***

James Kelly is a writer and translator with a strong interest in landscape and time. Read more of his work at www.geosoph.scot/writing/.

Mark Doyle is an artist and illustrator working in painting, sculpture, printmaking and digital media. See more of his work at www.markdoyle.org and on Instagram @markdoyleartist.

High Water

By Fiona M Jones:

I am underwater, give or take four days or maybe five. I stand below the ever-breaking surface of a galloping umbrous river: the Teviot carrying meltwater, silt and detritus down from the Cheviot Hills to the Tweed. 

February, in Scotland, drops slow grey rain from low grey skies, then turns to sleet and stays there far too long. One night the distant hills turn white, the short grey daylight fails to break the frost, and snow finally advances down across the landscape. 

It lingered this time for almost a week, reclaiming trodden tracks and drifting again over roads. On a brighter afternoon it began its thaw, icicles crashing from eaves and roadways turning to slush. The wind veered south-westerly; the rain arrived. 

That’s when this happens: when rain and slush and sliding snow all hit the streams at the same time. The rivers rise, heavy with silt, heavier still with the debris they rip from their banks. Branches of deadwood and torn-up greenery/brownery. Charging like wild horses, the water loosens last year’s whitened reeds and sweeps them along until every obstacle gathers its own tangle of strawlike flotsam. 

When the river subsides and the riverside walks re-emerge from water to mud, it’s the high-flung heaps of dead river-reed that mark where the water was: beside you, in the undergrowth; across glades of greening snowdrops and wild garlic; and, here and there, in the trees above your head. The Teviot has fallen back to a sedater cantering pace, still murky with silt, still covering more than its usual bounds. You can see where in its haste it has stripped away ground from under its nearest trees. You can see the broken stems of last season’s river-reeds, half-overlaid with mud now, ready for this year’s new spikes to take their place. And you can see new gravel-banks and newly-lodged fallen trees—things that will either wash away once more next time the river rises, or will gather enough grasping plantlife to grow into islands. 

This high-water mark will fade out over the weeks, swamped not by water now but by new foliage; atrophied by decomposition; removed piecemeal by wind and nest-building birds. Only for now it sits above my path, in places higher than my head, a boast or maybe a threat: This is my river-bed, and I am not always quiet. Can you feel my speed and coldness flowing through you where you stand?

***
Fiona M Jones writes short/flash/micro fiction and CNF. One of her stories gained a star rating on Tangent Online's "Recommended Reading" list for 2020. Fiona's published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

Names and Purposes

By Eytan Pol:

There is a juniper tree rooted in the red desert flats south of Twin Rocks in south-central Utah’s Capitol Reef National Park. Like most junipers, its bark and branches are not straight or smooth, but twisted, rolled upward and seemingly folding into itself. Junipers have a way of looking as if they are under constant pressure from within, the veins almost popping out, intensely tightening its muscles so it can.. so it can do what? It almost looks as if they are trying with all their might to get every single drop of water from the nearly-dry desert soil. Every fiber in their being is tensed up in the effort to reach it. 

But this particular juniper tree near Twin Rocks, looks different. Two sunburnt and scarred limbs stick out from the main trunk, reaching upwards and outwards in the soft blue desert sky. The bark is twisted like all others of its kind, but the way in which it is formed can only remind one of a ballerina posing beautifully on a stage. I do not know anything of dance and theater, but in a way, this juniper reminds me of exactly that. Posing on its own desert stage. A constant performance without an audience, a fact that makes it more captivating. 

Overwhelming and soothing serenity. An emancipating sensation of the necessity of self-reliance. If I were to disappear, how long would it take for people to take notice? How long could I wander around undisturbed if I strayed off-trail, disappearing into a side canyon? Hidden in vast and dry fields of red rock, heated by the high summer desert sun. A cottonwood or overhanging cliff to shade my mind and body. A solitary place to nurture and reset the synapses of my brain, a place of everything and nothing. Perhaps I tend to romanticize too much, and I might be a naive idealist. Know that this is by choice after careful consideration of the alternatives. 

A heavy red rock sits sturdy in place, lodged between brothers and sisters, big and small. It has fallen from the crimson Wingate sandstone cliffs hundreds or perhaps thousands of years ago. I see blooming cliffrose with soothing yellow flowers, exuding toughness rather than beauty. It has rooted in vertical nooks and crevices so unlikely and small that even their existence is simply a wonder to behold. A couple of green cottonwood trees are standing somewhere alone hidden in a canyon and filled with dozens of webby nests made by thousands of tent caterpillars. All hanging by a thread. It is a reminder that even here in this wretched wasteland, life does not only find a way, it thrives. A thought which results in joyful, tearful liberation, powerful enough to erode even the fear of death itself. 

The moment inspires elation with my time and place in the world and the finite nature of my existence. I am sitting in a part of the park that has no name. At least, as far as I know. In every direction, there are soft rolling desert hills, steeper to the foot than to the eye. They are sparsely scattered with as many black basalt rocks as green desert shrubs, prickly pear cacti and blooming yellow wildflowers. The occasional but lonely pinyon or juniper sticks out from the red dirt canvas in which it roots. Hidden between these gentle ups and downs are washes, gulches, gorges, and canyons. Invisible to the outsider’s eye, unless you know where to look. Carved by the patient forces of wind and especially water, although most of them exist in a dry state now for much of the year. 

It is becoming clear to me that this desert landscape is a metaphor for desert life. The superficial sameness of these arid hills can be mistaken in the same manner one misinterprets the days in the desert as monotonous. Yet, as this rolling horizon in front of me harbors secret depths and hidden places, so does the seemingly gentle line of time. 

***
After graduating in North American Studies, Eytan spent a number of months living and working in Capitol Reef National Park in Utah during the first wave of the corona pandemic. He is currently working on a larger project on the desert and the American West.

Limin-alley at Imagine! Belfast

Image: Imagine! Belfast

By Sara Bellini

“A successful city is an entity that is continually reconfiguring itself, changing its social structure and meaning, even if its contours don’t look very different” writes Deyan Sudjic in The Language of Cities. By successful, he means a city that is lively and functioning, where citizens not only feel safe and secure, but they feel like they belong. Well-maintained structures and infrastructures connect and serve people’s lives and “legible, handsome, easily negotiated public spaces make the individual feel part of something that they share with the rest of the city”.

The conversation on how we imagine the future of the city is at the core of Imagine! Belfast, a free festival about politics, culture and activism, promoting under-represented voices and equality. The annual event is now at its seventh edition and will run from the 22nd to the 28th of March, featuring talks, film, music, drama, readings, exhibitions, discussions and workshops. Highlights include an interview with Noam Chomsky and the possibility to pitch in ideas on how to change Belfast in the initiative Build Belfast Back Better. Due to the pandemic, all of the events are online, which means that anyone living elsewhere can join, with special exhibitions taking place in real life. 

One of them is Limin-alley, a group exhibition where eight local artists and designers are called to create site-specific pieces in “entries” (alleyways) across South and East Belfast. The project is a collaboration between 9ft in Common, developing a Belfast Alley Map, and Liminal [Space] Belfast, a platform for pop-up exhibitions in liminal spaces. The locations of Limin-alley, the alleyways between Belfast’s terrace houses, were chosen because of their potential for civic activism, due to their very nature of in-between spaces, neither completely private nor exactly public. The artworks will be on display between the 25th and 28th of March and will be introduced with an online talk by project partners Amberlea Neely, Aisling Rusk and Meadhbh McIlgorm on the 25th. Images of the exhibition will be available on the website of Liminal [Space] Belfast after the end of the festival.

Image: Imagine! Belfast

Although Limin-alley and the whole festival are Belfast specific, the themes and ideas are easily relatable. During the pandemic, as a consequence of the lockdown, the social fabrics of our cities have changed. The way we use public space has changed. The way we perceive togetherness. Even the way we experience the places we’ve always deemed safe, our own houses, where suddenly we have to spend more time than we deemed possible and at the same time we have to follow strict rules about whom we can allow in or about whom we can visit. Now more than ever, we need to imagine what could be and how we share our collective spaces, both physically in our cities and metaphorically in determining who gets to express themselves in politics, culture and public life.

To find out about all the events and to donate in support of the non-profit organisation behind the festival, please visit Imagine! Belfast
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On the verb 'to be'

By Ciarán O'Rourke:

After they died, I experienced a slow longing to see my grandparents again, but also for Rossinver itself. Their now-permanent absence seemed increasingly entangled with my yearning for that small corner of north Leitrim where they were from: the acre of mown grass at the back of their bungalow, within earshot of the Ballagh river, and haunted in summer months by quick-darting swallows, skirting close to ground whenever skies were changing, blue to grey. 

The poems I wrote for my grandparents – deathbed portraits, reaching through loss – were also tributes to this place that had shaped not just my siblings and myself, but several generations of my Dad’s family: a weathery place, rich with rain, that for me, visiting in summer months from the Dublin suburbs, had always been both recognisable and strange, a home away. 

I felt a similar sensation last autumn when I moved to Carrick-on-Shannon, with my bicycle and a bagful of books in tow. There was a quiet happiness in arriving not only in this town – with its wide, surging river and cautiously bustling streets – but at being able to call Leitrim my home county. By choosing Carrick, I imagined that I was somehow mending a gap, bridging the long aftermath of my grandparents’ lives.

The first time I decided to read the elegies for my Grandad in public, I had forced myself, beforehand, to practice the lines aloud, like an actor, until I knew their sound by heart. Regardless of what I consciously felt while reading, my voice and body could complete the performance, by reflex if necessary. This is now one of my preparatory rituals for any live event: I read (noisily) to myself, the very repetition of the words gradually providing a protective shelter against whatever gusts of panic or self-consciousness may arrive in the actual moment.

In decamping to Leitrim, of course, I was entering the demesne of a number of literary figures, past and present. On my daily walks, I pass a mural celebrating Carrick’s writers, including John McGahern, whose stories and often mordant essays my Grandad used to quote with admiring precision. “It takes some skill”, I recall him saying, definitively, “to finish a sentence with the verb ‘to be’”: a feat the Leitrim author had managed to do, with his adage that “all understanding is joy, even in the face of dread, and cannot be taken from us until everything is.” 

Another of McGahern’s creative credos concerned “the quality of feeling that’s brought to a landscape”, and his belief that this “is actually much more important” in the making of literature “than the landscape itself”. The question of “whether it contains rushes or lemon trees”, he said, is less vital than “the light of passion” that an author brings to the view. I agree with him. But I also suspect that he made these remarks partly in resistance to a culture accustomed to placing (perhaps even pigeon-holing) its writers: as if by re-affirming his fidelity to literature’s universality, he were also implicitly raising a question mark over its so-called “Irish” variety, or the applicability of this brand to his own origins and literary practice.

In fact, Leitrim, specifically, rooted and nourished McGahern: filtering that “light of passion” he so sought and valued, and helping to sustain the restraint and fierce clarity of his writing, with its breathing fields and hedgerows, its turning seasons. It was here that his revolving cast of reticent, perceptive characters became real, where his skill in rendering their flinty, sidling conversation was honed. His stories of endurance and return (both human and natural) were invariably drawn from Leitrim’s rushy hills, sodden with darkness and light – without a lemon tree in sight.

McGahern’s was a particular kind of attachment to a particular part of the world, his work lit through by a clear-eyed attentiveness to his own locale – an observational intimacy, allowing both vividness and depth. What I find in McGahern’s fiction is close, I think, to what led me back to Leitrim in life: the desire to stand on the fringes of a single place, only partly my own, with its hidden history and visible dailiness, looking in, hoping at last to belong.

***

Ciarán O'Rourke lives in Leitrim, Ireland. He has won the Lena Maguire/Cúirt New Irish Writing Award, the Westport Poetry Prize, and the Fish Poetry Prize. His first collection, The Buried Breath, was published by Irish Pages Press in 2018. His second collection is due to be released in 2021.

Printed Matters: Point.51

By Sara Bellini 

The 51st parallel north is the point where continental Europe and the UK meet, halfway between Dover and Calais in the English Channel. This meeting point also inspired the name of Point.51, a London-based magazine of slow journalism and documentary photography.

The look is simple and effective: a red matte cover, a full-page portrait, one word that identifies the theme of the issue and a phrase to invite you in. The content requires time, a comfortable armchair and a cup of tea: Don’t flip through the pages, linger, take everything in. This is what I immediately loved about this new publication, the slow and in-depth approach to stories, narrated equally through words and images. 

We all consume the news, or more often than not, news headlines, and their abundance and speed detach us from the content and from the people the headlines are about. Point.51 gives you the opportunity to explore significant news topics through personal stories, focusing on ordinary people and how they relate to the bigger narratives of our multi-layered present. It gives you time to empathise, reflect and form an informed opinion, which is crucial in shaping contemporary conversations.

Issue 4 will hit the shelves in May, and meanwhile we caught up with editor Rob Pinney:

What was the inspiration behind Point.51 and what drives you?

We wanted to do something that gave us the space and time to really dig into complex stories – both in the writing and in the photography – without having to strip them down. We want to work on stories that challenge us, and challenge our readers, and I think that curiosity is really what drives Point.51 forward. 

Why did you choose the print magazine as a format?

I think we knew that Point.51 was going to be a print magazine from the outset. In fact, I don't think I can remember us having a conversation about the possibility of doing it any other way. But as we've grown, I think it's now clearer than ever that print is the right format for us.

I like to think about it by flipping the question on its head: how would we want to read these stories? For me, it is undoubtedly in print. I want to sit with them and read them through, following the story as it unfolds, without distractions.

Point.51 comes out twice a year, and so the stories we work on for the magazine are usually put together over fairly long periods of time. They're designed to last – we want them to feel just as relevant in five years time as they do today – and there's a permanence to pulling them together in a printed magazine that reflects that.

Then it's also important for the photography. My background is as a photographer, and we pride ourselves on commissioning and publishing really great documentary photography that stands shoulder-to-shoulder with our journalism. There are 102 images in our latest issue, and without wanting to sound too old fashioned, I think that work really is at its best when seen in print.

At the core of your magazine are a strong sense of place and a genuine interest in people, what’s the relationship between these two elements?

Definitely. Both people and place are essential to the stories we work on. But they come up in different ways, and I think the relationship between them changes from story to story.

People are at the forefront of all of our stories – that has been a constant throughout. But place comes up in different ways. To give a couple of examples: there is a story in our first issue about Cuban asylum seekers arriving in Serbia to make use of visa-free entry for Cuban passport holders, which exists as a legacy of the Cold War. In that case, place plays a very specific and explicit role in the story. Then there's a story in our second issue about Port Talbot, an industrial town in north Wales known for steel production. When the steelworks opened there in the 1950s, it employed 18,000 people – literally half the town – but today that number has fallen to just 4,000. At the centre of the story are multiple generations of a family with a long-standing connection to the steelworks, and you get to see how those different generations – with different experiences – relate to their town. Bringing those different perspectives into our stories is really important.

So I don't think you can say that there's a fixed or static relationship between people and place in the magazine, but the stories are definitely concerned with the way the two inform and shape each other.

How has Point.51 changed since Issue 1 and what are your plans for Issue 4?

When we started out, lots of friends and colleagues thought we were crazy trying to start a print magazine for long-form journalism and documentary photography when other publications were disappearing left, right, and centre. They were probably right – it's certainly not easy. But we've seen the magazine go from being just an idea to an established title with a solid and growing reputation.

Issue 4 is well underway, and should hit the shelves in May. The theme for the next issue is Nations and Nationalism, but as with all of our issues, we're coming at it from a variety of angles – from the story of a "micronation" in Italy to the relationship between people living in Gibraltar and La Linea de Concepción, the towns on either side of the border.

The team of people working on Point.51 has also grown – Nick, Sara, and Meg have joined us, and their knowledge and hard work is already showing. So yes, there have been lots of changes.

But I also think that, in a fairly fundamental way, it hasn't changed at all. We had a very clear idea of what we wanted Point.51 to be when we started it: a straightforward magazine for considered long-form journalism and original photography. I think we've stuck to that pretty doggedly, and I think it's what a lot of our readers really like about it.

Can you tell us a bit more about the concept of little story/big story behind Point.51?

Yes certainly! "Big story/little story" is an approach we use when working on stories for Point.51. We can't claim it as an original concept – it has been put to use (and written about) widely – but it's something we try to put into practice wherever possible.

Essentially it comes down to the choice between doing something that is wide but shallow or narrow but deep, and deciding where you think the real value is. The stories we like to work on for Point.51 are usually concerned with pretty big topics: we've reported stories about migration and asylum, the climate crisis, mental health, Brexit, and the Irish border, to name a few. But in each case we're zooming right in to tell a smaller story within that, concentrating on just a few individuals, or a single place, or maybe both.

The small stories are the ones we can really relate to, and that stay with us. And I think that if you tell the small story really well – bringing in all the detail and complexity that exists in real life, and which often gets cut out – then you're also providing a much richer perspective on the big story too.

We're not trying to tell readers what to think or to persuade them to see something in a particular way. We want to bring people great stories that are told thoroughly and faithfully, but ultimately it's for them to engage with them on their own terms.

As usual, Berliners can find Point.51 at do you read me?!? and Rosa Wolf. Check out the website for online shopping and a free newsletter with more articles and photography.

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Maps in Sand

By David Lewis:

My family has passed through any number of forgotten towns and cities, losing languages and leaving our dead in overgrown graveyards.  What connects us to time and place?  Unless attachments are actively preserved, the connections become fainter with each generation.  

My grandfather William Eyton Jones was born in Llangollen, north Wales.  My grandmother Janet was born in Glasgow, but Llangollen became very important to her, and for my mother it was a second home.  When I was a child we visited the town to tidy the family graves and visit my mother’s cousin.  I felt that we belonged and did not belong; we ate ice cream in the sunshine with the other tourists, yet we had graves in the hillside cemetery and family on quiet back streets.  

I returned to Llangollen before lockdown to walk the streets and refresh the memories.  Strengthening these connections between memory, family and landscape is like maintaining maps in sand, retracing the outlines of a story to revitalise it, but what I am really strengthening is how my family feels about this town.  This was a landscape we knew for 160 years – windows, brickwork, chimney pots, the endless roar of the river; things of no importance, the secret elements of our lives unknown even to ourselves.  What stories took place on these streets? In thin sunshine I walked through love stories, family walks, chance encounters, laughter, funerals.  

I stopped at the war memorial.  The granite glinted in the sunshine, awaiting its moment of importance in November.  My grandfather knew and served alongside these Great War dead, the Hugheses, the Griffithses, the Lewises, above all the Joneses.  Family history is an emotional spotlight of memory and narrative that illuminates some people and hides others.  Many of these Joneses would be family who had faded from my story and become important in others.  Perhaps my grandfather joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers on the same day as these Joneses, the lost cousins from the hill farms.  Is it irreverent to think of this war memorial as a monument to unknown family?  Perhaps.  

The steep road to the cemetery was still narrow and quiet, but new houses were creeping up the hillsides, building on what was open farmland and a shaggy, gloomy playing field.  But the little cemetery was still a quiet place of yews and damp grass, wild-flowers and benign neglect, with superb views over the town and the distant hills.  My Llangollen grandparents are buried there.  This was the focus of our visits, the maintenance of their resting place; even today all my Llangollen excursions end at the grave. 

These maps in sand refresh family story and family history, but there is only so far back in time I can travel.  My most valued family connections to Llangollen are two battered 1930s photograph albums; my mother and her older sister at Plas Newydd, an uncle playing with his dog in the sunshine.  Yet one album is unlabelled, marooning the family in a permanent unknown past, their names forgotten.  Some I recognise, most I don’t.  For all the time spent reaffirming old stories, here is a bridge I cannot cross; I cannot travel back any further, and here the past cannot be reached.  

***

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

View from Bo'ness Harbour

By Andrew C. Kidd: 

Pink skies purple the hills.
The contrast of colours sharp-edge
to collage like clippings
cut out of a magazine.

Raggy strips from lighter pages
tear softly across
in three or four distinct
tincture lines:

lilac, peach, cream and soft yellow
smudge the down-curtaining day.
A faint thumbprint
of the moon is half-pressed

slowly bleeding into evening’s
blue hues, blending with water’s margin,
interrupted by
light-dot lattice and towers ahead

from where smoke ropes up
or down
depending on whether fire or sky-melt
pulls you in the hardest.

***

Andrew C. Kidd is an emerging writer. He is currently writing poetry that explores the intersection of the environment and industry.