Cuniculus In Pace

Every once in while, a thought about someone familiar makes you think about them outside the normal un-critical and accepting way that the mind craves the familiar and the routine. This happens now. Walking down that road, close to a friend, but in silence, as the day of null weather threatens to turn to something significant, she thinks of the friends she has known since the first day at school, how now she sees them every day, in and out of school, even on holiday together like today. This will end she realises, and she is lost in the despair of this thought, broken inside and trying not to show it. The breeze lifts the branches of the trees that line this road and so deep within the woods small sounds become strange, the creaking of branch on branch, the distant and final crash of an old beech brought to its end by the gentlest of touches of this weather, maybe the remnant of a storm in Russia. She thinks of the snow that this air touched only the day before, tinged with unfamiliar smells from so many degrees towards the rising sun. She thinks of the roads and paths that her little group explored as children, in their games imagining themselves dead soldiers, broken heroines driven destitute into the wilds when the world falls apart around them. They were explorers in safety, finding real secrets in their imagined games, piles of smashed bottles with the occasional whole one to take home and keep as a link with their ancestors who owned them. They found bones, human and animal, bleached and made delicate through age and never thought to report them to anyone. There are billions of people on the planet, millions must die every year and they have to go somewhere. The bones are not people and so what if their deaths were not natural? Their assassins, attackers and murderers would all be long dead too so there is no point in wasting resources trying to find them justice. Justice is death for us all in the end and our own bones bleached in the sun. The real secret that we should shout to the world is just to live and be alive and to be and have friends.

She remembers reading somewhere about a scientist who really believes that time is an illusion just to stop things happening at once, that deep in the workings of the universe, all time exists without needing minutes and eons to keep things apart. This of course is the opposite of our experience where we get older and worry about getting older, where the shortening of years as percentages of our lifespan means time seems to accelerate. All this to say seize the day she thinks, to tell us to get up and do things. She thinks as well that there is probably no bus, now drawn into practical thought by the need to get home before the rain starts. This is no matter and she returns to the automatic writing of her thoughts. Here is a small wood; a dark shadow it is at night as they drive home, just inside the limits of the village it has no lights, becoming a threatening place in darkness. But now, it is green and pleasant, mixing the brushing of its billion leaves against themselves with the white noise of the breeze and becoming a gentle music. This is one sound from her village, a homely, familiar sound at odds with the children's stories which tell of bad things that happen in the root tangles and clearings, water-proof even in leafless winter through density and age. In her scientist's mind she knows all these stories are made up over generations but in her lover's heart, the tiny truths of tales told in the pub are compelling. But nothing, true or otherwise, keeps the children then or now from exploring. Together, the village children know every part of this wood. You could take any one of them blindfold into the deepest, darkest mess of brambles and they would find their way home, still blindfolded, knowing every hill and every path and every body.

Time passes, dragged from the brains which are the only places it exists. We sit on the steps of the first house, swigging lemonade and shandy. We watch the cars that come through here everyday. There are not many for we are the last village in the valley. We know everybody in the further reaches up close to the moor edges. Some wave and some don't but they make us happy for they are familiar to us. Why do I want to leave here? I need to go for a mind needs other minds to develop. I hear some people talk about the wisdom of the ancients and even while they state their liberal opinions about listening to the masses, they cannot cover the sneers. We read between the lines and they think of us as dirty and uneducated. We need the urban sophistication to make us real. Many are the friends of mine who have stated that they will leave this backwater, this hole, as soon as they are of age. I know they will be back with their softer accents and partners from distant cities and new lands. This is good I know - we need new blood - but it is also a shame, a simple dilution of what makes this remote place a happy place. But I must go too. I see my first day away, me a staring ingenue, but wiser than all those who stare and laugh inwardly. Imagine me in some film, just arrived in the city, the camera spinning round me at some rate different to that of my own spinning head, taken in by the tallness and newness of the buildings around me. That is the saddest day and the happiest day as well, the main boundary in my life, the date from which all others before or after are measured.

We want to be democratic. I hope we will be one day. This is just brainwashing. I am supposed to think that they know more than me but they are just spitting it out of books, never bringing it up from deep inside themselves. They never make me believe that they believe. It is all just words. If I challenge them, there comes that wall of silent pointing and laughing again. And yet in classics and philosophy there is the answer to all this and yet they miss it. Enlightened Ignorance. It is the purpose of this teaching to make us challenge what is taught, to throw it back at those who tell us it is true and solid, to change the world, to change the world, to change the world.

All this she can tell in those few minutes. She looks back at the wood and imagines it back in time, seeing all the changes, from the few young saplings which broke the edge of the moor all those years ago when the ice retreated maybe, or when the Romans passed this way to man their posts between civilization and barbarism, up to the time they enclosed the land and the rough grass was stolen from the people. She sees at once all those who went into that wood and never came out until fragments of them returned in the pockets of small boys, stories untold of those who got drunk and froze one night, thinking themselves invincible, an agent of God on earth, an angel, a supernatural being, able to fly and escape from any prison. She sees how they lie down to sleep, happy and content and never return and are never seen as men again. And it means nothing to her now, all that misery in the shadow of her own at having to leave this place. But in a second, all things return to meaning, their relative positions in the spectrum of despair and leaving here is an adventure. There is the possibility of real flight and real wonders that were just not open to her ancestors. Home is happy and calm and linked to the rest of the world with pen and paper, with wires and radio and cars and trains. She smiles and the gloom lifts. It starts to rain but her house is in sight.