This wings its way in from LW’s
David in China…
I'm on the other side of the world but I've been following with interest - and admiration - the 10 (or so) course build-up-to-Halloween meal Adam's been serving up on the Daily Constitutional. One day at a time. Served up like a Chinese meal: one dish at a time.
Though the DC was out of sight - but not out of mind - when we were here.
Aside called for here. A lot of what we as guides (and historians) do is uncover traces of what went before. This, though, isn't a trace and it isn't before. It's still, it's now. Add to the mix how they're simultaneously there and here
(or if you prefer, how they got from there to here in 20 years) and you're into is this a dream/what have I been smoking? territory.
But, yes, that's an aside.
The reason the London Walks Blog wasn't out of mind when we were back in there was because while China doesn't get much more rural, much more remote than that patch of good earth (yes, by all means, give yourself some "extra credit" if you just caught the allusion) the actual colour of the stuff that's going to get his water buffalo through the winter lit up the synapses like the Hong Kong Harbour Symphony of Light.
Keats, for example: "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness".
And burning leaves. Burning literally and figuratively.
And bonfires this time of year. "Homecoming" bonfires on the other side of the Atlantic; Guy Fawkes getting a roasting on this side.
And that J.T. Ledbetter poem.
CROSSING SHOAL CREEK (Southern Illinois)
The letter said you died on your tractor crossing Shoal Creek.
There were no pictures to help the memories fading like mists off the bottoms
that last day on the farm when I watched you milk the cows,
their sweet breath filling the dark barn as the rain that wasn’t expected sluiced
through the rain gutters. I waited for you to speak the loud familiar words
about the weather, the failed crops—
I would have talked then, too loud, stroking the Holstein moving against her stanchion—
but there was only the rain on the tin roof, and the steady swish-swish of milk
into the bright bucket as I walked past you, so close we could have touched.
A poem, a line from a poem, various memory wisps - just a few bits and bobs of tinder tossed onto the flickering blue and orange flame of that little piece I wrote last year - Adam resurrected it here a few days ago - about Halloween, about this time of year, with its fading light, being a "membrane" between this world and that of "the departed". A membrane that's thin enough for spirits to pass through.
Tossed onto that little flame - and then fanned by the thought that the Chinese believe smoke is a way to communicate between the world of the living and the world of the dead.
Fanned by that thought. And then wafted by the three sticks of Chinese incense. (One stick for the past, one for the present, and one for the future; and likewise, one stick for heaven, one for earth, and one for mankind.)
They burn incense; they cremate their dead.
That burning incense in China; mists off Shoal Creek (and the cows' sweet breath filling the barn) in southern Illinois; what we get up to in England - in London ("the most haunted city on earth") on October 31st: you really going to try to tell me there aren't some joins - some "axial lines" - discernible here?
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28 Days Later
