Category: mind

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anew

One of the good things about having an impaired memory is that each season is new. This is my sixth spring since the concussion I haven’t fully recovered from, and my sixth successive spring here in Lochinver, but it could almost be the first.

It’s not that I don’t remember last spring but it feels so far away that it’s as if it happened years ago. As I walk along the slim path beside the river, the intense green glow of the young beech leaves in the evening sunlight arouses a sense of recognition, of greeting, but it’s faint and indistinct, like the memory of something once loved but long gone, and difficult to firmly recall.

I walk on, following the path until it reaches a bend in the river and falls into shadow, then turn back. Now the sun is in front of me, low in the north-west. Its golden light is filtered through the varied arboreal foliage, generating green hues of vivid tenderness. I stop in a copse of beech trees and soak it up: a sweetness of light, and a sweetness of flavour too, as I pluck a handful of the smaller leaves and fold them, one by one, into my mouth. Each leaf is soft and downy on my tongue and as I bite down, a subtle succulence is released. This feels more familiar, as if the tongue’s memory is more faithful than the eyes’. I’m reassured to know that my body holds what my mind can’t easily access, although, I tell myself, what matters is what’s present.

I stroll a few steps further then am stopped by a rowan, its emerging fistfuls of leaves brightly backlit, their serrated fringes casting finely-toothed shadows on each other as they layer and overlap in their open field of light. It’s the mosses which captivate me the most, though, covering the rocks by the path and the larger boulders alongside; thousands of tiny hairy fingers thronging upward in silent solar supplication. They seem to glow of their own accord, as if they’re not reflecting light but emitting it, and those in the shadier pockets of the wood appear almost phosphorescent.

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

Despite my disrupted memory of recent years, I still remember this stanza of a poem* we studied at high school: each summer the last summer, each moment the last and only of its kind. In my case, now, it’s the inverse: each season the first season, each spring the first to generously and gladly unfurl. I don’t think this matters though. It’s the gratitude which counts.

*Living by Denise Levertov

River Inver, Assynt, Scotland
8th May 2026

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liquidity

Another day, another city. Edinburgh, the Water of Leith. The bonny brown ribbon running through the city with its familiar metallic smell, the sun gleaming orange in the water. I recall my childhood at the foot of the Pentlands, where the river begins, playing in the parks and on the old railway line that ran alongside it, then, when I worked at the university, exploring the river paths that passed by my small flat in Stockbridge.

As I stroll into Saunders Street, I come upon a former university colleague, now, I discover, a recently retired professor. We discuss some of the people I used to know; she recounts the varied courses they’ve taken. Times and places, times and people. Water carrying it all along. A tear sits on her check, the cool weather she tells me. I feel liquid inside, the river of memory momentarily stopped, welling up, reminding me of its constancy, its resilience, its renewing presence.

Stockbridge, Edinburgh, Scotland
14th November 2024

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the stream

Out in the world. Glasgow on a Wednesday morning, Victoria Road, Govanhill. Low grey cloud after a false forecast of sun. I wander around trying to reorientate myself. My friend’s vintage clothes shop has vanished. My favourite cafe has become a refugee centre. The record shop cafe has become a yellow diner, complete with smiley American staff. Is it really that long since I was down this end of the street? In Queens Park, the magpies are still there, strutting and flitting in their handsome assured manner. I wonder how long magpies live, if these could be some of the same ones I’ve written about before, sliding smoothly up and down between the grass and the treetops, smart white fans snapping open and closed. I admire their clarity of movement, their crisp definition, their sure self-possession.

Back on the street, the human world seems less certain. It’s as if the street is undergoing an unseasonal moult, changing its plumage in patchy fits and starts. Above several shop fronts, painted signage from previous centuries has been uncovered or recreated, and there’s a lot of new signage which is weirdly old-fashioned. Garish fonts and hues from earlier decades compete with the alternative trend of twenty-first century Nordic minimalism. Of course, the charity shops persist: ‘shop here if you believe in children’, which I do. I saw one with my own eyes this very morning and, as I write this at my egg-yellow table, a gaggle of teenagers stroll past, puffer jackets on backs, mobile phones in hands. They’re much more glamorous than we used to be, with their dyed and straightened hair and polished faces. We saved our make-up for the weekends, for the Saturday nights going ’round town’, cramming in as many pubs and vodkas as we could manage. I heard they don’t drink to excess now, for fear of being filmed and ‘shared’ online. Better for their livers, I suppose, but I liked the forgetfulness of drinking, the possibility of a temporary loss of self and time.

In my own case, I don’t need to drink to get that now. Incurring a brain injury four years ago has done it for me. It hasn’t been catastrophic – I’m not amnesic – but I don’t feel like the same person. New memories fade quickly and old memories don’t always feel like mine. Reality has a different texture and, at a subtle level, it’s difficult to maintain a sense of continuity. All the more important, then, to stay in the stream of things; to not try to capture the moment but to absorb yourself in it. I settle up my bill and step back out into the street.

Govanhill, Glasgow, Scotland
13th November 2024

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abroad

I’ve only realised now that I’m here, but I’ve come to a foreign country.

It’s not the language and landscape that are disorientating, nor the food and customs, unfamiliar though they are – it’s the activity. My friend has organised a busy week – travelling and meeting people and playing taiko, with new dojos and groups almost every day. In itself that’s not strange: two years ago a week like this would have seemed completely normal. But since my head injury, I’ve been able to do these things only intermittently, tentatively, and here it’s all so efficient. I’ve come into in a new world: a world of planning and execution, of intentions and actions, all smoothly following one another; a linear world of efficiency and efficacy, and of certainty – certainty in one’s decisions, certainty in one’s ability to see them through.

I look on in slight bewilderment at all these individual trajectories weaving around me, lines and curves lifting and looping and neatly intersecting each other. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of this world but back at home I observed it from a safe distance, hovering at the edges, lingering in the shadows, while I waited for my head to clear, for my nausea to subside, for my capacity for sure action to return.

But here these intentions, these trajectories include me and now I have to step out towards them; now I have to carry myself forth.

Tiger and Turtle sculpture, a rollercoaster walkway silhouetted against a rose blue sky in which the sun has just set

‘Tiger and Turtle – Magic Mountain’, Duisburg, Nordrhein Westfalen / North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
30th September 2022

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joy in movement

“The trigram Tui, the Joyous, whose attribute is gladness, is above; Chên, the Arousing, which has the attribute of movement, is below.

And it’s true. I complain about not being able to afford a home in Scotland but I secretly love being on the move.

I secretly love the long drive to Lochinver and the cold dampness aboard when I get there, the effort to keep warm with clothes and wood – finding, carrying, sawing, splitting; the burning the least of it.

I secretly love the aching tiredness of travel, the echoing ache for a home which means I don’t have one yet, which means I’m still on the land road or sea road, still plying my way through the waves of our lives, still live to the ebb and flow.

I even secretly love the slow quease that sweeps over me at sea because it means I’m out on it, because I’m not at home, because I’m only at home, here, in movement.”

I wrote that sometime during the winter of 2018 and came across it in a computer file a couple of days ago. Today I did the I Ching again, and again: joy in movement. But what movement? I’m here now, in my own home, the first home I have ever owned, and although I still travel, with my persistent brain injury I get about much less than before. Yet the movement doesn’t stop, it’s simply more focused. My back and arms ache from digging and chainsawing and swinging my new axe. And I still have a slow seasick-like quease though now it’s from the movement of my mind rather than the ocean waves, as I struggle to shake off the lingering effects of my concussion. But I’m still glad and maybe that’s more focused too. After all, no situation can become favourable until one is able to adapt to it and does not wear himself out with mistaken resistance.

So I pause and watch the chaffinches and goldfinches as they mob my feeders, and the thrush and dunnocks as they pick about on the ground, and the wee wren as it dots about the pile of unsawed branches; and I listen to the wind prowling round the caravan and to the river churning down to the sea. It’s almost incredible, all this incessant noise and action, and all I can hope for is that it never stops; never stops at all.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
8th March 2022

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waves

Yesterday – For years I felt I was a gathering wave: all heaped up with nowhere to go and urgently looking for a shore to break on. Now I feel as if I’m a buoy on the sea, pushed up and down and back and fore in the tides and wind-driven surges, but essentially just held here in suspension – in motion without momentum – while out to sea the waves busily wash past.

I can’t get a grip on things, that’s the problem. Little things: dry paper, kindling, replying to emails. Big things: how to make a living, how to make sense of what’s happening to society, how to come to terms with what’s happened to myself. The thing with things is that they are too much. Even the little ones. Especially the little ones. A head-injured taiko player I spoke to online said that living with a brain injury is like having a hangover. All you want is comfort food and sleep and you know if you just ride it out it’ll pass. Except we’re still waiting.

Today – And then there are days like today when there is so much beauty: too much to take in, too much to give out. The sea is spilling over with golden blue light and in it all doubt is dissolved. For today at least, the waves don’t make me envious with their rhythmic fluid motion. Like me, they settle as the sun holds them, as the sun settles and holds everything, forever and ever.

Amen.

Lochinver, Assynt, Scotland
19th October 2021

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no evidence

I scamper off the boat as the white veil sweeps closer, racing ahead of it for the shelter of the woods. It follows behind me like a predatory net curtain, a finely woven mesh of raindrops, whose hem touches down just as I reach the trees. I stand in close to them, watching the rain drumming on the docks and decks and listening to it pelt the fledging birch leaves above me. Within a few minutes it passes and I continue on my walk. When I get back, half an hour or so later, I notice a couple of damp patches in the cockpit and am momentarily confused. It is a confusing day, right enough – one of those squally Scottish spring days: one minute sunshine, the next minute showers, each chasing away the other with fresh abandon as it makes the world anew.

Nonetheless, I wonder how I could forget the rain. I remind myself that my short-term memory isn’t yet fully restored and put it down to that. But then I wonder why I would remember. The sea level is not noticeably higher (at least not from rainfall) and, with the rain having drained from the boat through its various scuppers, the decks are mainly dry. There is no evidence of the rain having passed over. Unlike on land, there are no lingering puddles, no boggy ground, no high rivers or flooding. It’s the same with the wind. It blows and bounces us around endlessly without leaving any markers at all: no uprooted trees, no fallen roof tiles, no scattered outdoor possessions. While the wind can leave waves behind it in the open ocean, in the short fetch of this sea loch, even whitecaps quickly subside. This is one of the differences between living on land and living on the sea. On the sea, the seasons come and go – throughout the day, throughout the year – and the only traces are in our minds.

Lochinver harbour, Assynt, Scotland
4th May 2021

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notes on a head injury (3)

Writing is one of the things keeping me sane. With my words, I’m weaving a home for myself. In an increasingly ugly social world, I’m trying to make myself a shelter, a hidden place to heal.

A nest, a cocoon. A chrysalis. I discovered recently that some caterpillars turning into butterflies partially liquefy in their chrysalises, that they don’t just morph from crawling caterpillar to winged creature but return to primordial slime in between: holometaboly, a true transformation.

I’m thankful I haven’t turned to slime, or been reduced to a vegetable, by this bash on the head but I have subjectively entered a more fluid state. Reality feels much stranger, with my shrunken sphere of memory, and my sense of myself is dissolving. I can only hope that my imaginal discs – containing the proto-structures for the form that will follow – remain intact. In some butterfly species, future body parts covertly take shape even in the caterpillar’s early life. Perhaps the ideas that my mind will coalesce around in future are already in development.

It’s hard to tell though. It’s hard to tell anything these days. There’s been so much discontinuity – in my mind, in my life, in the locked-down, vaccine-pushing world around me – it’s hard to keep track. Hopefully, like the metamorphosed butterfly, when I emerge I’ll retain some memory of the time before. For now, I have to bide my time, and remind myself that, although the human world is in disarray, the rest of the natural world is just carrying on. This time of retreat is temporary.

As my eight-year-old self once wrote*,
‘When I come back out again
I’ll hear the birdie’s song’.

Indeed.

*From my first published poem,’The Butterfly in a Chrysalis’, which I recently came across in an old copy of my primary school’s annual magazine.

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
14th March 2021

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notes on a head injury (1)

I sit on my sofa-bed trying to read. I’m bathed in radiation, nestled between the soft light of the bulb hanging above me and the warm breath of the fan heater in front, but the comfort doesn’t console me. I’m trying to read the book which is in my hands, trying to catch hold of the words on the pages and find their connected meaning, but it’s difficult. It’s as if I can’t get in. My brain slips on the surfaces, lapsing instead of latching, and I find myself stumbling repeatedly over mysterious unseen obstacles.

“I begin with haard’dloq, extremely thin new ice that cannot be stepped on without danger, and then hikuliaq, new ice which is still slippery and yet can be travelled across.” *

Perhaps the subject matter isn’t helping and I wonder if it’s strange that I’m choosing to read about ice just now. It’s the season for it, I suppose, but it’s been a mild winter here so far. The temperature has rarely dropped towards zero and nothing has frozen yet. There hasn’t even been frost this week, the air being too wet and wild to permit any kind of stasis. I don’t think there’s much in our freezer either: the congealed mass of peas which I held to my head after bouncing it off a rock has long since been cooked and eaten. Nonetheless, I find it hard to get a grip. Words slide from the pages as I read, their crystallisations of meaning melting out of memory almost as soon as they’ve assembled, or sometimes before. It’s not that there are gaps – I’m not aware of any specific absences or elisions – but the greater order of things eludes me. On the rare occasions when I do manage to gather some sentences together, the reason for their proximity remains opaque.

Maybe I’m trying too hard. My consciousness is so clumsy at the moment, skiting across the veneer of the world ungracefully – and ungraciously. Yet, because or in spite of this, other things are drawing my attention. Maybe they’re always there and it’s only now I notice but lately I’ve been encountering all these little consonances; things echoing and repeating in different places. Photographs of snowflakes I see online recrystallise unexpectedly on the pages of a book, floods seep out of pages and into the fields around me, a phrase uttered by a character in an old Northern Exposure DVD is repeated by my boyfriend in the kitchen half an hour later. It’s as if different fields of existence are resonating, as if life itself is rhyming a bit.

I’m not sure what’s going on – if I am picking up on some subtle patterning or am simply confused. I’m certainly disorientated. Indeed, in some ways it seems that the world is inverted; as if I’m trapped on underside of ice and observing life from there. The most familiar things appear strange and at times I barely recognise myself.

It’s not just the brain injury, though that’s a big part of it. It’s also the lockdowns, the endless reiterating train of them: closing down, shutting up, holding in, keeping apart. Their effects are not just superficial. Like everything living, we’re not so much entities as processes – doings, motions, living veins running through the world. And when our activities are frozen and our moving stopped, we ice over, we ossify, we lose hold, not only of our livelihoods and of the human animals that we love but of our very companionship with ourselves.

It’s a discouraging time, all in all, but the consonances give me heart. Each time I meet one it’s like a warm touch, reassuring me that I’m still in favour with the world, still alive among its undercurrents even as I struggle at the surface. Indeed, during these moments I begin to feel a sense of belonging again; a sense that I’m inhabiting a deeper part of my brain and a deeper part of my body – a place beneath the stalled outer layers where my movement is more fluid, my contact more true. It’s a confirmation, a reminder, and a relief: that there’s life beneath; there’s always life beneath.

*Nancy Campbell, The Library of Ice (London: Scribner, 2018, pp. 112-3)

Pontycymer, Glamorgan, South Wales
12th January 2021