Serpentine
feeling the flow of the world
Hello friends
I woke this morning to a silence that felt eerie, unfamiliar, like something was missing. For days, maybe weeks, the wind has been a constant presence, thumping and rumbling and whistling and rattling, a living thing, moving about like a restless herd of big animals with thundering hooves, jostling flanks and snorting nostrils.
Fellow Orkney islander Rebecca Hooper wrote last week of a ‘rivering’ wind, and it struck me how vividly this word caught a sense of the wind’s muscularity, its heft. Yes, this island wind has a weight and flow like fast-moving water.
But this morning the air is briefly, unnervingly still. The cries of curlew rise up over the fields. Like oarsmen, the birds row up and glide down again and again, as if paddling out through an incoming surf. Greylag geese circle down onto the quiet loch, tipping the air from under their wings to drop down on the water. Nine pure white Whooper swans come coasting in, tilting their bodies like incoming jets to lose airspeed before splashing down on their big splayed feet. Still or moving, the air is still a physical presence for the birds that move through it.
I walk up to the shore most days, windy or not, often so wapped up in weatherproof layers that I start to overheat as I climb the hill. As I reach the shore I like to spread open my bare hands as if dipping them into cold water, to feel the flow of air as it eddies through my fingers. Its cold touch on my skin is met by my blood’s firm, hot pulse and I am cooled.
As I walk on, I push firmly with legs and arms pumping, working my way upstream with effort, then turn for home and coast easily along, pushed firmly from behind. I suck in deep breaths of the salted air to feel its chill drawn deep into my lungs, and then its warmth as it carries my bloodheat out with my exhalation. I am a swimmer in this moving ocean of cold air, riding its currents, breathing in and with it.
The poet Don Paterson offers this version of Rilke’s poem ‘Breath’:
Breath, you invisible poem – pure exchange, sister to silence, being and its counterbalance, rhythm wherein I become, ocean I accumulate by stealth, by the same slow wave; thriftiest of seas…Thief of the whole cosmos! What estates, what vast spaces have already poured through my lungs? The four winds are like daughters to me. So do you know me, air, that once sailed through me? You, that were once the leaf and rind of my every word? from Orpheus: A version of Rilke, Faber
Along with strong winds, the recent storms brought heavy rain, sleet and hail. The little burn that flows out of the loch by my house is now full and brown. Its flow is complex. The water turns and twists around itself, its surface bulging with upwellings and dimpled with tiny vortices that chase each other downstream and eddies that curl back and slow, counter to the main flow.
I’ve watched this motion in the sea too, as it roils over the rocky shore, waves heaving up and falling back, one over the other, churning so much of the air down into itself that the water turns as thick and white as double cream.
Water, wind, breath, blood, cold, hot, all twisting through each other, curling back over and round and again round. The living air flows through us as it flows through the world around us, and that flow is never straight but coiling and twisting, a spiralling motion that continues through the twisting thread of life itself, in the double helix of DNA. If there is ‘a motion and a spirit that’, as Wordsworth intuited, ‘rolls through all things’ that movement is surely serpentine.
Anthropologist Veronica Strang has described how serpentine water-beings and snake-like dragon gods have emerged in human cultures across every continent:
“They appeared wherever water flowed, sparkling in the celestial river we now call the Milky Way, emerging out of the clouds, arching over the Earth in rainbows and meandering across the land in shining streams. They roiled in the seas, gleamed in the depths of lakes and wells and lay hidden underground. Spiralling in hydro-theological cycles between Earth and sky, they were the bringers of water and life. Reflecting water, manifesting water, composed of water, serpent beings flowed through the world with beautiful and dangerous fluidity.”
This stormy season has been full of a powerful, serpentine water-dragon energy. I’ve been immersed in it whenever I step outside, and it has followed me into the studio, shaping the lines my hand has made as I paint, breath by breath, heartbeat by heartbeat, line by line.
I am not trying to paint a likeness of this place. But I am responding to the sensations it offers me, the feelings it leaves in my body, the glitter and shimmer and vibration of it all, the surging, living energy that blows my lightweight thoughts clean away and leaves me open and calm in the midst of it all.
Working with the tiniest brush I can find, I have been making lots of small paintings as a warm-up to a new series of large scale works for an exhibition next year.
I will be releasing twelve of these small paintings to my lovely Life Boat subscribers next week. It has been a good while since my least release, about 6 months, so I thought I would give you advance warning as these small pieces often sell fast. Keep an eye on your inbox next Wednesday morning!
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until next week!
Sam
I love the image of you swimming through air.
wow! awesome! Rob Macfarlane writes about a river alive. You have experienced and recognized the caress and deliberate life force of the wind. Masterfully told.